Original subtitles

This programme contains images of the aftermath of World War II and the suicide of Adolf Hitler

In this room we have a lot of World War II items.

This is where some of the Hitler items are housed.

This is Hitler's tea set.

A lot of American soldiers sourced very unusual artefacts.

We have some Eva Braun items down there. We have a Hitler shirt.

This is the swatch, and this is the blood stain.

That whole little corner here is all Hitler's blood.

The American soldier just took out a knife, cut a piece off,

put it in his pocket, and off he went.

He didn't think a lot about it.

He didn't think, 80 years later, people were going to

try to extract DNA off of it.

Responsible for some of humanity's worst atrocities,

Adolf Hitler is one of the most studied people in history.

But despite this, he remains an enigma.

Because he's so guarded about his own personal history,

there remain questions that continue to puzzle historians.

His ancestry is shrouded in mystery.

Hitler appears to have felt ashamed about his family.

There's been this rumour for a really long time that Hitler had

Jewish ancestry through his grandfather.

His psychological state is hotly debated.

There's a very long history of trying to diagnose Hitler,

who is one of the most enigmatic figures who ever lived.

Some have denied that he had any illness at all.

I've always argued that there's good medical evidence to the contrary.

His sex life is a secret he took to his grave.

He didn't seem to have the same libido

men of his age would have had.

And he remains the subject of persistent rumours about his health.

Hitler felt uncomfortable in his own body.

He didn't want to undress in front of anyone ever.

Now, 80 years since his death, can science provide answers?

Can a blood-stained piece of fabric unlock

the secrets contained in Hitler's DNA?

We've found something really interesting.

When these findings emerged, I was simply flabbergasted.

Can we finally understand history's most notorious tyrant?

This was how Adolf Hitler wanted to be seen in

the 1935 propaganda film, Triumph of the Will.

This was a documentary film commissioned by Hitler himself.

This is the staging of Hitler as the Messiah, as the Chosen One,

as the person who's descending from heaven to earth

in order to save Germany.

It's natural for people to want a saviour,

and Hitler presented himself as the Messiah.

He was the man who had the answers.

Promising to create a National Socialist Reich that would last

a thousand years, Hitler led Germany into its darkest chapter.

By April 1945, the thousand-year Reich was in ruins.

His Nazi regime was collapsing, and the Fuhrer himself

was a physical and mental wreck.

Hitler is increasingly faced with the question,

what will his fate be?

He decides before the Soviets take Berlin...

..to take his own life.

As the Third Reich crumbled, Hitler's personal valet

Heinz Linge bore witness to the tyrant's final moments.

Mr Linge, is Hitler really dead?

Yes. I was the last one who said goodbye to him,

and the first, after his suicide, to enter the room in the bunker.

And how did he kill himself, Mr Linge?

He shot himself, and Eva Braun took poison.

Hitler was determined that his most intimate secrets would die with him.

He gave me the order five days before to get gasoline

to burn the bodies. We burned them in the garden.

Hitler made sure that his body would be destroyed

so that there would be no traces left that would contradict

the artificial version of himself that had been created.

But while his body was destroyed, Hitler left something behind

that at the time would have seemed inconsequential -

his blood.

Now, an international team of experts will test

the DNA in this blood-stained swatch.

And if it does belong to Hitler, they will attempt a world first...

..to sequence his genome.

I am a geneticist who specialises in ancient and forensic DNA.

I'm probably best known for having led the genetic

and statistical identification of the remains of King Richard III,

who was found in a car park in Leicester in 2012.

I'm a historian of Nazi Germany, based in the University of Potsdam.

We already have historical documentation about Hitler,

but we don't have something like this - his DNA.

This will change the way we think about Hitler,

add to our understanding of him and be something that we'll be

talking about for a long time to come.

I think this is going to be a really interesting

and potentially difficult case.

I often collaborate with people in Germany

and they would not touch this.

Anyone we went to in Europe wouldn't touch it.

That gives us some idea of the shadow that Hitler

still casts over Europe, so we have to tread very carefully.

I really agonised about whether or not I wanted to be involved.

And that's because of who it is.

But it's also an extremely interesting project

because of who he is.

There's been huge amounts of interest in his mental health.

And we know that there's a genetic component

to psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders.

But we know it's about environment and upbringing and so on.

No matter what we find, that would never excuse

anything that Hitler did.

People with psychiatric disorders do not go on to do

the sorts of things that Hitler did.

My concern is that by not approaching this,

it makes him and DNA almost like a taboo, and I think that's wrong.

We need to demystify what we can and cannot tell

from somebody's DNA.

80 years of scientific breakthroughs have transformed our understanding

of human genetics.

The famous helix structure of DNA was identified soon after

the end of World War II.

Over the decades that followed, research progressed into its uses,

particularly in forensics.

And at the dawn of the 21st century, the Human Genome Project

made a major breakthrough.

We are here to celebrate the completion of

the first survey of the entire human genome.

With the power of this discovery comes, of course,

the responsibility to use it wisely.

Our individual genomes contain countless clues

to our propensity for physical features and disease,

for psychiatric and neurodevelopmental traits

and to our ancestry.

And because DNA remains long after we die,

geneticists can now shine new light on figures from history.

So in terms of doing genetic analysis like this,

provenance, understanding where the sample has come from is key.

So does the sample said to be from Adolf Hitler's sofa

stand up to scrutiny?

The grandson of the American soldier who cut

the swatch from the sofa has been traced to Italy.

So, Erik, this swatch that we are trying to get DNA out of

was from your grandfather. He was the one who got it.

My grandfather was the information officer under General Eisenhower

during the war.

And so he had access to people in places that very few people had.

When the allied forces came together in Berlin,

he was there, and he would have been, I believe,

in the first group of Americans that entered Hitler's bunker.

I don't know how long after Hitler killed himself

that visit would have occurred.

The bodies were gone, but there was blood on the sofa.

My grandfather cut the swatch of blood.

It's such a powerful memento.

For him, it was a true symbol of the death of Hitler

and the end of the war.

80 years later, we're sitting across the table from one another

talking about the possibility of getting DNA.

You know, good on you, grandad.

ERIK CHUCKLES

It seems that the swatch itself came from Hitler's bunker.

But does the blood on the fabric belong to Hitler himself?

To find out, a forensic geneticist will collect a sample.

We like to call ourselves the Island of Misfit Cases,

where all the most difficult things go when they're stuck.

So over here is the swatch and right there is the blood.

- Excellent, yeah, you can definitely see the discolouration. - Yeah.

I've done a lot of sampling in my life,

but this one brought me some anxiety.

I'm not going to even lie about it.

Yeah, classic red-brown staining. It looks like a real solid sample.

When you're working on something with historical relevance,

it's a destructive process.

You want to take a sample that is likely

to give you some information, but with every kind of

increase in size of that, you're destroying more and more

of the original object.

I'm going to take just a small little...

- About that, is that OK? - Yep.

When he handles something this historic, you know,

when you see it happen, it's, um... It's definitely stressful.

What we need is going to vary on the sample type,

how diluted it was, how old it was.

Just making sure that everything's sealed.

We don't want anything to get in or get out.

You can certainly tell that you had a blood stain there.

It's just how much is that impacted by the age?

You'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.

So is it really Hitler's blood?

And if it is, will the DNA reveal anything

after degrading for 80 years?

A 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.

What 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.

After 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.

We have had samples much older than 80 years that we've tested

and been able to obtain really good results from.

But 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.

So our extraction process begins with adding specific chemicals

that reveal DNA from deep within the nucleus.

We want DNA and water and that's it.

So far, this looks like a sample that could have some blood on it.

It's more red than the fabric is.

Oh, my gut feeling is that there's something there that is not just

an empty piece of fabric.

It's ready to go on our instrument.

So this will tell us how much DNA is present in our sample.

Your first steps are doing the DNA extraction

and then you want to determine is this human blood

and is it from a male?

It is one of the most nerve-racking parts of this process.

So, results are...

..there is human DNA. It appears to be male.

Degradation shows that it has failed, which is expected.

We expect DNA from 80 years ago to be degraded.

So 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.

So the initial findings seem positive.

The sample is blood, it is from a man,

and the DNA is not recent.

But how can genetics confirm it to be Hitler's blood?

So the piece of DNA that we use to do the identification

that this is Hitler is the Y chromosome.

We humans, we have got 23 pairs of chromosomes.

You get one half of each pair comes from mum

and the other half comes from dad.

Chromosome pairs number one to 22, they're the same between

men and women and they're known as our autosomes.

But we've got chromosome pair number 23 here,

those are known as are sex chromosomes.

So women have got two copies of this rather large X chromosome.

Men have got an X chromosome,

but they've also got this tiny little Y chromosome.

But it's going to be really important for this project,

because the Y chromosome that a man has,

it comes down to him down through the male line.

So if we can find a male line relative of Hitler

and look at their Y chromosome type,

we can see if it matches that from the DNA from the sample.

In Belgium, journalist Jean-Paul Mulders has spent years

tracking down Hitler's blood relations.

About 15 years ago, I read that strange story of a man who,

during the '70s, claimed to be Hitler's son.

My initial thoughts was this must be bullshit, in fact.

People lie, but DNA doesn't.

I had to find out whether it was true or not.

Using stamps licked by Hitler's supposed son,

Jean-Paul obtained a DNA sample.

Having the DNA of Loret is one thing,

obtaining the DNA of Hitler relatives is another one.

Working with a genealogist, Jean-Paul began to identify

living male relatives of Hitler.

You cannot contact them.

If you call them by phone, they simply do not answer.

So I started to visit relatives of Hitler in Austria

and ask them for a DNA sample.

Some of them react aggressive and said,

"I don't want to have anything to do with this."

I thought at that moment, it won't succeed.

We are here for nothing and we will go back with empty hands.

We visited one more relative of Hitler.

He was very friendly and he said, "Oh, a bit of saliva?

"Is that all you want?"

He took the swab and put it in his mouth

and gave it back. "Here you are, have a nice day."

And it was a nice day, because I had the DNA of the relative.

The results were crystal clear.

It didn't match with the saliva on the stamps belonging

to Jean-Marie Loret.

So Jean-Marie Loret was not at all the son of Adolf Hitler.

Now, many years later, this sample provides a definitive way

to test whether the blood from the sofa is in fact Hitler's.

So let me show you the Y chromosome results.

This is the male line relative from JP Mulder's sample.

And then let's bring you the one in from the swatch.

Look at that.

There's an exact match between the male-line relative

and the DNA from the sample from the swatch.

They're identical.

So does that mean that

the blood sample really does belong to Hitler?

This is a really important moment in any investigation like this.

You know what, Alex?

It looks like we've got Adolf Hitler's DNA.

When you can kind of go, yep, it's him.

We've got him. I'm so pleased with the result.

I feel like we can go forward with confidence, really.

For the first time in history,

Adolf Hitler's DNA has been identified.

The question now,

is there enough DNA left after 80 years

to reveal anything useful about history's most studied man?

Once we're alive, we have got really nice,

long strands of DNA,

and we can sequence modern DNA incredibly easily.

After death, our DNA starts to degrade.

It starts to be cut into smaller

and smaller fragments until eventually there is nothing

left to sequence.

Can DNA offer answers where historians have

so far failed?

And will this ground-breaking

evidence reveal what Hitler was so keen to hide?

After several rounds of sequencing,

the Hitler DNA sample has been rebuilt into this,

a reconstruction of the whole genome of history's most enigmatic tyrant.

So this is it, this is Adolf Hitler's genome.

So this reconstruction is an incredible achievement.

How close do you think it is to the entire thing?

We 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.

And we can start to get information about his health.

You cannot see evil in somebody's DNA,

but you can say things about whether or not they are genetically

predisposed towards certain conditions.

We're looking for something about Hitler's ancestry,

and we're looking for mutations in his DNA, insertions, deletions.

It brings a completely new slant, a new angle,

on someone who was responsible for

the most terrible crimes committed in modern history.

It'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.

So how does this new genetic information interact

with what we already know?

Can the genome shine new light on the dimmest reaches of

the Hitler story, his early life?

Hitler was born in a place called Braunau am Inn,

on the border of Germany and Austria.

He 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.

He famously started Mein Kampf

with this sanitised version of his childhood,

while in reality,

he really had a lot of adverse life experiences.

He was surrounded by death from an early age.

When he was 13 years old, his father died

and at the age of 18, his mother died.

Hitler's mother, Klara, had to bury not one,

not two, but four of her children who died at very,

very young ages from diphtheria.

Adolf and his younger sister, Paula,

were literally the only two survivors.

Combined with that, his father, Alois Hitler,

was a very physically violent alcoholic, and he beat Adolf.

Alois took every opportunity

to exert his authority relentlessly on the young Adolf.

We don't want to say anyone who's been abused or anyone who has

experienced neglect in their early life is

going to end up doing terrible things.

That's not the case. But these early adverse life

experiences do play a critical role.

Hate often does come from this sense of feeling angry,

feeling badly treated, feeling alienated from society,

maybe as a result of early negative experiences.

This is the former village

of Dollersheim in Lower Austria,

where generations of Hitler's ancestors lived

and died. Today, almost nothing remains.

We're here in what is left of Dollersheim,

which as you can see is now a military training area,

but up until 1938, was a thriving community.

One of the descendants of this community is Bernhard Lehr.

Despite its importance in Hitler's family story,

the German army was ordered to forcibly resettle all 2,000

villagers before bombing their homes as part of training exercises.

Could it be that Hitler was trying

to destroy evidence around his true ancestry?

So where does this rumour come from that Hitler had Jewish ancestry?

It's been around for a very long time,

since the late 1920s, early 1930s,

that Hitler's grandmother, Maria Schickelgruber,

had worked for a period of time in a Jewish household

and had got pregnant. Foreign media got hold of this,

made a big thing out of it,

and Hitler was clearly quite concerned about

the potential damage it would do.

And therefore he took steps to publish

an official version of his family tree,

which made clear that there was no Jewish ancestry.

Can Hitler's DNA shed light on the ancestry of his grandfather?

This is where the Y chromosome data actually backs up that Nazi version

of his family tree, because the Y chromosome

is showing that Hitler is indeed Hitler,

or he wouldn't get that DNA match with

the male line relative. If he had Jewish ancestry,

that match wouldn't be there.

So we can actually put that rumour about Jewish ancestry

- to bed based on the DNA. - Exactly, now we know for certain.

DNA has answered one of

the biggest questions about Hitler's ancestry.

But can it offer new insights into why he may have behaved as he did?

About 20 years ago, I studied Hitler's life.

There's a vast amount

of information available that was collected

and I was absolutely convinced at that time that he had

a whole variety of neurodevelopmental conditions,

and I published on this.

Many people obviously challenged me,

they didn't like it, they disagreed with it.

So are there any clues as

to whether he was affected by any conditions and if so,

what they might have been?

This is Linz, Austria's third city,

and the closest thing that Hitler had to a hometown.

This is a plaque that commemorates that this hotel was once a school

and that one of its most famous schoolchildren was

the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

However, this plaque fails to mention

the other most famous schoolchild

to attend this school, Adolf Hitler.

Hitler had dreams of being an artist,

and he talks about this from something like

the age of 12.

He said his father was absolutely adamant that this would not be

the case. As a school pupil, he was quite idle and lazy.

He didn't make any effort in school,

he didn't concentrate, he didn't do his homework.

He was unteachable. Nobody could tell him anything.

So whilst he was quite intelligent and clever,

if the subject didn't interest him, he just entirely neglected it.

Was Hitler just an unhappy, absent-minded child?

Or does his DNA indicate something more fundamental

that might help explain his behaviour?

Hitler's DNA results have been sent to

a world-leading team at Aarhus University

to assess his genetic propensity for psychiatric

and neurodevelopmental conditions.

We are doing genetic analysis where we are looking at thousands

of individuals with a psychiatric condition by using

something called the polygenic score.

A polygenic score assesses an individual's genetic markers for

a certain condition or disease.

It compares these with a large population sample

to chart the individual's likelihood of having the condition.

We were very surprised when we saw that he was such

an outlier on several conditions.

We found that actually very astonishing.

So we have been looking at his score

for childhood neurodevelopmental onset conditions.

We can maybe start with the score for ADHD.

So what you can see here is the distribution of the score.

You can see you have this bell curve.

And in the middle, you have a lot of individuals with an average score.

And then you can also see for ADHD, he's towards the end.

So he has a score that is higher than the average

with common variants that associates

with ADHD or increases the risk for ADHD.

Hitler's possible genetic propensity for ADHD seems

to be reflected in his poor performance at school.

But what about evidence from his

adolescence as his personality became more clearly formed?

With ADHD, those people are usually described as being lazy.

But it's a question of interest.

When the person with ADHD focuses on something of interest,

then they have the capacity to hyper-focus.

That profile does fit with Hitler,

particularly in school, and indeed,

you can find evidence of ADHD throughout his life.

He was hyperactive, he was impulsive,

he always on the go.

You can see how disastrous the management of

the war would be for somebody who had ADHD like Hitler.

Evidence of Adolf Hitler's behaviour,

before his reinvention as the Nazi demagogue,

is relatively scarce.

But August Kubizek's account of his teenage friendship

with Hitler is an invaluable source

for psychiatrists interested in the dictator's state of mind.

The benefit of the Kubizek memoirs is that they are

the only source about Hitler in his childhood

and teenage years,

and a very good source,

in the sense that Kubizek himself was not politically active.

Kubizek 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.

"He was a remarkably pale, skinny youth,

"about my own age, who was following

"the performance with glistening eyes.

"Once after the performance, I accompanied him home.

"When we took leave of each other, he gave me his name - Adolf Hitler."

Hitler and Kubizek's mutual passion for music created

a strong bond and they became close friends.

He was totally obsessed with opera.

He spoke to his friend August endlessly about opera.

But Hitler was very controlling and dominating.

He would talk in monologues,

he would harangue his friend.

It was a genuine friendship, but the only one in his life.

"He was always convinced that he was right.

"He would talk for hours, heatedly, passionately,

"often violently,

"and I would listen, completely under his spell."

Hitler clearly struggled with social relationships.

Can this be explained simply by

the higher than average likelihood of ADHD found in his genome?

For a lot of neurodevelopmental disorders,

we see very often, and if you have one condition,

there's a high probability of also having another condition.

So we have also been looking at Hitler's score for autism.

If 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.

He has a very high score,

and he actually belongs to the top 1%.

Top 1?%

This suggests that I would say quite

a high probability that he might have had some autistic behaviours

or symptoms of autism.

What's really interesting seeing these high polygenic scores is that

people were already speculating about whether or not he had these

conditions. They're really striking results.

I can hardly express how staggered I was to find support

for my findings from genetics,

because I had taken quite a lot of criticism

for describing Hitler as having autism,

for ADHD, for... And for other things.

We can't reduce his behaviour to these diagnoses.

Autism is a disability and a difference.

It's a disability in

the sense that people who are autistic struggle

with social relationships and communication.

They struggle with that first kind of empathy.

We call it cognitive empathy,

which is just the ability

to recognise what someone is thinking or feeling.

Autistic people have excellent attention to detail

and excellent pattern recognition skills.

And they tend to kind of focus on particular topics,

sometimes called obsessions.

So they go into great depth in a very systematic way.

Long before politics,

Hitler's obsessions were music and art.

And in 1907,

he moved to Vienna

to pursue his dream of becoming a painter.

He'd already left school,

he'd given up on everything in his life to that point

and only had this one idea in mind,

which is taking the entrance exam for

the Academy of Fine Arts.

This status was quite important for him.

Hitler seemed to have been obsessed with being an artist.

He really believed he was good enough.

So he was always very passionate about that,

but it seemed that it was not his actual calling.

Hitler had invested all his hopes into entering

the Vienna Academy, but he was rejected twice.

He spent the next few years drifting in Vienna,

eking out a living selling paintings in the street.

A major change of fortune came with the outbreak of

the First World War.

So how did the move

to military life suit Hitler's possible autistic traits?

1914 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.

Hitler left Austria and moved to

the Bavarian capital of Munich in Germany.

When the announcement of war was made in Munich,

Hitler claims he was there that day,

and he joined up with

the 16th Bavarian Infantry Regiment.

At 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.

Hitler thrived in the army.

He won an Iron Cross for bravery

and was promoted to the rank of corporal.

Hitler'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.

He didn't have friends in the army.

He didn't relate to the other soldiers.

If you ever look at a photograph of Hitler in the army,

he's always at a side.

Germany was at the mercy of the Allies.

We celebrate not only because the war was over but

because it seemed that we had put an end to German militarism forever.

After the war, Hitler returned to Munich.

In the chaos,

it had become a hotbed of revolutionary activity on

the left and right of politics.

Hitler worked for the army as an informant, sent

to monitor the activities of extreme parties.

He was soon drawn to

the right-wing nationalist views of one group in particular,

the NSDAP,

which became known as the Nazi Party.

It's not uncommon for a person with autism

to have very black and white thinking.

This black and white thinking makes people vulnerable

to join extreme groups. And of course,

Hitler did that. Of course, in the general population,

the vast majority of autistic people are highly moral.

They're excessively moral.

Now that's totally different from Hitler who was amoral

and perverse. The first fellow who heard him speak in

a bierkeller in Munich, he said, "What a gob he has,

"we could use him."

And because of that, he was made their leader.

Hitler's genetic propensity for autistic

and ADHD traits does seem

to align with what we know from history.

Could these findings help explain

Hitler's behaviour in later life?

At Trinity College, Cambridge,

a leading autism expert will assess his polygenic scores.

Simon, this is the one for autism.

So he's in the top 1% for autism on the polygenic score.

- Yeah. - We've got another polygenic score around ADHD,

and he's coming at the 80th percentile.

It is amazing how the scientists have managed

to extract these scores from the DNA.

But the process of science is all about critical review and scrutiny.

Going from biology to behaviour is a big jump.

It's an indication of a predisposition,

- but it's not a diagnosis. - Yeah.

By looking at genetic results like this,

there's a risk of stigma. People out there might feel,

is my diagnosis being linked

with somebody who did such monstrous things?

The vast majority of these individuals do not do bad things.

We've just got to keep that in mind

so that it doesn't become out of balance.

It would be very easy for people to look at this result

and say, "Was the whole of Hitler's behaviour to do with autism?"

And I think that would be the wrong conclusion to draw.

The risk is reductionism down to genetics,

when there are so many other factors that could be playing a part.

We know that genes don't operate in isolation,

they operate in an environment,

and I'm glad that Alex is here as the historian

to just remind us about the importance of social factors.

Yeah.

He clearly experienced

an unusual level of suffering during his childhood.

- And loss, yeah. - And loss. - To me, the experience of neglect

and abuse would be much more relevant

to understanding why somebody grows up with hate

and anger rather than the genetics. The two interplay.

And in Hitler's case,

autism and ADHD cannot explain his cruelty in later life.

But perhaps one other polygenic finding from his DNA can.

Tests have also revealed that Hitler's genetic propensity

for antisocial behaviour,

a measure of psychopathy, is in the top 10%.

I think that we're quite entitled

to use criminal autistic psychopathy to describe Hitler.

It highlights, number one, his criminality,

number two, his autism, and number three,

his psychopathy. So it's a very complex mixture.

Hitler was one in a million, or maybe one in billion.

The 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.

But strip away the theatrics, and Hitler was still a man.

No amount of power could help him to overcome

the limits of his body.

And when the scientists explore what

Hitler's DNA might reveal about his physique,

something truly extraordinary is exposed.

We've had some results come back,

and there's something really, really interesting in it.

He's got a deletion for one letter of his DNA,

but that really affects

the protein that is implicated in sexual development

and development of sexual organs. Really significant finding.

It seems this was manifested in his personal life,

in his own personal relations. He had throughout his life,

difficulty establishing intimate relationships.

Oh, my goodness, this is going to be quite big.

Could this finding help to answer one of

the most persistent rumours around Hitler?

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