The Psychology and Sex Life of Hitler
What the horrors of the Führer's bedroom have to teach us
If you enjoy this, you may also enjoy my earlier post The contents of Mao’s heart, a reflection on the terrible poetry and even worse sex life of Mao Zedong.
“Lenin is the greatest man, second only to Hitler, and that the difference between Communism and the Hitler faith is very slight.”
—Joseph Goebbels, speech on November 27, 1925
Before staring into the abyss of Adolf Hitler’s sexual psychopathology, let me say a word on his broader psychology. As I now have infamously argued, Hitler “was less evil than Lenin because Hitler only targeted people he personally believed were harmful to society whereas Lenin targeted even those he himself didn’t believe were harmful in any way.”
This tight formulation captures what is essential about the evil of both men while revealing the particular threats each one poses.
Hitler perpetrated a genocide against 6 million Jews in the Holocaust because he believed they were “Untermenschen” or subhuman. In Mein Kampf, he referred to Jews as “parasites,” “maggots,” and “bacteria.” He perpetrated a genocide against up to 1.5 million Romani in the porajmos, or the devouring, because he believed homeless “vagabonds” and refugees were “criminals.”
He enacted Action T4, the involuntary euthanasia of people with disabilities, in order to sterilize the gene pool of physical imperfection. Black Germans fell victim to Nazi racial policies, including ghoulish experiments, and he killed gay men and lesbians. This was all part of his obsession with disease, cleanliness, genetic sterilization through racial purification, and the elimination of anything he considered impurely white or imperfectly Aryan.
Naturally, special consideration was carved out for Joseph Goebbels who had a deformed right leg and the flamingly gay Ernst Röhm.
One possible cause for Hitler’s obsession with purification might be his mother’s death. In 1906, Klara Hitler found a lump in her breast but ignored it, and was soon waking in the middle of the night in pain. When she went to the local doctor in Linz, he told Adolf she had cancer and probably wouldn’t make it and left it to the boy to tell his mother. Klara underwent a mastectomy, but the cancer had already metastasized to the area around her lungs and the doctor said there was no hope.
Adolf had been in Vienna where he applied for admission to the Academy of Fine Arts and was rejected—twice. Like American kids off to college today, he became radicalized by Jew-hating activists, lost his kampf against antisemitism, and later wrote a book about it.
Vienna was the city where, one decade earlier, the journalist Theodor Herzl returned from covering the Dreyfus affair, a miscarriage of justice that saw an innocent French officer of Jewish descent shipped to a penal colony, and Herzl became so convinced that Jews would never be accepted by Europeans that he wrote the pamphlet Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State) in 1896, thus creating political Zionism.
More than any other place, Vienna contributed to Hitler’s antisemitism. But his mother was paying his way so when she became ill, he moved home to care for her. He begged the doctor to try a new treatment, and every day for 46 days, the doctor reopened Klara’s incisions and pressed iodoform-soaked gauze directly into the tissue to “burn” the cancer.
This process was excruciatingly painful, and fruitless. In the end, the iodoform poisoned Klara and she died four days before Christmas. She was 47, Adolf was 18, and he suddenly had no money and wound up a homeless street painter.
Others have speculated that Hitler was a serial killer, and his obsession with disease, cleanliness, and purity leans into that argument given that a number of famous serial killers have been meticulously clean and orderly men including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, and Ted Bundy.
During his reign, Hitler’s other targets were Jehovah’s Witnesses because they refused to serve in the military or salute the flag, as well as communists, socialists, Russians, Poles, and other Slavic peoples. In each case, he believed he was eliminating subhuman disease, criminals, threats to the economy or the gene pool, political and military enemies.
It can be difficult to put our minds into the place of someone as morally reprehensible as Hitler because we want to tell ourselves we cannot even imagine how someone could think like that, and we want to console ourselves with the belief that there is no one in the world like him and so now that he is gone, the danger is behind us.
But events since October 7 say otherwise. The Hitler threat is not behind us nor alien to our psychology, even yours. The clinical psychologist and public intellectual Jordan Peterson recently debated the psychology of Vladimir Putin with Piers Morgan, saying:
There’s a little bit of Hitler and Stalin in everyone … There’s more than a bit. Oh, absolutely. Why would’ve Nazism spread the way it did? You know, people think, well that’s all top-down. It’s not top-down. There’s a part of people that’s …
The wisest commentators on totalitarian states, like Solzhenitsyn, and many psychological commentators, Jung was a good example of that, made a very straightforward case that you can’t have a totalitarian state unless every single person is willing to lie about everything all the time.
Hitler was an antisemitic, racist, ableist, anti-homeless, anti-LGBT, genocidal tyrant but the problem was not his moral formula. Woke progressives today almost always focus on the moral aspect of racism or ableism because they want to be outraged, not to understand, and racism is outrageous, yet if we think more carefully, we find that one can hold the right moral formula and still commit acts of sheer evil.
The Nazis, the Soviets, the Ku Klux Klan, and the Hutus carried out their sickening acts of cruelty believing with every drop of blood, every trigger-pull, and every shovel of dirt that they were the good guys. The problem in Germany, the American South, or Rwanda was not that people needed some kind of formal education in normative ethics. The problem was cultural. Jews, blacks, and Tutsis were depicted as so thoroughly less than human and harmful to society that, as genocide expert Gregory H. Stanton notes in his 10 Stages of Genocide, it “overcomes the normal human revulsion against murder.”
The reason this is important is because if there’s a little bit of Hitler in everyone, and if the problem with Hitler was not a lack of moral pedagogy but an entire culture of bigotry, then to defend against such tendencies the answer is not moral outrage, cancel culture, or censorship. Rather than a long march through the classrooms, we need to foster a more tolerant and inclusive culture built on civil discourse.
Once we create a culture where disdain for Jews or, for example, all white people in America, becomes normalized then the little Hitler in all of us begins to out, and to spread in the way that wokeness spreads, by convincing you that this is how you help people. Again, the problem here is not the moral formula. Hitler believed he was protecting what he deemed to be good, namely the German nation and its “real” people, and that he was opposing what he deemed to be bad.
We all do this, which is why we cannot entirely rely on our moral compass and why Peterson so often talks about the deeper value of stored cultural wisdom within normative social behaviors such as getting married or having kids, or even the stored cultural wisdom in certain superstitious or religious beliefs.
There is a wisdom in our cultures of certain values that have been built by generations of our ancestors who have confronted these issues before and whose combined intelligence burns like a raging sun compared to any candle we might happen to hold, however brilliant its light.
But there was far more going on with Hitler’s psychology than merely being immersed in a culture of antisemitism. His search for purity made him the filthiest human who ever lived. Yes, as Peterson says, we all have that aspect within us that can be radicalized to hatred and violence. Just look how many Germans had it in them when tested, or how many young people worldwide have cheered Hamas.
This is because the psychology of woke progressivism and Nazism operate in a similar way, feeding off the better angels of our nature, our desire to be good, or offering the wolves among us a sheepskin. It is especially important to recognize this fact if we want to live in a society where we enjoy and protect freedom of speech, because this means we are more often going to be exposed to ideas that we dislike and we need a better response than the offend principle. We need to cultivate a culture of civility and true tolerance.
What made Hitler evil was not that he used the same moral framing as normal human beings, or pro-Hamas supporters, namely defend “the victims” and fight “the threat.” The difference was, he identified the victims as a threat and the threat as the victims. In logic, we would say that his argument was coherent but unsound, meaning that the basic structure was correct but it did not map onto reality.
Hitler was psychotic, not in the sense that he was a psychopath, although that too, but in the sense that he was in a psychotic break from reality because when he looked at Jews he did not see mothers, fathers, or children but rather a subhuman threat to innocent Germans.
The only thing worse than this is not having any moral framing at all, which would be tantamount to a protester who supports Hamas not because they believe Hamas are the good guys fighting the injustice of occupation and genocide, but because they want to see more people die. You have Republicans who voted for Donald Trump because they believed he was the better candidate, but you also have white nationalists who voted for Trump because they believed he would utterly destroy the nation, allowing for a white ethnostate to rise from the ashes of what was once America.
This is what I mean when I say, “Lenin targeted even those he himself didn’t believe were harmful in any way.” During the Russian famine of 1891, he sought to maximize the number of people who died, whether he considered them threats to society or entirely innocent children. Like the white nationalists noted above, he was an accelerationist.
As far as I can tell, Lenin was a primary psychopath, or type I psychopath, with a formidable intelligence and calculating, manipulative methods. Think Hannibal Lector. Hitler was a secondary psychopath, or type II psychopath, with average intelligence and an impulsive, hot-headed manner. Think Geoffrey Baratheon.
But of course, Geoffrey commanded the armies of Westeros and so killed far more people than Hannibal could have ever hoped to do. Likewise, 1920s peasant Russia was not capable of the destruction of 1940s industrial Germany, but do not forget where Hitler got the idea for concentration camps and secret police from in the first place.
Moreover, an evil genius is more terrifying than an evil brute. Hannibal with a room temperature IQ just isn’t very scary. Hitler was a bit of a moron, I’m afraid, whereas Lenin was able to give the best chess players in all of Russia a solid game.
As you can imagine, there has been a lot speculation over Hitler’s psychopathology. Different studies have alleged schizophrenia, antisocial personality disorder (or psychopathy), histrionic personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, sadistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, schizotypal personality disorder, PTSD, abnormal brain lateralization, bipolar disorder, even Asperger’s.
Unsurprisingly, Hitler’s monstrous behavior did extend to his personal relationships. He had no friends except the Nazi propaganda head Joseph Goebbels, who himself was a despicable narcissist who in the end gave cyanide to his six children and then he and his wife, who was romantically in love with Hitler, killed themselves because they couldn’t bear to live without the Führer. Goebbels also admired Lenin, writing in an open letter on October 15, 1925:
No Tsar ever grasped the Russian people in its depths, in its passion, in its national instincts as Lenin has. He gave the Russian peasants what Bolshevism always meant to the peasants: freedom and property. In this way he made the most indigenous group, the peasants, into the real supporters of the new system. The more the Russian peasants hates the Jew, especially the Soviet Jew, the more passionately is he a follower of agrarian reform, the more ardently does he love his country, his land and his soil. ‘Down with the Jewish Soviets, long live the Leninist agrarian reform!’
The Leninists were antisemitic then and they are antisemitic today, so what surprise is it to us that their political cousins, as I have explained before, scapegoated the Jews just as freely? Again, this gets back to the culture in which they lived and the problem that faces us today.
Now let’s turn the page and consider whether Hitler’s psychological issues also extended to the bedroom, because oh my God, did they. That said, some claims must be weighed with a little skepticism. For instance, the idea that he was a coprophile, or sexually aroused by feces, such as by having people shit on him while he masturbated, is unproven.
A 2016 New York Post article explains the following:
The Nazi leader’s bedroom habits included a love of “poo sex,” claims a dossier from the US Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence Agency.
The intelligence document says he liked women to stand over him and defecate because he was turned on by poo.
It also revealed the Fuhrer had a “micro penis” and — as the famous song suggests — only one testicle.
It also revealed he liked to be brutally kicked by women as part of his sex games.
But this OSS dossier is highly controversial and considered by many apocryphal. But don’t worry, that doesn’t mean Hitler had a normal sex life. In fact, you better sit back and pour yourself a Glencairn of bourbon, cause you’re gonna need it.
Hitler’s grandmother, a woman with the unfortunate name of Maria Schicklgruber was, some stories say, raped by her employer and gave birth to Hitler’s father Alois. She later married a man named Johann Hiedler, and Alois convinced Austrian authorities to acknowledge Hiedler as his own father, but when officials did the paperwork they misspelled Hiedler and that’s how the family became the Hitlers.
You don’t have to be a psychologist to guess that Adolf’s father was a disgusting piece of shit. At age 36, Alois married the wealthy 50-year-old daughter of a customs official named Anna Glasl-Hörer, who was sick when they wed and soon began her decline to death. After the wedding, Alois began an affair with a 19-year-old girl named Franziska, who worked at the local Pommel Inn. Three years later, he hired the 16-year-old Klara Pölzl, who was either Alois’ cousin or neice, as a house servant and also began an affair with her.
When his wife died, Alois immediately married Franziska, who demanded that the servant girl Klara be sent away, and so she was, but when Franziska began to die at the age of 23, Klara was brought back to watch over her during her final days, and one month after Frasnziska’s death, Alois penned a letter of appeal to the Catholic pope in order to obtain papal approval to marry his child niece, which he received, and throughout their relationship, she creepily referred to him as “Uncle.”
Klara gave birth to three kids in the first three years of marriage, all of whom died in childhood, before giving birth to a fourth on April 20, 1889, named Adolf. And so it was that Adolf Hitler was born out of incestuous pedophilia to an abusive beast.
As a young man, Adolf had a school crush on a girl he believed was sending him secret messages to let him know that she liked him even though he had never spoke to her. He told his friend about this, and his friend recommended that he should try dancing with the girl because she seem to like dancing. Hitler screamed, “No! She only dances because she is dependent on society and society expects that of young women, but when she is dependent on me she will never dance again!”
He later realized she wasn’t into him and decided he would kill himself and that she would have to die with him for spurning his affection, even though he never said a word to her.
In university, he displayed an obsession with prostitutes, believing they were filthy and talking for hours about them with the sociopathic coldness as one talks about tuberculosis, according to his friend August Kubizek. This too lends slight support to the serial killer theory, in that he apparently had a Madonna-whore obsession with women like Jack the Ripper and many other serial killers. Kubizek relates that Hitler was utterly disgusted by women and sex, but that he had abstract ideas about what the perfect marriage ought to be and the need to provide future progeny for the German race.
His obsession with disease and cleanliness apparently extended to women, as he was terrified of venereal disease and therefore fascinated by prostitutes and repulsed by them. According to the English historian Ian Kershaw, Hitler’s ideal woman was cute, cuddly, naive, and stupid. In other words, Adolf was into kids, just like his daddy.
But rather than the domineering tyrant many of us may picture in our minds when we try to imagine Hitler’s disposition, he was in fact profoundly insecure and embarrassingly inept around women. One story relates that he tried to impress a woman by waving his whip around and prancing about like a storybook hero. Imagine Napoleon Dynamite showing a girl his nunchuck skills.
He once went on a date with a girl named Maria Josepha Reiter, or “Mimi,” and over dinner he told her she had eyes like his dead mother. Then on the walk home, his dog barked at another dog, and he savagely beat the shit out of his beloved pet, which I think is an important detail given how often we hear about him walking Blondie even as the bombs fell. Even Hitler loved his dog, folks say, but what they often do not know is that he also took pleasure in brutally abusing his dog.
Hitler promised Mimi the world, and despite his animal abuse, she was swayed. But he was 37 and she was 16 and even by the standards of the time, this was a gross transgression that could have ended his career, so when people began asking questions, Hitler ghosted Mimi for months, she became distraught and tried to hang herself from a doorknob with a clothesline. At least, that’s one version of the story. More in a second.
His next relationship was with Geli Raubal, his sister Angela’s daughter and therefore his niece, who he met when she was 14. He waited until she was 16 and then “Uncle Alf,” as she called him, groomed her with lavish promises, as he had groomed Mimi. She moved into his apartment in 1929 and Hitler was incredibly controlling of her.
One day, they had a bitter fight and she was later found dead, apparently having shot herself in the lung with his Walther pistol. In his 1992 Vanity Fair piece, “Hitler’s Doomed Angel,” the journalist Ron Rosenbaum discussed all the theories around her suicide, including that Hitler had murdered her or had her killed on his orders. One theory says this is because she had an affair with a Jewish man. Another theory notes that while he was with Geli, Mimi showed back up and Hitler started an affair with her, shortly after which, Geli killed herself.
His next partner, and the third woman he would drive to suicide, was Unity Mitford. As a kid, Unity shared a room with her sister Jessica, whose side of the room was covered with hammer and sickles and pictures of Vladimir Lenin while Unity’s side of the room was covered with swastikas and pictures of Hitler. Unity became obsessed with Hitler, stalked him, finally met him in 1934, calling it the most wonderful day of her life in a letter to a friend. A few years later, she shot herself in the head, survived, but died several years later from meningitis caused by the bullet lodged in her brain.
According to the OSS dossier on Hitler:
The idea that Hitler had a sexual perversion particularly abhorrent to women is further supported by a statistic: of the seven women who, we can be reasonably sure, had intimate relations with Hitler, six committed suicide or seriously attempted to do so.” In addition to Geli, “Mimi Reiter tried to hang herself in 1928; Eva Braun attempted suicide in 1932 and again in 1935; Frau Inge Ley was a successful suicide as were Renaté Mueller and Suzi Liptauer.”
The alternative view, not demonstrated by any evidence, mind you, is that Hitler was either killing these women or ordering their deaths. That he was effectively a kind of Jeffrey Dahmer as dictator, who saw women, including his own partners, as brainless vectors of disease.
Hitler’s relationship with Eva Braun, which lasted nearly 14 years, was no better. They had separate bedrooms, he treated her like garbage in public, and she tried to kill herself more than once before finally succeeding in 1945, 40 hours after Hitler and Braun married in the Berlin Führerbunker.
There is far more available on Hitler’s sex life, enough to fill a library. My main concern here is how the basics inform our understanding of his psychology and who he was and how the wisdom we gain from that knowledge helps us with the problems we face in our world today, particularly problems of antisemitism or other forms of hate.
But so far as some of the other claims go, the claim that Hitler couldn’t get off unless someone defecated on him came from the OSS dossier, which itself was based on testimony by one-time Nazi and later political rival Otto Strasser who claimed that Hitler forced Geli Raubal to urinate and defecate on him.
There were also claims that he was impotent, or gay, or had a micro-penis. Kershaw rejects much of this as mere propaganda. Other than Goebbels, perhaps Hitler’s only real friend in life was the German architect Albert Speer, who wrote:
By no means would I describe Adolph Hitler as sexually normal in his relationships with women. In the case of Eva Braun in particular, it seems clear to me that aside from occasional passionate episodes there was no sexual activity at all for long periods of time. The effect of this on Hitler I do not know, but Eva Braun’s misery was well-known at headquarters. During the long dry spells she was irritable, impatient and quick to anger. She smoked much more and was incessantly lighting one cigarette after another … Though it seems obscene to pity one individual human being with so many millions dead, I do believe that Eva Braun was the loneliest woman I ever knew.
For more information on Hitler’s sex life, I recommend Ian Kershaw’s definitive two-part biography Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris and Hitler: 1936-1945 Nemesis, as well as the two-part podcast series Hitler’s Sex Life: The Whole Sad Story by Behind the Bastards.