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00:00In this room, we have a lot of World War II items.
00:07This is where some of the Hitler items are housed.
00:10This is Hitler's tea set.
00:13A lot of American soldiers sourced very unusual artifacts.
00:17We have some Eva Braun items down there.
00:20We have a Hitler shirt.
00:23Can you show me the swatch?
00:27This is the swatch, and this is the blood stain.
00:32That whole little corner here is all Hitler's blood.
00:36The American soldier just took out a knife, cut a piece off,
00:39put it in his pocket, and off he went.
00:41He didn't think a lot about it.
00:42He didn't think 80 years later
00:44people were going to try to extract DNA off of it.
00:48Responsible for some of humanity's worst atrocities,
00:58Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied people in history.
01:02But despite this, he remains an enigma.
01:05Because he's so guarded about his own personal history,
01:09there remain questions that continue to puzzle historians.
01:13His ancestry is shrouded in mystery.
01:16Hitler appears to have felt shamed about his family.
01:19There's been this rumor for a really long time
01:22that Hitler had Jewish ancestry through his grandfather.
01:26His psychological state is hotly debated.
01:29There's a very long history of trying to diagnose Hitler,
01:33who is one of the most enigmatic figures who ever lived.
01:37Some have denied that he had any illness at all.
01:40I have always argued that there's good medical evidence to the contrary.
01:44His sex life is a secret he took to his grave.
01:47He didn't seem to have the same libido men of his age would have had.
01:52And he remains the subject of persistent rumors about his health.
01:56Hitler felt uncomfortable in his own body.
01:59He didn't want to undress in front of anyone ever.
02:02Now, 80 years since his death, can science provide answers?
02:09Looks like a real solid sample.
02:11Can a blood-stained piece of fabric unlock the secrets contained in Hitler's DNA?
02:17We've found something really interesting.
02:22When these findings emerged, I was simply flabbergasted.
02:27Can we finally understand history's most notorious tyrant?
02:44This was how Adolf Hitler wanted to be seen in the 1935 propaganda film Triumph of the Will.
02:52This was a documentary film commissioned by Hitler himself.
02:58This is the staging of Hitler as a messiah.
03:02As the chosen one.
03:04As the person who's descending from heaven to earth in order to save Germany.
03:11It's natural for people to want a savior.
03:14And Hitler presented himself as the messiah.
03:17He was the man who had the answers.
03:23Hitler!
03:24Hitler!
03:25Hitler!
03:26Hitler!
03:27Hitler!
03:28Hitler!
03:29Hitler!
03:30Hitler!
03:31The President of the United States
03:37who feels like a champion of the best blood
03:42and has this knowledge to the nation's leadership
03:46and has decided to keep this leadership
03:50and to make it clear and not to give it away.
03:54The President of the United States
03:57promising to create a National Socialist Reich
04:00that would last 1,000 years,
04:02Hitler led Germany into its darkest chapter.
04:16By April 1945, the 1,000-year Reich was in ruins.
04:22His Nazi regime was collapsing
04:28and the Führer himself was a physical and mental wreck.
04:33Hitler is increasingly faced with the question
04:37what will his fate be?
04:41He decides before the Soviets take Berlin
04:44to take his own life.
04:48As the Third Reich crumbled,
04:55Hitler's personal valet, Heinz Linger,
04:58bore witness to the tyrant's final moments.
05:01Mr. Linger, is Hitler really dead?
05:04Yes.
05:05I was the last one who said goodbye to him
05:10and the first after his suicide
05:13to enter the room in the bunker.
05:15And how did he kill himself?
05:17He shot himself and Eva Braun took poison.
05:23Hitler was determined that his most intimate secrets
05:26would die with him.
05:28He gave me the order five days before
05:33to get gasoline to burn the bodies.
05:38We burned them in the garden.
05:42Hitler made sure that his body would be destroyed
05:47so that there would be no traces left
05:49that would contradict the artificial version
05:54of himself that had been created.
06:02But while his body was destroyed,
06:04Hitler left something behind
06:06that at the time would have seemed inconsequential.
06:10His blood.
06:11Now an international team of experts
06:16will test the DNA in this bloodstained swatch.
06:20And if it does belong to Hitler,
06:22they will attempt a world first.
06:26To sequence his genome.
06:33I am a geneticist who specializes
06:35in ancient and forensic DNA.
06:37I am probably best known for having led
06:40the genetic and statistical identification
06:42of the remains of King Richard III,
06:45who was found in a car park in Leicester in 2012.
06:50I am a historian of Nazi Germany
06:52based in the University of Potsdam.
06:56We already have historical documentation
06:59about Hitler,
07:00but we don't have something like this.
07:02Is DNA?
07:03This will change the way
07:05we think about Hitler,
07:07add to our understanding of him
07:09and be something that
07:11we'll be talking about
07:12for a long time to come.
07:18I think this is going to be
07:19a really interesting
07:20and potentially difficult case.
07:24I often collaborate with people in Germany
07:26and they would not touch this.
07:28Anyone we went to in Europe
07:30wouldn't touch it.
07:31That gives us some idea
07:32of the shadow that Hitler still casts over Europe.
07:36So we have to tread very carefully.
07:41I really agonized about
07:43whether or not I wanted to be involved
07:45and that's because of who it is.
07:47But it's also an extremely interesting project
07:50because of who he is.
07:53There's been huge amounts of interest
07:55in his mental health
07:57and we know that there's a genetic component
08:00to psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
08:05But we know it's also about environment
08:08and upbringing and so on.
08:12No matter what we find,
08:14that would never excuse anything that Hitler did.
08:18People with psychiatric disorders
08:20do not go on to do the sorts of things that Hitler did.
08:26My concern is that by not approaching this,
08:32it makes him and DNA almost like a taboo.
08:36And I think that's wrong.
08:39We need to demystify what we can and cannot tell
08:42from somebody's DNA.
08:4780 years of scientific breakthroughs
08:49have transformed our understanding of human genetics.
08:53The famous helix structure of DNA
08:55was identified soon after the end of World War II.
08:59Over the decades that followed,
09:01research progressed into its uses,
09:03particularly in forensics.
09:05And at the dawn of the 21st century,
09:09the Human Genome Project made a major breakthrough.
09:13We are here to celebrate the completion
09:14of the first survey of the entire human genome.
09:18With the power of this discovery,
09:20comes of course the responsibility to use it wisely.
09:24Our individual genomes contain countless clues
09:29to our propensity for physical features and disease,
09:32for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental traits,
09:37and to our ancestry.
09:39And because DNA remains long after we die,
09:43geneticists can now shine new light on figures from history.
09:49So in terms of doing genetic analysis like this,
09:52provenance, understanding where the sample has come from,
09:57is key.
09:59So does the sample said to be from Adolf Hitler's sofa
10:01stand up to scrutiny?
10:08The grandson of the American soldier who cut the swatch from the sofa
10:12has been traced to Italy.
10:15So Eric, this swatch that we are trying to get DNA out of
10:19was from your grandfather.
10:21He was the one who got it.
10:22My grandfather was the information officer
10:25under General Eisenhower during the war.
10:26And so he had access to people in places that very few people had.
10:32When the Allied forces came together in Berlin,
10:36he was there.
10:38And he would have been, I believe,
10:40in the first group of Americans that entered Hitler's bunker.
10:42I don't know how long after Hitler killed himself that visit would have occurred.
10:53The bodies were gone, but there was blood on the sofa.
10:57My grandfather cut the swatch of blood.
11:01It's such a powerful memento.
11:04For him, it was a true symbol of the death of Hitler in the end of the war.
11:10Eighty years later, we're sitting across the table from one another, talking about the possibility of getting DNA.
11:23You know, good on you, Grandad.
11:24Grandad.
11:31It seems that the swatch itself came from Hitler's bunker.
11:36But does the blood on the fabric belong to Hitler himself?
11:41To find out, a forensic geneticist will collect a sample.
11:45We like to call ourselves the island of misfit cases,
11:49where all the most difficult things go when they're stuck.
11:52So over here is the swatch, and right there is the blood.
11:56Excellent. Yeah, you can definitely see the discoloration.
11:57Yeah.
11:59I've done a lot of sampling in my life.
12:01But this one brought me some anxiety. I'm not going to even lie about it.
12:05Yeah, classic dead red-brown staining. It looks like a real solid sample.
12:18When you're working on something with historical records,
12:20it's a destructive process.
12:22You want to take a sample that is likely to give you some information.
12:27But with every kind of increase in size of that, you're destroying more and more of the original object.
12:34I'm going to take just a small little... about that. Is that okay?
12:42Yeah.
12:45When the handle is something this historic, you know, when you see it happen, it's definitely stressful.
12:51What we need is going to vary on the sample type, how diluted it was, how old it was.
13:01Just making sure that everything's sealed. We don't want anything to get in or get out.
13:04You can certainly tell that you had a blood stain there. It's just how much is that impacted by the age.
13:11You're talking about a very small sample. In theory, everything will work out just fine, but until you get in the lab, you just don't know.
13:20So is it really Hitler's blood? And if it is, will the DNA reveal anything after degrading for 80 years?
13:32A swatch of blood-stained fabric cut from a sofa in 1945 has been taken for analysis to determine if it is Adolf Hitler's blood.
13:51What we're desperate to know is whether or not we've got enough DNA that we can even do the analysis, because without that, that's the end of the project.
14:02After multiple rejections from European institutions, uncomfortable testing anything associated with Hitler, an American forensics lab will work on identifying any DNA in the sample taken from the museum.
14:23We have had samples much older than 80 years that we've tested and been able to obtain really good results from.
14:29But at the same time, if it is not kept well, we have samples five or six years old that are so degraded that it is very difficult to get usable information from.
14:40So our extraction process begins with adding specific chemicals that reveal DNA from deep within the nucleus.
14:55We want DNA from deep within the nucleus.
14:56We want DNA in water and that's it.
15:01So far this looks like a sample that could have some blood on it. It's more red than the fabric is.
15:07My gut feeling is that there's something there that is not just an empty piece of fabric.
15:13It's ready to go on our instrument.
15:18So this will tell us how much DNA is present in our sample.
15:22Your first steps are doing the DNA extraction and then you want to determine is this human blood and is it from a male.
15:32It is one of the most nerve-wracking parts of this process.
15:45So results are there is human DNA. It appears to be male.
15:52Degradation shows that it has failed, which is expected.
15:56We expect DNA from 80 years ago to be degraded.
15:59So that is a good sign that this is very likely the DNA that you're expecting it to be and not some new and fresh contaminant.
16:10So the initial findings seem positive. The sample is blood, it is from a man, and the DNA is not recent.
16:23But how can genetics confirm it to be Hitler's blood?
16:27So the piece of DNA that we use to do the identification that this is Hitler is the Y chromosome.
16:33We humans, we have got 23 pairs of chromosomes.
16:37You get one half of each pair comes from mom and the other half comes from dad.
16:42Chromosome pairs number 1 to 22, they're the same between men and women.
16:46They're known as our autosomes.
16:48But we've got chromosome pair number 23 here.
16:51Those are known as our sex chromosomes.
16:54So women have got two copies of this rather large X chromosome.
16:59Men have got an X chromosome, but they've also got this tiny little Y chromosome.
17:04But it's going to be really important for this project.
17:09Because the Y chromosome that a man has, it comes down to him down through the male line.
17:14So if we can find a male line relative of Hitler and look at their Y chromosome type,
17:20we can see if it matches that from the DNA from the sample.
17:23In Belgium, journalist Jean-Paul Mulders has spent years tracking down Hitler's blood relations.
17:36About 15 years ago, I read that strange story of a man who during the 70s claimed to be Hitler's son.
17:45My initial thoughts was this must be bullshit in fact.
17:57People lie, but DNA doesn't. I had to find out whether it was true or not.
18:07Using stamps licked by Hitler's supposed son, Jean-Paul obtained a DNA sample.
18:12Having the DNA of Lorette is one thing. Obtaining the DNA of Hitler's relatives is another one.
18:21Working with a genealogist, Jean-Paul began to identify living male relatives of Hitler.
18:27You cannot contact them. If you call them by phone, they simply do not answer.
18:34So I started to visit relatives of Hitler in Austria and ask them for a DNA sample.
18:41Some of them react aggressive and said, I don't want to have anything to do with this.
18:48I thought at that moment it won't succeed. We are here for nothing and we will go back with empty hands.
18:54We visited one more relative of Hitler. He was very friendly and he said, oh, a bit of saliva. Is that all you want?
19:04He took the swab and put it in his mouth and gave it back. Here you are. Have a nice day.
19:09And it was a nice day because I had the DNA of the relative.
19:15The results were crystal clear. It didn't match with the saliva on the stamps belonging to Jean-Marie Lorette.
19:22So Jean-Marie Lorette was not at all the son of Adolf Hitler.
19:29Now, many years later, this sample provides a definitive way to test whether the blood from the sofa is in fact Hitler's.
19:38So let me show you the Y chromosome results.
19:46This is the male line relative from JP Mulder's sample. And then let's bring you the one in from the swatch.
19:55Look at that. There's an exact match between the male line relative and the DNA from the sample from the swatch.
20:04They're identical. So does that mean that the blood sample really does belong to Hitler?
20:11This is a really important moment in any investigation like this.
20:17You know what, Alex? It looks like we've got Adolf Hitler's DNA.
20:21When you can kind of go, yep, it's him. We've got him.
20:28I'm so pleased with the result. I feel like we can go forward with confidence, really.
20:32For the first time in history, Adolf Hitler's DNA has been identified.
20:39The question now, is there enough DNA left after 80 years to reveal anything useful about history's most studied man?
20:49Whilst we're alive, we have got really nice long strands of DNA and we can sequence modern DNA incredibly easily.
21:02After death, our DNA starts to degrade. It starts to be cut into smaller and smaller fragments until eventually there is nothing left to sequence.
21:13Can DNA offer answers where historians have so far failed? And will this groundbreaking evidence reveal what Hitler was so keen to hide?
21:26After several rounds of sequencing, the Hitler DNA sample has been rebuilt into this.
21:45A reconstruction of the whole genome of history's most enigmatic tyrant.
21:51So this is it. This is Adolf Hitler's genome.
21:56So this reconstruction is an incredible achievement. How close do you think it is to the entire thing?
22:06We have got some gaps, but we've managed to get pretty good coverage for the genome, so I'm as happy as we can be.
22:13And we can start to get information about his health.
22:16You cannot see evil in somebody's DNA, but you can say things about whether or not they are genetically predisposed towards certain conditions.
22:25We're looking for something about Hitler's ancestry and we're looking for mutations in his DNA, insertions, deletions.
22:35It brings a completely new slant, a new angle on someone who was responsible for the most terrible crimes committed in modern history.
22:45It's really an irony that Hitler, who had his own body destroyed, did not manage to conceal his DNA and that now, in the 21st century, we can try to recover some of the secrets that Hitler wanted to conceal himself.
23:03So how does this new genetic information interact with what we already know?
23:11Can the genome shine new light on the dimmest reaches of the Hitler story, his early life?
23:17Hitler was born in a place called Braunau am Inn, on the border of Germany and Austria.
23:26He wrote in his memoir slash manifesto Mein Kampf that this was fate, that it was his destiny to unite these two nations, Austria and Germany.
23:39He famously started Mein Kampf with this sanitized version of his childhood while in reality he really had a lot of adverse life experiences.
23:54He was surrounded by death from an early age when he was 13 years old.
24:00His father died and at the age of 18 his mother died.
24:04Hitler's mother, Clara, had to bury not one, not two, but four of her children who died at very, very young ages from diphtheria.
24:17Adolf and his younger sister, Paula, were literally the only two survivors.
24:23Combined with that, his father, Alois Hitler, was a very physically violent alcoholic.
24:33And he beat Adolf.
24:36Alois took every opportunity to exert his authority relentlessly on the young Adolf.
24:45We don't want to say anyone who's been abused or anyone who's experienced neglect in their early life is going to end up doing terrible things.
24:53That's not the case.
24:55But these early adverse life experiences do play a critical role.
25:01Hate often does come from this sense of feeling angry, feeling badly treated, feeling alienated from society, maybe as a result of early negative experiences.
25:20This is the former village of Dollersheim in Lower Austria, where generations of Hitler's ancestors lived and died.
25:33Today, almost nothing remains.
25:36We're here in what is left of Dollersheim, which, as you can see, is now a military training area.
25:42But up until 1938 was a thriving community.
25:46One of the descendants of this community is Bernhard Lair.
25:53This is Bernhard Lair.
25:56In June 1938 was the Old Town in January.
26:00The people had to leave everything and stay.
26:02They had the job to search for other homes and homes.
26:08from here is the name of my father and that's why I am with this story
26:16trained.
26:17The city had houses, houses, workers, even a doctor, even a doctor, even a doctor
26:27lived in Döllersheim.
26:30There is nothing more there.
26:33The nature has taken it back.
26:40Despite its importance in Hitler's family story, the German army was ordered to forcibly resettle
26:46all 2,000 villagers before bombing their homes as part of training exercises.
26:53The military knew about this area, that they could use it for a manoeuvre.
27:03There were in the 1930s journalists who wanted to point out, that Hitler could be a part of the
27:10part of the Jewish population.
27:15We do not know it.
27:17But it looks like Hitler wanted to rest the whole region here, something from his past.
27:27Could it be that Hitler was trying to destroy evidence around his true ancestry?
27:40So where does this rumour come from that Hitler had Jewish ancestry?
27:43It's been around for a very long time, since the late 1920s, early 1930s, that Hitler's
27:49grandmother, Maria Schickelgruber, had worked for a period of time in a Jewish household and
27:55had got pregnant.
27:56Foreign media got hold of this, made a big thing out of it, and Hitler was clearly quite
28:01concerned about the potential damage it would do.
28:04And therefore he took steps to publish an official version of his family tree, which made clear
28:10that there was no Jewish ancestry.
28:13Can Hitler's DNA shed light on the ancestry of his grandfather?
28:18This is where the Y chromosome data actually backs up that Nazi version of his family tree,
28:25because the Y chromosome is showing that Hitler is indeed Hitler, or he wouldn't get that DNA
28:30match with the male line relative.
28:32If he had Jewish ancestry, that match wouldn't be there.
28:35So we can actually put that rumour about Jewish ancestry to bed based on the DNA.
28:40Exactly.
28:41Now we know for certain.
28:44DNA has answered one of the biggest questions about Hitler's ancestry.
28:49But can it offer new insights into why he may have behaved as he did?
28:54About 20 years ago, I studied Hitler's life.
28:58There's a vast amount of information available that was collected.
29:03And I was absolutely convinced at that time that he had a whole variety of neurodevelopmental conditions.
29:10And I published on this.
29:13Many people obviously challenged me.
29:15They didn't like it.
29:16They disagreed with it.
29:18They didn't like it.
29:19So are there any clues as to whether he was affected by any conditions?
29:23And if so, what they might have been?
29:27This is Linz, Austria's third city and the closest thing that Hitler had to a hometown.
29:37This is a plaque that commemorates that this hotel was once a school.
29:49And that one of its most famous school children was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
29:56However, this plaque fails to mention the other most famous school child to attend this school.
30:02Adolf Hitler.
30:06Hitler had dreams of being an artist.
30:09And he talks about this from something like the age of 12.
30:12He said his father was absolutely adamant that this would not be the case.
30:17As a school pupil, he was quite idle and lazy.
30:23He didn't make any effort in school.
30:26He didn't concentrate.
30:27He didn't do his homework.
30:30He was unteachable.
30:32Nobody could tell him anything.
30:34So whilst he was quite intelligent and clever, if the subject didn't interest him,
30:40he just entirely neglected it.
30:42Was Hitler just an unhappy, absent-minded child?
30:46Or does his DNA indicate something more fundamental that might help explain his behaviour?
30:57Hitler's DNA results have been sent to a world-leading team at Aarhus University
31:02to assess his genetic propensity for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions.
31:08We are doing genetic analysis where we are looking at thousands of individuals with a psychiatric condition
31:15by using something called the polygenic score.
31:19A polygenic score assesses an individual's genetic markers for a certain condition or disease.
31:26It compares these with a large population sample
31:29to chart the individual's relative likelihood of developing the condition.
31:34We were very surprised when we saw that he was such an outlier on several conditions.
31:43We found that actually very astonishing.
31:48So we have been looking at his score for childhood neurodevelopmental onset conditions.
31:55We can maybe start with the score for ADHD.
31:59So what you can see here is the distribution of the score.
32:03You can see you have this bell curve and in the middle you have a lot of individuals with an average score.
32:09And then you can also see for ADHD he is towards the end.
32:13So he has a score that is higher than the average with common variants that associates with ADHD
32:20or increases the risk for ADHD.
32:22Mm-hmm.
32:24Hitler's possible genetic propensity for ADHD seems to be reflected in his poor performance at school.
32:31But what about evidence from his adolescence as his personality became more clearly formed?
32:39With ADHD those people are usually described as being lazy.
32:45But it's a question of interest.
32:48When the person with ADHD focuses on something of interest then they have the capacity to hyperfocus.
32:56That profile does fit with Hitler particularly in school and indeed you can find evidence of ADHD throughout his life.
33:06He was hyperactive, he was impulsive, he was always on the go.
33:10You can see how disastrous the management of the war would be for somebody who had ADHD like Hitler.
33:18Seek violence! Seek violence! Seek violence!
33:32Evidence of Adolf Hitler's behavior before his reinvention as the Nazi demagogue is relatively scarce.
33:39But August Kubitschek's account of his teenage friendship with Hitler is an invaluable source for psychiatrists interested in the dictator's state of mind.
33:49The benefit of the Kubitschek memoirs is that they are the only source about Hitler in his childhood and teenage years.
33:57And a very good source in the sense that Kubitschek himself was not politically active.
34:05Kubitschek and Hitler's first encounter was here at the Municipal Theatre where the two of them discovered their shared love of music and the opera.
34:15He was a remarkably pale, skinny youth about my own age who was following the performance with glistening eyes.
34:27Once after the performance I accompanied him home.
34:31When we took leave of each other he gave me his name.
34:34Adolf Hitler.
34:36Hitler and Kubitschek's mutual passion for music created a strong bond and they became close friends.
34:46He was totally obsessed with opera.
34:48He spoke to his friend August endlessly about opera.
34:55But Hitler was very controlling and dominating.
34:59He would talk in monologues.
35:02He would arrange his friend.
35:04It was a genuine friendship.
35:07But the only one in his life.
35:12He was always convinced that he was right.
35:15He would talk for hours.
35:16Heatedly.
35:17Passionately.
35:18Often violently.
35:19And I would listen.
35:21Completely under his spell.
35:25Hitler clearly struggled with social relationships.
35:28Can this be explained simply by the higher than average likelihood of ADHD found in his genome?
35:35For a lot of neurodevelopmental disorders we see very often that if you have one condition there's a high probability of also having another condition.
35:47So we have also been looking at Hitler's score for autism.
35:51If we look here at the distribution of autism in the population you can see that Hitler is really, really lying high at the right end.
36:02He has a very high score and he actually belongs to the top 1%.
36:08Top 1%?
36:09This suggests that I would say quite a high probability that he might have had some autistic behaviours or symptoms of autism.
36:20What's really interesting seeing these high polygenic scores is that people were already speculating about whether or not he had these conditions.
36:31They're really striking results.
36:34I can hardly express how staggered I was to find support for my findings from genetics.
36:42Because I had taken quite a lot of criticism for describing Hitler as having autism for ADHD and for other things.
36:53We can't reduce his behaviour to these diagnoses.
37:00Autism is a disability and a difference.
37:05It's a disability in the sense that people who are autistic struggle with social relationships and communication.
37:13They struggle with that first kind of empathy.
37:16We call it cognitive empathy, which is just the ability to recognise what someone is thinking or feeling.
37:21Autistic people have excellent attention to detail and excellent pattern recognition skills.
37:31And they tend to kind of focus on particular topics, sometimes called obsessions.
37:36So they go into great depth in a very systematic way.
37:40Long before politics, Hitler's obsessions were music and art.
37:48And in 1907, he moved to Vienna to pursue his dream of becoming a painter.
37:55He'd already left school. He'd given up on everything in his life to that point.
38:03And only had this one idea in mind, which is taking the entrance exam for the Academy of Fine Arts.
38:09The status was quite important for him.
38:11Hitler seemed to have been obsessed with being an artist. He really believed he was good enough.
38:20So he was always very passionate about that. But it seemed that it was not his actual calling.
38:25Hitler had invested all his hopes into entering the Vienna Academy.
38:32But he was rejected. Twice.
38:35He spent the next few years drifting in Vienna, eking out a living selling paintings in the street.
38:41A major change of fortune came with the outbreak of the First World War.
38:55So how did the move to military life suit Hitler's possible autistic traits?
39:001914 was one of several turning points in Hitler's life. The First World War gave him a new opportunity to find employment, to find meaning when all his dreams of becoming an artist had actually been dashed.
39:18Hitler left Austria and moved to the Bavarian capital of Munich in Germany.
39:26When the announcement of war was made in Munich, Hitler claims he was there that day.
39:32And he joined up with the 16th Bavarian Infantry Regiment.
39:36At that point, he is willing to follow orders and function in this very structured hierarchical way where other people tell him what his boundaries are and what he can do within those boundaries.
39:54Hitler thrived in the army. He won an iron cross for bravery and was promoted to the rank of corporal.
40:01Hitler's entrance into the army is absolutely fascinating because he found a structure there. Another feature of autism is what we call preservation of sameness, wanting routine, wanting the same routine every day.
40:22He didn't have friends in the army. He didn't relate to the other soldiers.
40:26If you ever look at a photograph of Hitler in the army, he's always at his side.
40:35Germany was at the mercy of the Allies. We celebrated. Not only because the war was over, but because it seemed that we had put an end to German militarism forever.
40:46After the war, Hitler returned to Munich. In the chaos, it had become a hotbed of revolutionary activity on the left and right of politics.
40:57Hitler worked for the army as an informant sent to monitor the activities of extreme parties.
41:03He was soon drawn to the right-wing nationalist views of one group in particular, the NSDAP, which became known as the Nazi Party.
41:16It's not uncommon for a person with autism to have very black and white thinking.
41:23This black and white thinking makes people vulnerable to join extreme groups. And of course, Hitler did that.
41:31Of course, in the general population, the vast majority of autistic people are highly moral. They're excessively moral.
41:42Now, that's totally different from Hitler, who was amoral and perverse.
41:48The first fellow who heard him speak in a beer keller in Munich, he said,
41:52what a gob he has, we could use him. And because of that, he was made their leader.
42:01Hitler's genetic propensity for autistic and ADHD traits does seem to align with what we know from history.
42:11Could these findings help explain Hitler's behaviour in later life?
42:15At Trinity College, Cambridge, a leading autism expert will assess his polygenic scores.
42:25Simon, this is the one for autism. So he's in the top 1% for autism on the polygenic score.
42:33Yeah.
42:35We've got another polygenic score around ADHD and he's coming at the 80th percentile.
42:39It is amazing how the scientists have managed to extract these scores from the DNA.
42:46But the process of science is all about critical review and scrutiny.
42:52Going from biology to behaviour is a big jump.
42:55It's an indication of a predisposition, but it's not a diagnosis.
43:01Yeah. By looking at genetic results like this, there's a risk of stigma.
43:06People out there might feel, is my diagnosis being linked with somebody who did such monstrous things?
43:14The vast majority of these individuals do not do bad things.
43:18We've just got to keep that in mind.
43:19Completely.
43:20So that it doesn't become out of balance.
43:23It would be very easy for people to look at this result and say,
43:27was the whole of Hitler's behaviour to do with autism?
43:31Exactly.
43:32It would be the wrong conclusion to draw.
43:35The risk is reductionism down to genetics when there are so many other factors that could be playing a part.
43:41We know that genes don't operate in isolation.
43:44They operate in an environment.
43:46And I'm glad that Alex is here as the historian to just remind us about the importance of social factors.
43:51Yeah.
43:52He clearly experienced an unusual level of suffering during his childhood.
43:59Loss, yeah.
44:00And loss.
44:01To me, the experience of neglect and abuse would be much more relevant to understanding why somebody grows up with hate and anger,
44:10rather than the genetics.
44:12The two interplay.
44:14And in Hitler's case, autism and ADHD cannot explain his cruelty in later life.
44:21But perhaps one other polygenic finding from his DNA can.
44:26Genetic tests have also shown that Hitler's polygenic score for antisocial behaviour, a measure of psychopathy, is in the top 10%.
44:35I think that we're quite entitled to use criminal autistic psychopathy to describe Hitler.
44:45It highlights, number one, his criminality, number two, his autism, and number three, his psychopathy.
44:52So it's a very complex mixture.
44:56Hitler is one in a million or maybe one in a billion.
44:59The shy, unusual boy who failed at everything he had strived for, had put his unique mind to reinventing himself as a messianic leader, inspiring godlike devotion.
45:14But strip away the theatrics, and Hitler was still a man.
45:19No amount of power could help him to overcome the limits of his body.
45:23And when the scientists explore what Hitler's DNA might reveal about his physique, something truly extraordinary is exposed.
45:34We've had some results come back, and there's something really, really interesting in it.
45:42He's got a deletion for one letter of his DNA, but that really affects the protein that is implicated in sexual development.
45:56And development of sexual organs.
45:59Really significant finding.
46:01It seems this was manifested in his personal life, in his personal relations.
46:06He had, throughout his life, difficulty establishing intimate relationships.
46:12Oh my goodness.
46:14This is going to be quite big.
46:19Could this finding help to answer one of the most persistent rumours around Hitler?
46:24And Hitler's DNA blueprint of a dictator concludes next Saturday, slightly later, at five past nine.
46:34Gillian Anderson stars as a secret passion burns during the troubles.
46:38Trespasses is streaming now.
46:40And tensions simmer tomorrow in an atmospheric new drama.
46:43Will secrets surface in summer water at nine.
46:54Will free confess, longer here in second...
46:55Will was to путecerape after a few minutes.
46:58Well, for years ago he剛ves, only from there was in FEMA and puggins, in the World War山.
47:01The
47:10wrath of the sky with the God ofrotches.
47:15The courage that came to be and of now is led across platform.
47:18Those who are allérgных people, boom deaths
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