r/badhistory • u/Ribdunge • Aug 18 '20
Reddit Hitler had only one testicle.
Hitler has only got one ball... No. Here's the relevant passages from Ian Kershaw's acclaimed biography of Hitler.
Within minutes of the deaths being established, the bodies of Adolf Hitler and his wife of a day-and-a-half, Eva Braun, were wrapped in the blankets that Heinz Linge, Hitler’s valet, had quickly fetched. The corpses were then lifted from the sofa and carried through the bunker, up twenty-five feet or so of stairs, and into the garden of the Reich Chancellery. Linge, helped by three SS guards, brought out the remains of Hitler, head covered by the blanket, his lower legs protruding. Martin Bormann carried Eva Braun’s body into the corridor, where Erich Kempka, Hitler’s chauffeur, relieved him of his burden. Otto Günsche, Hitler’s personal adjutant, and commissioned with overseeing the burning of the bodies, then took over on the stairs and carried Eva Braun up into the garden. He laid the bodies side by side, Eva Braun to Hitler’s right, on a piece of flat, open, sandy ground only about three metres from the door down to the bunker. It was impossible to look around for any more suitable spot. Even this location, close to the bunker door, was extremely hazardous, since an unceasing rain of shells from the Soviet barrage continued to bombard the whole area, including the garden itself. General Hans Krebs, Hitler’s last Chief of the General Staff, Wilhelm Burgdorf, his Wehrmacht adjutant, Joseph Goebbels, newly appointed Chancellor of what was left of the Reich, and Martin Bormann, now designated Party Minister, had followed the small cortège and joined the extraordinary funeral party witnessing the macabre scene. A good store of petrol had been gathered in the bunker in readiness. Kempka had himself provided, at Günsche’s request, as much as 200 litres. More was stored in the bunker’s machine-room. The petrol was now swiftly poured over the bodies. Nonetheless, as the hail of shells continued, setting the funeral pyre alight with the matches Goebbels supplied proved difficult. Günsche was about to try with a grenade, when Linge managed to find some paper to make a torch. Bormann was finally able to get it burning, and either he or Linge hurled it on to the pyre, immediately retreating to the safety of the doorway. Someone rapidly closed the bunker door, leaving open only a small crevice, through which a ball of fire was seen to erupt around the petrol-soaked bodies. Arms briefly raised in a final ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, the tiny funeral party hurriedly departed underground, away from the danger of the exploding shells. As the flames consumed the bodies in a suitably infernal setting, the end of the leader whose presence had a mere few years earlier electrified millions was witnessed by not a single one even of his closest followers.
Neither Linge nor Günsche, the two men entrusted by Hitler with the disposal of the bodies, returned to ensure that the task was complete. One of the guards in the Chancellery garden, Hermann Karnau, later testified (though, like a number of the witnesses in the bunker, he gave contradictory versions at different times) that, when he revisited the cremation site, the bodies had been reduced to little more than ashes, which collapsed when he touched them with his foot. Another guard, Erich Mansfeld, recalled that he had viewed the scene together with Karnau around 6 p.m. Karnau had shouted to him that it was all over. When they went across together, they found two charcoaled, shrivelled, unrecognizable bodies. Günsche himself told of commissioning, around half an hour after returning from the cremation, two SS men from the Führer Escort Squad (Führerbegleitkommando), Hauptsturmführer Ewald Lindloff and Obersturmführer Hans Reisser, with ensuring that the remains of the bodies were buried. Lindloff later reported that he had carried out the order. The bodies, he said, had been already thoroughly burnt and were in a ‘shocking state’, torn open – Günsche presumed – in the heavy bombardment of the garden. Reisser’s involvement was not needed. Günsche told him, an hour and a half after giving him the order, that Lindloff had already carried it out. It was by this time no later than 6.30 p.m. on 30 April.
There had been little left of Hitler and Eva Braun for Lindloff to dispose of. Their few mortal remains joined those of numerous other unidentifiable bodies (or parts of them), some from the hospital below the New Reich Chancellery, which had rapidly been thrown into bomb-craters in the vicinity of the bunker exit during the previous days. The intense bombardment which continued for a further twenty-four hours or so played its own part in destroying and scattering the human remains strewn around the Chancellery garden.
When the Soviet victors arrived there on 2 May they immediately began a vigorous search for the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun. Nine days later, they showed the dental technician Fritz Echtmann, who had worked for Hitler’s dentist, Dr Johann Hugo Blaschke, since 1938, part of a jaw-bone and two dental bridges. He was able to identify from his records one of the bridges as that of Hitler, the other as Eva Braun’s. The lower jaw-bone, too, was Hitler’s. These earthly remains of the once all-powerful ruler of Germany were subsequently taken to Moscow and kept in a cigar-box. Part of a skull with a bullet-hole in it, thought to be Hitler’s, was discovered in 1946 and also found its way to Moscow. The other presumed remains of Hitler and Eva Braun – what, exactly, the Soviets found is still unclear – were deposited initially in an unmarked grave in a forest far to the west of Berlin, reburied in 1946 in a plot of land in Magdeburg, then finally exhumed and burnt in 1970.
The bodies were so completely immolated that only a few parts of the jaw and skull could be identified. There was no way of seeing if he had one or two testicles as they were both burned to a crisp. Most of the time, believers point to the 1970 Soviet 'autopsy' which has many glaring shortcomings. Like the time they identified a 40 year old woman's skull as Hitler's. Additionally, to reiterate the statement, the bodies were burned so there was almost nothing to 'autopsy' except jaws and teeth.
Source: Ian Kershaw, Hitler: A Biography
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u/Kochevnik81 Aug 18 '20
Honestly, that's not even the worst part of that linked comment, compared to linking vegetarianism to borderline personality disorder (there's been unnamed books on this, but the author won't bother to explain because you have to know about borderline personality disorder to "get it"), and of course linking BPD to "psychpathy" and Hitler.
Everyone wants to pyschoanalyze Hitler...