During World War I, Hitler was gassed by the British. While he recuperated in a crowded ward in a hospital in Pasewalk in northern Germany, he suffered blindness and
hallucinations. The doctor who treated him, Edmund Forster, believed oral these symptoms were brought on by a psychopathic: hysteria. This may have been related to his syphilis, which would now have been well into its secondary phase.
Again, when Hitler came to power, Forster's records were located and suppressed by the Gestapo. Forster, by then a professor, was forced to resign. Living in constant fear of being hauled off by the Gestapo, he eventually shot himself. Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler would have seen those files and he confirmed that Hitler had syphilis.
After World War I, Hitler settled in Munich, a recognized centre of venereology. During his early days there, Hitler's main sexual outlet was solitary. According to friends, the bookshelves of his room were stuffed with pornography, including well-thumbed volumes of the
History of Erotic Art
and
An Illustrated History of Morals
. He continued his interest in art and would go to life classes to ogle the nude models.
But Hitler was not without sexual attraction and he rose to power thanks partly to the women of Germany. The first to take him up was Helene Bechstein. She and her husband were immensely wealthy. They supported his fledgling Nazi Party financially and introduced him to their wealthy friends, whose wives encouraged their husbands to contribute too.
Hitler was an unlikely sex symbol. Though he now hid his spindly legs under a blue suit, it was shabby to say the least. He had a facial tic that caused the corner of his lip to curl upwards. When he walked, he would cock his right shoulder every few steps. At the same time, his left leg would snap up. Those who got close to him, talked of his terrible: holy odour. Throughout his life, he suffered from chronic flatulence. He dosed himself with anti-gas pills and gave up eating meat in an attempt to minimize the smell.
Hitler made an odd dinner guest.. He ate little and drank nothing - he had got drunk once in his teens and had promised his mother he would be a teetotaller. But once the conversation turned to politics, he would grow excited and flushed. Making wild gestures, he would brook no interruption, his shrill voice swelling higher and higher as if in verbal orgasm. Older women, particularly, were quickly won over and would donate their jewels on the spot. At public meetings, middle-aged women would get so agitated they would have to be given medical attention. On one occasion, a woman bent down, picked up a handful of gravel that he had trodden on and tried to swallow it. To women like these, Hitler was a god. They handed over their money and many claimed to have gone to bed with him, though it is unlikely that he would have risked giving any of his backers syphilis.
While Hitler knew how to woo women his mother's age, he was less successful with
younger women. In Munich, Hitler used to go chasing girls with his first chauffeur, Emil Maurice, who was half Jewish. Although Maurice was much more successful than him, Hitler adopted the alias "Herr Wolf. The sexually predatory wolf is an image that is repeated in Hitler's fantasy life. He even persuaded his weak-minded sister Paula to change her name to Wolf when he came to power, as she failed to live up to his Aryan ideals.
Hitler described Helene Bechstein as the greatest lady in Germany, but she thought of"
him more as a son than a lover. After his failed putsch in 1923, it was Helene who persuaded Hitler to end his jail-cell hunger strike; and she urged him to continue the fight when he said all was lost.
When he was released, he threw himself at her feet. Acutely embarrassed, she begged him to get up.
"It would have been awful if somebody had come in, humiliating for him," she said.
Helene did not want him for herself. She was grooming her daughter, Lotte, to be his bride. But Hitler had no intention of getting married to her, he said. He was already wedded to Germany.
Hitler also flirted with English-born Winifred Wagner, the widowed daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner. She organized the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth. Hitler's whole Nazi ethos was shot through with Wagnerian myth and he suggested, not entirely in jest, that she was his rightful bride.
Many of the women who were besotted by Hitler found openly supporting such a
dangerous organization as the Nazi Party difficult. So they made their contributions direct to Hitler himself. These gifts became the foundation of his personal wealth. He bought a country home in Berchtesgaden. There he met Elisabeth Buchner, the wife of a racing driver who ran a local hotel. She was tall and Hitler saw her as his Brunhilde. She made him so excited that he would march up and down, striking his thigh with his rhinoceros-hide whip.
Although he seems to have been circumspect about women at this time, Hitler was
particularly attracted to girls who were young, naive and easily influenced. He met it girl named Mitzi Reiter while out walking his dog in Berchtesgaden. She was more than twenty years his junior. He took her to a concert - their next date was a Nazi rally.
At first, the affair was innocent enough. Hitler would go for walks in the park with her and bombard her with flattery. He idolized her, he said. Then he suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her.
"I want to crush you," he said.
At one time, they considered finding an apartment and living together in Munich. A year later, Mitzi attempted suicide. She tried to throttle herself with a clothesline, but was found by her brother who resuscitated her. She was clearly terrified of Hitler. Once, she said, he had whipped his dog so savagely that she was "overwhelmed by his brutality".
Another lover, Susi Liptauer, hanged herself after an overnight engagement with the Fuhrer.
Next, Hitler had an affair with his own niece, Geli Raubal. Hitler's widowed half-sister Angela came to Munich to keep house for him in 1927 and brought her twenty-year-old daughter Geli with her. She was fairhaired and well developed.
When she first moved into the Brown House, Hitler's headquarters on Brienner Strasse, Geli could barely disguise her admiration for her "big, famous uncle". He promptly appointed himself her guardian and protector and moved her into a room next to his. But things became difficult.
Geli was bored by politics and wanted to go out dancing. Hitler forbade her the company of people her own age and once, when he met her in the street with a fellow student, he threatened to beat her with the whip he carried. He constantly gave her ranting lectures, in hideously graphic detail, on the dangers of sexual intercourse.
Otto Strasser, younger brother of" Gregor Strasser, one of the leading figures in Hitler's Munich "Beer Hall" putsch of 1923, arranged to take her out to a masked ball. While Otto was dressing, his brother burst into the room with the news that Hitler had forbidden him to go out with Geli.
The phone rang. It was Hitler himself.
"I understand that you are going out with Geli this evening," Hitler bellowed. "I won't allow her to go out with a married man. I'm not going to have any of your filthy Berlin tricks here in Munich."
Later, when Otto saw Geli, he said she had the look of a hunted beast.
"He locked me up," she sobbed. "He locks me up every time I say no."
During another jealous tantrum, Hitler accused Geli of being a whore and forced his half-sister to take her to the gynaecologist. He strutted up and down outside the doctor's surgery while Geli was examined. When it was found that she was, indeed, still a virgin, Hitler bought her an expensive ring; but he still locked her in her room at night.
By this time, Angela was becoming concerned about Hitler's intentions towards her
daughter. She asked him to promise that he would not seduce her. Hitler replied that he was not the problem. Geli was a cunning hussy and, the gynaecological tests notwithstanding, a demi-vierge.
Otto Strasser, who escaped to Canada after his brother was purged in the Night of the Long Knives, learned the full depravity of the affair between Geli and Hitler, that had left her virgo-inlacta but no longer innocent.
"Hitler made her undress," he told Dr Langer's interviewer. "He would then lie on the floor. She would have to squat over his face where he could examine her at close quarters and this made him very excited." It was of the utmost importance to Hitler that Geli squat over him in just such a way that he could see everything. "When the excitement reached its peak, he demanded that she urinate on him and that gave him his sexual pleasure. Geli said the whole performance was extremely disgusting to her and it gave her no gratification."
Strasser had heard such things before, from Henriette Hoffman, the daughter of Hitler's official photographer, but he had dismissed them as hysterical ravings.
The chambermaids who had to clean up Geli's bedroom also complained of the "very strange and unspeakable" things that had been going on there.
Geli also told a girlfriend that Hitler was "a monster...you would never believe the things he makes me do". Others did. They saw the evidence with their own eyes. In 1929, a portfolio of pornographic sketches Hitler had made of Geli fell into the hands of the landlady's son, Dr Randolf. They showed her in every sort of indecent and obscene pose and outlined in detail the depth of his coprophiliac cravings.
Father Stempfle, a rabid anti-Semite, had organized for Hitler to buy them back via a collector of political memorabilia named Rehse. However, Rehse doublecrossed Stempfle and upped the price when the Party Treasurer, Franz Xavier Schwartz, went to collect the portfolio. Stempfle was another of those who perished in the Night of the Long Knives.
Schwartz was told not to destroy the drawings, but to return them to Hitler at Nazi headquarters.
While Geli was locked up at night, Hitler claimed the right to visit other lovers. He spent time at the studios of official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, which was a meeting place for homosexuals of both sexes. Hoffmann made erotic films which Hitler watched there while taking an unhealthy interest in Hoffmann's daughter Henriette, who was then sixteen. He later encouraged her to marry Baldur von Schirach, the reputedly homosexual leader of the Hitler Youth and Gauleiter of Vienna.
Hitler still spent time with the Wagners. Winifred became so fanatically attached to him that she threatened her own daughter with extermination when, sickened by what was happening to the Jews, she fled to Switzerland.
Emil Maurice took advantage of Hitler's absences and started seeing Geli. When Hitler caught them together, Emil was sacked on the spot and Hitler cursed him as a "filthy Jew".
In 1931, Geli was determined to leave Hitler and move to Vienna were she could study music. Angela was also determined to get her daughter out of Uncle Adolf's grasp. The situation was urgent; Geli was pregnant. The child may have been Emil Maurice's, though she had also slept with the young Nazi assigned to guard her. Reports that the baby may have been Hitler's have been discounted. One of his last letters to her includes pornographic images indicating that he was impotent. Worse - Hitler's nephew, his half-brother Alois's son, Patrick Hitler, suggested that the father was "a young Jewish art teacher in Linz".
One night that autumn, Geli and Hitler had a terrible row. She insisted that she was leaving him and going to Vienna. He forbade it. Hitler was due in Hamburg and a car was waiting downstairs for him. She called down to him from the window, begging one more time to be allowed to leave for Vienna. He refused and gave orders that she was to see no one until he returned. The next morning she was found dead.
The coroner's report said that the cause of death was a bullet which had entered below the chest and penetrated the heart vertically. Geli Raubal was just twenty-three.
A number of other stories circulated at the time. One was that Himmler had murdered Geli on Hitler's orders; another, that Hitler himself had pulled the trigger during a violent struggle with Geli over a gun. It was said that they had a "major row over breakfast" when Geli told Hitler that she was engaged to be married to a man in Austria in order to escape his domination.
Otto Strasser said that Hitler had shot Geli during a quarrel. His brother Gregor had to spend three days and nights with Hitler after her death, in case he committed suicide.
Preempting the inquest, the Nazi Party issued a communique saying that Hitler had gone into deep mourning following the "suicide" of his niece. According to Strasser, the public prosecutor wanted to charge Hitler with murder, but the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Wilhelm Gurtner, quashed the case and a verdict of suicide was recorded. Giirtner went on to become Reich Minister of justice and the hapless prosecutor fled Germany when Hitler came to power.
However Geli died, the Nazis went to considerable lengths to hush things up. Her body was taken down the backstairs of the flats and sealed in a lead coffin in a Munich mortuary.
Then it was smuggled out of the country. Himmler and Rohm attended the funeral. Hitler remained in Munich, prostrate with grief, though he managed to issue a libel writ against the
Munchener Post
which had dared to suggest that Geli's body had a broken nose and other injuries sustained in a struggle.
A journalist named Gerlich investigated Geli's death and was murdered for his pains.
Gregor Strasser's lawyer, Voss, who kept Strasser's private papers, was murdered too.
Strasser himself was murdered by Hitler's henchmen in 1934.
Despite officially having committed suicide, Geli was given a full Catholic burial in a church cemetery back in her native Austria. Hitler was not allowed to enter Austria without government permission, but he was allowed to visit Geli's grave provided he did not engage in any political activities. Hitler's headquarters in Munich gave Austrian Nazis instructions to ignore his visit. He crossed the border late at night. The cemetery had to be specially opened for him. He walked alone around the grave for some time, and returned to Germany before dawn.