In 1837, when she was 42 years old and still unmarried, her only child,
Alois, was born. Maser notes that she refused to reveal who the boy's father was, so the priest baptized the baby Alois Schicklgruber and entered "
illegitimate" in place of the father's name on the baptismal register. Historians have discussed various candidates for the father of Alois: •
Johann Georg Hiedler, who later married Maria, whose name was added to the birth certificate later in Alois's life, and who was accepted officially by
Nazi Germany as Alois's father (i.e., as the paternal grandfather of Adolf Hitler). •
Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, Johann Georg's brother and Alois's step-uncle, who raised Alois through adolescence and later willed him a considerable portion of his life savings, but who, if he were the real father of Alois, never found it expedient to admit it publicly. • A
Jewish man named
Leopold Frankenberger, as reported by ex-Nazi
Hans Frank during the
Nuremberg trials. Prominent historians dismiss the Frankenberger hypothesis (which had only Frank's speculation as evidence) as baseless, as there were no Jewish families in Graz at the time Maria became pregnant. At the time of the birth of Alois, Maria was living with a Strones village family by the name of Trummelschlager. Mr and Mrs Trummelschlager were listed as Alois's godparents. Maria soon began residence with her father at house number 22 in Strones. After an unknown period, the three Schicklgrubers were joined by Johann Georg Hiedler, an itinerant
journeyman miller. On 10 May 1842, five years after Alois was born, Maria Anna Schicklgruber married Johann Georg Hiedler in the nearby village of
Döllersheim. Maria was 47 years old, and her new husband was 50. Whether or not Johann Georg Hiedler was actually the biological paternal grandfather of Hitler may remain unknown, as he was not recorded originally as the father on Alois's birth certificate. Illegitimacy was common in lower Austria; in some areas, it reached as many as forty percent of births, and as late as 1903 the rate was twenty-four percent, with the children normally legitimized at a later date. Hitler's ancestry was questioned when his opponents began spreading rumours that his paternal grandfather was Jewish, since one of
Nazism's major principles was that to be considered a pure "
Aryan" one had to have a
documented ancestry certificate (
Ahnenpass). In 1931, Hitler ordered the
Schutzstaffel (SS) to investigate the alleged rumours regarding his ancestry; they found no evidence of any Jewish ancestors. He then ordered a genealogist by the name of Rudolf Koppensteiner to publish a large illustrated genealogical tree showing his ancestry. This was published in the book
Die Ahnentafel des Führers ("The pedigree of the Leader") in 1937, which concluded that Hitler's family were all
Austrian
Germans with no Jewish ancestry and that Hitler had an unblemished "
Aryan" pedigree. As Alois himself legitimized Johann Georg Hiedler as his biological father (with three witnesses affirming and watching this) and the priest changed the father's blank space on the birth certificate in 1876, this was considered certified proof for Hitler's ancestry, and thus Hitler
was considered an "Aryan". ==Death and gravesite==