The story that Hitler had only one testicle has been in the news again, following the publication of a book by Peter Fleischmann. I thought this had long been confirmed, but it seems that publications during the Cold War may have been suspect.
German historian Professor Peter Fleischmann claims to have discovered the results of a medical examination on Hitler after his arrest in 1923. The reports confirm that Hitler suffered from a birth defect known as “right-side cryptorchidism” – an undescended right testicle.
The records were thought to have been lost but resurfaced at an auction in Bavaria in 2010. They were quickly confiscated by the Bavarian government before being studied at Erlangen-Nuremberg University.
This would disprove reports that it was blown off in the First World War.
This was headline news in Germany last Saturday in the ‘pithy’ Bildzeitung that referred to the pre-Cold War joke of British soldiers about Hitler’s inadequacy. In post-War Southern England, my primary schoolfriends and I used to chant every week the ditty learned off by heart from our ex-military fathers:
‘Hitler has got only one b***
The other is in the Old Town Hall.
Himmler has something sim’lar
And Poor Old Go-B***s (Goebbels) has no b***s at all.’
I felt that the ditty was implied in my post, but you do like to spell things out.
Our second line was neither yours nor the Albert Hall one, but ‘Goering has two, but very small’.
Thanks for the extra and new line after all this time. Interesting implication of yours that native Austrian and German readers of this blog – and born long after us – are already familiar with the ditty in English..
You sound skeptical, Adrian. No need to be. The only one b+ ditty is just as popular as the washing on the Siegfried Line to non-natives. They feature in about every second documentary on WWII, also available on Youtube.
Ah yes, I’d forgotten that when I spent three weeks with a family near Heidelberg in 1964 or thereabouts, the father sang ‘We’re hanging up our washing on the Siegfried Line’.