Sex Lives of the Great Dictators by Nigel Cawthorne Page B

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