So says a new study to be detailed in an upcoming documentary.
A 1923 medical examination of Hitler, which was uncovered in 2015, showed that the Nazi leader did indeed have an undescended testicle but, while we do not know exactly how it manifested, Hitler’s newly discovered genetic condition would have also affected his testosterone levels. It means he had a one in ten chance of having a micropenis. This is suggested by stories from the First World War, where Hitler was bullied over the size of his genitalia…
…The researchers looked at Hitler’s genome and compared it with “polygenic scores” based on thousands of samples. These establish his likelihood of having various conditions, but they do not diagnose. Nevertheless, the findings are striking.
Hitler was in the top percentile in terms of his chances of having autism, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and some of his genes overlap between conditions.
The study notes that they ruled out the old rumor that Hitler had Jewish ancestry, but conclude that “If he was to look at his own genetic results, he would have almost certainly have sent himself to the gas chambers.”
It’s not paywalled for me…I don’t have a subscription. Maybe because I’m in the US?
Colonel Roswell P Rosengren of the US army, one of General Eisenhower’s press officers, fixed his eye on the sofa where the Nazi dictator had taken his own life.
He cut a piece of the blood-stained cloth and carried it home.
Eighty years on, that grisly memento has allowed scientists to do something extraordinary: they have sequenced Hitler’s DNA.
The biological design of the tyrant has been studied in detail, and the research will be covered in the Channel 4 documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, which will be broadcast on Saturday. The study has made astonishing revelations and raised tantalising questions.
Professor Turi King of the University of Leicester, with a skull and jawbone, in front of a laptop.
King, a scientist of global repute who is best known for identifying the remains of Richard III,
Interesting, pity about the paywall (I am in Europe, maybe that is the reason), but if the scoop is not fake sooner or later others will cover this too.
Right now I am more interested in the DNA of politicians who did not die (yet). I guess it is protected by some NDA.
The Guardian’s article on the doc is skeptical of their findings about his possible mental conditions, but they note that the blood sample was authenticated using a sample from a male-line relative which produced a perfect Y-chromosome match.
Some guys with small dicks buy red Ferraris or large jacked up pickup trucks to compensate.
Others take over Europe.
In seriousness, I don’t know what this “revelation” means. He was still the most evil sumbitch of the 20th century. Other men with small dicks and mental illness don’t invent WWII. Genetics had nothing to do with that.
What I took from that article was rather the ending:
At the very heart of the Nazis’ so-called “race science” was the idea that our blood is where our destiny lies. In Mein Kampf, Hitler claims that purity of the blood is what enables individuals to make “correct” decisions and bonds a nation together, and its contamination through racial mixing is what causes individuals to act “incoherently” and leads civilisations to their doom. The most troubling thing about Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator is that those involved in making it may have read these passages carefully then continued to make the programme in the way they did anyway.
All the conclusions are very tenuous, not to say exagerated, independently of whether the DNA was authentic or not:
When a psychiatric geneticist from Aarhus University presents Hitler’s polygenic risk score for ADHD in the programme, it is shown to be merely “higher than average”, yet in the voiceover a few seconds later, this becomes a “propensity for ADHD”. Within two minutes talking head Michael Fitzgerald, who specialises in diagnosing historical figures with autism, says: “People with ADHD, like Hitler”.
And next people with ADHD will be called Little Hitlers and will be bullied at school.
