Herr Hitler's Testicle(s)

Caution: risque content

I have mentioned in the past that my father in law Noel is a history buff with a particular interest in Nazi history.

When I was with him in Canberra last, the topic came up of recent theories as to whether Hitler had died in his Berlin bunker in 1945 or whether he had faked his death and escaped to Argentina. This in turn generated discussion as to Russian autopsy results which included the finding that Herr Hitler had one testicle. Perhaps because of the glass of wine he was holding (and the others he had consumed), it prompted Noel to sing that famous ditty about Hitler lacking a full set (to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March – think the whistling scene at the end of The Bridge on the River Kwai): 

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.

It started me wondering about that song . . Who wrote it? When?

Knowing what a history nut (ha ha) Noel is, and that I missed posting a Bytes item yesterday (Noel looks forward to starting the day by reading the daily Bytes items), this one is for you Noel . . . 

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Attacking the sexual abilities of world leaders is a well known means of ridicule and impugnment.

As an example, another ditty from the time was:

Whistle while you work,

Hitler was a jerk,

Mussolini bit his weenie,

Now it doesn't work.

A different ode of the same era to Hitler’s little boys was:

Hitler has only got one ball, 

The other is in the Albert Hall. 

His mother, the dirty bugger, 

Cut it off when he was small.’

When Berlin fell, the Russians captured Hitler’s bunker. Conflicting reports by the Russkies as to whether Hitler’s body had been found or whether he had escaped led to the Brits appointing H R Trevor-Roper, later a well-known British historian, to investigate. Roper interrogated witnesses and concluded that Hitler and his girlfriend Eva Braun had shot themselves, with the bodies being cremated shortly afterwards. (Bear in mind though that Roper was also the expert who declared the forged Hitler diaries as genuine).

At the Potsdam Conference, Stalin declared that he believed Hitler to be in Spain or Argentina.

A 1968 book on the subject purported to contain the Russian post mortem examination on the body found in the bunker and included the statement that the "left testicle could not be found either in the scrotum or on the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal, or in the small pelvis. …"

This news came as a bit of a shock in that even Hitler’s own doctors had not previously mentioned that Hitler had not been playing with a full set. Doubts were raised when a woman who claimed to have been his lover said he was normally equipped. Furthermore, the autopsy report said Hitler's body showed no external wounds, even though all the German witnesses mentioned a shot through the head.

Enter Hitler's World War I company commander – he said he had discovered Hitler's missing testicle as a result of a wartime VD exam. 

Hitler had been wounded in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Although there is no precise knowledge as to the location of his wound, it is believed that it was in the thigh or groin. This has been confirmed by the medic who saved Hitler’s life after that wounding: “His abdomen and legs were all in blood. Hitler was injured in the abdomen and lost one testicle. His first question to the doctor was: ‘Will I be able to have children?’.”

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1945960.ece

One book, The Psychopathic God by Robert G.L. Waite, posits that Hitler's left testicle either failed to descend at puberty or was missing at birth. This in turn was a great negative formative experience of Hitler's life and, according to Waite, contributed to all manner of psychosexual complications. 

As with all theories, there are debunkers who believe that the corpse with one testicle was a patsy, that Hitler had a full rack and that Hitler lived out his days elsewhere. There is even a theory that the Russians staged it for their own purposes

Which raises an interesting question: how did British Tommies come to be marching to the Hitler one ball ditty. If opinions, including those of experts, are still divided on the issue of the contents of Adolf’s ball bag, and the matter was not widely known at the time, how were songs written about it?

There are some theories:

• Someone heard about Hitler’s Somme experience and wrote lyrics about it to the tune of Colonel Bogey. 

• Someone wrote the lyrics and fluked a lucky hit. After all, the lyrics also say that Goebbels has no balls yet in reality he had 6 kids. 

• In his autobiography Fringe Benefits, writer Donough O'Brien says his father, Toby O'Brien, wrote the original lyrics in August 1939 as British propaganda. His father had the words originally reversed, that Goring had only one ball, this being due to a grievous groin wound suffered during the Beer Hall Putsch. (What is it with all these Nazis with groin wounds??) The lyrics then stated that Hitler had two small ones. In later versions, the positions are reversed. The statement that Himmler was "sim'lar" appears in all versions, as does the final line that Goebbels had "no balls". Many recognise this assertion as a correct claim on authorship. 

So there we have it: both the Hitler escape and Hitler’s scrotum status are undetermined.