Did Hitler really have a “small penis”? Suspicious documentary that analyzes the dictator’s DNA | television

IA TV show revolving around the genome sequencing of Adolf Hitler — the person in modern history closest to the universally agreed-upon embodiment of evil — there are at least two questions she wants the producers to ask themselves. First: Is it possible? And secondly, the Jurassic Park question: just because scientists can do it, right?

Channel 4’s two-part documentary, Hitler’s DNA: A Dictator’s Blueprint, isn’t the first time the passionate British broadcaster has gone there. In the 2014 film Dead Famous DNA, he inadvertently answers both questions in the negative. Having first compromised moral integrity by paying Holocaust denier David Irving £3,000 for a lock of hair purportedly belonging to Adolf Hitler, the show’s makers then discovered it was not Hitler’s and was therefore useless for DNA sequencing.

Airing just over 10 years later, the producers of this new show were keen to at least answer the question “is this even possible”. Inside the mysterious Military History Museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, they tracked down a blood-stained piece of cloth that an American soldier cut from the couch on which Hitler killed himself. In their attempt to verify the authenticity of the blood, they failed to obtain a new DNA sample from any of Hitler’s surviving relatives in Austria and the United States, all of whom are understandably hesitant about media exposure.

But a smear performed on one of Hitler’s male relatives ten years ago (by a Belgian journalist who was investigating a rumor that the German dictator had fathered an illegitimate son during World War I) yielded a perfect match for the Y chromosome. It is unclear whether they obtained their relative’s permission to use his DNA for this purpose. However, they knew they had Hitler’s blood, and could squeeze it for genetic information.

In Professor Tori King, they have captured the scientist whose DNA verification in Richard III’s Leicester car park set the gold standard for doing genetics on television in an accessible and responsible way. Collaborating with Dr. Alex Kay, an authoritative historian of the Nazi era at the University of Potsdam, they extracted a range of insights into Hitler’s origins, biology and mental health. Should they?

Some ideas are scientifically sound and will contribute to historical debate. First, the show finally debunked an old rumor that Hitler was of Jewish descent. Its source is the fact that Hitler’s father Alois was an illegitimate child and the identity of his paternal grandfather is unknown. It was absolutely speculation, but the fact that it was repeated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov until 2022 shows how persistent such rumors are.

The researchers also found strong evidence – a letter deletion in a gene called PROK2 – that Hitler suffered from a form of a well-known but rare genetic disorder known as Kallmann syndrome, which prevents a person from starting or fully completing puberty. This is consistent with medical records from Landsberg prison, where Hitler was held after the failed Munich beer hall putsch in 1923, and which were discovered by German researchers in 2010. In these records, an examining physician confirmed that Hitler had a “right cryptorchidism” – not the missing ball from the British World War II song, but an undescended right testicle. Up to 10% of people with Kallmann syndrome also have a “small penis.” The most common symptom is low or fluctuating testosterone levels.

The program suggests that the justification for looking at Hitler’s trousers is that he was “very keen to hide” something, such as requesting that his body be cremated after his death. This is a strange argument: historians mostly agree that it was prompted by news of Mussolini’s body being displayed in public – not fear that Channel 4 would one day measure his penis.

But there is a better argument to be made: that these medical conditions can help us understand Hitler’s psychology. Has he turned the feeling of personal powerlessness, perhaps influenced by fluctuating testosterone levels, into an ideological issue? Nazi action Fuhrer Does he have an inability to have sexual relations that he compensates for by marrying himself to the country?

If the DNA of Hitler: Dictator’s Plot had stopped here, he might have presented a powerful programme: exciting but also credible. Instead, manufacturers also embarked on “evaluation.” [Hitler’s] “Genetic predisposition to psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions,” by performing polygenic risk score (PRS) tests. From the results, they confirmed that Hitler had a “higher than average likelihood of developing ADHD,” a “high likelihood” of certain autistic behaviors, a “propensity for antisocial behavior” and a “high likelihood of schizophrenia.”

Poverty testing is part of a booming industry that promises to estimate people’s risks not only for developing diseases, but also behaviours: popular websites such as ancestry.co.uk, where people can submit swabs to trace their heritage, now also automatically suggest to subscribers whether they are likely to have certain ‘traits’, such as ‘trying new things’.

Many scientists fear this is part of an insidious creep toward genetic determinism that is not supported by evidence. “Polygenic risk results tell you something about the population as a whole, not about individuals,” says David Curtis, emeritus professor at the Institute of Genetics at University College London. “If the test shows you are in the top percentile of genetic risk, your actual risk of developing a condition may still be very low, even for conditions that are strongly influenced by genetic factors.” Psychological testing may determine whether you have a “tendency” for schizophrenia – many scientists say the PRS test cannot indicate a tendency in the same sense of the word.

When it comes to autism and ADHD, the risks of stigmatizing these conditions by associating them with a universally disliked figure are particularly stark. If for some the conclusion drawn from monitoring Hitler’s DNA was that ‘Hitler had autism’, would those with this neurodiversity be classified as ‘little Hitlers’? Or, on the contrary, does this command sympathy for the chief architect of the Holocaust and World War II?

The program acknowledges these risks. “Going from biology to behavior is a big leap,” British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen says in the first episode. “There is a huge risk of stigma.” But expressing warnings will be undermined if you continue to speculate anyway.

“One of the things that we, as geneticists, really try to get across is that genetic determinism is wrong,” Tori King told me in an interview. “We cannot say with certainty that Hitler had any of these conditions, only that he was in the highest percentile in terms of genetic load for some of the conditions.”

It’s a word of warning that the film’s editors didn’t take it seriously. When a psychiatric geneticist from Aarhus University presented Hitler’s multiple genetic risk score for ADHD on the show, it came across as merely “above average,” but in voiceover a few seconds later, this became “ADHD propensity.” In two minutes, talk show host Michael Fitzgerald, who specializes in diagnosing autistic historical figures, says: “People with ADHD are like Hitler.” When I raise the ADHD allegations with King, she seems to express surprise that so many findings for the condition were presented in the final cut, because they were only “moderately elevated.”

King’s findings were submitted as a scientific paper to the medical journal The Lancet. Production company Blink Films says it was unable to delay the film’s broadcast until the paper had passed peer review because the pace of such academic proceedings can be slow. Considering that the program was seven years in the making, and that the claims made in the documentary are nothing short of shaping history, this decision is still surprising.

At the heart of what the Nazis called “race science” was the idea that our blood is where our destiny lies. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that purity of blood is what enables individuals to make “correct” decisions and binds a nation together, and its contamination through racial mixing is what causes individuals to act “incoherently” and leads civilizations to their doom. What’s most troubling about Hitler’s DNA: Dictator’s Plot is that those involved in preparing it may have read these passages carefully and then continued to prepare the program the way they did anyway.