HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-07-08T14:40:24.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/tag/holocaust/feed/atom Katja Hoyer <![CDATA["Weimar's citizens cheered on Hitler": why the home of German democracy was easy prey for the Nazis]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/weimars-citizens-cheered-on-hitler-why-the-home-of-german-democracy-was-easy-prey-for-the-nazis/ 2026-07-08T14:40:24.000Z 2026-07-08T13:56:39.000Z Adolf Hitler could not have been clearer. “I love Weimar,” he proclaimed at the end of 1925. He wasn’t talking about the Weimar Republic that had emerged from Germany’s defeat at the end of the First World War, but about the town that lent the ill-fated democracy its name.

Weimar lies in the heart of Germany, about halfway between Hamburg and Munich. It is a quaint place, conscious of history and tradition, both of which it has in abundance. Its cobbled streets are lined with timber-framed houses, elegant villas, churches and palaces – all embraced by vast, beautifully landscaped gardens. It’s this combination of cosy charm and cultural importance that made the town so attractive to Hitler. And he was far from the only one drawn to Weimar.

Between the two world wars, Weimar was a place where people dreamed big ideas, ranging from liberal democracy and utopian art to eugenics and a form of tyranny that would plunge Europe into conflict. Weimar was where the architects of the Bauhaus movement first experimented with new ways of living, but also where Buchenwald – the largest concentration camp on German soil – was established in a beech forest nearby. This uncomfortable proximity of idealism and barbarism makes interwar Weimar the perfect place to seek answers to one of the greatest questions of the 20th century: how did a nation that prided itself on its culture and civility enable the catastrophe of Nazism?

Map of Weimar-era Germany showing major regions, cities, rivers, and neighbouring countries. Key locations include Berlin, Weimar, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, and Munich, with regions such as Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, and East Prussia labelled. The Rhine, Danube, and Oder rivers are marked, along with the North Sea and Baltic Sea. Germany is shown bordered by countries including Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Hungary.

Today, few people outside Germany could point to the town on a map. Yet its name widely conjures powerful notions of noble experiments and fallen ideals. That’s because it was the cradle of Germany’s first full democracy. The Weimar Republic burned brightly, but endured for little over 14 years, from 1919 to 1933 – its demise sealed when Hindenburg appointed Hitler as chancellor.

The shock of the new

To understand how Weimar rose to such prominence, we need to look first at 1918, when Germany lost not just the First World War but also its monarchy. Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate and the country became a republic, requiring a new constitution. Berlin, which had been the capital of Prussia and the German empire, remained capital of the new Germany, but would not be where its administration was set up. For one thing, Berlin wasn’t safe. At the beginning of 1919, when the country held its first-ever fully democratic elections on a franchise that included all adult Germans – including women – Berlin was the stage for bloody street battles between communist would-be revolutionaries and the war-hardened soldiers deployed to quell their uprising.

As a seat of the dethroned Hohenzollern dynasty, Berlin was also associated with the old, Prussia-led Germany and, therefore, with a brand of militarism that had contributed to the outbreak of war in 1914. Germany needed to convince the world – and itself – that it was open to the idea of reinvention.

A black‑and‑white photograph of a European town square lined with tall, ornate buildings featuring steep roofs, dormer windows and decorative trim. A sign on one building reads “Restaurant Stadthaus,” while others display shop names such as “Weinhandlung” and “Drogerie.” In the foreground stands a sculpted fountain beside an old‑fashioned streetlamp with multiple lanterns. A church or clock tower rises above the rooftops in the background. The scene feels calm and historic, capturing well‑preserved architecture and a traditional public square.

Weimar seemed the ideal launchpad for a new national project. As the capital of the small state of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, it was neither in Prussia nor in any of the other major German states. It was safe, centrally located and relatively untouched by the political violence that raged in larger cities. Most importantly, it was a powerful symbol that a new Germany could emerge from the ruins of the old.

Weimar was widely regarded as Germany’s cultural capital. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the closest thing Germany has to a national poet, had once lived and worked here, as had his friend and fellow writer Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805). Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1760) resided in Weimar for years, as did composer Franz Liszt (1811–86) and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Weimar’s place in German culture far exceeds its physical size. All in all, it was the ideal setting for an ambitious rebrand.

The Social Democrat Friedrich Ebert, elected as the first president of the republic, knew all this. When he opened the National Assembly in the town’s theatre on 6 February 1919, he proclaimed: “Here in Weimar we must achieve the transformation from imperialism to idealism, from world domination to spiritual greatness… Now the spirit of Weimar, the spirit of great thinkers and poets, must fill our lives again.”

Black-and-white portrait photograph of Friedrich Ebert, the first president of Germany's Weimar Republic. Ebert is seated facing the camera, wearing a dark three-piece suit, tie, and overcoat, with a distinctive moustache and pointed beard. The image is closely cropped against a dark background, drawing attention to Ebert's face and formal attire. The photograph is representative of the political leadership that guided Germany during the early years of its first democracy.

So the first German republic became a “Weimar Republic”. It is telling, however, that the person who coined this term was Hitler. Officially, the postwar state was still called the German Reich (meaning ‘kingdom’ or ‘empire’), as it had been under the kaiser – a hint that regime change is easier than a change in culture. And in 1929, the future dictator and other enemies of the fragile democracy used its 10th anniversary to deploy the term ‘Weimar Republic’ in a derogatory fashion, deriding the system as un-German.

Designs on change

There was much about the new ‘spirit of Weimar’ that riled not just the Nazis but also many conservatives. In the early 1920s, the town drew radically creative minds. A key moment was when Walter Gropius agreed to settle in Weimar and establish the Bauhaus (literally: ‘building house’) art school in 1919. With his arrival, the town had attracted one of the most influential names in world architecture. Many other illustrious figures followed, among them the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky and Swiss-born artist Paul Klee. In its revolutionary approach, fusing design and craftsmanship with industrial mass production, the Bauhaus had a huge influence on the way we live today, sowing the seed for everything from IKEA flat-packs to clearer typography, prefabricated housing and the cantilever chair.

Photograph of a curved staircase inside the Bauhaus building, with a large abstract mural by Oskar Schlemmer covering the wall beside it. The mural features oversized geometric and organic shapes in muted pastel colours, including blue, orange, yellow, and pink, arranged in a modernist composition. Black metal railings follow the sweep of the staircase, contrasting with the soft colours and smooth surfaces of the artwork. The image reflects the Bauhaus emphasis on combining art, design, and architecture within everyday spaces.

Sensing the explosive potential of Bauhaus ideas, Weimar’s conservative elites pushed back hard. Their ire was aimed at both the burgeoning Bauhaus movement and those who represented it – students and teachers, an eclectic mix of men and women, many of whom had left-leaning outlooks that ranged from moderate to communist. Scandalously, some students lived in communes and went skinny-dipping in the river Ilm. Many wore distinctive, proto-hippy garments such as sandals and long, loose shirts provocatively referred to as Russen-kittel (Russian smocks), donned in protest against middle-class convention. It all smacked of social decay to conservatives, many of whom existed in a permanent state of moral panic brought on by the dizzying speed of postwar change. They drove Gropius’s art school out of town in 1925, and the Nazis closed the Bauhaus entirely in 1933.

Nursery of Nazism

Though Weimar was, in many ways, an epicentre of modernism, it was also an early stronghold of the Nazi movement. The first formal Nazi Party rally was held in Weimar in 1926, before such gatherings were relocated to Nuremberg. Weimar was where the Hitler Youth received its name, and where significant Nazi rituals such as the Hitler salute were first presented to the public. Nazi polling numbers in Weimar usually exceeded their average across Germany, and the town became the seat of the first state government to appoint a Nazi minister, in 1930, three years before Hitler became Germany’s chancellor.

As Weimar became a haven for the movement and a testing ground for Nazi ideas, its people found themselves on the frontline of the culture wars that played out across interwar Germany. With its peculiar combination of small-town life and cultural prestige, the town was home to both ordinary and illustrious people during the 1920s and 1930s, all striving to ride the waves of history – or, at least, to avoid being drowned. Individual stories of Weimar’s residents offer revealing and fascinating case studies of how people behave in times of crisis.

A black‑and‑white photograph of an outdoor market scene on a cobblestone street. Several adults and children stand among long, braided strings of onions, some holding them draped over their arms or shoulders. Behind them are market stalls and tables piled with more onions and produce. The people wear early‑20th‑century clothing such as coats, hats, and boots. Other shoppers and vendors move in the background, creating a busy, communal atmosphere.

Take Carl Weirich, a stationer and bookbinder. He moved to Weimar from nearby Eisenach in 1914 to take over a well-established stationery shop in the heart of the old town, just a short walk away from the theatre in which the Weimar Republic was founded. He’d arrived with great hopes for the future – only to be faced by the impacts of two world wars and a multitude of crises that hit both his business and his family.

Weirich was fascinated by paper, ink, typewriters and the written word. He meticulously kept a diary that details his story and is often surprisingly frank, providing unique, granular insights into life between the wars. Fundamentally, he was not a political man. His diary records more on the hiking tours he conducted each Sunday – come rain, come shine, come democracy, come dictatorship – than on the minutiae of current affairs. Yet politics touched every aspect of his life. When the National Assembly convened a stone’s throw from his shop in 1919, he attended some of the public sessions to see how “the new people presented themselves who would represent the fatherland headed by Fritz Ebert”.

Running a small shop that offered bookbinding services as well as fountain pens for schoolchildren and postcards for tourists, Weirich wasn’t rich, but he was comparatively comfortable when the economy was stable. During times of crisis, however, it felt as if the rug was being pulled from beneath his feet. In the spring of 1923, when hyperinflation began to hit the young republic hard, he bought a used bicycle for 2 million marks. Had he held on to the money until September, the same amount would have bought him a loaf of bread or an egg.

During the Great Depression that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, he once again suffered a reversal of fortunes as economic despair threatened to rob him and his young family of house, shop, home and livelihood. One government after another had failed to make things better. At the end of 1932, Weirich – like millions of his fellow Germans – was ready to pin his hopes on one “young man, the Führer of the National Socialist Party A. Hitler”. The war that “young man” would unleash just a few years later would leave Weimar – and, with it, the life Weirich had built for himself – in ash and ruin.

A black‑and‑white photograph of a large group of people standing outdoors in tightly packed rows. They all wear identical vertically striped uniforms and matching caps, suggesting imprisonment. The ground beneath them is bare dirt, and trees line the background under a cloudy sky. The figures face the camera with solemn, expressionless postures, creating a stark and somber scene.

Hosting Hitler

Weimar’s women who found themselves caught up in events also tried to shape their own destinies. Take Rosa Schmidt, a hotelier of Jewish heritage who, together with her husband, Arthur – a decorated war veteran from an old Protestant Weimar family – ran the Hotel Hohenzollern by the train station. The couple struggled to keep their business afloat during the challenging postwar years and hyperinflation. So when Hitler and his supporters booked the hotel repeatedly for early Nazi visits to Weimar, the Schmidts saw welcome opportunities to save their business from catastrophe. Hitler had no idea that his meals were prepared by a Jewish woman, even as he unleashed his antisemitic rants in her hotel. Rosa had no idea that her guest would bring death to the majority of European Jews, and that her family would be no exception.

At the other end of town, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche ran an archive that contained the papers of her late brother, Friedrich Nietzsche. After the philosopher suffered a mental breakdown in 1889, his sister became his carer until the time of his death 11 years later, and the self-appointed steward of his legacy thereafter. Permanently cash-strapped, she and the Nietzsche Archive relied on funding from generous donors and the various governments of the interwar era. Though not initially impressed by Hitler, Elisabeth soon embraced Nazism – and Nazism embraced Nietzsche.

A black‑and‑white photograph of a group of young people gathered outdoors on a cobblestone surface. Two musicians sit at the centre, one playing a guitar and the other a violin, while others stand or sit around them, listening. The group wears early‑20th‑century casual clothing, including shorts, long socks, shirts and jackets. Buildings frame the background, giving the scene the feel of a town square or courtyard. The atmosphere is relaxed and social, with music drawing everyone together.

Despite her politics, Elisabeth’s oldest friend remained the liberal Harry Graf Kessler, an Anglo-German aristocrat and diplomat who enjoyed the eccentric lifestyle of a cosmopolitan dandy. A gay man at a time when male homosexuality was illegal, he was careful not to draw too much attention to his relationships, but he nonetheless flaunted his bachelordom.

A mythical aura surrounded him almost from birth. Kaiser Wilhelm I had been so smitten with the boy’s beautiful mother that he had fostered the Kesslers’ swift rise, and became godfather to Harry’s younger sister, Wilhelmina. There were even rumours that the emperor was the illegitimate father of either or both of the Kessler children – something the younger man vehemently refuted. Multilingual, widely travelled and well-educated, the count felt as much at ease at court as he did in bars and ballrooms. He promoted art and moved to Weimar at the turn of the century, playing an integral part in its thriving cultural scene. There he befriended Elisabeth and helped to establish her brother’s archive.

Expressing an agony that will be familiar to modern readers, Kessler frequently complained in his diary that, in a deeply polarised society, it had become difficult to maintain friendships across the political divide. As Elisabeth became increasingly nationalistic and eventually outright supportive of Nazism, he remained staunchly liberal and had to flee Germany when Hitler rose to power. In one letter to his old friend Elisabeth, Kessler wrote: “I have strived my whole life to, yes, take politics seriously since it belongs to those things on which our daily life and work depends, but to bar it from entering into my relationships.” The pair agreed to avoid political subjects, but this proved increasingly difficult in an era in which everything was political.

Monstrous ideas

Weimar changed politically and physically in the 1930s. The Nazis intended it to be a model town for their murderous dictatorship, and thus reshaped it architecturally and ideologically. Its inhabitants were forced to respond to what was happening, whether they wanted to do so or not. Teachers had to decide if they were happy to teach ‘racial hygiene’ in their lessons. Jews were dismissed from public sector jobs, no matter what they did. Registrar Heinrich Fleischhauer, a civil servant, was soon expected to sign death certificates for the victims of the Buchenwald concentration camp.

Black-and-white photograph of a Nazi rally in Weimar in 1930, showing uniformed party members marching along a rain-soaked street carrying swastika flags. Adolf Hitler stands in an open-top car, raising an arm in salute as supporters and onlookers gather along the roadside. Historic buildings line the street in the background, illustrating the growing public presence of the Nazi movement during the final years of the Weimar Republic.

Many of those who spent time in Weimar in the 1920s made remarkably contrasting choices in the 1930s. Take Marlene Dietrich, who was sent to Weimar in her late teens to study violin with the best musicians. Or Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school. Neither found life in Nazi Germany bearable, and both chose to live in the US rather than remain in a country run by Hitler. Dietrich renounced her German citizenship in 1939 and became an American. Other inhabitants of Weimar embraced Nazism. Emmy Sonnemann worked as an actress at the Weimar theatre. One day in 1932, she happened to be sitting in the Kaiser Café when an important-looking man in uniform stepped in. It was Hermann Göring. The two married in 1935. Hitler was their best man.

Very few citizens of the town actively resisted Nazism. One of those who did was Kurt Nehrling, a young Social Democrat who returned from serving in the First World War with a debilitating case of tuberculosis. He allowed neither his illness nor personal setbacks to deter him from fighting for his convictions and, in resisting Nazism, he put both himself and his family in grave danger. Nehrling didn’t survive the Second World War. Arrested by the SS, he was executed at Dachau in 1943.

When the Americans occupied Weimar in the spring of 1945, they found that people such as Nehrling represented a tiny minority. To quote the American documentary Death Mills, filmed at liberated concentration camps including Buchenwald, the majority of Weimar’s citizens “had put themselves gladly into the hands of criminals and lunatics”.

A zone of interest

What roles did the people of Weimar play in Germany’s descent into darkness? Were they were culpable for the horrors of Nazism? Weimar’s citizens had, after all, found it possible to go hiking and sledging a stone’s throw from a concentration camp, and sleep soundly in their beds at night. They’d cheered on Hitler and stood by when Jewish neighbours were sent to their deaths. It’s always easier to condemn than it is to explain, but in the latter lies the key to understanding history and, ultimately, to drawing meaningful conclusions from it.

Black-and-white photograph showing a group of civilians from Weimar gathered outdoors at Buchenwald concentration camp shortly after its liberation in 1945. Several people stand closely together, wearing coats and suits, while looking at scenes within the camp as part of a guided visit. The image documents local residents being confronted with evidence of the atrocities committed at Buchenwald during the Nazi era.

Asking why Germans acted the way they did is not the same as justifying their choices. If we are to avoid the mistakes made by people in the past, the first step is to understand why these mistakes were made. No one is entirely free to act outside the circumstances in which they find themselves. But that doesn’t mean that people lack agency. Interwar Germany has long fascinated scholars and the public precisely because it embodies the tension between the individual and the collective, between inevitability and responsibility – and nowhere was this truer than in Weimar, where many of the contrasting pathways of the interwar era came together.

Weimar – with all of its inherent contradictions, with the hopes and fears of a nation stamped onto its houses and streets – acted as a crucible of German history between the world wars. In Weimar, both good and evil ideas were forged, tried and tested. The townspeople were, variously, observers, participants, perpetrators, bystanders and victims of events that shaped Germany, Europe and the world. Studying their behaviour, both as individuals and as members of society, gets us closer to understanding how Nazism took hold, and how it was able to spread its pernicious influence far beyond its fanatical core.

It is in these dynamics that we may find instructive points to help us safeguard democracy and freedom in our own time. When you piece together the human mosaic of Weimar, one stark lesson stands out: no amount of history, tradition or culture is sufficient on its own to safeguard against takeover by a ruthless totalitarian ideology. Democracy and civilisation are maintained or destroyed by the choices we make as individuals and as societies. There is no better place and time to study this than interwar Weimar, a town where people conjured up dreams of a better world – but woke to find themselves living under tyranny.

This article was first published in the July 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[“You can’t kill and maim with impunity”: the powerful legacy of Nuremberg]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nuremberg-trials-episode-four/ 2026-05-12T07:00:13.000Z 2026-05-12T07:00:13.000Z In the 80 years since Nazi leaders stood in the dock, how has the international community sought to deal with war criminals around the globe? For this concluding episode of our four-part series on the Nuremberg Trials, David Musgrove is joined by the lawyer and author Philippe Sands to chart the long, complex legacy of the events of 1945-46, and to consider whether those accused of war crimes in the present day might one day face international justice.

Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below:

View Green Video on the source website

Want to know more about the Nuremberg Trials? David Musgrove has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra Magazine archive. Go beyond the podcast.

Philippe Sands is the author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016).

]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[Did the Nazis get a fair trial?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nuremberg-trials-episode-three/ 2026-05-05T07:00:12.000Z 2026-05-05T07:00:12.000Z In October 1946, after a trial lasting almost a year, the Nazi leaders on the dock in Nuremberg received their verdicts. But what did the judges decide? And how did the defendants, and the world outside, respond to the sentences that were handed down? In the third episode of our four-part series on Nuremberg, David Musgrove is joined by the lawyer and author Philippe Sands to explore the conclusion of the trials and consider whether this was a form of victors’ justice.

Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below:

View Green Video on the source website

Want to know more about the Nuremberg Trials? David Musgrove has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra Magazine archive. Go beyond the podcast.

Philippe Sands is the author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016)

]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[The Nazis’ crimes laid bare]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/nuremberg-trials-episode-two/ 2026-04-29T10:58:40.000Z 2026-04-28T07:00:18.000Z When the Nazi leaders went on trial in Nuremberg from November 1945, the true horrors of their regime were exposed to the world. In the second episode of our four-part series on the trials, the lawyer and author Philippe Sands chronicles the dramatic days when the likes of Hermann Goering and Hans Frank were forced to face their accusers in the courtroom.

As he explains to David Musgrove, these were moments that those in attendance would never forget.

Audio excerpts as presented from Court TV, via Robert H Jackson Center

Watch the full episode, or listen ad-free at the link below:

View Green Video on the source website

Want to know more about the Nuremberg Trials? David Musgrove has curated a selection of essential reading from the HistoryExtra Magazine archive. Go beyond the podcast

Philippe Sands is the author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016)

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[I went digging for buried Nazi gold – and this is what I discovered]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/i-went-digging-for-buried-nazi-gold-and-this-is-what-i-found/ 2026-04-26T16:01:04.000Z 2026-04-26T16:00:57.000Z I have been appearing in history documentaries for the best part of 20 years. Usually, they are something to do with the Third Reich and for the most part, the documentaries are weighty and serious, as indeed they should be. But nearly every year, I get a call – normally from a junior producer or researcher – who tells me they wish to make a documentary about Nazi gold, and if so, do I know where they might find some?

It’s at that point that I ask them to think about their question very carefully.

If – I say – I did know the location of a load of Nazi bullion, do they think I would tell them? For a day rate? Furthermore, wouldn’t I have gone and dug it up myself, and currently be speaking from my 20-bedroom mansion in the Maldives?

The line invariably goes silent as the logic of my position seeps in. I then add that if they really want to find themselves some Nazi gold, they should just go to Zurich or Geneva and knock on the door of any Swiss bank and ask for a peek in the vaults. So far, so cynical.

But then, in January 2023, my position changed with an intriguing release from the Dutch national archives: a real-life treasure map, hand-drawn by a Nazi paratrooper, revealing where he and his comrades had buried a load of loot they had stolen towards the end of the war. The map even had a red ‘X’ that marked the spot, outside a village called Ommeren, along what was the Allied front line of Operation Market Garden in 1944.

A hand‑drawn map with labelled towns, a river running across the top, and a compass rose. At the bottom are two small inset drawings, including a terrain cross‑section and a landscape sketch.

The story goes that during the military operation, a bank in Arnhem was hit by a bomb and a few German soldiers took what they could from the remains. As they retreated, they buried the treasure to keep it safe.

So, this wasn’t technically Nazi gold, but it was close enough – actual treasure looted by actual Nazis! That would do nicely and might even make a good short film.

And so, at 5am the following day, accompanied by my cameraman son William and his mate Magnus dragooned in to do the sound, I set off to the middle of the Netherlands from deepest Wiltshire, the boot of my creaking Land Rover loaded with picks and spades. All my grown-up historian’s wariness had melted away – I was literally on a hunt for Nazi gold.

Digging for clues

We arrived at the site at around lunchtime, not surprised to discover that others were hot on the trail too. We found a couple of teenagers uprooting a bush in someone’s front garden, but I was sure they were in the wrong place. Then we came across a man in his forties digging a very deep hole on the side of a road – he even had a professional metal detector – but he too was way out.

After overlaying the rough treasure map on a Google Maps satellite view, we made our way to a spot near a wood, where we came across a retired businessman called Jan, who agreed that surely, we were pretty close to that tantalising red ‘X’.

So out came my pick, and I dug. And dug. And dug.

And – as I had subconsciously known would be the case all along – up came nothing. All I had to show for my labours were some very muddy jeans and a telling off from a policeman, who didn’t take kindly to a crazy Englishman excavating a significant part of his beat. With the light fading, we called it a day and rewarded ourselves with liquid gold in the form of the local brew.

Despite my failure, I realised that the subject of Nazi gold might at least bring some TV treasure, rather than the actual stuff. The YouTube video we uploaded got a lot of views and was bought off William and turned into a streaming documentary by a production company. The Sunday Times even dedicated the whole third page of its news section to our adventures.

All this attention convinced me there was a series in this, and soon the good folks at the History Channel had commissioned me to present and direct a six-part series called The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold.

As well as looking for Nazi gold, my co-host Justine Ostrowska and I suspected it would be fun to broaden the remit, and so we included other treasures looted by the Nazis, such as the Amber Room (a gold-panelled chamber stripped from Russia’s Catherine Palace), the fabled Nazi gold train (an armoured locomotive stuffed with treasures, supposedly buried in Poland), and countless missing paintings.

An opulent baroque room with amber‑toned wall panels, gold mouldings, framed paintings, chandeliers, and elegant furniture including draped chairs and display tables.

Gangsters and Monuments Men

All of these are, in a sense, Nazi gold. The tone of the show, as you shall see, is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, and we have as much fun meeting the wonderful – and sometimes weird – characters who are obsessed that such-and-such a spot contains billions of pounds of treasure, as we do in doing the digging ourselves.

But despite all the jocularity and my wariness of actually finding any treasure, the story of Nazi gold is a serious one. The Third Reich was undeniably a gangster state, and like all gangsters, the Nazis stole – and stole big time. Every country they invaded was plundered, its gold, silver, and other priceless treasures taken to Germany.

This is not to forget the gold stolen from the Jews, often gruesomely wrenched out of the mouths of so many corpses. It is hard to give a precise figure, but in today’s money, it is estimated that the Nazis stole some £8.5 billion worth of gold, of which some £1.5 billion to £3 billion was taken from Jews. This does not count the other treasures stolen, the value of which runs into the hundreds of billions.

The first obvious question is this: where did it all go?

The good news is that a lot was recovered. About half the bullion was found by the Americans in a massive mine called Merkers in Thuringia, while much other gold – and indeed silver – was found in banks in Berlin and throughout Germany.

Another billion pounds’ worth was unearthed in the hills above Lake Walchensee in southern Bavaria, where it had been taken by mules led by Nazi soldiers at the end of the war. Many artworks were discovered in a salt mine above the village of Altaussee in Austria by the Americans and their unit of ‘Monuments Men’ – a team of art experts seconded into the army and later the topic of a 2014 George Clooney movie.

An underground storage cavern with rough rock walls, lined with rows of tightly packed sacks and stacks of crates. A narrow rail track runs through the centre under overhead lights.

And now for the next obvious question: how much is missing? It is impossible to give a reliable answer. Most sensible historians suspect the figure is very low, and if any gold is missing then it is extremely likely to lie in bank vaults in Switzerland. It is well known that many senior Nazis spirited their wealth into the country towards the end of the war, but thanks to the notorious secrecy of Swiss banking laws, to establish just how much is there – if any – is very difficult, to put it mildly.

But Switzerland was not the only country where the Nazis sent their plunder, with countries such as Spain and Argentina also receiving Nazi wealth, which was often laundered through a system of dummy companies.

Those of a more conspiratorial bent firmly believe that many millions of pounds worth of gold and artworks still lie hidden, and it is these characters that Justine and I decided to meet on our month-long road trip around central Europe over the summer.

Four uniformed soldiers stand on stone steps outside a large building. Three hold framed artworks, and a fourth stands behind them writing on a notepad.

Treasure hunters

Armed with proper treasure-hunting equipment, including pickaxes and metal detectors, we joined forces with those who have been hunting Nazi gold and treasure for decades. Some of those we met more than raised our eyebrows, while others were far more plausible and made me reevaluate my scepticism.

Among the latter was the charismatic Cornelia Ostler, who has been treasure hunting across Germany nearly all her life, a passion imbued in her by her late father, who was also a fanatical treasure hunter. Cornelia’s speciality is looking for the gold that she believes is still missing above Lake Walchensee. While many believe that it was all recovered, Cornelia is adamant that there is still some to be found, and her copious documentation and archive material is undoubtedly impressive – and pretty convincing.

Also plausible was a friendly German chap called Jürgen Proske, with whom we spent a sweltering day high up a mountainside in a secret location in southern Germany. Like Cornelia, Jürgen has been hunting all his life, and while he may not have found any gold, he has certainly found all sorts of Nazi-era relics, some of which are of much historical interest, and even have some monetary value.

Lending Justine his far more professional metal detector, I am delighted to report that we did indeed find something, and we found it quickly. I am not going to give away any plot spoilers, but all I can say is that Justine has not yet replaced her old Porsche.

Two people stand among tall trees and dense greenery. One holds a metal detector, and the other, wearing a backpack, holds a walking stick.

What was refreshing about the likes of Jürgen and Cornelia is their acknowledgement that their chances are very slim indeed, but they both share a gut conviction that if there’s even a small chance of any Nazi gold still being out there, then it has got to be worth an effort. At the very least, treasure hunting is fun, good exercise, and as their spouses often comment, at least it’s a hobby that gets them out the house at the weekend.

A dark legacy

But then there are the hunters whose tales are just a little too tall for my taste. One of our ports of call was Wałbrzych in southwest Poland, where it is said that a whole train of Nazi gold is hidden in a hillside. The leading proponent of this theory is Piotr Koper, who says that he has spent the value of a second home in looking for the train. He has commissioned extensive ground radar surveys, and while the endless readouts and bits of data all seem very impressive, I’m not sure they scream ‘Nazi gold train’ at me.

Nevertheless, we did go and have a look, and unfortunately all Justine found was the existence of a place which truckers seem to regard as an open-air lavatory, a discovery that meant we had to keep the windows open when Justine got back in the Jeep.

Then there was Burkhardt List, a historian and inveterate treasure hunter, who is absolutely determined that a stash of artwork worth hundreds of millions is located deep beneath a clearing in a wood near the Czech-German border. I liked Burkhardt, but as the show reveals, I didn’t care much for his theory. When I asked him what was stopping him from trying to arrange an excavation, he looked at me darkly and informed me that the ‘Fourth Reich’ was against him, and that agents of this nefarious network of neo-Nazis had even gone so far as to attempt to poison him.

Four people stand close together outdoors, smiling in front of a wooden structure and greenery. They wear casual clothing, including grey, yellow, light green, and black shirts.

Ultimately, the biggest lesson I learned from The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold was that you never know. It is easy to be sceptical, and to be honest, I largely still am, but there are enough sensible people who think there might be a bar or two of gold kicking around some Mitteleuropean mountainside. And of course, if they find it, then perhaps they will end up in their very own mansion in the Maldives.

But then again, the decent thing to do would be to give it back to those from whom it was stolen. What’s important to remember is that the story of Nazi gold, while entertaining on one level, is also very dark indeed.

Guy Walters is a historian, author and journalist. He is the co-host of The Last Hunt for Nazi Gold, a Sky History documentary

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Did Hitler have sexual relations with Eva Braun? What my research reveals about the Führer's love life]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-hitler-have-sexual-relations-with-eva-braun-what-my-research-reveals-about-the-fuhrers-love-life/ 2026-01-25T19:24:39.000Z 2026-01-25T16:00:59.000Z 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”.

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

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”.

A black and white photograph of a man, wearing a black suit with a black bow tie.

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.

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.

"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.

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

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.

A black and white photograph of two young women sitting on top of a wall, alongside a black dog

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.

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”.

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

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.

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[AI: good or bad for history? Our experts weigh in]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ai-good-or-bad-for-history-our-experts-weigh-in/ 2025-12-10T09:01:06.000Z 2025-12-10T09:00:39.000Z “We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters”

Artificial intelligence isn’t inherently good or bad. Like the printing press or the written word itself, AI is a force – and whether it enhances or undermines historical practice will depend on who uses it, how, and why.

AI’s most obvious advantage is that it can process vast amounts of data much faster than your regular historian, which turns it into an incredible asset. The trick here is to use it as it was originally meant to be used – not to replace human interpretation but to identify patterns that humans might not notice and, thus, to enable us to come up with better, more nuanced questions.

But it goes beyond that. AI is forcing historians to rethink what constitutes evidence, authorship and interpretation. In doing so, it is not just supporting existing historical methods, it’s helping evolve them.

Though I am not worried that historians will be replaced by AI any time soon, there is a risk that indiscriminate use might flatten out the practice. Good history requires doubt, contradiction, ambivalence, even uncertainty, but AI models are designed to produce smooth answers even when the data is messy or the past is unknowable.

Moreover, history isn’t just knowledge – it’s a method of knowing. If AI shortcuts the method, it threatens the discipline’s integrity. There is little doubt that AI will be part of historical research, but it is crucial that historians shape its use to enhance rather than undermine our craft. We should resist the urge to scale for scale’s sake, and instead use AI to deepen, not dilute, historical understanding. If we do that, and embed AI within the discipline’s values – critical thinking, reflexivity, contextual awareness – then historians will become central in answering the question of whether AI is good or bad for history.

We must experiment thoughtfully, push back critically, and make the case that slow, humanistic thinking still matters, even in an age of rapid computation. I am confident that the tables will turn, and we’ll soon talk about the ways in which history is good for AI.

Delfi Nieto-Isabel is a lecturer in medieval and digital history, and co-director of the Digital Lives Programme at Queen Mary University of London

“The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions”

In his classic Foundation series, sci-fi author Isaac Asimov explored the idea of statistically based ‘psycho-history’, by which the future could be predicted through the mathematical analysis of data on the past and present. With the rise of generative AI, it may feel as if a dystopian version of Asimov’s future is edging towards reality, but there are grounds to be a little more positive.

A great deal of what historians do is attempting to understand past societies by observing patterns in the evidence they left behind. Machines are spectacularly good at this, and the large language models of contemporary AI take this to a new level.

A large stone with letters carved into it

To take an example from my own area of work, texts inscribed on stone in a variety of ancient languages survive from the Roman world in their hundreds of thousands. These are often fragmentary and difficult to interpret. To make sense of them, both individually and en masse, as evidence for ancient societies and languages, historians need to compare these texts with one another. But to do so requires familiarity with them all, and the ability to find and compare parallels or identify patterns. Large language models specially trained on this material can now offer suggestions for missing words, dates and origins of this material, precisely because they see patterns across the material that a solitary human might find only after days or weeks of library work – or not at all.

The crucial point, however, is that these are suggestions – and the models can offer multiple suggestions, ranked by probability and exposing some of the underlying reasoning. The best results come when humans work alongside machine-generated intuitions. Correlation is not the same as causation, and history is a fundamentally human ‘science’. Nuance, context and, above all, humanity is fundamental to understanding our past, present and future. If that is surrendered to a machine then all of it is lost, and we are no longer writing our own history.

Every generation writes its own history, it’s said. Powerful AI can stimulate that process – but it certainly cannot write it for us.

Jonathan Prag is professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford, and a co-author of the Aeneas AI model for contextualising ancient inscriptions (predictingthepast.com)

“Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot”

Historians have been using AI for many years as an important tool for exploring and analysing the vast digitised and born-digital materials that increasingly constitute our primary sources. For instance, using AI it becomes possible to extract the names of all members of parliament mentioned in historical Hansard, identify the themes and topics on which they have spoken, and trace changes of emphasis over time. Handwritten text recognition technologies enable the accurate transcription of manuscript collections at scale. There are many other examples.

A line of light blue book spines with gold words on them, each with a year and volume number on them

This has been unhelpfully elided by the use of ‘AI’ as synonymous with generative AI. Machine learning, however, has not captured the public imagination in the same way as GenAI, with its easy-to-use chatbot interfaces. The speed with which GenAI has become near-ubiquitous, allowing no time to consider all of the ramifications, seems bewildering. Familiar software packages and media platforms are increasingly cluttered with invitations to ask an AI assistant for help. The AI-generated is entangled with the human-created in ways that undoubtedly pose real difficulties for the integrity of the historical record. Fake ‘historical’ images and texts are already circulating and, with ever-greater sophistication, they will become harder to spot.

This is a huge challenge, but it is also an opportunity for historians to apply their knowledge and expertise to a problem that requires particular critical skills. A 2025 study sponsored by Microsoft sought to identify those occupations most at risk from GenAI. Historians came second, behind interpreters and translators. Dredge operators, last on the list, can apparently be more confident about their future role.

But historians can help navigate this new knowledge landscape. Insightful source criticism, deep understanding of context, awareness of archival absence and loss, and a commitment to centring the human experience in the technological are key elements of historical research and practice. Arguably, they have never been more useful.

Jane Winters is professor of digital humanities at the School of Advanced Study, University of London

“Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental”

We seek to understand ourselves by exploring our pasts – and AI will not change this fundamental urge. The digital revolution has already transformed the historian’s work considerably, without fundamentally altering our purpose. Much change has been positive. Barriers of geography, cost and materiality have collapsed, broadening access to history as never before.

Less profitably, instant access and keyword searching deprive us of context, and we are less likely to understand the systems that sort, sift and deliver our sources. Always, we shape and are shaped by our tools in a relationship that must be carefully negotiated.

Utopians and naysayers are united in their confidence that AI will change everything. We must recognise such predictions as products of a moment of frenzied development and investment. Once the hype has died down, historians will adapt – just as we did to that other over-hyped but transformational technology, the internet.

The Maughan Library, King’s College London: “Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past,” says Chris Sparks (Image by Getty Images)

We will use AI where it can help us – to automate repetitive tasks, to ‘distantly read’ sources identifying areas for closer inspection, or to hone our prose. But we will remain wary of its dangers – not least its tendency to hide its sources and make things up. Hopefully, new tools will become available that reduce our dependence on centrally controlled systems, allowing more thoughtful, bespoke and informed use.

We must think carefully about how we use AI in the classroom, too. Students learn that critical reading and precision writing are the essential tools for engaging with the complex human past. Reading is thinking. Writing is thinking. These core skills cannot be outsourced without losing something fundamental. They can be honed only with practice, and we must protect space for that in our teaching. Yet we cannot simply ignore AI, because we have begun to encounter its output routinely in our daily lives.

History is a project, not a product. If AI ushers in an era of fast, cheap, mass-produced text, then the skills that history teaches will only become more valuable.

Chris Sparks is a senior lecturer in digital history at Queen Mary University of London

“AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns"

There are plenty of anxieties about AI. This should not surprise us: in the past, new technologies such as the railway resulted in moral panics. Rather than a threat, AI can be used – just as other technologies have been.

It is important to draw a distinction between functions sometimes described as ‘generative’ and ‘hermeneutic’. The former is what first comes to mind: it can be used to write text, including historical arguments. The latter is using AI to ‘distant read’ large bodies of texts, including archives.

Much criticism levelled at AI tends to focus on generative AI – for example, teachers’ fears that students will ‘cheat’ on essays, simply entering the assigned title and word length as a prompt, then leaving AI to produce a passable composition within seconds.

A woman holds up an old passport in front of her face. On the left page there is a black and white photo of a young girl

Where AI has greater value for historians is as a hermeneutic tool. It is helpful to remember a point that Todd Presner makes to scholars in his 2024 book Ethics of the Algorithm: Digital Humanities and Holocaust Memory – that computers ‘read’ differently from humans, but neither better nor worse than us. The challenge facing historians is how to use this technology to ask new questions, particularly to interrogate vast archives that cannot be comprehensively searched through more traditional methods.

One area in which I, and other interdisciplinary teams, have been experimenting is using digital methods to access stories of Holocaust survivors in oral history collections. These are typically too large for any one person to watch in their life. The USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, for example, contains more than 55,000 interviews, each 2–3 hours long.

Rather than replacing close reading – or watching and listening – of these interviews, AI offers the chance to explore archives at scale, ask new questions and uncover new patterns that invite close reading. For example, what pronouns – I or we – do men and women use to tell what is variously a solo or shared story? Where and why do silences occur in oral history archives as the past becomes too hard to retell? Critical use offers opportunities to do history differently.

Tim Cole is professor of social history at the University of Bristol

“AI promises to make history faster, but also shallower”

AI is often hailed as the next great tool for historians. It can scan entire archives in seconds, collate references across databases, and generate polished prose at the click of a button. On the surface, this seems like liberation from drudgery. But, in speeding up our work, AI also risks hollowing it out.

History is not simply a matter of data extraction. The working historian does more than harvest facts: we interrogate silences in sources, wrestle with contradictions in established narratives, and read against the grain of the archive. AI machine tools excel at spotting patterns but fail at understanding nuance. They can tell you how often a phrase appears in a colonial newspaper, but not why irony mattered to the writer, nor how absence itself can be evidence. Outsourcing too much to algorithms risks confusing fluency with insight.

An old manuscript with writing on it

The bigger danger, however, lies in how AI will shape the dissemination of history. Museums, publishers and even classrooms may come to rely on AI-generated summaries to teach the past. This could democratise access, but it could also flatten differences and sanitise conflict. History risks being repackaged into uniform, bite-sized ‘lessons’ optimised for clarity rather than complexity. That should alarm any historian who believes that the discipline’s value lies in argument and debate.

AI will certainly change the rhythms of our work. It helps me, as a historian of modern subcontinental Buddhism, to map far-flung connections between texts in English, Hindi and Sinhalese. But if I do not remain critical, it is all too easy to mistake the machine’s quick outputs for deeper interpretation. And if the wider public comes to accept AI’s versions of the past as authoritative, the historian’s role as interpreter and critic could be diminished.

The challenge for us is clear. AI will not replace historians, but it could deskill us if we let it. Indeed, it promises to make history faster, but also shallower. Our task is to ensure that the speed it offers does not come at the cost of depth – because history done fast is rarely history done well.

Bhadrajee Hewage recently completed a DPhil in history from Trinity College Oxford, researching trends in subcontinental Buddhism during the late colonial and early postcolonial periods

This article was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[I've just been inside a Nazi monster's mansion – and what I found there was deeply haunting]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/ive-just-been-inside-a-nazi-monsters-mansion-and-what-i-found-there-was-deeply-haunting/ 2025-11-28T18:01:04.000Z 2025-11-28T18:00:32.000Z 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.

A black and white photograph of a man in full military uniform. He has right hand on his hip

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.

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

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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.

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

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.

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.

A black and white image of an open top car with a flat back tyre and extensive damage to the side facing the camera

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.

A black and white image of a burning village, with large clouds of smoke covering it

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.

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.

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.

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)

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Did Hitler have a secret Jewish grandfather? Our DNA research has solved the mystery]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/did-hitler-have-a-secret-jewish-grandfather-our-dna-research-has-solved-the-mystery/ 2025-11-22T22:01:03.000Z 2025-11-22T22:00:41.000Z 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.

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.

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.

A pair of hands in purple gloves hold two small tools and work on a ripped cloth sample on a table

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Hitler, dressed in a long overcoat and a cap, looks out over the sea

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.

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.

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

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.

A black and white photo of a young boy wearing a dark jacket and light shirt. He is looking seriously at the camera

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.

A close up photograph of Hitler, with a short black moustache and a very serious expression on his face

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

]]> Dr David Musgrove, FSA <![CDATA[“I hope I would have defended the Nazis at Nuremberg”]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/second-world-war/would-you-defend-nazis-at-nuremberg-phillippe-sands/ 2025-11-07T16:43:29.000Z 2025-11-07T16:34:36.000Z 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.

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.

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.

At the Nuremberg Trials on 5 February 1946, Hermann Göring hides a smile as he exchanges remarks with Rudolf Hess and Joachim von Ribbentrop, while Karl Dönitz sits behind them in dark glasses.

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.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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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

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