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Blog post by Aaron Winter, Lancaster University, UK and Co-Editor, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
Hitler has been making headlines a lot in recent years – often because of others’ politics, words or high-profile hand gestures. The most recent headline, though, was about Hitler himself on 13 November, only two days following Remembrance Day, when the media reported that new research and analysis of Hilter's DNA taken from blood on the sofa where he killed himself in 1945 at the end of the war showed that Hitler had Kallmann Syndrome. This is a genetic disorder that impacts the progression of puberty and, it is claimed, may have impacted the development of his sexual organs and ability to form sexual relationships. The news arrived in advance of the Channel 4 documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, which according to reports also contains claims that he had a high genetic propensity to autism, ADHD, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
Such diagnoses and representations of Hitler are not new and range from having a ‘micropenis’, undescended testicle and STDs (often attributed to a Jewish sex worker), as well as experiencing sexual dysfunction and rejection, to having Jewish ancestry and being a failed artist (often attributed to a Jewish art dealer) or just being uniquely evil. While this new evidence and the documentary do challenge some longstanding myths, including that of Hitler’s alleged Jewish ancestry, they also confirm others. Most notably, they confirm the longstanding claim that he had a ‘micropenis’, and ‘only one left ball’ as the popular song goes. The latter was confirmed by a 1923 medical exam made public in 2015. According to Professor Alex Kay from University of Potsdam who appears in the documentary, the new evidence could help explain Hitler’s “highly unusual and almost complete devotion to politics in his life”. He adds: “Other senior Nazis had wives, children, even extramarital affairs. Hitler is the one person among the whole Nazi leadership who doesn’t. Therefore, I think that only under Hitler could the Nazi movement have come to power”.
Despite challenging some myths and confirming others as true in a way that appears to ‘set the record straight’, the distinction almost doesn’t matter in that both the myths and facts presented all fulfil the same function: that is, removing responsibility for the Holocaust and other crimes from the wider society and system in which they emerged and occurred and placing it on Hitler as an individual. While some may say that ‘biography matters too’, biography, biology and psychology have their place in historical and political explanation, and the causes of Nazism and the Holocaust are multi-factorial. But, as the attention this news is receiving and the endurance of such myths and theories attest, they are sensational, seductive and simple (despite or because of the lack of medical training amongst the wider public) as a substitute for structural analysis, particularly as they are often elevated into quasi-causal keys that eclipse everything else. Ironically, the specific medicalisation not only risks absolving wider society, but Hitler himself, as well as further stigmatising people with similar conditions, many of whom would themselves have been targeted by Nazi eugenics and subjected to medical ‘experiments’ and death. I am neither contesting the diagnoses nor smugly highlighting the irony and hypocrisy of Hitler and the Nazis as so often occurs, as the latter is an often deployed, but weak and ineffective response to the fascism and genocide. Conversely, I am highlighting the use of ableist logic that underpinned Nazi policies and treating physical and mental health, as well as neurodivergence, as contested descriptors with their own histories of political use. Returning to the wider issue of individual versus structural analysis in which medicalisation occurs, in my work on the racism and far right, including notably that with Aurelien Mondon and our framework of 'Illiberal versus Liberal Racism', I have argued that the Nazis and Holocaust have long been evoked in ways that serve to exceptionalise and displace racism to something illiberal, extreme, elsewhere, past, and defeated. This allows for the whitewashing of the liberal democratic order established post-war, and the minimisation – or even denial – of other and ongoing racisms in comparison everywhere else – including Britain – and in the allegedly peaceful, tolerant and egalitarian post-racial present (where recognising racism is what is often claimed to be causing it because it was defeated with the Nazis, albeit later in the US and South Africa). In our work, we show how this narrative has enabled not only the minimisation and maintenance of systemic racism, but also the mainstreaming of the far right today. In this context, such exceptionalisation might seem to be contradictory and counterintuitive, but it is also more necessary than ever in order to allow for plausible deniability and preserve the illusion and status quo of the post-war liberal order. Reducing Nazism and the Holocaust, as well as wider racism, to the individual and even pathologising and medicalising these, do this work. While, as noted, this is not the first time this narrative has been promoted, there is something different about the current context in which this arrives, grabs headlines and functions. It is of course a time of rising fascism with public displays of white supremacy and Nazism, such as Elon Musk’s ‘Roman salute’ at Trump’s inauguration, and support or excuses for these and increasingly authoritarian policies and practices. Typically, we see such individualisation, pathologisation and medicalisation in media responses to and representations of far-right terrorists, who themselves are widely viewed as remnants of defeated Nazism and fascism, out of time and place in contemporary liberal democracies. Such responses and representations allow us not only to foreclose on implicating the wider system and mainstream, particularly when engaging with the far right, but also reaffirm the defeat of Nazism, fascism and racism as wider collective political forces. This was well illustrated by the case of Thomas Mair who murdered MP Jo Cox in 2016 at the height of the UK Brexit campaign, and an earlier warning stage of the mainstreaming of the far right and crisis we are now in. Despite evidence of Mair’s far right associations and calls for ‘Britain First’ or ‘put Britain First’ as he shot and stabbed Cox, a prominent Remainer and champion of refugee rights, Mair was widely described as a mentally unstable loner by the media. Not only were no organisations he was associated with proscribed (while the more overtly Nazi National Action was), but such far-right politics and slogans, as well as racist, anti-migrant ones, have been normalised, mainstreamed and popularised – even being described as ‘legitimate concerns’ and pandered to in the wake of the 2024 riots – instead of being stigmatised and challenged. We are also in a context in which genocide is occurring in Gaza that is supported, defended and denied by governments, political leaders and public figures internationally. Moreover, the genocide is often justified by Israel and its supporters through comparisons between the Hamas attack of 7 October and the Holocaust, calling Hamas worse than Hitler, and arguing Israel’s actions are necessary to prevent either from occurring again. Yet, they also reject comparisons between what is occurring in Gaza and the Holocaust, and between Israel and Nazism, or Netanyahu and Hitler, with some even calling such comparisons ‘antisemitic’ and ‘extremist’. This new evidence and the narrative it furnishes allow for plausible deniability and a defence for fascists and the far right, as well as the wider mainstream, and for those who might be compared such as Israel or implicated such as Germany, thus absolving all. The move for the latter is particularly important considering the rise of the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), government support for Israel and denial of genocide, and its self-appointment as the protector of Jews against antisemitism – a role that is often attributed to its experience with Nazism and the Holocaust and had seen the state rounding up, amongst others, anti-Zionist Jews. My – slightly rhetorical – question is: While you may be able to deny that the spread of fascism is, in fact, just that by reducing it to Hitler (if not his medical conditions) and justify authoritarian state repression, including of Jews, in Germany by individualising Nazism and the Holocaust (even if it negates Germany’s moral mandate), how do you explain that it might happen again if you give Israel free reign and protestors a hard time? The fact that this continues even after Hitler’s defeat and death and in other contexts, along with other issues highlighted here, shows the fallacy and danger of such a narrative and approach to explanation. What we desperately need today is a representation and understanding of the complex history, sociology and ongoing reality of racism, authoritarianism, fascism and genocide, and, crucially, how to recognise and stop these, not another way to distract from or obscure, and even enable, it.
Aaron Winter is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University and Co-Editor of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.
For more on the role of Hitler, Nazism, the Holocaust and Illiberal vs Liberal Racism, see:
Winter, A. 2025. ‘Far-Right Extremism and the Sociology of Race and Racism’. The Sociology of Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremism. A. Amarasingam and S. Lakhani (eds.). Oxford University Press. Mondon, A. and A. Winter. 2020. Reactionary Democracy: How racism and the populist far right became mainstream. Verso. Mondon, A. and A. Winter. 2018. ‘Auschwitz and anti-racism: the past (and racism) is another country’. openDemocracy. 22 October.
Read Aaron Winter’s other blogs at Identities:
Elon Musk, Nazi salutes and the reactionary redefinition of fascism On Gary Lineker’s tweet, the politics of comparison and denial of racism Whiteness, populism and the racialisation of the working class in the United Kingdom and the United States Conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism emboldens the far right (from openDemocracy) Comments are closed.
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The views and opinions expressed on The Identities Blog are solely those of the original blog post authors, and not of the journal, Taylor & Francis Group or the University of Glasgow.