Documentary film Hitler’s DNA: A Dictator’s Blueprint (Hitler’s DNA: The Dictator Archetype), broadcast by Britain’s Channel 4, was bound to generate controversy and sensational headlines, no matter how much effort its authors put into carrying out a tough or moderate action. Although some of the conclusions presented put an end to harmful myths and legends such as the supposed Jewish origin of the dictator (completely false), others allow for a dose of excitement, such as the idea that Adolf Hitler actually had Micropenis Or he was missing a testicle. Others open up important ethical debates, such as the researchers’ ventured conclusion that the most evil figure in human history seemed to have a predisposition to neurological syndromes such as autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
The story behind the making of this two-episode show is as fascinating as its conclusions. It involved authoritative scientists, such as the British historian Alex Kay, now at the University of Potsdam, specializing in Nazi Germany, or the geneticist Tory King, responsible among other important discoveries for the identification of the remains of the legendary Richard III in an outdoor car park in Leicester in 2012. “I had a painful debate (about whether to participate in the documentary or not),” King admits in the first minutes of the broadcast. But he was aware that the investigation would be conducted sooner or later, so he decided to join in order to exercise the necessary caution and seriousness.
Hitler’s DNA was obtained from traces of blood found on the sofa in the bunker where the Nazi dictator committed suicide by shooting himself in the head, shortly after Allied forces entered Berlin. Colonel Roswell P. Rosengren, of the US Army, gained access to the shelter and had the ability to cut a piece of fabric, which was on display for years at the Gettysburg History Museum.
None of Hitler’s living relatives offered the possibility of comparing their genetic material with the rest of the blood to confirm its authenticity. But researchers obtained a sample from a man collected by a Belgian journalist a decade ago, while investigating a rumor that the future dictator had fathered an illegitimate child during World War I.
The comparison gave a perfect identification of the Y chromosome. It was Hitler’s DNA. Hence, conclusions and findings about lineage, diseases, biology and mental health of personality open a range of few certainties and many guesses of more or less scientific solidity.
Kallmann syndrome
The part that will be the most positive of the documentary’s conclusions for many is the categorical rejection of the idea that Hitler had Jewish ancestry, a hoax promoted for decades by Holocaust deniers and history revisionists, and which is still being heard recently. In 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov used the argument that Hitler “had Jewish blood” to justify his accusations of Nazism against the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, who is of Jewish descent.
But the program’s most alarming finding was the absence of a letter in a gene called PROK2. From this absence it is concluded that Hitler suffered to some extent from a genetic disorder known as Kallmann syndrome, which affects, among other things, puberty and the development of the sexual organs. It can lead to the inability of one of the testicles to descend into the scrotum, or the size of the penis to be very small.
Communication is instant. During World War II, the song was very popular among British soldiers. Hitler only has one ball (Hitler only had one egg.) The chorus said: “Hitler, he only had one egg, and the other was in the Albert Hall (a concert hall in London), cut by his mother, a filthy creature, when he was young.”
The idea of the dictator’s small genitalia appears to match medical records from Landsberg prison, where Hitler was imprisoned after the foiled Munich putsch of 1923, and which were discovered by German researchers a decade ago. The doctor who examined him then indicated in the report that the prisoner had an undescended testicle in his right testicle, which had not descended completely. In no way did he talk about a small penis, and this condition cannot be deduced from the DNA results. What Kallmann syndrome produces is decreased libido and decreased testosterone production.
“He helps us understand a lot about his private life. Or rather, his lack of a private life,” historian Alex Kay explains in the documentary. According to him, this condition would have prompted Hitler to focus on politics rather than personal matters.
However, many scholars view an exercise like the one performed in the documentary as reductive and overly simplistic. For example, Denis Syndercombe Court, a professor of forensic genetics at King’s College London, told the BBC that the program’s authors “exaggerated their conclusions” and that “as far as (Hitler’s) personality or personality is concerned, the exercise has turned out to be completely useless.”
Ethical issues
Because far from the hoax about the dictator’s Jewish origins or the discussion about his genitals, the show’s writers presented methods that cause serious moral problems. Based on genetic testing, which assesses a person’s likelihood of developing complex diseases by comparing it to the DNA of a large sample of the population, the documentary comes to the conclusion that Hitler showed a predisposition to suffering from autism, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or ADHD.
Although the authors take pains to make clear that this predisposition does not imply that the dictator was afflicted with any of these conditions, the fact that he was linked to them was a scandal to organizations such as the National Autistic Society in the United Kingdom, which described the program as a “cheap publicity stunt.”
Both Channel 4 and production company Blink Films They tried to stay away from controversy, referring to the opinion of experts such as Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, from the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge, who participates in the documentary, and says that “a person’s behavior is the product of many factors, not only heredity, but also the environment, his childhood, his life experiences, the way he was raised, his access to education, and the cultural and economic factors that surrounded him.”
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