A documentary called Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator aired on Saturday on Channel 4, covering work done by the team who conducted the genetic identification of Richard the Third’s skeleton to sequence Adolf Hitler’s genome from a fragment of bloody fabric from the sofa on which he killed himself.
As a scientist who would usually argue that all attempts to increase the sum total of human knowledge are valuable no matter how bizarre or obscure they may seem, I find myself in the very strange position of feeling that this study should not have been done. The justification for our prurient interest in those who conduct atrocities is that the greater our understanding the more likely we are to be able to prevent these things from happening again. But learning more about one monstrous individual who was very much an outlier in respects that have nothing to do with genetics isn’t very likely to help with that. Studying how large numbers of average people in an average nation were persuaded to at least cooperate and at worst enthusiastically comply will do a lot more to further our understanding of crimes against humanity and prevent them in future, because by definition there are a lot more average people than there are outliers.
The study methodology can be assumed to be robust as it has apparently been scrutinised by reputable experts in the field such as Adam Rutherford, who wrote an excellent article on it. I have some questions about the ethics, not least how consent was obtained from the male line relative of Adolf Hitler’s against whose genetic sample the identity of the blood stain was verified. But releasing the program before the scientific paper it was based on has been published makes it is impossible for me to check these details for myself. For all the problems with academic publishing it does at least allow transparent, independent verification of a study’s methods and ethics.
Among the many findings with concerning implications in this era of misinformation and demonisation of difference is the discovery that Hitler’s genome places him in a group of people more likely than average to have ADHD, autism or schizophrenia. Contrary to much misleading reporting already out there he has not been shown to have any of these conditions, nor to have “the genes for” these conditions – we don’t even know of individual genes for neurodiversity or schizophrenia, just that some variants increase the likelihood of these conditions on a population level. Given that the US government is already compiling trying to compile registries of neurodivergent people and hoping to eradicate autism, I can’t imagine the perception that someone whose name is a byword for evil had these conditions will do anything other than fan the flames of hatred.
“None of this new genetic provides any deterministic evidence that his evil was rooted in his genes. It does not give any weight to the ill-conceived notion that evil is somehow biologically encoded.”
Moving on though to the finding that has generated the most headlines, the genetic study has revealed a deletion mutation in gene required for successfully transporting the cells responsible for the release of sex hormones to their correct location, causing Kallmann syndrome, a disorder of sexual development caused by low levels of sex hormones. Symptoms may include failing to start or complete puberty, infertility, small or underdeveloped penises and undescended testicles. Testicles and ovaries arise from the same embryonic tissue in the same position, but while the ovaries remain in the abdomen the newly formed testicles migrate downwards into the scrotum. This keeps them at a lower temperature than the interior of the body as in a fascinating evolutionary hangover from before mammals kept a consistent warm body temperature of around 36 to 40 degrees centigrade, spermatogenesis requires a lower temperature. If the testicles fail to descend properly and are retained in the abdomen they give the impression of being absent (as well as increasing the risk of testicular cancer).
It is this last symptom that resonates with folk memory and has prompted the most speculation – even growing up fifty years after the second world war I still learned the song “Hitler has only got one ball” in the playground, and I suspect most British schoolchildren are probably singing it to this day. It turns out that this may actually have been written based on some evidence; a report written by the medical officer at Landsberg prison where Hitler was taken after his arrest for the failed beer hall putsch in 1923 declared that he had right-side cryptorchidism, ie that only his left testicle had fully descended. It’s also possible though that this was simply a coincidence and the song was written to mock prominent Nazi officers, who placed high importance to conforming to ideals of manliness, by linking their masculinity to the size, presence or absence of their testicles.
This is where we hit my second issue with this study and the gleefully mocking way it is being reported: Hitler is dead. He will not see any of these jokes. There are many people out there today who live with Kallmann syndrome, other disorders of sexual development or with bodies that vary from the ideal in size or shape more broadly, and they will. No one’s moral character or value as a person is in any way linked to the way their genetics have shaped their bodies. The validity of someone’s gender is not dependent on the size or shape of their genitals.
Mocking bad people for their appearance rather than for their harmful words and actions is a problem that goes beyond laughing at men with small genitals – we do it all the time with politicians’ weight or height or bad teeth and we really need to stop because it doesn’t affect them but hurts those around us who do see it. Mocking whatever it is prominent US Republicans are paying to have done to their faces is a bit more of a grey area because that’s an aesthetic choice people are making on purpose, but it’s always possible that there’s someone out there whose face looks like that naturally. While it seems quite likely that Hitler may have had unusual genitalia, and multiple sources of evidence do suggest that may have taken the form of an undescended testicle, we should strongly resist clickbait attempts to link that discovery to his behaviour.
I’ve now spent far more time that I would have wanted thinking about the genitals of the most evil man in recent Western history, so I’m going to make a sudden jarring pivot and try and turn this into a post about botany. Some of you may have wondered why the word for undescended testicles, cryptorchidism, sounds like the plant orchid. They are in fact connected: our modern word orchid comes from the Latin word orchis, which comes in turn from the Greek orkhis, which means testicle. Due to the derivation of the name orchids are used as a symbol by intersex advocacy groups, particularly those focussed around people with androgen insensitivity.
For all species other than the naked man orchid, the connection between orchids and testicles is not immediately apparent when looking at the plants above group but is explained by examining the roots. Many European orchid species have a pair of subterranean tubers used for carbohydrate storage. They are often visibly different in size – the smaller one containing the starch stored in the previous year shrivels as it is depleted to fuel plant grown, whereas the current year’s tuber expands as this year’s photosynthate is stored away. In ancient Greek folk medicine it was thought that eating the larger tubers while pregnant would result in the birth of a boy, and eating the smaller one would produce a girl, and the paired tubers’ shape is probably responsible for orchids’ use as a aphrodisiac across many times and cultures.
It turns out that orchid is not the only plant name with a connection to testicles. The word avocado is derived from the Nahuatl word a:wakatl, which was also used a slang word for testicles in a way that Nahuatl scholar Magnus Pharao Hansen describes as “the same kind of euphemism that we make use of when we refer to a penis as “a wiener””. As Georgia O’Keeffe has taught us, we do seem to have quite a tendency to look at plants and see something else entirely.
Tangled Bank Foraging and Fibre Crafts 
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