The woman shaking hands with Hitler is not grandmother of EC president von der Leyen

A pre-World War II photograph of a young woman shaking hands with Adolf Hitler was shared on social networks in several languages in March 2024 with the unfounded claim that she is the grandmother of European Union chief Ursula von der Leyen. All evidence shows this is not true. The photograph can be found on a site of historical photos where it is listed as taken in 1937. It gives a name for the woman that is different to those of von der Leyen's grandmothers.

"A photo of Ursula von der Leyen's grandmother with Adolf Hitler is going viral on social media (...)," says a Facebook post in Greek from March 20, 2024 and shared a dozen times since. It includes a black-and-white image of the woman shaking hands with the German dictator.

The post also claims that von der Leyen's grandfather was a general in Hitler's SS paramilitary unit.

These claims about the grandparents of the president of the European Commission are false and misleading. They come in the run-up to the European Parliamentary elections on June 6-9 in which von der Leyen is seeking a second term.

The claim about the woman with Hitler was widely shared in Greek, for example on Facebook here and in online articles like here, here or here. It was in several other languages, too, for example German, Bulgarian and English.

Some posts share a screenshot of a photo in a post from Norman Finkelstein, an American political analyst, in November 2023. This has since been removed from his feed.

A woman named Hildegard Zantop

A reverse image search enabled us to find this photograph (archived here) on an archive site called Bildarchiv Ostpreußen (Picture Library East Prussia). This site collects historical photos from the region once known as East Prussia.

The site's description of the photo says it was taken in 1937, before the start of World War II. The caption reads in German: "Naunienen, Hildegard Zantop from Naunienen presents the harvest wreath of the East Prussian rural youth at the farmers' day in Bückeburg."

In an email dated April 19, 2024, Manfred Schwarz, project manager of the site, explained to AFP that aside from the name, he had no further information about the woman in the photo.

The picture archive library's purpose is to present historical views of the former German province of East Prussia, he said. "Ultimately, it's about preserving East Prussia's cultural heritage with these photographs."

We contacted Evelyn von Borries, representative of the Preußisch Eylau district community (archived here), whose contact details were listed in the photograph's data on the archive site. She, too, had no further information about the photo.

An advanced online search yielded no results regarding any relationship between Hildegard Zantop and Ursula von der Leyen's family. The name Zantop does, however, appear on an East Prussian genealogy website (archived here) and would seem to be typical of this former German region.

The village of Naunienen mentioned in the photo caption was in East Prussia (archived here).

On March 22, 2024, AFP consulted the Deutsches Geschlechterbuch, a genealogical handbook of prominent families, to find out the ancestry of today's European Commission president.

Ursula von der Leyen can be found on page 45 of volume 187, dedicated to the German state of Lower Saxony and published in 1982. Her given names are Ursula Gertrud and her date of birth is October 8, 1958, as visible in the picture below.

If we trace her ancestry, we can see that her maternal grandmother's name was Gertrud Emma Margarethe Ohlrogge.

Ohlrogge was the mother of Heidi Adele Stromeyer, wife of Ernst Carl Julius Albrecht, long-time prime minister of Lower Saxony (1976-1990). These are von der Leyen's parents.

On her father's side, von der Leyen's grandmother was Adelheid (Adda) Eugenie Johanna Berg, wife of Carl Eduard Albrecht, a renowned German psychologist and psychotherapist.

A search of the book did not find the name Hildegard Zantop, or even just Zantop, among von der Leyen's direct relatives.

Grandfather not an SS general

According to the same German archives and online sources, von der Leyen's grandfather was not the SS officer Karl Albrecht Oberg, as claimed in some of the social media posts. The name of this Nazi official is however similar to that of her paternal grandfather, Carl Eduard Albrecht, as AFP has previously investigated.

The Deutsches Geschlechterbuch gives the name of this grandfather on page 43. Carl Eduard Albrecht (1902-1965), a doctor and psychologist, was born in 1902.

The SS officer named Oberg was born in 1897 and joined Hitler's SS in 1932. He became known as the "Butcher of Paris" because of his activities in France and was captured in 1945 in Austria.