Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Hermann Rauschning, onetime mayor of the Free City of Danzig, one of Hitler’s earliest agitational targets (Danzig had been removed from German sovereignty by the Treaty of Versailles), who had contact with Hitler in the crucial years just before he came to power, later wrote a memoir of his conversations with Hitler. While his reminiscences have been challenged on the grounds he exaggerated his access, they were enormously influential and helped create the image of Hitler relied upon by the OSS and historians such as H. R. Trevor-Roper. Rauschning described the atmosphere around Hitler as a “reeking miasma of furtive unnatural sexuality that fills and fouls the whole atmosphere round him like an evil emanation. Nothing in this environment is straightforward—surreptitious relationships, substitutes and symbols, false sentiments, secret lusts—nothing has the openness of a natural instinct.”

  And attempts to explain Hitler’s political malevolence as an outgrowth of sexual unnaturalness arose quite early as well and quickly spread beyond Germany. Consider, for instance, the remarkable essay that appeared in London’s Spectator on January 19, 1934. I cite this essay, entitled “Hitlerism as a Sex Problem,” not for its analytical persuasiveness but as a symptom of a persistent, almost wishful strain of Hitler explanation.

  The author, Rodney Collin, begins by attempting to explain the German turn to Hitler as the result of a mass, generational “sex starvation”: The enforced abstinence of World War I turned, after 1919, he says, “to promiscuity, a neurotic state. . . . Unemployment and the terror of it” made “German males less willing to contemplate marriages.” Military fanaticism, “the recognized enemy of full heterosexuality,” led to “the literary preoccupation with perversity, the notorious nightclubs for men only; these stories showed how deep went the underground currents.”

  Then, “after the 1931 depression,” this analysis continues, “sex starvation turned guilty and flamed into fanaticism, cruelty and bitterness. Distorted sex showed itself in Jew-baiting, persecution and ultrapuritanism.”

  Finally, then, enter Hitler. The psychohistorical situation in Germany “threw up representative leaders—Hitler in whose life there has been no other woman but his mother.” Hitler, a “sexual abnormal with a childhood fixation . . . unable to conceive the normal ideal of full and ideal heterosexual love and marriage. . . . The tragedy lies in the power wielded by such abnormals over . . . average people.” (A contemporary, less homophobic descendant of this kind of argument can be found in Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies, a study of the sexuality of the proto-Nazi Freikorps militias heavily influenced by Freudian heretic Wilhelm Reich’s sexual analysis of fascism.)

  Collin laments the fact that “a psychoanalytical interpretation of history and politics which should naturally follow from any acceptance of Freudianism remains unwritten.” In fact, it would not remain unwritten for long. It crops up nine years later in the psychoanalytically oriented report on “The Mind of Adolf Hitler” prepared for the OSS by Dr. Walter C. Langer, the centerpiece of which is an assertion about the nature of Hitler’s relationship with Geli Raubal.

  “From a consideration of all the evidence,” Langer wrote, in a report destined for the eyes of FDR, “it would seem that Hitler’s perversion is as Geli described it.” Although this purported description by Geli, while certainly colorful, is not very well corroborated, nonetheless it became, in effect, the official diagnosis of the U.S. government: that Hitler had an extremely perverse sexual psychopathology, one he acted out with Geli Raubal, and one which was in effect a source of his murderous political pathology because “it isolated him from the normal love of human beings.”

  A key document upon which the OSS diagnosis is based, one that might be the missing link between the prewar stew of rumor and gossip about Hitler’s sexuality and the postwar formulation of the psychohistorians who raised these speculations to pretensions of science, is a report in the OSS files: the naval-intelligence debriefing of Dr. Karl Kronor, who had a story to tell about Hitler and Geli Raubal.

  The Kronor document (OSS number 31963, dated 1943) was prepared by a naval-intelligence analyst stationed in Reykjavík, Iceland, where he debriefed Kronor, a German refugee doctor; the analyst prefaced the refugee doctor’s diagnosis of Hitler thus: “The following report on Hitler prepared by Dr. Karl Kronor, a German refugee living in Reykjavík and a former nerve specialist in Vienna is forwarded for information. A tentative evaluation of B-3 has been placed on the report. Dr. Kronor is supposed to have been present at the original medical examination of Hitler.”

  Hitler’s original medical examination? Since Kronor is identified as a Viennese “nerve specialist,” that would seem to suggest an examination that took place before Hitler left Vienna for Germany. But since the medical treatment Kronor proceeds to describe focuses on Hitler’s treatment by a “nerve specialist” for hysterical blindness at the end of the First World War and since Kronor claims to be familiar with the circumstances of this treatment at firsthand, it suggests he meant to say Hitler’s original psychiatric treatment at Pasewalk in November 1918, when he had his alleged encounter with the “nerve doctor” Edmund Forster who some believe imbued Hitler with a vision of his calling. Perhaps Kronor was detailed there, or perhaps he heard the story in émigré circles. In any case, he professes great familiarity with, and strong opinions about, Hitler’s blindness.

  In the first place, Kronor is skeptical that Corporal Hitler’s blindness had anything to do with gas poisoning, as Hitler had claimed, because “blindness is not normally cured without trace,” and in Hitler’s case there were no known aftereffects. Indeed, Hitler is known for his “studied hypnotic stare” and “there is no recorded example of gas poisoning having had so favorable an outcome.” In such a case, he insists, “there are only two possible explanations: 1) simulation (i.e., faking), 2) hysteria or psychopathy (or, of course, a combination of both, for hysterics can simulate and, in fact, tend to do so).”

  This brings him to the Geli Raubal case, which he describes as one that will “prove that even in private life, the psychopath Adolf Hitler belongs to the class of psychopathic criminals”:

  His own niece, a certain Fraulein Raubahl [sic] was found dead with a bullet wound in the head and a revolver by her side. Suicide was declared to be the cause of death (as in the case of Professor Forster). Actually, she was shot because she refused to surrender to the perverse desires of her uncle. (Hitler like many psychopaths is sexually abnormal. He is not, however, as is commonly supposed, homosexual but a pervert of another kind.) . . . The murderer, usually so clever, had failed to remember in this instance that young girls very rarely commit suicide by shooting, and never by a shot in the head.

  Again, while we can question the accuracy of his evidence (Geli was shot in the chest, not the head), we have here encapsulated the linkage of perversion and murder Geli Raubal’s death gave birth to, from almost the first moment it became public. Indeed, the very first skeptical newspaper report—the one that appeared in the Munich Post the Monday following the Saturday when the death was announced—raised questions about the suicide verdict, suggested a violent quarrel with Hitler had preceded the death, raised the specter of sexual possessiveness, and in effect accused Hitler of lying to cover up the damaging truth about this “dark affair.” It went so far as to suggest that, if the truth came out, the scandal could spell the end of Hitler’s political career.

  The headline on the Post story read: “A Mysterious Affair: Hitler’s Niece Commits Suicide,” and the insidiously suggestive story went as follows:

  Regarding this mysterious affair, informed sources tell us that on Friday, September 18, Herr Hitler and his niece had yet another fierce quarrel. What was the cause? Geli, a vivacious twenty-three-year-old music student, wanted to go to Vienna, where she intended to become engaged. Hitler was decidedly against this. That is why they were quarreling repeatedly. After a fierce row, Hitler left his apartment on Prinzregentenplatz.

  On Saturday, September 19, it became known that Geli h
ad been found shot in the apartment with Hitler’s gun in her hand. The nose bone of the deceased was shattered, and the corpse evidenced other serious injuries. From a letter to a girlfriend in Vienna, it appeared that Geli intended to go to Vienna.

  The men in the Brown House [Nazi Party headquarters] then deliberated over what should be announced as the cause of the suicide. They agreed to give the reason for Geli’s death as “unsatisfied artistic achievement.” They also discussed the question of who, if something were to happen, should be Hitler’s successor. Gregor Strasser was named.

  Perhaps the near future will bring light to this dark affair.

  It was the allegations and insinuations in this story that would cause the Munich chief of police to order Detective Sauer to reopen his hastily closed investigation.

  But what’s remarkable is how widespread, how public, and how ugly and damning the publicity about Geli Raubal’s death was—and not just in Munich. It was as if her death suddenly unleashed or legitimized the expression of the unspoken, the publication of the most vile and virulent whispers about Hitler, embodying the belief, even the wish, by his opponents that he was as much a monster of perversion privately as he was in his politics—a belief, a wish that had already spread beyond the borders of Germany.

  Consider what turned up from a survey of the newspaper archives in Hitler’s native Vienna in the week following Geli Raubal’s death. No less than six newspapers ran stories about the case, stories that mixed fact, error, and dark speculation about the story behind the story. Two in particular caught my attention. The Neue Wiener Tageblatt, in a dispatch datelined Berlin, indicated skepticism about “the official version of her suicide: over anxiety and fear of her first public appearance in a music recital.”

  The Tageblatt also echoed the whispers that found their way into the Munich press, the ones that raised the specter of a Jewish (often Viennese) cuckolder: “Hitler was reported to have reproached her for a relationship with a music teacher of alien race.”

  And the account of Geli’s death in Vienna’s Der Abend (which reprinted the story published in Berlin’s left-wing Neue Montags Zeitung) reflects how widespread and public were the rumors about the aberrational nature of Hitler’s relationship to his half-niece. The suicide is attributed to the young woman’s “bitter disappointment at the nature of Hitler’s private life,” which echoes the euphemism employed by the Bavarian weekly Die Fanfare, which explained, “Hitler’s private life with Geli took on forms that obviously the young woman was unable to bear. Leaders of subordinate rank know so much about their top leader that Hitler is, so to speak, their hostage and thus unable to intervene and conduct a purge if party leaders are involved in dark affairs.”

  This image of Hitler and his party leadership poised in an embrace of mutual blackmail over an abyss of scandal might, perversely, have contributed to the fatal underestimation of Hitler’s prospects on the part of his political opponents: The widespread belief that he was so hopelessly compromised, so “unnatural,” so deeply enmeshed in dark affairs that were almost an open secret, led to the expectation that sooner or later exposure of them in episodes like the Geli Raubal affair would cause Hitler to self-destruct in disgrace over his private life and spare his opponents the task of defeating him politically. The sexual explanation of Hitler may have had unforeseen and unfortunate historical consequences even before it became a red herring for psychohistorians.

  But there was another detail further down in the Der Abend account that caught my attention: the earliest reference I’d seen in print to a previous woman’s suicide attempt over Hitler. One that took place several years before Geli Raubal’s death, one that became, along with that of Geli and several others, the basis for what might be called “The Legend of Hitler’s Suicide Maidens,” a legend that became enshrined in postwar psychohistorical explanations of Hitler’s sexual pathology.

  Der Abend referred to “another incident about three years ago when a young woman in Berchtesgaden committed suicide on account of Hitler. The girl hanged herself out of fear after having accused Hitler in a letter to her parents as the only one to be held responsible for it.” While a crucial detail is either deliberately or inadvertently reported incorrectly here—in fact, it was not an actual suicide but an unsuccessful suicide attempt—there can be no mistaking the reference. The young woman in question was one Mimi Reiter, a name that has since become enshrined in the realm of shadow-Hitler apocrypha as the first of the suicide maidens.

  The litany of Hitler’s suicide maidens appeared first in Robert Waite’s psychoanalytical biography, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. Waite, now an emeritus professor of history at Williams College, broke new ground in Hitler studies by succeeding in getting Walter Langer’s secret wartime OSS report on the mind of Adolf Hitler declassified.

  Waite adapted Langer’s conclusion that Hitler practiced an outré sexual perversion so repellent it drove women to suicide. He buttressed his belief by a kind of grim roll call: “The idea that Hitler had a sexual perversion particularly abhorrent to women is further supported by a statistic: of the seven women who, we can be reasonably sure, had intimate relations with Hitler, six committed suicide or seriously attempted to do so.” In addition to Geli Raubal, he reports, “Mimi Reiter tried to hang herself in 1928; . . . Eva Braun attempted suicide in 1932 and again in 1935; Frau Inge Ley was a successful suicide, as were Renate Mueller and Suzi Liptauer.” (The seventh—nonsuicide—maiden was Leni Riefenstahl, Waite believes.)

  The clear implication of this catalog is that Mimi Reiter was the first to know the awful truth about Hitler’s unnatural sexuality and the first to prefer death to living with the indelible memory of her humiliating participation in his perversion. And yet Mimi Reiter’s own account of her romance with Hitler, which surfaced in 1959, does not bear out Waite’s implication.

  Reiter’s description of her romance with Adolf Hitler, a complete version of which has never appeared in English, is certainly disturbing, even profoundly disturbing, but in a different way from the one Waite suggests: It’s disturbing because it gives an impression of something we may be far more squeamish about accepting than some excretory perversion; it gives a disturbing impression of something close to normality. And it is worth examining more closely for the context it gives to the subsequent affair with Geli Raubal and the pervasive reports that a horrible perversion drove her to kill herself or led to her being killed to silence her about Hitler’s shame.

  The Mimi Reiter story came to light in a chance conversation between Hitler’s sister Paula and Stern reporter Günter Peis. Peis had worked on a 1959 British documentary called The Hitler Years, which featured interviews with close Hitler associates, including Paula. Driving Paula (who then called herself Paula Wolf) home from the interview in his Volkswagen, Peis reported the following remarks from her: “‘The autobahn and the VW are probably the best things my brother left behind.’ And then she . . . suddenly mentioned a visitor she had a few days before. The visitor was a woman, ‘maybe the only woman my brother had ever loved. Who knows, maybe everything would have happened differently if he had married her.’”

  This was Mimi Reiter. Peis proceeded to track down Mimi Reiter and draw her out on the details of Hitler’s courtship and romance, an account (printed in Stern) that suggests some striking similarities to—and significant differences from—Hitler’s later, fatal affair with Geli Raubal.

  Mimi was only sixteen and Hitler thirty-seven when they met (Geli was nineteen and Hitler thirty-eight when he began keeping company with her). She was the daughter of a Social Democratic Party official in Berchtesgaden, site of Hitler’s mountain retreat. Her account is a curious mixture of naïve schoolgirl romanticism on her part—and a curious, stilted, almost crippling courtliness on his part that often seems to verge on the abnormal or unnatural but, at least in Mimi’s account, never quite does. In fact, in 1959, over thirty years after the affair, even after Hitler’s defeat and demonization, she describes the affair in the
language of a Harlequin romance novel. Hitler is the stiff, somewhat ruthless stranger who first appears with a dog and whip but is later melted into a schoolgirl-fantasy lover by her charms.

  “There is the famous Hitler recently released from prison,” she’s told, when she first glimpses him in 1925 on the street outside the family shop where she works.

  “He was wearing breeches and a light velour hat,” she recalls. “In his hand was a riding whip, he had warm light-gray stockings and a windbreaker that was held together by a leather belt . . . beside him walked a beautiful shepherd.”

  He sees her, too, and is theatrically captivated. He asks Mimi’s sister, “Could you introduce me to this bliss?”

  Mimi is brought over. “He transferred his riding whip from his right hand into his left . . . gave me his hand and looked at me with a piercing gaze.” And praised her dog: “The dog is really beautiful and well trained. You are really good at that.”

  They talked about dogs for an hour. Hitler “did not take his eyes off Mimi,” Peis reports. “Then he very formally asked [her sister] Anni whether she would permit him to take Mimi for a walk sometime. At that she [Mimi] got up and ran away.”

  Still, she was fascinated in a starstruck way. “He looks quite dashing, with his breeches and his riding whip.” There is one note that spoils the picture: his mustache. “The funny flies,” she calls the black, hairy growths beneath Hitler’s nose. I’m tempted here to introduce a digression on Hitler’s mustache styles, prompted by a viewing in Munich of the recent “Hoffmann on Hitler” exhibition, a collection of some of the thousands of Hitler photographs taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer and for many years the man with an absolute monopoly on Hitler’s image, the only person authorized to photograph him in the Munich years. One of the revelations of the Hoffmann exhibit is how calculated Hitler was in every aspect of his pose, how in the Munich period he experimented ceaselessly with details of his image, his physical appearance, especially his mustache.