A leading expert on the Third Reich who features in a new documentary* exploring Hitler's DNA, says that while there is 'no dictator gene' the insights revealed help to make sense of some of the remaining enigma about what drove Hitler and how he drove others.
Professor Thomas Weber of the University of Aberdeen says that when he was first shown the results of Hitler’s DNA analysis, based on the blood that had seeped into the sofa on which Germany’s dictator had shot himself on 30 April 1945, he was “in equal measure electrified and concerned”.
They revealed the dictator’s extremely high polygenic risk scores for bipolarity, depression, autism, ADHD, and schizophrenia and that Hitler had a pathogenic gene mutation that causes Kallman’s syndrome – the condition characterized by delayed or absent puberty and an impaired sense of smell.
“I could immediately see how these results would help us understand better how Hitler saw himself and his place in the world, how he interacted with others, and how he tried to remould the world. But I was concerned what damage the analysis of his DNA might do, if approached in a sensationalist and insensitive manner,” Professor Weber said.
“Yet now that Hitler’s DNA has been analysed, it would be wrong and even unethical to attempt to put the genie back into the bottle and to ignore the results of the analysis. As we regularly take psychopathology in the study of other extremists into account, we have no choice but to do the same in the case of Hitler, if new revelations about the dictator’s mental make-up come to light. Using other criteria and tools for researching Hitler than for other extremists would run the risk of distorting what is special, and what is not, about Hitler.”
Professor Weber has described in his books how until the early 1920s, Hitler rarely wanted to talk about himself, he refused to be photographed or stood on the sidelines and refused to undress in front of others.
But that as he began to reinvent himself, fuelled by perceived grievances and feelings of injustice, as evident from his earliest speeches, he went from not talking at all about much of his past to inventing a semi-fictional past of himself as a politically useful story - creating a space in politics for himself by presenting himself as a genius and as a quasi-messiah.
“We have previously considered this invention of an alternative version of himself largely for political reasons but the picture built from the DNA evidence reveals this may also have been for personal gain,” he added.
“Hitler quite clearly felt both different and inadequate, well in line with the symptoms of his likely psychopathology and syndromes.
“In the process of Hitler’s radicalization, Hitler’s sense of self started to change. Not only did he, in the wake of his radicalization, start to find meaning in life. He also slowly started to accept himself. His feeling of being different was transformed into one of feeling special.
“This process - called ‘enactivism’ in the cognitive sciences - allowed him to accept himself, to believe that he really was Germany's saviour, and most crucially that that narrative then structured and drove his actions until the day he died.”
But Professor Weber cautions that while this can help us understand what drove Hitler and how he drove others when he and his followers ‘brought the world to the gates of hell’, psychopathology can never provide the sole or even primary explanation.
He adds: “The genetic make-up of extremists and non-extremists is on average the same. There simply is no dictator gene. Nor is Hitler’s DNA, or the DNA of any other tyrant for that matter, the blueprint of a dictator.
“Yet similar warnings come with almost any historical source that scholars use to study the radicalization of Hitler. Hardly any of them are conclusive and irrefutable, as most of them come in the form of utterly unreliable claims published either by Nazi propaganda or by associates of Hitler after 1945, yet no one would say that we should not use them at all.
“What we need to do with the results of Hitler’s DNA analysis is what we as historians do with any source: apply source criticism, use them extremely carefully and soberly, compare them with other accounts and calibrate them.”