The Hidden Hitler

The Hidden Hitler by Lothar Machtan

This is a hard book to analyze. The essential point of this book is an argument that Hitler was a practicing homosexual during his youth and the period that he was building up his political machine. There is no direct evidence for this. There is a lot of circumstantial evidence, innuendo and inference that might allow that conclusion to be drawn. Is the evidence enough to warrant that conclusion?

I'm not sure. On the one hand, during the last forty years, homosexual apologists have tended to lay claim to a broad variety of historical figures, such as Shakespeare, Abraham Lincoln and John Henry Newman with less reason. This kind of thing used to be more common, but no one made a claim for Adolf Hitler.

On the other hand, there is no eyewitness testimony, just a lot of weird behavior that speaks to something and that Hitler was hiding something terribly private. People with something to hide usually have obscure private lives. Shakespeare, for example, private life is well-documented, but we don't know all that much about his private life, perhaps because he was a dissenting Catholic.

Hitler's private life, throughout his life, is similarly obscure in places, although, oddly, a lot of this obscurity comes from historians passing over known facts about Hitler's life. This book does a surprising service by disclosing things that are known to historians. For example, I've heard passing references to Hitler's boyhood friend, but never given much thought to him as a historical source, thinking that he was lost to history. According to the author, Lothar Machtan, the boyhood friend, August Kubizek, and Hitler appear to have an odd, perhaps homosexual relationship. Hitler wrote about his desire to set up housekeeping with August, they dressed alike, and they loved the music of Richard Wagner, which apparently was the “in thing” for homosexuals of fin de siècle Germany. In 1938, Hitler moved with alacrity to take all of Kubizek's papers about him. Kubizek's memoirs described a weird incident redolent of homosexuality. Hitler set himself up as the dominant member of the couple.

Hitler had two other similar relationships, including one with a fellow soldier, Schmidt, during World War I. In addition, Hitler never promoted past corporal, which would only have been possible if he was actively avoiding promotion for some reason. Machtan argues that the reason was a homosexual relationship with Schmidt, which would have been exposed if he had a higher rank. (See p. 91-92.) Machtan points out that we do not know the reason for the award of the Iron Cross to Hitler, but he notes that there was a delay in awarding the medal, which might be explained by the fact that a promotion should have gone with the medal and Hitler refused to be promoted. (p. 92.)

Hitler has always been portrayed as homeless, but Machtan suggests he may have been a street hustler. In one passage of Kubizek's memoirs, Hitler and Kubizek were approached by an older gentleman, who Hitler immediately identified as homosexual. Hitler's hostel was well-known to have been a location for homosexual prostitutes to work out of. Hitler checked in and out of the hostel and seemed to have more money than could be explained by painting post-cards, particularly given Hitler's lack of a work ethic.

Do we really think that Hitler would have had moral qualms against prostituting himself?

Machtan does a thorough job of documenting what look to be blackmail attempts against Hitler by people claiming to have “dirt” on Hitler. The nature of the dirt is only hinted at, but sometimes the blackmailers were quite successful in their enterprises. Machtan identifies one such as Hanfstaengl. I read Hanfstaengl's memoirs and I completely missed anything that would have put me on notice of homosexuality on the part of Hitler, but, then, I also never picked up that Hanfstaengl was himself a homosexual. (To be fair, Machten had access to an unpublished second memoir and interviewed Hanfstaengl's son.)

One thing about the issue of homosexuality is how repressed it is from disclosure. Obviously, Hanfstaengl was not going to out himself, nor would any of Hitler's partners. His risk came from third parties, such as Hans “Ghost Rider” Mend, who served with Hitler as a dispatch rider and obviously considered Hitler to have been something of a jerk and loser during his military years. Mend is the suspected source of information specifically outing Hitler – the “Mend Protocol” – which came into the possession of the German embassy in London in 1948. The Mend Protocol was affirmed or ascribed to the German resistance that was intended to be used in trying Hitler after he was ousted from power. (p. 65 -67.) The Mend Protocol confirms that Hitler was suspected of homosexual behavior with Schmidt and, interestingly, his politics were “Red” in the sense of Marxist. (p. 65-69.)

Then we come to Rohm and the homosexuals that Hitler surrounded himself. Rohm was indisputable to Hitler's rise to power. Rohm was also an open and unabashed homosexual, albeit he never went so far as admitting that he had broken Paragraph 175. (p. 198.) Hitler had no objection to Rohm or his sexual identity; he stated that he was indifferent to what Nazis did so long as they were good fighters for Nazism. (p. 207.) Machtan also identifies others around Hitler as homosexual, including Hess, von Schirach, Hanfstangl, and Ludicke. Hitler promoted Karl Ernst, a waiter from Berlin's homosexual scene, to the command of the Berlin SA. (p. 207.) Machtan argues that the brutality of the Rohm putsch was required because Rohm knew about Hitler's homosexuality, albeit it is certainly explained by the fact that Rohm had the loyalty of millions of violent thugs. (p. 211, 220.) Machten also suggests that Erich Klausener was not murdered because he was the head of Catholic Action, but because he might have acquired documents on Hitler because he had been the head of the police department of the Prussian ministry of the interior. (p. 217.) This seems like a stretch, but Karl Zehnter was an obscure victim of the putsch whose only connection was that he was a friend of Rohm and Ernst and served them as a waiter in private meetings between Rohm and his friends. (p. 217.) Rohm's former lover Martin Schatzl was also liquidated out of fear that he had been told something about Hitler by Rohm. (p. 217-218.)

I've noted in other reviews, the strange connection that was formed by people living in Germany during the 1920s between homosexuality and ultra-nationalism. Joseph Roth's Spider's Web, written in 1923, presented the beginning of the loathsome protagonist's career as occurring with a homosexual tryst with a nationalist nobleman. In Swastika Night, written by Murray Constantine in 1937, presented a future world ruled by the descendants of the Nazis where the males were brutal homosexuals and the women were reduced to brood mares.

Machten offers an explanation for this connection. In 1906-1909, the political weekly Die Zukunft accused Phillipp Prinz zu Eulenberg, a friend of Kaiser Wilhelm of homosexuality. Harden was a Jew. If Hitler was homosexual, he would have had some sense of that when he was 17 to 20, which might have cemented his pro-German nationalism/anti-Semitism. Hitler mentions this affair in Mein Kampf. Machten writes:

“Where Hitler was concerned strong language of this kind must have fallen on fertile ground, because he would already have discerned some connection between his own proclivities and the Jew Harden's public attacks on the German emperor's homosexual adviser. He must have felt personally assailed by Harden's revelations.” (p. 49.)

Now, a critical reader must agree that paragraph constitutes first-rate speculation and mind-reading, but if we put a series of “perhaps” in front of each clause, there is something interesting about the fact that this incident was sufficiently formative for Hitler to mention it in Mein Kampf fifteen years later.

Something was in the air, associating the Nazis with homosexuality. Presumably, this included Rohm and was certainly inspired by the usual political mud-slinging, but it may have been inspired by all the information that was available at the time. For that matter, Machten describes the belief of some German homosexuals who looked forward to better times under the Nazis. (p. 244-248.)

Another feature of Hitler's life is the absence of female romantic entanglements. Even the most famous – Eva Braun – was a “beard.” Machten quotes Braun as mentioning the absence of sex in their relationship. She was also quoted as saying “Just think how convenient it is for a woman never to have to be jealous of any other woman.” (p. 170.) That might be a tribute to Hitler's integrity, but it sounds like a cutting back-handed compliment.

The evidence in favor of Machten's thesis builds up bit by bit. If true, Hitler was a part of a German homosexual community.

Am I convinced? Not really. I am skeptical of the facts presented; I want to see them in the original sources. Also, rumors and gossip about the powerful are too common to uncritically accept such gossip and most of Machten's evidence is hearsay.

However, this is an illuminating book. It sheds a lot of light on the relationships – frequently, the “b*tchy” relationship – between the leading Nazis. It also sheds some light on Hitler's relationships in his youth, political career and with women. It also throws some interesting light on the culture of the time – Wagner was the Liza Minnelli of Germany in the 1920s??? Who knew???

Frankly, I intend to file this information as a possible explanation and see what confirmations turn up when I read more on the period.