SNEAK PEEK: Why Do We Care So Much about Hitler's Penis?

Speculation about the size of Hitler's penis tells us quite a lot about our culture and its understanding of men and their motivations

Before you read this sneak peek of my latest article, let me tell you about my new book The Last Men: Liberalism and the Death of Masculinity. It’s dropping in hardcover and aubiobook formats on December 16th, via Skyhorse. The book is about testosterone decline as a civilisational problem. It’s the first true hormonal theory of politics, drawing on cutting-edge science and the philosophy of great thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche, Francis Fukuyama and William James. The book can be preordered now directly via the Skyhorse website or from Amazon.

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Why do we care so much about Hitler’s penis? It’s a serious question. We do care about Hitler’s penis, as a culture. Quite a lot, it seems.

A new documentary in the UK claims, finally, to have solved the mystery of the Austrian painter’s schwanz—Was it big or was it small?—and to have proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the famous chant of “Hitler’s only got one ball,” a favourite among British soldiers, wasn’t just a litany of idle insults.

The key evidence is genetic: a blood-stained piece of fabric from the Hitlerbunker. The documentary-makers tested it against a sample from one of Hitler’s closest living relatives to make sure the blood was his. And it was. That meant his genome could be sequenced and then analysed for genetic clues about his personality, health and, of course, his manhood.

A similar venture in 2014 failed when the disgraced historian David Irving sold filmmakers one of the Führer’s hairs—only for it to turn out to be someone else’s.

The documentary puts to bed some persistent myths about Hitler, not least of all the secret Jewish ancestry thing. Hitler was not secretly Jewish.

But what about his penis?

A missing nucleotide base suggests Hitler had Kallman’s Syndrome, a condition that affects the onset and course of puberty and can lead to various forms of genital malformation, as well as lifelong low testosterone. Around ten percent of sufferers will have a micropenis: a very small penis, typically less than 2.7 inches in length when erect.

But none of this proves anything. It doesn’t prove Hitler had a micropenis or any other kind of physical anomaly, not even low testosterone. It just makes these things more probable.

As we might expect, the show relies more on innuendo and supposition than… hard fact to draw conclusions about Hitler.

There is, at least, a medical report from the early 1920s that states Hitler had an undescended right testicle. But otherwise that’s it. The report was only discovered in 2010, so it can’t have been the basis of the famous song.

Why would Hitler have asked to be cremated? the film asks. Was he trying to hide something? Obviously (a small penis).

(The answer, actually, is that he made the request late in the war, after he saw the mess Italian partisans made of his old friend Mussolini and his mistress, Clara Petacchi. He didn’t want to suffer the same fate.)

But surely something must have been really bugging Hitler to make him so power-mad and hungry for conquest? Surely he must have been compensating for something to want to invade Czechoslovakia and then Poland, and then France and then Norway and then, fatefully, the Soviet Union? No normal man with a normal penis would want to do that.

And here we reach the crux of the matter. I’m not about to launch a defence of Adolf Hitler and his virility. But I do think it’s worth asking, quite seriously, why we believe any of this matters.