In the view of the psychoanalyst Walter Langer, who reported to the American secret service during the war on ‘the mind of Adolf Hitler’, he was a sadomasochist who projected his sexual perversions onto the world stage.Ī later German attempt to analyse his personality concluded that Hitler suffered from ‘schizophrenic mania’ or, even less plausibly, that he never woke up from the hypnosis to which he was allegedly subjected following the temporary blindness he suffered after a gas attack on the Western Front at the end of the First World War. It was said that Hitler was anti-semitic because he had Jewish ancestry, ignoring the genealogical evidence to the contrary or because a Jewish doctor had deliberately helped his mother on her way when she was dying, and overcharged the family (in fact, his treatments were conventional and he charged the family hardly anything) or because he had caught syphilis from a Jewish prostitute in his youth (his medical records don’t record any symptoms of the disease).
Insanity was only one of a wide range of possible explanations for Hitler’s actions.
If they had known in 1932 what they knew ten years later, they claimed, they would have voted differently it wasn’t their fault that six million Jews had been murdered, countless soldiers and civilians on both sides killed, German cities devastated and Germany as they had known it destroyed. ‘No,’ Hess replies, ‘only his deputy!’ That Hitler was insane was something many Germans came to believe in the later stages of the war.
‘So you’re the madman,’ Churchill says to Hess. In May 1941, after the sudden flight to England of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had deluded himself that he could persuade the British to make peace, a joke went round Berlin.
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