Adolf Hitler was supposed to have taken his most intimate secrets to the grave. After his suicide in a Berlin bunker in April 1945, his aides followed his final orders to make sure his body could not be seized by his enemies. They doused it in petrol and set it alight.
But what the Führer did not reckon on was the discovery of the structure of DNA eight years later, and the tenacity of ancient and forensic DNA specialist Professor Turi King and a Channel 4 team eight decades on, in producing a two-part “world exclusive” documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator.
From the DNA, one can calculate polygenic scores, which assess an individual’s genetic markers and compare them with a large population sample to estimate the person’s genetic liability to a condition.
The most memorable of the results is that Hitler had a deletion in his DNA which strongly affects the protein that is implicated in the development of sexual organs.
King was raised in Canada, but she says, in reference to the British wartime propaganda ditty Hitler Has Only Got One Ball: “You can’t live [in the UK] without knowing about that song.”
A 1923 medical report unearthed in 2015 said Hitler had an undescended right testicle. The DNA analysis gives some weight to this, because the mutation in the gene known as PROK2 is strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome, which can result in one or both testes not descending normally.
Historian Dr Alex J Kay has studied Nazi Germany for 20 years. He says of the song: “How did the British know this? We haven’t yet been able to figure out where this rumour came from, but it was actually true.” He adds that it could have been a “really striking coincidence”, or simply based on an extrapolation from the knowledge that Hitler stood out from most other leading Nazis – who not only had wives and children, but mistresses too.
