Did Hitler really have a ‘micropenis’? The dubious documentary analysing the dictator’s DNA | Television
IOn a TV show whose goal is to sequence the genome of Adolf Hitler — the closest person in modern history to a universally accepted personification of evil — there are at least two questions you want the producers to ask themselves. First: is it possible? And second, the Jurassic Park question: just because scientists can, should they?
Channel 4’s two-part documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, is not the first time the conscientiously daring British channel has gone there. In 2014’s Dead Famous DNA, he inadvertently answered both of these questions in the negative. Having first cast aside ethical integrity by paying Holocaust denier David Irving £3,000 for a lock of hair claiming to belong to Adolf Hitler, the program’s creators later discovered that it did not belong to Hitler and was therefore useless for DNA sequencing.
Aired a little over 10 years later, the producers of this new program at least made sure to answer the question “is it possible”. At an obscure military history museum in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, they managed to find a piece of blood-soaked cloth cut by an American soldier from the couch on which Hitler committed suicide. In their attempt to authenticate 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 reluctant to be exposed to the media.
But a swab taken ten years earlier from a relative of Hitler’s male line (by a Belgian journalist investigating a rumor that the German dictator had fathered an illegitimate son during World War I) revealed a perfect Y chromosome match. It’s unclear whether they got permission from the relative to use his DNA for this purpose. Yet they knew they had Hitler’s blood and could extract it for genetic information.
They managed to recruit Professor Turi King, the scientist whose DNA check of Richard III’s remains in Leicester’s car park set the benchmark for genetics on television, in a way that was both accessible and responsible. Working with Dr Alex Kay, a credible historian of the Nazi era at the University of Potsdam, they extracted a range of information on Hitler’s ancestry, biology and mental health. Should they have?
Some of the ideas are scientifically based and will contribute to the historical debate. On the one hand, the program finally puts to rest an old rumor that Hitler had Jewish ancestors. Its source is the fact that Hitler’s father, Alois, was an illegitimate child and the identity of his paternal grandfather was unknown. These were just speculations, but the fact that they were repeated by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in 2022 shows how persistent such rumors can be.
Researchers also found strong evidence – deletion of one letter from a gene called PROK2 – that Hitler suffered from a well-known but rare form of genetic disorder known as Kallmann syndrome, which prevents a person from starting or completing puberty. This is consistent with medical records from Landsberg Prison, where Hitler was held after the failed 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch, discovered by German researchers in 2010. In them, a medical examiner certified Hitler with “right-sided cryptorchidism” – not quite the missing bullet from the British World War II song, but an undescended right testicle. Up to 10% of people with Kallmann syndrome also have a “micropenis”; The most common symptoms are low or fluctuating testosterone levels.
The program insinuates that what justifies peeking into Hitler’s pants is that he was “so keen to hide” something, such as asking that his body be burned after his death. It’s a strange argument: historians mostly agree that this happened following news of the public display of Mussolini’s corpse – rather than fears that Channel 4 would one day measure his member.
But there is a better argument: these medical conditions can help us understand Hitler’s psychology. Has he transformed a sense of personal deficit, perhaps influenced by fluctuations in testosterone levels, into an ideological cause? Did the Nazi Fuhrer does he have an inability to establish sexual relations that he compensated for by marrying the Fatherland?
If Hitler’s DNA: A Dictator’s Plan had stopped there, it could have been a solid program: sensational but also credible. Instead, the creators also set out to “evaluate [Hitler’s] “Genetic propensity for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental problems”, by performing polygenic risk score (PRS) tests. From the results, they claim that Hitler had “a higher than likely average likelihood of ADHD,” a “high likelihood” of some autistic behaviors, a “propensity for antisocial behavior,” and “a high likelihood of developing schizophrenia.”
PRS tests are part of a growing industry that promises to estimate individual risks of developing not only diseases but also behaviors: popular websites such as ancestry.co.uk, where people can submit swabs to trace their heritage, now automatically suggest to subscribers whether they are likely to have certain “traits”, such as “trying new things”.
Many scientists fear that this is part of an insidious drift toward genetic determinism that is not supported by any evidence. “Polygenic risk scores tell you about the population as a whole, not individuals,” explains David Curtis, honorary professor at the UCL Institute of Genetics. “If a test shows that you are in the top percentile of polygenic risk, the actual risk of getting a disease may still be very low, even for diseases that are strongly influenced by genetic factors.” A psychological test can determine whether you have a “propensity” for schizophrenia — a PRS test, many scientists say, cannot indicate a propensity in the same sense of the term.
When it comes to autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, the risks of stigmatizing these pathologies by linking them to a universally vilified figure are particularly glaring. If for some, the observation of Hitler’s DNA reveals that “Hitler was autistic”, will those who possess these neurodiversities be qualified as Little Hitlers? Or, conversely, does it arouse sympathy for the primary architect of the Holocaust and World War II?
The program recognizes these risks. “Moving from biology to behavior is a big leap,” explains British psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen in the first episode. “There is a great risk of stigmatization.” But expressing reservations is compromised if you continue to speculate anyway.
“One of the things that we geneticists are really trying to get across is that genetic determinism is wrong,” Turi King told me in an interview. “We cannot say with certainty that Hitler suffered from any of these conditions, only that he was in the highest percentile in terms of genetic load for certain conditions.”
It’s a warning that the film’s editors didn’t really take to heart. When a psychiatric geneticist from Aarhus University presents Hitler’s polygenic risk score for ADHD in the program, it simply appears “above average”, but in the voiceover seconds later it becomes “ADHD propensity”. Within two minutes, talking head Michael Fitzgerald, who specializes in diagnosing autistic historical figures, says: “People with ADHD, like Hitler.” When I raise the ADHD allegations with King, she seems to express surprise that so much was made about the condition’s results in the final edit, since they were only “moderately elevated.”
King’s findings were submitted as a scientific article to a reputable medical journal. Production company Blink Films says it could not have withheld release of the film until after the journal had passed peer review, because the pace of such academic proceedings can be glacial. Given that the program ran for seven years and the claims made in the documentary are nothing short of history-making, this decision is still surprising.
At the very heart of the Nazis’ so-called “racial science” was the idea that our destiny lies in our blood. In Mein Kampf, Hitler asserts that purity of blood is what allows individuals to make “correct” decisions and unites a nation, and that its contamination by racial mixing is what causes individuals to act “incoherently” and leads civilizations to their downfall. The most disturbing thing about Hitler’s DNA: A Dictator’s Plan is that those involved in making it may have read these passages carefully, then continued to create the program as they did anyway.
