MAN IN GERMANY SAYS HE'S THE COUSIN OF ADOLF HITLER

This is honestly a bizarre claim, Romano Lukas Hitler is claiming to be the only man alive who is directly related to the German responsible for the world's great atrocity.

Romano, 65, has his name on his passport, his German ID card, his bank account and his rental contract for his home in the eastern town of Görlitz.

"Adolf Hitler's father Alois had a younger brother. His grandson was my father", said Mr Hitler to German website, MOPO24.

He claims his parents fled communist East Germany and died in Bratislava in Slovakia. He also claims he was handed over to a monastery and was then adopted by a Polish family. He later returned to Germany as an adult to train as a ship's helmsman.  

"But my name has caused me lots of grief down the years," he admits.

With his grandfather reportedly the uncle of Adolf Hitler, the pensioner has a strange taste of art on the walls of his room - a picture of the dictator cousin on one side of the German flag, a picture of Angela Merkel on the other.

He went on: "People are shocked or laugh at me when they hear my name. It was also often the reason why I found no work.

"After me there will be no more Hitlers.  That's it, shame must have an end.  The name is like a cross to bear and  I wish that on nobody.

"The Germans always think Hitler was a bad man. But I'm a very simple person."

However Romano's claim about Hitler's father Alois having a brother doesn't fit the accepted version of history.

In 1837, when she was 42 years old, and still single, Alois' mother Maria Schicklgruber gave birth to him - her  first and only child. 

Maria refused to reveal who the child's father was, so the priest baptized him Alois Schicklgruber and entered "illegitimate" in place of the father's name on the baptismal register. historians have discussed two candidates for the father of Alois.

They are Johann Georg Hiedler, whose name was added to Alois's birth certificate later in his life and who was officially accepted as the father of Alois by the Third Reich.

Johann Nepomuk Hiedler, Georg's brother and Alois's step-uncle, who raised Alois through adolescence and later bequeathed him a considerable portion of his life savings.