In February 1945, when it was clear that the war was lost, Hitler ordered her to remain at Berghof. But being separated from her Adolf was more than she could bear. In April, she disobeyed him and got one of his official cars from Munich to drive her to his bunker in Berlin. She was almost killed by British dive bombers on the way. When she arrived he was so overjoyed that she was safe, that he did not have the heart to scold her.
With the tragedy in its last act, Goring sent an ultimatum, demanding that leadership of the Reich be handed over to him.
“Treachery,” screamed Hitler.
He ridiculed Goring, saying it was well known that a bullet in the groin in World War I had left him impotent. That was why he was so fat. Goring’s daughter bore a conspicuous likeness to Mussolini, Hitler said. Mussolini had stayed with Goring and Goring’s wife Emmy had become particularly attached to him.
When news came that Himmler had defected, Hitler went into a blood-curdling tirade. His body shook and his face became paralyzed. This rigor is another symptom associated with tertiary syphilis.
Some, mostly women, were still loyal to Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, the test pilot who proved the airworthiness of the V-1 flying bomb by flying it from a strap-on cockpit, made one last dash to be beside Hitler in his hour of need. She landed her plane under Russian gunfire in the avenue that ran down from the Brandenburg Gate. It is said that she had cooked up a plan to fly Hitler to Argentina, only to drop it when she discovered that he had Eva Braun with him in the bunker.
At midnight on 29 April, 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun married. They returned to his suite.
Next morning, while the newly-weds slept in late, Eva’s brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, was shot on Hitler’s orders. He had been caught leaving the bunker with a large amount of Swiss francs and a woman who spoke French. Eva had begged Hitler to spare his life — but it had done no good.
Later on 30 April, in Hitler’s study, Eva and Hitler bit into vials of poison and shot each other in the head. Goebbels found them. Their bodies were taken out of the bunker, doused with petrol and set alight. They did not burn completely, though; there was enough left for the Russian doctors to carry out a post-mortem. In the autopsy, it was discovered that Hitler did indeed have only one ball, but it could not be determined whether he had been born that way or whether one of his testicles had been removed surgically — not an uncommon practice when syphilis reaches its third and fatal stage.
The great dictator was dead, but that is not quite the end of the story. During the early 1970s, the story circulated that Hitler had had a daughter. It was said that she was the offspring of Tillie Fleischer, the Nordic javelin thrower who had won two gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. After Leni Riefenstahl had filmed a delighted Fuhrer embracing the Nordic beauty they had an eight-month affair. Hitler gave Tillie a white Mercedes and a lakeside villa near Berlin; but when she became pregnant, he dropped her like a stone.
Tillie Fleischer married Dr Fitz Hoser, one of Hitler’s aides, and they passed off Hitler’s daughter, Gisela, as their own. When Gisela grew up, she married a Jew, the son of a French Rabbi who had died in Hitler’s death camps, and she eventually converted to Judaism herself.
That would have been a rather ironic ending but it seems unlikely — it was Hitler, not Goring, who Magda Goebbels claimed had been rendered impotent by a bullet to the groin in World War I.
6. THE THOUGHTS OF CHAIRMAN MAO
Although Mao Tse-tung aspired to be an emperor, he remained a peasant. He cared little for his personal appearance or hygiene. He ate smelly food, which tainted his breath, and chainsmoked 555 State Express until his teeth went black. He liked to talk openly about his bowel movements and would unself-consciously remove his trousers in front of guests on a hot day. In later life, he stopped cleaning his teeth altogether and they became covered in a green film. He also stopped washing, considering it a waste of time. Servants would wipe him down with a wet towel each night while he attended to state papers, read or talked.
Also in later life, a medical examination revealed that his foreskin was tight and difficult to pull back. His left testicle was smaller than normal and his right one undescended. It had remained in the abdominal cavity since childhood. When this was pointed out to him, he was sixty. Up until then, he had never realized that most men have two balls.
Born in 1893 in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a peasant farmer, Mao’s first sexual experience occurred when he was still a teenager in his hometown. He had a youthful encounter with a twelve-year-old girl. In later years, Mao was fond of recalling this initiation. In 1962, Mao even arranged to meet her again, this woman to whom he had lost his virginity. By then, she was old and grey. He gave her two thousand yuan. When she left, he said wistfully: “How she’s changed.” What did he expect after more than fifty years.
However, the young Mao showed very little interest in sex. He was studious and introverted throughout his youth, and underwent long periods of sexual abstinence while he concentrated on the great political problems of the day. His father was worried about his dreamy, romantic son and decided to shake him out of it. In 1908, he arranged for the fifteen-year-old Mao to marry a woman six years his senior. For the first-and only- time in his life, he went through a full traditional wedding ceremony. Afterwards, although the woman was moved into the Mao family house, he refused to live with his bride. She died in 1910. Later, he maintained that he never laid a hand on her.
During his late teens and early twenties, Mao and his friends were too committed to politics to think about sex. There were women in their circle, such as Tsai Chang who went on to become a Communist leader, but shyness and inhibiting social tradition meant that Mao had little time for romance.
Mao devoted his energies to becoming a full-time revolutionary in Peking and probably remained celibate until he met Tao Szu-yung, a brilliant student. The romance withered when they disagreed about politics and they went their separate ways. Then he met another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Yang Kai-hui. He wrote love poems to her — as he did to his other lovers. She was the daughter of a university professor, white-skinned, with deep-set eyes They entered into a trial marriage before formalizing the situation in 1921, when she gave birth to their first child. This may seem conventional enough to us, but in China at that time for a couple to choose each other, without reference to their parents, was truly revolutionary.
The war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang nationalist (and vehemently anti-Communist) forces soon separated them. Mao left Yang and their children in Changsha for safety in 1927, while he established himself as a major revolutionary leader. Three years later, the Kuomintang seized Changsha. Yang was captured and executed when she refused to betray her husband. Their two boys fled to Shanghai where they had to fend for themselves on the streets. The younger son, Anqing, suffered from mental illness which was ascribed to the beatings he had suffered as a vagrant at the hands of the Shanghai police. The elder, Anying, was killed in an American air raid during the Korean war.
However, while Yang was sacrificing her life for her husband, Mao was already living with another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Ho Tzu-chen, a girl about half his age. She was eighteen; he was thirty-seven. When he first met his “revolutionary lovemate”, as he called her, he described her as “attractive and refined”. She spoke in a clear and measured way. Her eyes were a “pair of crystals”. Meeting her gave him a feeling “as sweet as honey”.
They married soon after Yang’s death — though some reports say that they had already wed in the safety of a Soviet base before Yang gave her life for her husband. When it came to marriage and divorce, Mao was always a bit sloppy about the paperwork.
Rumours were soon circulating, perhaps put about by Mao’s enemies, that Ho was sexually dissatisfied with Mao, because he was so much older than her and constantly busy. Mao wrote her a poem showing that he understood her frustration:
I am just eighteen, hair not yet white,
&nbs
p; Stuck on Well Mountain, waiting for old age…
A messenger comes to the door and says:
“Commander Mao is busy at a meeting”
I have only my pillow, to comfort me in my loneliness,
My grassy bed grows cold as the night wears on
I should have married an elegant man,
and drawn pleasure from the hours.
Ho was Mao’s companion on the Long March, which started in 1934. This was the two-year, 6,000-mile trek from their soviet in South-east China to the Shaanxi province in North-west China which the Communist forces undertook to escape the nationalist Kuomintang. Mao and Ho left their two children behind with a peasant family. They never discovered what happened to them. Ho gave birth to another two children during the Long March and conceived a third. She had six children in all. Only one was male and, as far as they knew, only one, a daughter, Lin Min, survived.
It was during the Long March that Mao began to exhibit his peculiar lavatorial habits. He refused the offer of a commode, preferring to go into the fields with his bodyguards and dig a hole. Mao believed that his bowel movements were an inspiration to his troops.
Lavatories and bowel movements were a big thing for Mao, even after he came to power. While many of his district leaders installed Western-style sit-down lavatories and soft Western mattresses in their residences, Mao preferred to travel with his hard wooden bed and a squat-style Chinese toilet. Even on a visit to Moscow, he would insist on squatting over a bedpan rather than use a decadent Russian sit-down loo.
After the end of the Long March, the Communist set up a base in ancient caves in Yanan and Mao started seeing other women. He had an affair with Ting Ling, a childhood friend of his second wife, Yang Kai-hui. Another lover was Lily Wu, an elegant actress said to be the “only girl in Yanan with a permanent wave”. He met her one night when he was having dinner in the cave where Agnes Smedley of the Manchester Guardian was sheltering. Lily was acting as interpreter and she kept putting her hand on Mao’s leg, saying that she had drunk too much.
He was a little startled at first, but then he took her hand and said that he too had drunk too much. Later they arranged a private meeting in another cave. When Ho found out about it, she was furious. She charged Lily formally with alienating her husband’s affections.
In 1938, Mao took up with a film actress with a less than savoury reputation, shocking the Communist hierarchy. Her name was Lan Ping — or Blue Apple. She changed it to Chiang Ch’ing — Azure River — though some called her Lang Ping Guo — Rotten Apple because of her early promiscuity.
Chiang Ch’ing had been born into a troubled family. Her father was violent and her mother’s work as a domestic servant bordered on prostitution. Chiang had a string of boyfriends before she married a man called Fei, the son of a merchant from Jinan, in 1930. The marriage lasted only a few months. Chiang fell out with Fei’s family who considered her lazy. They divorced.
Soon after, Chiang met Yu Qiwei, the leader of the local Communist underground. They fell in love and began living together in 1931. When the Japanese army seized Manchuria in September 1931, Chiang, already a budding actress, starred in several anti-imperialist plays. When the Nationalist government cracked down on the Communists, Yu Qiwei was arrested and Chiang took up with a student of physical education named Qiao. Soon she finished with him and headed for the bright lights of Shanghai, where she was determined to make it as an actress.
Chiang was poor but ambitious and quickly built herself a career on the casting couch. She was the mistress of movie director and Communist party official Chang Keny. She married actor and movie critic Tang Na, then moved in with leading theatre director, Zhang Min, a married man. Tang was so distraught that he tried to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills, but the owner of the inn where he was staying found him in time. Chiang had no pity and continued expanding her career with a series of other liaisons.
“Chiang Ch’ing was a licentious woman,” said the wife of a revolutionary leader in Yanan, where Chiang had gone accompanied by another ex-husband, David Yu. “She simply does not seem to be able to exist without a man.”
At that time, she said, Chiang was seeing an actor named Wang and they would use her husband’s office for sex sessions. It was in Yanan that Chiang met Mao.
As soon as Chiang arrived in Yanan, rumours spread about her. Mao immediately sought her out and gave her a ticket to the Marx-Leninist Institute where he was giving a lecture. She sat in the front row and got herself noticed by asking questions. He returned the compliment and went to see her in the theatre. He applauded her performance so loudly that Ho Tzuchen became jealous. They had a terrible row afterwards.
To Mao, Chiang was just another pretty girl, but Chiang was determined to get her man. She divorced Tang Na and abandoned their two children for Mao, explaining later: “Sex is engaging the first time around, but what sustains interest is power.”
When Chiang became pregnant, Mao announced that he was going to divorce Ho to marry Chiang. However, this was not just a matter for the individuals concerned. They had to ask permission from the Communist Party.
The party was naturally concerned about Chiang Ch’ing’s “colourful past” and refused Mao permission to divorce and remarry.
“Ho Tzu-chen has always been a good comrade to you,” the Central Committee explained. “She is a reliable and faithful companion and has shown her true worth in battle and in work. Why are you no longer able to live with a woman like this?”
Mao replied: “I esteem and respect Comrade Ho. But we should not think along feudalistic lines any more, where divorce is considered an injury to a woman’s reputation or position. Without Chiang Ch’ing I cannot go on with this revolution.”
The privations of the Long March had left Ho mentally unbalanced and the rejection by Mao pushed her over the edge. On these grounds, Mao eventually obtained permission to divorce in 1939. Many believed he was callously abandoning a valiant comrade and his divorce cost him a large number of followers. Mao also abandoned Lily Wu, who was despatched home to Szechuan.
Ho was sent to Moscow for psychiatric treatment, but there was no improvement in her condition. She spent the rest of her life in a comfortable house in Shanghai, paid for by the government, but she never fully recovered.
In 1961, Mao received a letter from Ho and decided that he wanted to see her. She was brought to his villa at Lushan. By this time, she was old and grey-haired. She was obviously delighted to see Mao, but her conversation was barely coherent. After she left, Mao sank into a deep depression.
As a condition of their marriage, Mao had to send Chiang Ch’ing to the Party School. The deputy head was Kang Sheng and, despite the fact that he was Mao’s right-hand man, Chiang had an affair with him during her four months there.
Chiang and Mao married in 1939. They did not bother with a wedding ceremony or a legal marriage certificate. A simple announcement was enough.
However, malicious gossip still pursued her and Chiang was forced to take a backseat in public. She became the perfect Communist housewife, but her hold on power remained through sex. She told one and all that Mao was a great lover and his whole entourage would know if they had made love the night before.
Mao was not a man to settle for one woman indefinitely and, by 1949, they were becoming distant. In March, he sent Chiang to Moscow while he went to the Fragrant Hills with an actress named Yu Shan. She was the sister of David Yu, Chiang’s ex-husband. David did not consider that Chiang Ch’ing had the right qualities to be the wife of Mao, who was by then effectively China’s new emperor. His sister was more: cultured, more cultivated, superior in every way. However, David Yu had misread the situation. Mao’s preference was for earthy peasant girls and, after six months, they broke up. Then, in November, Chiang returned from the Soviet Union and re-established her presence in Mao’s household.
It was also in 1949, when Mao was sixty, that his genital abnormalities were discovered, and his prostate was foun
d to be small and soft. The doctor examining him discovered that Mao was infertile. He had fathered several children by three of his wives, but the youngest was now fifteen years old. So Mao must have become sterile after the age of forty-five.
When told, Mao said: “So I’ve become a eunuch, haven’t I?”
He seemed genuinely concerned. His doctor had to explain that the eunuchs in the old imperial court had their testicles, or often their entire genitals, cut off. Mao, it seemed, had little grasp of the workings of the reproductive system.
By this time, Mao had grown tired of Chiang sexually. He told her that, at sixty, he was too old for sex. But underlings, such as Kang Sheng, moved themselves up the party hierarchy by providing Mao with a constant supply of libidinous young women. Kang Sheng also maintained a library of pornographic material for Mao. No nation on earth had a richer tradition of the erotic arts than China, and Mao’s collection far surpassed that of any emperor.
During the Cultural Revolution, Kang Sheng looted the official museums to add to Mao’s collection.
Mao’s favourite topic of conversation was sex and the sex lives of others. In 1954, Mao crushed Gao Gang, who had amassed so much power that Stalin called him the King of Manchuria. Mao accused him of making an “anti-party alliance” and he committed suicide.
But it seemed that Mao was not interested in the details of the political threat Gao Gang represented. It was Gao’s sex life that fascinated him. Gao had had sex with more than a hundred different women, it was said.
“He had sex twice on the night he killed himself,” Mao marvelled. “Can you imagine such lust.”
Mao tried to match these excesses. He was famously interested in swimming and would fill the heated indoor swimming pool in the Forbidden City with hundreds of naked girls, then take a dip.
At first, Mao was discreet about his activities. His confidential secretary, Ye Zilong, would recruit women from the Cultural Work Troupe, the Central Garrison Corps and the Bureau of Confidential Matters. They had to be young, uneducated and fanatically devoted to Chairman Mao. They would stay in Ye’s house until Chiang Ch’ing was safely asleep. Then they would be led quietly across the compound, through the dining-room and into Mao’s bedchamber. In the morning, before Chiang Ch’ing awoke, they would be led out.
Sex Lives of the Great Dictators Page 11