What I learned studying Hitlers DNA including his stunted sexual development

Early in the morning of April 29, 1945, in the final days of World War II, with the Allies closing in on the Führerbunker in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun exchanged marriage vows in which they declared that they were of “pure Aryan descent and not infected with inheritable disease which would exclude them from marriage.” Hitler and Braun were not unique in having to declare it.The Nazis had decreed that all marrying couples must make this pronouncement to ensure the nation’s eugenicist ends.

Given Hitler’s extreme views on eugenics, what would he have done if he had had access to the genetic information that we have today? And what would his DNA tell us if the opportunity ever came to analyze it? Hitler is one of the most studied men in history.Hundreds of television documentaries continue to pore over the details of his life.

But until recently, another “text” has eluded us: his DNA.In 2021, I was approached by Blink Films, a television production company, with an opportunity to study Hitler’s DNA purportedly from a bloodstained swatch of fabric from the sofa on which Hitler had killed himself. I’m a well-known forensic and ancient DNA specialist and they wanted me to oversee the genetics side of the project.But while the fabric certainly looked as though it could have been cut from the sofa on which Hitler killed himself and the provenance looked good, we needed to be sure. Ordinarily, this identification would be done by comparing the DNA of a close relative of Hitler with the DNA from the bloodstain.

But Hitler left no known living descendants.There was, however, another route to confirm identification.

The Y chromosome is a segment of our DNA inherited through the male line, from father to son.Some years ago, the journalist Jean-Paul Mulders and historian Marc Vermeeren traced distant male-line relatives of Hitler in Europe, obtained a DNA sample from one of them, and analyzed the Y chromosome. This data provided a Y-chromosome DN...