Live

Hitler seems to be the most convenient “guinea pig” of the modern social imagination, projecting onto him every kind of hatred, since he himself was the embodiment of cruel inhumanity, a cruelty that demands every possible—and improbable—explanation. Channel 4’s new documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, taps into this obsession, taking a bloodstained piece of fabric from the sofa in the bunker, running it through molecular biology machines, and promising to show us “what made him what he was,” as the title of the documentary suggests.

At first glance, the project seems to be doing something progressive or innovative. It debunks the old myth about Hitler’s “Jewish ancestry,” showing that there is no trace of such kinship in his genome, which is important, given the relevant rumor that has been circulating for decades. Hitler’s “Jewish ancestry,” showing that there is no trace of such a connection, which is significant given that the rumor persisted until Sergey Lavrov’s statements in 2022. At the same time, it finds evidence of Kallmann syndrome, a rare genetic syndrome associated with delayed or incomplete puberty, cryptorchidism, and possible “micropenis,” linking the findings to a medical file from 1923 that mentioned “right cryptorchidism,” which, of course, symbolically ties back to his role as a political figure or dictator, but let’s look at that below.

“A study that is supposed to dispel the myth of Nazi “racial science” actually reinforces its core tenets. For Nazism, “blood” is destiny; man is defined by his biology, his actions are an extension of his genome, and history is a eugenic statistic.”

So far, one might say, so good (?) a little biological demystification has never hurt anyone. But the problem begins when the documentary decides to go “further”: to map Hitler’s “genetic predisposition” to autism, ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and “antisocial behavior,” using polygenic risk scores, statistical tools designed for populations, not for the posthumous psychodiagnosis of an individual.

This is where the great irony lies: a study that is supposed to dispel the myth of Nazi “racial science” actually reinforces its core tenets. For Nazism, “blood” is destiny; man is defined by his biology, his actions are an extension of his genome, and history is a eugenic statistic. Today, with more elegant diagrams and more expensive machines, the same pattern returns as television entertainment. DNA as the blueprint of dictatorship, as if there were a “proposition for brutality” somewhere, just waiting for the right conditions to be activated.

The scientific caveats are clear. Geneticists point out that polygenic risk scores say something about how risk is distributed across large populations, not whether a specific individual “had a high probability” of autism or schizophrenia in a way that has political or ethical significance. Even Professor Turi King (head of the research) admits that you cannot say “Hitler had X disorder,” only that he belongs to a higher percentile of genetic load for certain conditions. However, in editing and journalistic framing, statistical accuracy and details are marginalized and translated into “propensity for ADHD,” “high probability of autistic behaviors”—and from there, a bag of entrenched stereotypes takes over.

This narrative also has profound practical implications, reproducing stereotypes and promoting eugenic principles. The National Autistic Society in the United Kingdom described the approach as a “cheap stunt,” pointing out that autism is not diagnosed with a blood test and that linking it to a mass murderer, even with a thousand “this is not a diagnosis” disclaimers around it, feeds old and new stigmas. The same applies to people with ADHD, bipolar disorder, or schizophrenia, who see their own experiences being used as dramatic effect in a narrative of “let’s see what went wrong in Hitler’s mind.”

“The biologicalisation of dictatorship also serves as a tool for depoliticisation. Suppose the violence of Nazism is interpreted as a mixture of low testosterone, sexual inadequacy, disturbed libido, and neurodiversity. In that case, the system itself—authoritarianism, anti-Semitism, militarism, racist capitalism—disappears from the picture. Nazism ceases to be a historically possible choice of a society and becomes the “strange” result of a specific body.”

And here we arrive at the political heart of the problem, the documentary itself, like much of the public debate surrounding it, is marketed as an attempt to “demystify” Hitler, to bring him down from his throne as a demonic monster and see him as “a man with passions and weaknesses.” In practice, however, what it does is shift the question again: from “how does a democracy collapse into mass violence with the active participation of ‘normal’ people?” to “what was wrong with him?”

Nazi ideology didn’t treat these groups as “biologically problematic” in any meaningful or scientific way, but as obstacles to an imagined racial order. The regime’s entire worldview depended on the myth of a “pure” German nation — the Arier ideal — and anyone who didn’t fit this fabricated template was cast as a contaminant to be removed. It wasn’t biology but ideology masquerading as biology: a political project dressed up in the language of genetics, where the supposed “purity” of the nation justified persecution, exclusion, and extermination.

It attributed, according to their propaganda, criminality, immorality, and parasitism to them as a hereditary burden. Now, 80 years later, we take a group of people who are already discriminated against—autistic people, people with mental health diagnoses—and try to link their stigma to the ultimate historical criminal. The biologicalisation of dictatorship also serves as a tool for depoliticisation. If the narrative shifts to treating a “micropenis” as a symbol of lost virility, then the nazi regime itself – authoritarianism, antisemitism, and racist capitalism – disappears from the picture. Nazism ceases to be a historically possible choice of a society and becomes the “strange” result of a specific body. The monster returns to its myth, unique, unrepeatable, locked away in defective DNA, and therefore not something that can happen again among “normal,” socially acceptable people.

Exactly here, the promise of demystification is disproved. The documentary removes Hitler’s mystical veil of inhumane only to replace it with another: the very human and “unique biological package” that, almost inevitably, leads to a specific historical course. Instead of understanding how a multitude of “normal” professionals, bureaucrats, businessmen, and neighbors collaborated in the genocide, we return to the old search for the sole culprit. The real lesson of history is that ordinary people in specific contexts can commit, incite, or accept horrific violence, and no blood test will ever record that.

The “banality of evil” does not suggest that evil is trivial or accidental, but that it can be carried out by people who have abandoned the activity of thinking — who no longer interrogate their actions, question orders, or imagine the standpoint of another human being. The horror, for her, is that mass violence becomes possible when ordinary individuals surrender their capacity for reflection and allow the machinery of the state to think in their place. No DNA test can capture that collapse of judgment; it is a political and ethical failure, not a biological one.

Finally, what has dominated public discourse, something that has been happening for a decade when the issue resurfaces, is the possibility of Hitler’s micropenis. In Foucault’s view, the phallus is not a biological given but an “imaginary sign,” a condenser of discourses and social technologies, which the dispositif (a network of discourses, institutions, and practices that organize how power produces truths and subjects—a “mechanism” of power-knowledge, not a thing) of sexuality produces in order to organize the truth of the subject.

Foucault shows that what we call “sex” does not pre-exist as a natural substance; it is a historically constructed point where the discourse of medicine, psychiatry, pedagogy, and biology converge and produce a seemingly unified whole, while in reality it functions as a “unique signifier and universal signified ” (it functions as a single symbol (a single signifier) which, however, is supposed to explain everything about the subjectivity, biology, and truth of the individual (universal signified) , imposing unity on the heterogeneous functions of the body. In La volonté de savoir, Foucault explains that “sex” was formed as the node where modern power connected the biological with the social, allowing the 19th-century regime of truth to present bodily differences as carriers of meaning, as “causes,” “deficits,” or “latent functions.”

“The connection between a physical “deficiency” and a political “overcompensation”—what is today crudely described as megalomania compensating for biological inadequacy— is simply the continuation of the same technology of power that Foucault analyzes: a medicalization of the political, a translation of historical responsibility into a biological sign.”

Through this logic, the phallus becomes a “surface network” (obvious, everyday connections where bodies, rules, and discourses interact and produce normality) between the subject and the mechanisms of power, it acquires the status of being considered the place from which the truth of identity, history, and even the fate of the individual “emerges.”

Across history, not just in “modern culture,” Mediterranean societies have learned to load sex—and especially the phallus—with an almost metaphysical charge. The phallus becomes “the element that is hidden and at the same time produces meaning,” “the part that is small but symbolically defines the whole.” In the Greek world, its power is not only erotic but also ritual and civic, on Delos, for instance, choragic monuments linked to the cult of Dionysos were crowned with colossal phalli and hybrid “phallic birds,” later reinterpreted as peacocks but still embedded in a dionysiac visual language of victory, spectacle, and divine favour. 

Against this background, the current obsession with Hitler’s alleged “micropenis” or “developmental deficiency” is not a trivial meme but a reactivation of that same cultural mechanism. Contemporary discourse once again asks the phallus to do heavy interpretive work: to turn a fragment of anatomy into the hidden key that explains political violence. Instead of examining how institutions, ideologies, and “ordinary” people made genocide possible, responsibility is displaced onto a supposedly defective body, as if history were written in hormones and tissues. The phallus thus moves seamlessly from amulet of fortune to diagnostic tool of cruelty—different values, same operation: it symbolically defines the whole, so that the collective can keep looking away.

The connection between a physical “deficiency” and a political “overcompensation”—what is today crudely described as megalomania compensating for biological inadequacy— is simply the continuation of the same technology of power that Foucault analyzes: a medicalization of the political, a translation of historical responsibility into a biological sign. The result is not the demystification of Hitler but the reestablishment of a eugenic way of thinking, namely that the body tells the truth about crime, that the “dictator is explained” by his genetic code. Ultimately, this is a shift from political historicity to the “technique of normalization,” where power reads the criminal not as a product of social and ideological structures but as an “anomaly” with an anatomical substrate. Thus, the television narrative about Hitler’s DNA does not dethrone Nazism; it biologizes it, reproducing the same patterns that once legitimized Nazi eugenics.

If the Hitler DNA craze tells us anything, it is not what he carried in his body, but what we carry in our modern fantasies: the refusal to see politics as a field of responsibility and choice, and the desire to find a biological “flaw” on which to collectively throw our guilt. Except that, historically, every time society looks for the “flaw” in someone else’s blood, we know where it ends up. Blood is not the “blueprint of a dictator”; society is. And if you stare too long at the monster’s DNA, you lose sight of the mirror.

Written by

Shape the conversation

Do you have anything to add to this story? Any ideas for interviews or angles we should explore? Let us know if you’d like to write a follow-up, a counterpoint, or share a similar story.

Write a counterargument article Write a related article