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.