Among conspiracy buffs, this is what is known as (ahem) the lone-nut theory. But let's get serious. The case of Hitler's missing testicle is one of many bizarre twists in the life of one of history's most bizarre hombres. (Another is the never-proven allegation that Hitler's paternal grandfather was Jewish.) A bit of doggerel goes something like the following, originally sung by British Tommies during World War II to the tune of the "Colonel Bogey March":
Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two, but very small;
Himmler is very sim'lar,
And Göbbels has no balls at all.
It's customary, of course, for soldiers to impugn the sexual capacities of enemy leaders. (Another verse from the era goes, {Whistle while you work/Hitler was a jerk/Mussolini bit his weenie/Now it doesn't work.}) But the troops may have had some reason to believe Hitler really was playing with a short set, so to speak. As a soldier in the German army during World War I, the future dictator was wounded in the Battle of the Somme in October, 1916. Sources differ on the precise location of the wound, but some say it was in the thigh or the groin. Conceivably some anonymous poet in the British Army heard this and used it as the basis for the abovementioned ode, although at this late date it's hard to say for sure.
At this point we have to delve into the mystery surrounding Hitler's demise. On May 1, 1945, German radio announced that Hitler had been killed fighting at the head of his troops. But the Russians captured the Führer's bunker, and nobody in the West ever saw the body. Rumors swirled that Hitler had escaped. To resolve the issue, the British assigned H.R. Trevor-Roper, later a well-known British historian, to investigate. After interrogating witnesses, Trevor-Roper concluded that Hitler and his girlfriend Eva Braun had shot themselves on April 30, and that the bodies were cremated shortly afterward.
The Russians, however, maintained that Hitler had managed to escape. At the Potsdam conference in July, Stalin said he believed Hitler was in Spain or Argentina. This was the official line until 1950, when the Soviets unveiled a film called The Fall of Berlin that depicted Hitler and Braun snuffing themselves with poison. But they did not say how they arrived at this conclusion.
In 1955 the Russians released several German prisoners who had been present during Hitler's last days, one of whom told of burying Hitler's remains in a bomb crater. Trevor-Roper interviewed the men, and on the basis of their comments deduced that the Russians had exhumed the bodies and examined them in May, 1945. This was confirmed to his satisfaction in the 1960s, when Russian journalists published accounts of the search for Hitler.
One such book published in 1968 was particularly interesting, and it's here we get back to the question of Hitler's missing organs. The book included the report of the autopsy performed on Hitler's body by Russian pathologists. This contained the startling news that Hitler's "left testicle could not be found either in the scrotum or on the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal, or in the small pelvis. . . ."
This revelation struck many as suspicious. None of Hitler's doctors or attendants had ever mentioned anything about a missing testicle, and his medical records were silent on the subject. A woman who claimed to have been his lover said he was normally equipped. Moreover, the autopsy report said Hitler's body showed no external wounds, even though all the German witnesses mentioned a shot through the head.
Hitler's World War I company commander, however, offered some support for the Russian finding. He said he'd discovered Hitler's missing testicle as a result of a wartime VD exam.
Questions about the authenticity of the Russian autopsy records were more or less resolved in 1972. Dr. Reidar Sognnaes, a dental expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, compared the Russky data with previous X-rays of Hitler's skull and pronounced the former genuine. (Sognnaes used similar methods to confirm that a body dug up in Berlin was that of Hitler's secretary, Martin Bormann.) So I guess we have to conclude that in some departments, at least, Hitler really wasn't all there.
As you can imagine, historians with a weakness for Freudian woolgathering have had a field day with this news. Perhaps the most elaborate treatment was The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite. Waite believed Hitler's left testicle either failed to descend at puberty or was missing at birth. He regarded the deficiency as one of the formative experiences of Hitler's life, and said it contributed to all manner of psychosexual complications. He stopped short, however, of saying it caused World War II
Why did the Russians wait so long to reveal the autopsy results? Trevor-Roper thinks Stalin arbitrarily decided that Hitler had escaped and compelled everybody else to go along. Later, he thinks, the Russians decided to keep things murky lest the Führer's death and/or remains somehow inspire future generations of Nazis. They may have suppressed evidence about the bullet wounds in order to make Hitler's demise seem less heroic.
Others, of course, have their own ideas. They see the missing testicle as evidence that the man who died in 1945 was a double. They think the Russians faked the dental evidence for unknown reasons and that Maria Schickelgruber's grandson ended up leading a life of ease in some South American banana republic.
You never know. After all, Trevor-Roper, the staunchest proponent of the Hitler-is-dead theory, was the same guy who pronounced the so-called Hitler diaries authentic.
There are actually two rumours about Hitler’s genitals – that he had a deformed penis, and (a speculation beloved of a generation of British infantrymen) that he was monorchic - ie that he had only one testicle
The one-ball rumour was current during the war, but it started as a joke. As early as 1939, British troops took to singing insulting songs about Hitler and his cronies, the most popular of which (sung to the tune of The Colonel Bogey March) usually went:
Hitler, he only has one ball,
Göring has two but very small.
Himmler has something similar,
But poor old Göbbels has no balls at all.
An alternative version had slightly different lyrics, viz.
Hitler has only got one ball
the other is in the Albert Hall
His mother
the silly bugger
Cut it off when he was very small.
It was only long after the war that the idea that Hitler really might have been monorchic gained some currency. In the 1960s, the USSR released what was claimed to be a secret report on an autopsy Soviet pathologists had carried out on two badly burned bodies (presumed to be those of Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun) which they had found outside the Führerbunker in Berlin.
The report was republished in The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, by Lev Bezymenski. However it is strongly suspected that the report was a hoax designed to discredit Hitler. It certainly contradicts the testimony of German witnesses to the dictator’s last hours in important ways. For example, it is generally accepted that while Braun committed suicide by taking cyanide, Hitler shot himself in the head (a much more soldierly thing to do). However the Soviet doctors wrote that both the people they autopsied had died after they had bitten into cyanide capsules and that glass fragments had been found in the mouths of both corpses. (The male body had also been shot in the head - by someone else, presumably - after he had taken the poison. The implication was that Hitler was too cowardly to shoot himself, and had an orderly put a bullet in his head to make himself look good to posterity once he had taken the coward’s way out.) The report presented in Bezymenksi's book then goes on to state that the burned body had been identified as Hitler's in part because it had only one testicle. Quite how Russian doctors were so certain Hitler exhibited this abnormality was not explained.
The truth is that almost no-one who survived the war could say for certain what Hitler’s genitals looked like. The dictator was pathologically reluctant to let even his own personal doctors examine him intimately – in fact this reluctance is the main reason many people suspect he must have had some sort of deformity.
According to David Irving, the controversial right-wing historian and author of The Secret Diaries of Hitler’s Doctor, Hitler’s principal doctor, Theodor Morrell, conducted many examinations of the rest of the Nazi warlord’s body (reporting he had no hair on his chest or back, had poor teeth and was bothered by a furred tongue), but was never allowed to go ‘further south’. On one occasion, when Hitler was asked to consent to an enema to relieve the symptoms of hepatitis, the Führer refused to let his doctor slip a tube up his arse, and retired to a locked toilet to try to administer it himself.
If Hitler did have some sort of deformity, though, it may not have made him incapable of getting it up. Most Nazis in Hitler’s inner circle believed he did have sex with Eva Braun, though only very occasionally (the couple generally slept in separate beds). However, another Nazi doctor, Professor Doktor Hans Karl von Hasselbach, testified in 1951:
Hitler had an extreme disinclination to let people see his body. Even I never saw him completely unclothed, let alone checked him over in that state.’
Hasselbach went on to confirm that even members of the Nazi hierarchy suspected their Führer’s motives for this excessive modesty, but all he could offer was:
Probably his former manservant Emil Maurice could give some information as to whether his sex organs were deformed; he dropped hints when we were in captivity.
Unfortunately, so far as we know, Maurice – who doubled as a hired thug and occasional hitman for the Führer – never did testify on this fascinating subject.
Discovered in a Russian text by intelligence officer Lev Bezymensky, the Russians captured a German guard who had witnessed the bodies of Hitler and Braun being taken from the Bunker to the garden, where they were burned and buried.
SMERSH apparently did not believe that the two bodies they dug up along with Göbbels and his wife were Adolf and Eva, but they didn't find their bodies anywhere else in the bunker. They examined the bodies in detail.
The autopsy report:
The teeth tell all. The autopsy report of the two bodies buried in the garden said that both had died after they had bitten into cyanide capsules: Glass fragments had been found in the mouths of both corpses. The male body had also been shot in the head - after he had taken the poison. And, like Hitler, the man had only one testicle.
This last remark is of course the one that needs further citation, but the authors treat it as a given and do not elaborate upon it. This is unusual on the authors' part, to assume certain knowledge to be true, and it stuck out like a sore thumb from just about everything else they examined.
Adolf Hitler Facts
and Factoids
The copy of the autopsy report presented in Bezymenksi's book states that the burned body identified as Hitler's had one testicle. Later ( he notes that this had not been mentioned in the literature, and that one of Hitler's doctors commented that the Führer refused to have medical check-ups (which Bezymenski guesses may have been due to Hitler's abnormality).
During the first weeks of the year 2000, a Russian news broadcast sparked fresh interest in Adolf Hitler's bunker suicide. The broadcast, following reports by former Soviet intelligence agents who claim to have buried the remains of Hitler and his wife Eva Braun in Magdeburg, Germany, said that much evidence was officially ignored at the time, and that the buried remains may not be of the German leader after all.
The autopsy report said that the male body had only one testicle. Aides reportedly had doused the corpse with gasoline and burned it to prevent the body from falling into Soviet hands. Its disappearance prompted reports that Hitler may have escaped.
The fact that over half a century has passed without an authorized inquiry or official explanation as to why the male body had only one testicle finally persuaded Russian investigators of a post-war cover-up. The broadcast suggested that the burnt remains may not be of the Nazi dictator.
The Stein Affair - Fact or Fiction?
During his young adulthood before rising to power, Hitler lived in Vienna. One of Hitler's friends, during that period was Walter Johannes Stein. During World War II, Dr. Stein became an advisor to England's Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill.
~William Bramley in The Gods of Eden
A number of people who intimately knew Walter Johannes Stein in the last years of his life state that Stein never met Hitler.
~Christoph Lindenberg in the German journal Die Drie
One of his [Hitler's] most influential mentors was a Viennese bookstore owner named Ernst Pretzsche. Pretzsche was described by Dr. Stein as a malevolent-looking man with a somewhat toad-like appearance. Pretzsche was a devotee of the Germanic mysticism that was preaching the coming of an Aryan super race. Hitler frequented Pretzsches store and pawned books there when he needed money. During those visits, Pretzsche indoctrinated Hitler in Germanic mysticism and successfully encouraged Hitler to use the hallucinogenic drug peyote as a tool for achieving mystical enlightenment.
~ William Bramley in The Gods of Eden
Ravenscroft's second mistake was to name the Viennese bookseller who introduced Hitler to drugs. "No better name occurred to him than Pretsche, popular among English writers of fiction for German malefactors", Lindenberg [in the German journal 'Die Drie'] writes scornfully before revealing that extensive checks of Vienna city and business directories and police records for the years 1892 through 1920 were negative for the name in question.
~Jeffrey Steinberg in The Unknown Hitler: Nazi Roots in the Occult
It was through buying a copy of Eschenbach's 'Parcival' that had once belonged to Hitler that Dr Stein met him. Dr Stein was impressed by the meticulousness of the marginal notes, though simultaneously appalled by the pathological race hatred that they showed.
~Frank Smyth in The Occult Connection
This was no ordinary commentary but the work of somebody who had achieved more than a working knowledge of the black arts! The unknown commentator had found the key to unveiling many of the deepest secrets of the Grail, yet obviously spurned the Christian ideals of the Knights and delighted in the devious machinations of the Anti-Christ. It suddenly dawned on him that he was reading the footnotes of Satan!
~Trevor Ravenscroft in The Spear of Destiny
The fictional nature of the whole episode surrounding the annotated copy of copy of Parzival is suggested by the similarity of Pretzsche's obscure bookshop to the one described by Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 'Zanoni' (1842), which probably served Ravenscroft as a literary model.
~Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke in The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism
Among them [the marginal notes] appeared numerous references to the character Klingsor, whom Hitler apparently identified with the notorious ninth-century tyrant Landuph II of Capua.
Landulph's avaricious grasping for power had led him to study the black arts, and it was for these practices that he was excommunicated in AD 875. But one other fact must have given Hitler a sense of identity with the ninth-century 'Führer'. Landulph seems to have been either partly or totally castrated: Eschenbach described him as 'the man who was smooth between the legs'.
~Frank Smyth in The Occult Connection
When Russian military surgeons examined Hitler's charred remains in the Berlin bunker in May 1945, they discovered that Hitler was indeed monorchid; he possessed but one testicle.
~Frank Smyth in The Occult Connection
According to Ravenscroft, "Hitler took Dr. Stein up the Danube to visit his mystic teacher, a rustic woodcutter and herbalist named Hans Lodz 'who retained in his peasant's blood the last traces of the atavistic clairvoyance of the ancient Germanic tribes' and who 'resembled a mischievous yet malevolent dwarf from the pages of Grimm's Fairy Tales or an illustration from a book on ancient Germanic folklore'. The men took a swim in the river at which Dr. Stein noticed that Hitler had only one testicle."
~Jeffrey Steinberg in The Unknown Hitler: Nazi Roots in the Occult
The details do not fit: - the snow melting in May, the steamer running in spite of the floods, bathing in the river - it makes no sense. Certainly wrong is the statement that Hitler had only one testicle...all this has been completely refuted by [Werner] Maser.
~Christoph Lindenberg in the German journal Die Drie
Hitler HAD Only Got One Ball
By Alex Peake
Published: 19 Nov 2008 London Sun
An extraordinary account from a German army medic has finally confirmed what the world long suspected: Hitler only had one ball.
War veteran Johan Jambor made the revelation to a priest in the 1960s, who wrote it down. The priest’s document has now come to light – 23 years after Johan’s death.
The war tyrant’s medical condition has been mocked for years in a British song. The lyrics are: “Hitler has only got one ball, the other is in the Albert Hall. His mother, the dirty b****r, cut it off when he was small."
Until now there has never been complete proof Hitler was monorchic – the medical term for having one testicle. But the document tells how Johan saw the proof with his own eyes. In the account, he relives the horror of serving as an army medic in World War I. He died aged 94 in 1985, but had told his secret to priest Franciszek Pawlar, who kept a note of their conversation. Johan’s friend Blassius Hanczuch confirmed the priest’s account of how the medic saved Hitler’s life.
He said:
In 1916 they had their hardest fight in the Battle of the Somme. For several hours, Johan and his friends picked up injured soldiers. He remembers Hitler. They called him the ‘Screamer’. He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming ‘help, help’. “His abdomen and legs were all in blood. Hitler was injured in the abdomen and lost one testicle. His first question to the doctor was: ‘Will I be able to have children?’.
Blassius said that when the Nazis swept to power Johan began to suffer nightmares and blame himself for saving Hitler.
Hitler’s genitals have long caused controversy. Some historians dismissed the “one ball” song as propaganda. But an alleged Soviet autopsy on Hitler backed it up. Records show Hitler did suffer a groin injury in the Somme. It is the first time an interview with anyone who treated Hitler during WWI has come to light. Dr Martin Farr, senior lecturer at Newcastle University School of Historical Studies, said last night: “This genuinely new twist is fascinating.”
