Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

by Nigel Cawthorne

  * * *

  Soon after Hitler came to power, he invited the beautiful German film star nineteen-year-old Renate Muller to visit him in the Chancellory. He began the evening with gloatingly detailed descriptions of how his Gestapo men wrung confessions from their victims. He boasted that his men were far more brutal and effective than the worst of the medieval torturers.

  Even though this sickened her, Renate had resigned herself to the fact that she was expected to go to bed with the Reichschancellor. They went into the bedroom and undressed.

  Then Hitler threw himself on the floor at her feet and begged her to kick him. “I am filthy and unclean,” he yelled. “Beat me! Beat me!”

  Renate was horrified. She had never seen such a thing. She pleaded with him to get up, but he just lay there grovelling and moaning. So eventually she had to kick and punish him. The harder she kicked him, the more excited he got. Renate was utterly revolted by this display; but in conversation with film director Alfred Zeisler, she said that this was not even the worst of it. There was something even more unspeakable that she could not bring herself to talk about.

  Soon after, Renate Muller jumped to her death out of the window of her hotel in Berlin — though there is some speculation that she may have been pushed out on Gestapo orders after being secretly charged with having a Jewish lover.

  Hitler, it seems, had quite a passion for film actresses. Linda Basquette, an American star of the silent movies, claimed to have received a fan letter from him, inviting her to Berchtesgaden. There, he made a vigorous pass at her.

  “The man repelled me so much,” she said. “He had terrible body odour. He was flatulent. But he had strange penetrating eyes.”

  Basquette claims that she had to kick the Fuhrer in the groin to dampen his ardour, but this only inflamed him more. To escape his attentions, she claimed that she was part Jewish.

  Linda Basquette went on to marry nine times, once to Sam Warner of Warner Brothers. She died in 1994 at the age of 87.

  Meanwhile, back at the Reichs chancellery, the party went on. Champagne was consumed by the gallon and fabulous sums were paid to singers and dancers. The Reichsministers indulged their every whim. Josef Goebbels, one of the few heterosexuals among the Nazi elite, was so promiscuous, especially with film actresses employed by his Ministry of Propaganda, that his longsuffering wife Magda told Hitler she was going to divorce him. Hitler pointed out that divorce was impossible. There was not a lawyer in Germany who would handle her case. Magda seems to have tried to get her own back on her husband by attempting to seduce Hitler. She was a considerable beauty, but reported later that the Fuhrer was impotent.

  Hitler conceived a short-lived passion for Margaret Slezak, but she was an independent minded woman. When she would not bend to his will, he banned her from his inner circle.

  There was little doubt that Hitler could have his pick of women. One night, Austrian movie-maker Luis Trenker accompanied actress Louise Ulrich to the Chancellory, where the Fuhrer was “telling stories”. They found him in a room full of dazzling women in evening gowns. His mere presence, it. was said, set the decolletages atremble. One woman, the wife of the director of the Nuremberg opera, was half-kneeling, half-lying at his feet in a pose of abject surrender, while Hitler ranted about the need for more tanks, more guns and more bombs.

  One of the strangest worshippers at the feet of Hitler was Unity Mitford. The fifth daughter of Lord Redesdale, she came from a distinguished family. Her sister Jessica was a communist, who had a controversial career in journalism in America; Deborah was Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy Mitford became a distinguished novelist; and Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, blackshirted leader of the British Union of Fascists. Unity thought she could go one better and marry the Fuhrer himself.

  It was Diana who introduced Unity to Hitler during a ten-day holiday to Germany in 1935. Unity was immediately besotted. She began to stalk Hitler like a hunter, bleaching her hair blonde to make herself look more Nordic and wearing the swastika pin he had given her prominently on her lapel. Her parents plainly approved. Lord and Lady Redesdale visited Berlin as special guests of the Fuhrer. This caused a split in the family, with Diana and Unity fanatically pro-Hitler and Jessica and Nancy violently against.

  It is not known how seriously Hitler took Unity, or whether their affair was consummated — in Hitler’s strange way or in any other. However, Hitler did make it a practice to take young innocent girls, like Unity, and manipulate them into fulfilling his desires. He certainly found solace in her company, which seems to have relieved his deepest tensions. But those around Hitler found Unity a bit of a joke. Goebbels and Streicher called her Unity “Mit-fart”.

  With articles like “I am a Jew-hater” and other pieces of Nazi propaganda that she published, Unity burnt her bridges back in England. The day war was declared, she sat in the English gardens in Munich and shot herself in the head. She did not die immediately. She was taken to Switzerland, then back to Britain. Her mother, Lady Redesdale, nursed her on a remote Scottish island until she died in 1948.

  Leni Riefenstahl — who so brilliantly portrayed the puny, effeminate Adolf Hitler as the mythic personification of the Aryan master race in the movies Triumph of Will and Olympia, the official film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics — claimed after the war that she had never been Hitler’s lover, but many people who were around at the time thought she was.

  They met when Riefenstahl was a film star rather than a film-maker. Goebbels introduced them. He thought that a marriage between Hitler and Riefenstahl, the athletic heroine of a series of mountaineering movies, would be a propaganda triumph. Herman Goring once remarked: “She’s the crevasse of the Reich” — much to Hitler’s displeasure.

  Nazi spin doctor Putzi Hanfstaengl, who was present at their first meeting, recalled that Hitler looked awkward and isolated, as if in a panic. Hanfstaengl played the piano while Riefenstahl danced provocatively to the music. She was out to get her man. So Goebbels and Hanfstaengl made their excuses and left.

  Riefenstahl had had numerous lovers, including the boxer Max Schmeling, movie producer Ernst Lubitsch and World War I flying ace Ernst Udet. Hanfstaengl believed that if Riefenstahl could not seduce Hitler, no one could.

  But apparently, that time at least, Hitler resisted her charms. When Hanfstaengl met Riefenstahl on board a plane a few days later, he asked how it had gone. Riefenstahl’s reply was a disappointed little shrug. However, she was not to be put off so easily. Hanfstaengl told Luis Trenker that one morning, about 2 a.m., he and Hitler had gone to Riefenstahl’s flat for coffee, when she performed one of her legendary nude dances. Hanfstaengl complained: “She kept on shaking her navel in front of my nose.”

  Riefenstahl, who had all her property confiscated because of her Nazi connections after the war, denies this ever happened. But Luis Trenker thinks it did and that it did the trick. During the filming of S.O.S. Iceberg! for Universal Pictures, Riefenstahl was supposed to catch a boat in Hamburg to sail to the Balearic Islands for some location shooting. The whole crew was waiting on the dockside, but there was no sign of her. She had been missing for several days and no one knew where she was. Then the producers got a telephone call. The Fuhrer’s plane had just landed in Hamburg. Riefenstahl was on board. She had been a guest at Hitler’s country house near Nuremberg.

  When Riefenstahl turned up, she was carrying a huge bunch of flowers. “Her eyes seemed to gaze into the distance,” Luis Trenker said. “Her whole being was transformed. She wanted everyone to know that she had just been through a wonderful experience.”

  Riefenstahl went to great lengths to please Hitler. She stopped using make-up because the Fuhrer disapproved. Parisian lipstick, he believed, was made from pig’s urine and he maintained that pure Aryan womanhood needed no cosmetics to improve its beauty.

  But the affair did not mature as Goebbels had hoped. The following year, she confided to Jewish reporter Bella Fromm that Hitler “asks me to dinner a couple of times a week, but always se
nds me away at quarter to eleven, because he is tired”. However, Hitler continued to take an interest in her. He warned her to be careful when she was filming another climbing movie in the Dolomites. She was needed to make Nazi propaganda films, he said. She proved to be the master of the medium. Although she was only shooting a newsreel, her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics made it look like a triumph of Hitler’s Aryan supermen. Against the demands of Goebbels and other top Nazis, Hitler allowed her to leave in the scenes where the great black American athlete Jesse Owens trounces the best Germany can offer. But the climax of the film is when Hitler greets German javelin thrower Tillie Fleischer, who won two gold medals — surely convincing proof of Nordic superiority.

  Hitler was genuinely taken with his vision of Nordic beauty. According to an FBI report, he went to bed with Danish beauty queen Ingrid Arvad, who fled Europe before the war. In America, she became the lover of a young Naval Intelligence officer called John F. Kennedy, who went on to become President of the United States. Lyndon Johnson found out about it and used the information to get himself onto the 1960 Democratic ticket.

  In 1938, whet Mussolini visited Munich, Riefenstahl was the only person Hitler personally introduced to Il Duce. The Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda was hers to command.

  After the personal intervention of the Fuhrer, she was allowed to film the Polish campaign including, by accident, several Nazi atrocities. At the front, she wore a field grey uniform, like Hitler.

  In gratitude for her propaganda films, Hitler gave Riefenstahl a Mercedes and had a villa built for her with a film studio in the garden. During the war, Hitler added a bombproof shelter so that her “immortal pictures” would survive the onslaught; but when the Americans marched into Kitzbuhel, they found her burning the negatives.

  After the war, Riefenstahl denied everything, especially her Salome act in front of Hitler and Hanfstaengl. She told American reporter Budd Schulberg: “I wasn’t his type. I’m too strong, too positive. He liked soft, cowlike women like Eva Braun.”

  Hitler met Eva Braun in 1929. She was a laboratory assistant in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic studio. Hitler was immediately impressed by her pretty ankles and legs. Convent-educated Eva was just seventeen. She was innocent, had few interests, no ambitions and was easily moulded.

  Hitler was twenty-three years her senior. From the beginning he kept a very close rein on her. One night at Hoffmann’s, not knowing who she was, Luis Trenker danced with her. He was told that he would be shot for trying to steal the Fuhrer’s mistress. Later, when they met again, Eva found a way to speak to him privately. She warned him never to mention the evening they danced. Becoming quite hysterical, she said, with unintentional irony: “You don’t know what a terrible tyrant he can be.”

  Hitler and Eva Braun first became lovers in the spring of 1932, shortly after Geli Raubal died. Eva’s diaries show that she adored Hitler, but at the same time she was tormented by him. She does not go into the details of their sexual relations, only saying obscurely: “He needs me for special reasons. It can’t be otherwise.”

  Whatever they got up to, it did not make her happy. On 1 November, 1932, she made the first of several suicide attempts. Shortly after midnight, she shot herself through the neck with her father’s service revolver, narrowly missing an artery. She managed to call a doctor, who informed Hitler that she had tried to shoot herself in the heart, but missed and that he had saved her just in time. Hitler immediately crowed to Hoffmann that Eva had tried to kill herself for the love of him.

  “Now I must look after her,” he said. “It must not happen again.”

  It did.

  After this first suicide attempt, Eva became the exclusive property of Hitler. It made her even more unhappy. On 6 February, 1935, her birthday, she wrote that she had just happily reached the age of twenty three”. Then she ponders whether this “is really a cause for happiness… At the moment I am very far from feeling that way”. All she craved was a little dog to make her less lonely.

  That evening she dined with her friend Herta and despaired that she ended her birthday “guzzling and boozing”. It was not until five days later that Hitler turned up unexpectedly. She recorded that they had a delightful evening, but he did not bring her the puppy she wanted and there were no cupboards stuffed with pretty dresses.

  “He didn’t even ask if I wanted anything for my birthday,” she wrote. Nevertheless, she basked in the attention. “I am infinitely happy that he loves me so much and I pray that it may always remain so. I never want it to be my fault if one day he should cease to love me.”

  But by 4 March, less than a month later, she wrote in her diary: “I am mortally unhappy again and since I haven’t permission to write to Him” — like most German women at the time she capitalized the pronoun, putting him on a par with God and Christ — “this book must record my lamentations.”

  She knew that he had been in Munich all that Sunday, but he had not visited her. Nor had he returned the phone calls she had made to the Osteria Bavaria, where he dined. She waited in all day “like a cat on hot bricks. I imagined every moment that he was about to arrive.” When she decided to do something about it, it was too late. She dashed to the station, only to see the tail-lights of his train as it pulled out. That evening, she turned down an invitation to go out and spent the evening alone in her apartment trying to figure out why he was angry with her.

  A week later she still had not heard from him. She longed to fall ill so that he might feel guilty for neglecting her.

  “Why do I have to bear all this?” she lamented. “If only I had never met him.”

  She began taking sleeping tablets so that she did not have to think about her plight. From this time on, she became addicted.

  “Why doesn’t the devil carry me off?” she wrote. “Hell must be infinitely preferable; to this… Why doesn’t he stop tormenting me.”

  Things got worse. Heinrich Hoffmann told her that Hitler had found a replacement for her. “She is known as the Walkure and looks the part, including the legs. But these are the dimensions he prefers,” Eva wrote.

  This could have been either Winifred Wagner, whose father-in-law wrote “The Ride of the Valkyrie”, or Unity Mitford, whose middle name was Valkyrie. Both were tall, full-breasted women, while Eva was slim with a small bust.

  “He’ll soon make her lose thirty pounds through worry,” she wrote, “unless she has a gift for growing fat in adversity.”

  Eva wrote that her only concern was that Hitler had not had the courtesy to inform her that he had lost his heart to someone else. It can hardly have been a surprise to her. He was pictured in the newspapers daily with other attractive women.

  “What happens to me must be a matter of indifference to him,” she concludes. “I shall wait until 3 June, in other words a quarter of a year since our last meeting. Let no one say I am not patient. I sit here waiting while the sun mocks me through the window panes. That he should have so little understanding, and allow me to be humiliated in front of strangers. But men’s pleasure…”

  But she could not wait that long. On 28 May, she sent him another letter and decided that, if he did not reply by ten o’clock that night, she would kill herself. Even if he. was not seeing the Walkfire, there were so many others.

  Eva received no reply — not before ten o’clock, not after. The following morning she took two dozen Phanodorm tablets and, within minutes, was unconscious.

  She was discovered by her sister Ilse, who came round to return a dress she had borrowed. Ilse called a doctor and Eva was revived. The whole incident was passed off as an accident, brought on by strain. But, soon after, Hitler found Eva a larger apartment on the outskirts of Munich and, later, the villa she wanted so much.

  Around that time, Eva introduced Hitler to Dr Theo Morrell, who was a specialist in venereal diseases. He was Hitler’s doctor up to his death in 1945. Morrell never admitted to treating Hitler for VD, but said he had been called in to treat eczema on his leg — a common
site for a syphilitic tumour. The drugs he prescribed were also commonly given to patients in the last stage of syphilis.

  Later, Eva asked Morrell to give Hitler something to increase his sexual potency. Morrell injected him with Orchikrin (emulsified bulls’ testicles). It did not seem to do any good and Hitler never tried it again.

  Throughout the war, Eva installed herself at Berghof, Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. There, she played at being the perfect little wife to her Adolf, when he could take time off from the war; but even at Berghof, she was a prisoner.

  “His jealousy is peculiar and inhuman,” she wrote in her diary.

  He loved to see her naked and encouraged her to swim and sunbathe nude. He constantly hinted that it was “too hot for clothes”, in the hope that she would strip for him. If he had time, he would undress her himself, with fumbling fingers that nearly drove her crazy with frustration.

  He also liked to photograph her nude. Often he would take close-ups of her buttocks. When taking intimate shots, he would be careful to photograph her from an obscenely low angle, explaining that he did not want anyone to recognize her if they fell into the wrong hands.

  Hitler’s commando chief, Otto Skorzeny, reported that Eva told him that Hitler “doesn’t even bother to take his boots off, and sometimes we don’t get into bed. We stretch out on the floor. On the floor he is very erotic.”

  There was little vaginal sex. Indeed, her medical records indicated that her vagina was too small for normal sex. But she desperately wanted children and had to undergo painful surgery to widen it. After the treatment was successfully completed, her gynaecologist died mysteriously, in a car accident. Despite the operation, their sex life did not become any more normal.

  “He only needs me for certain purposes,” she confided to her diary again. “This is idiotic.”