For anyone who has ever been a little testy about how much purer past time periods were, here’s a rude awakening: In a 1939, Toby O’Brien wrote a British propaganda song, which was titled “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball”.
Better yet, the recent study of one of Hitler’s past medical examinations has proven that the song is actually true, as it appears he has an undescended right testicle.
To set the tone for the rest, we invite you to play the melody of the song (“The Colonel Bogey March”) while you read:
And maybe sing along, too:
Hitler has only got one ball,
Göring has two but very small,
Himmler has something sim’lar,
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.
Obviously, people have long debated whether or not this song was true, but according to the Telegraph, a German historian, Peter Fleischmann of Erlangen-Nuremberg University, claims to have discovered interconvertible evidence that Hitler was indeed a little testy, too.
The evidence surfaced at an auction in 2010 in the form of medical records that were believed to be long lost—and so they were quickly seized by the Bavarian government.
Despite their swift action, though, they have only been thoroughly studied just now. The documents record the November 12, 1923 medical examination Hitler received in Landsberg Prison. He had just been arrested, following his failed coup d’état, at the Munich Beer Hall Putsch.
So, uh, what happened?
Dr. Josef Steiner Brin, the prison’s medical officer, wrote that “Adolf Hitler, artist, recently writer” was “healthy and strong” but suffered from “right-side cryptorchidism”.
Cryptorchidism is when a testicle fails to properly descend—meaning Hitler had an undescended right testicle.
“The testicle was probably stunted,” said Fleischman.
However, these findings are in direct contrast to other claims—like by an account of an army medic discovered in 2008, which claimed that Hitler lost a testicle due to a shrapnel injury in World War I. Further, Hitler’s childhood doctor, Eduard Bloch, had claimed that Hitler’s genitals were “completely normal.”
And then, the Soviet autopsy carried out after the fall of Berlin discovered that Hitler was missing a testicle entirely—except they found that it was the left one.
Of course, cryptorchidism can develop later in life, making Bloch’s account valid as well—and the prison medical examination seems to be from a more reliable source than the 2008 claims.
But there is one more caveat as well: No paper appears to have been published yet by Fleischman, meaning there is no peer review out yet. Further, all of this seems to have been broken by Bild—a German tabloid (in the sense of scandalous gossip and not alien abductions, as it often is in the US).
Regardless, the consensus is clear: Hitler only had one ball.
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Feature Image: Wikimedia Commons
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