Posted on 03/30/2005 7:12:00 PM PST by neverdem
He was a feminine boy, averse to manual work, who was "annoyingly subservient" to superior officers as a young soldier and had nightmares that were "very suggestive of homosexual panic." The mass killings that he later perpetrated stemmed in part from a desperate loathing of his own submissive weakness, and the humiliations of being beaten by a sadistic father.
What is believed to be the first psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, was posted this month by Cornell University Law Library on its Web site (www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/donovan/hitler/). Although declassified some years ago, the report, written in 1943, has not been widely cited or available to the public, historians and librarians at Cornell say.
The library published the analysis after receiving permission from a relative of its author, the late Dr. Henry A. Murray, a prominent personality expert at Harvard in the middle of the last century. The document's release was reported on Tuesday on the Fox News program "The Big Story With John Gibson."
"For a long time, people thought there was only one psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the O.S.S.," said Dr. Jerrold M. Post, a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University and the founder of the C.I.A.'s psychological branch, referring to a wartime report by Dr. Walter C. Langer that formed the basis of his 1972 book, "The Mind of Adolf Hitler."
Dr. Langer, a noted psychoanalyst, died in 1981. Dr. Murray was among several psychoanalysts who had worked with him in profiling Hitler for the O.S.S., and the Murray profile was apparently incorporated into the later, more definitive Langer account.
It is clear that this earlier profile added to the definitive profile of Hitler, Dr. Post said, "and very few people have known that it even exists."
Dr. Post said he came upon a draft of the Murray profile in 2000 while researching a book of his own, "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders."
Some experts, including Dr. Post himself, are not convinced that the report is without significant shortcomings.
The posted document is a condensed version of Dr. Murray's evaluation, a mixture of psychoanalytic theorizing, speculation and lurid detail about Hitler's life that could have come from a crime novel. In an authoritative voice, Dr. Murray diagnoses in Hitler neurosis, hysteria, paranoia, Oedipal tendencies, schizophrenia, "infinite self-abasement" and "syphilophobia," which he describes as a fear of contamination of the blood through contact with a woman. But the document refers only vaguely to its sources, and presents no scientific evidence for its findings.
"There's a whole lot of what we would now think of as psychobabble in Murray's article," Dr. Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University School of Medicine, said after reviewing the profile. One example, Dr. Stone said, is "the suggestion that as a child Hitler witnessed his mother and father having sex, which in those days was given great weight as a source of psychological turmoil." Such an effect has since been discredited.
Dr. Murray did not have the benefit of genetic studies, or of more carefully distinguished categories of mental illness established later.
"Almost anyone who appeared crazy was called schizophrenic back then," Dr. Stone said, "and people didn't make distinctions between schizophrenia, for example, and manic depression."
In a more recent psychological profile, the neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Fritz Redlich argued in his 1998 book, "Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet," that while troubled and with paranoid tendencies, Hitler had probably not been mentally ill. Even during the war, many historians were very skeptical of efforts to explain, with what they described as armchair psychoanalysis, acts of transcendent cruelty.
Dr. Murray himself was a controversial figure. Having returned to Harvard after the war, he was involved in psychological experiments in 1959-62 in which a stress test similar to one the O.S.S. had used to assess recruits was administered to student volunteers. Among them was the young Theodore J. Kaczynski, a precocious student at Harvard who later became known as the Unabomber. Lawyers for Mr. Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty in 1998 to letter bomb attacks that killed 3 people and wounded 28 others, traced some of his emotional instability and fear of mind control to those tests.
Still, historians say, the spirit of Hitler is alive, and infused with morbid detail, in Dr. Murray's pages. The growing boy, a frustrated romantic who loved painting castles and temples, and who was enthralled with architecture, also developed "a profound admiration, envy and emulation of his father's masculine power and a contempt for his mother's feminine submissiveness and weakness," Dr. Murray wrote.
"Thus," the profile says, "both parents were ambivalent to him: his father was hated and respected; his mother was loved and depreciated. Hitler's conspicuous actions have all been in imitation of his father, not his mother."
The assessment also includes advice for how the Allies should handle Hitler if he was captured (secretly film him, replete with sound track, in his cell so that the world would witness his rantings) and what name to give him when talking to his defeated countrymen (False Prophet or False Messiah at first; Corporal Satan or World Criminal No. 1 later). As for how Hitler's life would play out in the absence of capture, Dr. Murray predicted suicide.
"There is a powerful compulsion in him to sacrifice himself and all of Germany to the revengeful annihilation of Western culture, to die, dragging all of Europe with him into the abyss," Dr. Murray wrote.
Barring a deadly coup or insanity, Dr. Murray speculated, Hitler would arrange to have himself killed by a German or a Jew, to complete the myth of the hero betrayed. Or he would retreat to his bunker and, in dramatic fashion, shoot himself.
In the spring of 1945, as far as historians can determine, that is exactly what he did.
I guess you're saying that I "doth protest too loudly"? LOL
I can understand that some people might assume that. It's also a valid assumption in some cases. Not in my case, solid monogamous hetero, with occasional flings (female, DOH!), between long term girlfriends.
I do protest the homo agenda whenever I can. I see them as a cancer invading our society. As just one example, they've almost destroyed the Catholic church in the US. My Catholic sister-in-law is so fed up with the Catholic priests fiasco, she's semi-jokingly speaks of converting to Judaism.
Maybe it's that I've been overexposed to them, not just during my life in the liberal cities on the east coast, but in overseas DOD schools as a kid.
Maybe I've had to work with, and for, too many of them, and know what kind of twisted depraved beings they are.
Maybe it's that at one point, my primary contact at every one of my clients was a homo (I think that's when I finally lost it}.
Maybe it's that one of my clients was an organization in Boston that was at the heart of the homosexual marriage drive, and my professional ethics prevented me from doing anything about it.
I have my faults, and I'm well aware of them, but megalomania and homosexuality are not among them.
LOL, FR is my psychobabble couch. I'm in the Heart of Darkness, Boston. Where else can I turn? I'd rather converse with FR "peeples" than anyone up here.
I spent the entire Red Sox World Series on FR live threads, rather than going out and having to deal with liberals.
a man with an erection chasing you around
That reminds me of a line from a Dirty Harry movie... nekid man chasing a woman through an alley...
BTW would dsc be a Distinguished Service Cross?
Lost in Translation.
WRONG on point one.
WRONG on point two.
and WRONG! on point three.
Buh Bye DU!
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
"BTW would dsc be a Distinguished Service Cross?"
No, it would be my initials. If I had a Distinguished Service Cross, I would have chosen a different handle.
Come to think of it, if I'd stopped to think it might lead to that confusion, I would have chosen a different handle.
"Most sodomites are bisexuals."
All people are intrinsically heterosexual. It takes a bad case of SSAD to turn a man completely away from women.
"Sorry"
No sweatsky. No offense intended, I'm sure, and none taken.
Its been no secret that the SA was run a bunch of homosexual thugs (Ernst Roehm & Co.) In the end they proved too dangerous and expendable.
"Any OTHER history lessons you want me to present to you?
While not a true homosexual, nothing you wrote would rule out Hitler being bisexual or having gone through a period of exclusive homosexuality during his early adult years in Vienna."
Nothing you have written would rule out Hitler doing it with dogs during his years in Vienna, either - except the complete lack of any evidence.
There was a documentary on the History Channel last night comparing Stalin and Hitler's psychological makeup. It described both as paranoid and abusive of women. My husband had to laugh - that also describes his boss to a T.
Could be. My sources are myriad. I bring it all down from the old thinker when necessary.
I suggest 'Google' as a starting point.
History Channels recent special "High Hitler" is especially illuminating re: Hitler's drug use and possible (likely) health problems.
"Homosexuals were also singled out by Hitler's party for extermination. Perhaps he wanted to destroy everything resembling himself. Homosexuality itself is not destructive (the AIDS thing is a myth). It would be ethical to leave them to their desires."
I nominate this post for Laura Ingraham's 'Lie of the Day'
"One thing I thought was good was that they went into detail on how Hitler got Bismarck to apppoint him Chancellor."
Bismarck died around 1908.
President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany.
You're welcome.
So then you know that homosexuals overall were as much a contributor to the Nazis as they were victims of it.
"So then you know that homosexuals overall were as much a contributor to the Nazis as they were victims of it."
Generalizations are sometimes useful, sometimes not. You paint with too big of a brush. The fact that some of the early NAZIs (Roehm & Co.) were homosexuals is well-documented; to imply that most people with that personality disorder were NAZIs is going a bit too far. Certainly all the homosexuals in the conquered lands who were executed had nothing to do with the NAZI rise.
Overall, it is interesting as to how many top NAZIs had clearly diagnosable psychiatric problems (psychopathy being the most common thread running throughout).
I didn't imply that most people with that disorder were Nazis, I simply noted the impact of homosexuality in facilitating the rise of the regime, which runs at great odds to the victim-only myth that is common today.
"You're welcome."
Already covered. Read the thread.
You're welcome.
There is plenty of evidence that Hitler was a homosexual prostitute in his Vienna phase. Nazi goons did all they could to remove the evidence of that but failed.
Probably because there is no evidence whatsoever that he did.
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