00:00Adolf Hitler suffered, it seems, from a genetic disorder that stunts normal puberty.
00:05Researchers have extracted his DNA from a swatch of fabric with Hitler's blood
00:09from the sofa on which he killed himself.
00:12The results of which will be revealed this weekend in a Channel 4 documentary
00:16titled Hitler's DNA, Blueprint of a Dictator.
00:20I've been speaking to Professor Turi King,
00:21director of the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath,
00:25who led this research for the documentary,
00:27and I asked if she'd had any reticence about taking on the project.
00:31Well, you're absolutely right, I did agonise over it.
00:34When I was first asked to be involved, my first question is,
00:37I don't want to do this if it's going to be sensationalist.
00:40And I did wonder, you know, given who he is,
00:44but, you know, there have been thousands of archaeological and historical individuals
00:49who've had their whole genome sequenced, including Beethoven,
00:52and I thought, well, actually, you know, why should Hitler be exempt from that?
00:56He's, you know, we can't put him on some sort of pedestal,
00:59some sort of mystical person that we can't do this with.
01:02The other thing is the swatch is available, so it's going to be done at some point.
01:06So let's make sure it's done in the most rigorous, scientifically possible way.
01:11And we genuinely didn't know what we were going to find,
01:13and as it is, he has a very interesting genome.
01:16I'll come to that in a second.
01:17Are you absolutely sure that this swatch, this sample you tested, is genuine?
01:22Yes, so this is where I'm obviously taking the genetic evidence
01:27alongside all the other evidence, such as what's the provenance of this swatch.
01:32We know about how it came to be in the possession of a family.
01:35It was a public information officer of Eisenhower who cut it out of the sofa
01:40when he was one of the few men who was allowed into the bunker.
01:43It stayed in the family for decades, then ends up at a museum.
01:47The fabric looks right.
01:48Then when you do the DNA, so you've got a genetic match
01:51with a distant male-line relative,
01:53which allows us to look at a piece of DNA known as the Y chromosome,
01:56and you get a perfect match, and it's incredibly rare.
01:59And then you also have to ask, well, how likely would it be
02:01that another male-line relative of Hitler would have managed
02:03to get himself into the bunker and bleed on the sofa
02:06where Hitler killed himself, and the chances are incredibly remote?
02:10So yes, we can be happy that this is the blood of Hitler.
02:12OK, so the what. What did we reveal in the genetic profile?
02:18Well, so we looked at it two ways.
02:21One was a pure kind of, we're not interested in anything in particular.
02:24Let's just run it through the NHS pipeline, see if anything pitches up.
02:27But also, you know, there's been a lot of medical biographers
02:30who have looked at Hitler and they've tried to sort of diagnose him.
02:35There's historical information about how he had right-sided cryptorchidism,
02:39so an undescended testicle.
02:41So we did look at genes associated with sexual development,
02:45and this is the Pasteur team who are experts in this area,
02:49and they noticed very quickly that he has a very rare
02:52but very well-characterized genetic deletion in a gene known as PROC2,
02:57which has implications for the development of sexual organs,
03:01low testosterone levels, and in 5% to 10% of cases, a micropenis.
03:07And I confess I never thought in a million years
03:09that I would be chatting about Hitler's genitalia on television.
03:12But, I mean, you're a scientist, you're not a historian,
03:16and it's debatable how that affected his psyche and his politics,
03:20but he was open to ridicule because of that, and at the time.
03:24Absolutely.
03:25And I think this is the really important thing.
03:27We have Alex Kaye, who is a historian,
03:29who is the co-presenter of the project with me.
03:31And all of this, when you want to base it within what we know about him as an individual,
03:36we already know about this historical information.
03:39And so the genetics matches up with that.
03:42It cannot tell us about the size of his genitalia,
03:46but it's certainly intriguing to know what we know about him already.
03:49And just a very final quick one,
03:51you also disproved this spurious claim that he had Jewish ancestry,
03:54which the Russian foreign minister referred to very recently.
03:58Yes, that's right.
03:59We wouldn't have gotten the genetic match with the Hitler family
04:01if he had had that Jewish ancestry,
04:04as was put about in the Rubbers as far back as the 1920s.
04:06So we can put that to bed as well.
04:09Professor Turi King with a fascinating insight
04:11into the genetic history of adult Hitler.
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