Later he commissioned a life-sized bust of Geli from a photograph. When he was presented with it, he wept. The bust was kept surrounded by flowers and, every year on the anniversary of Geli’s death, he would shut himself away with it for hours.
Soon after Hitler came to power, he invited the beautiful German film star nineteen-year-old Renate Muller to visit him in the Chancellory. He began the evening with gloatingly detailed descriptions of how his Gestapo men wrung confessions from their victims. He boasted that his men were far more brutal and effective than the worst of the medieval torturers.
Even though this sickened her, Renate had resigned herself to the fact that she was expected to go to bed with the Reichschancellor. They went into the bedroom and undressed.
Then Hitler threw himself on the floor at her feet and begged her to kick him. “I am filthy and unclean,” he yelled. “Beat me! Beat me!”
Renate was horrified. She had never seen such a thing. She pleaded with him to get up, but he just lay there grovelling and moaning. So eventually she had to kick and punish him. The harder she kicked him, the more excited he got. Renate was utterly revolted by this display; but in conversation with film director Alfred Zeisler, she said that this was not even the worst of it. There was something even more unspeakable that she could not bring herself to talk about.
Soon after, Renate Muller jumped to her death out of the window of her hotel in Berlin — though there is some speculation that she may have been pushed out on Gestapo orders after being secretly charged with having a Jewish lover.
Hitler, it seems, had quite a passion for film actresses. Linda Basquette, an American star of the silent movies, claimed to have received a fan letter from him, inviting her to Berchtesgaden. There, he made a vigorous pass at her.
“The man repelled me so much,” she said. “He had terrible body odour. He was flatulent. But he had strange penetrating eyes.”
Basquette claims that she had to kick the Fuhrer in the groin to dampen his ardour, but this only inflamed him more. To escape his attentions, she claimed that she was part Jewish.
Linda Basquette went on to marry nine times, once to Sam Warner of Warner Brothers. She died in 1994 at the age of 87.
Meanwhile, back at the Reichs chancellery, the party went on. Champagne was consumed by the gallon and fabulous sums were paid to singers and dancers. The Reichsministers indulged their every whim. Josef Goebbels, one of the few heterosexuals among the Nazi elite, was so promiscuous, especially with film actresses employed by his Ministry of Propaganda, that his longsuffering wife Magda told Hitler she was going to divorce him. Hitler pointed out that divorce was impossible. There was not a lawyer in Germany who would handle her case. Magda seems to have tried to get her own back on her husband by attempting to seduce Hitler. She was a considerable beauty, but reported later that the Fuhrer was impotent.
Hitler conceived a short-lived passion for Margaret Slezak, but she was an independent minded woman. When she would not bend to his will, he banned her from his inner circle.
There was little doubt that Hitler could have his pick of women. One night, Austrian movie-maker Luis Trenker accompanied actress Louise Ulrich to the Chancellory, where the Fuhrer was “telling stories”. They found him in a room full of dazzling women in evening gowns. His mere presence, it. was said, set the decolletages atremble. One woman, the wife of the director of the Nuremberg opera, was half-kneeling, half-lying at his feet in a pose of abject surrender, while Hitler ranted about the need for more tanks, more guns and more bombs.
One of the strangest worshippers at the feet of Hitler was Unity Mitford. The fifth daughter of Lord Redesdale, she came from a distinguished family. Her sister Jessica was a communist, who had a controversial career in journalism in America; Deborah was Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy Mitford became a distinguished novelist; and Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, blackshirted leader of the British Union of Fascists. Unity thought she could go one better and marry the Fuhrer himself.
It was Diana who introduced Unity to Hitler during a ten-day holiday to Germany in 1935. Unity was immediately besotted. She began to stalk Hitler like a hunter, bleaching her hair blonde to make herself look more Nordic and wearing the swastika pin he had given her prominently on her lapel. Her parents plainly approved. Lord and Lady Redesdale visited Berlin as special guests of the Fuhrer. This caused a split in the family, with Diana and Unity fanatically pro-Hitler and Jessica and Nancy violently against.
It is not known how seriously Hitler took Unity, or whether their affair was consummated — in Hitler’s strange way or in any other. However, Hitler did make it a practice to take young innocent girls, like Unity, and manipulate them into fulfilling his desires. He certainly found solace in her company, which seems to have relieved his deepest tensions. But those around Hitler found Unity a bit of a joke. Goebbels and Streicher called her Unity “Mit-fart”.
With articles like “I am a Jew-hater” and other pieces of Nazi propaganda that she published, Unity burnt her bridges back in England. The day war was declared, she sat in the English gardens in Munich and shot herself in the head. She did not die immediately. She was taken to Switzerland, then back to Britain. Her mother, Lady Redesdale, nursed her on a remote Scottish island until she died in 1948.
Leni Riefenstahl — who so brilliantly portrayed the puny, effeminate Adolf Hitler as the mythic personification of the Aryan master race in the movies Triumph of Will and Olympia, the official film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics — claimed after the war that she had never been Hitler’s lover, but many people who were around at the time thought she was.
They met when Riefenstahl was a film star rather than a film-maker. Goebbels introduced them. He thought that a marriage between Hitler and Riefenstahl, the athletic heroine of a series of mountaineering movies, would be a propaganda triumph. Herman Goring once remarked: “She’s the crevasse of the Reich” — much to Hitler’s displeasure.
Nazi spin doctor Putzi Hanfstaengl, who was present at their first meeting, recalled that Hitler looked awkward and isolated, as if in a panic. Hanfstaengl played the piano while Riefenstahl danced provocatively to the music. She was out to get her man. So Goebbels and Hanfstaengl made their excuses and left.
Riefenstahl had had numerous lovers, including the boxer Max Schmeling, movie producer Ernst Lubitsch and World War I flying ace Ernst Udet. Hanfstaengl believed that if Riefenstahl could not seduce Hitler, no one could.
But apparently, that time at least, Hitler resisted her charms. When Hanfstaengl met Riefenstahl on board a plane a few days later, he asked how it had gone. Riefenstahl’s reply was a disappointed little shrug. However, she was not to be put off so easily. Hanfstaengl told Luis Trenker that one morning, about 2 a.m., he and Hitler had gone to Riefenstahl’s flat for coffee, when she performed one of her legendary nude dances. Hanfstaengl complained: “She kept on shaking her navel in front of my nose.”
Riefenstahl, who had all her property confiscated because of her Nazi connections after the war, denies this ever happened. But Luis Trenker thinks it did and that it did the trick. During the filming of S.O.S. Iceberg! for Universal Pictures, Riefenstahl was supposed to catch a boat in Hamburg to sail to the Balearic Islands for some location shooting. The whole crew was waiting on the dockside, but there was no sign of her. She had been missing for several days and no one knew where she was. Then the producers got a telephone call. The Fuhrer’s plane had just landed in Hamburg. Riefenstahl was on board. She had been a guest at Hitler’s country house near Nuremberg.