Newshouse Politics

In a recent column, Slate’s Ron Rosenbaum goes to great lengths to disprove the reemerging rumor  that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler only had one testicle.  This rumor, which has been around forever, has reappeared in the English tabloids this month, in papers like The Sun (headline: Hitler HAD only got one ball) and the London Telegraph.  

In a Nov. 19 story, Alex Peake of The Sun claims that he has found a new document that validated  the rumor.  Peake writes:

 

 

Johan’s friend Blassius Hanczuch confirmed the priest’s account of how the medic saved Hitler’s life. He said: “In 1916 they had their hardest fight in the Battle of the Somme.

“For several hours, Johan and his friends picked up injured soldiers. He remembers Hitler.

“They called him the ‘Screamer.’ He was very noisy. Hitler was screaming ‘help, help.’

“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?’ “

Blassius said that when the Nazis swept to power Johan began to suffer nightmares and blame himself for saving Hitler.

 

 

There’s a problem, however.  Peake never produces any document validating his claims.Perhaps somebody should have asked to see the document before the article went to publication, idk.   When Rosenbaum of Slate e-mailed Peake asking for the document, he received no response.  As a scholar of the Nazi leader, Rosenbaum suggests that people use this rumor to try to understand what made Hitler Hitler.  These psycho-historians suggest that there must be something in Hitler’s sexual history that made him who he was.  Some have claimed that Hitler was gay while others have contended that he lost a testicle during pubescence.

The question is, ‘what’s the point’?  Claims about Hitler’s sexuality and – what shall we call it? – testicular fortitude are ultimately irrelevant.  We know the man was  one of the worst villains in the history of the world, but looking into his sexual history has failed to provide us with anything but  salacious newspaper headlines.  It’s time to put this rumor to rest. As Rosenbaum writes:

There’s no excuse now for this incessant dwelling on Hitler’s sexuality, as if it tells us anything about the true nature of his evil. No, all the obsession can tell us about is the way the culture as a whole exhibits a refusal to face the profundity and complexity of evil and instead—with some honorable exceptions—prefers to escape responsibility for Hitler and the Holocaust by blaming it all on ludicrously unserious and ahistorical sexual mythologies, and the Freudian-influenced notion that all behavior has a sexual explanation at heart.