In case you were wondering, yes, research suggests that Hitler had a teeny tiny todger, a mini “mini me”, a diminutive addendum, a laughably small attachment. In short, a micro penis.
How do I know? Well, not because of all the obvious signs and portents; the larger than life public persona, the performative facial hair, the preponderance of extreme bluster, a taste for military drag, extreme hardware and all the attendant disasters and tragedies of the 20th century brought on by his hyped-up overcompensation for, what we now understand to be, his biological shortcomings. I know because they ran his DNA through one of those clever sequencing machines – and found the guy had a mutation that potentially results in the aforementioned “small man” syndrome.
The Kallmann Syndrome is responsible for stunting growth in certain crucial areas – along with other developments like anosmia (the complete loss of the sense of smell, which can be temporary or permanent), colour blindness and hand mirroring (what the one hand does, so does the other).
How, you ask, can we be sure that this is really Hitler’s DNA? Good question. Apparently, Allied soldier US Army Col. Roswell P. Rosengren, entered the bunker where Hitler had committed suicide on the floral couch in Berlin. The colonel was a bit of a collector of opportunistic mementoes. He cut a piece of the bloodied fabric from the couch and took it home with him. I suppose he wanted to show off the macabre find to friends and family around the Christmas lunch table. I can imagine it’s the kind of thing that took on a life of its own, malingering in the back of the cupboard, festering away with the other bits of semi-meaningful flotsam and jetsam of a life lived and now lost.
Still, here we find ourselves. It’s this piece of verified evidence, improbably snatched from the insatiable maw of time, that’s been mined for information no one could have imagined was going to become available at some horrific point in the future. The gory end of the little man, now immortalised in a whole new way. His final stain was run through a machine, communicating more information than we really cared to know.
The family sold the fabric to the Gettysburg Museum of History in Pennsylvania in 2014. They then commissioned a study involving the same geneticist who confirmed that the bones found in a parking lot under a supermarket were Richard III. She has a special interest in the dark side, it seems. Professor Turi King, at the University of Bath, cross-referenced the couch DNA with a known relative of Hitler and confirmed that they were indeed looking at the man himself. This was his genetic code.
There’s something particularly sad and pathetic to this set of presumed revelations from his DNA analysis. Once known, you can never not know. Does any of this help us to penetrate the mystery of his horrific ascendancy or his ultimate downfall?
The implications, however, are disturbing. Can they take his genetic material and reinvigorate him like they’re trying to do with the dinosaurs and other extinct creatures? Would the clone become the man he once was? Is biology destiny? In short, would the circumstances of birth this time round result in a different outcome, or is everyone with a genetic predisposition to a small penis as predicated by the PROK2 gene malformation doomed to overcompensate and aspire to become a “great man”?
I, for one, don’t want to speculate too minutely on the granular implications for our current spate of “great men”. I’m sure that they’re all really well endowed and totally untroubled by these antiquated notions that size actually matters.
Surely all the performative ‘bro’ness, chest thumping, territorial marking and display of huge expensive, externalised indicators of power and wealth – and selective uptake of warmongering – have absolutely nothing to do with their tackle. And just because the silverback gorilla has the smallest of the small dingles in the entire primate family, it doesn’t make him less of an alpha male in his little universe.
This stuff is so disappointing. I’d really have preferred to not know about Hitler’s biology - and just take it for granted that, but for a random roll of the dice, the guy would have slunk off to a small gallery in some provincial town and become an embittered failed artist instead. But now I have to conclude that maybe there is rather less to the entire story than meets the eye.
This article was first published in TimesLive.