The prisoners and their escorts arrived at Azzano at a quarter past three in the morning.
They were to stay at the home of a partisan family called the De Marias.
At about four o'clock the next night, a man in a brown mackintosh named Audisio turned up, saying that he had come to rescue them. They were driven to a nearby villa where they were ordered out of the car. Their "rescuers" were Communist partisans who had been ordered to execute Mussolini, along with fifteen other leading Fascists.
Clara threw her arms around Mussolini and screamed: "No! No! You mustn't do it. You mustn't."
"Leave him alone," Audisio said, "or you'll be shot too."
But this threat meant nothing to Clara. If Mussolini must die, then she wanted to die too and she clung on to him.
Audisio raised his gun and pulled the trigger but missed his target. Clara rushed at him and grabbed the barrel of the gun with both hands. As they wrestled, Audisio pulled the trigger again.
"You cannot kill us like this," Clara screamed.
Audisio pulled the trigger a third time, but the gun was well and truly jammed. So he borrowed a machine gun from a fellow partisan and sprayed them with bullets. The first shot killed Clara. The second hit Mussolini and knocked him down. The third killed him.
Their two bodies were thrown onto the back of a lorry, on top of the corpses of the other Fascists who had been executed. They were driven to Milan. In the Piazzale Loreto, they were strung up from a lamp-post by the feet. Clara's skirt fell down over her face, leaving her lower half naked. A partisan stood on a box and tied the torn hem of her skirt up between her legs to preserve some of her modesty. Curiously, though Mussolini's mistress was widely hated, many men who were there that day remarked on Clara's face. Even beneath the dirt and smears of blood, they said, she was remarkably beautiful.
5 - HITLER HAVING A BALL
Adolf Hitler was the most evil man of modern times; but, although he has been dead for over fifty years, he still has a growing band of followers across Europe, America, Russia, India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Far East. Racists, anti-Semites, religious fundamentalists, authoritarians and just plain nutcases are mesmerized by his demagoguery, his totalitarian vision and his simple, bloodthirsty solution to any political problem. But if his followers knew about his pitiful, pathetic, perverted sex life, they would find it hard to hold him in such awe. It is difficult to have any respect for a man who likes to cower naked on the floor while being kicked by a woman or gets the ultimate sexual satisfaction from being urinated or defecated upon. Several of his lovers committed suicide, they were so appalled at his depravity.
There is no doubt that Hitler was a very strange man. That was plain long before he came to power. His ranting, hypnotic speeches often excited women to orgasm. A man who worked as a cleaner in Munich said that they would sometimes lose control of their bladders too and the whole of the front row would have be to sponged dry. Hitler would have loved that.
Homosexual men were convinced that Hitler was a homosexual too. Almost all of his
bodyguards were homosexual. So were many of the inner circle of the Nazi Party.
Reichsmarschall Herman Goring was a transvestite. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess was known as "Fraulcin Anna" and Ernst Rohm, the homosexual head of the Nazi storm troopers and Hitler's long-time friend, said: "He is one of us."
Soon after the Night of the Long Knives, when Rohm and his friends were killed, there were mass arrests of homosexuals in Germany. The following year, the law was revised to make it illegal for a man even "to touch another man in a suggestive way". Homosexuals were given pink stars to wear and sent to the concentration camps. It is estimated that over half a million homosexuals died during Hitler's Reich. What was he trying to prove?
Early newsreels show that his gestures and walk were very effeminate - until Leni
Riefenstahl, the great film actress, film-maker and possible lover of Hitler, began shooting him from a low camera angle to emphasize his power and encourage his mythic status.
American generals would joke that he would never have gotten through West Point with his camp little mincing walk.
Another characteristic was his habit of clasping his hands protectively in front of his genitals. This prompted the joke that he was "hiding the last unemployed member of the Third Reich".
When war broke out, the Allies needed to know what made the Nazi dictator tick. If they could get inside the mind of the man, perhaps they would be able to predict what he was going to do next. In America, General William "Wild Bill" Donovan, head of the OSS - the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA put Boston psychologist Dr Walter C.
Langer on the case. Assisted by Dr Gertrud Kurth, a refugee from Hitler's persecution, and Professor Henry A. Murray of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, he collected all the material he could from published sources and interviewed as many people as he could lied who had known Hitler personally. Langer and his team made a particular effort to understand Hitler's sex life. In the psychoanalytical theories that were fashionable at that time, this was thought to be crucial.
Although Langer's report was sent to propaganda departments, it was not itself a tool of propaganda. Langer tried, as objectively as possible, to distil everything that was known about Hitler and his sexual proclivities. General Donovan expressed his satisfaction with the report. It was circulated widely. British foreign secretary Lord Halifax personally congratulated Langer; and it was read by Churchill and Roosevelt with evident satisfaction.
Given his psycho-analytic background, Langer, naturally, traced the roots of Hitler's behaviour back to his childhood. Hitler's father, Alois Hitler, was an Austrian customs official on the German border, a good-looking man and an insatiable womanizer. He was the illegitimate son of Anna Maria Schicklgruber, a housemaid who had worked in the home of a wealthy Jew named Frankenberger. Frankenberger was probably Alois's father. Later, Anna Maria married Johann Georg Heidler, whose name could be spelt in a number of ways, including the way Alois chose to spell it - Hitler. But Alois Schicklgruber did not change his name to Hitler until the age of forty, long after his step-father was dead and only then because he thought it would help his career in the customs service.
Hitler's mother, Klara Polzl, first came to work for her uncle, Alois Hitler, when she was sixteen and, by all accounts, very beautiful. She was nanny to Therese, Alois's illegitimate daughter by a former lover in Vienna. A relative of Johann I Heidler, she was not a blood relative of Alois's.
Alois lived in a tavern in Linz and Klara had been warned about his drunken, womanizing ways. He was married to Anna Glassl, fourteen years his senior. She had brought with her a considerable dowry, which Alois soon squandered while satisfying his sexual lust with a serving maid, seventeen-year-old Franziska "Fanni" Matzelberger.
Klara's supple young body scarcely escaped the attention of the lecherous Alois, and soon the atmosphere became so heated that Anna could stand no more and she fled.
With Anna out of the way, Alois's young lover Fanni took her place. She was clever enough to spot that Klara could, in turn, step into her former place as Alois's mistress. So she refused to go on living with Alois unless he sent Klara away.
Fanni and Alois married. They had two children, Alois Junior and Angela, but soon after the birth of Angela, Fanni became ill and Alois sent for Klara to nurse her on her deathbed.
When Fanni finally succumbed, Alois consoled himself with Klara. At the same time, he was having an incestuous affair with his daughter Therese, who had an illegitimate son by him.
Klara, too, became pregnant.
Alois and Klara married. Their first son, Gustav, was born a few days after the ceremony, but died within a few days. Klara lost two more children in a diphtheria epidemic. Then on the morning of 7 January, 1885, she had a son, Adolf, who survived.
Having lost three children already, Klara lavished all her love on Adolf" . She continued breast-feeding him long after the age when he should have been weaned.
The morbid bond between mother and son was further strengthened by the death of
another child, Adolf's brother Edmund, at the age of six. Mara's sixth and final child, Paula, survived but was feeble-minded. Hitler, alone of Mara's six children, was sound. Her love for all of them was focused on him. He described himself throughout his life as a "mother's boy", even writing about his mother in his political treatise,
Mein Kampf
.
The cloying love between Klara and her only sound child left little room for Alois. A promotion meant that he was away from home a lot, but when he returned he expected sex from her. Once when Klara would not oblige him, he went to visit his former lover in Vienna, Therese's mother. But she was in the advanced stages of pregnancy and could not help him out. Alois returned to Linz full of sexual craving and, on a hot August night, he brutally raped Klara in front of her son who was, at the time, too young to go to her assistance.
For the first seventeen years of his life, the young Hitler witnessed the total sexual subjugation of his beloved mother by his brutal and drunken father, until January 1903, when Alois collapsed and died. It was a relief to all concerned. His epitaph read: "The sharp word that fell occasionally from his lips could not belie the warm heart that beat beneath the rough exterior."
That epitaph certainly belied Hitler's feeling for him. After the Anschluss, which unified Austria with Germany, the cemetery where Alois was buried became part of an artillery firing range, destroying his grave for ever.
With Alois dead, mother and son were alone together, but not for long. Four years later, Klara Hitler contracted breast cancer. The doctor who treated her, Eduard Bloch, was Jewish.
I Hitler was also one of his patients, having caught syphilis in Vienna.
Despite the fact that his mother had already had one breast removed and was plainly dying of cancer, Hitler had decided to enroll at the General School of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As the capital of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was a cesspit of vice. Its infamous red-light district was Spittelberggasse, where girls sat seminaked behind lace curtains.
Due to the virulent anti-semitism of the time, many young Jewish girls were forced to eke out a living there, where sexual diseases were almost unavoidable. Prostitutes with syphilis had to work all the harder to pay the increasingly extortionate bribes for a medical certificate, and eager young men paid little attention to the risks.
After many visits to the Spittelberggasse, Hitler had already contracted syphilis - then an incurable disease when he was summoned back to Linz, where his mother was dying in great pain. At Hitler's insistence, Dr Bloch administered iodoform, which very occasionally, and for reasons then unknown to medical science, halted the growth of tumours. Hitler insisted:
"My mother must be treated by all possible means. A poison must be used to kill a worse poison."
In Klara's case, iodoform had no effect on the cancer. It simply produced hallucinations and increased her pain and she finally died in agony. Hitler was devastated by the loss.
Around this time, Hitler had a strange fantasy love affair. One evening he was walking down the main street of Linz with his friend Gustl Kubizek, when he pointed out a beautiful young woman earned Stefanie Jantsen. Hitler said that he was in love with her. Although he never spoke to her, this infatuation lasted for four years. Somehow Hitler imagined he was going to marry her and have children. For him, she was the very ideal of German
womanhood. He wrote poetry dedicated to Stefanie and once, when he imagined she was angry with him for some reason, he threatened to kill himself. When Kubizek enquired further, he discovered that Hitler had devised an entire fantasy suicide plot. Every aspect had been planned in detail, including the fact that Kubizek should witness the event.
When Kubizek related the tale later, he insinuated that Hitler made up the fantasy as an aid to masturbation. For much of the time when this "affair" went on, Stefanie does not even seem to have been in Linz.
Returning to Vienna, Hitler would lecture friends about the dangers of prostitution. He took Kubizek, now his room-mate, to the Spittelberggasse to see for himself "what imbeciles men become in the grip of their lowest desires". They walked the entire length of the quarter and back again, while Hitler ranted about the evils of prostitution and the foolishness of men who succumb. Kubizek sensed that Hitler derived some voyeuristic pleasure from their visit.
In the chronology of Hitler's life, there is a year during the period when he lived in Vienna that is unaccounted for. It is thought that he may have been undergoing some form of hospital treatment, possibly for syphilis. If he was, it was unsuccessful. During that entire.
period in Vicuna, he seems to have had no female company.
"For two years," lie wrote, "my only girlfriends were Sorrow and Need, and I had acs other companions except constant unsatisfied hunger. I never learned to know the beautiful word 'youth'."
This is not surprising, given the description of him at the time. He wore the Bavarian mountain costume of leather shorts, which showed off his short, spindly legs, a white shirt and braces. His hips were wide, his shoulders narrow and chest so puny that, later, he had to have his uniforms padded. His muscles were flabby. His clothes were none too clean, his fingernails dirty and he had a mouth full of rotten, brown teeth.
There were stories that Hitler had several homosexual liaisons during this period. They may have been put about later by political enemies but one, in particular, stands out. During World War I, Hitler was brave and fanatically patriotic. He received two Iron Crosses for courage, but was never promoted beyond the rank of lance-corporal. The widely circulated story was that Hitler was kept in the ranks because he had been court-martialed on a charge of indecency which implicated a senior officer. When he came to power, the story was suppressed by the Gestapo, who destroyed his military records. Comrades in the trenches also noted that Hitler "was a peculiar fellow - he never asked for leave; he did not have even a combat soldier's interest in women; and he never grumbled, as did the bravest of men, about the filth, the lice, the mud, the stench of the front line".