TG History — TG Urban Legends

“Abraham Lincoln Was a Woman! Shocking Pix Found in White House Basement! Was John Wilkes Booth Her Jilted Lover?” — Weekly World News, January 22, 2002

WAS HITLER INTERSEXED?

Let’s face it, if you’re transgendered the last person you’d want counted among your ranks would be Adolph Hitler. Still, this theory has proven weirdly compelling to some historians who believe there’s a physical or medical explanation for Hitler — that he suffered from an intersex condition causing monorchism (having only one testicle or an undescended testicle) and this condition left him psychologically warped. The rumor Hitler was, err, “lopsided” began during the war — but it started off as a joke. British Tommies marched off to fight singing insulting songs about Hitler and his cronies. Here’s the most popular one, sung to The Colonel Bogey March (that’s the tune whistled in Bridge on the River Kwai):

Hitler has only got one ball!
Goering has two but very small,
Himmler has something similar,
But Goebbels has no balls at all!

Catchy little ditty, isn’t it? It’s traditional, of course, for soldiers to make fun of the sexual capability of enemy leaders. A second rumor started that Hitler had a deformed penis. This led to a popular schoolyard verse:

Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk
Mussolini bit his weenie, now it will not squirt.

There are other versions but you get the idea. Still there was no reason to believe Hitler wasn’t all there (in more ways than one). Only long after the war did the idea that Hitler might’ve been monorchic gain credibility. When the Russians captured Hitler’s bunker nobody in the West actually saw Hitler’s body and rumors soon started that Hitler had escaped. To resolve the issue the British assigned H.R. Trevor-Roper to investigate. After interrogating witnesses who buried Hitler, Trevor-Roper concluded that Hitler and his girlfriend Eva Braun died on April 30, 1945 and their bodies were cremated shortly afterward. So far, so good.

Then what columnist Cecil Adams dubbed “The Lone Nut Theory” was revived in 1968 when the Russians finally released their autopsy report. In Lev Bezymenski’s book, The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, a copy of the autopsy stated 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…” Hitler’s World War I company commander supported the Russian finding, stating he’d discovered Hitler’s missing testicle following a wartime VD exam. Yet this revelation struck many as suspicious. None of Hitler’s doctors or attendants ever mentioned anything about a missing testicle and medical records show nothing amiss with the Fuehrer family jewels. A woman claiming to have been his lover said he was normally equipped. Moreover, the autopsy report said Hitler’s body showed no external wounds — even though he’d been shot through the head. It’s strongly suspected the Russian report was a hoax designed to discredit Hitler. It’s generally accepted that Eva Braun committed suicide by taking cyanide while Hitler manfully blew his brains out. However, Soviet doctors claimed both died from cyanide capsules and Hitler was shot in the head afterward, the implication being that Hitler was too cowardly to shoot himself. For years Stalin himself had even broadly hinted that Hitler might still be alive. Questions about whether Hitler was alive were more or less resolved in 1972. Dr. Reidar Sognnaes, a dental expert at the University of California at Los Angeles, compared the Russian data with previous X-rays of Hitler’s skull and pronounced them genuine — Hitler was, indeed, kaput.

Yet another rumor surfaced in 2008, this time courtesy of the British tabloid, The Sun. This time it was claimed that in 1916 during World War I Corporal Hitler lost his privates while fighting in the Battle of the Somme. Now technically that would mean he wasn’t intersexed since he would have been born fully loaded.  Spoilsport skeptics dismiss this is an old rumor, noting the person making the claim conveniently died, that military records only cite injuries to his leg, and that the often sued tabloid Sun just might not be the most reputable of sources. Still, some historians have latched onto the “missing ball” anecdote as a means of explaining Hitler. In The Psychopathic God, author Robert 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, saying it contributed to all sorts of psychosexual complications. He stopped just short of saying it caused World War II, though. Monorchism isn’t that rare — an estimated one in 50 boys go into puberty with one or both testes undescended, and one in 500 adult men has one or both testes undescended. But the fact remains there’s no documented medical evidence that Hitler had any sort of intersex condition – and thousands of intersexed persons who lead productive, well rounded lives can tell you that a physical condition is no excuse for choosing a life of mass murder.

So what about Hitler’s missing hoo-ha?  Well, assuming it really was missing other historians think that since Hitler’s body was first incinerated, then buried, and then dug up again, under all that physical abuse the poor thing might have just, well, fell off. Conspiracy theorists have their own ideas, of course. They see the missing member as proof those nefarious Russians submitted a double and the real Hitler is off sunning himself on some Latin American beach. Still, you never know. Cecil Adams points out that Trevor-Roper, one of the experts who pronounced Hitler dead, was also the same guy who pronounced the so-called Hitler Diaries authentic. (Cue the Twilight Zone music)

Bibliography
Human Sexuality: An Encyclopedia, edited by Vern and Bonnie Bullough
Explaining Hitler, Ron Rosenbaum
The Straight Dope, Cecil Adams, Jan 1, 1987
The Psychopathic God, Robert Waite
The Death of Adolf Hitler: Unknown Documents from Soviet Archives, Lev Bezymenski
Hitler HAD Only Got One Ball, The Sun, November 19, 2008

Category: Transgender History