Hitler
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Likewise, the claim especially popular among German exiles in the 1930s that Hitler was homosexual has been disproved. Historian Lothar Machtan made this idea the centre of a study that was marketed with great hullabaloo in 2001. Machtan claimed to have shown “that Hitler loved men…and that realising this is essential for understanding both his person and his career,” even though he had to “domesticate his same-sex passion” since homosexuality would have been “a fatal handicap for a political career.”6 For Machtan, Hitler’s “virile posturing and need to impress others was basically just a desperate attempt to cover up his feminine nature.”7 Machtan tried to cite hard evidence to make his interpretation more plausible, but was unable to produce even a single genuine piece of proof that the idea of Hitler’s homosexuality was anything but speculation.
A further curious variation within the broad spectrum of conjectures about Hitler’s physical urges holds that he was completely asexual. The main evidence for this hypothesis is a remark passed on by his long-standing secretary Christa Schroeder that her boss “needed eroticism but not sex.” According to Schroeder, Hitler gained satisfaction from the “ecstasy of the masses,” while his relations with women had been purely “platonic.”8 Joachim Fest picked up such statements, interpreting Hitler’s rhetorical flights as “compensation mechanisms for his dead-end sexuality.”9 This characterisation informs the popular idea that as an egomaniac who believed he was on a historic mission, Hitler was incapable of developing emotional bonds with women. The popular historian Guido Knopp put it succinctly: “In the end, Hitler only loved himself.”10 That is no doubt true in a sense, but is hardly sufficient to explain the complex story of Hitler’s relationships with women.
There is no doubt that Hitler was susceptible to feminine charms. “What beautiful women there are,” he exclaimed in late January 1942 in the Wolfsschanze.
We were sitting in the Bremen Ratskeller and a woman came in, and you would have thought Olympus had opened up! Simply incandescent! The diners all put down their forks and knives and feasted their eyes on this woman! Then, later in Braunschweig, I could have kicked myself afterwards! All the men there felt the same way. A blonde thing jumped up at my car to give me a bouquet of flowers. Everyone could remember her. But no one thought of asking the girl for her address so that I could write her a thank-you note. She was big and blonde and wonderful!11
Hitler also remembered his youthful crush from Linz, Stefanie, as “big and blonde and wonderful.” The 17-year-old had not dared approach her, remaining an admirer from afar. “In my youth in Vienna, I also encountered many beautiful women,” he concluded his monologue in 1942. But as far as we know, he never succeeded in getting to know any of them. Christa Schroeder recalled Hitler describing a woman named Emilie from his Vienna days as his “first love.”12 As the historian Brigitte Hamann has determined, the woman in question was the 17-year-old sister of Hitler’s friend Rudolf Häusler—a shy, sheltered girl to whom Hitler had once given a drawing but with whom he definitely had not had an affair.13 Moreover, there is no indication that Hitler had any contact with women during his time in Munich before the First World War, when he basically lived like a hermit.
Was it shyness or self-imposed asceticism that inclined Hitler to avoid getting to know members of the opposite sex? We do not know, and we can only speculate whether Hitler masturbated, as young men in his situation are wont to do. Onanism, which generations of priests, doctors and teachers had condemned as a serious sin, engendered feelings of guilt in adolescents of all social classes. In his study of neurasthenic conditions around the turn of the century, the historian Joachim Radkau characterised masturbation as the great illicit thrill of the time.14 Perhaps this was one cause of Hitler’s reticence around women. On the other hand, we should remember that after leaving school and failing to get accepted to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, the young Hitler felt like a failure—hardly the best position from which to conquer young ladies’ hearts.
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By the time he went off to war in 1914, at the age of 25, Hitler apparently had had no sexual experiences with women whatsoever, and that fact seems not to have changed in his four years on the Western Front. His comrades in the field, whose preferred topic of conversation was sex, often made fun of him for his lack of interest—whether it was play-acted or genuine—but they ultimately accepted him as what he seemed to be: a somewhat bizarre saint who was strangely abstinent when it came to sensual pleasures.15 After 1918, the soldiers who had survived the carnage and the women who had done without their men for so long were eager to make up for lost time. The general relaxation of morals, manifested, for example, in the “dance mania,” was a response to such desires. It has been speculated that Hitler overcame his skittishness around women and plunged into the whirlpool of physical pleasures in the first, wild, post-war years, which also marked the beginning of his political career.16 In fact, his rivals within the Nazi Party in the summer of 1921 accused him of “excessive contact with women.”17 But all we have are second-hand rumours. In 1923, he was alleged to have had an affair with Jenny Haug, the sister of his chauffeur at the time. That at least was the story told by Konrad Heiden, who claimed to have it on good authority.18
Nonetheless, even then Hitler preferred to keep the company of maternal patrons like Hermine Hoffmann, Helene Bechstein and Elsa Bruckmann, who took the ambitious but uncouth and somewhat lost young politician under their wings.19 There was certainly a measure of rivalry between Hitler’s “surrogate mothers.” In March 1942 he recalled that a Munich society lady was excluded from the Bruckmanns’ salon after the hostess had noticed her making eyes at him. “She was very beautiful and would have found me interesting—nothing more,” Hitler remarked.20 Helene Bechstein was so taken by Hitler that she would have liked to see him marry her only daughter, Lotte. “He couldn’t kiss,” the then 15-year-old publishing heiress later said when asked why she had not had a liaison with Hitler.21
Winifred Wagner also conformed to the image of a “surrogate mother,” even though she was eight years younger than Hitler. In November 1926, after reading a biography of Mussolini, she tried to understand her relationship with the friend she so greatly admired. Men who were “called to such exalted positions,” she wrote to an acquaintance, had to be “fully isolated inside” since their mission demanded that they be “above and outside others.” Relations with a female represented “the only bridge and contact with the rest of humanity” and were thus of “inestimable significance” to such men, whose character was almost completely formed by their mothers. Unconsciously, both Mussolini’s and Hitler’s relationships with women, Wagner wrote, were influenced by “the desire for their deceased mothers.”22 Wagner knew what a major role Klara Hitler had played in her son’s life and how much Hitler had suffered because of her early death. Thus she tried to be a surrogate mother to him, even though her own feelings for the man she nicknamed “Wolf” were more than just maternal.
During Hitler’s time in Landsberg, prison director Otto Leybold noticed that as a bachelor he seemed better able to adjust to incarceration than his fellow prisoners who were married. “He isn’t drawn to women,” Leybold remarked, “and he treats those he encounters during visits here with the utmost politeness without getting involved in serious political discussions with them.”23 In fact, Hitler was always quite solicitous around women. Like an old-school cavalier, he greeted them by kissing their hands and gave his voice a soft, insinuatingly warm tone. Those who only knew him as a bellowing, wildly gesticulating rabble-rouser were usually astonished at how charming Hitler could be in private. Leybold, however, was correct in his observation that Hitler did not want women getting involved in his political affairs. History had proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, he proclaimed years later over lunch in the Wolfsschanze, that “women, no matter how clever, are unable to separate reason from emotion in politics.”24
Hitler maintained a traditional view of women. Politics and work were the domain of men
, while women were responsible for keeping house, taking care of their husbands and raising children. “The man’s world is large compared to the woman’s,” Hitler pontificated in one of his monologues. “Man belongs to duty, and only now and again do his thoughts turn to women. The woman’s world is her husband. Only now and again does she think of anything else. That is the big difference.” Women depended on men for protection, Hitler repeatedly stressed. Without it they were lost: “That’s why a woman loves a hero. He gives her a sense of safety. She wants a heroic man.”25 Hitler could not conceive of a relationship in which men and women were equal partners.
Hitler decided early on in life to forgo marriage and traditional family life. In June 1924, when his fellow inmate in Landsberg, Rudolf Hess, suggested moving his sister Paula from Vienna to Munich, Hitler dismissed the idea “with every sign of horror,” protesting that it would only be “a burden and an inhibition.” Hitler was afraid his sister might try to influence his decisions. “For the same reason,” wrote Hess, “he refused to get married and avoided, as he himself hinted, strong feelings of attachment to women. He had to be ready at any time to face all perils and if necessary die without the slightest personal, human thought.”26 Hitler would stay true to the principle of never binding himself to a woman in marriage—so as to prevent personal concerns from limiting his political latitude—until shortly before his suicide in his Berlin bunker.
After Hitler was released from Landsberg, there was talk in Nazi circles in Munich of him having a relationship with Ernst Hanfstaengl’s sister Erna. The rumours persisted, so that in early March 1925 Hitler felt compelled to publicly deny them, declaring, “I am so married to politics that I cannot even consider another ‘engagement.’ ”27 Yet that attitude did not rule out relationships with women. After Hitler’s stretch in prison, his new chauffeur, the good-looking Emil Maurice, was tasked with “chatting up girls” when driving his boss around. But as Maurice told Christa Schroeder after the war, Hitler and the women had merely socialised and conversed in the evenings after big events. Hitler had given them money, but had not asked for anything in return.28 It seems that Hitler liked relaxing in the company of beautiful women after strenuous speaking appearances. When he was interrogated in June 1945, Maurice said he was certain that “neither Hitler’s short nor his long amorous relationships had resulted in sexual congress.”29
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The same was apparently true for Hitler’s relationship with Maria Reiter. Hitler met her in Berchtesgaden in the autumn of 1926 while he was completing the second volume of Mein Kampf, but the public first learned of the existence of Hitler’s “unknown lover” in 1959, when Reiter was “sensationally discovered” by the West German news weekly Stern.30 Not all of the information supplied by Reiter, who was living then in obscurity in a Munich suburb, was credible. Nonetheless, in a number of respects, the magazine report does shed light on Hitler’s complex relationship with women.
Maria Reiter was born on 23 December 1909 in Berchtesgaden. Her father was a tailor and one of the founders of the local chapter of the Social Democratic Party. Her mother ran a women’s fashion shop on the ground floor of the Deutsches Haus, the hotel Hitler stayed at in the autumn of 1926.31 A few weeks before Reiter met Hitler, her mother had died. Her older sister took over the shop, while Maria helped out as a salesgirl. Hitler had observed the blonde, blue-eyed Reiter for quite some time before introducing himself. Their first conversation revolved around the dogs they took for walks in a nearby park. “German shepherds are truly loyal and friendly,” Hitler is supposed to have said. “I can no longer imagine life without this dog. Do you not feel the same way?”
At the time, Reiter was 16, Hitler 37 years old. Like his father, Hitler preferred younger women, and he made no secret of it: “There is nothing better than educating a young thing,” he would declare in 1942. “A girl of 18, 19, 20 years is as malleable as wax. A man needs to be able to put his stamp on a girl. Women themselves want nothing different!”32 That was obviously Hitler’s rationalisation for the problem he had with women of his own age, who displayed self-confidence, were well educated and let him know that they saw through his charming but artificial poses. Encounters with such women stirred feelings of inferiority, as he had displayed by his nonplussed behaviour when interviewed by Dorothy Thompson in 1931.33
With “Mimi,” “Mizzi” or “Mitzerl,” as he soon called his new acquaintance, Hitler could play the role of the vastly superior, paternal friend. He courted her, inviting her and her sister to an NSDAP event in the Deutsches Haus and devoting his entire attention to her at the subsequent private reception. In response to the hotel owner’s daughter’s somewhat indiscreet question as to why he was not married, Hitler declared that he “first had to rescue the German people lying on the ground.” Reiter remembered Hitler touching her legs with his knee and stepping firmly on her toes with his foot as he said this. Such rather crude advances continued later in her sister’s apartment, when Hitler suddenly placed himself in front of her with a penetrating glare and asked: “Don’t you want to give me a kiss goodnight?” When Reiter resisted, protesting that she had never kissed a man, the change in Hitler’s manner was instantaneous: “He pursed his lips, and his gaze lost the warmth it had just had,” Reiter reported.
There is some evidence that Reiter’s story was genuine. Henriette Hoffmann—the young daughter of Hitler’s court photographer Heinrich and later wife of Hitler Youth leader Baldur von Schirach—described a similar incident. Hoffmann claimed that one evening in her father’s apartment Hitler approached her after the other guests had left: “Herr Hitler wore an English trench coat, holding a grey velour hat in his hand, and said something that wasn’t like him at all. He asked very seriously: ‘Don’t you want to kiss me?’ ” Henriette Hoffmann, too, rejected this advance: “No please, Herr Hitler, I really can’t.” In response, “He said absolutely nothing, rapped the palm of his hand with his riding crop and slowly descended the stairs to the front door.”34
How should we interpret this type of behaviour? Apparently, despite all his charm, Hitler was unable to approach women confidently in any way that went beyond the mere exchange of pleasantries. His lack of experience may have played a role in this, but it may also have been an inability or unwillingness to empathise with the wishes and needs of the women he fancied. Thus Hitler launched sudden advances and then turned his back equally abruptly, if his clumsy forays did not meet with approval. He seemed to have lacked an internal emotional compass.
Despite being rejected, Hitler did not end his relationship with Maria Reiter. He accompanied her to her mother’s grave, suggested that they use the informal “du” form of address and asked her to call him “Wolf”—a privilege enjoyed by few women other than Winifred Wagner. They did eventually kiss, although if we believe Reiter’s account, it came about under strange circumstances. Maurice had chauffeured the couple to a forest behind the Bischofswiesen area of Berchtesgaden. He remained in the car, while Hitler led the 16-year-old girl into a clearing, placed her in front of a tall fir tree and stared at her “as a painter does at a model.” Then, according to Reiter, Hitler pulled her close: “He took a firm hold of my neck and kissed me. He didn’t know what he was doing.”
Lothar Machtan has interpreted this scene as proof of Hitler’s homosexuality, asking, “How could he know what he was doing if desire did not show him the way?”35 Another interpretation is more plausible: Hitler may have felt desire but was uncertain how far he should take it. Perhaps he feared that his new girlfriend, if things went beyond one kiss, would make demands on him. In January 1942, he recalled the incident: “Miezel was pretty as a picture. I knew a great many women back then, and many of them liked me a lot. But why should I get married and leave behind a wife?…Back then, this thought led me to pass up on several chances. I forcibly restrained myself.”36
Maria Reiter seems to have believed that Hitler’s intentions were serious. After he left Berchtesgaden, she wrote him long let
ters. Most of the time, he responded with brief postcards with basically the same message: “My dear child! Receive my most heartfelt greetings. I think of you all the time. Yours, Wolf.”37 In the few letters he wrote to her, he complained about being overworked and having too little time for his private life while pledging his enduring affection: “Yes, child, you truly don’t know what you mean to me and how fond I am of you.”38 When Reiter turned 17 on 23 December 1926, Hitler visited her and stayed for Christmas. She gave him two sofa cushions embroidered with swastikas; he gave her a leather-bound two-volume edition of Mein Kampf. In late 1927, she visited him in Munich, but nothing came of it aside from an innocent tête-à-tête in his apartment on Thierschstrasse. Then, in the summer, Hitler abruptly ended their romance after party headquarters received anonymous letters accusing him of rape. In 1930, Reiter married a hotelier and moved to Seefeld in Tyrol. She later said she visited Hitler in Munich in the summer of 1931, claiming to have spent the night in his apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse, but this story should be viewed sceptically. By that point, there was a new woman in Hitler’s life: his niece Geli Raubal.
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None of the women in Hitler’s life fired the imaginations of both contemporaries and later historians as much as Raubal. Konrad Heiden called her “Hitler’s great lover,” and most other commentators shared the view that Hitler’s niece was the only woman, other than his mother, for whom he developed deeper feelings.39 The speculations and rumours surrounding Hitler and Raubal make it difficult to view the subject objectively. What kind of relationship did they have, and was it really so central in Hitler’s biography?