But even more questionable is the insistence that it was in Hitler’s “Secret Book,” as it’s come to be called, that Hitler for the first time linked hatred of Jews with ideas of race and blood. Overly eager to make the Geli secret and the Secret Book the key nexus of Hitler’s psychological and political evolution, they ignore evidence that Hitler became a racial anti-Semite (as opposed to a traditional “religious” anti-Semite who would theoretically accept a Jew who converted to Christianity—the racial anti-Semite is convinced “Jewish blood” is an inherited evil no conversion can change) long before 1928. They ignore, for instance, a 1919 letter Hitler—then a political-information officer for the defeated German army who’d yet to join the Nazi Party—addressed to a Munich man, in which he specifically characterized Jews as a “racial tuberculosis” that would have to be “amputated” or exterminated because Jews were, in effect, an incurable genetic evil, not a mere religious threat that could be “cured” by conversion. If the authors were unaware of the 1919 letter, they could hardly ignore the many passages in Mein Kampf (written in 1924) in which Hitler explicitly defines himself as an anti-Semite of race and blood, long before any involvement with Geli Raubal.
The extent to which Bromberg and Small ignore this evidence to bolster a connection between the sexual and the political in Hitler is testimony to the conceptual prize they seek: the source of Hitler’s exterminationist impulse.
Others have found more simple and direct ways to integrate the putative Geli Raubal sexual secret into their Hitler explanations: Hitler’s alleged rage, for instance, his sexual jealousy over a rumored Jewish seducer of Geli. Several gossipy contemporary sources suggested that Geli’s attempt to escape Hitler’s ménage for Vienna shortly before her death was motivated by her plan to marry a Viennese Jew who seduced her and possibly made her pregnant. Which, if true, would not only have made Hitler the victim of a Jewish cuckolder but also have “poisoned” his beloved Geli with “Jewish blood.” Indeed, considering Hitler’s fearful view of Jewishness as a kind of sexually transmitted disease, he might have felt it had poisoned him—sufficient fuel, supposedly, to ignite an exterminationist urge against all Jews as violators. Or, in other versions of this theory, it was not so much jealousy of Geli’s affection for the spectral Viennese Jew but fear of what she might confide to him—fear that knowledge of Hitler’s shameful and disturbing sexual secret would be placed in the hands of his worst enemies.
The problem with these theories is that they beg the question of whether there was a sexual secret, some hidden pathological abnormality that made Hitler nicht natürlich. Perhaps it might be best, before assessing the role the Geli Raubal relationship played in the evolution of Hitler’s pathology, to examine the competing explanations of Hitler’s sexuality from the ground up, so to speak, beginning with the genital-wound theories.
There is an almost comic disproportion to the amount of attention, the amount of weight, the amount of potency that has been projected upon Hitler’s genitalia in general and on his purportedly absent testicle in particular. Like the lost safe-deposit box, the lost testicle has become a repository for the hope that some singular solution—an explicatory single-bullet theory—exists somewhere to explain everything. The lost-testicle myth serves as a metaphor for the urge to find some freakish, idiosyncratic abnormality in the person of Hitler—to explain the magnitude of his crimes as a freak of nature rather than something that arose from the “normal” human nature we would otherwise share with Hitler.
The missing-testicle question poses, first of all, a perplexing problem of origins: The rumor preceded the supposed factual confirmation by some thirty years. The rumor is best known in the doggerel line of the popular World War II marching song: “Hitler—has only got one ball.” The problem this presents is that, of all the scurrilous rumors about Hitler’s sexuality and Hitler’s genitalia that circulated up to the time of his death—rumors that were assiduously compiled regardless of reliability in the 1943 OSS “Hitler Sourcebook”—none suggested monorchism or cryptorchism. (The latter is the condition in which both testicles are present, but one intermittently retracts up into the inguinal canal from the scrotum.)
Homosexuality, syphilis, excretory perversion, impotency, freakish underdevelopment—all these were whispered about, some even published, before the war. The missing testicle did not become the subject of serious historical speculation (to the point that Oxford’s Lord Bullock can chattily discourse to me upon the import of “the one-ball business,” as he called it) until three decades after the war. The missing-testicle theory might have gone the way of the others into the realm of the unprovable conjecture had not the Soviet government, in 1968, permitted the release of the 1945 autopsy report prepared by Soviet doctors shortly after Hitler’s body was found in the Berlin bunker.
The forensic description of Hitler’s remains by the head of the Autopsy Commission, the wonderfully named Doctor Faust Shkaravski, is detailed and disturbing to read. Of an organ that, metaphorically, has been the subject of even more speculation than his genitals—Hitler’s heart—he observed: “The cardiac ventricles are filled with coagulated reddish brown blood. . . . The heart muscle is tough and looks like boiled meat.” The last words on Hitler’s heart: boiled meat.
Moving on to the sexual organs, the Soviet doctor records that “the genital member is scorched. In the scrotum, which was singed but preserved, only the right testicle was found. The left testicle could not be found in the scrotum or in the inguinal canal, nor in the small pelvis.”
Much about the Soviet autopsy revealed since its 1968 publication has made it suspect, revealed it to be as much a political as a medical document. The chief focus of its distortions has been its attempt to prove that the method Hitler used to kill himself revealed he died “a coward’s death” rather than a “soldier’s death.” That he lacked the nerve (colloquially, the balls; that he wasn’t man enough) to put a bullet into his head with his revolver, the traditional way defeated German generals cheated the enemy of a captive. But rather that he cravenly chewed a cyanide capsule, having first arranged for an aide to enter his death chamber and put a bullet in his head after cyanide killed him—to make it appear that he died a soldier’s death. Most experts now agree that the Soviet theory (particularly the posthumous gunshot by the aide) was falsified to prove Hitler’s lack of manhood. Wouldn’t it be equally possible that they falsified the autopsy details to show that his “manhood” was physiologically impaired as well—confirmation for the literal minded?
One almost suspects the fine hand and black humor here of one of the British moles consulting for the KGB in Moscow in the sixties. Guy Burgess or Kim Philby would have been familiar with the “one-ball” line in the Colonel Bogie song parody about Hitler; they could easily have been called in to consult when the results were being prepared (or doctored) to be released to the world in 1968.
My own skepticism about the one-ball report in the Soviet autopsy has been strengthened by my discovery of a hitherto-unknown, or at least long-ignored, source on the subject, one with what one might say was firsthand knowledge of the question. But before introducing this source, I think it’s worth looking at what a mountain of signification has been piled upon the putatively absent testicle. Psychoanalytic explainers, in particular, have made it a foundation for their posthumous analysis of Hitler. An analysis that begins, in the most ambitious psychoanalytic vision—that of psychohistorian Robert Waite—with Hitler’s mother Klara’s hands:
“Klara was not only worried about her son’s feeding and toilet training,” Waite tells us.
While cajoling (or forcing) him to eat more food, to move his bowels regularly and on schedule, and to control his bladder, she also could have fretted about an anatomical defect she may have detected in her son: one of his testicles was missing. One can speculate that she periodically felt the little boy’s scrotum, checking anxiously to see if the testis had descended. Such solicitous concern would have heightened Adolf’s infanti
le sexual feelings and increased the difficulty of a healthy mother-son relationship [emphasis added].
It’s a passage so riddled with conjecture and tentative speculation—she could have fretted . . . she may have detected . . . one can speculate . . . solicitous concern would have heightened—that it’s hard to imagine it serving as anything but a cryptofoundation for a cryptorchid or monorchid theory.
In placing such great emphasis on the destiny-shaping role of an absent testicle, psychoanalytic explainers rely on the work of a psychoanalytically oriented child analyst, Dr. Peter Blos, who did a small study of emotionally disturbed eleven- and twelve-year-old boys who were missing a testicle. Blos concluded that when mon- or cryptorchism occurs “within the matrix of a disturbed parent-child relationship . . . profoundly detrimental” consequences result, among them: “Hyperactivity, learning difficulties, compulsive toying with physical danger, social inadequacy, chronic indecision, and tendencies to exaggerate, to lie, and to fantasize. . . . A bisexual sense of identity and an interest in architecture, as a symbolic substitution for the absent testicle in concrete objects in the outer world.” Taking this list as a blueprint or as a lens through which to view the supposed facts of Hitler’s childhood, psychoanalyst Dr. Norbert Bromberg claims, “Adolf’s need to continue playing cowboy-and-Indians and war games after his playmates had become bored with them attest to his youthful hyperactivity.”
Waite dutifully adduces rages and poor report cards at a crucial age (“learning difficulties”) as further evidence for the monorchid hypothesis. And, of course, there is the architectural obsession later on. But Waite is only getting started. He goes on to link Hitler’s monorchism to his notoriously mesmeric stare, the way he’d attempt to fix those in his presence with the power of his gaze: “Monorchid boys favor symbolic substitutes for the missing testicle. . . . Patients may be excessively concerned about eyes. Hitler’s eyes were particularly important to him. . . . The adult Hitler was aware of their power and practiced ‘piercing stares’ in front of the mirror. He also played games with his eyes. He would slowly cross them in looking at people, or he would stare them down.”
While some might see this as Hitler attempting to exercise hypnotic self-aggrandizing power over individuals the way he did with crowds, Waite, steeped in the supposed insights yielded only to the adepts of psychoanalysis, sees something deeper going on: Hitler “may have been saying to them and to himself, ‘See I do have two powerful (potent) testicles, and I can penetrate and dominate others.’”
Is that really what Hitler was saying? On any level, conscious or unconscious? Waite’s book was written at a time when it was still common to give the insights of psychoanalysis an almost touching credulity and power. But Waite carries his monorchid theorizing so far, his Hitler explanation almost becomes a replication of it: Compensating for a conspicuous absence (here not of testicle, but of hard evidence), the crypto-explainer claims to have eyes, to see, to penetrate into matters further than others with his potent insights.
In fairness to Waite’s monorchid preoccupation, he does adduce one possible consequence of the condition that has a suggestive resonance. He cites the report of an American child analyst “that his young monorchid patients have a desire ‘of an almost frantic or feverish type’ for redesigning and reconstructing buildings. They hope to quell their anxiety about defects in their own bodies by making other kinds of structures whole.” (This sounds like a hyperbolic way of saying they liked playing with building blocks.) Hitler’s lifelong preoccupation with architecture fits the pattern, Waite asserts, citing his architectural ambitions and fantasies that go back to his first years in Vienna and the frenzy for redesigning and reconstructing entire cities he indulged himself in in partnership with Albert Speer once he came to power. Waite has even discovered a previously unpublished passage from Hitler’s wartime Table Talk in which Hitler goes to great lengths to define himself, as a youth, not as an aspiring painter but as an aspiring architect. He disparages the watercolors he painted to raise money from tourists and lauds his “architectural sketches . . . [as] my most valuable possessions, my own brainchildren which I would never have given away as I did the pictures” (emphasis added).
The problem with this insight is that while it might be an important aspect of Hitler’s self-definition, there’s no basis in evidence for believing it’s explained by monorchism, unless we’re compelled to believe that all impassioned architects must be driven by missing testicles.
Bromberg takes another tack: In his analysis of the monorchid effect, he suggests that all wicked rulers must be suffering from a physical defect that is the true source of their wickedness. “Freud cited Gloucester in Richard III,” Bromberg writes, “who argues that since he cannot play the lover because of his [hunchback], he will be a villain, intriguing and murdering as he pleases. For the physical wrong done him, he claims the right to exemption from the scruples inhibiting others. . . . The similarity to Hitler’s feeling of justification for any behavior is striking.”
Striking, if one takes Richard III’s words literally, if one believes that in fact he is offering a sincere “victim defense” of himself, rather than offering, say, a transparently cynical parody of the victim defense—by someone whose predilection for evil is far deeper and more complex than some all-too-easily-understandable compensation for his conspicuous hump. Similarly, it seems to miss a dimension of Hitler’s capacity for evil to define him by his absent lump; it tends to make him a figure of pity for his psychological suffering, someone who couldn’t help himself.
But Bromberg believes he can explain just about everything about Hitler from this single-pointed, single-testicle theory. He cites another Freudian study, “of narcissistic adults with minor physical anomalies,” that found additional features that also stand out in Hitler’s life record:
These include a secret fantasy life replete with narcissistic-exhibitionistic-aggressive themes, sadomasochistic fantasies, eroticized megalomanic daydreams, conscious or semiconscious aspirations to greatness and immortality; compensatory self-aggrandizement; heightened aggressiveness, often accompanied by outbursts of aggression and hate in word and deed . . . revenge fantasies. . . . Particularly intense in male patients in whom inguinal or genital anomalies such as testicular malformations exist.
Finally, Bromberg makes the monorchid theory jump through its trickiest hoop of all and explain the exact nature of the perversion Hitler allegedly practiced with Geli Raubal—the extreme version of the alleged perversion described most explicitly by Otto Strasser, the version Strasser claims to have heard from Geli herself, the one involving undinism. The way Bromberg explains it, “a perversion itself bespeaks extreme castration anxiety.” And Hitler’s extreme castration anxiety can be traced in a large part to the missing testicle: “Monorchism would lend an element of reality to castration anxiety.”
There is, at best, a conjectural quality to this assertion; at worst, a projection of the explainer’s own epistemological castration anxieties—his incapacity to fully know—on the thought process of the monorchid child. Such questions do not trouble Bromberg, who moves from monorchism to castration anxiety to the engendering of Hitler’s perversion:
Fear of his father’s imagined castration threat because of the Oedipus complex added to anxiety, as did identification with his mother while she was also perceived as a phallic castrating figure. All these converged in an unconscious acceptance of an image of himself as castrated and also resulted in the feminine passive inclinations which he disavowed so disastrously. . . . An extreme, even degrading form of the passive feminine inclination was obviously expressed in the submissive situation Hitler chose for himself in the perversion [emphasis added].
Perhaps I would have been less inclined to be skeptical of the interpretive castles in the air the architects(!) of the monorchid Hitler theory have built upon the slender foundation of Hitler’s purportedly half-empty scrotal sac, had I not come across what seems like a fairly convincing refutatio
n of the whole premise of their arguments. It came to me in a communiqué from a woman named Gertrud Kurth, who played a little-known but important role in the development of postwar psychological theories of Hitler. She’d written to me in response to Alan Bullock’s comments on the “one-ball business” which appeared in my New Yorker essay on Hitler theories. She had something to add, she said.
Hearing from and then meeting with Dr. Kurth (she has a Ph.D. in psychology) was both extremely rewarding and rather a surprise. Until I received her letter, I’d carelessly assumed she was no longer alive. But, in fact, at age ninety-two, she was still very much alive, very much alert, still enthusiastically practicing psychotherapy part-time in her apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
She was more than alive, she was one of the last living embodiments of the thrilling, febrile world of Viennese Jewish culture that the resentful Viennese tramp, Adolf Hitler, so loathed he destroyed. A culture exemplified by Dr. Kurth’s mother, for instance. Toward the end of our conversation in her West End Avenue office, Dr. Kurth began to talk a bit about her family—about her mother in particular, a talented, emancipated woman who’d not only been the first woman ever to earn a doctoral degree in Vienna but who had, in addition, as an eighteen-year-old, written a novel that became a sensation from Vienna to Moscow because it touched upon the anxieties unleashed by the newly open discussion of sexuality in Vienna.
The novel, called One for Many, took the form of the diary of a young Viennese woman named Vera, who makes the shocking and demoralizing discovery that her beloved fiancé has been sexually promiscuous before their betrothal. The revelation of his crude sexuality is unbearable to her, and she ends up committing suicide. As a novel, it was both sexually frank and morally censorious, not dissimilar in that sense from the Freudian fusion of the two that emerged from Vienna. And, like Freud, the novel spawned a cultlike following, at least for a while. In Russia, for instance, earnest young men formed “Vera clubs” (not unlike today’s fundamentalist men’s group the Promise Keepers) in which they ostentatiously pledged themselves to the ideal of premarital chastity to spare the Veras in their midst the shock that led to Vera’s suicide.
Explaining Hitler Page 27
