Did you expect the revelations about Adolf Hitler’s DNA to bring the fatherland to a standstill? Well, they haven’t. We seem less interested than you in the führer’s alleged micropenis, and whether he really did have one ball.
This isn’t because Germans have stopped caring. Far from it. Whenever the documentary channels need a quick ratings boost, they wheel out yet another programme on Hitler’s hobbies, Hitler’s henchmen, Hitler’s helpers, his mistresses, his dog or his diet. There appears to be an infinite supply.
So why not leap at the suggestion that the coils in Hitler’s double helix bear an uncanny resemblance to SS runes? Tempting, isn’t it?
Jokes aside, what has probably prevented Hitler’s DNA from dominating German front pages is that the trauma of the Hitler Diaries fiasco is too fresh in living newsroom memory.
Still, the Channel 4 documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator was covered, albeit reluctantly and with a generous amount of scepticism.
By and large, the editorial take had two strands.
First, that – bottom line – it’s a case of sensationalism outdoing itself not to look sensationalist. In fairness, this verdict might have been a bit softer if the investigation had come from a homegrown heavyweight, say, Der Spiegel, ARD or Frankfurter Allgemeine, rather than some UK channel few in Germany have ever heard of.
More to the point, though, is the question of why a respected geneticist like Turi Emma King didn’t wait for the DNA findings to be independently peer-reviewed before going on air.
German weekly Die Zeit raised this with King herself, and she told the magazine she would have preferred the paper and the TV documentary to have been released simultaneously, too. But “when you work with television, you can’t influence everything”. And that unfortunately, due to the sensitive nature of the topic, no specialist journal has agreed to publish it so far.
QED, one might say.
Second: how, exactly, would knowing about the führer’s alleged genetic defects be in any way conducive to explaining or understanding his crimes – and why a whole nation was complicit?
Die Zeit also interviewed forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier, who in 2018 was able to match to Hitler a tooth fragment that Russian investigators had secured from his corpse in 1945 and stored in Moscow (European Journal of Internal Medicine: Charlier et al, 2018). After intense debate, he said, he and his team decided against taking a DNA sample – a decision he doesn’t regret.
His reasoning: “The madness of an individual, his complete ideological paranoia – none of that is in his DNA”, he told the paper.
To its credit, the documentary concedes that it’s impossible to know whether Hitler ever had any of the diseases linked to his supposed genetic disposition. Because even if he had such genes, experts say, there is still a 95% chance of not developing any of them. Yet critics argue that viewers will probably assume he did.
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The same goes for the speculation about a “micropenis”. Unprovable and probably wrong. Among the symptoms for Kallmann syndrome is a low testosterone level – and sparse facial hair. Need I mention the moustache?
The TV documentary, however, wonders aloud if a “micropenis” could explain Hitler’s rise. And here lies the real danger: offering pseudo-medical excuses for the inexcusable – and in the process stigmatising people with mental illness as potential mass murderers.
As the historian Sven-Felix Kellerhoff notes in Die Welt, the “only reliable” book on Hitler’s health remains 2009’s War Hitler krank? (“Was Hitler ill?”), based on the records of his personal physician Theo Morell and an evaluation of all known serious medical theories about Hitler’s symptoms.
According to their research, he suffered from chronic gastrointestinal cramps, which were probably psychosomatic, as well as high blood pressure and coronary sclerosis. In addition, from 1943, Parkinson’s, as film footage clearly shows.
However deranged he appears today, there is no evidence for a “medically objectifiable mental illness”, meaning that in a court he couldn’t have claimed diminished criminal responsibility. Nor, as Tagesspiegel points out, could millions of Germans whose DNA did not force them in 1933 to vote NSDAP.
And that – understanding why the masses fell for the fanatics – would be the much more worthwhile research today. For obvious reasons.
