Everyone knows the rhyme about Adolf Hitler. The popular ribald wartime song, beloved of school children, has it that: ‘Hitler has only got one ball/ The other is in the Albert Hall/ Himmler is very similar/ And poor old Goebbels has no balls at all!’. The rhyme works, but is it right? A two-part Channel 4 documentary airing tonight suggests the verse about the Nazi dictator might not be entirely fictitious.
Now that same science has been deployed to help explain the deeds of the biggest criminal of them all: Adolf Hitler
Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator uses an analysis of his DNA to suggest he suffered from Kallmann Syndrome, which can affect the development of sexual organs. The DNA sample, found on a fading bloodstain on a sofa in the Berlin bunker where Hitler blew his brains out in April 1945, has also debunked the myth that the Fuhrer had Jewish ancestry.
‘We had these tantalising clues about Hitler,’ says professor Turi King, from the University of Bath, who led the analysis. ‘But now we’ve got some genetic information that backs that up. DNA can be likened to another text, helping to solve historical mysteries.’
The programme makers also sent Hitler’s DNA results to Aarhus University in Denmark, to determine whether he may have suffered from any psychiatric or neurodevelopmental conditions. The analysis suggests he had a higher-than-average chance of having ADHD and was in the top one per cent of people at risk of having autism.
‘I think that we’re quite entitled to use ‘criminal autistic psychopathy’ to describe Hitler,’ says psychiatrist professor Michael Fitzgerald. ‘It highlights: number one, his criminality; number two, his autism; and number three, his psychopathy. It’s a very complex mixture. Hitler is one in a million, or maybe one in a billion.’
It is a supreme irony, of course, that Hitler’s own condition would have probably merited death under the Nazis’ own warped and inhuman ideology.
The findings shed some light on another mystery about Hitler: why his relationships with women throughout his life were so uncomfortable. Dr Alex Kay, a historian at Germany’s Potsdam University, says that ‘no one has ever really been able to explain why Hitler was so uncomfortable around women throughout his life, or why he probably never entered into intimate relations with women.’ Channel 4’s programme offers a possible answer: symptoms of Kallmann Syndrome include low testosterone.
Eva Braun, his long-suffering mistress who died in the same bunker as Hitler, twice attempted suicide because of his neglect of her. Hitler’s sexuality has long been a subject of prurient speculation but the DNA analysis seems to confirm Eva’s complaints of his inadequacy as a lover. Some sources – like Hitler’s valet Heinz Linge, whose wife washed their bedsheets – maintained that the couple never had ‘normal’ sex at all.
Before Eva was on the scene, Hitler lived in Munich with his young half niece Geli Raubel, who shot herself in their flat in 1931, in despair at his perverse behaviour and controlling attitude. Hitler showed extreme grief at her passing, kept her room as a shrine, and almost abandoned his political career as a result.
Another significant discovery emerging from the DNA analysis shows that, contrary to rumours, the architect of the Holocaust had no Jewish blood. His father’s biological father was rumoured by his political enemies to be Jewish. Hitler went to great lengths to investigate and then destroy documentary evidence about his Austrian family roots. But the show’s analysis suggests this wasn’t because he was partly Jewish, but rather that his family roots were full of incestuous intermarriage between his relations.
The idea for the documentary arose in 2018 when the producers, Blink Films, noted how many criminal cold cases were being solved using advances in DNA science. Now that same science has been deployed to help explain the deeds of the biggest criminal of them all: Adolf Hitler. We’ll never know if Hitler really did have ‘one ball’. But a diagnosis of Kallmann Syndrome – which can mean that a man’s testicles don’t descend properly – suggests there was, at least, some semblance of reality behind the rhyme.
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