The Two Hitlers

First he poisoned his favorite dog Wolf. Then he took his new wife to his private quarters and sat down on a sofa beside her. Before them was a coffee table on which were a vase of roses, a vial of cyanide and his 7.65 Walther automatic pistol. He did not use the gun. Instead he swallowed the cyanide, and as he struggled for air, his wife shot him in the left temple with her own weapon, a 6.35 Walther. Then she poisoned herself.

According to Williams College Historian Robert G.L. Waite, that is how Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun died in Berlin in 1945. Their bizarre deaths came as no surprise to Psychoanalyst Walter Langer. Two years earlier, he had predicted the German leader's suicide in a secret study prepared at the request of the Office of Strategic Services. Intended as an aid to Allied war planners, the study was classified "secret" and tucked away in the National Archives for years. Now it has been declassified and will be published this week as The Mind of Adolf Hitler (Basic Books; $10). In a postscript to the book, Waite praises Langer's use of psychoanalytic principles to investigate Hitler's psyche. The technique, he says, led not only to predictions of uncanny accuracy but to insights never provided by historians relying on traditional research methods.

Langer, who is now retired and living in Florida, tapped three major sources: he conducted exhaustive interviews with people who had known Hitler; he used "The Hitler sourcebook" (1,100 pages of biographical data compiled by three analytically trained assistants); and he carefully studied Mein Kampf. His conclusion: Hitler was "probably a neurotic psychopath bordering on schizophrenia," or, in simpler terms, the Fuhrer was not insane but was emotionally sick and lacked normal inhibitions against antisocial behavior. A desperately unhappy man, he was beset by fears, doubts, loneliness and guilt, and spent his whole life in an unsuccessful attempt to compensate for feelings of helplessness and inferiority.

Although Hitler tried to portray his early years as serene, Langer postulated from Hitler's character and writings that his father must have been a drunken, menacing brute. (Interviews in the 1950s with neighbors of the Hitler family substantiated this professional hunch, Historian Waite reports.) Because children view the universe in the light of their home experience, Hitler probably saw the whole world as "extremely dangerous, uncertain and unjust." This was the origin of his sense of powerlessness.

Even more devastating to Hitler was a feeling of inferiority that stemmed in part from sexual difficulties. Hitler was tormented by fear of genital injury.* He was uncomfortable with women and often said he would never marry because Germany was his only bride. Though Hitler was "probably impotent," Langer found no reliable evidence of overt homosexuality. "His perversion," Langer wrote, "is an extreme form of masochism in which the individual derives sexual gratification from having women urinate or defecate on him."

One woman claimed to have shared a perverse relationship with Hitler: his niece, Geli Raubal. Their liaison caused much gossip and ended in Geli's mysterious death--perhaps by her own hand, perhaps by Hitler's. At least one other woman admitted to firsthand experience of Hitler's masochism, though in a less extreme form. The actress Rene Mueller told her director that on an evening when she had expected to have intercourse with Hitler, he instead threw himself on the floor, begged her to kick him and became excited when she finally complied. Rene later killed herself. According to Langer, Eva Braun tried twice to take her life before her final successful attempt, and another Hitler intimate, Unity Mitford, also tried suicide. "Rather an unusual record for a man who has had so few affairs with women," Langer wryly observed.

At first Hitler accepted his fate passively. In Vienna before World War I, he could have supported himself modestly by painting watercolors, but he chose to live in poverty, sleep in flophouses, and beg for money on the street. "He seemed to enjoy being dirty and even filthy," Langer said. After the defeat of Germany in World War I, Hitler began to feel it his mission to lead his country to greatness, and he invented a new personality for himself that was strong enough to do it. This "Fuehrer personality," Langer noted, "is a grossly exaggerated and distorted conception of masculinity" and "shows all the earmarks of a reaction formation created unconsciously as a cover-up for deep-lying tendencies that he despises."

Hitler found a second way of freeing himself from these tendencies: he attributed them, along with everything else that he hated and feared, to the Jews. The Jew became a symbol of sex, disease, his perversion--and even the tormenting guilt that perversion caused him. Conscience, he ranted, was "dirty and degrading," "a Jewish invention," and "a blemish like circumcision." For Hitler, Langer wrote, getting rid of Jews means getting rid of his own unconscious inner difficulties.

To Langer, the difference between Hitler and other psychopaths was "his ability to convince others that he is what he is not." He could never quite convince himself, however, because the Fuehrer personality never permanently supplanted his old self. Hitler, Langer said, "is not a single personality but two that inhabit the same body. The one is very soft and sentimental and indecisive. The other is hard, cruel and decisive. The first weeps at the death of a canary; the second cries that 'there will be no peace in the land until a body hangs from every lamppost!' "

That duality led to the horrible excesses that occurred in Nazi Germany's twilight. "As Germany suffers successive defeats, Hitler will become more and more neurotic," Psychoanalyst Langer warned the OSS. "Each defeat will shake his confidence and limit his opportunities for proving his own greatness to himself. He will probably try to compensate for his vulnerability by stressing his brutality and ruthlessness."

Langer's 1943 prediction is a description of what actually happened in 1945, Historian Waite writes. As it became increasingly evident that Hitler could not vanquish the Allies, "he manufactured ruthless 'victories' over the Jews in the gas ovens." At the same time, he vowed to destroy Germany itself. "Not a German stock of wheat is to feed the enemy," cried a Hitler-approved editorial, "not a German hand to offer him help. He is to find nothing but death, annihilation and hatred."

* What Langer could not know when he made his study was that Hitler's genitals were malformed. After an autopsy in 1945, Russian doctors reported that "the left testicle could not be found, either in the scrotum or on the spermatic cord inside the inguinal canal, or in the small pelvis." Such a deformity is not uncommon and has no important physiological consequences, but it causes serious emotional disturbances in some men.

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