Was Adolf Hitler into Sexual Sadomasochism?
The last of the great personal myths surrounding the German leader during the Second World War Adolf Hitler is that he was sexually excited by and experimented with extremely perverted sexual practices. The jewish link is once again that the originating source of these claims was a jewish anti-Nazi journalist named Konrad Heiden.
The claim centres around Hitler’s relationship with his niece Geli Raubal between 1925 and 18th September 1931 when Geli committed suicide in Hitler’s apartment using his pistol. A fact that has long drawn much unjust and a-historic speculation from (often jewish) authors desperate to find something – anything – to vilify Hitler with. (1)
However an additional element was provided by Konrad Heiden in his 1944 ‘Der Fuehrer: Hitler’s Rise to Power’ when he wrote that:
‘One day, Hitler’s parental relations to his niece Geli ceased to be parental. Geli was a beauty on the majestic side… simple in her thoughts and emotions, fascinating to many men, well aware of her electric effect and delighting in it. She looked forward to a brilliant career as a singer and expected “Uncle Alf” to make things easy for her. Her uncle’s affection, which in the end assumed the most serious form, seems like an echo of the many marriages among relatives in Hitler’s ancestry.
At the beginning of 1929, Hitler wrote the young girl a letter couched in the most unmistakeable terms. It was a letter in which the uncle and lover gave himself completely away: it expressed feelings which could be expected from a man with a masochistic coprophilic inclinations bordering on what Havelock Ellis calls “undinism”. The letter probably would have been repulsive to Geli if she had received it. But she never did. Hitler left the letter lying around, and it fell into the hands of his landlady’s son, a certain Doctor Rudolph: perhaps this was one of the reasons for Hitler’s change of lodgings. The letter was in no way suited for publication: it was bound to debase Hitler and make him ridiculous in the eyes of anyone who might see it. For some reason, Hitler seems to have feared that it was Rudolph’s intention to make it public.’ (2)
To be very clear: undinism is the desire to be urinated on for sexual gratification.
Heiden’s claim that I’ve quoted in full above is often conflated with another similar story retailed by Otto Strasser in which Strasser contradicts Heiden and says that Geli was aware of Hitler’s masochistic and sexual desire to be urinated on because she’d done it with him and then later told Strasser before her death. (3)
The story is echoed but not corroborated by Ernst ‘Putzi’ Hanfstaengl who claims that fairly early in 1930 he bumped into long-time NSDAP treasurer Franz Xavier Schwartz who told him that he’d had to buy off a blackmailer for a large sum of money because they’d acquired very detailed nude sketches of Geli by Hitler. (4)
This seems solid until we note that the three claims simply do not match: in Heiden’s account Geli was unaware of Hitler’s masochistic desires and sexual fantasy of being urinated on which then make Hitler subject to implied blackmail, in Strasser’s account Geli was not only aware of Hitler’s masochistic desires and sexual fantasy of being urinated on but had actually participated in them (possibly more than once) and in Hanfstaengl’s account nothing is stated about Hitler’s masochistic desires and sexual fantasy of being urinated on but instead we are told that Hitler had drawn some rather explicit nudes of Geli which are then successfully used to blackmail the NSDAP in early 1930.
Just from outlining what the three different sources say we can already see that Heiden and Strasser contradict each other while Hanfstaengl’s account doesn’t validate or really impact either claim since it is a completely separate claim. (5)
Rosenbaum has reasonably speculated there is some original ‘Q’ source on which Heiden, Strasser and Hanfstaengl stories are based. (6) I am inclined to agree with this since Heiden only wrote about this in 1944 – completely ignoring it in his far better known 1932 ‘History of National Socialism’ – and had Heiden had substantial justification for making this claim without being successfully sued by Hitler and NSDAP for libel in the courts then he would have made it.
Personally, I would speculate that the original ‘Q’ source is probably something published in the SPD-aligned ‘Münchener Post’ – the famous ‘Poison Kitchen’ for publishing malicious rumours and gossip about the Hitler and NSDAP from the 1920s to 1933 – which is also the source for the claim that Geli died ‘due to Hitler’s loathsome sexual advances’ (7) and it would be make sense that the two similar claims about Hitler and Geli’s relationship are somehow related.
However, the ‘Q’ source for this claim might be one of Walter Langer’s principal sources for his psychological report on Hitler for the OSS: Alfred Zeisler.
Zeisler was an American jewish film director who had worked in Germany in the 1920s (8) who told Langer that Hitler asked him to send young actresses over to the Reich Chancellery and then Hitler would spend his time telling them about medieval torture methods which apparently terrified them. (9) Zeisler also claimed – falsely as far as we know - that Hitler had an affair with German actress Renate Müller who Zeisler claimed told him that Hitler begged Müller to repeatedly kick him while he was on the floor before she killed herself soon after. (10)
That Zeisler was claiming this as early as 1942-1943 tells us that he is also possibly the ‘Q’ source, and it might be that Heiden’s claim in his 1944 ‘Der Fuehrer’ is actually a combination of Strasser and Zeisler’s earlier but lesser-known claims. That Zeisler was jewish, doesn’t appear to have known Hitler and left Germany for America in 1935 (at least two years before Renate Müller killed herself on 7th October 1937) informs us that Zeisler’s claims are almost certainly made-up nonsense, but this didn’t stop Walter Langer treating them as if they were fact and it also wouldn’t have stopped Heiden including them in his own explicitly anti-Nazi propaganda work. (11)
Regardless of this as far as we know Heiden was the first person to make this claim publicly in 1944 and as such is the ‘ur-source’ (i.e., original source) for what Rosenbaum refers to as the ‘Hitler perversion myth’. (12)
The problem with it is that it simply makes no sense in that Strasser’s account of ‘Hitler’s sexual perversions with Geli’ grew and changed with every telling and re-telling, which almost certainly means that – quite aside from the sheer improbability of Strasser’s rather strange story of how Geli came to confide such a personal secret to him – that Strasser’s ‘Hitler as a sexual degenerate’ narrative is invented from whole cloth and not something he was actually told by Geli. (13)
It is also directedly contradicted by Mimi Reiter’s relationship with Hitler from 1926 to 1931 which came to light in 1959. (14) The relationship between Mimi Reiter and Hitler reveals Hitler (at worst) to be completely normal sexually. (15)
If Hitler had been a sexual degenerate interested in sadomasochism and being urinated on, then we should hear about this from Mimi Reiter who was having a sexual relationship with Hitler around the same time that Heiden and Strasser allege that Geli was, and she simply doesn’t even mention it. Throwing serious doubt on the already dubious Second World War-era claims of Heiden and Strasser while in exile in North America.
But what were Heiden and Stasser’s motives for lying about Hitler’s sexuality?
Rosenbaum thinks revenge (16) but Rudolph Binion thinks it was to for personal profit and to sell books. (17)
But what of Hanfstaengl’s claims?
Well, Hanfstaengl despite seeming to be a solid source is quickly revealed not to be when we note that he was discovered to be a completely unreliable fantasist by British intelligence in 1940 and then in the United States by the OSS and President Roosevelt in 1944. (18)
Indeed, British intelligence’s verdict on Hanfstaengl’s credibility is pretty damning: he was ‘an adventurer, untrustworthy and a liar.’ (19)
His motives indeed may well have been more personal as there is some speculation that Hitler may have cuckolded him and had an affair with his wife Helene. (20) This alone would give Hanfstaengl plenty of good reasons to spread false rumours about Hitler’s sexuality after his arrival in the United States in 1940.
But coming back to the point: fundamentally the ‘sources’ for the ‘Hitler was a sexual degenerate’ claim were either fanatical opponents of Hitler who had fled Germany in 1933 or previous supporters of Hitler trying to get back at him which is hardly a good source base to build so wild a claim. (21)
The fact is - that whatever you might think about him – the evidence can only be read to show that Hitler was completely normal sexually. (22)
To quote Kershaw:
‘Later rumours of Hitler’s sexual perversions are similarly based on dubious evidence. Conjecture – and there has been much of it – that sexual repression later gay way to sordid sado-masochistic practices rests, whatever the suspicions, on little more than a combination of rumour, hearsay, surmise and innuendo, often spiced up by his political enemies.’ (23)
So, no Adolf Hitler was not into Sexual Sadomasochism.
References
(1) I have discussed the myth of Hitler’s involvement in Geli’s suicide and how it roots from a complete misreading of their relationship as well as Hitler’s sexuality in two articles: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-a-paedophile-andor and https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/was-adolf-hitler-a-homosexual
(2) Quoted in Ron Rosenbaum, 1998, ‘Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of his Evil’, 1st Edition, MacMillan: London, pp. 128-129
(3) Ibid., p. 129
(4) Ibid., pp. 129-130
(5) Ibid., p. 130
(6) Ibid.
(7) Ian Kershaw, 1998, ‘Hitler’, Vol. 1, 1st Edition, Penguin: New York, pp. 353-354
(8) Meredith Chambers, 1999, ‘Sex and the Swastika’, 23 minutes: 50 seconds (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5911494/)
(9) Ibid., 24 minutes: 5 seconds
(10) Ibid., 24 minutes: 20 seconds
(11) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 130-132
(12) Ibid., p. 129
(13) Ibid., pp. 133-134
(14) Kershaw, Op. Cit., pp. 284-285
(15) Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., p. 110
(16) Ibid., pp. 130-132
(17) Ibid., p. 131
(18) Ernst Hanfstaengl, Richard Evans, 2005, ‘The Unknown Hitler: Notes from the Young Nazi Party’, 1st Edition, Gibson Square: London, p. 19
(19) Ibid.
(20) Kershaw, Op. Cit., p. 352
(21) Ibid., pp. 46; 352; Rosenbaum, Op. Cit., pp. 83-84; 181
(22) Kershaw, Op. Cit., p. 352
(23) Ibid., p. 46