Original subtitles

This programme contains strong language

Adolf Hitler's suicide shot reverberates through history.

For 80 years, endless documents have been analysed,

trying to understand this most notorious of tyrants.

Someone who can order the deaths of six million Jews...

..what kind of person is that?

Now science is unlocking a new source of information.

Hitler wanted to destroy all traces of himself,

but failed.

In the wreckage of his Berlin bunker,

an American colonel cut out a swatch of sofa material,

stained with Hitler's blood.

In 1945, it was just a war trophy...

He didn't think 80 years later,

people were going to try to extract DNA off of it.

..but now it's a unique historical document.

Tests have proved it is Hitler's blood.

An exact match.

For the first time,

an international team has sequenced his genome.

We've got Adolf Hitler's DNA.

They've already rewritten history.

The rumour that Hitler had Jewish ancestors is not true.

We can actually put that rumour about Jewish ancestry

to bed based on the DNA.

A strong association with genes to do with

autism could explain his all-or-nothing thinking.

And he actually belongs to the top 1%.

Hitler's genome suggests he may have been genetically

pre-disposed to psychopathic behaviour.

When these findings emerged, I was simply flabbergasted.

What other secrets can his DNA now unlock

about his mental state...

Genetic evidence for Hitler having psychiatric illness

is really important.

..about his delusions of grandeur...

Hitler felt that he could control the planet.

..and about an entirely new insight into his intimate relationships.

He was interested in women, but only at a distance.

He's got deletion in a gene strongly associated

with the development of sexual organs.

On the 30th of January 1933,

Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.

The Nazis called it their seizure of power.

Goebbels straight away organised this huge torchlight parade.

Hitler was basically a nobody from a village in Austria

who had nothing to his name.

So how did he get so much influence and power so quickly?

The average person does not do that.

Hitler was far from average.

His passionate oratory commanded huge crowds.

And the talkativeness and the ability to speak so much,

and if you're very charismatic and you have new ideas,

it attracts people to you.

He's accruing more and more power to himself,

and at the same time is the establishment of

the first concentration camps,

the intimidation and imprisonment of political opponents.

They were beaten up in the streets by the Nazi stormtroopers.

Hitler's rise to power is characterised by a willingness

to use violence.

His greatest hatred was reserved for the Jews.

And Hitler proves to be completely ruthless.

Anti-Semitism becomes German state policy.

And to understand an individual who takes these ideas to an extreme,

to start designing the so-called "final solution".

There were nine million Jews living in Europe,

of whom six million died.

It's a killing machine on a massive scale.

Hitler's obsessive nationalism

and use of extreme violence, including murder,

are typical of dictators past and present.

But Hitler was an untypical dictator in one key area.

Mussolini was very well known for his affairs

and relationships with women,

and kind of quite proud of showing some of that off.

It was very common among the Nazi leadership

to have mistresses and many sexual relationships.

Hitler, on the other hand,

was determined to keep his personal and private life absolutely secret.

Why were Hitler's relationships with women so unusual?

For the first time,

scientists have sequenced his genome

and discovered something extraordinary.

I have to say there was a bit of a...

- SHE GASPS - ..moment.

He's got a deletion in a gene known as PROC2.

So PROC2 is found on chromosome three,

and we've got two chromosome three's.

He has a section on one of his where there's a deletion,

a crucial letter, and it's a nonsense deletion.

So if you've not got one working,

it can have a pretty big impact on your health,

and we know that it's strongly associated

with something known as Kallmann's syndrome.

One of the big things that Kallmann's is about...

..is about development of sexual organs.

The DNA diagnosis of Kallmann syndrome

reveals an entirely new source of information

that raises questions about

Hitler's sexual development.

At Turku University in Finland,

this rare condition is a specialism of Professor Jorma Toppari.

How would this have affected him?

Yeah, the typical symptoms in 10% of the kids

with this kind of mutation might have a small penis,

micropenis.

Much more common feature would be that

the testes don't descend normally to the scrotum.

The DNA reveals the possible physical impact

of Kallmann syndrome.

So it seems a coincidence that during World War II,

there was a British propaganda song about his genitals.

MUSIC PLAYS

In the Second World War, there was a popular song in Britain.

People thought that that was probably not really quite true.

# Hitler has only got one ball!#

The song was clearly intended to belittle Hitler,

but did it contain a grain of truth?

Pretty much everybody knows there's this song from

World War II where it talks about Hitler having only one ball.

What's the historical evidence?

It turns out that this is more or less true.

In 1923,

Hitler spent nine months in Landsberg prison,

and in 2010, a medical report was discovered

showing that Hitler had right-sided cryptorchidism,

in other words, an undescended testicle.

So there's some truth in this rumour that was already being circulated

during the war.

Yeah, and now we have genetic evidence

which seems to back that up.

Hitler's PROC2 mutation indicates that as well as

an undescended testicle,

he may also have had a micropenis.

This diagnosis reflects testimony from a friend of Hitler's

during his rise to power in the 1920s.

When he was a young man in the army

and would get dressed and undressed in front of his fellow soldiers,

the other men would make fun and say to him,

"Your penis is smaller than everybody else's."

And that is potentially more psychologically traumatic

for a young boy, a young man, than anything else.

This genetic condition would have shaped Hitler throughout his life.

So, as a baby, he could already be starting to show signs

of the implications of having this deletion in that particular gene.

Yes, but that's it in the childhood.

Then the next time one would see something wrong would be in puberty.

So talk me through that. What happens?

Well, most of the ones

with Kallmann syndrome

don't enter puberty because they don't produce testosterone.

Jorma, Hitler is heterozygous,

so he's got one copy of the PROC2 gene that's normal,

one copy that's not.

But my understanding is that even having just one copy

with his mutation, you will have some form of Kallmann's.

- Is that correct? - That's correct.

And the majority of the cases

with this mutation are heterozygous,

and it always causes the syndrome,

but the severity of the syndrome can be very variable.

So how might fluctuating testosterone levels

have affected Hitler?

His iconic moustache shows he managed to enter puberty.

But did his testosterone levels then falter?

A unique historical source might shed light on this question.

Incredibly, despite his many declamatory speeches on film,

Hitler's speaking voice was recorded only once.

This is the place where Hitler met Marshal Mannerheim,

the chief of Finnish military force during the Second World War.

After recording the official reception

and speeches aboard the train,

the Finnish sound engineer kept recording

as Hitler chatted casually over lunch.

So this is a picture of that meeting.

Yes.

They have a nice white cloth on the table,

though, which we don't have.

- Yeah. - But it's the very same table, and the microphones were up there.

Wow.

The only time we have recording

of Hitler speaking in normal circumstances.

Should we have a listen?

- So that sounds like a grown man's voice. - Yeah.

So his voice is quite...deep, really.

- It is, yeah. - Yeah.

It shows that he had gone through puberty

and he had his voice break.

He might have not had the most severe condition

because the mutation was only in one of the genes, not on both.

He's certainly born with some kind of abnormalities

around his sexual organs,

so he may have had a micro penis.

We know he certainly seems to have had something

with one of his testicles.

He might have not had sexual desire,

because that's the specific symptom of lack of testosterone.

Although women were, of course, so idolising him.

Bringing him flowers and screaming and everything,

like a pop star,

but he doesn't seem to take that as a hint

to anything else.

He's not interested in sex.

The Nazi philosophy emphasised

the importance of fertility, of large families,

of lots of children,

creating a racially pure German nation.

Hitler clearly goes very much against this

in not having any kind of family,

in not have children, in not being married.

Hitler quite effectively cultivates the image

of a man devoted entirely to the fatherland.

Our discovery strongly suggests

that it may have been only a convenient cover

for his Kallmann syndrome.

Analysis of Hitler's DNA shows he had

a rare condition called Kallmann syndrome.

Symptoms include low testosterone

and abnormal genital development,

which may have brought psychological challenges.

Back 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.

How would that have affected him,

growing up and into adulthood, and his relationships with women?

He really, really did struggle to feel comfortable with women,

and that in itself can be an act of great shame.

And the earlier that shaming exercise take place,

the more rage, fury,

and murderousness will develop within one's psyche.

Hitler's friend August Kubizek wrote in his memoir

about the teenage adult's dysfunctional relationships.

Kubizek 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.

Kubizek describes how Hitler had a crush

on a girl named Stephanie.

He never actually went out with her,

but he did have a couple year-long infatuation with her.

Hitler fantasised about kidnapping Stephanie

and them dying in a melodramatic death pact.

"It's the first and last time

"I heard him seriously speak of suicide.

"He would jump in the Danube River and make an end of it.

"But Stephanie would have to die with him.

"He insisted on that."

Many years later, in 1929,

there's a record of an actual relationship.

It was far from a healthy romance.

He was 40,

she was just 21, and she was his half niece.

Geli Raubal.

She was a young and attractive woman.

Kind of liked attention, she was quite flirtatious,

she had quite a lot of admirers.

Hitler was clearly infatuated,

obsessed with his half-niece Geli Raubal

in a way that he wasn't obsessed with any other woman in his life

before or after.

She felt trapped by Hitler's attention.

Hitler was controlling.

Hitler was jealous.

He was quite manipulative of her.

Possibly there was violence involved.

Lots of people think that Hitler was having some kind

of sexual relationship with this niece of his.

We do not know for certain.

Clearly, she was very unhappy.

Geli, after two years living with her controlling uncle, Adolf,

made a tragic decision.

In 1931, Geli took her own life.

She used Hitler's pistol and shot herself in his apartment.

The shadow of suicide often fell

over Hitler's relationships with women.

One historian has estimated that of the seven women

with whom Hitler had some kind of boyfriend-girlfriend encounter,

at least three of these women attempted suicide,

and another three actually committed suicide.

Including his longest and most famous relationship with Eva Braun.

After she met Hitler,

she endeavoured to commit suicide not once,

but twice.

So 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.

Hitler's relationship with Eva Braun was one that lasted 14 years.

He was attracted to her from the very beginning.

He developed quite a fascination with her,

but what really went on between the two of them sexually,

we do not know.

Hitler's housekeeper Herbert Doehring

and his wife were close to the couple

and well-placed to discover

the truth of their sexual activities.

No-one has ever really been able to explain

why Hitler was so uncomfortable around women throughout his life,

or why he probably never entered into intimate relations with women.

But now we know that he had Kallmann syndrome,

this could be the answer we've been looking for.

The Kallmann diagnosis is a new source of information,

filling gaps left by the existing records about Hitler's health.

The medical notes made by the Fuhrer's personal physician,

Dr Theodor Morell,

can now be examined in a fresh light.

Morell was giving Hitler all kinds of pills

and injections, around 80 different medications,

over the course of the time that he spent with him.

It's unlikely Dr Morell knew about Kallmann syndrome,

as it wasn't identified until 1944.

But now Hitler's DNA has revealed the PROC2 gene mutation,

one of Dr Morell's treatments stands out -

testosterone.

This is an entry here from Morell's diary.

It's the 24th of January,

and we can see here,

25 milligrams of testosterone injected.

So we know that he was regularly injecting Hitler with testosterone.

It'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,

also things like erectile dysfunction, loss of libido.

Unfortunately, Morell doesn't explain explicitly

in his notes why he's giving Hitler testosterone,

but he's certainly receiving it on a fairly regular basis.

In Kallmann's, the treatment is actually sex hormone.

So Morell may have identified some sort of sexual issue,

we don't know, but maybe they were onto the right track.

Dr Morell unwittingly provides more evidence that supports

the Kallmann diagnosis.

His own body odour.

Kallmann syndrome has two principal features.

One is there is no sex hormone production.

And the other one is the lack of sense of smell.

Whilst Hitler trusted him entirely,

some of the other leading Nazis took quite a strong dislike to him.

People were complaining to Hitler about him.

They were even complaining also that he was smelly,

to which Hitler responded,

"I employed Dr Morrell not for his fragrance,

"but for his skills as a doctor."

The very fact that everyone in Hitler's inner circle

seemed to have been irritated by the smell of Dr Morell,

and Hitler did not, would suggest that Hitler

might have not been able to smell very well.

Which now in the light of the diagnosis of Kallmann's,

is highly significant.

Hitler wanted to be seen as a godlike figure,

the heroic leader of a pure Aryan race.

But Kallmann syndrome now reveals

the truth about his own body.

Hitler knew nothing of the DNA clues that would be left in his blood.

But the Nazis did understand that disease

and disability could be passed down the generations.

So we've known about the heredity of characteristics

for literally thousands of years.

I mean, we know things like the early farmers used it

as a way of kind of selecting for crops

and selecting animals and domesticating animals.

Selective breeding to improve livestock is seen as a good thing.

Selective human breeding,

eugenics, is widely condemned and illegal.

A central component of Nazi ideology was eugenics,

that the health of the nation could be improved

through selective breeding.

In his earliest days as dictator,

Hitler authorised forced sterilisation of people

with mental and physical disabilities

to stop them passing on what he believed were impurities.

Eugenics and a determination to ensure the purity

of the Aryan race was an obsession that led to

the worst atrocities of the Nazi regime.

In 1939, Hitler signed a decree

to eliminate people he deemed unworthy of life

in a state-organised programme of euthanasia.

This is Hartheim Castle, near Hitler's hometown of Linz,

which was used as part of the so-called "euthanasia programme"

to murder the mentally and physically disabled.

It's the one killing decree or the one order

to murder people actually signed by Adolf Hitler.

The castle was a home for disabled people beginning in 1898.

The Nazis changed the castle into

an annihilation centre in March 1940,

and they murdered up to 30,000 people here.

This was the former gas chamber.

It was disguised as a shower room.

About 30 people were brought in at the same time,

and from outside, the doctors,

they filled in the carbon monoxide.

- It's hard to imagine... - No. - ..you cannot imagine what took place here.

Hartheim formed a prototype for the use of gas chambers

for the mass murder of six million European Jews

in the extermination camps set up by the Nazis.

Hitler's policies are completely around eugenics,

and based on his own DNA,

particularly with the Kallmann syndrome,

if he had been able to look at his own DNA

as if it was somebody that he was making a decision about,

whether or not to go to the gas chambers or not,

he almost certainly would have sent himself.

The castle archive reveals that Hitler's policies

did send one of his relatives to die at Hartheim,

his second cousin, Aloisia Veit.

She'd been confined for years in a psychiatric facility in Vienna.

Her medical records state she imagined she could see ghosts

and evil people.

Her vivid hallucinations and delusional behaviour

often meant she was restrained on a bed.

The diagnosis doctors gave Hitler's cousin was schizophrenia.

HE SHOUTS IN GERMAN

This could have implications

for our understanding of Hitler's mental state,

because schizophrenia runs in families.

Ground-breaking analysis of Hitler's DNA

is unlocking more secrets of the infamous dictator.

You get a little glimpse into his personality

by looking at his DNA.

What I'm doing in my research is that I'm trying

to identify genetic risk factors for psychiatric conditions.

We know that Hitler's relative was diagnosed

with schizophrenia and that it runs in families.

So what does Hitler's polygenic score suggest

about his likelihood of developing the condition?

You can see here the distribution of the score

for schizophrenia in the population,

and you can see that Hitler is located in

the very end of the distribution.

He has a very high polygenic score for schizophrenia.

Actually, he belongs to the top 1%.

Top 1?%

- Yeah, it's high. - Wow.

But what does it actually mean when somebody's in that top 1%

in terms of how likely they are to develop the condition?

It's very difficult to say from the score,

because it's only capturing a small part of the risk.

But he is highly loaded with common variants that increases the risk.

The latest DNA result reveals Hitler

had an increased risk of developing schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a very challenging mental illness

where the person experiences hallucinations and delusions.

It often means that your everyday life falls to pieces.

Hitler would not be diagnosed with schizophrenia today,

as he did not show these serious debilitating symptoms.

In acute schizophrenia,

there's a total fragmentation of the personality.

And so a person in that state has no ability

to lead a country, no ability to wage war.

If he had full-blown schizophrenia,

he couldn't have achieved what he achieved.

Hitler may not have had schizophrenia,

but his DNA analysis reveals a range of genes associated with it.

When we look at physical health conditions,

sometimes we can find a single gene that is the cause.

But when it comes to psychiatric

and neurodevelopmental conditions,

it's very rarely the case that there's a single gene.

There are hundreds of genes that are likely to be involved.

Recent international studies

show that some of these schizophrenia genes

may actually have positive effects.

Research found relatives of people with schizophrenia

are often extremely creative.

In families that have schizophrenia,

you often find that there's a genius.

These genes may have given him the creative,

unconventional thinking that drove his early success.

At the Berghof, his mountain retreat in Bavaria,

Hitler conceived his plans for Nazi domination.

It 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.

Hitler's plans at the start of the war were spectacularly successful.

Poland quickly fell, Denmark and Norway followed.

His armies swept through Belgium,

the Netherlands and part of France,

then Yugoslavia and Greece.

Some historians have put Hitler's success

down to his unconventional thinking.

In 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.

This 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.

Hitler's DNA is suggesting new explanations

for his behaviour.

Schizophrenic traits involve unconventional creativity.

Autistic traits include attention to detail.

ADHD can add hyperfocus.

He also often had a manic energy in pursuit of a goal or idea.

He 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.

Hitler's doctor noted this behaviour.

Theodor Morell diagnosed Hitler in his diaries

with manic-depressive illness in 1943.

His own physician diagnosed him during his lifetime

with this condition.

If the latest DNA analysis detects genes

for manic depression, now called bipolar disorder,

it could transform our view of Hitler.

We're also looking at the 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.

Actually, he belongs to the top 1%

of individuals with the highest score.

Another 1?%

Yeah, really, really striking results.

Bipolar 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.

Hitler had manic and depressive 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 underactive,

not get out of bed, not say anything,

not eat anything for a few weeks,

and back and forth between these states.

If we look back at Hitler's youth,

in the diaries of his teenage friend, Kubizek,

before politics, before power, the signs are already there.

Kubizek 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.

Hitler's manic phases may have aided his rise to power...

..and fuelled his early success in directing the war.

But then, he seemed to lose touch with reality.

Hitler made a very bold and surprising decision,

to invade Russia.

This time...

..his plans led to disaster.

In this kind of moment of euphoria,

Hitler starts to fantasise

what the world would look like after the defeat of the Soviet Union.

Hitler, against the explicit advice

of his officers, thought that he knew best.

This was a much bigger enemy

with much bigger manpower resources.

And it was also a much bigger terrain and territory.

Hitler'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.

After crushing defeats in Russia,

Hitler's mood swings grew more severe.

He was no longer the energetic, highly active,

excitable, but very functional and often very calm,

charismatic, creative leader of the early 1930s.

He was becoming more and more angry, and irritable, and rageful.

Hitler increasingly resorts

to haranguing those around him, dictating to them,

flying off the handle.

It 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.

As Hitler's mood swings and rages grew worse,

his personal physician,

Dr Theodor Morell, tried to treat him.

What 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.

Morrell gave Hitler vitamultin tablets,

a mixture he made up himself that dramatically altered

the Fuhrer's moods.

Morell 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.

The worst possibility to give to a person

with bipolar would be amphetamines.

So Dr Morell 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.

So then he just get more and more amphetamine,

and it became a vicious circle.

He certainly was not in touch with reality.

On the 6th of June 1944,

Hitler was at his mountain hideaway, the Berghof.

After talking into the early hours,

he finally went to bed at 3am.

One hour later,

news came in of a vast Allied invasion

on the beaches of northern France.

It was D-Day.

The generals were in a quandary.

They just didn't know what to do.

They 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.

The landing of Allied troops in Normandy

began the recapture of Europe from the Nazis.

As Germany's enemies invaded, vital hours were wasted.

When Hitler woke at 10am,

he was unconcerned, even optimistic.

He would kind of delusionally seemed to think that Germany would prevail.

When D-Day started, there was this moment of elation,

of almost euphoria in German population

because of successful propaganda.

Germans thought, finally,

we can still win this war.

But this is, of course, all based on Hitler's delusions,

on Hitler's self-belief and grandeur.

In reality, it was the beginning of the end.

In January 1945,

France was being liberated

and the Soviets were sweeping through Eastern Europe.

As Germany's fortunes declined,

Hitler's mental and physical state deteriorated rapidly.

Hitler fled to Berlin, into an underground bunker,

to avoid the Russian bombardment.

The Fuhrer was chauffeured through the bombed out ruins of his capital

in an armoured limousine.

And now we're getting ever closer to the bunker

and to the heart of what was then Hitler's Berlin.

What's it like at that point?

Hitler would have been driving through

a devastated Berlin,

and he's travelling from the, more or less,

the western outskirts into the centre,

can't really fail to notice how devastated Berlin was.

A Berlin, which is, large chunks of it is rubble, at this point?

Yes.

Given that Germany is being destroyed,

he knows it's over.

The sun is setting on the Third Reich.

The devastation of Berlin matched Hitler's

own mental and physical decline.

This was clear to staff in the bunker,

including his secretary, Traudl Junge.

He looked like a shadow.

He looked emotionless and very grey and pale

and like a broken old man.

His leg was lame,

and his movements were very slow.

He was not any more the dictator and impressive,

fascinating man he was earlier.

Hitler was only 56 years old,

but staff also noticed further evidence of his deterioration,

a trembling left hand,

possibly a sign of Parkinson's disease.

For the majority of cases,

DNA analysis can't help doctors diagnose Parkinson's.

Can we find clear evidence of the condition from another source?

This last piece of footage of Hitler,

it's from the final days of the war,

the final days of his life.

And this is the official version of

the footage that was shown in the German newsreel at the time.

I think what strikes me about this footage is not what we see,

but what we don't see.

What's really hidden in this footage, is his left hand.

It's only when we see the uncensored version

that we know what's really happening.

And we do have the full footage,

which was not released to the German public at the time.

So now we see this left hand behind his back,

and there is this rest tremor, it's a very coarse tremor.

The regime did not want the German public to see this footage.

Because it shows us for sure that this is

a neurodegenerative condition,

this is Parkinson's, and there's no doubt about the diagnosis here.

Hitler, an unknown provincial loner, tried to realise his dream

of a thousand year German Reich.

That fantasy was shattered.

By April 1945, Soviet guns were trained on his bunker,

and shells were pounding above.

Terrified of being captured by the Soviets,

Hitler planned his and Eva Braun's suicide.

At the end,

even most of Hitler's inner circle had abandoned him.

Hitler was losing any sense of reality.

He continued directing the war,

holding meetings with his generals,

moving armies around the map.

In reality, those armies had collapsed.

By this very late stage,

Hitler seemed to be losing grip on reality.

He was determined to keep fighting to the bitter end,

and 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.

Hitler's mindset,

Hitler's personality was such that there could only be death

by that point.

It is just unimaginable that Hitler would have wanted

to sit things out.

It is absolutely clear that

Hitler would rather die than live beyond

the moment where he could still control things.

Hitler maintained absolute control over his suicide

and left detailed instructions with his valet, Heinz Linge.

He gave me the order five days before

to get gasoline

to burn the bodies.

He actually marries the previous day.

He marries his long-term companion, Eva Braun.

In the early hours of the morning,

there's a little wedding celebration.

There are guests. There are drinks.

The following day, around 3.30 in the afternoon,

Eva Braun takes cyanide and Hitler shoots himself with his pistol.

Hitler tried to destroy every trace of himself,

to preserve his godlike image, but failed.

Something crucial survived to reveal his secrets.

His DNA.

There have been attempts for a long time to obtain DNA

to analyse it.

It is remarkable that, finally, it has been achieved.

The DNA analysis is a new source of evidence,

revealing conditions likely

to have shaped Hitler's thinking and changed history.

The genetic findings from the blood, they are absolutely extraordinary.

I just cannot believe how well they fit

with everything that I know about psychiatry.

Some historians are very motivated

to believe that if Hitler has a psychiatric illness,

that in some way, he can't be blamed

for the evil things that happened when he was the leader.

You're responsible for it whether you have a mental illness or not.

We may never fully understand Adolf Hitler,

but analysing his DNA has brought us closer than ever before.

There's no doubt in my mind that these findings will change

the way we think about Hitler in many ways

and also add a new layer of understanding of him.

I mean, people are fascinated by Hitler and by his mind,

maybe just to try and make sense of the incomprehensible,

because someone who can order the deaths of six million Jews,

you know, what kind of person is that?

Our behaviour is a complex mix of genes and environment,

and looking at anything that could give us answers

becomes part of the picture.

We had these kind of tantalising clues about Hitler,

but now we've got some genetic information that backs that up.

DNA can be likened to another text,

helping to solve historical mysteries.

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