Hitler Has Only Got One Ball

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"Hitler Has Only Got One Ball" refers to the many variations on a set of lyrics to the popular "Colonel Bogey March". These are four-line lyrics making fun of the Nazi leaders.

[edit] Origin of the song

In his autobiography Fringe Benefits, Anglo-Irish writer and publicist Donough O'Brien says that the original was written by his father, Toby O'Brien, in August 1939 as British propaganda.^[1] Toby O'Brien was the publicist for the British Council at the time. This version started with the words "Göring has only got one ball", and went on to imply that Hitler had two small ones. In virtually all later versions, the positions are reversed. The statement that Himmler was "sim'lar" appears in all versions. The final line of this original and some later forms ends with the clever word play that Goebbels had "no balls". Both these variations argue strongly in favour of O'Brien's version being a very early version, and a Daily Mail report of the time states that it was "attributed to someone not unconnected with our old friend the British Council".

O'Brien's claims have not been substantiated, and no author has ever been identified for the more popular versions that begin "Hitler has only got one ball". There is no known attempt by anyone to claim or enforce a copyright on the lyrics. It is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index, number 10493.

[edit] Song lyrics

All versions are sung to the tune of The Colonel Bogey March:

• The Colonel Bogey March MIDI file

[edit] Claimed original version, credited to Toby O'Brien

Göring has only got one ball

Hitler's [are] so very small

Himmler's so very similar

And Goebbels has no balls at all

This version, thought to be the original, is interesting in that Göring has the one ball and Hitler apparently has two and that it starts with Göring. The musical comedy word play of rhyming Goebbels with "no balls" both argue in favour of this being a very early version.

[edit] Variant stanzas

Variant number 1 (The most common variant)

Hitler has only got one ball,

Göring has two but very small,

Himmler is somewhat sim'lar,

But poor Goebbels has no balls at all.

For line 2, sometimes is heard "Göring his balls are very small".

In line 3, "somewhat" is sometimes replaced by "rather". The first line may also be one left ball, one brass ball, one big ball; approximately this version appears in Thomas Pynchon's V. Other alternatives to line 3 include: "Himmler's are somewhat slimmler," and "Hess has even less,"

For line 4, sometimes is heard "And Mussolini ain't got no balls at all."

Variant number 2

Hitler has only got one ball,

The other is on the kitchen wall,

His mother, the dirty bugger,

Chopped it off when he was small.

Outside of the United Kingdom, the second line is oft invoked as "The other is on the kitchen wall" or "The other is hanging on the wall". Some areas of the United Kingdom alter the second line to include local buildings. Mancunians use "The other is in the Free Trade Hall", whereas Londoners use "the Albert Hall"

Other variations include use of the past tense, referring to Goebbels as Doctor, Hitler's other ball being "on the wall", mixtures of the variants above, and Hitler's life being "much simpler if he didn't have any at all".

Variant number 3 As sung in Australia by school children in the 1950s and 60's, with phonetic spelling.

Hitler had only one brass ball,

Ger-ring had two but they were small,

Himmler had something simmler,

And poor old Go-balls had no balls at all.

Note the addition of Hitler having had a brass testicle. Sometimes "Go-balls" would be replaced by a fictional "Joe-Balls", possibly because by then young children were unaware of who Goebbels was.

Variant number 4 As sung by the Boy Scouts of America^{[citation needed]}

Hitler - oh he had one big ball

Göring - had two but they were rather small

Himmler - had something similar

But mister Goebbels had no balls at all

Varient number 5 as sung also in the united kingdom

Hitler has only got one ball

the other is in the albert hall

his mother, who has the other . . .

and a varied last line.. this also incorrectly infers that hilter had 3 balls originally

[edit] Second verses: Hitler's mother

When the first verse includes Hitler's mother, a second verse is generally added:

She threw it over Germany,

It landed in the deep blue sea,

The fishes got out their dishes,

And had scallops and bollocks for tea.

or

She threw it into a conker tree

It missed and went into the sea

The fishes got out their dishes,

And had scallops and bollocks for tea.

or

Hitler has only got one tit

The other is in a ball of shit

His father the dirty faggot

Bit it off and swallowed it

[edit] Verses about Germany and Germans

These verses mention neither Nazis nor Hitler:

Frankfurt has only one beer hall,

Stuttgart, die München all on call,

Munich, vee lift our tunich,

To show vee "Cherman" have no balls at all.

Hans Otto is very short, not tall,

And blotto, for drinking Singhai and Skol.

A "Cherman", unlike Bruce Erwin,

Because Hans Otto has no balls at all.

[edit] Introductory verse

(Sung to the tune of Land of Hope and Glory, and followed by some variant of the Nazi verses, above.)

Land of soap and water,

Hitler's having a bath.

Churchill's looking through the keyhole,

Having a jolly good laugh

Be..e..e..e..cause...

Hitler — has only [etc]

[edit] The song in other media

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

The song has frequently been heard and seen in other media.

• The lyrics were not sung during the famous Colonel Bogey March sequence in the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai because they were considered too vulgar.
• The verse was obviously alluded to without actually using the words in episodes of It Ain't Half Hot Mum and Goodnight Sweetheart. In the former, the Sergeant Major complained that the band at the last concert had played, he then hummed the tune of Colonel Bogey, then he said "And we all know what the words to that are!". In an episode of the latter, a German officer sings the German lyrics.
• Thomas Pynchon quoted the words in his novel V. by putting them in the mouths of British artillerymen on Malta.
• Bette Midler sang the lyrics in her concert film Divine Madness!.
• The song is used to harass a Jewish student in School Ties, a 1992 film.
• The lyrics were heard on the British TV sitcom 'Allo 'Allo!
• The song is sung in the Czech film Dark Blue World (2001).
• The lyrics were sung in the 1972 film adaptation of the John Knowles novel A Separate Peace (although they are not in the book, and the tune to which they are sung in the film is not the "Colonel Bogey March").
• A verse combining the first two lines of Variant 2 and the last two lines of Variant 1 appears in the 2000 Vertigo miniseries Adventures in the Rifle Brigade by Garth Ennis and Carlos Ezquerra. The follow-on miniseries, Operation Bollock, uses the missing testicle as a central plot device.
• The lyrics are alluded to in a 2003 advertisement for Spitfire Beer (the 'Bottle of Britain'), an English Ale. Hitler is shown photographed in full Wehrmacht Uniform with the caption 'Spot the ball'. The advertisement refers to print media spot the ball competitions in which readers were shown photographs of moments in football matches and asked to guess where the ball (which is edited out) would have been. See: Spitfire site
• In one of the 'Head-to-Head' dialogue sketches in the BBC comedy series Alas Smith and Jones Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones reminisce about the war and about the songs of the era. Smith sentimentally and poignantly sings the opening lines of "White Cliffs of Dover", and "We'll Meet Again", and then (to avoid lowering the tone) has to interrupt Jones when he begins to sing, "Hitler has only got one..."
• In an episode of the BBCTV comedy programme, 2 Point 4 Children the grandmother mentions Goebbels in conversation with a friend and - when queried - points out that "he was the one with no balls at all, if you remember".
• In the British radio series, The Bradshaws, Alf taught Billy the song.
• The Hector Scott character (played by Donald Moffat) sings this ditty to Shirley MacLaine's character in the movie The Evening Star (1993).
• In the Camp Dance episode of 'Allo 'Allo! where Captain Geering is disguised as a British POW due to circumstances, he starts singing the first verse upon inspection by German officers so as to seem genuinely British and avoid detection, since he was illegally present in the POW camp.
• The main character of the 2003 movie Wondrous Oblivion, a British teen who is the son of Jewish Holocaust survivors, sings this song for a friend.
• In Ricky Gervais' stand-up tour Fame, he speaks about the version of the song which refers to the Albert Hall. He states that when he went to the Albert Hall he couldn't find it and he had even looked for it which is "suspicious". Gervais continues stating that "if I had that, I'd have it in the foyer. On a plinth. In an eggcup". He ends it by questioning why "His mother has got the other", which would mean Hitler had three.

[edit] Did Hitler really have only one testicle?

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references (ideally, using inline citations). Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

An alleged Soviet autopsy on Hitler's remains made shortly after the war claimed Hitler was monorchic, but most historians dismiss this reference as propaganda. This autopsy was released around 1970. In November 2008, the discovery of an eye-witness account by a World War I army medic, one Johan Jambor, was announced in the press. According to these reports, Jambor intimated an account of how he saved Hitler's life after a groin injury in 1916 to a Polish priest and amateur historian, one Franciszek Pawlar, in the 1960s. Pawlar's record of the conversation that was discovered by Pawlar's relatives and published by Polish author Grzegorz Wawoczny.^[2] According to the German Bild magazine, a surviving friend of Jambor's, one Blassius Hanczuch, has confirmed the story, adding that Jambor and his co-rescuers dubbed Hitler "screamer" (Schreihals) because, as they were carrying him away, they came under French fire and had to temporarily abandon him, upon which he began to scream very loudly, imploring them to come back and threatening them with court martial if they were to leave him behind.^[3]

Records show that Hitler was wounded in 1916 during the Battle of the Somme, and some sources describe his injury as a wound to the groin. Hitler's World War I company commander has said that a VD exam found that Hitler had only one testicle. Robert G.L. Waite in his book The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1978) accepts the accuracy of this evidence:

Since the matter is of considerable importance to the psychological development of Hitler from infancy onward, let us pause here and come to grips with the problem of the Fuehrer's testicles. It can now be affirmed that the British Tommies were right all along in the first line of their version of the Colonel Bogey March, they were although manifestly mistaken in the last—that is to say, unless Goebbels' six children were the progeny of adoption, paternal surrogacy or some hitherto unconsidered, presumably unpalatable "Gott mit uns" form of divine intervention.

The autopsy performed by the Red Army pathologists on Hitler's body... [produced clear] findings:

The left testicle could not be found either in the scrotum or on the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal, or in the small pelvis...

There was some discussion of this issue for several weeks in the early 1970s in the letters column of the British magazine the New Statesman, although all correspondents accepted the Soviet autopsy as valid. One claimed that British intelligence had discovered that Hitler was monorchic and written the song in an attempt to drive him even further round the bend than he was already, with some elaborate theories about how they might have discovered this. Others thought that it was sheer coincidence, and one even claimed that there had been a similar song sung about Napoleon (this may not be true). One pointed out that most English speakers would not pronounce "Goebbels" correctly (an approximate rhyme with "gerbils"), they would pronounce it "Goballs", which suggests "no balls" and the rest would follow. (This correspondence came to a conclusion of sorts when one correspondent wrote a letter complaining about the conditions in which alleged illegal immigrants were being detained, adding that this was a more important issue than Hitler's balls.)

Unfortunately, the Soviet autopsy of Hitler cannot be accepted as authoritative. Hitler's death by suicide and the subsequent almost complete burning of his body would leave little for doctors to analyze — much less be able to focus on such a small body part. The autopsy is discussed in Ron Rosenbaum's book Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil (1998). He concludes that it was fabricated, based on information from Hitler's doctor and recantations by the compilers of the published form of the report.

The DVD version of the TV series The World At War has an interview with the Russian doctor Lt. Col. Sherovski (spelling uncertain), who led the autopsy, who claims that they unexpectedly found one testicle missing. This interview would have been conducted in the early 1970s. The programme presents dental evidence that an autopsy really was conducted, but also shows that the findings may have been distorted for political reasons. Specifically, Sherovski states Hitler was not shot in the head, but it is now known that he was.

[edit] See also

• Adolf Hitler's medical health
• Discrediting tactics
• Nazi songs
• Propaganda

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• The Colonel Bogey March MIDI file
• Did Hitler have only one testicle? from The Straight Dope
• A British Soldier Remembers, songs and lyrics of World War II
• Weebls Stuff: On The Moon 2 Reference to Hitler's missing left testicle
• NY Times: Insane or Just Evil? A Psychiatrist Takes a New Look at Hitler