Posted on 08/09/2003 7:28:17 PM PDT by chance33_98
Was Hitler homosexual?
In The Hidden Hitler, author Lothar Machtan looks between the sheets for the key to Adolf Hitler. Marius Benson assesses what he finds.
It was a man's world at the top of the Third Reich.
Among Hitler's henchmen there were no henchwomen.
There were wives and secretaries, and there was Eva Braun, the simple and loyal dumpling who became Mrs H in the final hours of the Reich.
But there was no Madam Mao, no Lady Macbeth.
Traditional accounts of Hitler's love life tend to be short. The list of his hatreds is longer and more important.
Before Eva Braun was Geli Raubal, the daughter of Hitler's half sister. In 1928 Hitler asked his half-sister, Angela to be his housekeeper, she agreed and moved in with her 20-year-old daughter.
Over the next three years Geli was often seen with "Unlce Alf" as she called the man who was on his way to being Germany's leader. In 1931, at the age of 23, Geli was found in her uncle's flat, shot dead by his pistol.
But that is another story, not the one Lothar Machtan is pursuing in The Hidden Hitler.
Hitler enjoyed the company of women — he liked playing the gallant gent with elaborate displays of courtesy and good manners.
But women were a sidelight in a life lived mainly with men. In that world there is at times a sense of excitement that seems to have a sexual edge. Albert Speer, the architect who became the closest thing Hitler had to a friend, described a thrill in being with Hitler. The emotion was not expressed physically, but it sounds far from purely mental.
Hitler himself had sometimes foppish mannerisms, limp salutes, precise dress and a theatrical sense in uniforms and parades which provide Machtan with circumstantial evidence of a homosexual sensibility.
But when it comes to actual proof of homosexual activity, the author's case rests largely on one man who was with Hitler in the trenches of World War 1.
Hans Mend was a dispatch rider when Hitler was a runner of messages. In the key account for Machtan, given in 1939, Mend says Hitler was known as Crazy Adolf in the trenches and that he flew into rages, even frothing at the mouth.
Mend also observes, in his 1939 recollections, that Hitler "never looked at women". How many men spent time in the trenches of the western front girl-watching is not made clear.
But then Mend provides the description for Machtan's “smoking revolver”: "In 1915 we were billeted in the Le Febre brewery at Fournes. We slept in the hay. Hitler was bedded down at night with 'Schmidl' [Ernst Schmidt], his male whore. We heard a rustling in the hay. Then someone switched on his flashlight and growled: 'Take a look at those two nancy boys'."
This seems damning, but Mend is not the most reliable of witnesses. He was a petty criminal who, as Hitler's fame grew, made a small living trading on memories of his old comrade in arms.
His accounts were tailored to audiences and times. His early recollections were of a brave Hitler in the trenches, with no mention of rustling in the hay. His account of the hayride with Schmidt was given in 1939 to opponents of Hitler.
Mend might have been telling the truth, but there are equally good grounds for thinking he was not.
Regardless, Machtan, having established to his own satisfaction the case for Hitler's homosexuality, then bounds off to explain this as the motivation behind key actions.
In 1934 Ernst Rohm, the head of the Nazi SA — and a known homosexual — was executed along with many supporters, by Hitler loyalists. This purge, the Night of the Long Knives, is a key moment in Hitler's ensuring his supremacy in the Party and it is analysed in all substantial histories of the time.
Until now, it has been seen as a murderous power play. Machtan sees it differently — his Hitler is motivated by a desire to silence Rohm as a man who could have revealed the Fuehrer's sexual orientation.
The case here, as throughout Machtan's treatise, starts from a wobbly premise (Hitler was gay, see evidence above) then proceeds by way of inference, assumption and guesswork to its tendentious conclusion.
It is a pattern repeated throughout The Hidden Hitler, which at times provides a titillating read, but reveals no new truth about a man who is still only partly known, even after 120,000 books.
OTOH, the mustache, the tight leather, etc. are all pretty damning.
Everyone is gay nowadays from some of the stuff I have seen, and if you say you're not you're repressing yourself. Or something like that ;) Now I have to run and redecorate my room.....
True.
Abe Lincoln, The Apostle Paul, now Hitler.
Reaching into the bottom of the barrel for this one
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