Did Hitler really only have ONE testicle? A historian sorts the extraordinary truth from the far-flung myths about the Fuhrer

Sung to the tune of The Colonel Bogey March, the old wartime song had it that Hitler was not quite a 'complete' male.



Now, an extraordinary claim based on an account from a long-dead German army medic asserts that the basic fact of the song is true - that Hitler really did have just one testicle.

The World War I medic, Johan Jambor, is said to have discovered an injured Hitler at the battle of the Somme in 1916 and saved his life.

A German army medic who treated an injured Adolf Hitler during World War I told a priest the Nazi leader did have just one testicle



Hitler was screaming for help as a result of injuries to the abdomen, claimed Jambor. His legs were covered in blood and he had lost a testicle.

How do we know this? Apparently, Jambor revealed all to a priest in the Sixties, adding poignantly that Hitler's first question to him was: 'Will I be able to have children?'



The priest dutifully wrote down the sensational revelation and now the vital document on which he recorded it has come to light.

Much as we would all love the story to be true, sadly it is merely the latest in a very long line of unfounded rumours about the most evil tyrant of the 20th century.

It is perhaps inevitable that someone who caused as much misery as he did should be surrounded by such a welter of unsubstantiated gossip, half-truths, innuendos, weird theories and pure lies, as we search for explanations about what drove this extraordinary, complicated, ultimately satanic individual.

The allegation that Hitler lost his testicle at the battle of the Somme has, in fact, been around for decades, and of course formed the basis of the morale-boosting ditty 'Hitler has only got one b***', supposedly written in 1939 and sung uproariously by every schoolboy since.

Corporal Adolf Hitler (right) during World War I. He suffered a groin injury during the Battle of the Somme

Yet it was no more true than the subsequent assertions that Heinrich Himmler 'has something similar', or that 'poor old Goebbels has no b***s at all'.

Hitler's conscientious physician Dr Theodor Morell, who knew every inch of the Fuhrer intimately and had the trust and affection of his patient, certainly made no mention of it, and neither do any contemporaneous or subsequent medical records.

The unsubstantiated claims of a friend of a long forgotten German army medic are frankly unconvincing as evidence, and no autopsy could be carried out on the charred remnants of the Fuhrer's corpse.

So the claim that Hitler was monorchic (the medical term for having one testicle) must join the many other weird assertions that have been made about him over the 119 years since his birth in 1889.

There were tales, for example, of the infant Hitler having his penis bitten off by a goat into whose mouth he was attempting to urinate.

And respectable modern medical journals have even published articles on the supposed potty-training techniques used by his mother.

Many different theories have been adduced for why Hitler hated the Jews, from his catching syphilis from a Jewish prostitute, via his feeling cheated because the Jewish Dr Eduard Bloch failed to save his mother from dying of breast cancer, to the Jewish professors who turned him away from the Visual Arts Academy of Vienna.

Some claim he had nothing against the Jews personally; he just used them as a scapegoat in order to become Chancellor of Germany.

And then there is his sexuality. Dr Lothar Machtan of Bremen University recently claimed that not only was Hitler a promiscuous homosexual before coming to power in 1933, and a severely repressed one afterwards, but that he instituted the Night of the Long Knives massacre of July 1934 (when he killed 150 of his own Brownshirt supporters) to cover up this guilty secret.

Hitler: 'The most evil tyrant of the 20th century'

According to Dr Machtan, Hitler was an insatiably promiscuous and predatory homosexual, who acted out his crushes on chauffeurs, fellow soldiers, Viennese rent-boys and casual street pick-ups.

It is not only his sexual reputation that was blackened: according to a former comrade of Hitler's from the trenches, Hans Mend, his comrades used to put boot blacking on the future Fuhrer's penis when he was asleep in the trenches, which Dr Machtan describes as 'evidently a common occurrence' in the German army in the Great War.

Yet although Mend, nicknamed 'the Ghost Rider', did, indeed, serve in Hitler's unit, he was a blackmailing paedophile who wound up in prison for sex offences and had a series of unrelated money grievances against Hitler.

His death in Dachau has been taken as evidence that Hitler had him silenced because he knew of the Fuhrer's supposed homosexuality.



But this is unfounded nonsense - Mend may just as easily have been incarcerated as a result of his unsavoury extra-curricular activities.

Incidentally, Hitler was also regularly accused of homosexuality by German Social Democrat and Communist newspapers before 1933, which made innuendos about the nature of his friendship with Rudolf Hess and Albert Speer, in particular.



But these slurs can be discounted because they were made for party political reasons.

In any case, his relationship with Eva Braun seems to have been genuine and casts serious doubts on any theory that he was gay.



Gossip also concerns Hitler's niece and flatmate, Geli Raubal, whose suicide led to many rumours about whether the two were having an incestuous affair.

On the morning of September 19, 1931, Raubal was found face down on the floor of their Munich apartment with a lung wound caused by Hitler's Walther 6.35 pistol.

From these facts and very few others, a writer called Ronald Hayman has constructed an ingenious theory which named Hitler as the killer, albeit with manslaughter as the crime rather than murder.

For the conspiracists, the fact that Hitler's policies led to the deaths of more than 50 million people worldwide is enough to convict him of Raubal's death, but he actually had an alibi for his whereabouts that morning.

After Hitler's death, the rumours and innuendo went into overdrive.

In January 1946, it was reported to SMERSH, the Soviet Army's counterintelligence agency, that Eva Braun's marriage certificate might have been forged in order to mislead Allied Intelligence into thinking the couple had died in the Reichs Chancellery bunker, while in fact they had fled Germany.

In November 1946, a sealed bottle with a German label was found in the sea off Denmark with a message inside saying that Hitler was on board a Spanish submarine that had left Finland bound for Fascist Spain.

There were even suggestions made at the time that Hitler did not commit suicide at all, but was shot by his devoted valet, Heinz Linge.

That was the evidence given to SMERSH by the head of Hitler's bodyguard, SS Gruppenfuhrer Hans Rattenhuber, who was in the bunker at the time and recalled that between 3pm and 4pm on the day of Hitler's death: 'Linge came in and confirmed that Hitler was dead, saying that he'd had to carry out the hardest order the Fuhrer had ever given him.

'I looked at Linge in surprise. He explained to me that before his death, Hitler ordered him to leave the room for ten minutes, then to return, wait ten more minutes and then carry out the order.

'Having said that, Linge quickly went to Hitler's room and returned with a Walther pistol, which he placed on the table before me. By its special external finish, I recognised it as the Fuhrer's personal pistol.

'Now it was clear to me what Hitler's order had been. Obviously, Hitler, doubting the effectiveness of the poisons after all the injections he had been given for such a long time, ordered Linge to shoot him after he had taken the poison. Linge had shot Hitler.'

In fact, the 'hardest order' was to destroy Hitler's body before the Russians could use it as a trophy.

And the contemporaneous belief that a 12-year-old son of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had escaped to Czechoslovakia under the name Friedrich Schulz simply added grist to the Soviet propaganda machine.

'It is supposed that [Martin] Bormann's aide-de-camp Friedrich Wilhelm Paustin tried to deliver Hitler's last will and the boy's photograph to Eva Braun's family,' recorded the Soviet news agency TASS about Hitler's son in 1946.

The sad truth is that these rumours say more about the human condition - in particular, our need to find over-arching, mono-causal explanations for the unexplainable evil of men such as Adolf Hitler - than it says about the banal yet monstrous subject himself.

Of one thing we can be certain, however. Whatever the truth about Hitler's having only one b***, the other is not to be found, as the song says, in the Albert Hall.





The lyrics (sung to the tune of The Colonel Bogey March)



‘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.’

An alternative version has the lyrics:

‘Hitler has only got one ball,



Goering has two but very small.



Himmler is somewhat sim'lar,



But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.’

• Masters And Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall And Alanbrooke Won The War In The West by Andrew Roberts is published by Penguin.