The Irony of Hitler’s Junk

A slightly different take on the news that Hitler’s DNA reveals some genetic anomalies. The most interesting thing to me is that history has a profound capability for irony.

This week, Channel 4 will broadcast a programme in the UK called Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, in which they analysed the Nazi leader’s entire genome. I had heard this was coming on the grapevine years ago – it’s not the first time. The last time they tried this, again for Channel 4, the sample of hair from the Fuhrer turned out to be from a wig.

The provenance of the sample is very credible this time round. The science here has been done by Turi King, the geneticist behind the exemplary work on Richard III’s genome. Turi is a brilliant scientist, and a good friend. She is diligent, meticulous and honest, and when she told me about the project, I scrutinised it with the scepticism of a fellow geneticist, and the protectiveness of a friend, for the results are not trivial, and profoundly subject to misunderstanding and misinterpretation. Instead, in an ideal world, we could use this moment for some education about genetics, and history.

I threaded on Bluesky about the genetics. There is more to say, which will be in the ten year anniversary edition of my big book, A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived (with 30,000 new words!)

There is also a scientific paper in the works, but this is the gist. It is quite possible that Hitler had a significant disorder of sexual development. The DNA bears a mutation which is strongly associated with a condition called Kallman Syndrome and Congenital Hypogonadotropic Hypogonadism. This is a complex disorder of sexual development, and as is often the case with this type of condition, the physical characteristics are varied. One consistent expression of Kallman Syndrome in males is incomplete or delayed puberty and infertility, cryptorchidism and microphallus – an undescended testicle and an unusually small penis. It is impossible to know what Adolf Hitler’s genitals were like, and there is one medical report from his time in Landsberg Prison in 1923 that says he had right-sided cryptorchidism. I have no particular desire to spend anything other than the minimum amount of time thinking about them. But the new genetic evidence – and I choose my words very carefully here – is consistent with Adolf Hitler only having one visible testicle. I expect some of you of a certain age are now humming a particular tune.

Most important of all, aside from the salaciousness of the main claims about his genitals, is that the polygenic risk analysis categorically does NOT and CANNOT be used to ascribe complex psychiatric or psychological traits to an individual. Genetics plays no role in the diagnosis of schizophrenia or ADHD or bipolar. Hitler did not have ‘the gene for schizophrenia’ because there is no such thing. He did not have schizophrenia cos he was not diagnosed as such, and posthumous or remote diagnosis are not possible. We should express extreme caution in discussing this with regards to any individual, let alone one of such historical significance. The Daily Mail seem to have missed this.

Seufzer.

None of this new genetic provides any deterministic evidence that his evil was rooted in his genes. It does not give any weight to the ill-conceived notion that evil is somehow biologically encoded. It does, however, potentially add a new level of complexity to a psychologically unusual man, whose actions and beliefs are of profound historical significance, and therefore should be added to the body of evidence. We cannot know much more than this, but the new genetic evidence strongly suggests, at least, that Adolf Hitler’s sexual biology and anatomy was atypical, and possibly significantly disordered. How this might have affected his behaviours, his views, his relationship with women and his overall temperament is entirely in the realm of speculation.

One thing that interests me is peripheral to Hitler’s penis and balls – and it should be noted that as sometimes happens in my work, that is a sentence that no one should ever have to write. Or read. Kallman Syndrome was named after the German doctor Franz Josef Kallmann in 1944. By the time he had identified it, Kallman – who was Jewish – had fled Nazi Germany for New York, where he spent the rest of his life. Before his no-doubt necessary flight from a regime that may well have had him executed, he was a student of Ernst Rüdin, the key architect of the despicable racial hygiene policies of Nazi Germany. Most of Kallman’s work was on schizophrenia, before and after the war, much of it via twin studies. Kallman proposed in 1935 that the relatives of schizophrenia patients should be sterilised as well as the patients themselves, as part of their rassenhygiene project, to eliminate the supposedly recessive gene responsible.

The Nazis did indeed sterilise or execute more than 250,000 schizophrenia patients, which we estimate to be between 70 and 100 per cent of people with this condition living in Germany at the time, an attempt at purifying the nation. The policy was inarguably cruel, yet it was also futile, because it was driven by ideology bolstered by a profoundly naïve understanding of human genetics. Schizophrenia had actually increased in prevalence in Germany by the 1970s, indicative of the fact that it is a condition influenced by genetics and the environment, and not a simple recessive gene as had been assumed. Germany was a country whose economy was ravaged by the ultimately doomed Third Reich, and the most plausible argument for the increase in schizophrenia diagnoses was that the war had in fact created and nurtured the environment in which schizophrenia could thrive.

That Hitler himself had a condition that was discovered and named by a Jewish man who also held some responsibility for the scientifically misguided murderous policies of the Nazis is at least a reflection that history is often imbued with a sense of complex and confusing irony.

PS: Apologies for this being abrupt and formatted poorly, I am posting it from 35,000 feet above the Indian Ocean. I’m en route to Melbourne to participate in some lectures about eugenics in Australia. I will update and modify when I’m on terra firma.

PPS: Microphallus is pronounced MY-CROF-ULUS, as if it were a dinosaur. This is not true, but should be.