How a blood-soaked memento taken from Hitler’s lair held key to DNA discovery ...Middle East

When Lieutenant-Colonel Roswell P Rosengren arrived at Adolf Hitler’s “Führerbunker” in the days after Germany’s surrender in 1945, he wasted little time in examining the bloodstained sofa where the Nazi leader had taken his life.

A US intelligence expert and chief information officer for Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, Rosengren was one of four senior American soldiers granted access by the Soviet military to the dictator’s lair in the aftermath of the fall of Berlin.

While the exact purpose of the visit by Rosengren and his colleagues is unclear, they went about their task with precision.

Using a knife, Rosengren cut a swatch of cloth from the small, two-seat couch where Hitler and Eva Braun had killed themselves on 30 April, 1945 – she by swallowing poison, he by pressing his pistol to his right temple and shooting himself. Crucially, the piece of upholstery included a corner of a bloodstain adjacent to where Hitler had been sitting.

How the artefact was preserved for 70 years

The US officer, who also cut a sample from a leather office chair in the bunker, was nothing if not a precise record keeper. He attached to the quasi-rectangular sofa sample, measuring some 15cm by 9cm, a cardboard tag which read: “Piece of covering of davenport [an American term for a sofa] in Hitler’s air raid shelter – blood supposed to be Hitler’s.”

For the best part of 70 years, this macabre artefact of the death of the architect of the Holocaust remained under lock and key in the possession of Rosengren and his family, bearing mute testimony to Hitler’s demise.

As Erik Rosengren, the late Lt-Col’s grandson, this week told a Channel 4 documentary: “For him, it was a true symbol of the death of Hitler and the end of the war.”

Now, however, the piece of cloth severed by Rosengren from the sofa’s upholstery, depicting a traditional hunting scene, has begun to yield secrets which for those men entering that bunker in 1945 would have belonged to the realm of science fiction.

The two-part Channel 4 documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator, makes a series of claims about the dictator’s physical and mental condition after an international team of scientists was able to isolate his genome from the bloodstain.

Their findings, which include the claim that Hitler is highly likely to have suffered from a genetic sexual disorder whose symptoms include undescended testicles and a micropenis, cast new – if controversial – light on the physical and psychological make-up of the man responsible for some of the most malign and murderous deeds in history.

But of similar fascination is the story of how the race to shape the peace in the wake of the Allied victory in 1945 provided the material which continues to fuel the world’s enduring scrutiny of every aspect of Hitler’s existence.

What happened inside Hitler’s Berlin bunker

Rosengren’s presence in the Führerbunker – a sprawling complex in central Berlin used to shelter senior commanders – took place as the Allies sought to piece together the final days of the German leader’s existence amid a quickening operation to round up top Nazis and fill the power vacuum left by the fall of Hitler’s regime.

The dictator left instructions that his remains and those of his wife were to be destroyed. Hitler’s personal SS valet, Heinz Linge, later provided testimony that the bodies were doused with petrol and immolated outside the bunker in central Berlin as the battle for the German capital with encroaching Soviet forces reached its climax. It is widely thought that Russian archives also contain genetic material belonging to Hitler.

It seems unlikely that the visit of the American delegation to the scene of Hitler’s death, which was within the zone subsequently controlled by the Soviet military, was simply a sightseeing tour, and may have been part of a wider attempt by US intelligence to confirm the circumstances of the despot’s demise. Among the other items taken by Rosengren were the dial to Hitler’s safe.

Ultimately, however, the evidence recovered from the bunker remained in the American officer’s possession and was regarded by his family as a somewhat unique souvenir of the war.

In a letter written in 2001, the late Lt-Col’s son, Erik L Rosengren, a professional photographer, wrote: “A few days after Hitler’s suicide my father and three senior army officers entered Hitler’s bunker. Dad cut a piece of blood-soaked material from Hitler’s davenport… These and other mementoes were catalogued and numbered with tags and placed under lock and key. These pieces have been in my possession since that date.”

Blood sample held by museum so as not to ‘censor history’

This remained the situation for the best part of seven decades until the Rosengren family took the decision in 2014 to offer the artefacts for sale via an American auction house specialising in historical items.

Waiting to buy them was Erik Dorr, the flamboyant curator of a private museum in the Pennsylvania town of Gettysburg which has a focus on displaying items reflecting the military and political history of the United States

After paying some $16,000 (£12,000) for the Führerbunker sofa swatch, Dorr explained that he had been keen to acquire the cloth to both keep it out of the unsuitable hands – and see if its DNA secrets could eventually be revealed.

Speaking in 2014, Dorr said: “I feel the Hitler blood artefact is a fitting symbol and a testament to the final days of World War Two in Europe, and the end to the suffering that Hitler inflicted on the world.

“We make it clear that it is not a shrine to Hitler, but a symbol to the ultimate defeat of the evil that Hitler and his supporters espoused.”

He added: “Sometimes with stuff like that, you don’t want it to get in the wrong hands, so I wanted to keep it in the museum system.”

The curator, whose Gettysburg Museum of History is open to the public for free and also contains “blood artefacts” of figures including Abraham Lincoln and president John F Kennedy, said he acknowledged concerns over displaying a sample of Hitler’s blood but insisted it had the power to deepen understanding of the depravities of the Second World War.

“My policy here is that we don’t censor history,” he said.

Despite making clear his openness to the possibility of having the upholstery sample tested and studied – “including a possible television documentary” – it took the best part of a decade before that scientific analysis took place. Dorr did not immediately respond to a request from The i Paper to comment on the findings of the documentary.

‘You cannot see evil in someone’s DNA’

It is nonetheless a mark of the enduring unease in academic circles at embarking on the scientific study of a figure like Hitler that the programme makers explain that they received multiple rejections from European institutions when they sought a laboratory to conduct the DNA testing and sequencing used for the project.

Instead, the documentary team used a private forensics company based in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Indeed, the documentary is at pains to point out that for all the insight that Hitler’s genome can provide into his physical and mental state – including the revelation that he had genetic markers for conditions including ADHD – it should not be seen as a definitive explanation for, or root of, his actions.

As Professor Turi King, the British specialist in ancient DNA who led the project, puts it: “You cannot see evil in someone’s DNA.”

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At the same time, the findings provide a curious overlap with the popular history of the Second World War and the bawdy ditty impugning the masculinity of senior Nazis which was widely sung by British soldiers and civilians to the tune of the “Colonel Bogey March”.

Written in 1939 as an apparent propaganda tool by the British Council, the song “Hitler Has Only Got One Ball” appears to have been at least in part a reflection of long-standing pre-war speculation in intelligence circles based on a medical examination of the Nazi leader carried out in the 1920s.

A century later, via the circuitous route of the actions of an enterprising US army officer in 1945 and the subsequent advances of DNA analysis, it appears the song may well have been founded in reality.

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