Hitler: what can we learn from his DNA?

“I remember singing it in the playground in the late 1970s,” said Guy Walters in The Independent: “Hitler has only got one ball / The other is in the Albert Hall.” We all assumed the ditty was just a morale-boosting marching song. Now it turns out Hitler really might have been “one nut short of a lunchbox”.

‘Startling’ discovery

For a new Channel 4 documentary, genetics experts analysed Hitler’s DNA, extracted from a bloodied swatch of fabric that a US soldier had cut from the sofa in the Berlin bunker on which the dictator “blew his brains out” – and found that he had Kallmann syndrome. This genetic disorder hinders puberty, often resulting in undescended testicles and, in one in ten cases, a “micropenis”.

The “startling” discovery correlates with notes made by a doctor who had examined Hitler in 1923, and found that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” (an undescended testicle). There are also stories of Hitler being mocked by his First World War comrades for his “inadequacy”. If his genitals were severely undeveloped, it could go some way to explaining the psychology of one of history’s most evil men.

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Dubious claims

It certainly raises some fascinating psychoanalytic questions, said Philip Oltermann in The Guardian. Did the Führer “transform a sense of personal deficit” into an ideological cause? Had the documentary, “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator”, stopped there, it would have been “sensational but also credible”. Instead, it makes a series of more dubious claims. Based on a polygenic risk score (PRS) test, to assess Hitler’s genetic “propensity” for mental health conditions, its makers blithely assert, for instance, that he had a “high probability” of displaying autistic traits and developing schizophrenia.

Not only does this risk stigmatising those with these conditions – will they be cast as “Little Hitlers”? – it’s misleading. PRS tests are not diagnostic tools, said Tiffany Wertheimer on BBC News, and their use to assess people’s susceptibility to complex neurological conditions is controversial.

Hitler’s mental and physical health has been the source of endless fascination, said Ben Macintyre in The Times. Over the years, he has been variously diagnosed with syphilis, rotting teeth, Parkinson’s and flatulence – as if the insanity of the Third Reich could be “reduced to one man’s apparent symptoms”. It’s “tempting fodder”, but in reality, genetics cannot explain Hitler or Nazism; neither could have emerged without the social, economic and political conditions of interwar Germany. Hitler’s genes “may have contributed to creating a singular monster. But German society was already fatally sick.”