I remember singing it in the playground in the late 1970s: “Hitler has only got one ball/ The other is in the Albert Hall/ Himmler is very similar/ But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.” Of course, even at the age of eight, we all suspected that the idea that Hitler was one nut short of a lunchbox was probably not true. How on earth could anybody possibly know?
However, it now appears that not only might the ditty have been true, but Hitler had a hidden genetic disorder that would likely have hindered the development of his sexual organs. A gift for any wartime writer of bawdy ballads – he had a one in 10 chance of having a micropenis.
The answer to how we may know such intimate knowledge of the biological design of the Führer lies in a patch of dried blood on the sofa on which Hitler blew his brains out in April 1945. The stain was found by Colonel Roswell P Rosengren of the US Army, one of General Eisenhower’s press officers, who cut some fabric off the couch and took it home. Eight decades later, that blood has been analysed by scientists, who have managed to sequence Hitler’s DNA, and the picture his genome reveals is extraordinary.
The results are being shown tonight in a Channel 4 documentary called Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. The big revelation is that Hitler’s genetic markers show he had Kallmann syndrome, a genetic disorder that delays and hinders puberty, often resulting in a very small penis as well as undescended testicles.
This startling find partially correlates with the notebooks of Josef Brinsteiner, the doctor at Landsberg prison in 1923, who had examined Hitler after he had been incarcerated that year. His records clearly show that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” – an undescended testicle. Incidentally, Brinsteiner was sympathetic to Hitler’s political goals, so we cannot put this potential slur down to a left-wing doctor seeking to defame a political opponent. However, it is notable that despite tales of Hitler’s fellow soldiers in the trenches of the First World War laughing at their comrade’s inadequacy, Brinsteiner did not remark on the small size of the tyrant’s member himself.
If Hitler’s genitals were indeed severely underdeveloped, it goes some way to explaining why his romantic relationships never appeared to be a priority for him. Alex J Kay, a senior historian at the University of Potsdam who specialises in Nazi Germany and was the co-lead investigator, says it brings new understanding to his “highly unusual and almost complete devotion to politics in his life”.
He said: “Other senior Nazis had wives, children, even extramarital affairs. Hitler is the one person among the whole Nazi leadership who doesn’t. Therefore, I think that only under Hitler could the Nazi movement have come to power.”
While Hitler cultivated an image as the “celibate father of the German nation”, the relationships he did have were kept hidden from the public. Several women close to him died by suicide or attempted suicide, suggesting deeply troubled dynamics. His most famous relationship was with Eva Braun, whom he kept completely hidden from the public and from political affairs.
She attempted suicide twice before marrying Hitler on 29 April 1945, in a civil ceremony. The next day, both died by suicide – she by consuming cyanide, and he by shooting himself.
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Hitler cultivated an image as the “celibate father of the German nation” (Ullstein Bild/Getty)
How different might Hitler’s character have been had he not suffered from the condition? Would a sexually confident Hitler have been less drawn to extremism and violence? Might he even have eschewed politics altogether? Of course, we can never know, but it is tempting to wonder whether the Second World War might never have happened had Hitler been able to enjoy a functional and fulfilling romantic relationship.
More worryingly still, the DNA paints an even more parlous picture of Hitler’s health. Not only did he have the markers for Kallmann syndrome, but his genes also show he was extremely likely to have had autism, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. While the documentary researchers speculate on how some symptoms might have affected Hitler’s life, such as paranoia, poor social skills, and mood swings, they are keen to ensure that their findings are not used to stigmatise people with any of the conditions indicated in Hitler’s DNA.
Plenty of people get by with all sorts of congenital complaints without having to slaughter six million Jews. Saying it’s in your genes is surely an even worse excuse than the old Nuremberg defence of following orders.
“Behaviour is never 100 per cent genetic,” said psychologist Professor Sir Simon Baron-Cohen. “Associating Hitler’s extreme cruelty with people with these diagnoses risks stigmatising them, especially when the vast majority of people with these diagnoses are neither violent nor cruel, and many are the opposite.”
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Dictators such as Mao Zedong (left) and Joseph Stalin (right) suffered illnesses that may have profoundly affected their behaviour (AFP/Getty)
While the study of history often examines the mighty crashing forces of politics and circumstance, it cannot be denied that the medical conditions of dictators are endlessly fascinating.
Take Joseph Stalin. Smallpox left his face pitted. A carriage accident in childhood permanently shrivelled his left arm. Then add chronic pain, hypertension, insomnia, and the psychological sludge created by a childhood so bleak it could make Dostoevsky weep – you don’t need a PhD in trauma studies to see how the self-loathing of a pockmarked Georgian boy mutated into the paranoia of the Soviet autocrat.
And what of Mao Zedong? The chairman suffered from sleep disorders, heart trouble, and an intestinal constitution best described as apocalyptic. Yet he refused medical treatment with the sort of obstinacy that would have impressed even his own pig-headed Red Guards. Mao believed acknowledging illness was ideologically unsound – a bourgeois weakness that could not be associated with the Great Helmsman.
The result? A leader drifting in and out of lucidity while millions rampaged across China on the fumes of his increasingly erratic wishes. When your leader believes laxatives are a counter-revolutionary plot, the phrase “national delirium” stops being metaphorical.
Then there’s Kim Jong Il, who provides perhaps the purest example of how a dictator’s physiology can shape an entire nation’s political weather.
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North Korea was said to be at the mercy of Kim Jong Il’s health-related mood swings (AFP/Getty)
Alcoholism, severe anxiety, and a stroke in 2008 that left him temporarily incapacitated were not mere footnotes. Defectors have described how the rhythm of North Korea pulsed to the capricious beat of Kim’s mood swings. Nuclear threats one week, eerie silence the next. Foreign policy was drafted by neurotransmitters. In the West, we think of geopolitics as strategy. In Pyongyang, it was more like endocrinology.
Saddam Hussein, meanwhile, had a medical issue less about malfunction and more about presentation. The Iraqi dictator is widely believed to have undergone cosmetic procedures – including possible fillers – in the service of the virile, hypermasculine persona he plastered across Baghdad in mural form. Saddam’s greatest fear was not invasion, but humiliation. The slightest dent to his preening image provoked volcanic overreaction. A man who cannot bear a wrinkle is hardly going to tolerate dissenting MPs.
And then we arrive at Nicolae Ceausescu, the Romanian tyrant whose later years were overshadowed by serious heart disease and a decline in cognitive clarity that would have sent any sane person to a GP – or, at the very least, a quiet retirement in a bungalow.
But Ceausescu, like his peers, believed himself biologically exempt from mortality. His failing health coincided with increasingly bizarre policies – rationing schemes constructed around fantasy, industrial goals that appeared to have been scribbled in crayon, and a level of delusion that made even his own security services nervous.
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Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu’s health problems coincided with increasingly bizarre policies (AP)
By the time he stood on the balcony in 1989, shaking with anger as the crowd turned against him, we were watching not only the collapse of a dictatorship but the collapse of a man whose body simply could not prop up the myth any longer.
So what do we do with all of this? Does illness explain evil? Obviously not. If insomnia, anxiety, constipation, or an undersized member caused genocide, your local pharmacy might be the most dangerous shop in Britain. But dictators differ from the rest of us in one crucial respect: they cannot admit weakness. Their bodies must be perfect, invincible, beyond criticism. And when the flesh inevitably falters, they respond not with acceptance but with denial, projection, rage, and – in several cases – mass murder.
History is usually written as a story of ideas and armies, but the private insecurities of powerful men have a habit of spilling messily into the public realm.
We do know one thing for sure. As Professor Turi King, the lead geneticist on this latest research on Hitler’s DNA, says: “If he were to look at his own genetic results, he would have almost certainly have sent himself to the gas chambers.”
Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator will air on Channel 4 on Saturday, 15 November 2025 at 9 pm.
