It was the Second World War ditty that mocked not just Adolf Hitler but the whole Nazi high command for their lack of sexual prowess.
Sung to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March, it went:
‘Hitler has only got one ball,
‘Göring has two but very small,
‘Himmler is rather sim’lar,
‘But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.’
Now, a two-part Channel 4 documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint Of A Dictator has discovered that the song was not simply a piece of Allied propaganda but rooted in reality – at least so far as the dictator was concerned.
After analysing Hitler’s DNA, the programme makers have discovered that the dictator had Kallmann Syndrome, which affects the development of sexual organs. Typical symptoms include low testosterone, abnormal genital development and a lack of a sense of smell.
Dr Alex Kay, a historian at Germany’s Potsdam University, tells the documentary: ‘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.
‘But now we know that he had Kallmann Syndrome, this could be the answer we’ve been looking for.’
It would also explain why Hitler failed to have children with his companion Eva Braun, in spite of his insistence that Germans have large families to promote the Aryan race.
‘Hitler clearly goes very much against this in not having any kind of family, in not having children, in not being married,’ says Dr Kay.
‘He quite effectively cultivates the image of a man devoted entirely to the fatherland. Our discovery strongly suggests that it may have been only a convenient cover for his Kallmann Syndrome.’
Although he’s one of the most studied people in history, Hitler remains something of an enigma.
Whole libraries have been written on his life, as the dictator who started a world war and presided over the genocide of six million Jews during the Holocaust, but his ancestry remains shrouded in mystery.
He was notoriously guarded about his private life and wanted to keep his medical history secret, even after he committed suicide.
In archive footage recorded after Hitler shot himself in the Berlin bunker, his personal valet Heinz Linge – who witnessed the tyrant’s final moments – said: ‘I was the last one who said goodbye to him, and the first, after his suicide, to enter the room in the bunker.
‘He shot himself, and Eva Braun took poison. He gave me the order five days before to get gasoline to burn the bodies. We burned them in the garden.’
Hitler’s body was destroyed, however, remnants of his blood remained, meaning that 80 years after the end of the war, it can now be analysed.
American soldier Colonel Roswell Rosengren, an information officer under Allied Supreme Commander General Eisenhower, was the man who unwittingly preserved Hitler’s DNA by cutting a swatch of fabric from Hitler’s sofa as a memento.
This was some 40 years before it was discovered that DNA could be profiled in criminal cases. His grandson Erik Rosengren tells the programme: ‘When the Allied Forces came together in Berlin, he was there, and he would have been, I believe, in the first group of Americans that entered Hitler’s bunker.
‘I don’t know how long after Hitler killed himself that visit would have occurred. The bodies were gone, but there was blood on the sofa. My grandfather cut the swatch of blood.
‘It’s such a powerful memento. For him, it was a true symbol of the death of Hitler in the end of the war.’
The bloodstain has now been analysed by a team of international specialists, led by Professor Turi King, from the University of Bath, the forensic expert who analysed the remains of Richard III when he was unearthed from a Leicester car park.
They tested the DNA and sequenced Hitler’s genome – the entire genetic make-up of any organism, running to some 3 billion genetic instructions.
‘We had these tantalising clues about Hitler,’ she says, ‘but now we’ve got some genetic information that backs that up. DNA can be likened to another text, helping to solve historical mysteries.’
Firstly, they debunked the myth that Hitler had Jewish ancestry, a rumour that persisted down the decades. Hitler even went to the lengths of publishing an official version of his family history to dispel stories that his grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, had become pregnant while working in a Jewish household.
And that family history, says Professor King, was correct as the Fuhrer’s DNA shows he was neither illegitimate nor Jewish.
‘The Y-chromosome is showing that Hitler is indeed Hitler, or he wouldn’t get that DNA match with the male-line relative. If he had Jewish ancestry, that match wouldn’t be there.’
Hitler’s psychological state is also hotly debated, with some historians believing he was prone to mental illness.
So, the team sent Hitler’s DNA results to a world-leading team at Aarhus University in Denmark to assess his genetic propensity for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions.
Tests revealed that he had a higher-than-average chance of having ADHD and was in the top 1 per cent of people at risk of having autism, bi-polar disease and schizophrenia, conditions which run in families.
His second cousin, Aloisia Veit, spent years confined in a psychiatric facility in Vienna. Her hallucinations and delusional behaviour often meant she was restrained on a bed.
‘You can see here the distribution of the score for schizophrenia in the population, and you can see that Hitler is located in the very end of the distribution,’ says Professor Ditte Demontis, a psychiatric geneticist at Aarhus.
‘He has a very high… score for schizophrenia.’
The analysis suggested that he also had a high genetic propensity for antisocial behaviour, a factor in diagnosing whether or not an individual is a psychopath.
Author and psychiatrist Professor Michael Fitzgerald says: ‘I think that we’re quite entitled to use “criminal autistic psychopathy” to describe Hitler. 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.’
Finally, the team analysed Hitler’s DNA for sexual abnormalities. The dictator was notoriously uncomfortable in his own skin, never wanted to undress in front of anyone and showed no sign of the healthy libido enjoyed by other Nazi leaders.
The shadow of death fell over his relationships with women. One historian has estimated that, of the seven women romantically linked to Hitler, three committed suicide and at least three more attempted it.
His first troubled relationship was described in the memoir, The Young Hitler I Knew by his friend August Kubizek, published in 1953, who described how Hitler had a crush on a girl called Stephanie when he was a teenager.
He claimed that Hitler fantasised about kidnapping Stephanie before the two of them died in a melodramatic death pact.
‘It’s the first and last time I heard him seriously speak of suicide,’ Kubizek said. ‘He would jump in the Danube river and make an end of it. But Stephanie would have to die with him. He insisted on that.’
In 1929, when Hitler was 40, he had a dysfunctional relationship with his half-niece Geli Raubal, who, at 21, was half his age.
Living in stifling secrecy in the Nazi leader’s Munich apartment, she shot herself with his gun in 1931. ‘Hitler was clearly infatuated, obsessed with his half-niece Geli Raubal in a way that he wasn’t obsessed with any other woman in his life before or after,’ says Dr Kay. ‘She felt trapped by Hitler’s attention. Hitler was controlling. Hitler was jealous.’
Hitler’s longest and most enduring relationship was with Eva Braun, who twice tried to kill herself during the 14 years she was with him.
According to their housekeeper, Herbert Doehring, and his wife Anna, who was the cook, the couple never slept together. ‘My wife was always very curious, as was I… and she often did Hitler’s washing,’ said Doehring, who was the administrator at Hitler’s Berghof between 1936 and 1953.
‘And the first thing she always did was to check if there had been any sexual activity, but there was never any evidence.
‘My wife checked the sheets and there were no signs of sexual activity. Never.’
The scientists believe that Hitler’s unusual sexual behaviour might well be explained by Kallmann Syndrome.
Professor Jorma Toppari, a specialist at Finland’s Turku University, says: ’10 per cent of the kids with this kind of mutation might have a small penis, a “micro-penis”. A much more common feature would be that the testes don’t descend normally to the scrotum.’
Professor Brett Kahr, of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology, concurs.
‘When he was a young man, in the army and got… undressed in front of his fellow soldiers, the other men would make fun and say to him, your penis is smaller than everybody else’s,’ said Prof Kahr.
‘That is potentially more psychologically traumatic for a young boy, a young man, than anything else.’
Even Hitler’s own medical records, written by the Fuhrer’s personal physician Dr Theodor Morell, suggest that Hitler had Kallmann Syndrome.
‘This is an entry here from Morell’s diary,’ says Dr Kay.
‘It’s the 24th of January. And we can see here 25 milligrams of testosterone injected. So, we know that he was regularly injecting Hitler with testosterone. Unfortunately, Morell doesn’t explain explicitly in his notes why he’s giving Hitler testosterone, but he’s certainly receiving it on a fairly regular basis.’
Hitler’s long list of ailments may explain why he was so secretive about his health. He believed that eugenics, the selective breeding of the population, would ensure the purity of the Aryan race.
From his earliest days as a dictator, he authorised the forced sterilisation of people with mental and physical disabilities and in 1939 he signed a decree authorising a state-organised programme of euthanasia.
Unfortunately, he might well have been one of the first people on his own list.
‘Hitler’s policies are completely around eugenics,’ says Professor King. ‘If he had been able to look at his own DNA [to decide] whether or not to go to the gas chambers, he almost certainly would have sent himself.’
Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint Of A Dictator is screened on Channel 4 at 9pm on Saturday November 15 and 22.
