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00:00Adolf Hitler's suicide shot reverberates through history.
00:07For 80 years, endless documents have been analyzed, trying to understand this most notorious of tyrants.
00:15Someone who can order the deaths of 6 million Jews. What kind of person is that?
00:21Now, science is unlocking a new source of information.
00:25Hitler wanted to destroy all traces of himself, but failed.
00:31In the wreckage of his Berlin bunker, an American colonel cut out a swatch of sofa material stained with Hitler's blood.
00:39In 1945, it was just a war trophy.
00:43He didn't think 80 years later people were going to try to extract DNA off of it.
00:47But now it's a unique historical document.
00:51Tests have proved it is Hitler's blood.
00:54An exact match.
00:56For the first time, an international team has sequenced his genome.
01:00We've got Adolf Hitler's DNA.
01:03They've already rewritten history.
01:05The rumor that Hitler had Jewish ancestors is not true.
01:09We can actually put that rumor about Jewish ancestry to bed based on the DNA.
01:14A strong association for genes to do with autism could explain his all or nothing thinking.
01:20And he actually belongs to the top 1%.
01:23Hitler's genome suggests he may have been genetically predisposed to psychopathic behavior.
01:29When these findings emerged, I was simply flabbergasted.
01:33What other secrets can his DNA unlock about his mental state?
01:40Genetic evidence for Hitler having psychiatric illness is really important.
01:45About his delusions of grandeur.
01:47Hitler felt that he could control the planet.
01:50And about an entirely new insight into his intimate relationships.
01:55He was interested in women, but only at a distance.
01:59He's got a deletion in a gene strongly associated with the development of sexual organs.
02:07On the 30th of January, 1933, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.
02:28The Nazis called it their seizure of power.
02:31Goebbels straight away organized this huge torchlight parade.
02:36Hitler was basically a nobody from a village in Austria who had nothing to his name.
02:43So how did he get so much influence and power so quickly?
02:46The average person does not do that.
02:48Hitler was far from average.
02:53His passionate oratory commanded huge crowds.
02:58And the talkativeness and the ability to speak so much.
03:07And if you're very charismatic and you have new ideas, it attracts people to you.
03:12He's accruing more and more power to himself.
03:21And at the same time is the establishment of the first concentration camps.
03:26The intimidation and imprisonment of political opponents.
03:30They were beaten up in the streets by the Nazi stormtroopers.
03:35Hitler's rise to power is characterized by a willingness to use violence.
03:41His greatest hatred was reserved for the Jews.
03:45Hitler proves to be completely ruthless.
03:50Anti-Semitism becomes German state policy.
03:57And to understand an individual who takes these ideas to an extreme,
04:02to start designing the so-called final solution.
04:06There were nine million Jews living in Europe, of whom six million died.
04:13It's a killing machine on a massive scale.
04:21Hitler's obsessive nationalism and use of extreme violence, including murder,
04:26are typical of dictators past and present.
04:31But Hitler was an untypical dictator in one key area.
04:41Mussolini was very well known for his affairs and relationships with women.
04:47I'm kind of quite proud of showing some of that off.
04:51It was very common among the Nazi leadership to have mistresses and many sexual relationships.
04:56Hitler, on the other hand, was determined to keep his personal and private life absolutely secret.
05:06Why were Hitler's relationships with women so unusual?
05:10For the first time, scientists have sequenced his genome and discovered something extraordinary.
05:17I have to say there was a bit of a moment.
05:21He's got a deletion in a gene known as PROC2.
05:26So PROC2 is found on chromosome 3, and we've got two chromosome 3s.
05:31He has a section on one of his where there's a deletion, a crucial letter.
05:36And it's a nonsense deletion.
05:38So if you've not got one working, it can have a pretty big impact on your health.
05:43And we know that it's strongly associated with something known as Kalman's syndrome.
05:49One of the big things that Kalman's is about is about development of sexual organs.
06:03The DNA diagnosis of Kalman's syndrome reveals an entirely new source of information
06:09that raises questions about Hitler's sexual development.
06:14At Turku University in Finland, this rare condition is a specialism of Professor Jorma Topari.
06:23How would this have affected him?
06:26Yeah, the typical symptoms in 10% of the kids with this kind of mutation might have a small penis, micropenis.
06:34Much more common feature would be that the testis don't descend normally to the scrotum.
06:43The DNA reveals the possible physical impact of Kalman's syndrome.
06:48So it seems a coincidence that during World War II, there was a British propaganda song about his genitals.
07:02In the Second World War, there was a popular song in Britain.
07:06People thought that that was probably not really quite true.
07:15The song was clearly intended to belittle Hitler.
07:18But did it contain a grain of truth?
07:21Pretty much everybody knows there's this song from World War II where it talks about Hitler having only one ball.
07:27What's the historical evidence?
07:30It turns out that this is more or less true.
07:34In 1923, Hitler spent nine months in Landsberg prison.
07:39And in 2010, a medical report was discovered showing that Hitler had right-sided cryptochidism.
07:48In other words, an undescended testicle.
07:51So there's some truth in this rumour that was already being circulated during the war.
07:57Yeah, and now we have genetic evidence which seems to back that up.
08:03Hitler's Proc 2 mutation indicates that as well as an undescended testicle, he may also have had a micropenis.
08:10This diagnosis reflects testimony from a friend of Hitler's during his rise to power in the 1920s.
08:18When he was a young man in the army and would get dressed and undressed in front of his fellow soldiers,
08:25the other men would make fun and say to him,
08:29your penis is smaller than everybody else's.
08:33And that is potentially more psychologically traumatic for a young boy, a young man, than anything else.
08:44This genetic condition would have shaped Hitler throughout his life.
08:49So as a baby, he could already be starting to show signs of the implications of having this deletion in that particular gene.
08:58Yes, but that's it in the childhood.
09:02Then the next time one would see something wrong would be in puberty.
09:07So talk me through that. What happens?
09:09Well, most of the ones with Kalman syndrome don't enter puberty because they don't produce testosterone.
09:19Jorma, Hitler is heterozygous.
09:22So he's got one copy of the Proc 2 gene that's normal, one copy that's not.
09:27But my understanding is that even having just one copy with this mutation, you will have some form of Kalman's.
09:33Is that correct?
09:34That's correct. And the majority of the cases with this mutation are heterozygous.
09:40And it always causes the syndrome, but the severity of the syndrome can be very variable.
09:48So how might fluctuating testosterone levels have affected Hitler?
09:59His iconic moustache shows he managed to enter puberty.
10:04But did his testosterone levels then falter?
10:07A unique historical source might shed light on this question.
10:11Incredibly, despite his many declamatory speeches on film, Hitler's speaking voice was recorded only once.
10:20This is the place where Hitler met Marshal Mannerheim, the chief of Finnish military force during the Second World War.
10:32After recording the official reception and speeches aboard the train, the Finnish sound engineer kept recording as Hitler chatted casually over lunch.
10:42So this is a picture of that meeting?
10:46Yes.
10:47They have a nice white cloth on the table, though, which we don't have.
10:53Yeah.
10:54But it's the very same table and the microphones were up there.
10:57Wow.
10:58Wow.
10:59The only time we have recording of Hitler speaking in normal circumstances.
11:07Should we have a listen?
11:19So that sounds like a grown man's voice.
11:21Yeah.
11:22So his voice is quite deep.
11:30It is.
11:31Yeah.
11:32Yeah.
11:33It shows that he had gone through puberty and he had his voice break.
11:41He might have not had the most severe condition because the mutation was only in one of the genes, not on both.
11:53He's certainly born with some kind of abnormalities around his sexual organs.
11:58So he may have had a micropenis.
12:00We know he certainly seems to have had something with one of his testicles.
12:04He might have not had sexual desire because that's the specific symptom of lack of testosterone.
12:13Although women were, of course, so idolizing him, bringing him flowers and screaming and everything like the pop star.
12:24But he doesn't seem to take that as a hint to anything else.
12:31Mm.
12:32He's not interested in sex.
12:40The Nazi philosophy emphasised the importance of fertility, of large families, of lots of children, creating a racially pure germination.
12:50Hitler clearly goes very much against this in not having any kind of family, in not having children, in not being married.
12:59Hitler quite effectively cultivates the image of a man devoted entirely to the fatherland.
13:07Our discovery strongly suggests that it may have been only a convenient cover for his Kalman syndrome.
13:15Analyse of Hitler's DNA shows he had a rare condition called Kalman syndrome.
13:31Symptoms include low testosterone and abnormal genital development, which may have brought psychological challenges.
13:38Back then, if a boy was thought to be in any way not fully masculine from a psychological point of view, that could well have had a big impact upon his sense of masculinity, his sense of identity, and make one feel very, very depressed, very, very ashamed, and also desperate.
14:05How would that have affected him, growing up and into adulthood, and his relationships with women?
14:11He really, really did struggle to feel comfortable with women, and that in itself can be an act of great shame.
14:20And the earlier that shaming exercise takes place, the more rage, fury, and murderousness will develop within one's psyche.
14:35Hitler's friend August Kubitschek wrote in his memoir about the teenage adults' dysfunctional relationships.
14:41Kubitschek said he was with Hitler daily from age 15 to 19, and he clearly can state that Hitler never had a girlfriend during that time, never had an ongoing sexual relationship.
14:54Kubitschek describes how Hitler had a crush on a girl named Stephanie.
14:59He never actually went out with her, but he did have a couple year-long infatuation with her.
15:05Hitler fantasized about kidnapping Stephanie and them dying in a melodramatic death pact.
15:12It's the first and last time I heard him seriously speak of suicide.
15:17He would jump in the Danube River and make an end of it.
15:20But Stephanie would have to die with him. He insisted on that.
15:25Many years later, in 1929, there's a record of an actual relationship.
15:36It was far from a healthy romance.
15:40He was 40, she was just 21, and she was his half-niece.
15:46Geli Raubal.
15:48She was a young and attractive woman.
15:51Kind of liked attention, she was quite flirtatious, she had quite a lot of admirers.
16:01Hitler was clearly infatuated, obsessed with his half-niece, Geli Raubal,
16:06in a way that he wasn't obsessed with any other woman in his life before or after.
16:12She felt trapped by Hitler's attention.
16:17Hitler was controlling. Hitler was jealous.
16:22He was quite manipulative of her. Possibly there was violence involved.
16:28Lots of people think that Hitler was having some kind of sexual relationship with this niece of his.
16:35We do not know for certain.
16:38Clearly, she was very unhappy.
16:41Geli, after two years living with her controlling uncle Adolf, made a tragic decision.
16:49In 1931, Geli took her own life.
16:54She used Hitler's pistol and shot herself in his apartment.
17:00The shadow of suicide often fell over Hitler's relationships with women.
17:05One historian has estimated that of the seven women with whom Hitler had some kind of boyfriend-girlfriend encounter,
17:17at least three of these women attempted suicide and another three actually committed suicide.
17:24Including his longest and most famous relationship with Eva Braun.
17:31After she met Hitler, she endeavoured to commit suicide not once, but twice.
17:37So whether he was already attracted to people with a passion for self-harm and death, or whether he actually was so cruel to them that he really caused the suicide, that we do not know for certain.
17:52Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun was one that lasted 14 years.
18:00He was attracted to her from the very beginning.
18:04He developed quite a fascination with her, but what really went on between the two of them sexually, we do not know.
18:11Hitler's housekeeper, Herbert Döring, and his wife were close to the couple, and well placed to discover the truth of their sexual activities.
18:22My wife was very anxious, as I am.
18:26My wife washed me often.
18:29And at the first time, she looked at her, with a lot of anxious, whether it was sexual.
18:34But she had never seen anything.
18:36Never seen anything.
18:45No one has ever really been able to explain why Hitler was so uncomfortable around women throughout his life.
18:52Or why he probably never entered into intimate relations with women.
18:56But now we know that he had Kalman syndrome.
18:59This could be the answer we've been looking for.
19:02The Kalman diagnosis is a new source of information.
19:06Filling gaps left by the existing records about Hitler's health.
19:12The medical notes made by the Führer's personal physician, Dr Theodor Morel, can now be examined in a fresh light.
19:20Morel was giving Hitler all kinds of pills and injections, around 80 different medications, over the course of the time that he spent with him.
19:30It's unlikely Dr Morel knew about Kalman syndrome, as it wasn't identified until 1944.
19:40But now Hitler's DNA has revealed the Proc 2 gene mutation.
19:45One of Dr Morel's treatments stands out.
19:49Testosterone.
19:50Testosterone.
19:51This is an entry here from Morel's diary.
19:55It's the 24th of January and we can see here 25 milligrams of testosterone injected.
20:02So we know that he was regularly injecting Hitler with testosterone.
20:05It's not that unusual that testosterone was being used at this time because people understood it could help energy, it could help fatigue, for example, as well as things like muscle mass and really producing masculine characteristics as it was branded and sold as.
20:21Also things like erectile dysfunction, loss of libido.
20:23Unfortunately Morel doesn't explain explicitly in his notes why he's giving Hitler testosterone, but he's certainly receiving it on a fairly regular basis.
20:33In Kalman's the treatment is actually sex hormone.
20:36So Morel may have identified some sort of sexual issue, we don't know, but maybe they were onto the right track.
20:42Dr Morel unwittingly provides more evidence that supports the Kalman diagnosis, his own body odour.
20:53Kalman syndrome has two principal features.
20:59One is there is no sex hormone production and the other one is the lack of sense of smell.
21:08Whilst Hitler trusted him entirely, some of the other leading Nazis took quite a strong dislike to him.
21:18People were complaining to Hitler about him, they were even complaining also that he was smelly, to which Hitler responded,
21:27I employ Dr Morel not for his fragrance but for his skills as a doctor.
21:32The very fact that everyone in Hitler's inner circle seemed to have been irritated by the smell of Dr Morel and Hitler did not,
21:43would suggest that Hitler might have not been able to smell very well,
21:48which now in the light of the diagnosis of Kalman's is highly significant.
21:53Hitler wanted to be seen as a god-like figure, the heroic leader of a pure Aryan race.
22:04But Kalman syndrome now reveals the truth about his own body.
22:10Hitler knew nothing of the DNA clues that would be left in his blood,
22:14but the Nazis did understand that disease and disability could be passed down the generations.
22:23So we've known about the heredity of characteristics for literally thousands of years.
22:31I mean we know things like the early farmers used it as a way of kind of selecting for crops
22:35and selecting animals and domesticating animals.
22:40Selective breeding to improve livestock is seen as a good thing.
22:45Selective human breeding, eugenics, is widely condemned and illegal.
22:50A central component of Nazi ideology was eugenics,
22:55that the health of the nation could be improved through selective breeding.
23:01In his earliest days as dictator, Hitler authorized forced sterilization of people with mental and physical disabilities,
23:10to stop them passing on what he believed were impurities.
23:14Eugenics, and a determination to ensure the purity of the Aryan race,
23:20was an obsession that led to the worst atrocities of the Nazi regime.
23:24In 1939, Hitler signed a decree to eliminate people he deemed unworthy of life,
23:32in a state-organized program of euthanasia.
23:35This is Hartheim Castle, near Hitler's hometown of Linz,
23:50which was used as part of the so-called euthanasia program to murder the mentally and physically disabled.
23:57It's the one killing decree or the one order to murder people actually signed by Adolf Hitler.
24:13The castle was a home for disabled people, beginning in 1898.
24:20The Nazis changed the castle into an annihilation center in March 1940,
24:31and they murdered up to 30,000 people here.
24:39This was the former guest chamber.
24:41It was disguised as a shower room.
24:43About 30 people were brought in at the same time.
24:48And from outside, the doctors, they filled in the carbon monoxide.
24:59It's hard to imagine.
25:00You cannot imagine what took place here.
25:03Heartheim formed a prototype for the use of gas chambers for the mass murder of 6 million European Jews
25:15in the extermination camps set up by the Nazis.
25:21Hitler's policies are completely around eugenics and based on his own DNA,
25:27particularly with the Kalman syndrome.
25:29If he had been able to look at his own DNA as if it was somebody that he was making a decision about,
25:36whether or not it should go to the gas chambers or not,
25:39he almost certainly would have sent himself.
25:44The castle archive reveals that Hitler's policies did send one of his relatives to die at our time,
25:50his second cousin, Aloisa Veit.
25:54She'd been confined for years in a psychiatric facility in Vienna.
25:57Her medical records state she imagined she could see ghosts and evil people.
26:04Her vivid hallucinations and delusional behaviour often meant she was restrained on a bed.
26:11The diagnosis doctors gave Hitler's cousin was schizophrenia.
26:15This could have implications for our understanding of Hitler's mental state, because schizophrenia runs in families.
26:27Groundbreaking analysis of Hitler's DNA is unlocking more secrets of the infamous dictator.
26:40You get a little glimpse into his personality by looking at his DNA.
26:47What I'm doing in my research is that I'm trying to identify genetic risk factors for psychiatric conditions.
26:54We know that Hitler's relative was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that it runs in families.
27:04So what does Hitler's polygenic score suggest about his likelihood of developing the condition?
27:09You can see here the distribution of the score for schizophrenia in the population.
27:16And you can see that Hitler is located in the very end of the distribution.
27:21He has a very high polygenic score for schizophrenia.
27:25Actually he belongs to the top 1%.
27:28Top 1%?
27:29Yeah.
27:30Yeah, it's high.
27:31Wow.
27:32But what does it actually mean when somebody's in that top 1% in terms of how likely they are to develop the condition?
27:39It's very difficult to say from the score because it's only capturing a small part of the risk.
27:45But he is highly loaded with common variants that increases the risk.
27:51The latest DNA result reveals Hitler had an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.
27:57Schizophrenia is a very challenging mental illness where the person experiences hallucinations and delusions.
28:09It often means that your everyday life falls to pieces.
28:13Hitler would not be diagnosed with schizophrenia today as he did not show these serious debilitating symptoms.
28:20In acute schizophrenia there's a total fragmentation of the personality.
28:27And so a person in that state has no ability to lead a country, no ability to wage war.
28:35If he had full blown schizophrenia he couldn't have achieved what he achieved.
28:39Hitler may not have had schizophrenia, but his DNA analysis reveals a range of genes associated with it.
28:49When we look at physical health conditions, sometimes we can find a single gene that is the cause.
28:59But when it comes to psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions, it's very rarely the case that there's a single gene.
29:07There are hundreds of genes that are likely to be involved.
29:10Recent international studies show that some of these schizophrenia genes may actually have positive effects.
29:19Research found relatives of people with schizophrenia are often extremely creative.
29:24In families that have schizophrenia, you often find that there's a genius.
29:31These genes may have given him the creative, unconventional thinking that drove his early success.
29:43At the Berghof, his mountain retreat in Bavaria, Hitler conceived his plans for Nazi domination.
29:50It is from the picture perfect world of the Bavarian Alps that he starts the war, that he conducts the war, that he brings death and destruction across the world.
30:10Hitler's plans at the start of the war were spectacularly successful.
30:15Poland quickly fell, Denmark and Norway followed. His armies swept through Belgium, the Netherlands and part of France, then Yugoslavia and Greece.
30:27Some historians have put Hitler's success down to his unconventional thinking.
30:32In May 1940, when most of Hitler's generals wanted to invade France from the north, Hitler insisted on attacking further south, through the difficult wooded terrain of the Ardennes.
30:46This plan proved to be a brilliant and decisive success. The French army collapsed. It was all over within six weeks, just as Hitler had predicted.
30:56Hitler's DNA is suggesting new explanations for his behavior. Schizophrenic traits involve unconventional creativity. Autistic traits include attention to detail. ADHD can add hyper focus.
31:15He also often had a manic energy in pursuit of a goal or idea.
31:22He was a man who became obsessed by the things that interested him. And he would focus on these things to the exclusion of everything else in his life. Sleep, hunger, relationships, everything.
31:40Hitler's doctor noted this behavior.
31:45Theodore Morell diagnosed Hitler in his diaries with manic depressive illness in 1943. His own physician diagnosed him during his lifetime with this condition.
31:54If the latest DNA analysis detects genes for manic depression, now called bipolar disorder, it could transform our view of Hitler.
32:09We're also looking at his score for bipolar disorder. And if you look here again at the distribution, you can see that Hitler is loaded really at the top. So he has a very high high score.
32:22Actually, he belongs to the top 1% of individuals with a high score.
32:27Another 1%?
32:28Yeah.
32:29Yeah, really, really striking results.
32:31Bipolar really means that your mood swings from very low when you're depressed through to very high when you are manic. So it's sometimes also called manic depression.
32:46Hitler had manic depression periods throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Hitler would be highly excitable, highly talkative, very overactive for a few weeks, and then times when he would be highly underactive, not get out of bed, not say anything, not eat anything for a few weeks, and back and forth between these states.
33:05If we look back at Hitler's youth, in the diaries of his teenage friend Kubitschek, before politics, before power, the signs are already there.
33:16Kubitschek describes him being in a state of ecstasy and talking and talking and talking in a grandiose way. And the talkativeness and the ability to speak so much is a manic trait. That doesn't happen in a normal mentally healthy person.
33:32Hitler's manic phases may have aided his rise to power and fueled his early success in directing the war. But then he seemed to lose touch with reality.
33:53Hitler made a very bold and surprising decision to invade Russia. This time his plans led to disaster.
34:09In this kind of moment of euphoria, Hitler starts to fantasize what the world would look like after the defeat of the Soviet Union.
34:20Hitler, against the explicit advice of his officers, told that he knew best.
34:31This was a much bigger enemy with much bigger manpower resources.
34:39Hitler's attack on Stalingrad leads to over half a million German casualties. His sixth army, which had played a key role in the devastating assault on France, is destroyed.
34:58After crushing defeats in Russia, Hitler's mood swings grew more severe.
35:10He was no longer the energetic, highly active, excitable, but very functional and often very calm, charismatic creative leader of the early 1930s.
35:20He was becoming more and more angry and irritable and rageful.
35:25Hitler increasingly resorts to haranguing those around him, dictating to them, flying off the handle.
35:32It became virtually impossible for these military advisers to tell him the truth, to disagree with him if they didn't want to incur his wrath.
35:44As Hitler's mood swings and rages grew worse, his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morel, tried to treat him.
35:55What he tried to do was to treat the lows with the amphetamines, and the highs with barbiturates, and of course there's only so far you can get with that, so Hitler generally got worse.
36:05Morel gave Hitler Vita-Multin tablets, a mixture he made up himself, that dramatically altered the Führer's moods.
36:13Morel gave Hitler gold foil tablets, and that tablet was once analysed by another German physician in the Nazi hierarchy, and it turned out to be methamphetamine.
36:24The worst possibility you would give to a person with bipolar would be amphetamines.
36:31So Dr. Morel was treating Hitler's depression with the amphetamines, but what he didn't appreciate is that they were also causing the manic states to be worse, and then he would cycle back into his depressions again.
36:43So then he would just get more and more amphetamine, and it became a vicious circle.
36:47But he certainly was not in touch with reality well.
37:01On the 6th of June 1944, Hitler was at his mountain hideaway, the Berghof.
37:08After talking into the early hours, he finally went to bed at 3am.
37:14One hour later, news came in of a vast Allied invasion on the beaches of northern France.
37:26It was D-Day.
37:37The generals were in a quandary. They just didn't know what to do.
37:41They couldn't actually give out any orders without Hitler's say-so on the one hand, and yet, on the other hand, they were fearful of a terrible fit of rage if they woke Hitler up.
37:53The landing of Allied troops in Normandy began the recapture of Europe from the Nazis.
38:00As Germany's enemies invaded, vital hours were wasted.
38:06When Hitler woke at 10am, he was unconcerned, even optimistic.
38:20He kind of delusionally seemed to think that Germany would prevail.
38:25When D-Day started, there was this moment of elation, of almost euphoria in the German population because of successful propaganda.
38:34Germans thought, finally, we can still win this war.
38:38But this is, of course, all based on Hitler's delusions, on Hitler's self-belief and grandeur.
38:47In reality, it was the beginning of the end.
38:50In January 1945, France was being liberated and the Soviets were sweeping through Eastern Europe.
38:57As Germany's fortunes declined, Hitler's mental and physical state deteriorated rapidly.
39:04Hitler fled to Berlin, into an underground bunker, to avoid the Russian bombardment.
39:11The Führer was chauffeured through the bombed-out ruins of his capital, in an armoured limousine.
39:26And now we're getting ever closer to the bunker and to the heart of what was then Hitler's Berlin.
39:39What's it like at that point?
39:41Hitler would have been driving through a devastated Berlin.
39:46Wow.
39:47And he's travelling from the, more or less, the western outskirts into the centre.
39:51Can't really fail to notice how devastated Berlin was.
39:56Berlin, which is large chunks of it, is rubble at this point?
39:59Yes.
40:01Well, given that Germany is being destroyed, he knows it's over.
40:07The sun is setting on the third right.
40:09The devastation of Berlin matched Hitler's own mental and physical decline.
40:19This was clear to staff in the bunker, including his secretary, Traudel Junge.
40:26He looked like a shadow.
40:29He looked emotionless and very grey and pale and like a broken old man.
40:39His leg was lame and his movements were very slow.
40:46He was not, not anymore the dictator and impressive, fascinating man who was earlier.
40:56Hitler was only 56 years old, but staff also noticed further evidence of his deterioration.
41:02A trembling left hand.
41:05Possibly a sign of Parkinson's disease.
41:09For the majority of cases, DNA analysis can't help doctors diagnose Parkinson's.
41:16Can we find clear evidence of the condition from another source?
41:21This last piece of footage of Hitler, it's from the final days of the war, the final days of his life.
41:27And this is the official version of the German newsreel at the German newsreel at the time.
41:36I think what strikes me about this footage is not what we see but what we don't see.
41:42What's really hidden in this footage is his left hand.
41:46It's only when we see the uncensored version that we know what's really happening.
41:50And we do have the full footage, which was not released to the German public at the time.
41:57So now we see this left hand behind his back and there is this rest tremor, it's a very coarse tremor.
42:02The regime did not want the German public to see this footage.
42:05Because it shows us for sure that this is a neurodegenerative condition.
42:09This is Parkinson's and there is no doubt about the diagnosis here.
42:19Hitler, an unknown provincial loner, tried to realise his dream of a thousand year German Reich.
42:26That fantasy was shattered.
42:32By April 1945, Soviet guns were trained on his bunker and shells were pounding above.
42:42Terrified of being captured by the Soviets, Hitler planned his and Eva Braun's suicide.
42:49At the end, even most of Hitler's inner circle had abandoned him.
42:56Hitler was losing any sense of reality.
43:00He continued directing the war, holding meetings with his generals, moving armies around the map.
43:08In reality, those armies had collapsed.
43:14By this very late stage, Hitler seemed to be losing grip on reality.
43:19He was determined to keep fighting to the bitter end.
43:22And it was very, very late in the day, maybe just like one week before the very end, that he finally acknowledged that he was beaten.
43:33Hitler's mindset, Hitler's personality was such that there could only be death by that point.
43:40It is just unimaginable that Hitler would have wanted to sit things out.
43:47It is absolutely clear that Hitler would rather die than live beyond the moment where he could still control things.
43:57Hitler maintained absolute control over his suicide and left detailed instructions with his valet, Heinz Linger.
44:07He gave me the order, five days before, to get gasoline, to burn the body.
44:16He actually marries the previous day. He marries his long-term companion, Eva Braun.
44:21From the early hours of the morning, there's a little wedding celebration, there are guests, there are drinks.
44:28The following day, around 3.30 in the afternoon, Eva Braun takes cyanide and Hitler shoots himself with his pistol.
44:37Hitler tried to destroy every trace of himself to preserve his godlike image, but failed.
44:52Something crucial survived to reveal his secrets. His DNA.
44:58There have been attempts for a long time to obtain DNA, to analyse it.
45:04It is remarkable that finally it has been achieved.
45:08The DNA analysis is a new source of evidence, revealing conditions likely to have shaped Hitler's thinking and changed history.
45:17The genetic findings from the blood are absolutely extraordinary.
45:21I just cannot believe how well they fit with everything that I know about psychiatry.
45:30Some historians are very motivated to believe that if Hitler has a psychiatric illness,
45:36that in some way he can't be blamed for the evil things that happened when he was the leader.
45:42You're responsible for it whether you have a mental illness or not.
45:46We may never fully understand Adolf Hitler,
45:48but analysing his DNA has brought us closer than ever before.
45:53There's no doubt in my mind that these findings will change the way we think about Hitler in many ways
45:58and also add a new layer of understanding of him.
46:03I mean, people are fascinated by Hitler and by his mind.
46:07Maybe just to try and make sense of the incomprehensible,
46:11because someone who can order the deaths of six million Jews, you know, what kind of person is that?
46:19Our behaviour is a complex mix of genes and environment,
46:23and looking at anything that could give us answers becomes part of the picture.
46:31We had these kind of tantalising clues about Hitler,
46:35but now we've got some genetic information that backs that up.
46:40DNA can be likened to another text, helping to solve historical mysteries.
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