If anyone were to ask you to pinpoint the precise moment of your epiphany, that statement you made to a large enough audience to assure your reputation as a thinker, perhaps not brilliant, but at least a notch or two above average, what would you say?
I can tell you what was on my lunch plate yesterday, but probably would say mash potatoes instead of carrots; however, I can most accurately recount to you, word for word, my almost brilliant observation in my college class of World History II forty-six years ago.
Professor Stern sat at his desk nearly the entire class period delivering his nonstop soliloquy on Adolf Hitler, or perhaps filibuster, since it had all the earmarks of Stern’s modus operandi: to conduct class as if his captive audience were all ears and nothing else, so we were surprised when he paused and asked, “What compelled Hitler to attempt world domination?”
None of us raised a hand, assuming one more rhetorical question. He had given us something to which we were not accustomed––silence––so a few of us raised hands and offered suggestions. After each one Stern either shook his head or rated the suggestion a vocal and vociferous “Absurd!”
Then it came to me in a weird flash: a logical reason why the Austrian madman with the silly mustache and that diagonal swipe of dark hair over half his forehead was so maniacally driven to conquer the globe. Smugly satisfied with myself, a college junior on his way to bringing to light a discovery that would earn me a place in college history, I raised my hand. Stern nodded.
“I read somewhere,” I began, “that Hitler had only one testicle, so is it possible he was compensating for the missing body part, maybe feeling less than adequate, even though Eva Braun seemed not to care, and he saw Planet Earth as the other testicle, something he had to have to make him––”
“Yes, yes, perhaps you are right,” interrupted an excited Professor Stern, “something he had to have to make him the world ubermensch, the world Superman!”
As it turned out, the lack of Hitler’s scrotal symmetry was one of hundreds of falsehoods attributed to the mad dictator. Equally false was another rumor that claims Hitler invented the goosestep because marching like that for him was much more comfortable than the traditional march that tended to throw his equilibrium out of whack.
This one-testicle rumor dates back to the World War I Battle of the Somme in 1916 where Hitler suffered a groin wound, a medic named Johan Jambor supposedly found the injured corporal, and saved his life. Many years after the war, sometime in the 1960s, medic Jambor, now old civilian Jambor, revealed his one-testicle discovery to a priest in the Sixties who, the rumor goes, wrote it in a notebook that someone later found. Jabor told the priest that Adolf Hitler’s main concern was, “Will I be able to have children?” Rumor or not, aren’t we all glad the madman did not have any offspring?
One further note about Hitler and this gossipy swipe against half his private pair. The rumor gave rise to lyrics made popular among European schoolboys in the 60’s, sung to the "Colonel Bogey March" which had been written in 1914 by Lieutenant F. J. Ricketts (1881–1945), a British army bandmaster. The lyrics rounded up, not only Hitler, but his three high-ranking Nazi cohorts, and they went like this:
Hitler has only got one ball,
Goering has two but very small.
Himmler is somewhat sim'lar,
But poor old Goebbels has no balls at all.’
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Salvatore Buttaci’s Flashing My Shorts and 200 Shorts, published by All Things That Matter Press, are available at http://www.kindlegraph.com/authors/sambpoet
His new book If Roosters Don’t Crow, It Is Still Morning: Haiku and Other Poems:
http://tinyurl.com/76akl73
Buttaci lives in West Virginia with Sharon, the love of his life.