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”.
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.