It was one of Hitler’s closest friends who tried to explain Nazi dictator’s ‘terrifying urge for domination’.
Writing years after he had defected to the US, Ernst Hanfstaengl argued the Nazi dictator had been influenced by his ‘sense of shame’ at his ‘freakishly under-developed genital organs’ after being bullied by his army comrades.
Now, that long-rumoured notion that Hitler might have had something wrong ‘down there’ has been given credence by research outlined in a new Channel 4 documentary.
After analysing Hitler’s DNA, experts who feature in Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint Of A Dictator tomorrow have found that the mass murderer had a rare condition that affects development of the sexual organs.
Symptoms of Kallmann Syndrome include abnormal sexual development and low testosterone.
So for a mass murderer so obsessed with genetic purity, it is somewhat ironic that Hitler himself would have been a target for the eugenics-obsessed Nazis had they been able to look at his DNA.
The new research, based on a strip of blood-stained fabric taken from Hitler’s sofa after the dictator shot himself in his Berlin bunker in 1945, also found that he was in the top one per cent of people at risk of having schizophrenia, bi-polar and autism.
Hitler may also have had a ‘micro-penis’. Up to 10 per cent of boys with Kallmann Syndrome end up with very small genitalia.
After analysing Hitler’s DNA, experts who feature in Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint Of A Dictator tomorrow have found that the mass murderer had a rare condition that affects development of the sexual organs
According to expert Professor Jorma Toppari in tomorrow’s programme, it is ‘much more common’ for sufferers to end up with testes that ‘don’t descend normally to the scrotum’.
The notion that Hitler only had one testicle has been one delightedly repeated by successive generations.
It was the subject too of one particularly mischievous wartime song.
The famous British tune 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.’
In 1943, while the war was still raging, America’s forerunner to the CIA – the Office for Strategic Services – published a report into Hitler’s personality.
Written by psychologist Henry Murray, it claimed that Hitler attempted to manage his insecurities by worshipping ‘brute strength, physical force, ruthless domination, and military conquest’.
Another expert, psychoanalyst Dr Walter Lange, contended in another report the same year: ‘The image Hitler created was a compensation for his own inferiorities, insecurities and guilts.
‘All love, pity, sympathy and compassion were interpreted as weakness and disappeared in the transformation.
‘All love, pity, sympathy and compassion were interpreted as weakness and disappeared in the transformation.’
Both views chimed with what Hanfstaengl’s recollections.
He would go on to write of Hitler in his memoir: ‘I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else.
‘A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself.
‘It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.’
Adolf Hitler as a baby with his mother Klara, who died of cancer when he was 18
Hitler’s traumatic treatment at the hands of his army comrades is also referenced in tomorrow’s Channel 4 programme by Professor Brett Kahr, of the Tavistock Institute of Medical Psychology.
He too highlights the impact that Hitler’s army comrades’ jibes had on him.
The expert says: ‘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.’
The Nazi mass murderer’s obsession with his political goals at the expense of all aspects of a ‘normal’ life has previously been explained by Professor Ian Kershaw, his respected biographer.
He wrote: ‘There was no “private life” for Hitler.
‘Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin.
‘But these were empty routines.
‘There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence which conditioned his public reflexes.’
Christa Schroeder, Hitler’s trusted secretary, believed he never had sex, not even with his long-time partner Eva Braun.
Schroeder wrote in her memoirs: ‘Even his relationship with Eva Braun was a facade.
‘Eva braun confided to her hairdresser… that Hitler never had sexual intercourse with her.’
Schroeder also recalled Hitler’s insecurities about his appearance. She claimed he told her: ‘Many people say I should shave off the moustache, but that is impossible,’ he once explained.
‘My nose is much too big. I need the moustache to relieve the effect.’
Hitler also hated being seen in his swimming trunks, she said.
Similarly, Albert Speer, Hitler’s armaments minister, in his memoir Inside the Third Reich, remembered Hitler’s strange relationship with women.
Hitler in Munich in the spring of 1932, shortly before was elected chancellor of Germany
‘He spoke more about their figures than their charm or cleverness, and always there was something in his tone of the school-boy who is convinced that his wishes are unattainable’.
That view echoed what his former comrade Joseph Goebbels had recorded in his diary: ‘He really is very lonely. Has no luck with women.’
Among the women Hitler was close to was his half-niece Geli Rauabal. She ended up shooting herself with his gun in 1931.
Another aspect of Hitler’s health covered in tomorrow’s programme was his treatment by his personal doctor Theodor Morrell.
The physician’s diary backs up the discovery that Hitler had Kallmann Syndrome.
Speaking of the diary, Dr Kay says: ‘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 traumatic childhood is also believed to have shaped his twisted character.
He was very close to his mother Klara, whilst his father, Alois, was unpleasant and violent.
Klara’s death with breast cancer when Hitler was 18 in 1907 left the future dictator distraught.
In his infamous memoir, Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that his mother’s passing ‘hardened’ him.
He said: ‘I am thankful for that period in my life because it hardened me and enabled me to be as tough as I now am.
‘And I am even more thankful because I appreciate the fact that I was thus saved from the emptiness of a life of ease and that a mother’s darling was taken from tender arms and handed over to Adversity as to a new mother.
‘Though I then rebelled against it as too hard a fate, I am grateful that I was thrown into a world of misery and poverty and thus came to know the people for whom I was afterwards to fight.’
