Israeli prof: my step-great-great uncle Adolf

Hard, perhaps, to credit but a relative of Adolf Hitler has been discovered alive and well and working as a professor in Israel. Even more to the point, he converted to Judaism many years ago and teaches at the Jewish studies faculty at one of Israel's universities.

That much is revealed - and the fact that he was born in Germany, but after the war - in a tantalising interview in the Guardian by a journalist, Tanya Gold, who tracked the man down but gives no precise details about his identity, having promised not to use his name.

She describes the man as "incredibly tall and slim, in a blinding yellow shirt, very animated, and his accent - an odd pulp of German, English and Hebrew - seems to zoom out of him" and in a long rambling interview in a grimy block of flats, during which he never quite answers her questions about why he became a Jew, he describes how he is related to Hitler, not by blood, but by a series of marriages and two illegitimate births, apparently making him, though it is never spelled out, Hitler's step-great-great nephew. (Continued below)

Defensively, he becomes agitated and immediately tells Gold that he hates the Hitler branch of his family. "I have neither any blood nor DNA from Adolf and his family," he insists. "I was not socialised by that family." But Erna, his grandmother, was thrilled to have married into the Hitler clan, and remained a Nazi until she died.

The professor says that as a teenager, his mother was beaten for refusing to go to Hitler Youth dances, and when she gave birth to him - illegitimately during an affair with a married major in the Wehrmacht - her mother and stepfather disowned her. He was raised in a series of rented rooms, while the Hitlers lived well.

During the war, his mother worked as a typist for the Wehrmacht in Poland and she saw dead Jews hanging in the town squares. "She was a girl," he says, "but I always appreciated that she told me the truth about it. We spoke frankly. I never heard that normal German lie you hear so often from that generation."

When the time came for him to be conscripted into the German army, he decided to take a theology degree, which exempted him from the call-up. As part of the course, he spent six weeks in Israel in the early 1970s. "I felt at home. And I thought I had met for the first time a nationality that at that point in history - today it is more problematic - still had good reasons to be proud of itself." So he stayed.