Jean-Marie Loret - Biography

Biography

Jean-Marie Loret was born in 1918 in Seboncourt as Jean-Marie Lobjoie. The mother of the illegitimate child was Charlotte Eudoxie Alida Lobjoie (1898–1951), the daughter of the local butcher and his wife, Louis Joseph Alfred Lobjoie and Marie Flore Philomène (née Colpin). According to the entry in the birth registry of his home town, Loret's father was an unidentified German soldier from World War I. Since Adolf Hitler had stayed in the localities of Seclin, Fournes, Wavrin, and Ardooie in the years 1916 and 1917, and according to eyewitnesses is supposed to have had a relationship with Charlotte, Hitler's paternity of Loret became the subject of discussion on various occasions.

Charlotte Lobjoie's profession, according to various sources, was "dancer", though it is unclear whether she was one in 1916/1917. She appears to have taken up this profession only after she moved to Paris, some months after the birth of Jean-Marie, which was after the withdrawal of the Germans from France. Jean-Marie lived for his first seven years in the household of his grandparents, from whom Charlotte broke off all contact after her move to Paris. On May 22, 1922 Charlotte married lithographer Clément Loret, who declared he would support his new wife's illegitimate son, though he had at that point never met the boy, and that he would allow the boy to bear his own last name. According to Loret, his grandparents had "treated him badly." After their deaths in 1925 (grandfather) and 1926 (grandmother), 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, the boy attended, one after the other, two Catholic boarding schools, in Cambrai and Saint Quentin.

In 1936, Jean-Marie entered into military service and was promoted in subsequent years, ultimately reaching the rank of staff sergeant. He later occupied himself for some years as a businessman until 1948, when he had to give up that profession due to insolvency.

According to Loret, even as a child he knew that he was the son of a German soldier, but he had no clue as to the identity of his father. Years later he claimed that in 1948, his mother revealed to him, shortly before her death, that the said soldier had in fact been Adolf Hitler.

During World War II Loret worked as chargé de mission with the French police in Saint Quentin. He allegedly got this post accorded to him at Hitler's personal command, though there is no concrete evidence to support this claim. Claims that he had collaborated with Gestapo units stationed in France in this capacity are also unproven. However, after the war, no trial for collaboration was held against him, which speaks against the claim. This is explained by Loret in various sources by claiming that Hitler had any and all material on Loret destroyed. It should be noted that Loret was considered to be rather average and not overly diligent, so that it would appear rather unusual for him to have earned himself so high a post entirely by his own merit while under the age of 25.

Loret was married at least once and had nine children. Some sources maintain that his wife separated from him in 1948 when she learned of his family heritage. In later newspaper articles on Loret, a wife by the name of "Muguette" is mentioned, who was supposedly living with him at the point in time when these articles were being written. But it remains unclear whether "Muguette" was a second wife or unmarried partner, or whether she was the mother of his children and had come back to him, or whether she had never even left him at all.

On June 7, 1978, during public discussion of the controversy, Maser moved Loret to his own house in Speyer in order to seclude him from the intense scrutiny of the press at his own home in Saint-Quentin. While there, the two visited, among other things, the former concentration camp at Dachau, on which occasion Loret is supposed to have said "I didn't choose my father."

Maser took Loret with him as he traveled around the world to lecture on the subject of Loret's parentage, even bringing him to Tokyo, in order to encourage Loret to give interviews, but the Frenchman appeared rather reserved regarding giving interviews.

Finally, in 1979, Loret and Maser had a falling-out, and broke off with one another. Subsequently, Loret, in collaboration with René Mathot, published his autobiography, Ton père s'appelait Hitler (Paris, 1981).