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The playground ditty about Hitler’s ‘missing ball’ may have been closer to the truth than anyone imagined. As a new documentary reveals DNA analysis showing the dictator likely had a syndrome affecting sexual development as well as other conditions, Guy Walters explores how medical histories may have shaped the world’s most brutal dictators from Hitler to Stalin and beyond
I
remember singing it in the playground in the late 1970s: “Hitler has only got one ball/ The other is in the Albert Hall/ Himmler is very similar/ But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.” Of course, even at the age of eight, we all suspected that the idea that Hitler was one nut short of a lunchbox was probably not true. How on earth could anybody possibly know?
