A brief encounter with a Jewish prostitute may have led to Hitler’s genocidal Holocaust, claim psychiatrists. They believe he may have caught the sexually transmitted disease syphilis which, if untreated, can eventually cause madness.

According to a report, mental and behavioural disturbances triggered by the advanced stages of the disease could have resulted in Hitler targeting Jews and the mentally retarded.

There is “ample circumstantial evidence” for the theory, according to a team headed by psychiatrist Dr Bassem Habeeb. He said that there had been speculation that Hitler had syphilis from diary entries made by his personal doctor, Theo Morrell.

Yet despite significant medical and political clues, the theory has never been rigorously examined, he told the Royal College of Psychiatrists’ annual meeting in Edinburgh.

He said: “If Hitler’s life is looked at through the lens of a syphilis diagnosis, one clue leads to another until a pattern of infection and progressive infection emerges, a disease that may have defined him from youth as an outsider and that progressively ravaged his body and mind.” The disease would have fuelled a “deadly logic and blueprint for the Holocaust” which focused on particular minorities, he said.

Hitler, who reportedly had sex with a Jewish prostitute in Vienna in 1908, put syphilis high on his political agenda, devoting 13 pages to the disease in his book Mein Kampf. The job of “combating syphilis – the Jewish disease – should be the task of the entire German nation,” he wrote.

“The health of the nation will be regained only by eliminating the Jews.”

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