Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

5. HITLER HAVING A BALL

Adolf Hitler was the most evil man of modern times; but, although he has been dead for over fifty years, he still has a growing band of followers across Europe, America, Russia, India, Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Far East. Racists, anti-Semites, religious fundamentalists, authoritarians and just plain nutcases are mesmerized by his demagoguery, his totalitarian vision and his simple, bloodthirsty solution to any political problem. But if his followers knew about his pitiful, pathetic, perverted sex life, they would find it hard to hold him in such awe. It is difficult to have any respect for a man who likes to cower naked on the floor while being kicked by a woman or gets the ultimate sexual satisfaction from being urinated or defecated upon. Several of his lovers committed suicide, they were so appalled at his depravity.

There is no doubt that Hitler was a very strange man. That was plain long before he came to power. His ranting, hypnotic speeches often excited women to orgasm. A man who worked as a cleaner in Munich said that they would sometimes lose control of their bladders too and the whole of the front row would have be to sponged dry. Hitler would have loved that.

Homosexual men were convinced that Hitler was a homosexual too. Almost all of his bodyguards were homosexual. So were many of the inner circle of the Nazi Party. Reichsmarschall Herman Goring was a transvestite. Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess was known as “Fraulcin Anna” and Ernst Rohm, the homosexual head of the Nazi storm troopers and Hitler’s long-time friend, said: “He is one of us.”

Soon after the Night of the Long Knives, when Rohm and his friends were killed, there were mass arrests of homosexuals in Germany. The following year, the law was revised to make it illegal for a man even “to touch another man in a suggestive way”. Homosexuals were given pink stars to wear and sent to the concentration camps. It is estimated that over half a million homosexuals died during Hitler’s Reich. What was he trying to prove?

Early newsreels show that his gestures and walk were very effeminate — until Leni Riefenstahl, the great film actress, film-maker and possible lover of Hitler, began shooting him from a low camera angle to emphasize his power and encourage his mythic status. American generals would joke that he would never have gotten through West Point with his camp little mincing walk.

Another characteristic was his habit of clasping his hands protectively in front of his genitals. This prompted the joke that he was “hiding the last unemployed member of the Third Reich”.

When war broke out, the Allies needed to know what made the Nazi dictator tick. If they could get inside the mind of the man, perhaps they would be able to predict what he was going to do next. In America, General William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the OSS — the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA put Boston psychologist Dr Walter C. Langer on the case. Assisted by Dr Gertrud Kurth, a refugee from Hitler’s persecution, and Professor Henry A. Murray of the Harvard Psychological Clinic, he collected all the material he could from published sources and interviewed as many people as he could lied who had known Hitler personally. Langer and his team made a particular effort to understand Hitler’s sex life. In the psychoanalytical theories that were fashionable at that time, this was thought to be crucial.

Although Langer’s report was sent to propaganda departments, it was not itself a tool of propaganda. Langer tried, as objectively as possible, to distil everything that was known about Hitler and his sexual proclivities. General Donovan expressed his satisfaction with the report. It was circulated widely. British foreign secretary Lord Halifax personally congratulated Langer; and it was read by Churchill and Roosevelt with evident satisfaction.

Given his psycho-analytic background, Langer, naturally, traced the roots of Hitler’s behaviour back to his childhood. Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was an Austrian customs official on the German border, a good-looking man and an insatiable womanizer. He was the illegitimate son of Anna Maria Schicklgruber, a housemaid who had worked in the home of a wealthy Jew named Frankenberger. Frankenberger was probably Alois’s father. Later, Anna Maria married Johann Georg Heidler, whose name could be spelt in a number of ways, including the way Alois chose to spell it — Hitler. But Alois Schicklgruber did not change his name to Hitler until the age of forty, long after his step-father was dead and only then because he thought it would help his career in the customs service.

Hitler’s mother, Klara Polzl, first came to work for her uncle, Alois Hitler, when she was sixteen and, by all accounts, very beautiful. She was nanny to Therese, Alois’s illegitimate daughter by a former lover in Vienna. A relative of Johann I Heidler, she was not a blood relative of Alois’s.

Alois lived in a tavern in Linz and Klara had been warned about his drunken, womanizing ways. He was married to Anna Glassl, fourteen years his senior. She had brought with her a considerable dowry, which Alois soon squandered while satisfying his sexual lust with a serving maid, seventeen-year-old Franziska “Fanni” Matzelberger.

Klara’s supple young body scarcely escaped the attention of the lecherous Alois, and soon the atmosphere became so heated that Anna could stand no more and she fled.

With Anna out of the way, Alois’s young lover Fanni took her place. She was clever enough to spot that Klara could, in turn, step into her former place as Alois’s mistress. So she refused to go on living with Alois unless he sent Klara away.

Fanni and Alois married. They had two children, Alois Junior and Angela, but soon after the birth of Angela, Fanni became ill and Alois sent for Klara to nurse her on her deathbed. When Fanni finally succumbed, Alois consoled himself with Klara. At the same time, he was having an incestuous affair with his daughter Therese, who had an illegitimate son by him. Klara, too, became pregnant.

Alois and Klara married. Their first son, Gustav, was born a few days after the ceremony, but died within a few days. Klara lost two more children in a diphtheria epidemic. Then on the morning of 7 January, 1885, she had a son, Adolf, who survived.

Having lost three children already, Klara lavished all her love on Adolf” . She continued breast-feeding him long after the age when he should have been weaned.

The morbid bond between mother and son was further strengthened by the death of another child, Adolf’s brother Edmund, at the age of six. Mara’s sixth and final child, Paula, survived but was feeble-minded. Hitler, alone of Mara’s six children, was sound. Her love for all of them was focused on him. He described himself throughout his life as a “mother’s boy”, even writing about his mother in his political treatise, Mein Kampf.

The cloying love between Klara and her only sound child left little room for Alois. A promotion meant that he was away from home a lot, but when he returned he expected sex from her. Once when Klara would not oblige him, he went to visit his former lover in Vienna, Therese’s mother. But she was in the advanced stages of pregnancy and could not help him out. Alois returned to Linz full of sexual craving and, on a hot August night, he brutally raped Klara in front of her son who was, at the time, too young to go to her assistance.

For the first seventeen years of his life, the young Hitler witnessed the total sexual subjugation of his beloved mother by his brutal and drunken father, until January 1903, when Alois collapsed and died. It was a relief to all concerned. His epitaph read: “The sharp word that fell occasionally from his lips could not belie the warm heart that beat beneath the rough exterior.”

That epitaph certainly belied Hitler’s feeling for him. After the Anschluss, which unified Austria with Germany, the cemetery where Alois was buried became part of an artillery firing range, destroying his grave for ever.

With Alois dead, mother and son were alone together, but not for long. Four years later, Klara Hitler contracted breast cancer. The doctor who treated her, Eduard Bloch, was Jewish. I Hitler was also one of his patients, having caught syphilis in Vienna.

Despite the fact that his mother had already had one breast removed and was plainly dying of cancer, Hitler had decided to enroll at the General School of Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. As the capital of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna was a cesspit of vice. Its infamous red-light district was Spittelberggasse, where girls sat seminaked behind lace curtains.

Due to the virulent anti-semitism of the time, many young Jewish girls were forced to eke out a living there, where sexual diseases were almost unavoidable. Prostitutes with syphilis had to work all the harder to pay the increasingly extortionate bribes for a medical certificate, and eager young men paid little attention to the risks.

After many visits to the Spittelberggasse, Hitler had already contracted syphilis — then an incurable disease when he was summoned back to Linz, where his mother was dying in great pain. At Hitler’s insistence, Dr Bloch administered iodoform, which very occasionally, and for reasons then unknown to medical science, halted the growth of tumours. Hitler insisted: “My mother must be treated by all possible means. A poison must be used to kill a worse poison.”

In Klara’s case, iodoform had no effect on the cancer. It simply produced hallucinations and increased her pain and she finally died in agony. Hitler was devastated by the loss.

Around this time, Hitler had a strange fantasy love affair. One evening he was walking down the main street of Linz with his friend Gustl Kubizek, when he pointed out a beautiful young woman earned Stefanie Jantsen. Hitler said that he was in love with her. Although he never spoke to her, this infatuation lasted for four years. Somehow Hitler imagined he was going to marry her and have children. For him, she was the very ideal of German womanhood. He wrote poetry dedicated to Stefanie and once, when he imagined she was angry with him for some reason, he threatened to kill himself. When Kubizek enquired further, he discovered that Hitler had devised an entire fantasy suicide plot. Every aspect had been planned in detail, including the fact that Kubizek should witness the event.

When Kubizek related the tale later, he insinuated that Hitler made up the fantasy as an aid to masturbation. For much of the time when this “affair” went on, Stefanie does not even seem to have been in Linz.

Returning to Vienna, Hitler would lecture friends about the dangers of prostitution. He took Kubizek, now his room-mate, to the Spittelberggasse to see for himself “what imbeciles men become in the grip of their lowest desires”. They walked the entire length of the quarter and back again, while Hitler ranted about the evils of prostitution and the foolishness of men who succumb. Kubizek sensed that Hitler derived some voyeuristic pleasure from their visit.

In the chronology of Hitler’s life, there is a year during the period when he lived in Vienna that is unaccounted for. It is thought that he may have been undergoing some form of hospital treatment, possibly for syphilis. If he was, it was unsuccessful. During that entire period in Vicuna, he seems to have had no female company.

“For two years,” lie wrote, “my only girlfriends were Sorrow and Need, and I had acs other companions except constant unsatisfied hunger. I never learned to know the beautiful word ‘youth’.”

This is not surprising, given the description of him at the time. He wore the Bavarian mountain costume of leather shorts, which showed off his short, spindly legs, a white shirt and braces. His hips were wide, his shoulders narrow and chest so puny that, later, he had to have his uniforms padded. His muscles were flabby. His clothes were none too clean, his fingernails dirty and he had a mouth full of rotten, brown teeth.

There were stories that Hitler had several homosexual liaisons during this period. They may have been put about later by political enemies but one, in particular, stands out. During World War I, Hitler was brave and fanatically patriotic. He received two Iron Crosses for courage, but was never promoted beyond the rank of lance-corporal. The widely circulated story was that Hitler was kept in the ranks because he had been court-martialed on a charge of indecency which implicated a senior officer. When he came to power, the story was suppressed by the Gestapo, who destroyed his military records. Comrades in the trenches also noted that Hitler “was a peculiar fellow — he never asked for leave; he did not have even a combat soldier’s interest in women; and he never grumbled, as did the bravest of men, about the filth, the lice, the mud, the stench of the front line”.

During World War I, Hitler was gassed by the British. While he recuperated in a crowded ward in a hospital in Pasewalk in northern Germany, he suffered blindness and hallucinations. The doctor who treated him, Edmund Forster, believed oral these symptoms were brought on by a psychopathic: hysteria. This may have been related to his syphilis, which would now have been well into its secondary phase.

Again, when Hitler came to power, Forster’s records were located and suppressed by the Gestapo. Forster, by then a professor, was forced to resign. Living in constant fear of being hauled off by the Gestapo, he eventually shot himself. Gestapo head Heinrich Himmler would have seen those files and he confirmed that Hitler had syphilis.

After World War I, Hitler settled in Munich, a recognized centre of venereology. During his early days there, Hitler’s main sexual outlet was solitary. According to friends, the bookshelves of his room were stuffed with pornography, including well-thumbed volumes of the History of Erotic Art and An Illustrated History of Morals. He continued his interest in art and would go to life classes to ogle the nude models.

But Hitler was not without sexual attraction and he rose to power thanks partly to the women of Germany. The first to take him up was Helene Bechstein. She and her husband were immensely wealthy. They supported his fledgling Nazi Party financially and introduced him to their wealthy friends, whose wives encouraged their husbands to contribute too.

Hitler was an unlikely sex symbol. Though he now hid his spindly legs under a blue suit, it was shabby to say the least. He had a facial tic that caused the corner of his lip to curl upwards. When he walked, he would cock his right shoulder every few steps. At the same time, his left leg would snap up. Those who got close to him, talked of his terrible: holy odour. Throughout his life, he suffered from chronic flatulence. He dosed himself with anti-gas pills and gave up eating meat in an attempt to minimize the smell.

Hitler made an odd dinner guest. He ate little and drank nothing — he had got drunk once in his teens and had promised his mother he would be a teetotaller. But once the conversation turned to politics, he would grow excited and flushed. Making wild gestures, he would brook no interruption, his shrill voice swelling higher and higher as if in verbal orgasm. Older women, particularly, were quickly won over and would donate their jewels on the spot. At public meetings, middle-aged women would get so agitated they would have to be given medical attention. On one occasion, a woman bent down, picked up a handful of gravel that he had trodden on and tried to swallow it. To women like these, Hitler was a god. They handed over their money and many claimed to have gone to bed with him, though it is unlikely that he would have risked giving any of his backers syphilis.

While Hitler knew how to woo women his mother’s age, he was less successful with younger women. In Munich, Hitler used to go chasing girls with his first chauffeur, Emil Maurice, who was half Jewish. Although Maurice was much more successful than him, Hitler adopted the alias “Herr Wolf. The sexually predatory wolf is an image that is repeated in Hitler’s fantasy life. He even persuaded his weak-minded sister Paula to change her name to Wolf when he came to power, as she failed to live up to his Aryan ideals.

Hitler described Helene Bechstein as the greatest lady in Germany, but she thought of him more as a son than a lover. After his failed putsch in 1923, it was Helene who persuaded Hitler to end his jail-cell hunger strike; and she urged him to continue the fight when he said all was lost.

When he was released, he threw himself at her feet. Acutely embarrassed, she begged him to get up.

“It would have been awful if somebody had come in, humiliating for him,” she said.

Helene did not want him for herself. She was grooming her daughter, Lotte, to be his bride. But Hitler had no intention of getting married to her, he said. He was already wedded to Germany.

Hitler also flirted with English-born Winifred Wagner, the widowed daughter-in-law of the composer Richard Wagner. She organized the Wagner festivals at Bayreuth. Hitler’s whole Nazi ethos was shot through with Wagnerian myth and he suggested, not entirely in jest, that she was his rightful bride.

Many of the women who were besotted by Hitler found openly supporting such a dangerous organization as the Nazi Party difficult. So they made their contributions direct to Hitler himself. These gifts became the foundation of his personal wealth. He bought a country home in Berchtesgaden. There he met Elisabeth Buchner, the wife of a racing driver who ran a local hotel. She was tall and Hitler saw her as his Brunhilde. She made him so excited that he would march up and down, striking his thigh with his rhinoceros-hide whip.

Although he seems to have been circumspect about women at this time, Hitler was particularly attracted to girls who were young, naive and easily influenced. He met it girl named Mitzi Reiter while out walking his dog in Berchtesgaden. She was more than twenty years his junior. He took her to a concert — their next date was a Nazi rally.

At first, the affair was innocent enough. Hitler would go for walks in the park with her and bombard her with flattery. He idolized her, he said. Then he suddenly grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her.

“I want to crush you,” he said.

At one time, they considered finding an apartment and living together in Munich. A year later, Mitzi attempted suicide. She tried to throttle herself with a clothesline, but was found by her brother who resuscitated her. She was clearly terrified of Hitler. Once, she said, he had whipped his dog so savagely that she was “overwhelmed by his brutality”.

Another lover, Susi Liptauer, hanged herself after an overnight engagement with the Fuhrer.

Next, Hitler had an affair with his own niece, Geli Raubal. Hitler’s widowed half-sister Angela came to Munich to keep house for him in 1927 and brought her twenty-year-old daughter Geli with her. She was fairhaired and well developed.

When she first moved into the Brown House, Hitler’s headquarters on Brienner Strasse, Geli could barely disguise her admiration for her “big, famous uncle”. He promptly appointed himself her guardian and protector and moved her into a room next to his. But things became difficult.

Geli was bored by politics and wanted to go out dancing. Hitler forbade her the company of people her own age and once, when he met her in the street with a fellow student, he threatened to beat her with the whip he carried. He constantly gave her ranting lectures, in hideously graphic detail, on the dangers of sexual intercourse.

Otto Strasser, younger brother of” Gregor Strasser, one of the leading figures in Hitler’s Munich “Beer Hall” putsch of 1923, arranged to take her out to a masked ball. While Otto was dressing, his brother burst into the room with the news that Hitler had forbidden him to go out with Geli.

The phone rang. It was Hitler himself.

“I understand that you are going out with Geli this evening,” Hitler bellowed. “I won’t allow her to go out with a married man. I’m not going to have any of your filthy Berlin tricks here in Munich.”

Later, when Otto saw Geli, he said she had the look of a hunted beast.

“He locked me up,” she sobbed. “He locks me up every time I say no.”

During another jealous tantrum, Hitler accused Geli of being a whore and forced his half-sister to take her to the gynaecologist. He strutted up and down outside the doctor’s surgery while Geli was examined. When it was found that she was, indeed, still a virgin, Hitler bought her an expensive ring; but he still locked her in her room at night.

By this time, Angela was becoming concerned about Hitler’s intentions towards her daughter. She asked him to promise that he would not seduce her. Hitler replied that he was not the problem. Geli was a cunning hussy and, the gynaecological tests notwithstanding, a demi-vierge.

Otto Strasser, who escaped to Canada after his brother was purged in the Night of the Long Knives, learned the full depravity of the affair between Geli and Hitler, that had left her virgo-inlacta but no longer innocent.

“Hitler made her undress,” he told Dr Langer’s interviewer. “He would then lie on the floor. She would have to squat over his face where he could examine her at close quarters and this made him very excited.” It was of the utmost importance to Hitler that Geli squat over him in just such a way that he could see everything. “When the excitement reached its peak, he demanded that she urinate on him and that gave him his sexual pleasure. Geli said the whole performance was extremely disgusting to her and it gave her no gratification.”

Strasser had heard such things before, from Henriette Hoffman, the daughter of Hitler’s official photographer, but he had dismissed them as hysterical ravings.

The chambermaids who had to clean up Geli’s bedroom also complained of the “very strange and unspeakable” things that had been going on there.

Geli also told a girlfriend that Hitler was “a monster… you would never believe the things he makes me do”. Others did. They saw the evidence with their own eyes. In 1929, a portfolio of pornographic sketches Hitler had made of Geli fell into the hands of the landlady’s son, Dr Randolf. They showed her in every sort of indecent and obscene pose and outlined in detail the depth of his coprophiliac cravings.

Father Stempfle, a rabid anti-Semite, had organized for Hitler to buy them back via a collector of political memorabilia named Rehse. However, Rehse doublecrossed Stempfle and upped the price when the Party Treasurer, Franz Xavier Schwartz, went to collect the portfolio. Stempfle was another of those who perished in the Night of the Long Knives. Schwartz was told not to destroy the drawings, but to return them to Hitler at Nazi headquarters.

While Geli was locked up at night, Hitler claimed the right to visit other lovers. He spent time at the studios of official photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, which was a meeting place for homosexuals of both sexes. Hoffmann made erotic films which Hitler watched there while taking an unhealthy interest in Hoffmann’s daughter Henriette, who was then sixteen. He later encouraged her to marry Baldur von Schirach, the reputedly homosexual leader of the Hitler Youth and Gauleiter of Vienna.

Hitler still spent time with the Wagners. Winifred became so fanatically attached to him that she threatened her own daughter with extermination when, sickened by what was happening to the Jews, she fled to Switzerland.

Emil Maurice took advantage of Hitler’s absences and started seeing Geli. When Hitler caught them together, Emil was sacked on the spot and Hitler cursed him as a “filthy Jew”.

In 1931, Geli was determined to leave Hitler and move to Vienna were she could study music. Angela was also determined to get her daughter out of Uncle Adolf’s grasp. The situation was urgent; Geli was pregnant. The child may have been Emil Maurice’s, though she had also slept with the young Nazi assigned to guard her. Reports that the baby may have been Hitler’s have been discounted. One of his last letters to her includes pornographic images indicating that he was impotent. Worse — Hitler’s nephew, his half-brother Alois’s son, Patrick Hitler, suggested that the father was “a young Jewish art teacher in Linz”.

One night that autumn, Geli and Hitler had a terrible row. She insisted that she was leaving him and going to Vienna. He forbade it. Hitler was due in Hamburg and a car was waiting downstairs for him. She called down to him from the window, begging one more time to be allowed to leave for Vienna. He refused and gave orders that she was to see no one until he returned. The next morning she was found dead.

The coroner’s report said that the cause of death was a bullet which had entered below the chest and penetrated the heart vertically. Geli Raubal was just twenty-three.

A number of other stories circulated at the time. One was that Himmler had murdered Geli on Hitler’s orders; another, that Hitler himself had pulled the trigger during a violent struggle with Geli over a gun. It was said that they had a “major row over breakfast” when Geli told Hitler that she was engaged to be married to a man in Austria in order to escape his domination.

Otto Strasser said that Hitler had shot Geli during a quarrel. His brother Gregor had to spend three days and nights with Hitler after her death, in case he committed suicide. Preempting the inquest, the Nazi Party issued a communique saying that Hitler had gone into deep mourning following the “suicide” of his niece. According to Strasser, the public prosecutor wanted to charge Hitler with murder, but the Bavarian Minister of Justice, Wilhelm Gurtner, quashed the case and a verdict of suicide was recorded. Giirtner went on to become Reich Minister of justice and the hapless prosecutor fled Germany when Hitler came to power.

However Geli died, the Nazis went to considerable lengths to hush things up. Her body was taken down the backstairs of the flats and sealed in a lead coffin in a Munich mortuary.

Then it was smuggled out of the country. Himmler and Rohm attended the funeral. Hitler remained in Munich, prostrate with grief, though he managed to issue a libel writ against the Munchener Post which had dared to suggest that Geli’s body had a broken nose and other injuries sustained in a struggle.

A journalist named Gerlich investigated Geli’s death and was murdered for his pains. Gregor Strasser’s lawyer, Voss, who kept Strasser’s private papers, was murdered too. Strasser himself was murdered by Hitler’s henchmen in 1934.

Despite officially having committed suicide, Geli was given a full Catholic burial in a church cemetery back in her native Austria. Hitler was not allowed to enter Austria without government permission, but he was allowed to visit Geli’s grave provided he did not engage in any political activities. Hitler’s headquarters in Munich gave Austrian Nazis instructions to ignore his visit. He crossed the border late at night. The cemetery had to be specially opened for him. He walked alone around the grave for some time, and returned to Germany before dawn.

Later he commissioned a life-sized bust of Geli from a photograph. When he was presented with it, he wept. The bust was kept surrounded by flowers and, every year on the anniversary of Geli’s death, he would shut himself away with it for hours.

Soon after Hitler came to power, he invited the beautiful German film star nineteen-year-old Renate Muller to visit him in the Chancellory. He began the evening with gloatingly detailed descriptions of how his Gestapo men wrung confessions from their victims. He boasted that his men were far more brutal and effective than the worst of the medieval torturers.

Even though this sickened her, Renate had resigned herself to the fact that she was expected to go to bed with the Reichschancellor. They went into the bedroom and undressed.

Then Hitler threw himself on the floor at her feet and begged her to kick him. “I am filthy and unclean,” he yelled. “Beat me! Beat me!”

Renate was horrified. She had never seen such a thing. She pleaded with him to get up, but he just lay there grovelling and moaning. So eventually she had to kick and punish him. The harder she kicked him, the more excited he got. Renate was utterly revolted by this display; but in conversation with film director Alfred Zeisler, she said that this was not even the worst of it. There was something even more unspeakable that she could not bring herself to talk about.

Soon after, Renate Muller jumped to her death out of the window of her hotel in Berlin — though there is some speculation that she may have been pushed out on Gestapo orders after being secretly charged with having a Jewish lover.

Hitler, it seems, had quite a passion for film actresses. Linda Basquette, an American star of the silent movies, claimed to have received a fan letter from him, inviting her to Berchtesgaden. There, he made a vigorous pass at her.

“The man repelled me so much,” she said. “He had terrible body odour. He was flatulent. But he had strange penetrating eyes.”

Basquette claims that she had to kick the Fuhrer in the groin to dampen his ardour, but this only inflamed him more. To escape his attentions, she claimed that she was part Jewish.

Linda Basquette went on to marry nine times, once to Sam Warner of Warner Brothers. She died in 1994 at the age of 87.

Meanwhile, back at the Reichs chancellery, the party went on. Champagne was consumed by the gallon and fabulous sums were paid to singers and dancers. The Reichsministers indulged their every whim. Josef Goebbels, one of the few heterosexuals among the Nazi elite, was so promiscuous, especially with film actresses employed by his Ministry of Propaganda, that his longsuffering wife Magda told Hitler she was going to divorce him. Hitler pointed out that divorce was impossible. There was not a lawyer in Germany who would handle her case. Magda seems to have tried to get her own back on her husband by attempting to seduce Hitler. She was a considerable beauty, but reported later that the Fuhrer was impotent.

Hitler conceived a short-lived passion for Margaret Slezak, but she was an independent minded woman. When she would not bend to his will, he banned her from his inner circle.

There was little doubt that Hitler could have his pick of women. One night, Austrian movie-maker Luis Trenker accompanied actress Louise Ulrich to the Chancellory, where the Fuhrer was “telling stories”. They found him in a room full of dazzling women in evening gowns. His mere presence, it. was said, set the decolletages atremble. One woman, the wife of the director of the Nuremberg opera, was half-kneeling, half-lying at his feet in a pose of abject surrender, while Hitler ranted about the need for more tanks, more guns and more bombs.

One of the strangest worshippers at the feet of Hitler was Unity Mitford. The fifth daughter of Lord Redesdale, she came from a distinguished family. Her sister Jessica was a communist, who had a controversial career in journalism in America; Deborah was Duchess of Devonshire; Nancy Mitford became a distinguished novelist; and Diana married Sir Oswald Mosley, blackshirted leader of the British Union of Fascists. Unity thought she could go one better and marry the Fuhrer himself.

It was Diana who introduced Unity to Hitler during a ten-day holiday to Germany in 1935. Unity was immediately besotted. She began to stalk Hitler like a hunter, bleaching her hair blonde to make herself look more Nordic and wearing the swastika pin he had given her prominently on her lapel. Her parents plainly approved. Lord and Lady Redesdale visited Berlin as special guests of the Fuhrer. This caused a split in the family, with Diana and Unity fanatically pro-Hitler and Jessica and Nancy violently against.

It is not known how seriously Hitler took Unity, or whether their affair was consummated — in Hitler’s strange way or in any other. However, Hitler did make it a practice to take young innocent girls, like Unity, and manipulate them into fulfilling his desires. He certainly found solace in her company, which seems to have relieved his deepest tensions. But those around Hitler found Unity a bit of a joke. Goebbels and Streicher called her Unity “Mit-fart”.

With articles like “I am a Jew-hater” and other pieces of Nazi propaganda that she published, Unity burnt her bridges back in England. The day war was declared, she sat in the English gardens in Munich and shot herself in the head. She did not die immediately. She was taken to Switzerland, then back to Britain. Her mother, Lady Redesdale, nursed her on a remote Scottish island until she died in 1948.

Leni Riefenstahl — who so brilliantly portrayed the puny, effeminate Adolf Hitler as the mythic personification of the Aryan master race in the movies Triumph of Will and Olympia, the official film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics — claimed after the war that she had never been Hitler’s lover, but many people who were around at the time thought she was.

They met when Riefenstahl was a film star rather than a film-maker. Goebbels introduced them. He thought that a marriage between Hitler and Riefenstahl, the athletic heroine of a series of mountaineering movies, would be a propaganda triumph. Herman Goring once remarked: “She’s the crevasse of the Reich” — much to Hitler’s displeasure.

Nazi spin doctor Putzi Hanfstaengl, who was present at their first meeting, recalled that Hitler looked awkward and isolated, as if in a panic. Hanfstaengl played the piano while Riefenstahl danced provocatively to the music. She was out to get her man. So Goebbels and Hanfstaengl made their excuses and left.

Riefenstahl had had numerous lovers, including the boxer Max Schmeling, movie producer Ernst Lubitsch and World War I flying ace Ernst Udet. Hanfstaengl believed that if Riefenstahl could not seduce Hitler, no one could.

But apparently, that time at least, Hitler resisted her charms. When Hanfstaengl met Riefenstahl on board a plane a few days later, he asked how it had gone. Riefenstahl’s reply was a disappointed little shrug. However, she was not to be put off so easily. Hanfstaengl told Luis Trenker that one morning, about 2 a.m., he and Hitler had gone to Riefenstahl’s flat for coffee, when she performed one of her legendary nude dances. Hanfstaengl complained: “She kept on shaking her navel in front of my nose.”

Riefenstahl, who had all her property confiscated because of her Nazi connections after the war, denies this ever happened. But Luis Trenker thinks it did and that it did the trick. During the filming of S.O.S. Iceberg! for Universal Pictures, Riefenstahl was supposed to catch a boat in Hamburg to sail to the Balearic Islands for some location shooting. The whole crew was waiting on the dockside, but there was no sign of her. She had been missing for several days and no one knew where she was. Then the producers got a telephone call. The Fuhrer’s plane had just landed in Hamburg. Riefenstahl was on board. She had been a guest at Hitler’s country house near Nuremberg.

When Riefenstahl turned up, she was carrying a huge bunch of flowers. “Her eyes seemed to gaze into the distance,” Luis Trenker said. “Her whole being was transformed. She wanted everyone to know that she had just been through a wonderful experience.”

Riefenstahl went to great lengths to please Hitler. She stopped using make-up because the Fuhrer disapproved. Parisian lipstick, he believed, was made from pig’s urine and he maintained that pure Aryan womanhood needed no cosmetics to improve its beauty.

But the affair did not mature as Goebbels had hoped. The following year, she confided to Jewish reporter Bella Fromm that Hitler “asks me to dinner a couple of times a week, but always sends me away at quarter to eleven, because he is tired”. However, Hitler continued to take an interest in her. He warned her to be careful when she was filming another climbing movie in the Dolomites. She was needed to make Nazi propaganda films, he said. She proved to be the master of the medium. Although she was only shooting a newsreel, her film of the 1936 Berlin Olympics made it look like a triumph of Hitler’s Aryan supermen. Against the demands of Goebbels and other top Nazis, Hitler allowed her to leave in the scenes where the great black American athlete Jesse Owens trounces the best Germany can offer. But the climax of the film is when Hitler greets German javelin thrower Tillie Fleischer, who won two gold medals — surely convincing proof of Nordic superiority.

Hitler was genuinely taken with his vision of Nordic beauty. According to an FBI report, he went to bed with Danish beauty queen Ingrid Arvad, who fled Europe before the war. In America, she became the lover of a young Naval Intelligence officer called John F. Kennedy, who went on to become President of the United States. Lyndon Johnson found out about it and used the information to get himself onto the 1960 Democratic ticket.

In 1938, whet Mussolini visited Munich, Riefenstahl was the only person Hitler personally introduced to Il Duce. The Reich’s Ministry of Propaganda was hers to command.

After the personal intervention of the Fuhrer, she was allowed to film the Polish campaign including, by accident, several Nazi atrocities. At the front, she wore a field grey uniform, like Hitler.

In gratitude for her propaganda films, Hitler gave Riefenstahl a Mercedes and had a villa built for her with a film studio in the garden. During the war, Hitler added a bombproof shelter so that her “immortal pictures” would survive the onslaught; but when the Americans marched into Kitzbuhel, they found her burning the negatives.

After the war, Riefenstahl denied everything, especially her Salome act in front of Hitler and Hanfstaengl. She told American reporter Budd Schulberg: “I wasn’t his type. I’m too strong, too positive. He liked soft, cowlike women like Eva Braun.”

Hitler met Eva Braun in 1929. She was a laboratory assistant in Heinrich Hoffmann’s photographic studio. Hitler was immediately impressed by her pretty ankles and legs. Convent-educated Eva was just seventeen. She was innocent, had few interests, no ambitions and was easily moulded.

Hitler was twenty-three years her senior. From the beginning he kept a very close rein on her. One night at Hoffmann’s, not knowing who she was, Luis Trenker danced with her. He was told that he would be shot for trying to steal the Fuhrer’s mistress. Later, when they met again, Eva found a way to speak to him privately. She warned him never to mention the evening they danced. Becoming quite hysterical, she said, with unintentional irony: “You don’t know what a terrible tyrant he can be.”

Hitler and Eva Braun first became lovers in the spring of 1932, shortly after Geli Raubal died. Eva’s diaries show that she adored Hitler, but at the same time she was tormented by him. She does not go into the details of their sexual relations, only saying obscurely: “He needs me for special reasons. It can’t be otherwise.”

Whatever they got up to, it did not make her happy. On 1 November, 1932, she made the first of several suicide attempts. Shortly after midnight, she shot herself through the neck with her father’s service revolver, narrowly missing an artery. She managed to call a doctor, who informed Hitler that she had tried to shoot herself in the heart, but missed and that he had saved her just in time. Hitler immediately crowed to Hoffmann that Eva had tried to kill herself for the love of him.

“Now I must look after her,” he said. “It must not happen again.”

It did.

After this first suicide attempt, Eva became the exclusive property of Hitler. It made her even more unhappy. On 6 February, 1935, her birthday, she wrote that she had just happily reached the age of twenty three”. Then she ponders whether this “is really a cause for happiness… At the moment I am very far from feeling that way”. All she craved was a little dog to make her less lonely.

That evening she dined with her friend Herta and despaired that she ended her birthday “guzzling and boozing”. It was not until five days later that Hitler turned up unexpectedly. She recorded that they had a delightful evening, but he did not bring her the puppy she wanted and there were no cupboards stuffed with pretty dresses.

“He didn’t even ask if I wanted anything for my birthday,” she wrote. Nevertheless, she basked in the attention. “I am infinitely happy that he loves me so much and I pray that it may always remain so. I never want it to be my fault if one day he should cease to love me.”

But by 4 March, less than a month later, she wrote in her diary: “I am mortally unhappy again and since I haven’t permission to write to Him” — like most German women at the time she capitalized the pronoun, putting him on a par with God and Christ — “this book must record my lamentations.”

She knew that he had been in Munich all that Sunday, but he had not visited her. Nor had he returned the phone calls she had made to the Osteria Bavaria, where he dined. She waited in all day “like a cat on hot bricks. I imagined every moment that he was about to arrive.” When she decided to do something about it, it was too late. She dashed to the station, only to see the tail-lights of his train as it pulled out. That evening, she turned down an invitation to go out and spent the evening alone in her apartment trying to figure out why he was angry with her.

A week later she still had not heard from him. She longed to fall ill so that he might feel guilty for neglecting her.

“Why do I have to bear all this?” she lamented. “If only I had never met him.”

She began taking sleeping tablets so that she did not have to think about her plight. From this time on, she became addicted.

“Why doesn’t the devil carry me off?” she wrote. “Hell must be infinitely preferable; to this… Why doesn’t he stop tormenting me.”

Things got worse. Heinrich Hoffmann told her that Hitler had found a replacement for her. “She is known as the Walkure and looks the part, including the legs. But these are the dimensions he prefers,” Eva wrote.

This could have been either Winifred Wagner, whose father-in-law wrote “The Ride of the Valkyrie”, or Unity Mitford, whose middle name was Valkyrie. Both were tall, full-breasted women, while Eva was slim with a small bust.

“He’ll soon make her lose thirty pounds through worry,” she wrote, “unless she has a gift for growing fat in adversity.”

Eva wrote that her only concern was that Hitler had not had the courtesy to inform her that he had lost his heart to someone else. It can hardly have been a surprise to her. He was pictured in the newspapers daily with other attractive women.

“What happens to me must be a matter of indifference to him,” she concludes. “I shall wait until 3 June, in other words a quarter of a year since our last meeting. Let no one say I am not patient. I sit here waiting while the sun mocks me through the window panes. That he should have so little understanding, and allow me to be humiliated in front of strangers. But men’s pleasure…”

But she could not wait that long. On 28 May, she sent him another letter and decided that, if he did not reply by ten o’clock that night, she would kill herself. Even if he. was not seeing the Walkfire, there were so many others.

Eva received no reply — not before ten o’clock, not after. The following morning she took two dozen Phanodorm tablets and, within minutes, was unconscious.

She was discovered by her sister Ilse, who came round to return a dress she had borrowed. Ilse called a doctor and Eva was revived. The whole incident was passed off as an accident, brought on by strain. But, soon after, Hitler found Eva a larger apartment on the outskirts of Munich and, later, the villa she wanted so much.

Around that time, Eva introduced Hitler to Dr Theo Morrell, who was a specialist in venereal diseases. He was Hitler’s doctor up to his death in 1945. Morrell never admitted to treating Hitler for VD, but said he had been called in to treat eczema on his leg — a common site for a syphilitic tumour. The drugs he prescribed were also commonly given to patients in the last stage of syphilis.

Later, Eva asked Morrell to give Hitler something to increase his sexual potency. Morrell injected him with Orchikrin (emulsified bulls’ testicles). It did not seem to do any good and Hitler never tried it again.

Throughout the war, Eva installed herself at Berghof, Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden. There, she played at being the perfect little wife to her Adolf, when he could take time off from the war; but even at Berghof, she was a prisoner.

“His jealousy is peculiar and inhuman,” she wrote in her diary.

He loved to see her naked and encouraged her to swim and sunbathe nude. He constantly hinted that it was “too hot for clothes”, in the hope that she would strip for him. If he had time, he would undress her himself, with fumbling fingers that nearly drove her crazy with frustration.

He also liked to photograph her nude. Often he would take close-ups of her buttocks. When taking intimate shots, he would be careful to photograph her from an obscenely low angle, explaining that he did not want anyone to recognize her if they fell into the wrong hands.

Hitler’s commando chief, Otto Skorzeny, reported that Eva told him that Hitler “doesn’t even bother to take his boots off, and sometimes we don’t get into bed. We stretch out on the floor. On the floor he is very erotic.”

There was little vaginal sex. Indeed, her medical records indicated that her vagina was too small for normal sex. But she desperately wanted children and had to undergo painful surgery to widen it. After the treatment was successfully completed, her gynaecologist died mysteriously, in a car accident. Despite the operation, their sex life did not become any more normal.

“He only needs me for certain purposes,” she confided to her diary again. “This is idiotic.”

In February 1945, when it was clear that the war was lost, Hitler ordered her to remain at Berghof. But being separated from her Adolf was more than she could bear. In April, she disobeyed him and got one of his official cars from Munich to drive her to his bunker in Berlin. She was almost killed by British dive bombers on the way. When she arrived he was so overjoyed that she was safe, that he did not have the heart to scold her.

With the tragedy in its last act, Goring sent an ultimatum, demanding that leadership of the Reich be handed over to him.

“Treachery,” screamed Hitler.

He ridiculed Goring, saying it was well known that a bullet in the groin in World War I had left him impotent. That was why he was so fat. Goring’s daughter bore a conspicuous likeness to Mussolini, Hitler said. Mussolini had stayed with Goring and Goring’s wife Emmy had become particularly attached to him.

When news came that Himmler had defected, Hitler went into a blood-curdling tirade. His body shook and his face became paralyzed. This rigor is another symptom associated with tertiary syphilis.

Some, mostly women, were still loyal to Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, the test pilot who proved the airworthiness of the V-1 flying bomb by flying it from a strap-on cockpit, made one last dash to be beside Hitler in his hour of need. She landed her plane under Russian gunfire in the avenue that ran down from the Brandenburg Gate. It is said that she had cooked up a plan to fly Hitler to Argentina, only to drop it when she discovered that he had Eva Braun with him in the bunker.

At midnight on 29 April, 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun married. They returned to his suite.

Next morning, while the newly-weds slept in late, Eva’s brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, was shot on Hitler’s orders. He had been caught leaving the bunker with a large amount of Swiss francs and a woman who spoke French. Eva had begged Hitler to spare his life — but it had done no good.

Later on 30 April, in Hitler’s study, Eva and Hitler bit into vials of poison and shot each other in the head. Goebbels found them. Their bodies were taken out of the bunker, doused with petrol and set alight. They did not burn completely, though; there was enough left for the Russian doctors to carry out a post-mortem. In the autopsy, it was discovered that Hitler did indeed have only one ball, but it could not be determined whether he had been born that way or whether one of his testicles had been removed surgically — not an uncommon practice when syphilis reaches its third and fatal stage.

The great dictator was dead, but that is not quite the end of the story. During the early 1970s, the story circulated that Hitler had had a daughter. It was said that she was the offspring of Tillie Fleischer, the Nordic javelin thrower who had won two gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. After Leni Riefenstahl had filmed a delighted Fuhrer embracing the Nordic beauty they had an eight-month affair. Hitler gave Tillie a white Mercedes and a lakeside villa near Berlin; but when she became pregnant, he dropped her like a stone.

Tillie Fleischer married Dr Fitz Hoser, one of Hitler’s aides, and they passed off Hitler’s daughter, Gisela, as their own. When Gisela grew up, she married a Jew, the son of a French Rabbi who had died in Hitler’s death camps, and she eventually converted to Judaism herself.

That would have been a rather ironic ending but it seems unlikely — it was Hitler, not Goring, who Magda Goebbels claimed had been rendered impotent by a bullet to the groin in World War I.