Showing posts with label office of strategic services. Show all posts
Showing posts with label office of strategic services. Show all posts

13 Dec 2017

Kissing Hitler 2: Notes on the Führer's Love Life

Heil honey, I'm home!


Hitler's love life has long been subject to critical and clinical analysis, as well as sensational speculation and obscene rumour. We know that he had relationships with a number of young women during his life and seemed to enjoy their company. The most famous and long-lasting of these relationships was with Eva Braun, whom he married in a civil ceremony on April 29, 1945, shortly before they committed suicide. (Is there anything more Romantic than a honeymoon in Hell?)

Although this relationship was kept secret from the public so as to protect Hitler's image as a man dedicated entirely to his political mission and the German people, there is no reason to think it was in any way an abnormal affair and Braun's biographer, the respected historian Heike Görtemaker, notes that the couple enjoyed a normal sex life (whatever that is).

There is also no real evidence that Hitler ever had any homosexual encounters, or desired such. The 1943 report by Walter C. Langer for the American Office of Strategic Services and the separate psychoanalytical study for the OSS by Henry Murray written in the same year that describe Hitler as having repressed homosexual tendencies and speculate that he was a shit-loving, sado-masochist with only one testicle who had trouble getting it up can, I think, be safely dismissed as shameful wartime propaganda that, actually, relies upon homophobia and encourages queer bashing.

Even if true, there's nothing wrong with being a kinky monorchid and coprophile; certainly in Hitler's case, this wasn't the most troubling aspect of his character and doesn't explain the genocidal nature of National Socialism. It's a shame, ultimately, that Hitler wasn't more of a libertine and less of a Nazi. For without wanting to sound like an old hippie, it's always better to make love rather than war, no matter how perversely one may choose to do so - though we shouldn't, of course, mistakenly posit these things as mutually exclusive terms, or binary opposites.


Note: readers interested in the idea of kissing Hitler should go to part one of this post: click here