Sexuality of Adolf Hitler  

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psychobiography

Despite the Nazi Party's opposition to homosexuality and persecution of homosexuals, some historians have argued that Hitler himself was homosexual or bisexual. Some have argued that he was asexual, whereas others dismiss these claims and believe he was heterosexual. To date no cogent evidence has been found to support either claim.

He met Eva Braun in 1929, a woman he would marry on 29 April 1945, a day before their suicide. He was also engaged to two other women earlier in his life.

History

In 1943, the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) received A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend, written by Walter C. Langer (with assistance from other leading psychoanalysts) for the purpose of helping the Allies understand the dictator, related to strategic purposes (including post-war purposes). It also appears as the mainstay of the fuller work that is available in book form as The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report, in which Langer's Wartime Report is accompanied by a foreword by his brother, historian William L. Langer, an introduction by Langer himself and an afterword by the Hitler psychoanalytic historian Robert G.L. Waite. The researchers performed a "psychological analysis ... in which an attempt is made to understand Hitler as a person and the motivations underlying his actions." The OSS report states that Hitler was an impotent coprophile. The report describes Hitler as having "possibly even a homosexual streak in him," although the researchers concluded that the evidence of Hitler's homosexuality was too thin to make any conclusions. One of Hitler's opponents in the Nazi Party, Otto Strasser, claimed that the Nazi dictator forced his niece Geli Raubal to urinate and defecate on him.

Historian Lothar Machtan argues in The Hidden Hitler that Hitler was homosexual. He argues basically on speculation, including Hitler's experiences in Vienna with young friends, his adult relationships with (among others) Ernst Röhm, Ernst Hanfstaengl and Emil Maurice, and the Mend Protocol, a series of allegations made to the Munich Police in the early 1920s by a former soldier colleague of Hitler. In 2004, HBO produced a documentary film based on Machtan's theory, titled Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler's Sexuality. Mend was a convicted fraudster, and historian Anton Joachimsthaler (TV interview for BBC Two in 2002) is among those who regard the protocol as unreliable. The 2002 book The Pink Swastika, by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams, dealt with similar topics. A line-by-line rebuttal, The Annotated Pink Swastika, outlines in detail numerous factual inconsistencies in Lively and Abrams' book.

Jack Nusan Porter, of the University of Massachusetts Lowell, wrote:

Did Hitler despise homosexuals? Was he ashamed of his own homosexual identity? These are areas of psychohistory that are beyond known knowledge. My own feelings are that Hitler was asexual in the traditional sense and had bizarre sexual fetishes.

Female relationships

There is strong evidence that Adolf Hitler had relationships with a number of women. The most known about are shown below.