Jean-Marie Loret

Jean-Marie Loret (born 18 or 25 March 1918 in Seboncourt near Saint-Quentin in Picardy; died 1985 in Saint-Quentin) was a French railway worker who claimed to be Adolf Hitler's illegitimate son. According to Loret, in 1948 his mother revealed to him shortly before her death that the "unknown German soldier" with whom she'd had an affair during World War I was Adolf Hitler.

His claim was backed by German historian Werner Maser, who first brought the claim to public attention in 1977 newspapers followed by a February 1978 Zeitgeschichte magazine article. Loret published his own autobiography, Ton père s'appelait Hitler [Your Father's name was Hitler] in 1981.

However, the dominant view represented by historians such as Anton Joachimsthaler,Timothy Ryback, Sir Ian Kershaw, and Belgian journalist Jean-Paul Mulders, is that Hitler's paternity of Loret is unlikely or impossible.

Jean-Marie Loret was born illegitimately in 1918 in Seboncourt as Jean-Marie Lobjoie. His mother was Charlotte Eudoxie Alida Lobjoie (1898–1951), daughter of Louis Joseph Alfred Lobjoie, a butcher, and his wife Marie Flore Philomène (Colpin) Lobjoie. According to the birth registry of his home town, Loret's father was an unidentified German soldier during World War I. Adolf Hitler had stayed in the localities of Seclin, Fournes, Wavrin, and Ardooie during the years 1916 and 1917, and, according to eyewitnesses, he supposedly had a relationship with Charlotte Lobjoie. As a result, the idea that Hitler could be Loret's father was a perennial topic of discussion.

Charlotte Lobjoie was a dancer, although she apparently only took up the profession after she moved to Paris, months after the birth of Jean-Marie and the end of the war. Jean-Marie spent his first seven years with his grandparents, with whom Charlotte had no contact after moving to Paris. On 22 May 1922, Charlotte married Clément Loret, a lithographer, who declared he would support his wife's illegitimate son and would allow him to bear his own last name. According to Jean-Marie, his grandparents had "treated him badly." After their deaths in the mid 1920s, his aunt, Alice Lobjoie, worked to have her nephew adopted by the family of the wealthy construction magnate Frizon from Saint Quentin. From then on, Jean-Marie attended consecutively Catholic boarding schools in Cambrai and Saint Quentin.

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