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00:04In 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.
00:12A lot of American soldiers sourced very unusual artifacts.
00:17We have some Eva Braun items down there.
00:19We have a Hitler shirt.
00:23Can you show me the swatch?
00:27This is the swatch.
00:29And this is the bloodstain.
00:31That whole little corner here is all Hitler's blood.
00:36The American soldier just took out a knife, cut a piece off, put it in his pocket, and off he
00:40went.
00:41He didn't think a lot about it.
00:42He didn't think 80 years later people were going to try to extract DNA off of it.
00:54Responsible for some of humanity's worst atrocities,
00:57Adolf 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, there remain questions that continue to puzzle historians.
01:13His ancestry is shrouded in mystery.
01:16Hitler appears to have felt ashamed about his family.
01:19There's been this rumor for a really long time that 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, who is one of the most enigmatic figures who ever
01:36lived.
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.
01:43His sex life is a secret he took to his grave.
01:46He 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.
01:58He didn't want to undress in front of anyone ever.
02:03Now, 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.
02:26Can 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.
02:53This was a documentary film commissioned by Hitler himself.
02:58This is the staging of Hitler as a messiah, as the chosen one, as the person who's descending from heaven
03:06to earth in order to save Germany.
03:11It's natural for people to want the saviour, and Hitler presented himself as the messiah.
03:18He was the man who had the answers.
03:35He was the man who was descending from heaven to earth in the house.
03:41He was the man who was descending from heaven to earth in the earth.
03:56Promising to create a National Socialist Reich that would last 1,000 years, Hitler led Germany into its darkest chapter.
04:15By April 1945, the Thousand Year Reich was in ruins.
04:25His Nazi regime was collapsing, and the Fuhrer himself was a physical and mental wreck.
04:32Hitler is increasingly faced with the question, what will his fate be?
04:40He decides, before the Soviets take Berlin, to take his own life.
04:53As the Third Reich crumbled, Hitler's personal valet, Heinz Linger, bore witness to the tyrant's final moments.
05:01Mr. Linger, is Hitler really dead?
05:04Yes. I was the last one who said goodbye to him, and the first, after his suicide, to enter the
05:13room in the bunker.
05:14And how did he kill himself?
05:17He shot himself, and Eva Braun took poison.
05:23Hitler was determined that his most intimate secrets would die with him.
05:41Hitler made sure that his body would be destroyed so that there would be no traces left that would contradict
05:51the artificial version of himself that had been created.
06:02But while his body was destroyed, Hitler left something behind that at the time would have seemed inconsequential.
06:10His blood.
06:13Now an international team of experts will test the DNA in this bloodstained swatch.
06:20And if it does belong to Hitler, they will attempt a world first.
06:26To sequence his genome.
06:33I am a geneticist who specializes in ancient and forensic DNA.
06:37I am probably best known for having led the genetic and statistical identification of the remains of King Richard III,
06:45who was found in a car park in Leicester in 2012.
06:49I am a historian of Nazi Germany, based in the University of Potsdam.
06:55We already have historical documentation about Hitler.
07:00But we don't have something like this is DNA.
07:03This will change the way we think about Hitler, add to our understanding of him, and be something that we'll
07:11be talking about for a long time to come.
07:17I think this is going to be a really interesting and potentially difficult case.
07:24I often collaborate with people in Germany, and they would not touch this.
07:28Anyone we went to in Europe wouldn't touch it.
07:31That gives us some idea of the shadow that Hitler still casts over Europe.
07:36So we have to tread very carefully.
07:40I really agonized about whether 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 because of who he is.
07:53There's been huge amounts of interest in his mental health.
07:58And we know that there's a genetic component to psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.
08:04But we know it's also about environment and upbringing and so on.
08:12No matter what we find, that would never excuse anything that Hitler did.
08:18People with psychiatric disorders do not go on to do the sorts of things that Hitler did.
08:24My concern is that by not approaching this, it makes him and DNA almost like a taboo.
08:35And I think that's wrong.
08:38We need to demystify what we can and cannot tell from somebody's DNA.
08:4780 years of scientific breakthroughs have transformed our understanding of human genetics.
08:53The famous helix structure of DNA was identified soon after the end of World War II.
09:00Over the decades that followed, research progressed into its uses, particularly in forensics.
09:06And at the dawn of the 21st century, the human genome project made a major breakthrough.
09:13We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome.
09:18With the power of this discovery comes, of course, the responsibility to use it wisely.
09:24Our individual genomes contain countless clues to our propensity for physical features and disease,
09:33for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental traits, and to our ancestry.
09:39And because DNA remains long after we die, geneticists can now shine new light on figures from history.
09:48So in terms of doing genetic analysis like this, provenance, understanding where the sample has come from is key.
09:58So does the sample said to be from Adolf Hitler's sofa stand up to scrutiny?
10:07The grandson of the American soldier who cut the swatch from the sofa has been traced to Italy.
10:14So, Eric, this swatch that we are trying to get DNA out of was from your grandfather.
10:20He was the one who got it.
10:22My grandfather was the information officer under General Eisenhower during the war.
10:27And so he had access to people in places that very few people had.
10:34When the Allied forces came together in Berlin, he was there.
10:37And he would have been, I believe, in the first group of Americans that entered Hitler's bunker.
10:47I don't know how long after Hitler killed himself that visit would have occurred.
10:54The bodies were gone, but there was blood on the sofa.
11:00My grandfather cut the swatch of blood.
11:05It's such a powerful memento.
11:08For him, it was a true symbol of the death of Hitler and the end of the war.
11:15Eighty years later, we're sitting across the table from one another, talking about the possibility of getting DNA.
11:22You know, good on you, Grandad.
11:30It seems that the swatch itself came from Hitler's bunker.
11:35But does the blood on the fabric belong to Hitler himself?
11:40To find out, a forensic geneticist will collect a sample.
11:45We like to call ourselves the island of misfit cases, where all the most difficult things go when they're stuck.
11:54So over here is the swatch, and right there is the blood.
11:59Excellent. Yeah, you can definitely see the discoloration.
12:01Yeah.
12:02I've done a lot of sampling in my life, but this one brought me some anxiety.
12:07I'm not going to even lie about it.
12:13Yeah, classic dark red bronze staining.
12:16It looks like a real solid sample.
12:18When you're working on something with historical relevance, it's a destructive process.
12:25You want to take a sample that is likely to give you some information.
12:30But with every kind of increase in size of that, you're destroying more and more of the original object.
12:37I'm going to take just a small little, about that.
12:41Is that okay?
12:42Yeah.
12:45When the handle is something this historic, you know, when you see it happen, it's definitely stressful.
12:54What we need is going to vary on the sample type, how diluted it was, how old it was.
13:00Just making sure that everything's sealed.
13:02We don't want anything to get in or get out.
13:05You can certainly tell that you had a blood stain there.
13:08It's just how much is that impacted by the age.
13:12You're talking about a very small sample.
13:15In theory, everything will work out just fine.
13:18But until you get in the lab, you just don't know.
13:22So is it really Hitler's blood?
13:24And if it is, will the DNA reveal anything after degrading for 80 years?
13:40A swatch of blood stain fabric cut from a sofa in 1945 has been taken for analysis to determine if
13:47it 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,
13:58because without that, that's the end of the project.
14:06After multiple rejections from European institutions, uncomfortable testing anything associated with Hitler, an American forensics lab will work on identifying
14:17any 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
14:29from.
14:29But at the same time, if it is not kept well, we have samples five or six years old that
14:35are so degraded that it is very difficult to get usable information from.
14:46So our extraction process begins with adding specific chemicals that reveal DNA from deep within the nucleus.
14:55We want DNA in water and that's it.
15:00So far this looks like a sample that could have some blood on it.
15:04It'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.
15:15It's ready to go on our instrument.
15:18So this will tell us how much DNA is present in our sample.
15:23Your first steps are doing the DNA extraction and then you want to determine, is this human blood and is
15:32it 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.
15:53Degradation shows that it has failed, which is expected.
15:56We expect DNA from 80 years ago to be degraded.
16:00So that is a good sign that this is very likely the DNA that you're expecting it to be and
16:07not some new and fresh contaminant.
16:13So the initial findings seem positive.
16:16The sample is blood, it is from a man, and the DNA is not recent.
16:22But how can genetics confirm it to be Hitler's blood?
16:26So the piece of DNA that we use to do the identification that this is Hitler is the Y chromosome.
16:32We 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.
16:41Chromosome pairs number 1 to 22, they're the same between men and women.
16:46They're known as our autosomes.
16:47But we've got chromosome pair number 23 here, those are known as our sex chromosomes.
16:53So 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.
17:08Because the Y chromosome that a man has, it comes down to him down through the male line.
17:13So if we can find a male line relative of Hitler and look at their Y chromosome type,
17:19we can see if it matches that from the DNA from the sample.
17:30In Belgium, journalist Jean-Paul Mulders has spent years tracking down Hitler's blood relations.
17:38About 15 years ago, I read a strange story of a man who during the 70s claimed to be Hitler's
17:45son.
17:52My initial thoughts was this must be bullshit in fact.
17:59People lie, but DNA doesn't. I had to find out whether it was true or not.
18:06Using stamps licked by Hitler's supposed son, Jean-Paul obtained a DNA sample.
18:15Having 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.
18:28You 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.
18:42Some 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
18:54hands.
18:56We visited one more relative of Hitler. He was very friendly and he said,
19:01Oh, a bit of saliva. Is that all you want?
19:04He took the swab and put it in his mouth and gave it back.
19:08Here you are. Have a nice day. And it was a nice day because I had the DNA of the
19:13relative.
19:15The results were crystal clear. It didn't match with the saliva on the stamps belonging to Jean-Marie Lorette.
19:23So 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
19:37fact Hitler's.
19:42So let me show you the Y chromosome results.
19:46This is the male line relative from JP Mulder's sample.
19:50And then let's bring you the one in from the swatch.
19:55Look at that.
19:56There's an exact match between the male line relative and the DNA from the sample from the swatch.
20:05They're identical. So does that mean that the blood sample really does belong to Hitler?
20:10This 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.
20:22When you can kind of go, yep, it's him.
20:27We've got him.
20:28I'm so pleased with the result. I feel like we can go forward with confidence, really.
20:33For 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?
20:50Whilst we're alive, we have got really nice long strands of DNA and we can sequence modern DNA incredibly easily.
21:01After death, our DNA starts to degrade.
21:04It starts to be cut into smaller and smaller fragments until eventually there is nothing left to sequence.
21:14Can DNA offer answers where historians have so far failed?
21:19And will this groundbreaking evidence reveal what Hitler was so keen to hide?
21:36After several rounds of sequencing, the Hitler DNA sample has been rebuilt into this.
21:43A reconstruction of the whole genome of history's most enigmatic tyrant.
21:51So this is it. This is Adolf Hitler's genome.
21:57So this reconstruction is an incredible achievement. How close do you think it is to the entire thing?
22:05We have got some gaps, but we've managed to get pretty good coverage for the genome, so I'm as happy
22:11as we can be.
22:12And 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
22:23towards certain conditions.
22:27We're looking for something about Hitler's ancestry and we're looking for mutations in his DNA, insertions, deletions.
22:36It brings a completely new slant, a new angle on someone who was responsible for the most terrible crimes committed
22:44in modern history.
22:46It's really an irony that Hitler, who had his own body destroyed, did not manage to conceal his DNA.
22:54And that now, in the 21st century, we can try to recover some of the secrets that Hitler wanted to
23:03conceal himself.
23:04So how does this new genetic information interact with what we already know?
23:10Can the genome shine new light on the dimmest reaches of the Hitler story, his early life?
23:18Hitler 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
23:35these 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
23:51of 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.
24:07Hitler's mother, Clara, had to bury not one, not two, but four of her children who died at very, very
24:15young ages from diphtheria.
24:17Adolf and his younger sister, Paula, were literally the only two survivors.
24:24Combined with that, his father, Alois Hitler, was a very physically violent alcoholic and he beat Adolf.
24:35Alois took every opportunity to exert his authority relentlessly on the young Adolf.
24:44We don't want to say anyone who's been abused or anyone who's experienced neglect in their early life is going
24:51to end up doing terrible things.
24:53That's not the case.
24:54But these early adverse life experiences do play a critical role.
25:02Hate often does come from this sense of feeling angry, feeling badly treated, feeling alienated from society, maybe as a
25:14result of early negative experiences.
25:24This is the former village of Dollersheim in Lower Austria, where generations of Hitler's ancestors lived and died.
25:32Today, almost nothing remains.
25:36We're here in what is left of Dollersheim, which as you can see is now a military training area, but
25:43up until 1938 was a thriving community.
25:50One of the descendants of this community is Bernhard Lair.
26:12One of the descendants of this community is Bernhard Lair.
26:19One of the descendants of the There was also a doctor and also a doctor and a doctor and a
26:27doctor and a doctor lived in Döllersheim.
26:29He lived in Dollersheim and there was no other thing left and there was no left.
26:33So the representatives of the land were gone.
26:35One of the descendants of the capitalism had gone back and left and left and left and left and left.
26:39In their homes, New York, there was no longer left and left.
26:43The nature had created it.
26:462,000 villagers, before bombing their homes as part of training exercises.
27:27Could it be that Hitler was trying to destroy evidence around his true ancestry?
27:39So where does this rumor come from that Hitler had Jewish ancestry?
27:42It's been around for a very long time, since the late 1920s, early 1930s,
27:48that Hitler's grandmother, Maria Schickelgruber,
27:51had worked for a period of time in a Jewish household and had got pregnant.
27:56Foreign media got hold of this, made a big thing out of it,
27:59and Hitler was clearly quite concerned about the potential damage it would do,
28:04and therefore he took steps to publish an official version of his family tree,
28:09which made clear that 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,
28:24because the Y chromosome is showing that Hitler is indeed a Hitler,
28:28or he wouldn't get that DNA match with the male line relative.
28:31If he had Jewish ancestry, that match wouldn't be there.
28:35So we can actually put that rumor about Jewish ancestry to bed based on the DNA.
28:40Exactly. Now we know for certain.
28:44DNA has answered one of the biggest questions about Hitler's ancestry.
28:48But can it offer new insights into why he may have behaved as he did?
28:53About 20 years ago I studied Hitler's life.
28:57There's a vast amount of information available that was collected,
29:02and 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, they didn't like it, they disagreed with 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?
29:31This is Linz, Austria's third city, and the closest thing that Hitler had to a hometown.
29:42This is a plaque that commemorates that this hotel was once a school,
29:48and that one of its most famous school children was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
29:55However, 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, and 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.
30:18As a school pupil, he was quite idle and lazy.
30:24He didn't make any effort in school, he didn't concentrate, he didn't do his homework.
30:29He was unteachable, nobody could tell him anything.
30:34So whilst he was quite intelligent and clever, if the subject didn't interest him, he 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?
30:56Hitler's DNA results have been sent to a world leading team at Aarhus University to assess his genetic propensity for
31:04psychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions.
31:07We are doing genetic analysis where we are looking at thousands of individuals with a psychiatric condition by using something
31:16called the polygenic score.
31:19A polygenic score assesses an individual's genetic markers for a certain condition or disease.
31:25It compares these with a large population sample to chart the individual's relative likelihood of developing the condition.
31:35We were very surprised when we saw that he was such an outlier on several conditions.
31:42We 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.
31:58So 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
32:08Aarhus 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 Aarhus with common variants that associates with ADHD or increases
32:21the risk for ADHD.
32:24Hitler's possible genetic propensity for ADHD seems to be reflected in his poor performance at school.
32:30But what about evidence from his adolescence as his personality became more clearly formed?
32:38With ADHD those people are usually described as being lazy.
32:44But it's a question of interest.
32:47When the person with ADHD focuses on something of interest then they have the capacity to hyper focus.
32:55That 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.
33:24Seek 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
33:48state of mind.
33:50The benefit of the Kubitschek's memoirs is that they are the only source about Hitler in his childhood and teenage
33:56years.
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
34:13of music and the opera.
34:20He was a remarkably pale, skinny youth about my own age, who was following the performance with glistening eyes.
34:28Once after the performance, I accompanied him home.
34:31When we took leave of each other, he gave me his name.
34:35Adolf Hitler.
34:38Hitler 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.
34:54But Hitler was very controlling and dominating.
34:59He would talk in monologues.
35:02He would harangue his friend.
35:04It was a genuine friendship, but the only one in his life.
35:11He was always convinced that he was right.
35:14He would talk for hours, heatedly, passionately, often violently.
35:19And I would listen, completely under his spell.
35:24Hitler clearly struggled with social relationships.
35:27Can this be explained simply by the higher than average likelihood of ADHD found in his genome?
35:34For a lot of neurodevelopmental disorders, we see very often that if you have one condition, there's a high probability
35:43of also having another condition.
35:46So we have also been looking at Hitler's score for autism.
35:52If we look here at the distribution of autism in the population, you can see that Hitler is really, really
35:59lying high at the right end.
36:01He has a very high score and he actually belongs to the top 1%.
36:07Top 1%.
36:10This suggests that I would say quite a high probability that he might have had some autistic behaviors or symptoms
36:18of autism.
36:20What's really interesting seeing these high polygenic scores is that people were already speculating about whether or not he had
36:29these conditions.
36:31They're really striking results.
36:33I can hardly express how staggered I was to find support for my findings from genetics, because I had taken
36:43quite a lot of criticism for describing Hitler as having autism, for ADHD, and for other things.
36:54We can't reduce his behavior 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.
37:15We call it cognitive empathy, which is just the ability to recognize what someone is thinking or feeling.
37:21Autistic people have excellent attention to detail and excellent pattern recognition skills.
37:30And they tend to kind of focus on particular topics, sometimes called obsessions.
37:35So they go into great depth in a very systematic way.
37:43Long 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.
37:56He'd already left school.
37:58He'd given up on everything in his life to that point.
38:02And 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.
38:14Hitler seemed to have been obsessed with being an artist.
38:18He really believed he was good enough.
38:20So he was always very passionate about that.
38:23But it seemed that it was not his actual calling.
38:27Hitler had invested all his hopes into entering the Vienna Academy.
38:32But he was rejected.
38:34Twice.
38:34He spent the next few years drifting in Vienna.
38:38Eking out a living selling paintings in the street.
38:50A 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?
39:021914 was one of several turning points in Hitler's life.
39:07The First World War gave him a new opportunity to find employment,
39:12to find meaning when all his dreams of becoming an artist had actually been dashed.
39:19Hitler 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.
39:31And he joined up with the 16th Bavarian Infantry Regiment.
39:36At that point, he is willing to follow orders in function in this very structured hierarchical way
39:47where other people tell him what his boundaries are and what he can do within those boundaries.
39:54Hitler thrived in the army.
39:56He won an iron cross for bravery and was promoted to the rank of corporal.
40:03Hitler's entrance into the army is absolutely fascinating because he found a structure there.
40:09Another feature of autism is what we call preservation of sameness,
40:14wanting routine, wanting the same routine every day.
40:22He didn't have friends in the army.
40:24He didn't relate to the other soldiers.
40:26If you ever look at a photograph of Hitler in the army, he's always at a side.
40:34Germany was at the mercy of the Allies.
40:38We celebrated.
40:40Not only because the war was over,
40:42but because it seemed that we had put an end to German militarism forever.
40:46After the war, Hitler returned to Munich.
40:50In the chaos, it had become a hotbed of revolutionary activity on the left and right of politics.
40:58Hitler worked for the army as an informant sent to monitor the activities of extreme parties.
41:04He was soon drawn to the right-wing nationalist views of one group in particular.
41:09The NSDAP, which became known as the Nazi Party.
41:17It's not uncommon for a person with autism to have very black-and-white thinking.
41:24This black-and-white thinking makes people vulnerable to join extreme groups.
41:30And, of course, Hitler did that.
41:33Of course, in the general population, the vast majority of autistic people are highly moral.
41:39They're excessively moral.
41:41Now, that's totally different from Hitler, who was amoral and perverse.
41:47The first fellow who heard him speak in a beer keller in Munich, he said,
41:52what a gob he has.
41:54We could use him.
41:56And 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.
42:10Could these findings help explain Hitler's behaviour in later life?
42:16At Trinity College, Cambridge, a leading autism expert will assess his polygenic scores.
42:24Simon, this is the one for autism.
42:28So, he's in the top 1% for autism on the polygenic score.
42:32Yeah.
42:33We'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.
42:45But the process of science is all about critical review and scrutiny.
42:51Going from biology to behaviour is a big jump.
42:55It's an indication of a predisposition, but it's not a diagnosis.
43:00Yeah.
43:01By 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.
43:17We've just got to keep that in mind.
43:19Completely.
43:19So that it doesn't become out of balance.
43:22It would be very easy for people to look at this result and say,
43:26was the whole of Hitler's behaviour to do with autism?
43:30Exactly.
43:31I think that would be the wrong conclusion to draw.
43:34The risk is reductionism down to genetics, when there are so many other factors that could be playing a part.
43:40We know that genes don't operate in isolation.
43:43They operate in an environment.
43:45And 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.
43:58Loss, yeah.
43:59Loss.
44:00To me, the experience of neglect and abuse would be much more relevant to understanding why somebody grows up with
44:08hate and anger,
44:09rather than the genetics.
44:11The two interplay.
44:13And in Hitler's case, autism and ADHD cannot explain his cruelty in later life.
44:20But perhaps one other polygenic finding from his DNA can.
44:25Genetic tests have also shown that Hitler's polygenic score for antisocial behaviour, a measure of psychopathy, is in the top
44:3410%.
44:37I think that we're quite entitled to use criminal autistic psychopathy to describe Hitler.
44:44It highlights, number one, his criminality, number two, his autism, and number three, his psychopathy.
44:51So it's a very complex mixture.
44:55Hitler is one in a million or maybe one in a billion.
45:00The shy, unusual boy who failed at everything he had strived for, had put his unique mind to reinventing himself
45:08as a messianic leader, inspiring godlike devotion.
45:13But strip away the theatrics, and Hitler was still a man.
45:18No amount of power could help him to overcome the limits of his body.
45:24And 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.
45:43He's got a deletion for one letter of his DNA, but that really affects the protein that is implicated in
45:53sexual development and development of sexual organs.
45:58Really significant binding.
46:00It seems this was manifested in his personal life, in his personal relations.
46:06He had throughout his life difficulty establishing intimate relationships.
46:11Oh my goodness.
46:14This is going to be quite big.
46:18Could this finding help to answer one of the most persistent rumours around Hitler?
46:24Yeah.
46:28And 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 trespasses is streaming now.
46:39And tensions simmer tomorrow in an atmospheric new drama will secret surface in summer water at nine.
46:44Thank you, everybody.
46:47Thank you very much.
46:48Thank you very much.
46:50We are honored to be delighted with him later.
46:54Thanks for having us too much, everybody.
46:55And a woman who has esteemed to share with?
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