A new book suggests that the Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco lost a testicle when injured on the battlefield in 1916, the same year that the future Nazi leader is believed to have suffered his own, much mocked, loss.
In a new book by the Spanish historian José Maria Zavala, Ana Puigvert, who is a doctor, is quoted claiming that her grandfather Antonio Puigvert, a urologist known to have had Franco as a patient, had told her that the dictator only had one testicle.
It is thought his loss stemmed from a war injury in 1916 when Franco was wounded during battle at El Biutz, near Ceuta, which today is a Spanish enclave on the Moroccan coast. In June 1916, Franco, then a captain, led an attack in the region which was then a Spanish protectorate and was hit in his lower abdomen and seriously wounded.
Biographers have often speculated that his injury affected the reproductive organs of the dictator, who ruled Spain following the Civil War of 1936-1939 until his death in 1975.
Last year it emerged that Hitler had lost a testicle during the Battle of the Somme in 1916 after documents came to light containing an account by a doctor who treated him on the battlefield. Rumours of his condition provided inspiration for a notorious and morale-boosting song on the subject that was popular with British soldiers in the Second World War.