British researchers claim to have found genetic evidence of a rare disease in Hitler’s blood. The documentary “A Dictator’s Blueprint” shows an attempt to explain megalomania with micropenis – and evil biochemically.
Hitler’s union has long been the subject of scholarly debate. Until now, scientists are still debating whether the missing testicles are caused by cryptorchidism or monarchy. The first refers to an apathetic testicle that prefers to remain in the testicular canal rather than migrating properly into the sac. Monorchy, on the other hand, describes the complete absence of testicles.
One theory is that the young soldier was wounded in the First World War, on 5 October 1916, at the Battle of the Somme. After emergency surgery, Hitler asked paramedics if he could still father a child. A friend of his youth, the Austrian Eugen Wasner, said in 1943 on the Eastern Front that little Adolf had lost some of his limbs as a child while trying to urinate in the mouth of a billy goat – the animal, perhaps blessed with the prophetic gift of history, bit firmly. Wasner was court-martialled on charges of “undermining military power” and “treason.” An execution by guillotine followed — although pranksters couldn’t help but think of the scene from Mel Brooks’ “Heroes in Tights” in which the rabbi demonstrates his circumcision guillotine.
Now British television station Channel 4 has announced a spectacular revelation. “Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator” is the name of a documentary scheduled to air this weekend. It is based on a genetic analysis of Hitler’s blood, obtained in the Führerbunker from a piece of cloth from the sofa on which the dictator committed suicide. An American soldier claimed to have cut it up as a trophy and kept it for decades. Comparison with relatives’ genome structures was intended to prove the authenticity of the grisly remains.
Among the researchers setting up microscopes and centrifuges was geneticist Turi King, best known for identifying Richard III’s bones, discovered in 2012 by excavating the car park in Leicester where the king lost his life at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
So now it’s Hitler’s turn. “He could have the most boring genome in the world,” King said. “But he didn’t.” A deletion of the PROK2 gene was found, which can cause Kallmann syndrome – a deficiency condition in which the body produces too little sex hormone. With a one in ten chance, the dictator suffered from micropenis.
One should not fall into the trap of interpreting Hitler’s desire for space and progress, the destruction of his naked body a million times over, as an act of psychosexual compensation. King himself stopped short-circuiting: “Genetics simply cannot justify his actions,” said the director of the Milner Center for Evolution in Bath.
And it would be even better: from a biochemical point of view, the 20th century was a pubertal anomaly, a hypothalamic logistical accident, an endocrinological accident – right down to the thesis that the Holocaust could have been prevented with hormone tablets. CRISPR does not replace character development, germline is not an alternative to historians’ conferences. Hannah Arendt’s recognition of the banality of evil does not call into question genome analysis. Just because Hitler was, as his colleague Ernst Hanfstaengl once said, in a “sexual no man’s land” did not give him the right to embark on conquests elsewhere. Nonetheless, the findings are interesting. If the odds are good, the first free rider is guaranteed to appear soon. We already have the title: “CSI: Reich Chancellery”.
