Was My Grandfather a POW or Balkan Refugee?

My Dad did a DNA test to find out who his father was. My Dad was conceived in England (somewhere near London) in 1949 and my grandmother would never divulge his identity (not even to her parents). She told a friend it was a 'taboo subject' and her parents would never approve of the man's identity. We always assumed she had an affair with a married man near London while she worked there in a B&B and that is why the subject was taboo. Fast forward to 2018. My Dad got his DNA results and it turns out his father was from the Balkans. Here are the results below. Any ideas why a person from that region of Europe would be staying in London in 1949? Would he be part of the Axis or the Allies? Did refugees from that region come to England, or could he have been an Axis POW who stayed in England after the war, or maybe helped to rebuild London after the Blitz? I'm puzzled why my mystery Grandfather's DNA comes from the Balkans and yet he turned up at a B&B near London in 1949 where he met my grandmother. Any ideas will be greatly welcomed and received.


Grandfather DNA.




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London was one of the major "international" cities of the era. I suspect there were a fair number of individuals from the Balkans there. The British had helped a number of the resistance movements in the area during the war. Some of them didn't get along well with the Communist governments that formed in many of those countries after the war.

Some of the DNA test can localize it a bit more. One of my cousins got one that identified his male line as coming from a particular branch of the O'Shea clan.

 

Thanks. I wasn't sure if London was as multi-cultured then as it is today. The tests also show I have many cousins living in Austria. Wasn't sure if that held any significance.

 

The former Austro-Hungarian Empire included parts of the Balkans. If you can contact those cousins you might get some leads.

 

Will do. Plenty of new found cousins in Austria. The scary thing is, when I used google images for WW2 Austrians, I saw a man who is the spitting image of my father. Same face, and nose and ears, and everything. Even the comparisons from his younger years and older years are the same. Even their occupation. My dad was a policeman and this man was also a policeman before the war. Is it possible we are related?

 

It was very brave of your father to do the DNA test but I suppose the 'not knowing' was worse. I hope you meet up with your lost family successfully. Remember that it may be an 'unwelcome' surprise for them.

 

Very true. The man on google images who looks 'exactly' like my father is called Franz Stangl. He was the commander of a Nazi concentration camp. I think my family our hesitant about looking deeper in case it turns out he is linked to my father. As the old saying goes - Sometimes it's better to live in ignorance than know the truth. Also my dad recently got married again. His wife is Jewish and news like this might upset their marital relations. I wish I could dig deeper, but several of my newly found cousins in Austria are deliberately withholding their family's past because they don't want to incriminate or reveal their family connections to the Reich, which I guess must be common practice for people today who are the children and grandchildren of Nazis.

 

Sorry to break the news, but there is still a 34.6% chance your grandfather isn't from Eastern Europe. DNA is incredibly vague. There is apparently, still 26.9% chance that he is neither Eastern, nor Southern European. That pretty means the test says.... not much. The guy could've been one of millions of immigrants from anywhere across the world in the 20th century (Italian American? Austrian-Argentinian?)

As to why they wouldn't want to admit who the father was; Social rank, criminal, marriage (already married was common), religion (Jewish, Catholic), could still well be factors. One set of my grandparents estranged my uncle because he married a Catholic, in the 60's. Merchant navies plied the oceans again; falling prey to a foreign sailor's charms and getting preggers wasn't exactly brag-worthy.

As to any connection to Franz Stangl, you can safely put that to rest, unless she travelled to Syria:

At the end of the war, Stangl fled without concealing his name. He was detained by the American Army in 1945 and was briefly imprisoned pending investigation in Linz, Austria in 1947. Stangl was suspected of complicity in the T-4 euthanasia programme. On 30 May 1948, he escaped to Italy with his colleague from Sobibór, SS sergeant Gustav Wagner. Austrian Roman Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathizer, forced in 1952 to resign by the Vatican, helped him to escape through a "ratline" and to reach Syria using a Red Cross passport. Stangl was joined by his wife and family and lived in Syria for three years, until 1951.​