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Fascism? No thanks! Why Britain rejected extremism in the 1930s
Extremism was on the march across continental Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Yet Britons chose a different, more moderate, path. Alwyn Turner explores why the posturing and rants of would-be dictators largely fell on deaf ears between the wars
“Is this the age of dictators?” asked veteran journalist Sir Sidney Low. He was writing in September 1923, the month in which a military coup brought Miguel Primo de Rivera to power in Spain. At the same time, Benito Mussolini was reinforcing his new dictatorship in Italy, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was shaping the nascent republic of Turkey, and disruptions – including those fomented by Hitler’s Nazis – were building to a climax in Germany. Taken together, these developments led Low to wonder whether the world might be witnessing “the general decline of parliamentary institutions”. Over the years that followed, his comments were to become commonplace. By 1938, there was autocratic rule in more than a dozen European countries across the continent, from Portugal to Poland and beyond to the Soviet Union. Even in some countries that remained democracies, substantial anti-democratic elements were growing in power and influence: in the 1936 Belgian elections, the far right won nearly 20 per cent of the vote, while the Communist Party took 15 per cent in French elections that year. In Britain, however, there was no equivalent body of support for extremism in the interwar years. There was, of course, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) under the leadership of Oswald Mosley – a Conservative MP who then sat as an independent before switching to Labour and eventually finding his way to fascism. But Mosley was never more than a peripheral figure. At its peak in mid-1934, the BUF briefly numbered around 45,000 members. Meanwhile, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) never got above 20,000 members in the 1930s. By comparison, the Labour Party claimed up to half a million members, and there were 6 million trade unionists. The CPGB’s best electoral showing came in the 1931 general election when it fielded 26 candidates, averaging fewer than 3,000 votes each – 0.3 per cent of the total – while Mosley’s New Party got 0.2 per cent. In 1935, the BUF didn’t even put up candidates. It’s not that Britain narrowly escaped the extremism that swept across Europe in the interwar years – it never came even vaguely close. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-545715027webready-1d9cdc7-e1771233358771.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a large group of people, dressed in long coats, scarves and hats marching through the street. They all have sad, concentrated looks on their faces" title="The National Hunger March (1932) saw men and women converge on London from around the country. The Great Depression caused a great deal of hardship, but Britons weren’t as badly affected as many other nations (Image by Getty Images)" /> Safe across the water There were multiple reasons why Britain didn’t succumb to the appeals of fascism or other extreme ideologies. There was the security of being an island, and the stability of a long existence as a nation within fixed borders. There was the fact that, horrific as the numbers of British fatalities were in the First World War, they were dwarfed by those of other combatant nations. Similarly, although the Great Depression brought hardship to many, Britain was not affected as badly as other countries. There was also the nature of the Labour Party, committed to the parliamentary process, as were the trade unions. And indeed the nature of the Conservative Party under the One-Nation leadership of Stanley Baldwin – as well as the electoral system that made it so difficult for rival parties to emerge. Read more | When Mosley's fascists took on East End London and lost: the Battle of Cable Street explained In his 1937 account of life in the industrial north, The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made the suggestion that “cheap luxuries” kept the working class quiescent. “It is quite likely that fish-and-chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolate (five two-ounce bars for sixpence), the movies, the radio, strong tea, and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution,” he wrote. But low-level consumerism was not unique to Britain. If the country chose “to make the best of things”, it was surely because the national culture was already averse to radical disruption. It’s relevant, for example, that this was the great era of voluntary associations. There had been working men’s social clubs in industrial towns and cities for decades, but numbers grew substantially in the aftermath of the First World War. By 1922, its diamond jubilee year, the Working Men’s Club and Institute Union could boast 2,300 affiliated clubs with more than a million members. The Women’s Institute, which was founded in Canada and had reached Britain during the war, grew in the 1930s to around 300,000 members. Rotary Clubs, founded in Chicago, had around 19,000 members, and the League of Nations Union more than 400,000. Perhaps most important of all was the British Legion, which merged various ex-servicemen’s groups in 1921. Within a decade, it had a membership of 300,000 – around one in 10 of those who had served in the forces. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2170737679webready-ac4bf6e-e1771233487438.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of five women standing around a long table with a white tablecloth on it. There are various items on the table, including some wicker baskets and a set of scales. The woman in the centre, an older woman dressed in dark clothing, is holding up a bunch of carrots" title="Members of the Women’s Institute gather at a garden show in 1922. By the end of the 1930s, Britain’s WI had grown to around 300,000 members (Image by Getty Images)" /> Beyond these big networks, Britain nurtured a vast array of local societies and groups dedicated to single interests: photography, prison reform, amateur dramatics, vegetable growing, jazz records and a thousand other issues and hobbies. What they had in common, pointed out the novelist Phyllis Bentley, was a high level of self-regulation. “Each of these societies has a properly elected committee and chairman,” she wrote, “and conducts its business by means of an agenda, a proper procedure of moving and voting resolutions, an annual report and a balance sheet open to all members.” The British, she observed, were a people “unexcelled in the proper conduct of public business by entirely voluntary but strictly self-regulated methods”. This was the institutionalised form of Edmund Burke’s “little platoons”, a term coined by the philosopher and politician to express the importance of societal bonds formed at a local and family level. There were also political clubs – some 2,000 Conservative, nearly 1,000 Liberal, the early stirrings of Labour – but it was the institutions that weren’t based on party that really mattered. The non-aligned status of the various societies allowed for diversity of opinion, and for finding common cause. The societies operated on the basis of cooperation and coalition. It was from voluntary societies and trade unions, argued Baldwin, that the people had learned “the elements and principles of a democracy” which “they will never let go”. Democratic practice was thus embedded in everyday life, far beyond politics. Cultural caution Indeed, there was a striking absence of politics in British social life, and even more so in cultural life. The cinema, for example, was regulated by the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC), a body whose only remit was not to offend and which approved nothing more provocative than resilience in the face of adversity. The espousal of doctrines of revolution or free love were banned, as were “references to controversial politics”, including “relations between capital and labour”. So a proposed movie of Walter Greenwood’s Depression-era novel Love on the Dole was rejected by the BBFC for having “too much of the tragic and sordid side of poverty”. Permitted, however, was the comedy Off the Dole in which George Formby was “sacked” by the Labour Exchange after four years of not working, and which displayed nothing more contentious than the gentlest of political satire. (“A member of parliament is a man who gives your life for his country.”) Also banned by the BBFC was anything “calculated to wound the susceptibilities of foreign people”, as well as “the insistence on the inferiority of the coloured races” and “scenes calculated to inflame racial hatred”. Read more | The BBC begins: how a group of radio pioneers launched one of Britain's most famous institutions It was a very British take on censorship, quite unlike that of most European countries. It wasn’t any particular political viewpoint that was banned, but politics as a whole. “We may take pride,” said Lord Tyrrell, president of the BBFC, in 1937, “in observing that there is not a single film in London which deals with any of the burning issues of the day.” The BBFC had been established – and was still run – by the industry itself and, although its writ was never challenged, it had no statutory authority. This system of self-regulation was, acknowledged Labour politician Herbert Morrison, “a curious arrangement” but, he added, “The British have a very great habit of making curious arrangements that work very well.” In any event, it was surely preferable to the intense government control seen in Germany under Joseph Goebbels, or in Russia, where the head of the Soviet film industry, Boris Shumyatsky, was executed as a traitor in 1938 for not doing his job well enough. Reithian values An equally curious arrangement governed the BBC, founded in 1922, which operated first as a private company and then as a public-service corporation under royal charter. It had a monopoly on radio broadcasting in Britain and became the most significant cultural institution in the country. By the end of the 1920s there were 3 million radio licences, 9 million by the end of the thirties – virtually every household in the country had a radio. It was a little odd, though. Even in its early commercial days, the BBC was never a conventional operation that responded to audience demand. Nor did it ever become an organ of government. Instead, general manager (later director-general) John Reith created his own vision of public service broadcasting, and mostly resisted external pressure from those who wished to shape this new medium. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-613463542webready-2ec1964-e1771233639521.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man wearing a white shirt, dark sweater vest and striped tie, sitting at a desk with papers in front of him. To the right is a large microphone with the letters BBC on the front" title="Announcers such as Alvar Lidell (above), the man who told the nation of Edward VIII’s abdication, were trusted figures whose work helped bind the nation together (Image by Getty Images)" /> There were restrictions, of course. Like the cinema, radio was not a place for disruption. The government, explained Reith, had given “an explicit instruction to avoid anything in the nature of religious, political or industrial controversy”. There wasn’t even a great deal of news. The newspaper industry, fearful of being made redundant, successfully lobbied the government to ensure that the first radio bulletin of the day wasn’t broadcast until 7pm, so that it wouldn’t harm sales of morning or evening titles. That curfew was broken – never to return – during the nine-day General Strike of 1926, when independent newspaper production was suspended and the radio became the chief source of news for many. During the dispute, Reith complained about the government – “I do not think they treat me altogether fairly,” he wrote in his diary – but he strove to keep coverage calm and detached. Even in this moment of national crisis, the BBC was not a propaganda station – largely because Baldwin overruled those in his cabinet (most notably Winston Churchill) who wanted to commandeer the airwaves. More broadly, as political coverage expanded, the BBC allowed for a variety of voices but had a clear bias towards parliamentary democracy: communists and fascists were seldom heard on the radio. It was ecumenical but definitely mainstream. So too was its approach to religion. Despite his own Presbyterian faith, Reith believed that religious broadcasting should be based on “a non-sectarian Christianity, confined, in respect of doctrine, to those simplest essentials to which all Christians of the west can adhere”. With only one national channel, augmented in most regions by a local station, the intention was to occupy a shared middle ground. As with the cinema, there was no wish to ruffle feathers. And, also like the cinema, the BBC was essentially self-regulating. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-590536530webready-693ada3-e1771233743610.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in uniform holding tightly onto the raised arm of a woman, who is holding a gun above her head. She is dressed in a collared shirt and long skirt. Behind them is a set of windows" title="Catherine Lacey stars in Judgment Day in 1937, at a time of tight control over what could be seen on theatre stages (Image by Getty Images)" /> For other cultural forms, there existed a patchwork of censorship that had evolved over generations without any sense of logic or coherence. The London stage was under the tight control of the Lord Chamberlain, while variety theatres were overseen by local councils. Books and exhibitions required no prior approval but were subject to the Obscene Publications Act. The Post Office was empowered to intercept mail, and customs officers to seize material brought in from abroad. None of this was draconian. It simply smothered: a comfort blanket that insulated against conflict. The resultant lack of cultural engagement with burning political issues on stage, screen and radio was part of the reason why the country felt – and was – so much more stable in the 1930s than most of Europe. Culture in Britain was far quieter than in its neighbours. There was something more that underpinned these cultural manifestations: a conviction that dictatorship ran against the grain of the nation. “Autocracy is abhorrent to the British mind,” wrote a columnist in the West Sussex Gazette in 1933, “and the kind we see in operation in Germany seems to us almost incredible.” The totalitarian state, with its intrusion into private life, offended a culture that had always prided itself on privacy and independence; somehow, it all looked so alien. The leader-worship accorded to Hitler, Stalin and their ilk – the ubiquity of their images on posters, placards and public portraits – felt wrong. That role was already taken by the monarchy, whose iconography was woven into the social fabric, from the national anthem to banknotes and coins, postage stamps and pillar boxes. The words “an English Hitler”, reflected novelist Louis Golding in 1931, were “comically contradictory of each other”. (Which didn’t stop people from trying them out: the previous year, Labour minister Arthur Greenwood had used precisely that phrase to describe Winston Churchill.) <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2630393webready-0ec36cd-e1771233973188.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man dressed in a black uniform with a wide belt around his waist. He is standing above a crowd, shouting out to them with his right arm raised and curled towards his face" title="Oswald Mosley, far-right leader of the British Union of Fascists, addresses his supporters. The party never won a single parliamentary seat (Image by Getty Images)" /> No need to get shirty Equally alien, if not downright silly, were fascism’s quasi-military uniforms – all those monochrome shirts. “The number of nations that may be led to salvation, generally an undemocratic salvation, need to be limited only by the number of colours that shirts may be dyed,” mocked the Roscommon Herald. They became a standing joke in the literature of the time. There were Green Shirts in John Buchan’s 1935 novel The House of the Four Winds and again in Richmal Compton’s William the Dictator, White Shirts in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (both 1938), and unspecified Imperial Shirts in Agatha Christie’s One, Two, Buckle My Shoe (1940). Best of all, in his 1938 novel The Code of the Woosters, PG Wodehouse introduced Roderick Spode, a parody of Oswald Mosley who leads the Black Shorts. As Gussie Fink-Nottle explains: “There were no shirts left.” In the same book, Wodehouse ridiculed “those pictures in the papers of dictators with tilted chins and blazing eyes, inflaming the populace with fiery words”. That was another part of the problem with such figures: the posturing and the bragging rants looked out of place in a British context, in the same way that fire-and-brimstone evangelicalism doesn’t work in a home counties accent. When Mosley launched the British Union of Fascists, he replaced his conventional tweeds and suits with a black polo-neck sweater tucked into black trousers, held up by a wide black leather belt, and his onstage persona adopted a more declamatory tone and exaggerated arm gestures. But he looked unconvincing, as though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatics society show. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/02/GettyImages-2634991webready-fc16f26-e1771233862476.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph showing a short man in a suit and bowler hat walking in an exaggerated manner, arm in arm with a taller woman dressed in a long coat. They both look excited. Behind them is a large crowd of people, cheering the on" title="Irene Dipper and Billy Pease do ‘The Lambeth Walk’ in London, 1938. While the song was wildly popular in Britain, in Nazi Germany it was labelled “degenerate” (Image by Getty Images)" /> If there was a single cultural symbol of Britain’s instinctive distrust of the dictator, it was perhaps ‘The Lambeth Walk’ – the song, and accompanying dance, that swept the country in 1938. A highlight of the musical Me and My Girl it was a simple and instantly catchy tune that cried out to be whistled cheerily by postmen and plumbers. The lyrics were even simpler, notable for the shout of “Oi!” and for the happy-go-lucky bridge: “Everything free and easy; do as you darn well pleasey.” The song seemed to speak of a people free from an overbearing state – an anomaly in an increasingly authoritarian world. And it was embraced across the whole of society – danced, according to Mass Observation reports, “in Mayfair ballrooms, suburban dance halls, cockney parties and village hops”. Read more | From Mosley to the summer riots of 2024: the opportunistic evolution of Britain’s far right Some 350,000 copies of the sheet music for ‘The Lambeth Walk’ were sold in Britain in its first year, and it was exported successfully, too. It was recorded by dozens of artists including American bandleaders Artie Shaw and Duke Ellington, as well as Europe’s greatest jazz group, the Quintet of the Hot Club of France. As the continent lurched towards another conflict in the year of Munich and the idea of “peace for our time” proved illusory, The Times predicted that the song would “be the ‘Tipperary’ of the next world war”. In Nazi Germany, however, the song encountered stiff opposition. It was banned at the Shrovetide Carnival festivities in Munich and at the University of Heidelberg – where Joseph Goebbels had been awarded his PhD – and Hermann Göring reportedly forbade Luftwaffe bands from playing it. “This is degenerate music and the people who dance it are also degenerate,” thundered Der SA-Mann, newspaper of the Brownshirts. From a British perspective, this was a fundamental clash of cultures and values. “There is nothing free and easy in Nazi Germany,” said the Liverpool Echo. “‘The Lambeth Walk’ must seem out of place in the land of the goose step.” If that comparison seems a little fanciful – perhaps trivial – it made sense at the time. And even Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, drew exactly the same conclusion. “I understand that Hitler regards the Lambeth Walk as too democratic a dance for Germany,” he said. “All they can do there is the goose step.” Alwyn Turner is senior lecturer in cultural and literary history at the University of Chichester. His new book is A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars (Profile, January 2026) This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra magazine
Step inside Hitler's U-boats to witness the nightmarish reality of life on board
Hitler’s U-boats were a feared component of his naval strategy during the Second World War. But what was life aboard these weaponised submersibles actually like?
Slipping unseen beneath the Atlantic, German U-boats were a terrifying development in the naval battles of the Second World War. They threatened Britain’s supply lines and seemed to offer Nazi Germany a way to starve the island nation into submission. Britain – heavily dependent on imported food, fuel and raw materials – was particularly vulnerable to attacks on its merchant shipping. German naval planners believed that cutting these lifelines could force Britain out of the war without the need for a costly invasion. As such, German propaganda cultivated an image of U-boats packed full of elite sailors waging a high-tech, daring campaign beneath the surface of the sea. Successful commanders were celebrated at home, and early victories against poorly protected Allied convoys helped create the perception of the U-boat as a uniquely deadly naval weapon. The reality was very different. As historian Roger Moorhouse explains on the HistoryExtra podcast, life aboard a U-boat was overwhelmingly and relentlessly degrading. Far from being glamorous, the experience was often “thoroughly, thoroughly horrible”. What were U-boats? U-boat is a shortened form of the German word 'unterseeboot', meaning “undersea boat”. Although submarines were used by several nations during the First World War, Germany had employed them with particular effectiveness, sinking thousands of Allied ships. When war broke out once more in Europe, Germany’s experience had prepared them. The backbone of their fleet was the Type VII U-boat, which Moorhouse describes as “an updated version of the U-boats used at the end of the First World War” and, by later standards, “a pretty primitive weapon”. Read more | Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime These boats were not true submarines in the modern sense. “It was meant to spend most of its time on the surface,” Moorhouse says. “It’s basically a submersible rather than a submarine.” They could dive to attack or evade danger, but only for limited periods. “It can’t spend more than probably about twenty-four hours underwater,” he says, before batteries needed recharging. It was this limitation that defined U-boat warfare. On the surface, boats were faster and more comfortable, but dangerously exposed to aircraft. When submerged, they were slow, blind and vulnerable to depth charges. From the outset, U-boat crews lived with the knowledge that their survival depended on technology that was already being overtaken by Allied detection methods such as radar, sonar and improved air patrols. Claustrophobia at sea If the tactical constraints were severe, the physical environment was much worse. “In terms of interior size, I usually describe a Type VII as being about the size of two underground train carriages,” Moorhouse says. Engines, fuel tanks, batteries, torpedoes, food stores, bunks and a crew of around fifty men were all crammed within that narrow space. Every cubic inch was used for something specific. “There was only one place in a Type VII where two grown men could pass each other without awkwardly shuffling,” he explains. Privacy was non-existent, and senior officers lived under the same conditions as the rest of the crew. Read more | I've just been inside a Nazi monster's mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting A typical patrol lasted around eight weeks, though some extended far longer. During that time, sailors slept in shared bunks on a rota system. There was no escape from the endless noise, and no opportunity to be alone for any moment. “The stress placed on U-boat crews was extreme, particularly because of the claustrophobia. They couldn’t leave the vessel. They couldn’t get fresh air.” Hunger and disease U-boats carried all the food they would require for an entire patrol, loaded wherever space could be found. “There was a lot of fresh food initially,” Moorhouse explains, “but that ran out after about two weeks.” After that, crews survived on tinned rations that were monotonous and nutritionally poor. Fresh water was rationed so tightly that washing was almost impossible. “At most, you might wash your face with fresh water.” Each sailor was issued with a single change of underwear for the entire patrol, and damp clothing rarely dried in the cold, humid air. The health consequences were stark. “They all developed skin conditions,” Moorhouse explains. Read more | 'Real life battleships': the secret game that countered German U-boat attacks during WW2 Scabies was a common condition, as was a painful infection known as ‘red dog’, which left raw, inflamed patches across the body. Scurvy – which had been the bane of pirates centuries before – returned once vitamin-rich food ran out. As Moorhouse says, “the health of the crew was horrific.” On top of that, veterans spoke of the ‘U-boat stink’: a nauseating mix of diesel fumes from leaking engines, mould from permanent damp, unwashed bodies, bad breath caused by scurvy, and vomit from chronic seasickness. “When you combine all of that,” Moorhouse says, “it was a deeply unpleasant existence.” Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now Sleeplessness and fear To reduce the risk of air attack, boats often remained submerged during daylight hours and surfaced only at night. This imposed an artificial rhythm on life aboard, with watches and meals detached from normal patterns of day and night, producing chronic sleep deprivation that wore men down physically and psychologically. Read more | Bismarck: why was the WW2 German battleship so feared? In the early years of the war, when U-boats enjoyed notable successes, crews could at least believe that the suffering served a purpose. Even then, the risks were extreme. Moorhouse notes that the average statistical lifespan of a U-boat crew was between seven and nine patrols. By 1943, when Allied radar, sonar and air power had turned the Atlantic into a killing ground, that figure declined. “It dropped to between two and three patrols,” Moorhouse says. By late 1944, “it hovered around a single patrol”. Men sailing at that stage knew they were, statistically, embarking on a mission that would take them to their death. The toll of combat stress German naval doctors did attempt to study the psychological impact of U-boat service, but their findings were unwelcome. Moorhouse notes that “senior officers did not want to hear about it”, while sailors themselves resisted discussion because psychological suffering was interpreted as weakness in Nazi Germany’s military culture. Read more | The Stalingrad of Africa: the story of the battle for Tunis “One commander, Heinrich Blücher, suffered a nervous breakdown on patrol in 1943 and had to be removed from service. The most extreme case was a U-boat commander named Pittesch, who committed suicide during a depth-charge attack.” In all, around 75 per cent of men who served in the U-boat arm were killed during the war, making their casualty rates one of the highest of any branch of Germany’s armed forces. “The stress placed on U-boat crews was extreme,” Moorhouse concludes. Their stories, he says, remain “one of the untold stories of the war.” Roger Moorhouse was speaking to Spencer Mizen on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Did Hitler have sexual relations with Eva Braun? What my research reveals about the Führer's love life
Last year, the results of a groundbreaking study into Adolf Hitler’s DNA were revealed to the world. The project’s senior historical consultant, Alex J Kay, looks at what the findings might be able to tell us about the Führer’s relationship with Eva Braun and the other women in his life
In November 2025, I was lead historian on the television documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, which revealed the results of a world-first analysis of Adolf Hitler’s DNA. The results – as explained by the project’s lead geneticist, Turi King – revealed that Hitler had a disorder known as Kallmann syndrome. Among other things, this condition can result in impaired testosterone production, low libido, underdeveloped reproductive features and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function. The revelation that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome is intriguing because of the likely implications for his private life. This finding strongly suggests a causal relationship between Hitler’s genetic make-up and particular facets of his behaviour. It complements what we already knew about this part of Hitler’s biography, and it sheds light on aspects of his life that we could previously only speculate about. Born in provincial Austria in 1889, Hitler had a very traumatic childhood, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father and losing four out of five siblings as well as both parents by the time he turned 19. He later wrote in his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf that his mother’s death had been “a dreadful blow, particularly for me”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/2-Traumatic-childhood-248974imagno-5c13625-e1769175795531.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Two black and white photos alongside each other. A woman is on the left, wearing a high collar and looking straight at the camera. On the left there is a man, wearing a jacket with several buttons down the middle. He is facing the left, and has a large moustache" title="Hitler’s parents, Klara and Alois, pictured around 1890. The future Nazi leader would go on to describe his mother’s death in 1907 as “a dreadful blow” (Image by Topfoto)" /> The family doctor, Eduard Bloch, subsequently remarked: “While [Hitler] was not a ‘mother’s boy’ in the usual sense, I have never witnessed a closer attachment.” Hitler was at his mother’s bedside when she passed away. Dr Bloch later observed: “In all my career, I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.” Experiencing such loss during his formative years would have had a lasting impact on Hitler’s character. A portrait of adolescence As we have known since the medical file resurfaced at an auction in 2010, a physical examination during Hitler’s time in Landsberg prison in 1923, following his arrest for the failed Munich putsch that November, revealed that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism” – that is, an undescended testicle. This physical abnormality might help to explain the account given by Hitler’s closest (and perhaps only) friend during his adolescence, August Kubizek. While living in Vienna, Hitler and Kubizek shared a room from February to July 1908. Noting Hitler’s “obvious indifference to the opposite sex”, his “strict monk-like asceticism” and the fact that he “refrained from masturbation”, Kubizek observed: “my friend undoubtedly found favour with the opposite sex although, to my amazement, he never took advantage of it”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/4-August-Kubizek-GettyImages-1371458593-bbe65ce-e1769175883617.jpg" width="1500" height="2106" alt="A black and white photograph of a man, wearing a black suit with a black bow tie." title="A photograph of August Kubizek, Hitler’s former roommate. Kubizek would later claim that his friend had shown an “obvious indifference to the opposite sex” (Image by Getty Images)" /> Commenting on the entirety of their friendship from the autumn of 1905 (not 1904, as Kubizek claimed), when they met at the opera in Linz, to the summer of 1908, when their time together in Vienna came to an end, Kubizek concluded: “I think I can say with certainty: Adolf never met a girl, either in Linz or Vienna, who actually gave herself to him.” None of the accounts of Hitler’s remaining years in the Austrian capital suggests anything changed in this regard. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” Tellingly, one of Hitler’s closest confidants during the 1920s and 1930s, Ernst Hanfstaengl, later wrote: “I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else. A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself. It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.” According to the historian Ian Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of the Nazi leader: “Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.” The German historian Peter Longerich, in his own biography of Hitler, goes one step further: “In view of Hitler’s personality, it seems altogether plausible that his life was asexual: any intimate relationship would simply have been incompatible with his arrested emotional development with regard to other people and with his self-perception as a public figure through and through with an extraordinary historic mission.” No room for a wife Rumours that Hitler had been infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute were without foundation. Medical tests in 1940 showed that Hitler had not suffered from syphilis. Although the serological tests carried out in 1940 did not exclude neurosyphilis, recent medical research has concluded that the suggestion that Hitler may have had neurosyphilis is unsustainable. The discovery that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome might thus be the key to explaining his seemingly “disturbed and repressed sexual development”. As Hanfstaengl observed, Hitler must have been extremely self-conscious about his body and, for this reason, reluctant to engage in relations of an intimate or sexual nature – and perhaps even uninterested in that side of life. This fact would help to explain Hitler’s absolute devotion to politics to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life. Such devotion was exceptional among Nazi leaders. All other senior Nazis – Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and so on – had wives and children; some even had extramarital affairs. Ian Kershaw once wrote: “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence which conditioned his public reflexes.” The identification and testing of Hitler’s DNA, combined with the historical facts already available to us, may now explain why. The fact that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome surely played a part in his renunciation of any kind of private life or intimate relationships. According to Christa Schroeder, who served as one of Hitler’s secretaries for the entirety of his 12 years in power: “Undoubtedly Hitler enjoyed the company of beautiful women and was inspired by them. He used eroticism, but not sex. Because of the great objective he had set himself and to which he was totally committed, sexual gratification occurred mentally.” Hitler always claimed that his life was devoted to Germany, so that there was no room in it for a wife. It seems this claim might, at least in part, have been a way of covering up his aversion to intimate relationships, and that his genes may have played a bigger part in his decision not to marry and have children than he was willing to admit. Read more | “We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers "Saturated with jealousy" It is with two women that Hitler is most closely associated: Geli Raubal and Eva Braun. Geli, born in 1908 (and thus 19 years younger than Hitler), was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, Angela Raubal. Geli’s father died two years after her birth, and Hitler became her legal guardian in 1923. Six years later, Geli moved into Hitler’s nine-room apartment in Munich. Hitler was overbearing and jealously possessive of his half-niece. He took her everywhere with him, and if she went out alone, she was chaperoned and had to be home early. To all intents and purposes, Geli was a prisoner. And she resented it bitterly. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/6-Geli-Raubal-GettyImages-541794949-f720675-e1769176093295.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in a suit, asleep in a deckchair. To his right, a woman in a patterned dress sits on the floor, looking at him" title="Hitler with his half-niece, Geli Raubal. The former medical student would take her own life in the Nazi leader’s apartment (Image by Getty Images)" /> On 18 September 1931, Geli shot and killed herself in the apartment, using Hitler’s own pistol. According to Ian Kershaw, his emotional relationship with Geli was “more intense than any other human relationship he had before or after”. Anni Winter, Hitler’s housekeeper in Munich from 1929 to 1945, summed it up, according to Christa Schroeder, as “a platonic love saturated with jealousy”. In the autumn of 1929, the same year that Geli Raubal moved into his Munich apartment, Hitler first met Eva Braun at the Munich studio of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, where she worked as an assistant and, later, as a photographer herself. Eva, born in 1912, was nearly 23 years younger than Hitler. The two began spending more time together from early 1932, after several months had passed since Geli Raubal’s suicide. One of Hitler’s closest political associates, Franz Xaver Schwarz – who had joined the Nazi Party in 1922, taken part in the failed Munich putsch the following November, and then served as treasurer of the Nazi Party from 1925 to 1945 – told Allied officers in July 1945 that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun since 1931 had been “platonic”. Heike Görtemaker, the biographer of Eva Braun, is right to point out that Schwarz “had absolutely no reason to reveal anything about Hitler’s carefully concealed private life to his American interrogators”. However, many other people who spent years in close proximity to Hitler said the same as Schwarz. Herbert Döhring, Hitler’s caretaker at the Berghof for eight years, claimed that there was never any evidence that the two had sex. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/8-Eva-and-sister-Gretl-GettyImages-109852808-30f2189-e1769176211496.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of two young women sitting on top of a wall, alongside a black dog" title="Eva Braun (right), with her sister, Gretl. Hitler had first met Braun at the Munich studio of his photographer, Heinrich Hoffman, in 1929 (Image by Getty Images)" /> The aforementioned Christa Schroeder insisted in her memoir that “Hitler was not the lover of Eva Braun”. Heinrich Hoffmann, who introduced Hitler – “a personally modest and intensely shy person” – to Eva Braun, wrote in his memoir that she “became the constant companion of his leisure hours and, to the best of my knowledge, that was all there was to it”. He added: “there never was any love story”. While physical intimacy between them cannot be ruled out entirely, all available evidence suggests that Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun was not sexual. In Hitler’s Munich apartment, his suite of rooms in the Reich Chancellery, at the Berghof and, later, in his Berlin bunker, Eva Braun always had her own separate bedroom. Keeping secrets One disturbing fact is worth pointing out here: Geli Raubal was not the only woman intimately associated with Hitler to attempt, or die by, suicide. His brief flirtation with Maria ‘Mimi’ Reiter, born in 1909 (and thus 20 years younger than Hitler), began in the autumn of 1926 when they met in Berchtesgaden. According to Kershaw, Hitler’s letters to her “were affectionate, though in a fatherly, patronising fashion”. Their friendship ended after a few months when Hitler broke off contact. Mimi Reiter unsuccessfully attempted to hang herself the following year. During her relationship with Hitler, Eva Braun attempted suicide not once but twice, in November 1932 and May 1935 (before finally killing herself, alongside Hitler, in the Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 – less than 40 hours after they had married). A few months after the second suicide attempt, she and her sister Gretl moved into a house that Hoffmann had bought for them on Hitler’s instructions. By the following year, Eva Braun had become a member of the Berghof inner circle around Hitler. Read more | The real Unity Mitford: meet the high society British Nazi who was rumoured to have had Hitler's child Nonetheless, whatever the nature of their relationship, most German people did not know about it until after the war. She was only once caught on camera with Hitler in public, when she sat directly behind him during the women’s skating competition at the 1936 Winter Olympics. Otherwise, Hitler never allowed her to be seen in public with him. Christa Schroeder may have succeeded in explaining both the longevity and Hitler’s true motivation in entering into his long-term companionship with Eva Braun when she wrote that “Hitler as a politician could not afford a second suicide of a young woman in his close circle… This protected him against future suicide attempts and was also a shield against all his other ardent female admirers”. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/9-Hitler-and-Eva-GettyImages-514679166-302118e-e1769176611254.jpg" width="1500" height="2461" alt="A black and white photograph of a man standing in a double breasted suit, along side a woman in a dress, sitting in a chair to the right" title="Most German people did not know about Hitler and Braun’s relationship until after the war (Image by Getty Images)" /> Though he was, by all accounts, fond of Mimi Reiter, Geli Raubal and Eva Braun (as well as other women) in his own way, they were all much younger women whom Hitler could – and did – dominate. Heinrich Hoffmann’s assessment of Hitler's view of Eva Braun likely applied to all those women with whom he formed some sort of attachment: “To him, she was just an attractive little thing, in whom, in spite of her inconsequential and feather-brained outlook – or perhaps just because of it – he found the type of relaxation and repose he sought.” Christa Schroeder concludes for all these relationships that “Hitler appears to have kept his love life platonic throughout”. In his own account, August Kubizek leaves the reader in no doubt as to his belief that Hitler was a pronounced misogynist. According to Kershaw: “Probably, he was frightened of women – certainly of their sexuality.” Alex J Kay is a reader in modern history at the University of Potsdam. He recently served as the senior historical consultant and co-lead on the Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. Alex J Kay and geneticist Turi King spoke to Matt Elton on the HistoryExtra podcast about their involvement in the DNA research. Listen to the full conversation.
Hitler's war on words: how the Nazis used art to bolster their murderous regime
Hitler and his acolyte Joseph Goebbels wielded propaganda as a potent weapon in the battle for German hearts and minds. Lisa Pine shows how posters targeted all sectors of society to promote prejudice and bolster support for party policies
FAMILY PLANNING The Nazis considered nuclear families to be the building blocks of a ‘pure’ German nation The family was exalted in Nazi ideology and propaganda as “the germ cell of the nation”. In the Nazi Party platform, a 25-point programme outlining their political goals, it was declared that: “The state must ensure that the nation’s health standards are raised by protecting mothers and infants.” This 1936 poster shows the Nazi eagle spreading its wings protectively over the valuable German family. Echoing the eagle, the father of the family has his arms around his wife and one of his children; the mother holds a baby in her arms, while a third young child smiles out at the viewer. “The NSDAP protects the national community” is the headline slogan, with further wording proclaiming that “national comrades” could turn to their local NSDAP group for help or advice. The Nazi Party did indeed provide assistance and counsel to families – provided that they were deemed ‘pure’ German, hereditarily healthy, and of good blood and character. OWNING THE AIRWAVES Encouraging universal uptake of radios, the Nazis hijacked broadcast media for propaganda purposes Radio offered a convenient way of streaming propaganda and speeches directly into homes – so, unsurprisingly, the Nazis were keen to ensure that as many Germans as possible had their own radios. Hence the Volksempfänger (‘People’s Receiver’), a range of low-cost sets developed by the government from 1933. “All Germany listens to the Führer with the People’s Receiver,” proclaims this 1936 poster, one of several designed to encourage take-up. The implication was, of course, that every proud citizen would be expected to buy a set and tune in to listen to Hitler. And the effort succeeded: by 1939, 70 per cent of German households owned a radio, creating a mass audience for the regime’s output. In 1933 alone, Hitler made at least 50 radio broadcasts. Communal listening was also encouraged, to heighten the emotional impact of speeches, with loudspeakers set up in town squares and other public areas for this purpose. Read more | The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings DRIVING FORCE A scheme designed to boost car ownership reflected the regime’s plan to motorise Germany The Nazis were determined that Germany should be a nation of motorists as a signifier of the regime’s modernity, speed and progress. From August 1938, workers were encouraged to save for a Volkswagen (‘People’s Car’) via the government-backed Kraft durch Freude (KdF; Strength through Joy) organisation. To make car ownership accessible to all Germans, not just the wealthy elites who were previously able to afford one, the KdF-Wagen scheme involved paying instalments of 5 Reichsmarks each week for four and a half years. Posters such as this 1938 example, showing a black Volkswagen with a voucher card, were produced to promote the scheme. By 1939, some 270,000 people had signed up. The Volkswagen was intended as “a car for free time and leisure” – no longer largely the preserve of the business sector but a desirable, useful and enjoyable consumer product. However, the outbreak of war in 1939 choked the output of KdF cars, as the economy was diverted to support armament production and factories were dedicated to turning out military vehicles. FEMALE GAZE Posters played on the fears of economically deprived women during the Depression At the height of the economic crisis in Germany, in 1932 some 6 million people were unemployed across the country, leading to widespread poverty. The Nazis played on the hardships suffered by so much of the population, using posters to declare that only Hitler and his party could lift the country – and its citizens and their families – out of the deprivation that afflicted so many. To maximise the impact, campaigns were cannily targeted, using images, language and themes to appeal to specific groups .This example, aimed at women, proclaims: “Frauen! Denkt an Eure Kinder!” (“Women! Think of your children!”). The picture shows a young family – a dejected, unemployed father, an anxious mother and two small children – with the clear message to “save the German family”. The suggestion being that voting for Hitler was the best way to secure a brighter future for the nation’s children. Read more | “I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg” FIGHTING TALK Posters were deployed to boost public morale during wartime In this “Ein Kampf, Ein Sieg!” (“One Struggle, One Victory!”) poster designed by Hans Schweitzer in 1943, a brown-shirted member of the Sturmabteilung (Stormtroopers, the paramilitary force that played a key role in Hitler’s rise to power) joins a Wehrmacht solder in stretching his right arm in a Hitler salute beside swastika flags. The dates at the top, 30 January 1933–1943, imply that the war was simply an extension of Hitler’s continued efforts, right from the moment he took power, to make Germany great and to defeat its enemies. This evokes the sense of a continued battle from the early days of Nazi political success to projected victory in the war. This strikingly martial and belligerent poster was intended to bolster endurance among the German people by reinforcing the prowess, fortitude and ideological determination of German soldiers. It was one of many designed to boost morale and dictate the public narrative about the progress of the war. ANTISEMITIC ART Nazi posters painted Jews as the root of Germany’s economic and political problems In Nazi propaganda, the Jew was frequently used as a scapegoat for all that had gone wrong in Germany. In his writings and speeches, Hitler repeatedly blamed the Jews for both the disaster of the First World War and the outbreak of the Second. Using lurid colours to highlight the alarming nature of the Jewish ‘enemy’, antisemitic posters appeared on the streets of Germany and across Nazi-occupied territories to try to influence the public as they went about their daily activities. This 1943 example by Hans Schweitzer epitomises the themes and style. It features a caricature of the ‘capitalist’ Jew, presented as hook-nosed, fat and repellent in his black hat and suit, wearing a yellow Star of David bearing the word “Jude” (“Jew”). The text makes no bones about the perceived culpability of the Jews. “Der ist schuld am Kriege!” (“He is responsible for the war!”), it shouts, the word “Der” (“He”) presented in a much larger font size to emphasise who’s to blame for the conflict. Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery AMIABLE OCCUPATION The Nazis attempted to pacify the civilian inhabitants of the countries they invaded The Nazi regime was keen to extol the benefits of occupation to the populations of some lands its troops invaded. For example, in this positively cheerful poster from 1940 by Theo Matejko, aimed at civilians in occupied France, a German soldier is shown holding a smiling French child munching a piece of bread, with two more French youngsters gazing hopefully up at him. The caption, in red and black lettering, reads: “Populations abandonnées, faites confiance au soldat allemand!” (“Abandoned populations, place your trust in the German soldier!”). Such calculated propaganda, offering reassurances about the occupying forces, belied the truth of their aims. This gentle image of a German soldier was very different from those portrayed on propaganda posters distributed in Germany – such as the one shown on the opposite page – which showed the Wehrmacht as ruthlessly determined in the face of its enemies. Slogans intended for a German audience were powerful and memorable: “Life or Death”, “For Freedom and Life”, “Perish Judah”, “Victory at any Price”. Lisa Pine is a fellow of the Institute of Historical Research at the University of London. Her most recent book (co-authored with Kees Boterbloem) is Soviet and Nazi Posters: Propaganda and Policies (Bloomsbury, 2025)
I've just been inside a Nazi monster's mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting
Earlier this year, Keith Lowe was granted access to the home of one of the Nazi regime’s most notorious war criminals. Here, he reveals what he discovered within the chateau’s crumbling walls – and the challenges of separating a building from its disturbing past
It’s the summer of 2025 and I find myself standing at the entrance of an old, abandoned mansion just outside Prague. It looks like a stereotypical haunted house. On either side of the wrought-iron gates is a Gothic statue of a wild boar, glowering towards the road as if to deter all visitors. Beyond lies an overgrown garden and an austere-looking building with crumbling walls and dark windows. Just looking at this place sends a shiver down my spine – not because of the Scooby Doo atmosphere, but because I know its history. It was once the home of a Jewish industrialist, who used to hold lavish parties here for the cream of Czech society. But at the beginning of the Second World War it was requisitioned by the Nazis, who made it the official residence of one of their most notorious war criminals: Reinhard Heydrich. It has taken months to gain access. I first came here in September 2024 with a small group of historians from the US National World War II Museum in New Orleans. We had been tasked with scouting out sites related to Heydrich, but the Czech tourist office told us that this particular place would be impossible to visit because it was private property. Undeterred, my colleagues did a little detective work and managed to locate the owner, and after months of negotiation he finally agreed to give us exclusive access. And so here we are again – only this time the chateau’s gates are open, and we are allowed to go in. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/HeydrichGettyImages-107425114-31d8c6f-e1764247394375.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white photograph of a man in full military uniform. He has right hand on his hip" title="Reinhard Heydrich pictured in 1942. The top-ranking Nazi was one of the chief architects of the ‘Final Solution’ (Image by Getty Images)" /> Portrait of a killer The historical significance of this site cannot be overstated. Its owner, Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the most important men in the Nazi hierarchy. He was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst, the much-feared intelligence service of the Nazi party. Between 1934 and 1936 he was also head of the Gestapo. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was promoted to head up the Reich Security Main Office, the umbrella organisation that oversaw all police and security operations throughout Hitler’s empire. As such, he was one of the most feared men in the whole of Europe. Tall, blond and athletic, Heydrich was the very picture of the Nazi ideal. He was also utterly ruthless: Hitler himself described him as “the man with the iron heart”. In the first three years of the war, he organised mass killings calmly, efficiently and without compunction. For example, after the invasion of Poland in 1939 he planned the arrest and murder of more than 60,000 intellectuals and community leaders, for no other reason than that they might one day pose a threat to Nazi rule. Later, under the cover of Hitler’s ‘Night and Fog’ decree, he masterminded the ‘disappearance’ of thousands of suspected Resistance members in occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Families were deliberately kept in the dark about the fate of their loved ones. The purpose was to spread uncertainty and terror amongst the general population. Read more | Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery But it was Heydrich’s actions against the Jews that made him most notorious. In 1938 he helped to organise Kristallnacht. The following year he supervised the creation of the Einsatzgruppen, who followed in the wake of the German Army in eastern Europe, murdering hundreds of thousands of Jews by firing squad as they went. It was Heydrich who organised the Wannsee Conference. WATCH | Laurence Rees gives an expert overview of the Holocaust View Green Video on the source website From atrocity to assassination Heydrich spent the last nine months of his life in Prague. By this time, he had been made the de facto ruler of Bohemia and Moravia, and was living a life of luxury at the expense of the Czech people. His offices were in Prague Castle and the nearby Czernin Palace, but his official residence was in the village of Panenské Břežany, just a few miles outside the city. In those days his chateau was far more glamorous than it is today: it had 50 rooms, including offices, servants’ quarters and at least a dozen bedrooms. The double staircase leading to the upper floor had red marble walls, and all the hallways were paved with elaborate mosaic tiles. At the top of the stairs was a sumptuous ballroom with views over the extensive grounds. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/11Ballroom-20250512144741-Ballroom-03-69e4d34-e1764243055312.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A large room with several windows on the right hand side, with billowing white curtains. On the floor are two large blue carpets and there is a long wooden table with maroon chairs" title="The former ballroom at Panenské Břežany, photographed by the author. The chateau once boasted 50 rooms, including offices, servants’ quarters and at least a dozen bedrooms (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> As soon as he arrived in Bohemia, Heydrich began treating the Czechs in the same way that he had already treated the Poles and the French. One of the first things he did was to declare martial law, and within just a few months he had already executed more than 400 suspected dissidents. His sentiments were quite clear: in comments to his aides, he announced his intention to “Germanise the Czech vermin”. Heydrich worked closely with his secretary of state, a Sudeten German called Karl Hermann Frank, who lived in the same village as Heydrich. The two men were well suited to one another. Frank, like Heydrich, was a vicious antisemite and seemingly addicted to brutality. During the day, this pair would plan repressive police actions against the Czech population, but in the evening they both would return to Panenské Břežany, to one or other of their luxurious mansions, where they would socialise with other senior Nazis and SS officers. All of this came to a dramatic end on the morning of 27 May 1942. That day, Heydrich set out from his chateau on his daily commute into Prague around 10am, just as he always did. He rode in an open top car, driven by an SS driver named Johannes Klein. He had no escort – he was arrogant enough to believe that he did not need one – and he followed the same route that he always took on the way to Prague Castle. It was this complacency that led to his downfall. Over the previous months, British and Czech intelligence had been observing Heydrich’s movements and had formulated an assassination plan, codenamed Operation Anthropoid. Having worked out his daily routine, they knew exactly where and when to ambush him. This particular morning, as his car slowed down at a bend in the road on the outskirts of Prague, a pair of Czech Special Operations Executive (SOE) agents were waiting for him. One of them, a man named Josef Gabčik, tried to fire a Sten gun at him, but it jammed. His partner, Jan Kubiš, then threw a specially prepared grenade at Heydrich’s car. Read more | The rise of the Nazis and the importance of heeding warnings Rather than speed away from the ambush, Heydrich ordered his driver to stop, drew his pistol and stood up in the car to confront his attackers. It was thanks to his arrogance that shrapnel from the exploding grenade tore into his body, mortally wounding him. He died several days later, in hospital, of sepsis. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/8-AssasinationGettyImages-104419725-be43add-e1764243103902.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white image of an open top car with a flat back tyre and extensive damage to the side facing the camera" title="Heydrich’s heavily damaged Mercedes-Benz following the grenade attack of 27 May 1942. Although Heydrich survived the initial blast, he succumbed to his injuries eight days later (Image by Getty Images)" /> Grim reprisals Heydrich’s assassination took the whole of the Nazi hierarchy by surprise, but when they finally gathered themselves, their reaction was typically brutal. Hitler called for the murder of 10,000 Czechs in reprisal and was only dissuaded from this by the need to keep Czech workers producing for the German war effort. Meanwhile, Heydrich’s subordinate, Karl Hermann Frank, was determined to track down and punish anyone even remotely linked to the assassination. He arrested and tortured hundreds of civilians in an attempt to find someone who could reveal where the assassins were hiding. On 10 June, he went a step further. Frank’s security forces surrounded the village of Lidice and executed all 173 men and boys they found there. More than 300 women and children were then rounded up and sent to concentration camps, where around half of them also died. As a final act of viciousness, the village itself was burned down and levelled, as if it had never existed at all. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/LidiceFFRH60-afccb73-e1764247521981.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="A black and white image of a burning village, with large clouds of smoke covering it" title="Smoke rises from the village of Lidice during its destruction by Nazi forces, June 1942. Hundreds of residents were murdered as ‘punishment’ for Heydrich’s assassination (Image by Alamy)" /> Lidice was chosen because several known Czech army officers happened to come from here, and it was assumed that they must have had something to do with the assassination – but in actual fact, the people of Lidice were entirely innocent in this respect. Two weeks later, a second village, Ležáky, suffered a similar fate. There was no attempt to hide these crimes. In fact, the Nazis openly publicised every stage of the massacres. This was designed to be a message to all potential resisters about the fate that awaited them and their communities if they ever attempted to defy the Nazis in future. Unfortunately, Frank’s brutality paid off. Appalled by the massacre, one of the special forces team voluntarily gave himself up to the Gestapo. In return for one million Reichsmarks and the promise of a new identity, he revealed the whereabouts of some of the other operatives in the Czech resistance network. After more arrests, and more torture, Heydrich’s assassins were finally tracked down, hiding in the crypt of Saints Cyril and Methodius Cathedral in Prague. The church was surrounded and a massive firefight ensured, but eventually, to avoid capture, the surviving Czech resistance fighters took their own lives. Abandoned to time After Heydrich’s assassination, his widow, Lina, continued to live in the chateau at Panenské Břežany. For the next three years she ran the house and its estate like a mini concentration camp. She was given a workforce of 150 or so slave labourers from the Theresienstadt ghetto and from Flossenbürg concentration camp. It turned out that this woman had many of the same psychopathic tendencies as her husband: those of her prisoners who survived the war later testified that she had personally subjected them to physical abuse. At the end of the war, Lina and her family finally fled the chateau to escape the advancing Red Army. They returned to Germany where she lived out her years on a generous army pension. Despite being found guilty of complicity in war crimes by a Czech court, she was never extradited. Meanwhile, her glamorous home and its lands were taken over by the Czech state. Over the next 50 years, a series of workshops were built in its grounds, and it became a kind of minor industrial estate. The chateau itself was used by the Metal Research Institute, before eventually being abandoned. As I walk around the building today, all these different layers of history are on display. Some of the rooms have ornate plasterwork ceilings that betray the house’s lavish past, while others are lined with functional tiles and electric cables left over from its time as a technical institute. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/13-Ruins-20250512141953-61f32b5-e1764243186292.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="The chateau has fallen into a severe state of disrepair, with few of its lavish interiors still intact (Image by Keith Lowe)" title="The chateau has fallen into a severe state of disrepair, with few of its lavish interiors still intact (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> Some of the original features are still there. In the huge, vaulted entrance hall there is an ornate stone fireplace where Heydrich’s guests would have warmed themselves before proceeding up the staircase to the ballroom on the first floor. The marble walls and mosaic floors are intact, but the artworks and 19th-century furniture are gone. The walls are deeply cracked, with peeling paint, and exposed pipes and beams where some of the ceilings have collapsed. Everything is in a state of disrepair. An uncertain future It is difficult to know what is to be done with this place today. The current owner wants to restore the building but is struggling to find the time or the money to do it justice. When we met him, he expressed a desire to preserve the place as an important cultural site and a place of Czech memory. But he is also a businessman, and needs to find a way to make it pay for itself. Read more | "We need to understand the Nazis as human beings": Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler's followers One idea is to make the house into a museum. This is what happened to Karl Hermann Frank’s villa nearby, which was originally part of the same estate. That building now houses a permanent exhibition devoted to the history of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and the atrocities that were committed by Frank after Heydrich’s assassination. The owner is keen to do something similar with this place, but is not sure if a small village like Panenské Břežany can sustain a second museum devoted to a very similar subject. Alternatively, he could make it into some kind of exhibition space, or even a hotel. This would bring other concerns: it is not clear what kind of guests would want to take weekend breaks in the former home of a Nazi mass-killer. The last thing he wants to do is to create a pilgrimage site for Holocaust deniers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/2-Main-Entrance20240918122145-Main-entrance-9512b18-e1764243226544.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Plans to turn the site into a museum or hotel are complicated by fears that it could become a tourist destination for Nazi sympathisers (Image by Keith Lowe)" title="Plans to turn the site into a museum or hotel are complicated by fears that it could become a tourist destination for Nazi sympathisers (Image by Keith Lowe)" /> Until he has made up his mind, the building is likely to remain in a state of serious disrepair. As I walk around its dilapidated rooms and echoing corridors, I can’t help feeling that perhaps this is no bad thing. We are so used to having our thoughts and emotions curated for us that it is actually quite refreshing to visit a memorial site where you are free to imagine the past for yourself. I also wonder if there is something quite apt about how derelict this building has become. When they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Nazis made this place the centre of their power and authority over the Czech people; the fact that it is now a virtual ruin feels satisfyingly appropriate. I can think of no better epitaph for the evil man who lived here and the hollow ideology that created him. Keith Lowe is an author and former military history publisher who has spent more than 20 years writing about the Second World War and its aftermath. His most recent book is Naples 1944: War, Liberation and Chaos (William Collins, 2024)
Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery
Geneticist Turi King and historian Alex J Kay are in the spotlight after their research into Hitler’s DNA was featured in a new Channel 4 series. Shortly after the first episode aired, Matt Elton spoke to them about the complex ethical dimensions of this work and some of the stunning revelations that have emerged from it
Matt Elton, HistoryExtra: How did you get involved in this project and did you have any concerns? Alex J Kay: I got involved in the project in March 2023. I was contacted by Dan Chambers from Blink Films, who had already been working on this project for quite some time. I knew that Turi was already involved and they were looking for a lead historian for the programme. My big concern – because there’s so much out there about Hitler, so many documentaries, so many studies, so many books – was that this was going to be done in a serious way. Not sensationally, but really following the science, and very much based on research and evidence. Everybody who was involved with the project was clearly following science and really wanted to do a good job, and make sure it was as ironclad as possible in terms of the research and the evidence, so that reassured me. Turi King: I was brought on almost exactly four years ago. My first question was around not wanting to be involved if this was going to be done in a sensationalist way. And I did agonise [over doing it] because of who it is. But then, as an ancient DNA specialist, there have been thousands of individuals, archaeological and historical specimens, who have had their whole genome sequenced – including Beethoven. And I was thinking: “Well, why should Hitler be seen as this kind of mystical figure whom we could never do this DNA analysis on? And who is it who makes those kinds of decisions?” As Alex has said, Hitler has been the subject of so many books and articles and television programmes and so on, but this would add a new layer of information that hasn’t been available before. The other thing was that, because the swatch [a small sample of material] was being made available for DNA analysis, somebody was going to do this at some point, so let’s make sure it’s done in an absolutely rigorous way. My first question was: “Is this actually Hitler’s DNA?” My first role in this was to go through the entire process around authenticating the DNA. So let’s talk about the swatch you mentioned there. Alex, can you talk about the final days of Hitler’s life and how they enabled the specific set of circumstances that allowed this research to happen? AJK: Hitler spent the last weeks of his life in his Berlin bunker virtually the entire time, only occasionally going up into the garden of the Reich Chancellery building. By [April] the Soviets were attacking the city. The Red Army had already entered Berlin and was fighting its way to the city centre, where the government headquarters were and where Nazi power was based – and of course Hitler’s bunker as well. At some point, Hitler realised the war was definitively lost and the Soviets would reach him within a matter of days. He took the decision to take his own life, which we know from eyewitness accounts he did by shooting himself, in his study on the now notorious sofa. It’s from this sofa that the piece of fabric was taken with the blood sample. Who took the sample from the sofa? And why? TK: So this was Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, who was a public information officer for Eisenhower during the war. The Red Army was in charge and apparently very few people were allowed to go into the bunker, but he was one of them. This was where Hitler had killed himself – so they got into the bunker and essentially started taking souvenirs. Rosengren cut a sample out of the sofa and took a swatch away – which, rather crucially, had blood on it from where Hitler killed himself. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/15-COL.-ROSWELL-P.-ROSENGREN-Credit-Erik-Rosengren--cdabc52.jpeg" width="4688" height="5800" alt="Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, who entered the Führerbunker after Hitler’s death, and cut out the sofa sample that would go on to be used to test his DNA (Image by Erik Rosengren)" title="Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, who entered the Führerbunker after Hitler’s death, and cut out the sofa sample that would go on to be used to test his DNA (Image by Erik Rosengren)" /> Did he have any idea that it was likely to be Hitler’s blood? TK: You would have to ask his family, but my understanding is that yes [he did]. The swatch was then brought back to the US and kept in the family for several decades. It was then passed down to his son, whom I had the pleasure of talking to, and who knew the entire story about how it had been brought into the family. Then, [in 2014] it was sold to the Gettysburg Museum of History. It was the museum that had been offering it for DNA analysis. Why has all this happened now given that that sample was in this museum all this time? TK: I think part of it [is a result of] genetic technology and what’s become available over the past 10–20 years. We are now able to do more and more in terms of sequencing. The field of ancient and historical DNA has really taken off, and we now have the ability to do this sort of work, which is why everything’s come together to make this happen. Read more | “We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp” There were multiple objections from European institutions because they were uncomfortable with testing Hitler’s DNA. Did that cause you any concerns? TK: Certain labs would have a think about it. They might go to their boards and they would say, “No, we don’t feel comfortable with doing this.” I’m Canadian and I have a lot of colleagues in the US, and I think for us the shadow of Hitler doesn’t feel as close as it must do to people here. That’s to do with geographical distance. In the end, the two labs that did the sequencing – because you want the sequencing done in two separate labs to make sure you’re getting the same results in both labs – are both in the US, where the sample is. AJK: I wasn’t entirely surprised when I was told that a number of European labs had decided not to get involved. I’m based in Germany, and there is a lot of awareness of the long shadow that Hitler still casts here, even 80 years after his death. There’s a great reluctance to get involved with anything that could be used for sensationalist purposes or where somebody could distort the facts. TK: One of the things that’s been really difficult about this project is trying to work to get an academic paper and the documentary to go out at the same time. It’s something over which I have no control, but there is an academic paper that I’m hoping will be able to come out in the next few weeks. That was one of the other things that I said when I first got involved: that there had to be an academic paper as well, it couldn’t just be a documentary. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/12-Taking-of-Sample-Credit-Blink-Films--08cb285.jpg" width="1915" height="815" alt="A pair of hands in purple gloves hold two small tools and work on a ripped cloth sample on a table" title="The sofa sample is tested in a lab. Alex J Kay and Turi King were both keen that this investigation was rigorous and not sensationalist. “There had to be an academic paper as well, it couldn’t just be a documentary”, says Turi (Image by Blink Films)" /> How did you determine whether the sample that was taken stood up to scrutiny? TK: This is where I always say it’s incredibly important that you don’t just use genetic data on its own, you link it with the historical information. My first question was, “What’s the provenance of this sample?” And actually, if you have a look at the photos of the sofa from the time period and then you look at the swatch, there’s a very distinctive pattern and those match. So that’s another tick we could put into the box. The other thing we could then do is genetic analysis. But there were no very close relatives that you could use for doing DNA testing and comparing against, such as you would do in a forensic case – a parent or a sibling or a child. They don’t exist because Hitler didn’t have any children. There are no close relatives who are alive today. This is where I got interested in a piece of DNA known as the Y chromosome, a segment of DNA that’s just passed down through the male line. So if there’s a male-line relative of Hitler, then you can look at the Y chromosome that’s coming back from the DNA, from the blood, and see if that matches a male-line relative. There was a study that had been done by Jean-Paul Mulders and Marc Vermeeren. They had tracked down quite distant members of the Hitler family, male-line members, including one who had given a DNA sample. The data from that was made available. We could then do an analysis of the Y chromosome and there was a perfect match between them. The next thing you have to ask as a geneticist is, “Okay, but how common is this Y chromosome type?” And, actually, it’s incredibly rare, not found in the Y chromosome forensic database. Even then, because we were being careful as we went, we wanted to know how common it is in Europe, let alone worldwide. There were no hits, so we could therefore say: “Yes, it’s a rare Y chromosome type.” And then we had to ask: “What is the likelihood that a close male-line relative of Hitler would have managed to get himself into the bunker, over to that sofa and bleed on it?” This is where Alex is great because I can turn to him and ask: “So what do we know about close male line relatives?” Once we can rule out all of these possibilities, it becomes vanishingly unlikely that this is not Hitler’s DNA. AJK: Hitler had very few close male-line relatives. He had no surviving brothers, for example, and lost four of his five siblings during his childhood. The only other surviving child was his sister, Paula. He did have a half-brother from his father’s previous marriage. However, I was able to determine that his half-brother at the end of the war was in Hamburg, not Berlin, so that ruled him out. This half-brother had two sons. One of those sons, however, had been killed in combat during the Second World War. So he was no longer alive in 1945, and the other son had actually emigrated and wasn’t even in the country. So we were able to rule out in this way that any other close male relative of Hitler’s could have been anywhere near the bunker in April 1945. Read more | “We need to understand the Nazis as human beings”: Richard J Evans on the motivations of Hitler’s followers Once you had started to become convinced that this might actually be Hitler’s DNA, what did that feel like? TK: That was a bit of a moment because you can go: “Okay, great, we can be confident that we’ve got Hitler’s DNA.” The next stage then is to do the whole genome sequencing. But the thing about that was we genuinely had no idea what we would find. As a geneticist, you think: “Well, possibly he has a very boring genome where he has a slight genetic predisposition towards something like coronary heart disease.” We didn’t know at all what we were going to find. Just before we get into what you found, what happened to Hitler’s body? AJK: Hitler’s body was burnt. He gave very explicit instructions to some of his members of staff who were still in the bunker for his body to be doused in petrol and burnt so that no remains were left. Hitler was very concerned that he would fall into the hands of the Soviets, dead or alive. Stories had been told to him about Mussolini’s death. Mussolini had been killed by Italian partisans and his corpse had then been strung up in a city square and abused by people – spat on and hit. Hitler wanted to avoid this demeaning fate, so he gave his members of staff in the bunker explicit instructions to get rid of his body, to destroy it completely. This didn’t happen: there were attempts made and the body was partially burnt, but not completely. Some bones did survive and the Soviets had access to those, but there was no body to speak of. How big a factor is the degradation that happens to a sample such as this over time, and does it affect the validity of the results in any way? TK: That’s a good question. One of the things I was actually looking [into] as part of the authentication processes was whether the DNA looks like it’s degraded. If it was a hoax, first of all, you wouldn’t get a DNA match but, secondly, the DNA would look quite different. While we’re alive we actually have really lovely long strands of DNA. And we do have things that come along and ‘nick’ it, but our body has mechanisms for fixing those DNA strands back together again. After death, that doesn’t happen. The DNA ends up in shorter and shorter strands, until there’s nothing left to sequence and the DNA is quite damaged. People often have this idea that there is a time factor in terms of how long it would be that we are able to obtain DNA. It’s actually time, but also the conditions under which the sample has been kept. Cold and dry is best for preserving DNA, which is why you can have some samples that are only a few years old but, if they’ve been kept in warm and damp conditions, you can’t get DNA out of them. But with other samples, people have managed to get nearly 2 million-year-old DNA out of permafrost. It was one of those things that, until we started the project and started having a look, we didn’t know quite whether or not the sample would be usable. The DNA is degraded, as would be expected, but we’ve got enough sequencing from two separate labs to get enough ‘coverage’ of the genome so that we can have a look at it. There are still gaps, but there’s enough that we can still do the analysis that we’ve been doing. A key thing is that, when we started this project, it was very important to say – and still to say – that nothing that we could ever find in Hitler’s DNA would excuse what he did. If I can get that message across, I think that’s super-important because no matter what we found, it doesn’t excuse what Hitler did in his lifetime. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-2696366-e250414.jpg" width="2766" height="3910" alt="Corporal Adolf Hitler (right) in a military hospital during WW1. “We’ve got to keep in mind that genetics is only one small piece of the puzzle,” says Alex J Kay. “Hitler was very much a product of his times”" title="Corporal Adolf Hitler (right) in a military hospital during WW1. “We’ve got to keep in mind that genetics is only one small piece of the puzzle,” says Alex J Kay. “Hitler was very much a product of his times”" /> AJK: We’ve got to keep in mind that genetics, as Turi has just said, is only one small piece of the puzzle. Hitler was very much a product of his times, of the First World War and postwar revolution in Germany. He was a product of a particular political radicalisation that took place in Germany in the 1920s. He was also the product of a traumatic childhood, losing four of his five siblings and both his parents by the age of 19. We have to keep in mind all of these factors when trying to understand the man Hitler became, and how it was possible for him to do what he did – and also in assessing how important these genetic findings are in the bigger picture. We’ve also got to emphasise that Hitler was a central figure in what then happened in the Second World War, and in the Holocaust, but he was only one man. There were hundreds of thousands of German and Austrian perpetrators [and other collaborators] who committed the most horrific crimes. There were many millions of people who followed Hitler and profited from the Nazi regime. We can’t explain what happened just by looking at Hitler and certainly not just by looking at Hitler’s genes. Read more | The final mystery of Richard III: how 21st-century science cracked a 500-year-old cold case One of the claims the programme specifically debunks is the idea that Hitler might have had Jewish heritage. How did you go into looking into this and how specifically did you debunk it? TK: I’m going to let Alex talk about the history here, but I can give you the genetics. So essentially my understanding is that there were queries about who Hitler’s paternal grandfather was. The story is that Hitler’s paternal grandfather wasn’t actually from the Hitler family and might have been Jewish because Hitler’s paternal grandmother was working in the house of a Jewish family at the time. The fact that we have a Y chromosome match between the blood and a distant male-line member of the Hitler family shows that Hitler’s grandfather was indeed from the Hitler family. AJK: Rumours that Hitler might have had some Jewish ancestry have been around for the best part of a century. They were already circulating in the 1920s. Some people believed that his paternal grandmother, Maria Anna Schicklgruber, who had worked for a period of time in a Jewish household, had become pregnant as a result of that. The foreign press got hold of these rumours and made a lot out of them. It’s very important that we’ve been able to debunk that, because this has been something that both scholars and the general public alike have been very interested in – understandably, because of Hitler’s rabid antisemitism and his crucial role in the extermination of 6 million European Jews. There’s no truth in the rumours. Hitler did not have Jewish ancestry. Work also began on sequencing the entire genome of Hitler’s DNA. Before we talk about the potential this has for revealing new information about Hitler’s health, where do we need to be cautious when we’re talking about this kind of research? TK: I think a genetics lesson here is important because, when you’re looking for a genetic predisposition towards particular health conditions, there are two types of health condition that you can look at. There are particular health conditions where we know it goes back to a single gene, so if something is wrong with a particular gene, you will develop this condition. And then there are other conditions where we know it’s both polygenic, meaning many genes, and also multifactorial. So genetics is just a component of the condition, but there are all kinds of other factors that are involved. You could be genetically predisposed towards heart disease, for example. If you are being healthy, eating well and exercising, you’re less likely to go on to develop this than if you are sedentary, and you’re sitting on the sofa and you’re eating doughnuts all day. With things like smoking, chemical factors come into it, too, and we know that smoking makes you more likely to develop lung cancer, for example. So when we were looking at these two particular types of conditions, what we were doing with Hitler’s DNA was, firstly, running it through standard NHS ‘pipelines’. But also, because there have been so many medical biographers over the past [few] years and also during his lifetime who had suggested particular conditions, we did send the DNA to experts in particular fields to ask “Is there anything here that stands out to you?” This is where colleagues at the Pasteur Institute found there’s a deletion [a type of mutation where a part of a chromosome or a segment of DNA is lost] in a gene known as PROK 2, which is strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome, which has implications for testosterone levels and the development of sexual organs. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/09-DNA-structure-Credit-Blink-Films-ca2cd88.jpg" width="1860" height="818" alt="The structure of a DNA strand. Expert testing shows that Hitler had a PROK 2 deletion, strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome (Image by Blink Films)" title="The structure of a DNA strand. Expert testing shows that Hitler had a PROK 2 deletion, strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome (Image by Blink Films)" /> We also found that Hitler was in the top 1 per cent for polygenic scores for schizophrenia, bipolar and autism. It’s probably a good idea that I give a quick explanation about how polygenic scores work. So this is where geneticists say: “Right, we’ve got all of these people over here with this particular condition. What are the genetic variants that they seem to have in common with one another that these people over here without the condition don’t seem to have, or have at much lower frequencies?” What you can then do is take somebody’s DNA and ask: “Well, where do they sit on this particular distribution?” This was work done by the IPSYCH team in Denmark. And this is where Hitler came in as being in the top 1 per cent for these three particular conditions – and that is incredibly rare. This is one of the areas in which the documentary enters into territory where we need to be careful about what we’re talking about. Did either of you have concerns about making connections between Hitler and specific conditions, however delicately phrased and couched? TK: That’s really important. In the documentary, what we do is we put all of the caveats in: we do talk about how this is not diagnostic just because he’s getting these scores. It is talking about a genetic predisposition, and you can’t run a straight line from this particular polygenic score to him being diagnosed with this particular condition. The other thing that’s very important to say is that it’s incredibly rare for people with these conditions to go on to commit violent acts, let alone genocide. They’re more likely to be on the receiving end of violence. And as Alex was saying, Hitler was not active on his own. There were hundreds of thousands of people who were helping him. They’re not all going to have the same genetic makeup as one another. These caveats are really important to put out there. In the documentary, we’re clear we cannot say that he had any of these particular conditions, but there is a genetic predisposition towards them. AJK: As a historian, I would say we have to approach this research like we would approach any other historical source, namely with care. We have to double-check it. We have to compare it against other sources of information, other evidence that we have, other things that we know. That would be the first step in any approach in dealing with this. And in this case, as Turi has already wonderfully explained, this is an indication of predisposition. We do not know whether Hitler had any of these conditions. And therefore for me, the finding, while fascinating, is less important than the findings on potential Jewish ancestry – because we now know something definite, whereas with the polygenic scores the findings are merely an indication. I do think it’s striking, as Turi has said, that Hitler had this top 1 per cent predisposition in all three of these categories, but we’re not saying, “Oh, look, Hitler might have had one of these conditions” – it’s actually that he’s in the top 1 per cent for all three. Potentially, this kind of explosive mix makes it quite a quite remarkable finding, but it’s not proof of anything yet because it’s just an indication. I would also say that we’re talking a lot about what responsibilities the makers of the programme have and the people involved in it. Both Turi and I, and everybody else involved in the programme, take these responsibilities very seriously. I also think, by the same token, that anybody watching this documentary and then commenting on it, particularly journalists reporting on it, equally has a responsibility to report on it in a serious way and to place it in context – not to emphasise one particular aspect to the exclusion of everything else, not to remove all the caveats that we have put in. That responsibility works both ways. During the media frenzy of the past few days, and when some journalists have emphasised certain findings of the programme or certain indications in the programme to the exclusion of others, or when people have talked about the risk of stigmatisation, I have asked myself: “Would some people have preferred us not to reveal certain findings, just to reveal some findings but hold back other findings?” Surely, if we’d done that and it had come out at some point in the future, that would’ve been a good reason to reproach us? <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/14-Hitler-Credit-BAYERISCHE-STAATSBIBLIOTHEK-8fabb60.jpg" width="3998" height="2641" alt="Hitler, dressed in a long overcoat and a cap, looks out over the sea" title="The DNA testing revealed that “there is a genetic predisposition towards” Hitler having schizophrenia, bipolar and autism, but there can be no direct diagnoses from these findings (Image by BAYERISCHE STAATSBIBLIOTHEK)" /> TK: Just to echo what Alex has said, it’s been really interesting to see how some of the journalism has gone. You know, they haven’t bothered to take on board everything that Alex and I talk about, about how it’s so important that you take this in the context of what we know about DNA and in the context of the historical setting for all of this. And also to echo that our role is to lay out what we have found, and to put in all of the caveats about what we can and cannot say. But again, as Alex was saying, if we held back information, that would be seen as kind of gatekeeping and elitist, and I would not feel comfortable with that. I think it would be inappropriate to withhold information. Among the research findings is the fact that Hitler’s DNA bears evidence of a genetic mutation that in some cases can result in abnormalities, including a micro-penis. Lots of the more salacious reporting has focused on this. Given that, do you have any regrets about its inclusion and the fact it’s overshadowed the rest of the research? TK: In the documentary and in the academic paper, we talk about how the DNA cannot tell us what Hitler’s genitalia looked like. All we can do is report that [a micropenis] is known to be strongly associated with Kallmann syndrome. He will have had some form of Kallmann syndrome. These are various phenotypes, or ways in which the condition manifests itself in somebody. All we can do, again, is put the caveats in. And this is where Alex’s work is really important, because there are historical documents around what we already know about Hitler’s genitalia. It’s when you put the genetics and the history together that you get a better understanding of all this. Read more | Simon Schama on British history if Hitler had beaten Churchill: "The Holocaust would have happened here" AJK: It was slightly predictable, the way that some newspapers and some media outlets have reported on this. For me, it’s not particularly interesting what Hitler’s genitalia looked like. What is interesting is the discovery that he had Kallmann syndrome, which is a genetic disorder. It actually explains a lot about Hitler’s private life – or, more accurately, his lack of a private life, because Kallmann is associated with low testosterone levels, low sex drive, and it impacts on the development of the reproductive features and the reproductive functions. It tells us a lot about how Hitler [might have] felt about intimate relationships, how he felt about himself, his level of self-consciousness, and thereby goes some way to explaining why he devoted himself completely to politics, to the exclusion of any kind of private life or relationships. Hitler is obviously not the only political figure to have foregone intimate relationships or sexual relationships or romantic relationships. But if we compare him to all the other leading Nazi figures, he is the outlier. All the other senior Nazis had wives, had children, often had extramarital affairs. So Hitler is unique in that respect and historians have puzzled over why this was for a long time. And I think this finding of Kallmann syndrome is really very significant and striking because it adds that final piece of the puzzle in explaining why Hitler basically didn’t have a private life. So as a historian, you do think there are real findings here that help explain Hitler’s personality and even his actions? AJK: Absolutely. Now they don’t explain all of his actions by any stretch. We talked earlier about environmental and social factors, the context of the times in which Hitler lived and his childhood experiences. All of those factors are equally, if not more, important than any genetic findings. However, these genetic findings contribute to our understanding of Hitler and why he behaved in certain ways. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-514704098-6f0fed0.jpg" width="3164" height="2641" alt="A black and white photo of a group of men in Nazi uniform walking down a set of steps. In the centre of the image is a young woman in a long black coat with 8 buttons down the front" title="Adolf Hitler pictured with Eva Braun, whom he met in 1929. Eyewitness testimony suggests the couple’s relationship was platonic, says Alex J Kay (Image by Getty Images)" /> Hitler did have a relationship with Eva Braun. Do the findings shed any new light on that particular relationship? AJK: Not specifically about that relationship as such, but it tallies with what we know about that relationship. Everything we know suggests that Hitler and Eva Braun were companions as much as anything else. We have numerous eyewitness statements from people who were close to them, from people who spent a lot of time with them. Hitler’s caretaker of eight years at the Berghof, his mountain retreat, Herbert Döhring, said there was never any evidence that Hitler and Eva Braun had sex. Christa Schroeder was one of Hitler’s secretaries for 12 years. She said exactly the same. Heinrich Hoffmann, who was the photographer who introduced Hitler and Eva Braun in the first place, said their relationship was always platonic. We also know they didn’t share a bedroom, either at the Berghof, in Hitler’s bunker in the final weeks of the war, or in Hitler’s suite of rooms at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. They always had separate rooms, so everything points to this having been a platonic relationship and not a sexual relationship. One of the experts featured in the documentary is Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who’s director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. He says: “The experience of neglect and abuse” – which you have talked about, Alex, in Hitler’s childhood – “is much more relevant to understanding why someone grows up with hate and anger rather than the genetics – the two interplay.” I wondered if either of you had anything you’d like to add to that? TK: As a geneticist, I’m the first person to say that genetics is just a part of the puzzle of who somebody is. This is where, again, it’s marrying genetics up with the history when we talk about what appears to be a genetic predisposition. We’ve got to set that really in the context of who was this individual? How did he grow up? What was the time that he was growing up in? The genetics is only going to give you a very small part of who somebody is and goes on to become. AJK: Simon Baron-Cohen is obviously in a much better position to comment on the relative importance or impact of genetics versus upbringing or childhood. However, I would be inclined overall to agree with him that environmental and social factors, particularly neglect and abuse during childhood, have a huge impact on the adult that a person becomes. And therefore, as I said earlier, these are at least as important as genetic factors – and I would be inclined to say more important. As we’ve been stressing, the genetics is only a part of the jigsaw puzzle, and doesn’t explain and cannot explain everything. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/17-Hitler-as-a-Child-Credit-NARA-c1e5ebb.jpg" width="1896" height="816" alt="A black and white photo of a young boy wearing a dark jacket and light shirt. He is looking seriously at the camera" title="Hitler as a child. It’s likely that abuse suffered by Hitler during his childhood greatly contributed to his character later in life (Image by NARA)" /> We are talking in the middle of a week where you’ve been at the centre of a media storm. Has the backlash in some quarters been along the lines of what you expected or has anything here come as a surprise? TK: I don’t want to speak for Alex, but we knew it was going to be controversial. For me, the most important thing to do is to say: “This is what the DNA can say, this is what the DNA cannot say.” We knew that some parts of the media were not going to listen to that, but all we can do as scientists is just keep the guardrails in about what we can and cannot say from somebody’s DNA. Again, it’s also placing all of this within the historical context. AJK: I think we did anticipate this would be big. This is a major project. It’s a world-first analysis of Hitler’s DNA, right? We all knew it would be controversial because of who this is. That’s perfectly understandable. I think we all also expected some dissenting voices. I personally have been a little surprised at just how huge it’s been and how global the response has been in the media. I wasn’t entirely expecting this magnitude of response. TK: I think it goes back to what Alex was saying about a responsibility in the media to report accurately. And while we knew that some people were not going to do this, in some ways the magnitude of how it’s been portrayed was something that I don’t think any of us were quite expecting. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/22-Hitler-General-Credit-BUNDESARCHIV-f932c12.jpg" width="1736" height="820" alt="A close up photograph of Hitler, with a short black moustache and a very serious expression on his face" title="According to Turi King, DNA testing like this provides “another layer of information” for historians to use to understand Hitler further (Image by BUNDESARCHIV)" /> What do you hope is the next stage for our understanding about Hitler and the period of history in which he was part? TK: From a geneticist’s point of view, we have done this analysis. I keep coming back to the guardrails about what DNA can and cannot say, and context. It’s another layer of information that historians such as Alex can draw on in terms of how they understand Hitler. AJK: I’m still trying to digest the reactions to this step in our attempts to understand Hitler. I think I say somewhere in the documentary that this will change the way we think about Hitler in the future and that we’ll be talking about it for a long time. I stand by that. I do think that it has added very significant new information and added a new layer of understanding. I don’t know if this is realistic, but I would actually hope that maybe in the future we can treat Hitler a little bit less like a mythical figure or a monster, although he was certainly guilty of monstrous acts, and instead try to understand how a human being can get to the point where they do this kind of thing. I’ve always been a little bit concerned when people dismiss Hitler and the Nazis as monsters, because if we dismiss somebody as a monster then we’re not obliged to explain them or understand how they could commit the acts they committed. But the scary fact of the matter is that Hitler was a human being and all of those hundreds of thousands of Nazi perpetrators who did monstrous, horrific things were human beings. So sadly, we need to understand how this was possible. Turi King is the lead geneticist on the research into Hitler’s DNA. Alex J Kay is a historian specialising in Nazi Germany. Their groundbreaking work is covered in the two-part Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator
“We analysed Hitler’s DNA – and what we discovered made us gasp”
Turi King and Alex J Kay have married genetics with history to study a sample of DNA from Adolf Hitler – and, as they reveal, their research has thrown up some extraordinary insights into the Nazi dictator’s private life
Few historical figures have been discussed and debated as much as Adolf Hitler. We have a wealth of primary source material available to us about his life, including his autobiographical manifesto Mein Kampf, personal correspondence, political directives and military orders, recordings and transcripts of his countless speeches, eyewitness accounts, photographs and film footage. Now, 80 years after his death, Hitler's DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, a groundbreaking documentary produced by Blink Films and currently airing on Channel 4, has unlocked a new source by presenting the results of a world-first analysis of a sample of Hitler’s DNA. The DNA was taken from the blood on a small piece of fabric cut from the sofa on which Hitler died after shooting himself in his Berlin bunker on 30 April 1945 We have the privilege of being part of this documentary – both as lead investigators and in our separate roles as senior historical consultant (Alex) and the person leading the genetic analysis (Turi). The background to the documentary was a multi-stage process, each step a powerful marrying of genetics with history. It probably goes without saying that the first step was to confirm that the blood sample was actually that of Hitler. With this in mind, it’s important to remember that, as in any forensic case, DNA evidence cannot be taken in isolation. It has to be combined with other types of evidence, in this case reaching back into the past for information first about Hitler’s suicide and then about how the piece of fabric came to be available for DNA testing. The Führer’s family tree So, what does the history tell us? With the Red Army closing in, Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker on the afternoon of 30 April 1945. In the days following his death, the Soviets controlled access, and few people were allowed in. Among those who were permitted to enter was Lieutenant Colonel Roswell P Rosengren, public information officer for General Dwight D Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander in Europe. While taking various souvenirs, Rosengren cut out a swatch of the fabric on the sofa on which Hitler had shot himself – and which, crucially, was stained with blood. He took it home to the United States and kept it under lock and key, before passing it down to his son. It was later acquired by the Gettysburg Museum of History in Pennsylvania, which in turn offered it for DNA analysis to anyone who was interested. Accompanying the swatch was a signed affidavit from Rosengren’s son confirming its provenance. Certainly, the fabric looked like it matched photographs of the sofa. So far so good. Next came the genetic analysis for the identification. It is standard in cases such as this to analyse the DNA from the sample and compare it either with a previous authenticated sample from the individual in question or with the DNA of a close relative. Yet there were no such close relatives available to carry this out: Hitler had no children. However, as part of a previous study, more than a decade ago, a journalist called Jean-Paul Mulders and a genealogist named Marc Vermeeren had traced distant male-line members of Hitler’s family tree living in Europe and had obtained DNA from one of them. Mulders had been particularly interested in tracing male-line members of Hitler’s family tree because there is a segment of DNA that is passed down through the male line: the Y-chromosome. Y-chromosome types differ between individuals, but male-line members of the same family tree should carry identical, or near-identical, Y-chromosome types. Analysing the Y-chromosome type from a male-line relative gives you, essentially, Hitler’s Y-chromosome type. All these years later, if the blood on the piece of fabric was from Hitler, the Y-chromosome from it should match that from the relative whose DNA had already been tested. Read more | Step inside Hitler's U-boats to witness the nightmarish reality of life on board This was a huge moment in the project. So you can imagine our relief when we established that there was a DNA match – and, what’s more, it was a rare Y-chromosome type. Still, here historical context is, again, important. What were the chances of a male-line relative having access to the bunker and, crucially, also bleeding on the sofa? Given the rarity of the Y-chromosome type and what we know about the whereabouts of Hitler’s few male-line relatives at the time, the chances of this happening were vanishingly small. The blood sample, and thus the DNA in it, belonged to Hitler. We had his DNA. Sequencing the genome The match led to another of the study’s major discoveries: an answer to the question of whether Hitler had Jewish heritage through his paternal grandfather. In view of Hitler’s virulent antisemitism and his pivotal role in the extermination of 6 million European Jews, it is understandable that this particular rumour has triggered a great deal of speculation among both scholars and the general public alike. Well, the rigorous scientific testing carried out for the documentary has now confirmed beyond doubt what serious historians had long believed: namely that there is no truth in a rumour that has circulated since the early 1920s. The DNA match firmly debunks the Jewish ancestry myth. The next step was to sequence the entire genome. Hitler now joins thousands of historical individuals – often nameless but including among their number the famous German composer Ludwig van Beethoven – whose genomes have been sequenced. We approached the task with an open mind. But given how many medical biographers have tried to diagnose Hitler from a distance, we were naturally interested in what the former German leader’s DNA could tell us about his health. But first, let us be clear about what Hitler’s DNA can tell us – and, more importantly, what it cannot. This calls for a quick genetics lesson. For some diseases and conditions, the process is straightforward. Known as monogenic in origin, the development of a given condition can be traced back to a single gene or genetic variant that affects how the gene is working or, in this case, not working. A common example of a single gene disorder is cystic fibrosis. However, for other conditions and diseases, it is a far more complex picture, because they are both polygenic and multifactorial. This means that many – often hundreds – of genetic variants are involved, each incrementally increasing or decreasing a person’s risk of developing the condition. What’s more, the risk of developing the condition is also influenced by environmental factors ranging from chemical exposure (such as smoking) to lifestyle (such as diet). A common example of one of these conditions is coronary artery disease. A shock revelation We analysed the DNA in two ways: by sending the genetic results to experts in different fields so that they could identify any medical conditions of interest; and also by running it through the standard medical pipelines for known genetic variants associated with various conditions. The results were striking. First, thanks to the work of colleagues at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, we found that Hitler had a well-known deletion in a gene that is associated with Kallmann syndrome and the elaborately named Congenital hypogonadotropic hypogonadism. While the severity can vary from person to person, this mutation can result, among other things, in an impaired testosterone production, low libido, abnormalities in the development of sexual organs, and, by extension, a disrupted reproductive function. This was a gasp moment in the study, and of particular interest to historians. The revelation that Hitler had some form of Kallmann syndrome is intriguing because of the implications for his private life. The finding suggests there could have been a causal relationship between Hitler’s genetic make-up and particular facets of his behaviour. It complements what we already knew about this part of Hitler’s biography, and it sheds light on aspects of his life that we could previously only speculate about. A physical examination of Hitler, conducted during his incarceration in Landsberg prison in 1923 following the failed Munich putsch – but only known about since the rediscovery of the medical file in 2010 – revealed that he had “right-sided cryptorchidism”. That is, an undescended testicle. (It turns out that the British satirical song ‘Hitler Has Only Got One Ball’, the origins of which remain unknown, was close to the mark after all.) “Some sense of shame” This physical abnormality might help to explain an account given by August Kubizek, Hitler’s closest (and perhaps only) friend during his adolescence. Hitler and Kubizek shared a room in Vienna from February to July 1908. Noting Hitler’s “obvious indifference to the opposite sex”, his “strict monk-like asceticism” and the fact that he “refrained from masturbation”, Kubizek observed: “My friend undoubtedly found favour with the opposite sex although, to my amazement, he never took advantage of it.” Commenting on the entirety of their friendship from the autumn of 1905, when they met at the opera in Linz, to the summer of 1908, when their time together in Vienna came to an end, Kubizek concluded: “I think I can say with certainty: Adolf never met a girl, either in Linz or Vienna, who actually gave herself to him.” Tellingly, Ernst Hanfstaengl, one of Hitler’s closest confidants during the 1920s and 1930s, later wrote: “I can never recall having seen him in a bathing costume, nor had anyone else. A story, probably authentic, was frequently told that Hitler’s old army comrades, who had seen him in the wash-house, had noted that his genital organs were almost freakishly underdeveloped, and he doubtless had some sense of shame about displaying himself. It seemed to me that this must all be part of the underlying complex in his physical relations, which was compensated for by the terrifying urge for domination expressed in the field of politics.” According to the historian Ian Kershaw, author of the definitive biography of Hitler, “Kubizek’s account, together with the language Hitler himself used in Mein Kampf, does point at the least to an acutely disturbed and repressed sexual development.” Rumours that Hitler had been infected with syphilis by a Jewish prostitute were without foundation: medical tests in 1940 showed that Hitler had not suffered from syphilis. The discovery that Hitler had Kallmann syndrome might thus be the key to explaining his seemingly “disturbed and repressed sexual development”. Looking for patterns Hitler may well have been extremely self-conscious about his body and, for this reason, reluctant to engage in relations of an intimate or sexual nature – and perhaps even uninterested in that side of life. This fact would help to explain his absolute devotion to politics to the almost complete exclusion of any kind of private life. Such devotion was exceptional among Nazi leaders. All other senior Nazis – Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Rudolf Hess, Albert Speer, and so on – had wives and children. Some even had extramarital affairs. Ian Kershaw also wrote: “There was no ‘private life’ for Hitler. Of course, he could enjoy his escapist films, his daily walk to the Tea-House at the Berghof, his time in his alpine idyll far from government ministries in Berlin. But these were empty routines. There was no retreat to a sphere outside the political, to a deeper existence that conditioned his public reflexes.” Read more | Did Eva Braun love Adolf Hitler? The discovery and testing of Hitler’s DNA, combined with the historical facts already available to us, may explain why. When testing the DNA sample, experts at Aarhus University in Denmark looked at more complex conditions such as neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders. When scientists are interested in a condition that is polygenic, they determine which genetic variants might predispose someone to the condition by looking, in a large population, at the patterns of DNA in people who have that particular condition compared to those who do not. One can then take an individual’s DNA and place them, based on the genetic variants they carry, on the bell-curve distribution to see how they compare to others in that population. Do they have a lot of the genetic variants that seem to predispose someone to the condition, or very few? This is known as a polygenic score. Hitler’s results were, again, striking. His polygenic score placed him in the top 1 per cent for schizophrenia, for autism and for bipolar disorder. However, we have to be really clear here: Hitler’s polygenic score being high is not diagnostic. We cannot, from his DNA, say that he would have been diagnosed with any of these conditions. Even people with the highest scores aren’t diagnosed with the disorder 95 per cent of the time. What makes Hitler so unusual is not the possibility that he might have had any one of these disorders on its own, but rather the fact that his placement in the top 1 per cent for the polygenic scores of all three of these conditions is exceptional: none of the other individuals in the population analysis had the same result. Still, we know that numerous environmental factors, such as adverse life events, would have had a big influence on his likelihood of developing them. What’s more, it is important not to stigmatise people with these conditions. It is rare for anyone with any of these conditions to go on to commit violent acts, let alone genocide. Indeed, they are more likely to be on the receiving end of violence. Genetics is only one part of the puzzle in determining who someone will become. Nature vs nurture No attempt to explain the man Hitler became and the extreme inhumanity he exhibited can, therefore, be reduced to a question of genetics. But it is interesting to view these scores in light of what we already knew about him. Environmental and social factors played a central role in moulding Hitler. Born in provincial Austria in 1889, he had a traumatic childhood, experiencing abuse at the hands of his father and losing four out of five siblings as well as both parents by the age of 19. He later wrote in Mein Kampf that the death of his mother, Klara, had been “a dreadful blow”. These events would have gone a long way toward shaping Hitler’s character, regardless of his genetic makeup. Similarly important for the bigger picture is the fact that Adolf Hitler was only one man. He was the undisputed dictator of Germany for 12 years. He devised and ordered the genocide of Europe’s Jews, as well as countless other atrocities. But he did not act alone. There were hundreds of thousands of perpetrators, each with their own genetic makeup and life experiences. Millions more eagerly followed him and profited from his policies. Genetics does not bring us any closer to understanding and explaining how the Holocaust could have happened. At the same time, it is undeniable that certain people have a huge and lasting impact on the course of historical events. Hitler is one of those people. Ian Kershaw once wrote of the dictator: “He is one of the few individuals of whom it can be said with absolute certainty: without him, the course of history would have been different.” Being able to analyse Hitler’s DNA thus offers us a remarkable opportunity to add another layer of information in the quest to understand more about the man regarded as “the embodiment of modern political evil” (Kershaw). However, we want to emphasise that it is not possible to see evil in someone’s DNA. A new piece of the puzzle It can be argued that only under Hitler could the Nazis have come to power, consolidated that power, waged a European war and committed the most terrible crimes in modern history. One reason for this is Hitler’s single-mindedness in the pursuit of power, which was unmatched by any other senior Nazi. That he had some form of Kallmann syndrome could well have been a factor in his renunciation of any kind of private life or intimate relationships. All available evidence suggests that he did not even have sex with his long-term companion, Eva Braun. Hitler always claimed that his life was devoted to Germany, so that there was no room in it for a wife. It seems this claim might, at least in part, have been a way of covering up his aversion to intimate relationships, and that his genes could have played a more significant role in his decision not to marry (until the day before his death) and not to have children than he was willing to admit. No single piece of evidence explains everything. We cannot take the genetic information about Hitler in isolation. It needs to be couched within our knowledge of what DNA can and cannot tell us, but crucially also within what we know about Hitler, and the time in which he lived. A rare constellation of factors – genetic, environmental and societal – all contributed to the emergence of Hitler. The discovery of his DNA – and the findings that have emerged from its analysis and are now presented in this cutting-edge documentary – provide historians with a rare and extremely significant new piece of the jigsaw puzzle in their attempts to understand and explain the most notorious figure of the 20th century. Turi King is the lead geneticist on the research into Hitler’s DNA. Alex J Kay is a historian specialising in Nazi Germany. Their groundbreaking work is covered in the two-part Channel 4 and Blink Films documentary Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator
It was Operation Unthinkable: Churchill's "impossible" plan to start World War 3
In 1945, as Europe celebrated peace, Winston Churchill quietly asked his generals to plan an attack on the Soviet Union. But how close was Britain to an immediate and consecutive war?
In the summer of 1945, Europe lay in ruins. But for the first time in close to a decade, the continent was contemplating the prospect of peace. Hitler was dead, the Nazi high command had collapsed, and while the war raged on in the Pacific, bombs had at least finished dropping across Europe. It was a fresh and uneasy peace – but it was still a peace. But even as celebrations were filling the streets of Europe’s great cities, British prime minister Winston Churchill was already considering another conflict. At Churchill’s request, the British chiefs of staff had drafted a proposal codenamed Operation Unthinkable. Its goal was immense: a plan to drive the Red Army out of eastern Europe and restore the independence of the nations that had now fallen under Soviet control. Within weeks of the Second World War ending, Britain was already assessing the possibility of a third. It was, as its name implied, almost inconceivable. And yet, Churchill insisted on seeing the plans. Speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, historian Tim Bouverie explained how the idea developed. From WW2 allies to adversaries During the war, Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union had fought together against Nazi Germany. But their alliance was built on a pragmatic necessity rather than trust, or a sense of shared politics. By the time of the Yalta conference in February 1945, the cracks were already showing. Read more | The rise and fall of the Third Reich At Yalta, Churchill, US president Franklin D Roosevelt and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed on a postwar settlement for Europe, including a promise that liberated countries would hold free elections. Yet, as Bouverie explains, those promises began to crumble almost immediately. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/GettyImages-2642765-1-b0480b2-e1762862505374.jpg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="In the grounds of the Livadia Palace at Yalta, Winston Churchill, Franklin D Roosevelt, and Joseph Stalin meet. The wartime leaders of Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union gathered to plan the final defeat of Nazi Germany and shape the postwar world order." title="Three Powers Meet" /> “In the months following the Yalta agreement, Roosevelt was bombarded with messages from Churchill,” says Bouverie. “He gave details of how the Soviets were breaking the Yalta accords, how they were refusing to allow Allied observers into eastern Europe, how Stalin was dragging his feet on the exchange of prisoners of war, how he was progressing his plans to dominate these countries by force.” While Roosevelt still hoped for cooperation, Churchill grew increasingly alarmed as Soviet control expanded through Poland, Romania and the Balkans. The uneasy alliance that had won the war was quickly hardening into mistrust. The ‘percentages deal’ But Churchill’s suspicion of Stalin had predated Yalta. “[During] Churchill’s mission to Moscow in October 1944, he came up with the infamous ‘percentages deal’ with Stalin over how the British and the Soviets were going to divide influence in the Balkans,” says Bouverie. On a scrap of paper, Churchill jotted down rough proportions of influence: 90 per cent Soviet in Romania, 90 per cent British in Greece, and equal shares elsewhere. Stalin ticked the paper and passed it back. Even if he couldn’t stop Soviet domination outright, Churchill at least hoped to provide some limit to it. Read more | Who was Hermann Göring? But by early 1945, it was clear Stalin intended to keep what he had taken. Churchill’s appeals to Roosevelt for a firmer response went largely ignored. It was out of that frustration that he came up with a more drastic idea. Planning the impossible In the spring of 1945, as Soviet troops rolled towards Berlin (doing so more quickly than the British and Americans had expected) they consolidated control over eastern Europe. “[It was then that Churchill] asked his chiefs of staff to look at the military feasibility of driving back the Red Army to the Soviet Union’s supposed natural frontiers; to where they were before the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.” Read more | The eastern front in WW2: how it all went wrong for the Germans The proposal envisioned British and American forces (and, controversially, rearmed German soldiers) launching a surprise offensive to push Soviet troops east. The chiefs of staff produced a preliminary report, codenaming the plan Operation Unthinkable. Its stated aim was to compel Stalin to accept a limitation to Soviet boundaries, but it would have meant an Anglo-American war against their recent ally within weeks of victory in Europe. Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now Why it could never happen Churchill’s advisers quickly concluded that Operation Unthinkable was impossible on every level. “It was unthinkable for two reasons,” says Bouverie, “and these are reasons which surely Churchill knew.” Militarily, the Red Army was vast. It outnumbered the Allied forces several times over, occupying most of eastern and central Europe. Even if an attack succeeded in Poland, Stalin could retreat deep into Russian territory, forcing the Allies into a long, unwinnable campaign. “Suddenly it wouldn’t have been the Wehrmacht freezing to death outside Moscow,” Bouverie notes, “but the British and the Americans.” Read more | The Nuremberg Trials: the tribunal that brought Nazi leaders to justice Politically, the idea was even more untenable. “The British and American publics had been fed on a pro-Soviet, pro-Red Army propaganda diet for the last three years,” Bouverie explains. “[Stalin] was Uncle Joe; these were our comrades-in-arms.” To persuade exhausted soldiers and civilians to fight again, in the harshest of fronts, was unimaginable. Churchill’s fears, and the Cold War to come Operation Unthinkable was quietly shelved by June 1945. A month later, Churchill was voted out of office in the general election that brought Clement Attlee’s Labour government to power. Read more | Did the Cold War ever really end? Still, the episode revealed how profoundly Churchill distrusted Stalin and anticipated the coming divide in Europe. “From 1943 onwards,” Bouverie notes, “Churchill was increasingly obsessed with trying to save as much of eastern Europe as he could from the USSR’s domination and from communism.” But his concerns, for all they foreshadowed the Cold War, didn’t matter. “The idea of asking the British and the American people to engage in another conflict – against an emerging superpower, after five years of war to defeat Hitlerite Germany – was completely and utterly unthinkable.” Tim Bouverie was speaking to Danny Bird on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
I met two survivors of the Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. This is their story
In 1943, women and girls were forced to form an orchestra inside Auschwitz-Birkenau. Acclaimed biographer Anne Sebba describes her experiences of meeting the ensemble’s last surviving members – and what their words reveal about music, friendship and the will to endure
“Why did I survive?” the cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch mused in one of my interviews with her about the extraordinary Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz. “I came to the conclusion that it’s better somebody survives to tell the story. I don’t feel too guilty about that.” She is still, at the age of 100, sharing her experiences. Anita was a valuable member of the girls’ marching band, the name they gave themselves, because until she joined there were no bass instruments, but instead a motley collection of recorders, piccolos, mandolins, violins, an accordion and a guitar. At its height under Vienna-born conductor Alma Rosé, a niece of Gustav Mahler, approximately 43 women and girls were saved from being killed in the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Almost all the musicians survived the camp, although two died from disease and malnutrition after they had been forcibly moved to Belsen in early 1945. The Nazis had ordered the creation of the band in 1943 so that the other women prisoners – who had to work in the nearby factories or demolition squads – would march faster, making it easier for them to be counted in rows of five. It was the only all-female orchestra in any of the camps, prisons and ghettos run by the Nazis, and featured members from 11 different nations and a variety of political and religious backgrounds. Although the women sometimes argued amongst themselves (mostly over food, or lack of it), they pulled together when they needed to perform. If they did not play well, they would be sent to the gas chambers. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/02-bf880dd.jpg" width="382" height="538" alt="The orchestra was conducted by Vienna-born musician Alma Rosé, a niece of Gustav Mahler. Tragically, the virtuoso violinist would not survive Auschwitz." title="The orchestra was conducted by Vienna-born musician Alma Rosé, a niece of Gustav Mahler. Tragically, the virtuoso violinist would not survive Auschwitz." /> One of the themes in my book The Women’s Orchestra of Auschwitz, which was published earlier this year to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, is to examine what gave these women the desire to survive when they were surrounded by such suffering and brutality. Many of the musicians had arrived in Auschwitz after seeing their parents, friends or siblings pulled into the line of those who were immediately gassed. Others had already been in prison for resisting or being Jewish, often tortured, before they were given a place in the music block. Some women were driven by a desire for revenge on those who had betrayed them; others by a desperate need to bear witness to what they had seen. But most simply wanted to live and taste a better life. The orchestra, which played twice a day as the prisoners went in and out of work and rehearsed constantly during the hours in between, was no soft option. Yet I was only able to find one or two women who, if offered, refused a place in the group, recognising that it gave them a chance for life. When Alma Rosé needed a new accordion player, 150 women applied for the position. Testimony from a woman like Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is gold dust for a historian. The story of why music flourished in a death camp is so impossible to believe that it almost needs a living witness as proof that it happened. While the Nazis were trying to eradicate Jews and obliterate Jewish culture, here they were preserving a small group of them. Anita is extraordinary not only in her longevity, but in her ability to articulate how the women felt at the time. “It was a luxury to feel anything,” she revealed during one of our interviews. “We just hoped to live until the next day.” Although Anita always insists that survival was “a matter of luck”, she admits that being a cellist instead of a tattooed number restored a crucial element of humanity. She also maintains that the music was not what saved them, even if it did give them something to concentrate on amidst the brutality and killing. “We focused only on ‘would I still be alive tomorrow?’ from one day to the next. Nothing more.” Astonishing courage When I began my research, I believed that Anita was the only remaining survivor of the orchestra. However, due to an unlikely series of events (and an announcement in The Bookseller that I was working on the project), I was contacted by the granddaughter of another player to tell me that there was a second survivor, Hilde Grünbaum, living on a kibbutz in Israel. I immediately went out to visit her, and our interview was crucial in helping me understand the human will to survive in the direst of circumstances. Grünbaum had such a strong moral certainty that she would survive and live to see better times that she declined a place on Kindertransport to come to England. She also became the unofficial leader of the group when the women were transferred to Belsen (Alma Rosé had died of a sudden illness in April 1944), ensuring that everyone had their fair share of the meagre soup and bread rations. When asked many years later about what drove her in such appalling circumstances, she was unequivocal: “I knew that if I didn’t do my best to help people then there would be nothing left.” Meeting Hilde, by then aged 99, helped me understand the real privileges of the women in the musicians’ block. It wasn’t so much the pair of underpants and access to a toilet, important though these were, but the ability to hope. For Hilde, a passionate Zionist, this meant the hope that she could one day lead a better life in a new country where Jews would not face antisemitism. Hilde never lacked courage, and just as the Jewish musicians were being forced onto the train for Belsen, she bravely dashed back into the music block to rescue some mementoes, as she knew the world would never believe what the women had been forced to do survive. The items – Alma Rosé’s address book, a volume of Faust and a hand-sewn sheet music bag – are now in the collections of Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem. Together, they represent an important part of any historian’s research into the orchestra. The will to survive There is no shortage of literature about the Holocaust, and there are several memoirs about the orchestra specifically. Many of the accounts date from the 1990s and were written in response to the television drama Playing for Time, which was itself based on a ghostwritten – and highly fictionalised – book by orchestra member Fania Fénelon (which should be viewed as more of a novel rather than a memoir). There are also hundreds of filmed interviews available online, some curated by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, and others provided by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation. These moving testimonies – some of which were conducted with fellow prisoners who had heard the musicians play – were invaluable in trying to understand what it must have been like to feel cold, hungry and fearful, yet summon up the strength to perform music twice a day. But while I have a proper reverence for archive material, there are few surviving diaries from Auschwitz. Access to writing supplies was limited, so many of the primary sources were actually recorded many years after the fact. People tend to remember the same events differently, and their accounts are more likely to be subjective. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/05-48201be.jpg" width="2291" height="3103" alt="Anne Sebba with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turned 100 in July 2025. The musician is still telling her story, more than 80 years after the end of the Second World War." title="Anne Sebba with Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turned 100 in July 2025. The musician is still telling her story, more than 80 years after the end of the Second World War." /> However, I believe there is something vitally important about being able to interview those who witnessed the events first-hand. Every survivor I have spoken to has said that, unless you were there, you cannot imagine what it was like to feel fear, hunger and deprivation on this scale. I have tried to create a synthesis of all these sources in a bid to answer two key questions: were these ordinary women who transcended their circumstances because they never gave up hope in a better future? Or were they extraordinary women from the start? I can never know for certain, but I believe that sisterhood, group solidarity and small acts of kindness each played a part in strengthening both their will to survive and the qualities that make us human. Anne Sebba is an award-winning biographer, lecturer and journalist. Her most recent book is The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz: A Story of Survival (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025)
“I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg”
That’s what renowned barrister, and bestselling historian, Philippe Sands told us, but could you? With the 80th anniversary of the famous war trials upon us – and a new movie to boot – Dave Musgrove reflects on the perils of staging a trial the likes of which the world had never seen before
To have defended someone like Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland during WW2, charged with the murder of four million human beings, is a tough thing to imagine. Nevertheless, when I asked Philippe Sands – lawyer and writer – whether he would have defended the Nazis in the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, he told me “I hope so! I'm a believer that everyone is entitled to have their lawyer to defend their rights and their interests, irrespective of who they are or what they've done.” That was my final question to Sands after we’d recorded four episodes of an upcoming HistoryExtra podcast series on the Nuremberg Trials at the conclusion of the Second World War. I wanted to know where he’d stand on that question, because our conversation had reminded me how complicated some of the moral, as well as legal, questions were around the decision by the Allies to put a selection of leading Nazis on trial in November 1945. As a UK barrister, Sands is subject to the ‘cab-rank rule’, which obliges members of his profession to “take on any case provided that it is within their competence and they are available and appropriately remunerated”, but the idea of having to defend a Nazi war criminal, quite understandably, gave him pause for thought. Read more | Hitler's downfall and the end of the war and the Third Reich The trial of the century We shall all be given pause to reflect on the Nuremberg Trials as they hove back into public consciousness on their 80th anniversary. The trials ran from November 1945 through to October 1946. Twenty-four leading Nazis were indicted, though only 21 of them eventually stood trial in the courtroom proceedings. Neither Adolf Hitler nor the SS leader Heinrich Himmler were among them, as both had already taken their own lives. That left the biggest name in the dock as Hitler’s successor Hermann Göring, along with Hans Frank, Rudolf Hess, Admiral Karl Donitz and others. As with many big anniversaries, there will be media depictions, and so we have Russell Crowe playing Göring in the film 2025 film Nuremberg. Read more | Life in Nazi Germany We don’t see any of the lawyers who defended Göring and the other Nazis in the film, but rather we follow the efforts of the American chief prosecutor Robert H Jackson (played by Michael Shannon) to ensure that the crimes of the Nazis were exposed to the world. Plus, there is the fascinating side story of the US psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek) who was tasked with assessing the mental state of the defendants. A trial unlike any other After watching the film I was drawn to reflect on how it compared to what I gleaned from Sands. Where it matches up is in its depiction of the wrangling over who should be put on trial and for what crimes. This was an international court with no precedent. The film also captures some of the urgency of the planning for the trial. Given that the Second World War only ended in Europe in May 1945, it was a very tight schedule to have the court up and running by November of the same year. Obviously there was a lot of thought given to the idea of a trial before the end of the war, though it was not a certainty that it would happen. Soviet leader Josef Stalin and US President Franklin D Roosevelt wanted a trial, but British Prime Minister Winston Churchill initially preferred the idea of summary justice. He wanted the Nazi leaders lined up and shot. He came round though, and at the Yalta Conference in February 1945, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin agreed there would be a trial for Nazi leaders. With the Allied commanders in accord, the lawyers could get to work. Read more | When and why did the US get involved in WW2? “It seems almost incredible that such an enterprise as the famous Nuremberg Trials were put together in so short period of time,” said Sands. “There are two really big issues they had to decide on. The first one is, who do you go for? And an early decision was taken to go for leaders. They wanted people who had planned, who'd been in government positions or who were serious industrialists. In the end, they chose 24 top political and financial leaders in Germany. “But the second issue, and this was even more complicated, was what were the crimes? As of February 1945, there was only one international crime, and that was war crime, which is the targeting of civilians in times of war.” Read more | Was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the US in WW2 justified? The answer was that the Allies invented new crimes. “Crimes against humanity; crimes against peace, (which was waging illegal war), and then as a subhead of war crimes, [and] genocide, which makes its way in through the back door.” What the film gets right The film captures those deliberations well, along with the practicalities of actually running the trial, rebuilding the damaged courthouse, housing the prisoners, and gathering the international legal teams and global media in the shattered ruins of Nuremberg. It also, I think, demonstrates another point that Sands stressed to me, which is that the trial had to be fair, and had to be seen to be fair, under the glaring bulb of the press cameras. Though it was a form of victors’ justice, in that the Allies made the rules and ran the trial, Sands notes that “The defendants basically felt they got a fair trial. No one complained about the quality of the proceedings. No one complained about the behaviour of the judges.” A running theme of the film is the jeopardy that the Nazis might not be found guilty; that the Allies would be exposed to international ridicule. That was the risk of running a fair trial. Perhaps proof of that fairness is that some of the defendants were in fact acquitted. The film concludes, reasonably enough, with the hanging of those who were found guilty, but it omits to mention that some of those in the dock were sentenced to imprisonment and some were acquitted and walked free. The film also does well at showing the media interest in the trials, and particularly how the evidence presented by the prosecution of the crimes enacted in the concentration camps was brought to global attention via the court. The showing of film reel from the camps in the courtroom evinced global shock, as the true horror of the Nazi Final Solution was revealed to many observers around the world for the first time. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/11/hermann-goring-nuremberg-trials-ae99ebb.jpeg" width="1500" height="1000" alt="Hermann Göring testifies in his own defense at the Nuremberg Trials in 1946. Once a leading figure of the Nazi regime, Göring faced prosecution alongside other high-ranking officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the aftermath of the Second World War." title="hermann-goring-nuremberg-trials" /> Göring and Kelley One of the key themes of the film is the relationship between Göring and the psychiatrist Kelley. Russell Crowe’s portrayal of the Nazi leader is something to behold, and is pretty uncomfortable viewing in the first half of the film as the viewer is tempted to find some likeable elements to the character, through his dealings with Kelley. In the real trial, incidentally, the psychologist Dr Gustave Gilbert played a key role, as is depicted in Sands’ book East West Street. This isn’t something I discussed with Sands, but we did talk about the cross-examination of Göring by Robert Jackson. This scene is the dramatic highlight of the film, and it shows Crowe’s Göring getting the better of Shannon’s Jackson, only for Richard E Grant, playing the British lawyer David Maxwell Fyfe, to step in and rescue the situation. Sands told me that a relevant must-read is the account written by the American journalist Janet Flanner. Read more | The 1943 battle of Kursk: was it the biggest tank battle in history? “From Janet Flanner, we get the most extraordinary account of the cross-examination by Robert Jackson of Herman Göring. She observed that Göring runs rings around Jackson, and the reason was that Jackson was essentially an appellate lawyer. He didn’t know how to cross examine,” says Sands. “Flanner writes an excoriating account of Jackson’s performance as a cross examiner. She describes how eventually he had to stop. And a British lawyer, David Maxwell Fyfe, who knows how to cross examine, comes on and destroys Göring in short order. These accounts, absolutely brilliantly written, give you the full flavour of what’s going on in the courtroom.” Nazi Germany | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy Member exclusive | Everything you need to know about Nazi Germany, guided by historian, author and broadcaster Laurence Rees. Explore the course now As courtroom drama scenes go, Nuremberg’s Goering cross-examination is not quite up there with Jack Nicholson barking ‘You can’t handle the truth’ at Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men, but Crowe’s moment in the dock is nevertheless a memorable one. The film ends with a moralising message about how we need to take heed of the lessons of Nuremberg. I wasn’t convinced by the conclusion – it felt a bit forced to me. But the legacy of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1945-46 is certainly something we should take note of. "Nuremberg was a revolutionary moment” says Sands. “It was the first time in human history that countries came together and said the power of the state, the sovereign, the king, president or prime minister, is not absolute; you cannot anymore treat your own nationals or the nationals of other countries as you wish. You can’t kill and disappear individuals; you can’t kill and disappear groups. You are subject to constraints, not imposed by your own legal order, but by international law." The rule of international law depends on lawyers prepared to defend those charged with having broken it. So it makes perfect sense that Sands, as a vocal defender of the international legal system that owes so much to Nuremberg, should hope that he would have been prepared to act for the Nazis in the dock there. For more content like this, check out the best historical movies of all time as chosen by historians and ranked by you, history TV shows and films to stream tonight, and our picks of the new history TV and radio released in the UK this week