Explaining Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Could Heiden, Hitler’s longtime nemesis, his most knowledgeable biographer, his most intimate explainer, driven into exile by Hitler’s triumph, have seized the opportunity to take a very personal kind of revenge upon Hitler, to brand him, stain him with a story that, once heard, sticks almost indelibly to its subject? It would be a gesture that he might also have rationalized on political grounds—mobilizing hostility and disgust against a Hitler whose genocidal potential he may have sensed, using the classic tactic of “black propaganda.”

  I thought there might be a clue to Heiden’s intent in the apparently gratuitous inclusion of coprophilia in his account. As we’ll see, the only other contemporary source who links Hitler to an excretory perversion, Otto Strasser (who may well have been Heiden’s source for the perversion story), mentions only undinism. Heiden gratuitously adds coprophilia. It’s almost a metaphor for what the whole Heiden story is doing—smearing Hitler’s image with excrement. A metaphor perhaps for the defilement Heiden wanted to inflict on him? In telling this story, Heiden assumes the position of Geli Raubal in Hitler’s alleged fantasy: pissing on him, shitting on him. If the Jewish-blood story is the family romance of the Hitler explainers, the Heiden-Strasser stories can be seen as the sexual fantasy of the Hitler explainers, with Geli Raubal as their stand-in.

  In a sense, the preoccupation of the explainers with Geli Raubal can be seen as a kind of envy of Geli for another reason: She just might have achieved the explainer’s fantasy: seeing Hitler unmasked, Hitler close up, with his defenses down, the “real” Hitler. It is probably not an accident that when Heiden describes the purported pornographic letter Hitler wrote to Geli, he calls it one in which Hitler “gave himself completely away”—the grail of the explainer, the moment of naked self-revelation.

  What about Otto Strasser’s version of the story, the second pillar of the case for the Party of Perversion? Strasser’s version omits coprophilia, but it does two things Heiden’s doesn’t: It describes consummated acts, not fantasies. And it claims the description comes firsthand from Geli Raubal herself.

  What makes Strasser’s account even more significant historically is that it is this version of the perversion story that was adopted almost in its entirety by the OSS. It is, in fact, then, the paid-for, classified, officially stamped U.S. government sexual fantasy about Adolf Hitler.

  But, like Heiden, Otto Strasser had, at the very least, an equal motive to want to revenge himself on Hitler, to defile his person: Hitler murdered his brother Gregor. The two Strasser brothers had been founders of the Nazi Party in northern Germany, at least as responsible for its success outside Bavaria as Hitler, who for a long time was regarded as a clownish Bavarian anomaly in the more cosmopolitan urban centers of the north.

  Gregor Strasser was the public man, the politician; Otto the journalist, propagandist, pamphleteer. Hitler had always resented them as an independent power in the party, and by the late 1920s strains had grown between him and the Strassers. At first it was over ideological issues: The Strassers, who had always stressed the socialist side of National Socialism, were alarmed at Hitler’s sacrifice of populist principles in order to court the contributions of big-money industrialists and Junkers as he got closer to power. Otto quit the party first, late in 1931 (shortly after Geli’s death, in fact), and began to wage an increasingly active opposition to Hitler. Gregor remained the nominal number-two figure in the party until shortly before Hitler took power, when he was dismissed for attempting to broker a power-sharing deal with the short-lived government of Kurt von Schleicher. Hitler never forgot what he regarded as a betrayal; he had Gregor murdered amid the carnage of the Night of the Long Knives in June 1934. By then, Otto had gone into exile in Czechoslovakia, where he’d formed an anti-Hitler underground group known as the Black Front to engage in sabotage and black propaganda against the man who killed his brother.

  Before the split, however, the Strassers were part of the Hitler inner circle in Munich, close to both Hitler and Geli. Otto would later claim, in fact, that Gregor was the one who took the gun from Hitler’s hand as he was about to commit suicide in the aftermath of the ugly publicity surrounding Geli Raubal’s death. And Otto claimed to have socialized with Geli herself. According to a story told by Hanfstaengl as well as Strasser, Otto even aroused Hitler’s “jealous possessiveness” over Geli on more than one occasion.

  “I liked the girl very much,” Strasser told a German writer. “And I could feel how much she suffered because of Hitler’s jealousy. She was a fun-loving young thing who enjoyed the Mardi Gras excitement in Munich but was never able to persuade Hitler to accompany her to any of the many wild balls. Finally, during the 1931 Mardi Gras, Hitler allowed me to take Geli to a ball.” It was on that occasion that Otto claimed Geli disclosed to him exactly what went on between her and Hitler in his bedroom.

  “Geli seemed to enjoy having for once escaped Hitler’s supervision. On the way back . . . we took a walk through the English Garden. Near the Chinese Tower, Geli sat down on a bench and began to cry bitterly. Finally, she told me that Hitler loved her, but that she couldn’t stand it anymore. His jealousy was not the worst of it. He demanded things of her that were simply repulsive. . . . When I asked her to explain it, she told me things that I knew only from my readings of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis in my college days.”

  Again, as with Heiden, we have the pseudovalidation of a sexologist tossed in. But Strasser, in his OSS debriefing, becomes as specific as Havelock Ellis or Krafft-Ebing, providing details of what Heiden had only alluded to in Latinate euphemism before.

  That night “at the Chinese Tower in the English Garden,” Strasser says, Geli told him that, when night came, “Hitler made her undress [while] he would lie down on the floor. Then she would have to squat down over his face where he could examine her at close range, and this made him very excited. When the excitement reached its peak, he demanded that she urinate on him, and that gave him his sexual pleasure. Geli said that the whole performance was extremely disgusting, and although it was sexually stimulating [to him], it gave her no gratification.”

  It’s a story that can give no one any gratification. But over the years it has satisfied a kind of need among explainers, the need for some hidden variable, often a sexual secret, some dark matter, that could help illuminate the otherwise inexplicable enigma of Hitler’s psyche.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Dark Matter: The Sexual Fantasy of the Hitler Explainers

  A critical evaluation of certain hidden variable theories

  The putative sexual secret: It’s the “dark matter” in the universe of Hitler explanations. Like the invisible, only indirectly detectible dark matter of cosmology—whose existence, whose powerful gravitational pull physicists are obliged to believe in without seeing in order to account for otherwise inexplicable behavior of visible matter—the notion that Hitler had a profound, concealed, and deeply disturbing sexual secret that explains his otherwise inexplicable pathology is a persistent one.

  In fact, to exploit another analogy from physics, Hitler explanations can be divided into distinct genres: field theories and hidden-variable theories. Field-theory explanations of Hitler are analogous to the way the Copenhagen school of quantum physics explains radioactive decay. In a given field, with the right preconditions, a disciple of Danish physicist Niels Bohr will tell you that a certain number of particles will inevitably decay (split), releasing fragments that can, for instance, spark a chain reaction. However, the school of quantum-field theorists founded by Bohr will absolutely deny that there is anything about any individual particle that would allow an observer to predict that it is the unstable particle that will decay next. You could theoretically investigate an individual particle “in depth” forever without being able to find some “hidden variable,” some internal instability that will make one more likely than another to decay.

  Similarly, in historical explanation, field-theorist types tend to argue that it is the preconditions in the field
—societywide poverty, desperation, depression, panic, poisonous ideas, and ideology—that create the preconditions for some individual like Hitler to emerge, to crystallize the field of discontent, to start a chain reaction. The readiness is all to field theorists; it hardly matters what hidden variables within an individual psyche cause him to emerge as a catalyst; the societal critical mass produces its own trigger. Or as Daniel Goldhagen, a field-theorist type, suggests: if not Hitler, someone like Hitler would emerge.

  On the other hand, Albert Einstein resisted to the end of his life the Copenhagen school’s insistence that “hidden variables” within particles did not exist or were not causally significant. Einstein insisted there had to be some as-yet-undiscovered hidden variable within that caused one particle as opposed to another to decay. Most but not all contemporary physicists believe Einstein was on the losing side of the argument, and many but not all contemporary theorists of historical explanation regard the search for hidden variables within Hitler (or “Hitler-centric” explanations of any kind) to be irrelevant. The search for the origins of the Holocaust has been shifting—not without opposition—from the search within Hitler to the fields of social forces and ideological currents into which he was born. Why history was ready and waiting for a Hitler is seen as more important than why he turned out to be the Hitler.

  Ironically, when Einstein specifically addressed the question of Hitler he adopted an uncharacteristic field theory for his rise: “As soon as economic conditions improve, Hitler will sink into oblivion,” Einstein said in The Cosmic Religion, a collection of his remarks published in 1931. He sees Hitler as an aberrational particle: “Hitler is no more representative of the Germany of today than are the smaller anti-Semitic disturbances.” But Hitler is a particle whose aberration is the product of a disturbance in the larger field: “Hitler is living—or shall I say, sitting?—on the empty stomach of Germany,” Einstein maintained. Hitler is, then, the product of a rage generated by societal deprivation rather than someone who conjured up, catalyzed, a rage that might not otherwise have materialized in the malevolent form it took without his literally particular impetus.

  In any case the putative sexual secret Hitler may have concealed from the world can be envisaged as perhaps the last best hope of the hidden-variable theorists of Hitler—the most hidden hidden variable. Does it really matter to anyone if Hitler had a sexual secret? In practice, it seems to have mattered most to two remarkably disparate groups. It mattered to Freudians as a vindication of the belief that the defining truth about the unanalyzed person can be found in what is hidden rather than what is apparent; that the important truths are always beneath the surface and that they are almost always sexual truths. Hitler was one of the first living world leaders to be subjected to prolonged long-distance analysis by Freudians, and it became a kind of crucial test for the discipline: If they could not offer a specifically psychoanalytic explanation for Hitler’s twisted psyche, how relevant could Freudian theory be to history and human nature?

  And so, from the beginning, psychoanalytic writers (and subsequently in the sixties and seventies a whole school that came to be known as psychohistorians) have had a go at Hitler, most trying to locate the source of his problems in his infantile erotic life, the preferred breeding ground for problems in Freudian theory. Curiously, Freud himself does not seem to have pronounced on the source of Hitler’s pathology (at least in print), although he suffered directly from it, being forced by the Gestapo to flee from Vienna in 1938 to escape a climate hostile not just to Jews but to psychoanalysis as a pernicious “Jewish science.” But generations of his successors have tried to make the analysis of Hitler’s psyche a demonstration and confirmation of the ability of Freudian theory to diagnose the origins of evil.

  The other group that has joined the Freudians in promoting the notion of a sexual secret—indeed, formed, in effect, a strange explanatory alliance with them—consists of a number of embittered ex-Nazi defectors from Hitler’s inner circle, former intimates such as Otto Strasser, Ernst Hanfstaengl, and (to a lesser extent) Hermann Rauschning. If the mostly Jewish Freudians lacked inside information and the former Nazi insiders lacked objectivity and theory, the two groups found—at a distance—common ground in their vision of Hitler, with the Freudians frequently adapting the Strasser and Hanfstaengl perversion stories as confirmation for their speculations.

  What the two groups have in common is a tendency to focus on the Geli Raubal relationship (rather than the later Eva Braun relationship, considered by most to be of far less decisive significance) as the episode in which the dark secret of Hitler’s true sexual pathology came closest to declaring itself—the closest to the light the dark matter has come. But some psychoanalytical explainers have gone further than making the Geli Raubal relationship the revelation of Hitler’s sexual pathology; they have tried to make it the moment in which his sexual pathology engendered his political pathology. When his anti-Semitism metamorphosed from a common opportunistic political device—from a disposition to exploit the Jews—to a determination to exterminate them.

  This is the thrust of the only book-length purely psychoanalytic study of Hitler, Norbert Bromberg and Verna Volz Small’s Hitler’s Psychopathology. The two authors (the former a psychoanalyst and professor at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, the latter a medical writer) specifically link Hitler’s alleged sexual perversion—the nature of which they adopt from Strasser’s excretory version—to the crystallization of the exterminationist version of his anti-Semitism.

  For them, the secret sexual pathology is the missing link. It was not so much the specifics of the perversion (although they account for the alleged undinism in Freudian infantile-erotic terms) that made it decisive, as it was, they argue, that only in the freedom of his intimacy with Geli Raubal was Hitler able to fulfill his paraphilic desires fully. And, they contend, it was this very fulfillment that led to a profound shift in the gravitational center of his pathology. They characterize the three-year period (1928–1931) that they say encompassed the Hitler-Geli Raubal relationship as one that saw “a striking shift” in Hitler’s psychic constellation: “the displacement of his fear from women to Jews” (emphasis added). “Around 1928,” they write:

  Hitler was deeply, and more openly than ever, involved with a woman: his niece, Geli. About the same time he was preparing a work which became known as Hitler’s Secret Book, published for the first time thirty-three years later. In this book he associated his hatred of Jews with ideas about blood and race for the first time. His sexual interest in his niece must have inevitably stirred in Hitler thoughts of incest and fears of harming her and possible progeny by what he believed might result: the corruption of her blood [by the putative “Jewish blood” Hitler believed he’d been tainted with, in their view]. All these ideas and wishes he projected onto the Jews, and by universalizing, as was his wont, he made the Germans, the Motherland, and the whole world their victims instead of Geli.

  To parse out the complicated dynamic they claim obtained within Hitler: The combination of the intensity of the sexuality (his first fulfilling experience) and the near incestuousness of Hitler’s relationship with Geli exacerbated what Bromberg and Small believe was his obsession with his Jewish blood—the Jew “within” him; exacerbated Hitler’s sense of himself as a violating Jew, specifically an identification of himself with the Jew whose original predatory sin violated, poisoned the blood of his grandmother Maria Schicklgruber. Hitler’s relationship with Geli was then, Bromberg and Small imply, a kind of recapitulation of the relationship between his putative Jewish grandfather and his Aryan grandmother. The anger he projected outward at the Jews was, they conclude, derived from the hatred of the sexual predator, the predatory Jew within himself. He had to exterminate them because he was them. As overcomplicated, uncorroborated, and speculative as it seems, it was this self-hating dynamic that, the psychoanalytic authors maintain, generated the Holocaust.

  I cite this not for its persuasive power (it falls
far short of convincing me) but as an example of the way explainers strain for the ultimate explanatory prize, the missing link, the key hidden variable in Hitler studies: the link between his purportedly aberrant personal pathology and his abhorrent political ideology—between his sexuality and his anti-Semitism.

  Which isn’t to say the authors don’t sincerely believe in their solution. (Although, from my conversations with Verna Volz Small, I believe she has a more highly nuanced view of the question than the more dogmatically Freudian Dr. Bromberg). But there are several problems with the way they’ve forged this connection that betray an overeagerness to explain everything. For one thing, singling out 1928 as the year the missing link materialized is important to them, since 1928 is the year Hitler wrote the so-called Secret Book (rants mainly on race and foreign policy initially planned as a sequel to Mein Kampf but never published in his lifetime because of changes in the foreign situation). But Bromberg and Small’s ambiguous characterization of the Hitler-Geli relationship in 1928 may betray their own doubt (and the doubt in the evidence) about how real the involvement between Hitler and Geli was at that point. In one sentence, the authors claim there was a “deep and open involvement” between Hitler and his half-niece as early as 1928. But there is still considerable dispute about how deep (in the sense of mutual and consensual) and how open (if it was deep in the sense they suggest, it was never open) it was even as late as 1931, when Geli was found dead. And yet a few sentences later, they back off from “deep and open” to suggest that Hitler’s sexual “interest in” (as opposed to involvement with) Geli in 1928 would have been enough to trigger the poisonous dialectic they envisage ensuing.