What I've Been Up To (Shudder)

The past few days I've been putting together the beginnings of an alternate history surrounding World War II. I know. This has been done to death by hundreds of thousands before me. But I need something to keep the mental gears fluid and rolling, and I definitely need some time off my second novel. I only have fourteen more pages left to edit/re-write and then I'm officially done with it, but still: I'm a procrastinator and need something new to do after six months of that novel. If you want to watch my "history" unfold, just click away.

Hitler and Stalin Possessed by the Devil, Says Vatican Exorcist

Adolf Hitler and Russian leader Stalin were possessed by the Devil, the Vatican's chief exorcist has claimed.

Father Gabriele Amorth who is Pope Benedict XVI's 'caster out of demons' made his comments during an interview with Vatican Radio.

Father Amorth said: "Of course the Devil exists and he can not only possess a single person but also groups and entire populations.

"I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler - and Stalin did. Almost certainly they were possessed by the Devil.

"You can tell by their behavior and their actions, from the horrors they committed and the atrocities that were committed on their orders. That's why we need to defend society from demons."

According to secret Vatican documents recently released wartime pontiff Pope Pius XII attempted a "long distance" exorcism of Hitler which failed to have any effect.

Father Amorth said: "It's very rare that praying and attempting to carry out an exorcism from distance works.

"Of course you can pray for someone from a distance but in this case it would not have any effect.

"One of the key requirements for an exorcism is to be present in front of the possessed person and that person also has to be consenting and willing.

"Therefore trying to carry out an exorcism on someone who is not present, or consenting and willing would prove very difficult.

"However I have no doubt that Hitler was possessed and so it does not surprise me that Pope Pius XII tried a long distance exorcism."

In the past Father Amorth has also spoken out against the Harry Potter books, claiming that reading the novels of the teen wizard open children's minds to dabbling with the occult and black magic.

Father Amorth, who is president of the International Association of Exorcists, said of the JK Rowling books: "Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil."

He said that Rowling's books contain innumerable positive references to magic, "the satanic art" and added the books attempt to make a false distinction between black and white magic, when in fact, the distinction "does not exist, because magic is always a turn to the devil."

Father Amorth is said to have carried out more than 30,000 exorcisms in his career and his favorite film is, according to Italian newspapers The Exorcist.

Was there more to Hitler's dramatic change?

This, as well as my preceding posts on Hitler, are first and foremost a scholarly diversion. To those accusing me of diabolical or distasteful goals, please read the material and try not to draw unfounded, inflammatory views upon what is nothing more than a hobby. Largely, what I have written is fiction, though plausible and entertaining. I do not support fascism, racism, Nazism, or any other -ism for that matter. -Isms, in my opinion, are not a good thing.

The occultist magician Aleister Crowley liked to describe himself as the Antichrist of the Apocalypse (Therion - Beast 666) and once boasted: "Before Hitler was, I am." He often claimed that Adolf Hitler was his guinea pig or magic child, a term used by hypnotists to describe an "inner shadow" or product of the unguarded psyche.

While in America during the First World War, Crowley unflinchingly proposed "collecting a large number of photographs, full face and profile for each subject, and classifying them according to the horoscope." To other occultists, such a photo experiment would have been for "the educated astrologer to adopt scientific methods of study." But it would have also been a very good way for a schemer of in-the-flesh identity fraud to look for his double or look-alike:

"The labour required for this research would be enormous, but the bulk of it would be done by ordinary clerks. And as for the preliminary difficulty of collecting material, any great newspaper could carry out the scheme easily enough. It would of course be necessary to publish an explanation of the proposal with a questionnaire covering the principle points, and asking for good photographs to be sent with the filled up form." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

Police and military intelligence files are even better sources for collecting mug shots than a newspaper survey. According to Crowley, Professor Hugo Munsterberg of Harvard Universitywas the war-time secret director of German propaganda in America. Crowley went to great lengths to act as a friend to Munsterberg and even volunteered to collect and report information for Germany and the Central Powers of World War I.

Hundreds or perhaps thousands of photographs of German soldiers could have been classified and studied to find Crowley's look-alike. But why Aleister Crowley? According to some accounts, Crowley was not only an occultist, but also a double-agent during the First World War; a skilled practitioner of counter-espionage. He wrote disturbing anti-British stories for a pro-German weekly paper called The Fatherland, published in America by George Sylvester Viereck. And the New York Times even printed a three-column article about how he supposedly destroyed his British passport, while standing in a small motorboat with a woman playing a violin, under the Statue of Liberty. Crowley had told Viereck in 1915 that he wanted to help Germany in order "to exploit the stupidity of the British public." But he later claimed to others that he was actually doing mischief to Germany by working upon "the baser passions of the mob" and wrecking the German propaganda machine.


"It was necessary to persuade the Germans that arrogance and violence were sound policy, that bad faith was the cleverest diplomacy, that insult was the true meaning of winning friendship, and direct injury the proper conjuration to call up gratitude." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

The brutalizing or demoralization of Germany was his apparent goal. During the First World War, Crowley sent secret correspondence to an acquaintance in the British Intelligence Department, saying that he was "in a position to get into the full confidence of the Germans." Crowley maintained that he "had the absolute confidence, years old, of a man high in the German secret service," and that he "could go to Germany" under an assumed identity and "report on the conditions of the country" as a spy for Britain. When his secret proposal was rejected by British Intelligence, Crowley wrote that he "was compelled to go on playing a lone hand." If Crowley was indeed preparing to penetrate the German intelligence community, having his own German look-alike would have provided him with a safety escape measure. Perhaps this is where our doppelganger plot of identity fraud begins.

While it is still not clear whether Aleister Crowley was primarily spying for Britain, Germany, or a rogue regime, we do know from his writings that he was looking for a distinct type of doppelganger or "Magic Child." Of course, Crowley's double had to be someone who closely resembled him in photos and in the flesh. But Crowley also needed a look-alike with a clean police and service record, perhaps even a soldier noted for courage on the battlefield. He also needed someone single, an unknown loner living far enough away from any family members or friends who might otherwise notice the "switch-over." But most important, he needed someone who was still morally innocent; a virgin. The Magic Child would be the ritual sacrificial victim or foundational guinea pig for Crowley's new anti-Christian religion. The motives which determined the policy of Crowley's political actions would be kept secret. The Magic Child would be forced to forfeit his identity and, if the devil had his way, even his soul.

"For the highest spiritual working one must accordingly choose that victim which contains the greatest and purest force. A male child of perfect innocence and high intelligence. It is the sacrifice of oneself spiritually. And the intelligence and innocence of that male child are the perfect understanding of the Magician, his one aim, without lust of result. And male he must be, because what he sacrifices is not the material blood, but his creative power." - Aleister Crowley

Switch-Over: The Great Change
In his 1983 book The Leader and the Damned, Colin Forbes was perhaps first to make popular the idea that Adolf Hitler's double may have been responsible for the final horrors of the Second World War. Forbes points to a 1943 bomb attack on the Fuhrer's private plane as the time for the "switch-over" between the real Hitler and his impostor. But recent studies indicate that the greatest change in Adolf Hitler's personality (and physical appearance) took place long before he became well-known. It happened in 1918, while Hitler was still a soldier at the end of World War I.

About two months after winning the Iron Cross, Hitler was blinded by mustard gas during a battle. He was taken to the Pasewalk military hospitalin northernGermany where he was diagnosed as suffering from "psychopathic hysteria." Hitler was consequently placed under the care of a psychiatrist, Dr. Edmund Forster. What exactly was done to Hitler while under Dr. Forster's care is uncertain because years later, in 1933, the Gestapo rounded up all psychiatric records related to Hitler's treatment and destroyed them. Dr. Forster "committed suicide" in that same year.

In a work published in the History of Childhood Quarterly, psycho-historian Dr. Rudolph Binion suggested that Hitler's psychopathic visions may have been deliberately induced by the military hospital psychiatrist, Edmund Forster. Dr. Binion cited a book completed in 1939 entitled, Der Augenzeuge (The Eyewitness), written by a Jewish doctor named Ernst Weiss who knew Dr. Forster and had fled Germany in 1933. It is a thinly fictionalized account of Hitler's "miracle cure." As a follow-up in a published review, David Bonnell recently summarized the Pasewalk puzzle:

There is considerable controversy regarding precisely when Hitler became driven to destroy the Jews and dominate the world. There is strong evidence, however, that the 'hate and pain' which characterized Hitler's speeches in 1919 and afterward, as well as his fanatical purpose, were not in evidence prior to his psychiatric treatment.

Other psychologists have also published conclusions similar to those of Dr. Binion. In November 20, 1998, for example, the following feature article was dispatched by Reuters to international newspapers:

Baton Rouge, Louisiana (Reuters)-- Adolf Hitler's belief he was meant to rule the world may have stemmed in part from a hypnotic suggestion given during treatment for hysterical blindness in 1918, a Louisiana psychiatrist said in the November Journal of Forensic Science. Dr. David Post, a forensic psychiatrist at the state's forensics hospital in Jackson, Louisiana, based his theory on a book he believes used material from a German military hospital where Hitler was treated after he was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack in the First World War in October 1918. Hitler was a corporal at the time, but the hospital records from that period were later destroyed by the Gestapo, although Hitler wrote of his sudden blindness and his resolve to enter politics if he regained his sight. After Germany's surrender on Nov. 11, 1918, Hitler wrote that he had "a supernatural vision ... A miracle came to pass" and he could see again.

In a book called "Eyewitness" by Ernst Weiss, an exiled German doctor and novelist, a German psychiatrist in a military hospital uses hypnotic suggestion in a still-accepted medical protocol for post-traumatic stress syndrome. He tells the patient A.H.: "I am a simple doctor. But perhaps you yourself have the rare power, which occurs only occasionally in a thousand years, to work a miracle. Jesus did it. Mohammed. The saints.... An ordinary person with such a condition would be blind for life. But for a person of particular strength and will and spiritual energy, there are no limits."

"You have to have a blind faith in yourself, then you will stop being blind ... You know that Germany needs people who have energy and blind self-confidence. Austria is at an end, but not Germany," the book passage stated. Hitler was born in Austria.Post believes that passage was based on the German Pasewalk Military Hospital notes and records of Weiss' friend, Dr. Edmund Forster, chief of the Berlin University Nerve Clinic, who treated Hitler at Pasewalk in 1918.

"It was chilling and disturbing to me to read what I believe may have been an account of his hypnotic session," Post told Reuters. Weiss wrote the book for a literary competition in Paris in 1933.

He committed suicide as the German army marched into the city and the book was not published until the 1960s. Weiss also was on the board of a German exiles newspaper Forster contacted in Paris in 1933, taking copies of his records from Pasewalk. Forster warned the editorial board not to be surprised if he were killed.

Shortly after returning to Germany, Post said, Forster was picked up by the Gestapo on charges of "harboring a subversive attitude toward the new (Hitler's) regime." After 13 days of interrogation, Forster was reported to have killed himself.The records of Hitler's 29-day stay at Pasewalk later were destroyed by the Gestapo, Post said. Although Hitler suffered what are now considered classic symptoms of mustard gas poisoning, including depression, he was diagnosed as a "psychopath with hysterical tendencies" by Forster even before the hysterical blindness, Post said.

Post is a faculty member at the Louisiana State University Medical Center in New Orleans and a former fellow in forensic psychiatry at Harvard University Medical School, where he began his research on Hitler. Post documented connections between Weiss and Forster through interviews with historians, a Hitler biographer, a copy of a 1943 U.S. Naval Intelligence report declassified in 1973, and records of the German exiles' newspaper.

"Because of the deaths and the records' destruction, we'll never be able to prove definitively if Weiss' book is a direct account from Forster's reports or just an incorporation of key passages," Post said. "But I'm convinced the account is true."

Psycho-historians agree that the greatest change in Adolf Hitler's life occurred in Pasewalk Military Hospital while recovering from a mustard gas attack at the end of World War I. His hatred for Jews may have been implanted there by hypnosis, drugs and modern brain washing techniques. But if Aleister Crowley saw a double or look-alike in Hitler, his sudden switch-over to Aryan racism would not have been a coincidence. To bigoted Crowley, all women were unintelligent, and black men were primitive. Jews were vile in his opinion and "possess bad qualities" not because they want to, but because they have been forced to behave as such by the development of hostility over a long period of time:

"But the Jew has been persecuted so relentlessly that his survival has depended on the development of his worst qualities; avarice, servility, falseness, cunning and the rest." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

An explanation for what may have happened in Pasewalk to cause Hitler's desire to rule the world is that Dr. Forster developed a scientific method of producing a "programmed assassin" or cruel, pre-coded tyrant using mind control drugs. But the drastic alteration of Hitler's personality may have been a more thorough switch-over than just a change of mind. Pasewalk would have presented a perfect opportunity for identity theft, the world's fastest growing crime today. If so, perhaps the real Adolf Hitler never left the military psychiatrist's watch, but remained an experimental hostage or guinea pig until his apparent suicide. An in-the-flesh impostor such as Crowley, using Hitler's name and personal data to spy within Germany in ways that involved fraud and deception, may have been the man who was actually released from Pasewalk Hospital a month later:

A young German soldier lies in a hospital bed, suffering from hysteria and mustard gas blisters. His face is bandaged with gauze. Is he really Adolf Hitler? When the bandages are finally removed, he will only slightly resemble his earlier person. A New Hitler is about to be hatched, a changed man, with almost no recollection of his past. His nose, forehead, and chin will seem permanently altered from inflammations caused by exposure to mustard gas. From now on, his voice will sound rough and croaking due to respiratory damage and coughing. He will wear dark glasses during the first period of recovery from his chemical blindness. He will have extreme difficulty recognizing his close friends and remembering old acquaintances. But he will be a New Hitler indeed, always mindful of the miraculous change which guided him on his occult mission to lead Germany. Literally overnight, he will quickly discover his eloquent powers of ceremonial speech. And he will debate with dogmatic opinions about history, geopolitics, philosophy, and other things that never crossed his mind before. The uneducated country bumpkin who never had a girlfriend will suddenly emerge from a few weeks in hospital as aseasoned diplomatic leader and spy. He will even shamelessly seduce his own niece.

Yet ironically, in 1918 the New Hitler will abruptly lose his artistic talent. Out of awkwardness, he must abandon the art of applying paint to canvas, even as a pastime. The illustrator who once made a living by selling landscape paintings in Vienna will now be all thumbs: he can't draw a straight line. His artist's signature will not be the same.


Hitler supposedly painted between one and three watercolors a day during his Vienna years. If one assumes he painted only one painting a day, and only three days a week, then the minimum number he would have painted would be six hundred, which is close to Hitler’s own recollection of "over a thousand." While the early years were doubtless lean at times, he was not nearly as destitute as he indicates in Mein Kampf. After Hitler's stay in PasewalkHospital he stopped painting and concerned himself with politics. Yet it would be wrong to say that he no longer had time for art.

One of his most ambitious projects was codename Sonderauftrag Linz (Special Assignment Linz). It involved establishing Linz, Austria as the art capitol of Europe and stripping Vienna of that distinction. It is interesting to note that one of Hitler’s favorite official functions was the dedication of art galleries depicting a variety of artworks, past and present. Yet he himself would no longer paint. Only when critics became skeptical of his artistic talent did Hitler finally produce a few more paintings and architectural sketches in the 1920s and late 30s. (Of course, there were also forgeries and copies of his work which the Nazis ordered destroyed.)If we assume that the real Adolf Hitler was still being held as a secret hostage since his stay in Pasewalk Hospital, it would not have been difficult for his military guards to persuade him (by threat or torture) to produce a few more paintings to satisfy the public's curiosity. Characteristically, Hitler's last artworks were interiors, as one might expect from a prisoner under secret arrest. It is highly possible that in those final paintings, the Pasewalk hostage left abstract visual clues about himself and his captors.

Keeping a doppelganger hostage could serve two main purposes in this type of in-the-flesh identity theft. First, to be able to interrogate the hostage at will, and extract any relevant information about that person's life, including other people's names, past activities, and special experiences worth quoting or remembering. Second, if the secret plan to commit genocide or violate sovereignty went wrong, the look-alike hostage would be blamed and killed in a way resembling suicide. The real criminal would then be able to escape unnoticed.

Rumors of a Hitler-Hostage: Official World War Two intelligence reports from some nations disclosed formal references to "a war prisoner named Hitler." According to Reich leaders, the mysterious hostage was Adolf Hitler's favorite nephew, Heinz, who they said was captured by Soviet troops. Resembling an off-camera scene from Fleming's "The Man From UNCLE," an exchange of prisoners was supposedly set in motion with Stalin to free the obscure Hitler-Hostage. But his fate remains unknown. He is presumed to have died in a death camp in 1942.

Time to Meet the New Man
Where was Aleister Crowley during Hitler's miserable stay in Pasewalk Hospital? For the most part, we know that Crowley had dropped out of sight. Anyone wishing to meet with him was kindly informed by friends or solicitors that Mr. Crowley had gone on a Masonic "Magical Retreat" to a secret place he called Oesopus Island. He supposedly went off to camp and canoe for over a month somewhere, writing a commentary on the ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu. Since Crowley had studied for the foreign service, he learned various languages including Russian and modern Persian Farsi.

"Persian fascinated me more than any other language had ever done and I revelled in the ideas of the Sufis." - The Confessions of Aleister Crowley

Crowley studied to be a diplomat at Cambridge, before devoting himself entirely to the occult, and was competent in his knowledge of English, French and German. He considered himself to be a neglected poet. But where was his mysterious Oesopus island, not listed in any Atlas or travel guide? Gary Alexander, a freelance writer who lives in New York, recently wrote:

Aleister Crowley came not to some Olympian myth of an upstate island named "Oesopus" for magical retreat but to our own Esopus Island right here in the Hudson Valley.Today, Esopus Island, a small rocky streak of land in the Hudson, is still uninhabited and officially off-limits. Coast Guard markers are sunk into the rock at the southern end. Visitors have left carvings in stone and painted graffiti, but one searches in vain for traces of Crowley or his campsite.

There are no wartime reports of Aleister Crowley ever being in Esopus Island, not even in the official Hudson Valley records. He simply vanished from America during the summer of 1918 and did not turn up in England again until the next year. When magical scoundrels may have escaped the process of legend-building, a New Hitler had entered Germany. The missing weeks that marked the end of the First World War would have been as good a time as any for Hitler and Crowley to meet. Biographer John Symmonds quotes Crowley:

I never met... someone so demonic as Herr Hitler. Why do you think I spend so much time with him? And come when he bids me? I tell you only the universe can prevail against Hitler. But the universe for the present doesn’t seem to be interested; though Hitler is the enemy of the universe, that is to say of God; for the universe is only God’s instrument. It is as if God said, "Let mankind learn a lesson; they need to open their eyes a little wider. Hitler will do that for them. Just wait. They will see things that men have never seen or heard before - such horrors that there will be no word in the German or any other language to describe them."



Hitler:"And are you an angel of darkness?"

Crowley: "You’ll find out in good time all about me. For the present, I’ll say this: if I were an angel of light, you wouldn’t want to know me."

Was Hitler really Crowley's guinea pig? "Before Hitler was, I am," replied the new man. By 1919, the New Hitler immediately began identifying all colleagues and fellow soldiers who smelled a rat (or impostor). He earned himself a promotion by having them rounded up to be shot as Communists. Then, he was assigned to the highly secret Political Department of the Army District Command. Hitler's new unit was an intelligence operation (Crowley's German-spy ambitions realized) that engaged in acts of domestic terrorism. The unit refused to accept the defeat of the German-Turkish Central Powers in World War I and assassinated some of the leaders who had negotiated surrender. The New Hitler had now entered a different, wealthier inner social circle. He avoided, and in many cases even refused to see his old acquaintances and relatives. In a secret wartime report, later published as The Mind Of Adolf Hitler, Walter C. Langer drew attention to the curious fact that the New Hitler supposedly always carried a photograph of his deceased mother in his vest pocket. Yet when questioned about her, he could not remember the date of her death.

Another peculiar detail noticed by Langer was Hitler's German "accent" or particular mode of pronunciation. It is taken for granted that Hitler sometimes uttered Germanic syllables with a local Austrian dialect. But his voice defect was important enough to be brought to the attention of William Donovan, the director of OSS (forerunner of CIA).

The New Hitler ran into serious dysfunction when he plotted to kidnap the leaders of the Bavarian government and force them at gunpoint to accept him as their leader. With the aid of famous World War One General Erich Ludendorff, he hoped to win over the German army, proclaim a nationwide revolt and bring down the German democratic government in Berlin. The Nazis put this plan into action when they learned there would be a large gathering of businessmen in a Munich beer hall and the guests of honor were to be the Bavarian leaders they wanted to kidnap. It did not occur to them to first take over newspaper offices and radio broadcasting stations. A beer hall was selected instead as the best site for their revolution. In an incidental way, Aleister Crowley had a self-centered tendency of using beer halls to stage his magical events. His family fortune came from the brewing of Crowley's Ale.

Crowley celebrated a Gnostic Mass the basis of which is in the believed sexual secrets of the Eucharist. Some of Wicca’s analysts guess the Gnostic Mass to be the origin of the “Cakes and Ale” ceremony that is part of Wiccan rituals.

"On November 8 and 9, 1923, SA troops under the direction of Hermann Goring surrounded the place. Hitler and his storm troopers burst into the beer hall causing instant panic. Hitler fired a pistol shot into the ceiling. 'Silence!' he yelled at the stunned crowd."

Hitler and Ludendorff then marched through the streets of Munich at the head of a group of roughly 3000 men, only to be met by police gunfire which resulted in sixteen dead and Hitler's arrest. This brought the would-be putsch to an end.

On February 26, 1924 the New Hitler was tried for his crime. He successfully turned the tables on his accusers with a "white brotherhood" propagandist speech. Hitler was sentenced to five years imprisonment in Landsberg Prison. It was during this time that his autobiography, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), was dictated to Rudolph Hess. Hitler was released November 1924, after serving only nine months of his five year sentence.

Where was Aleister Crowley from the time of the failed Nazi beer hall putsch until Hitler's release from Landsberg Prison? In 1923 Crowley was suddenly expelled from Sicily by Mussolini (Mussolini later asked the Pope to excommunicate Adolf Hitler). Once more, Aleister Crowley dropped out of public view on a new "Magical Retreat," supposedly going to Tunisia this time, for several months of isolation to complete his autobiography, "The Confessions." He did not resurface in Europe again until 1924, having undergone the "supreme ordeal" for his initiation of the Masonic Ipsissimus Grade in Paris.

As one might expect, Crowley's published autobiography briefly described a dismal incident involving street gunfire: "I do not know whether I stepped over fallen bodies or not... The report of the pistol, the screams (for all I know!) of the wounded or frightened men, and the alarm given by the fugitives, had aroused the entire district."

One of Aleister Crowley's German secret societies - based on Ottoman Caliphate role play, assumed identities, and sex magic - was known as O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis). Crowley declared that the Silver Star (S.S.) was his grand occult school, in succession to the mission of Mohammed.

During a museum visit in Egypt with his wife Rose Kelly, Crowley was attracted to an ancient Egyptian artifact with exhibit number 666. Shortly later an entity known as Aiwass dictated "The Book of the Law" to Crowley. The book expounds a spiritual path called Thelema, the Greek word for "the will."

"Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."

A member of the OTO wrote to Adolf Hitler on behalf on Crowley, suggesting that Thelema was the best choice for the national religion of the Third Reich. Hitler summoned an up-and-coming movie director named Leni Riefenstahl and asked her to film the entire week-long 1934 Nazi rally at Nuremberg. Her film of the Nuremberg rally bore the title personally chosen by Hitler, "Triumph of the Will," and became one of the most powerful propaganda statements ever made. As a pseudo-religious movement, the "triumph of Thelema" became political gold, symbolizing the neo-pagan dynasty Hitler claimed would survive for the next thousand years.



Aleister Crowley's most important occult ritual is said to have been the Sacred Magic of Abra-Melin the Mage. Ironically, Crowley was never able to complete the operation which lasts over a year. It is a series of prayers that allow magicians to converse with guardian angels and secure the salvation of the soul. And it requires a special place to perform it:



Scotland Yard: Foiled Again
Aleister Crowley attracted the attention of Scotland Yard on various occasions. Crowley claimed he had personal information concerning Jack the Ripper's identity. His sinister approval of the German-Ottoman Central Powers during World War I became a well-known embarrassment for England, where the national press called him "the world's wickedest man." But secret investigations into Crowley's espionage acts reached an even higher pitch during the Second World War.

One case involved a special unit that was created to monitor the movements of carrier pigeons using the expertise of Lord Tredegar, a falconer, whose birds of prey were sent in pursuit of suspected spy pigeons (The Falcon Unit). The question of Nazi pigeons was taken seriously enough to launch a pigeon deception plan over the English Channel during the German advance into Belgium and France. The object of this exercise was to confuse the enemy by filling the sky with pigeons. It is mentioned by Nigel West in MI5: British Security Service Operations 1909-1945, (Great Britain, 1981). "Lord Tredegar, an Old Etonian Welshman, had been somewhat indiscreet after lunching with Lady Baden-Powell and actually gave her a guided tour of his office as well as describing how he was engaged in the destruction of Nazi carrier pigeons. When word leaked of Tredegar's lapse he was taken into custody at the Tower of London but released soon afterwards when MI5 intervened. This, however, was not the last of the affair. Tredegar was outraged by his arrest and threatened dire consequences. He retired to his country seat, TredegarPark in South Wales, and invited Aleister Crowley, the renowned occultist and magician, to prepare a spell. Coincidentally or otherwise, Tredegar's arresting officer fell painfully ill shortly afterwards and nearly died."

A more serious incident involving Crowley also concerned Maxwell Knight, the secret head of British Intelligence. Charles Henry Maxwell Knight joined MI5 in 1924 and was to have considerable influence with the intelligence hierarchy and the government. He recruited and ran individual agents. Max Knight thrived on the intrigue and greatly enjoyed the trappings of counter-espionage. Different agents knew him simply as 'M' (later made famous in the James Bond novels). His secretary Joan Miller compiled long lists of British people who were Nazi sympathizers.

Knight penetrated both the Right and Left and had recruited agents in every walk of life. According to Christopher Andrews in Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (London, 1985), "Knight also had for a time a rather disturbing interest in the occult, going with Denis Wheatley to seances by the notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley to research black magic for Wheatley's novels." Maxwell Knight's first wife committed suicide after an occult experience with Aleister Crowley.

A similar account of the above story is described by Anthony Masters in The Man Who Was M (Oxford, 1984).

It was by now becoming painfully clear to some officials that Aleister Crowley had more or less penetrated the heart of British Intelligence. John Baker White, Director of the Economic League between 1926 and 1939, later wrote that he had been recruited to run "Section D" of a private intelligence agency operated by a "Sir George McGill." According to White, McGill's agency "investigated all forms of subversion including communism... the international traffic in drugs and the traffic in women and children... [and] the cult of evil which Aleister Crowley was the centre."

Scotland Yard was no doubt concerned by the fact that several suspicious deaths were indirectly being connected to Aleister Crowley. He always claimed that dark, avenging spirits were protecting him from his magical adversaries, causing illness and accident. Yet Sir George McGill and other inspectors probably saw the known pattern of a serial killer emerging in Crowley's peculiar attitude to the tragic deaths of those around him.

Before Scotland Yard could lawfully seize Aleister Crowley, he supposedly quietly died in December of 1947. When the authorities arrived to investigate, they found that Crowley's Satanic disciples had broken into a countryside chapel and staged a secret "last rite" which involved sex orgies and the desecration of the small chapel. A handful of ashes found in a jar were reported to be Crowleys' last remains. An official coroner holding inquests on deaths was one of Crowley's followers, who call themselves New Age "Thelemites." Crowley's morphine-prescribing physician died within 24 hours.

Did Aleister Crowley suddenly die in 1947, or did he conveniently go into hiding after the collapse of Nazism? Leaving that question unanswered, Gershom Scholem, the leading historian of mysticism at the University of Jerusalem, later wrote that Aleister Crowley died in 1946. A typographical error? Scholem categorized Crowley as an occultist of "supreme charlatanism." Undoubtedly, the world was lied to about Hitler's double.

Surrender Rejected?
On the 10th of May 1941, Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of Nazi Germany, flew to Scotland where he landed by parachute and surrendered to Britain. Was he a deranged peacemaker or the bearer of a message so bizarre it was not believed? Had Rudolf Hess discovered that his Fuhrer was an impostor?

Outraged Reich leaders quickly announced that Hess had been suffering from "a worsening mental condition." Most of Germany's Masonic lodges were violently forced to close. In Britain, secret intelligence agent Ian Fleming was carefully arranging a face-to-face meeting between Rudolf Hess and Aleister Crowley. But Fleming's proposal was rejected by his superiors of higher rank in the British Intelligence Department. Hess himself was finally treated summarily as either a madman or a doppelganger. He died in Spandau Prison in 1987. It appears that Hess committed suicide by hanging himself.

Recognizing the serious nature of identity fraud and the long term ramifications to its victims, the Identity Theft and Assumption Deterrence Act of 1998 criminalized fraud in connection with the unlawful theft and misuse of personal identifying information, regardless of whether it appears in or is used in documents. - FBI

In May 2002, US Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered federal prosecutors nationwide to speed up investigations and trials of people accused of stealing identities.
- DAVID HO, Associated Press

"But the bloody sacrifice, though more dangerous, is more efficacious; and for nearly all purposes human sacrifice is the best. In the Sacrifice during Invocation, however, it may be said without fear of contradiction that the death of the victim should coincide with the supreme invocation." - Aleister Crowley

A blurred portrait is visible in the controversial photos of Adolf Hitler's "doppelganger suicide." The out-of-focus portrait is almost certainly a photograph of Eva Braun. It's size, contours, shadows, and range of luminance all bear marked similarities to a now-famous series of photos probably taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who was Hitler's personal photographer and "corporate" image maker.

Avenging an Allied Hoax: Hitler Part 3

If the man who died in the Berlin bunker was actually Gustav Weber, one of Hitler's doubles whose body was found and photographed by the Russian Army, then how did the real Adolf Hitler's corpse end up being burned in the Chancellery garden?

In 1943, the body of a Royal Marines captain was washed ashore on the coast of Spain. His case contained the Allied invasion plans for Europe. The Germans believed what they found. But little did they know that the body had been packed in dry ice and dropped from a submarine as part of one of the most elaborate hoaxes of the war.

This war hoax became the subject of a recent BBC documentary called "The Corpse that Fooled the Axis." Based on the discovery of the captain's body, the Germans erroneously concluded that the Allies planned to attack Greece, rather than Sicily. It marked a major turning point in the war and signaled the final downfall of Nazi power and control over Fortress Europe. Since the Allied forces used a dead body to dupe and defeat Germany, it may have been a tit for tat retaliation, to repay in kind, for Nazi agents to do just the same thing with Hitler's corpse.



Reich leaders may have avenged the Allied hoax by packing Adolf Hitler's dead body and transporting it from their hidden mountain Redoubt fortress to his Berlin bunker garden, where it was incompletely destroyed by fire. When the Russians finally pieced together the clues and discovered his actual remains, it appeared to the Allies that Hitler had been in his Berlin bunker all along, and probably died there. But it was really a double who died in Berlin. Fooled by an Axis corpse? In this way, the existence of the Nazi National Redoubt was never publicly acknowledged, and its location was never revealed. Hitler's most important and most dangerous doppelganger was able to escape punishment, leaving behind him the bodies of Gustav and Adolf.

The Final Switch-Over

A few days before Hitler's alleged 1945 suicide, some bunker guests began to suspect that he was an impostor. According to reports, "all his movements were those of a senile man" who appeared to be about 70 years old, somewhat older than his actual age. As if to celebrate imposture, during the last days of the war, Germany launched "Operation Greif" (Skorzeny's Panzer Brigade 150) with its men outfitted in American uniforms and driving captured American tanks, trucks and jeeps. Thus, thousands of US soldiers as far away as Paris had to be stopped by Allied military police and asked to prove their nationality by telling who won the baseball World Series. Even Himmler was later caught trying to pass through British and American lines between Hamburg and Bremerhaven with his mustache shaved, wearing a black patch over his left eye.

Modern historians maintain that the Americans would probably have reached Berlin before the Russians if Eisenhower had not tried to find Hitler's Alpine mountain retreat. The Nazi National Redoubt was assumed to have been somewhere near Hitler's "Eagle's Nest" mountain villa, the Berghof in Berchtesgaden. It was rumored to have been stocked with Nazi jets, rockets, and possibly nuclear weapons. Eisenhower's chief of staff, General Bedell Smith, warned "of a prolonged campaign in the Alpine area." But a Nazi Redoubt fortress was never found in the Alpine mountains.

To the Allies, Hitler's final war actions seemed absurd and contradictory. While Berlin was being attacked by Russian troops from the north, Hitler ordered an all-out counterattack in the southern suburbs of Berlin, led by S.S. General Felix Steiner. Perhaps the actual reason for that Nazi build-up was to form a column for the "final switch-over" to be carried out. The authentic Hitler corpse and its death scene photo would secretly be moved into the Berlin Chancellery bunker, from the hidden Nazi southern Redoubt. The death scene setting would then be carefully reconstructed on the Berlin bunker floor, with a murdered doppelganger, while the real Adolf Hitler's last remains would be burned outside in the garden. If such a final switch-over mission occurred it might answer a critical question of the last days of the war: General Steiner did indeed assemble a massive German arrangement of troops south of Berlin. But he never launched a counterattack. What were the German troops really there for?

"The withdrawal of troops from the north of Berlin to support Steiner had so weakened the front there that the Russians had broken through and their tanks were now within the city limits."

There can be little doubt that Steiner's military column in the southern suburbs of Berlin was privately linked to Obergruppenfuehrer Gottlob Berger, who was head of Himmler's Prisoner-of-War Administration. Captured official Nazi documents clearly stated that "important prisoners were being moved."

Eva Braun arrived in Berlin to join Hitler on April 15. The last visitors to the Chancellery bunker were Hanna Reitsch, a crack woman test pilot, and General Ritter von Greim. Those high ranking visits would have provided the best cover for the final body switch-over, perhaps flown in and regulated by "an unidentified S.S. orderly." We also know that Hitler's double or doppelganger was in the Berlin bunker at that time. On April 30, for example, at about 2:30 in the morning, it was probably a doppelganger who emerged from Hitler's private quarters and appeared in the general dining passage where some 20 persons were assembled. He walked speechlessly down the line shaking their hands with tears in his eyes. Then, an uncanny "party" began in the canteen which went on through the night. Hitler's so-called suicide finally took place at about 3:15 in the afternoon. Shortly after 3:30 Heinz Linge and an unidentified S.S. orderly carried out a male body to the Chancellery garden, wrapped in a blanket.

Martin Bormann immediately sent messages to Hitler's successor, Admiral Doenitz, notifying him that he was now the new leader of Germany. Yet Bormann did not even once mention to Doenitz that the Fuhrer was dead. Was he? Meanwhile, the Goebbels family, also temporarily living in the Berlin bunker, decided to poison their six children. An unidentified S.S. orderly then supposedly killed Goebbels and his wife with two shots in the garden, at their request. The rest of the guests made efforts to escape along the subway. In a ghastly display of villainous irony to avoid punishment, an "important prisoner" was moved for the last time and finally put to rest; deserted by everyone, betrayed by all. "Nothing remains. Every wrong has already been done me."

Two "Hitler corpses" were actually discovered at the Berlin bunker, although only one gunshot sound was ever reported by the bunker witnesses. One of the men was shot in another setting and his body was then moved into the Berlin bunker. How far was he moved? A few streets or almost 2,000 kilometers? Which corpse belonged to the "real" Hitler could not be established by the Allies until after a long-running forensic investigation.

They should have kicked it.


The bloodstained mattress (above right) was discovered in 1980, in a hidden underground World War II bunker. On a map of the world, this bunker is located in a Greek rock called Lycabettus almost 2,000 kilometers below Berlin, or south of Germany. The mathematical likelihood that similarities between mattress folds, blood spots, and markings on the floor are due to random coincidences, is astronomical. In other words, it is more probable that a comet will fall into your tea cup, than for the bunker resemblances to be the results of sheer chance. A body was not found in the Lycabettus bunker, but the evidence of torture was obvious.
They should have kicked that mattress across the floor.




Visible portion of mattress in the
official photo (above) corresponds
to destroyed part of mattress in
the Lycabettus bunker (middle).
Compare to sofa (bottom) where
Hitler allegedly shot himself.

But why dirty their boots?



With radioactive oxide.

The chair with a hole in it (above) was found near the mattress in a corner of the Lycabettus bunker, next to a pile of burnt newspaper shreds from the early 1940s featuring articles about the Nazis. A small ball of clay or soil, pressed around the foot of the chair, bewildered the investigators. It was later concluded that "feet of clay" were used to psychologically torture a hostage tied to the chair, who was probably ordered not to move, but to remain perfectly still and motionless at all times. Any movement of the chair would cause the clay lump to crumble and break into smaller fragments. The guards could then measure even the slightest movements that had occurred while they were not in the bunker, and punish the hostage accordingly. A hole in the seat of the chair may have been due to an act of extreme violence or a malicious experiment. The male body discovered in the Berlin Chancellery garden had only one testicle, according to the Russian autopsy report.



In 1980 I briefly rented a basement apartment in Athens, Greece (Lycabettus - Kolonaki district). One day while cleaning, I discovered a framed canvas that covered a metal door in one of the walls. It looked like a submarine door with an air lock. I called some friends over to help me open it. We had to remove parts of the wooden floor-boards. The bunker walls were a few feet thick. When we opened the door, we found the evidence of a Nazi torture chamber, which I immediately photographed.



The chair with a hole in it was found near the bloody mattress in a corner of the Lycabettus bunker next to a pile of burnt newspaper shreds from the early 1940s featuring articles about the Nazis.

A small ball of clay or soil, pressed around the foot of the chair, bewildered us. We later concluded that "feet of clay" were used to psychologically torture a hostage tied to the chair, who was probably ordered not to move, but to remain perfectly still and motionless at all times. Any movement of the chair would cause the clay lump to crumble and break into smaller fragments. The guards could then measure even the slightest movements that had occurred while they were not in the bunker, and punish the hostage accordingly. A hole in the seat of the chair may have been due to an act of extreme violence or a malicious experiment. I sent the photos to the local police department, but they arrived too late. When the authorities finally got there about a month later, I had been evicted and the evidence had already been removed.

It haunted me for some time. The big question was: who was the Lycabettus hostage or victim of this torture chamber? I visited libraries and bookstores looking for war photos that might resemble the Kolonaki bunker. Then in 1997, I found an official war picture that matched up perfectly.





The mathematical likelihood that similarities between mattress folds, blood spots, and markings on the floor are due to random coincidences is astronomical. In other words, it is more probable that a comet will fall into your tea cup than for the bunker resemblances to be the results of sheer chance.

Please note that I am not out to "prove" anything with this description. I mainly wish to publish a report of what was found in the Lycabettus bunker so that legal investigators can establish what may have happened there. The only problem is this: The dead person in the official photo appears to be Adolf Hitler's double. The alleged body of the Nazi Fuehrer discovered in the Berlin Chancellery garden had only one testicle according to the Russian autopsy report.

What was a "ghost detainee" doing in the Kolonaki bunker? Was this a case of identity theft or extraordinary rendition? How long was the victim being held as a tortured hostage? How were the Nazis using the Kolonaki - Lycabettus district of Athens during World War Two? A war crime appears to have been committed in the Lycabettus bunker. But why are the authorities today not willing to discover who the victim actually was?

Was the same person in both photos? Hitler Part 2

A blurred portrait is visible in the controversial photos of Adolf Hitler's "doppelganger suicide." In the picture above on the left, the out of focus portrait was placed directly onto the corpse. In the Russian movie footage frame on the right, the blurred portrait appears as a prop in the background. This change of position invites serious speculation that the body may also have been moved, switched, or meddled with between photos.


The out-of-focus portrait is probably a photograph of Eva Braun. It's size, contours, shadows, and range of luminance all bear marked similarities to a now-famous series of photos taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, who was Hitler's personal photographer and "corporate" image maker. Eva Braun was Hoffmann's model and darkroom assistant. Whoever included that portrait in the morbid bunker death scene may have done so to lend authenticity to Hitler's suicide deception. But instead of inspiring pity for the Fuhrer's parting gesture to the only woman who could have known him, it cast a spotlight directly on Heinrich Hoffmann's delight for photographic trickery and the likelihood of fraud. The ridiculous presence of a Hoffmann pinup exactly on Hitler's own dead body was almost an outright confession of photographic hocus-pocus, with some help from Eva Braun.

Imagine that you're a high-ranking public official for one of the world's most powerful governments.

The phone rings and suddenly a man who introduces himself as "the butler" calmly informs you that the head of your government is dead. But the courteous butler asks you to trust him on this, because there's nothing to prove his claim, other than disfigured parts of a charred corpse with one testicle, and some gasoline rags, rammed into the ground-soil of a garden with a clumsy wooden club.

Being a responsible civil servant, you quiver and wonder why it was necessary to shame your leader's body in such a macabre way. No funeral or burial rites? Diplomatic Corpus strictly forbids the morbid abuse of the deceased body of a head of state. Doing so would constitute a serious crime...

"I did it with the bodyguard," the butler's voice politely cuts you off, "to prevent the enemy from desecrating his body."

While the reason for destroying vital evidence may seem dubious, if not bogus, you must now make a critical choice: Either insist on more proof, including photographs, or simply trust the butler and affix your signature to a formal agreement for the transfer of world power.

For obvious reasons, this report assumes that at least one of the exhibited Hitler suicide photos was authentic. Other photos were of his dead look-alike.



The top photo is how Hitler's suicide picture was shown in most reports. Visible parts of his white shirt (below the blue arrow) suggest that his vest-front was fastened or buttoned on the left side of his uniform. But according to western military dress regulations, the side-fronts of vests, shirts, and coats should always be fasten with rows of buttons located on the right side of the male soldier's uniform.

The confusing vest evokes the idea that the picture may have been intentionally printed in reverse from left to right, to mirror the image and misrepresent details of locality. The correct dress orientation is in the bottom photo.

Printing negatives backwards is a trick used by portrait photographers to present desirable views because their subjects are accustomed to seeing themselves in mirrors. (See: photographer Hoffmann; assistant, Eva Braun.)

Although the Berlin bunker witnesses never mentioned it in their testimonies, there is a high probability that the successors of Nazism would have required an authentic image of Hitler's corpse before it was destroyed by fire. The photographic evidence would not have been intended for Allied investigators, but for remaining top-ranking Germans who would have certainly desired legitimate details of his death. Such admissible proof would need to serve two purposes: to convince Reich hardliners that Hitler was indeed dead, yet to also mislead the Allies in their inquiry, without failing lie detector tests. Therefore, at least one suicide picture may have been a genuine image of Hitler, not his double (or doppelganger). The photographic negatives, or exposed film in a camera, may have been intentionally left in the Berlin bunker for the Russians to discover. The photo would almost exactly match the movie film footage of Hitler's dead double, taken by the Red Army.

While we know that one of Hitler's doppelgangers died in the Berlin Chancellery bunker, the real Adolf Hitler may have died elsewhere, perhaps even in the German National Redoubt, which was never found by the Allies. If so, an elaborate suicide cover-up would have been required for an important reason: to hide the true whereabouts of the National Redoubt, which according to some observers, was the secret site of Nazi nuclear weapons research. To conceal its location, it would have been necessary to spread a new propaganda myth that there never was a hidden mountain Redoubt, no Nazi nuclear weapons site, and the Fuhrer directed the war from his Berlin bunker, where he finally committed suicide.

An authentic image of Adolf Hitler's corpse was perhaps needed to circulate throughout the world and inform escaped or imprisoned Nazi activists, while deceiving the Allied search. Here is where Hoffmann's photographic trickery came into play: the well-known portrait of Eva Braun was printed in reverse, as a mirror image from left to right, and placed on the body of the real Adolf Hitler laying dead on a floor, somewhere in the German National Redoubt. The corpse's death scene was then carefully photographed and also printed in reverse (duplicated on film). The portrait of Eva on Hitler's body would now appear normal again; with its left and right appearance restored to the correct, original view. Although there would be a slight increase in image contrast, no one would suspect tampering.

But the very small background details of the National Redoubt floor's surface would be seen the other way around, and not match properly with other Allied intelligence photos. An authentic photo of Hitler's death could thus be released for Nazis in custody and on trial to view and allude to as an absolute fact, without failing lie detector tests. But the details of the Redoubt killing floor would never be compromised or shown plainly to Allied investigators. To complete the cover-up, all that was left to do now was to reconstruct the very same scene, using one of Hitler's doubles on the Berlin bunker floor, for the Russians to discover. Of course, Eva Braun's famous portrait would also be placed conspicuously among the bunker debris, as the misleading "clincher." Soon enough, the burnt remains of the real Adolf Hitler would turn up in the Chancellery garden, nowhere near the hidden National Redoubt.

Was the same person in both photos?

One of the Hitler suicide photos displays greater contrast and sharper focus than the other pictures. It may have been taken by a still camera with well-defined exposure settings and better lens quality than the photos which were printed from blurred Russian movie footage. The bunker room lighting contrast is not identical in both pictures below. In the well-defined photo (left), the shadows are dark enough to block out all details under the chin. But the Russian film frame photo shows softer shadows, allowing us to see skin tones and fabric textures in the shaded regions. There is also a barely noticeable difference from the light source (of just a few degrees) in the angle of the shadow which falls from the nose to the mouth. In the Russian film frame photo (right), the angle of the shadow is very slightly displaced toward the center of the upper lip. If the Nazis did indeed produce a multiple fraud with near-microscopic precision, it would have probably been the most important, and expensive, cover-up in history. Remarkably, the characteristic mustache which Hitler was well-known for is not clearly discernible in either of the photos. Below are some other confusing points:


The missing mattress: In the well-defined photo (above), Hitler's corpse is laying with his head at the corner of a stained mattress. But in the Russian movie film frame (right), the mattress is not visible. Although the film frame was shot from a different camera angle than the other photo, the edge of the mattress should be visible above the body's shoulder or behind his coat lapel. A portrait (of Eva Braun?) on Hitler's body in the left photo was moved to the background in the right frame. Perhaps the body and other objects were also moved.

Was one scene a reconstructed copy of the other?

The open mouth: In the well-focused photo (left), Hitler's mouth is gaping wide enough to expose a tooth or part of his tongue. His upper lip appears to be cracked and smudged. But in the Russian film frame the mouth seems almost shut, with no visible smudge marks on the upper lip. When a camera lens is out of focus, details will appear blurred and lines will thicken as the light rays scatter from edges and contours. This can be seen in the apparently larger size of the forehead bullet wound in the blurred frame on the right. Yet, the outline of the mouth does not appear to be thicker or larger in that photo, but thinner and narrower than in the picture on the left.

The mutilated or cauliflower ear: The anatomical structure of the external ear changes from person to person. A doppelganger who may otherwise appear to be an exact look-alike of someone else will probably have noticeable differences in the elevated ring of cartilage on the external ear. The fleshy ear lobe may also display separate features. As a means of removing undesirable clues, the ear was apparently mutilated to avoid comparison. In both photos, the ear seems thickened and deformed, perhaps by repeated blows.


In the frame on the right, the corner of some light-colored, rectangular object(s) can be seen on the floor, just behind the back of Hitler's head. But the converging edges of this flat-sided object are not visible in the photo on the left.

The reality of no floor object(s) seen in one picture seems to indicate (together with the missing bloodstained mattress) that Hitler's body may have been moved between photos. But if so, it appears that the corpse was carefully lifted up and placed on the floor again with near exact precision. This probably would have required a team of photo-stylists to make sure each detail, including the folds on both sides of the coat-front and the hanging strands of hair, matched as much as possible in both pictures. Yet there is no reason why the Russian Army would have contrived such a deception. It is more likely that one of the two suicide photos was produced by a different camera, perhaps even in a different bunker or at an earlier time. How the Soviets may have taken possession of it remains a mystery. Various Reich military cameras were no doubt found on the Chancellery bunker shelves and in pieces of luggage.

While it may not be possible to determine if it's the same person in these photos, sufficient evidence seems to indicate that the body was moved between photos. How far had Hitler's body been moved, just a few feet - or almost two thousand kilometers?

If the man who died in the Berlin bunker was actually Gustav Weber, one of Hitler's doubles whose body was found and photographed by the Russian Army, then how did the real Adolf Hitler's corpse end up being burned in the Chancellery garden?

The World was Lied to about Hitler's Death

'Identity Theft' must be carried out before an impostor can use the name of another person to commit fraud

As the Third Reich collapsed in the spring of 1945, the Russians were the first to enter Berlin and capture Adolf Hitler's bunker. Then, the Soviet Union made a series of contradictory statements or lies concerning Hitler's death. Stalin announced to Truman during lunch in Potsdam on July 17, that Hitler did not commit suicide but had probably escaped. After that, the Russians released photographs of what they claimed to be Hitler's corpse on a dingy floor.

Finally, they asserted that Hitler's burnt remains, together with the body of his mistress Eva Braun, were discovered on May 4, by Soviet soldiers outside the Berlin Chancellery bunker, in the garden.

After 50 years, Russian officials said the photos of Hitler's corpse were part of authentic military film footage from the Moscow Central Archive. But the glasnost photos created more problems than they solved. The main question is: whose body is really in the pictures - was it Adolf Hitler or his double? If it actually was Hitler, then the photos (or film footage) must have been taken by someone inside the bunker before Hitler's corpse was burned with gasoline in the Chancellery garden. It is assumed that Red Army soldiers took the photos just after they captured Berlin.


Were these photos confiscated from Third Reich leaders or printed from a camera deliberately left in the bunker? To confuse us, the released photos were sometimes published in reverse, from left to right, in a mirror image, to misrepresent details. Were they retouched or manipulated? Props were applied to the background, including a blurred female portrait which in one photo appears on the dead man's chest. Reports also mention a "group photo" of soldiers standing around the corpse, which may have been moved between photos. The man in the pictures has not been positively identified.

No other photos of Hitler's body were ever released by the Russians, who insist they discovered his corpse and performed several autopsies to positively identify him. How and why such an extremely important forensic investigation could have been conducted in the 20th century, without extensive photographic evidence, remains one of the great mysteries of modern history. Surely, the world was lied to about Hitler's death.

Various Western sources have reported that the dead body in the photo was Hitler's double (or doppelganger), a man called Gustav who was executed with a gunshot to the forehead. Some give his name as Gustav Weber, while other say he was Gustav Weler. No further attempts were made to identify him. By contrast, reports now circulate in Russia that an actor, Andreas Kronstaedt, was the impersonator who had volunteered to die in Hitler's place. This was the theme of the 1996 film, Conversation with the Beast, directed by one of Fassbinder's followers, Armin Mueller-Stahl. Meanwhile, in Germany some suspicion still points to Julius Schreck, who was Hitler's favorite driver and party member from 1921. He occasionally acted as Hitler's double because of their resemblance.

According to some reports, Schreck died in a traffic accident in 1936. Other reports say that he died from an abscessed tooth fever. To confuse matters more, Time magazine once wrote that Hitler's alleged double was Heinrich Bergner who was killed in July, 1944 when a bomb or hand grenade exploded under Hitler's table. Other publications said that a stenographer named Berger died when Colonel Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg planted a bomb under Hitler's chair on July 20, 1944, at his headquarters in East Prussia. Some sources have oddly suggested that the burnt corpse found in the Chancellery garden was that of SS-Gruppenfuehrer Hermann Fegelein, husband of Eva Braun's sister, Gretl, who was stripped of his rank for committing treason and shot outside the Berlin bunker two days before Hitler's suicide.

Rumors started to circulate about a double for Hitler. He was supposed to be a total look-alike, and he was trained to "be" Hitler and was supposedly going to die a martyr’s death on the battlefield so that Hitler could be glorified without dying. - New York Times 19 April 1945.

The erratic rumors about Hitler's doubles were soon to be accepted by many as facts. According to one report: "The doubles were given voice and movement instruction, and they mastered Hitler's soft conversational voice and distinctive walk. Their faces and dental work were altered, and even their spines were broken in the same place where Hitler had been injured in the First World War. German efficiency left nothing to chance. But the one thing that none of these doppelgangers could ever hope to duplicate, was Hitler's hypnotic, charismatic public speaking style. His ability to sway a crowd had never been matched or equaled. The doubles would be good for public appearances, parties, or maybe meetings or briefings where Hitler was not expected to have that much interaction with his underlings."

The doubles would also be good for dying in place of Hitler, should the occasion arise. When Newsweek magazine published an article named Adolf Hitler's Double, in its March 13, 1939 issue, the editors were only repeating an opinion that was already widely acknowledged by the Allies. According to a recent Russian story, "Goebbels had engaged six doubles to impersonate Hitler for purposes of security and public appearances. After the capitulation of the Third Reich, Hitler had to die for the sake of vindication. There could be no doubt of his death."

Despite the intelligence reports, many Western historians continued to maintain that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin underground bunker on April 30, 1945. Ironically, it was not the evidence provided by Russia that convinced them, but the testimony of the obsessively devoted Nazis who were also present in the Chancellery bunker when Hitler allegedly killed himself. Here is where their futile pretence became a matter of imprudence: For they were primarily the very same historians who insisted that the body shown in the annoying Russian photos was a doppelganger killed by those Nazis in the Berlin bunker who wanted to thwart Allied investigators. We were therefore expected to believe that after committing the outright murder of a double for the purpose of obstructing justice, our Nazi bunker guests were nonetheless quite frank and honest in their eye-witness accounts of what really became of Adolf Hitler.

Hence, one witness reported seeing a gunshot wound in Hitler's mouth, while others claimed it was near the corner of his eye (some even hinted that Hitler's butler strangled him and forced a cyanide capsule into his mouth). Pick a card, any card. One witness described finding the body of Hitler perched limp next to a dead Eva Braun on an elongated, upholstered sofa. But another found Hitler's corpse sitting alone near a corner, on a chair by itself. Mix and match. Hitler's one-day marriage to Eva Braun was another sentimental enticement, orchestrated to win our naive confidence. For only a worm could marry a lovely woman, just to poison her a few hours later, and then escape with a doppelganger's charred corpse left in his place. The unhappy couple, together at last. The fact that a maid admitted seeing a Hitler look-alike confined to the butler's pantry area was not considered to be of great consequence. A question mark near the water pipes? And the murder of the doppelganger was just another war technicality. Who did it? No doubt it was one - or all - of our bunker guests. They would not stop even at murder to perpetrate their Fuhrer's cover-up. But by now, the world was totally convinced of their honest integrity and humble desire to satisfy our secret wish that Hitler should not have escaped justice.

Establishment historians assured us that Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker, shortly after exchanging marriage vows with Eva Braun. No bullet was ever found. But that does not matter. The blood stains on the sofa were reportedly of the wrong blood-type. But such details need not concern us. Hitler's entire body apparently vanished into thin air. But at least we found his teeth, in the garden.

Dental assistants apparently identified them from X-rays made public in 1968. And what was the actual point of murdering the doppelganger on the floor? What was that cover-up about if Hitler had already left a legally written will; a historical document, stating that his body was to be "immediately destroyed" by fire? We never thought of that. But since we must believe in something, our Chancellery bunker guests were ingenious enough to embellish us with such an entwined mass of information and confused additions that we could now produce our own personal interpretations of history; our own special views of faith. Indeed, an entire library of books may be filled with eye-witness accounts and so-called proofs of Hitler's suicide. Most of the new printed works were merely rehashed Berlin bunker testimonies, smoothed out to make a bit more sense, and hopefully convince us by their sheer size of whatever we seriously hope is true. But as one American military officer commented: "Upon reviewing the actual facts, not a single insurance company would ever pay out a cent to similar claims based on such scant, non-conclusive evidence." With certainty, the world was lied to about Hitler's death.

What sort of cover-up was the actual purpose behind the murder of Hitler's double? The most prevalent opinion is that the true motive was for Hitler to escape: According to the Washington Post, the US Office of Censorship intercepted a letter in July 1945 written from someone in Washington. Addressed to a Chicago newspaper, the letter claimed that Hitler was living in a German-owned hacienda 450 miles from Buenos Aires. The US government gave this report enough credibility to act on it, sending a classified telegram to the American embassy in Argentina requesting help in following up the inquiry.

In his 1995 book "The Greatest Illusion: The Death (?) of Adolf Hitler," Australian historian Fred C. McKenzie summarizes how Stalin was adamant in his conviction that Adolf Hitler still lived. In August of 1945, Stalin personally accused the British of "concealing the real, living Adolf Hitler in their sector of Berlin." A similar inquiry currently being published by Oberbaum Verlag in Germany is "Hitler's Double" by Walter Laufenberg, an award winning German author who has written and published several novels.

The noted British surgeon Hugh Thomas is chief spokesman for the growing opinion that not only Adolf Hitler had a doppelganger, but also Rudolf Hess and Heinrich Himmler. Perhaps all of the top Reich leaders kept look-alikes as part of a master contingency plan to escape unnoticed should the need arise. Dr. Thomas' doppelganger theory was finally investigated by Scotland Yard and the final report now remains hidden from the public. A hundred-year ban has been imposed on key facts concerning the so-called deaths of certain Reich leaders.

Although inclined to doubt Thomas' doppelganger theory, L. Ingrams Jr. describes what he believes to have been a British plot to lure Rudolf Hess to England using Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and the notorious occult Satanist Aleister Crowley: In Hugh Thomas' book, The Murder of Rudolf Hess (1979) Thomas recalls his medical examination of Rudolf Hess in 1973, while Hess was in Spandau Prison. He believed that there was a difference between Hess' medical records from World War I and the torso of the man imprisoned at Spandau. 'The torso cannot lie' wrote Thomas, convinced that the Hess in Spandau was not the real Rudolf Hess.

"Ian Fleming knew that Hitler, Himmler and Hess were all fascinated by the occult, particularly Astrology, but also by Occultist rituals. Secret Agents such as Frau Nagenast , an Astrologer who Hess consulted and paid, were employed to produce charts that pointed to the 10th of May being a propitious moment for Hess to fly to Britain. Fleming carefully made sure that the Astrological forecasts that Hess received from his usual Astrologers contained very similar information. This was accomplished using intrigue, bribery and forgery."

Fleming, who was part of the (ALSOS) mission to locate the Nazi nuclear site, hoped to arrange a face-to-face meeting between Rudolf Hess and Aleister Crowley in Britain. But Fleming's proposal was rejected by his superiors of higher rank in the British Intelligence Department.

According to a 1997 report by Sean David Morton, a female Nazi Intelligence Officer named Magda Zeitfeld offered her services to the United States Government. She worked in Berchtesgaaden, and was apparently one of Germany's top intelligence agents. She had been sending the Allies information since the spring of 1944, acting as a double agent, because the SS she worked for had murdered her father and brother, under very mysterious circumstances. Her father had the biggest plastic surgery clinic in Berlin. He was a pioneer in the field, and well financed by the Nazis, due to their obsession with physical perfection, and was doing a landmark business. He pioneered and specialized in implanted facial prosthetics, using highly advanced silicates to build up weak jaws and noses to fit the German fashion of chiseled strength.

Three men, exceptionally high level Nazi officials, were brought to her father's clinic under a veil of extreme security and secrecy in the fall of 1943. Her father and brother were required to drastically alter the appearance of each of the men. Two weeks after the "Men" left her family's clinic, and sufficient time had passed to be sure there was no need to go back for follow up treatment, the hospital was raided and the entire staff, including both Magda's father and brother, were brutally murdered, and the clinic was burned to the ground, files and all. Magda knew that it was the Nazi's who had done this, in fact it was a division within the SS for whom she worked. According to the report, two of the men were Martin Borman and Adolf Hitler. Just as Himmler aimed to do, Adolf Hitler would escape from Berlin disguised as a priest.

That Hitler did undergo some sort of cosmetic surgery was independently confirmed in a well-known 1942 Time magazine article about the Nazi leader. His plastic surgery was also referred to by United Press Central European manager Frederick C. Oechsner, and in the Office of Strategic Services' Hitler Source Book.


The story broke when some journalists began to notice a strange alteration in Adolf Hitler's physical appearance, especially his nose. The SS immediately released an official press dispatch stating that Hitler had his fat nose streamlined by a plastic surgeon. That did not, however, explain why the originally thin, straight nose of Corporal Hitler gave way to the large, exaggerated nostrils of the Fuhrer.
Other minor details of identification no doubt had to be handled with care when dealing with a double. Exact body height was very important: Eva Braun's statement regarding Hitler's Munich-based double, that he "wears built-up shoes to overcome a height difference," possibly explains the 5 cm height discrepancy of the body autopsied. Duplicating eye color accurately also presented a perceptible doppelganger obstacle: In 1887 the first contact lenses were manufactured from glass and fit to cover the eyes. By 1939 contact lenses were made from plastic. The wearing of dyed or tinted contact lenses to change the apparent eye color did not become common until the late 20th century. But colored contact lenses could have been easily exploited as early as the First World War. Changing eye color was part of the infamous research conducted by Joseph Mengele, the Nazi doctor of Auschwitz. Mengele had dye injected into the eyes of several subjects.

Surprisingly, the tell-tale fingerprint issue was not such a serious problem in the early days of Nazism. Although various anthropologists and novelists had toyed with the idea of fingerprints as a form of identification in the 1800s, it was not until 1924 that an act of congress established the Identification Division of the FBI. But by then, Hitler already led the Nazi party. And later of course, the Reich maintained full control over all fingerprints kept in Germany's files. Hitler's burnt corpse had no surface skin to yield fingerprints.


In the end, only Hitler's false teeth, found with the Chancellery garden corpse fragments, provided some evidence to satisfy the strict terms imposed by most modern insurance companies. And that was still highly questionable, because a patient's bridgework could easily be reproduced by an experienced dentist and deliberately placed almost anywhere.

The key suspects of a possible cover-up in the Berlin bunker were Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, Otto Gunsche, Hitler's Adjutant, Hans Baur, his personal pilot and Johann Rattenhuber, the Chief of Bodyguards. They were all vigorously trained to guard Hitler's personal secrets, even under the threat of torture and death. And they would not hesitate to kill a doppelganger to complete their Chancellery cover-up. However there was still one entity they could not easily deceive or trick: the polygraph or lie-detector test. An instrument capable of continuously recording blood pressure, respiration, and pulse rate was devised by John Larson in 1921, followed by the polygraph (1926) of Leonarde Keeler, and the psychogalvanometer (1936) of Walter Summers, which measured electrical changes on the skin. Because instruments were able to record bodily changes resulting from the telling of a lie, it is likely that certain testimonies, as witnessed by those in the bunker, were absolutely true. Perhaps for this reason, no one actually saw Adolf Hitler shoot himself. They could only be called upon to describe what they did to dispose of the dead body. Whose corpse they actually burned in the garden was a matter of recognition, especially if Hitler's double was an exact look-alike. In this way, even a lie-detector test could be beaten. Certainly, some of the bunker guests presumably could not establish the difference between Hitler and his doppelganger.

The World was Lied to about Hitler's Death

A View on Hitler's Sexuality

Sex and Hitler. It's an all too irresistible combination. All too many attempts to explain Hitler have been haunted by the assumption that his heart of darkness resides in a dark secret about his sexuality. Whether it's a rumored deformation of his genitals, a putative degrading sexual preference, there must be some abnormality. It makes us nervous to think anyone in any way "normal" could become a Hitler. In particular, Hitler's tormented relationship with Geli Raubal, his half-niece, summons up some uneasy, unresolved questions about the relationship between sexual and political pathology.

Sexual explanations for Hitler have proliferated in a postwar, post-Freudian intellectual climate in which nearly all biographers seek to find some occluded sexual source, a secret key to their subjects' psyches in an idiosyncratic sexuality. Sexual pathology leads to political pathology in this simplistic equation. It's almost always reductive, almost always denies personal responsibility—in favor of uncontrollable compulsion—and it is almost never usefully illuminating.

It doesn't seem to matter that the evidence on the question is so fragmentary, rumor-ridden, uncorroborated, and conflicting. It doesn't seem to matter that the etiology of such putative aberrations involve contradictory, evidence-challenged theories of Hitler's childhood: among them, that he had a father who beat him (according to psychoanalyst Alice Miller); or rather that he developed "a malignant incestuous attachment" to his overprotective mother (according to Erich Fromm); that he witnessed a "primal scene" of parental sex, or had a missing testicle, or had contracted syphilis from a Jewish prostitute as a teenager, or was secretly gay.

Or maybe it was something else, something virtually unspeakable. Of all the sexual explanations of Hitler, none has the detail and drama of the one involving a young woman named Geli Raubal. She was 27 years old when she was found dead in a pool of blood in a bedroom in Adolf Hitler's apartment in September 1931 (on the eve of his first presidential campaign). Found dead with Hitler's gun by her side, a bullet through her lung, and unresolved questions about the nature of her relationship with her "Uncle Alf" in the air.

Later, Hitler explainers would posit that Raubal's death left Hitler so embittered it became a turning point in his political career. (The "No More Mr. Nice Guy" Hitler explanation).
Sex and evil.

I feel a personal responsibility to warn against some of the pitfalls of the Geli Raubal relationship.

I harbor the hope—or the hubris—that I can suggest that there are certain temptations in the Geli Raubal story that all too many have fallen for in writing about Hitler, sex, and evil. Another unfounded strain of Hitler explanation that allows him to escape personal moral responsibility for his crimes.

The Selbstmord register, the lustmord narrative, and a digression on orgone boxes.

When I think of Geli Raubal, I recall the grim fortress that is the Bavarian State Archives in Munich, where I got the chief archivist to show me the Selbstmord record for the year 1931.

Selbstmord, of course, is the evocative German word for suicide. The suicide register was a thick musty accounting-style ledger with hand-ruled pages, and ink black as night. The 1931 Selbstmord recorded 334 suicides in Munich that year, nearly one a day. No. 193, dated September 18, was for Angela Raubal, 27 years old, birthplace Linz, Austria, "medical student."

"Medical student" was false at the time, but more important was what the skeletal register didn't record. Her true address, for instance: Adolf Hitler's house. Nor was there room to report that she was Hitler's half-niece, that her body had been found in a bedroom down the hall from his, nor any of the sordid rumors surrounding Hitler and Angela, known as "Geli."

But people talked about it: A survey I did of German and Austrian newspapers for September and October 1931, made it clear that sordid rumors about questionable and quasi-incestuous relations between Hitler and Geli were widespread, and some accounts implied a connection with the suicide. "His demands became unbearable," one anti-Hitler paper reported.

There was, the Bavarian State archivist told me, a hint in the Selbstmord ledger entry of some ambiguous indications of doubt about the verdict of suicide. There are some hard-to-decipher markings on the very right-hand box of the Geli Raubal entry under which the disposition of the case is recorded. To the archivist who showed me the Selbstmord, the numbered markings suggest the case had been reopened, the suicide verdict questioned by a public prosecutor.

There were all sorts of rumors and fragmentary reports of a reopened investigation at the time, rumors I was never able to confirm. No documents have surfaced to testify to it aside from the ambiguous encryptions in the Selbstsmord register. And in fact, whether or not the case was reopened then, the case has been opened and reopened and reopened by historians, biographers, and novelists for 75 years now. All, alas, too late.

I was one of the reopeners. I initially wanted to prove that Hitler murdered Geli Raubal (or at the very least drove her to suicide with his "demands") and that the murder arose in some way from some depraved or degenerate treatment of his half-niece. It would make a good story, and some historians and novelists (Ronald Hayman and Ron Hansen, for instance) have tried to make a good story of it. But I did not find sufficient corroboration for the inferences I might have liked to make. The novelistic inferences.

What do we think of novels that incorporate history and then use potential versions of it? Do they illuminate the possibilities of unproven (but un-disproven) conjectures and thus benefit us? (Not that this should be the only criterion for a novel.) Or do they perpetuate unfounded distortions of history by presenting themselves as truth?

To understand where I am going with this one must understand the theory of sex, of the orgasm, I am using. Namely, the sexual/characterological theories of Freudian disciple and psychoanalytic black sheep Wilhelm Reich.

Few remember Reich now, but in a way he's a progenitor of the New Age Mind/Body/Energy ideology, especially through his American disciple Alexander Lowen of "bioenergetic" semifame. Reich believed that one's character is determined (or determines—it gets a little fuzzy on this chicken/egg question) by the quality of one's orgasm. If one has the right kind of orgasm, the "unarmored" liberating orgasm which allows the "orgone energy" of the universe (a force most physicists have not reported encountering) to flow through one's body and mind, then one will have a good, liberated character and be less likely to commit pathological, genocidal acts. If one has the "wrong" kind of orgasm, one becomes a fascist or worse.

These theories Reich adumbrated in prewar books like The Mass Psychology of Fascism. In his postwar American expatriate period, Reich became more and more of an orgasm extremist and scold, publishing subsequent treatises featuring detailed instruction manuals—complete with diagrams of sexual positions, with directional arrows for every limb. Reich also devised a mysterious contraption called the "orgone energy accumulator" or "orgone box," which one was supposed to sit in and, well, accumulate orgone energy. Reichian theory put a "scientific" gloss on the depiction of good and bad sexuality in certain postwar fiction. (Saul Bellow, Irving Howe, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Norman Mailer, were said to have put in time in orgone boxes.) It seemed daring at the time, although Reich ended up regarded as a crank, did jail time for allegedly making cancer-cure claims for his orgone box, and eventually turned into a full-fledged UFO nut.
But aside from Reich, Mailer would have a long tradition of Hitler apocrypha to draw on in explaining the Führer through sex, explaining him, for instance, through the kind of sexual relationship he was supposed to have had according to what I call the "Lustmord narrative" of the Hitler-Geli Raubal ménage.

The Lustmord narrative fits the agenda of two strangely different parties of Hitler explainers. First, certain embittered former Hitler confidantes. Two of the latter, "Putzi" Hansfstangl and Otto Strasser, spread a particularly lurid, excretory version of what went on between Hitler and Geli Raubal. (It starts with "undinism" and doesn't end there, if you know what I mean. If you don't, you're better off in your state of innocence.) In addition to ex-Nazis, the other parties that favor the Lustmord narrative are (mainly) Jewish psychoanalysts who sought to turn the ex-Nazi rumors into a psychosexual analysis of Hitler's evil.

Let me summarize the lurid, unreliable narrative this way: Young, fresh-faced 23-year-old Geli comes to Hitler's Bavarian mountain retreat in the Obersalzberg to serve as her mother's (Hitler's half-sister Bridget's) helper in housekeeping duties for the paroled Nazi party Führer about the time he re-enters politics with a big Nazi-party parliamentary election surge in 1928.*

Geli is infatuated by the aura of celebrity and political significance that surrounded Uncle Alf. Uncle Alf is entranced by the beautiful young girl. Hitler is reported to have squired her around the countryside, almost as if she were an official consort; he called her the perfect image of an Aryan maiden; on the other hand, one of her rivals called her "an empty-headed little slut"…

The next step was Geli's move into Hitler's three-story Munich mansion as a vaguely defined "housekeeper" separate from the mother, who remained behind in the Obersalzberg.

She prompts grumbling in the Hitler party about public relations, prompts jealousy on the part of the party wives and women, all exacerbated by a secretiveness and ambiguity surrounding whatever went on behind closed doors between the two.

And whatever went on is much in dispute. Nothing? Something "normal"? Or something "nicht natürlich," unnatural, degrading, not voter-friendly. In any case, things end badly in a short time when Geli, according the official version, shoots herself because of "frustrated artistic ambitions," as Hitler's party flack put it.

The cops asked nothing about Hitler's attentions or his restrictions on her or his reported jealousy, all of which figure heavily in the Lustmord narrative. No, after a hasty suicide verdict (without an autopsy), her body was shipped off to be buried in Vienna, in her native Austria, leaving behind a trail of questions. When the fuss died down, what might have been Hitler's Chappaquiddick did not affect his political momentum.

I tried to find evidence for murder or a cover-up by Hitler or by somebody in his circle. And while there was certainly a cover-up of the closeness of their relationship and perhaps genuine ignorance of what it was, there did not seem to be a cover-up of a murder or indisputable evidence of the nature of their relationship.

But Hitler's alibi looked good, and no other suspect emerged. Biographer Ronald Hayman twisted himself into knots trying to discredit the alibi, mistakenly inserting an extra day into the chronology to allow Hitler time to kill Geli and scurry off to Nuremberg, but the theory was based, I believe, on a misinterpretation of Hitler's chauffeur's testimony. And novelist Ron Hansen bought the perversion story.

So, here are the temptations: the murder narrative and the intimations of paraphilic sexuality.

Should we attribute Hitler's moral deformity to his sexual proclivities? Or will they be the promptings of a devil? Do we underpin it with some version of the Freudian interpretation of Dr. Norbert Bromberg, an NYU professor who, in the first book-length "analysis" of Hitler by a credentialed psychoanalyst, Hitler's Psychopathology, attempts to link Hitler's exterminationist anti-Semitism to his relationship with Geli Raubal and the discredited "Jewish blood" legend (the rumor that Hitler was obsessed with the possibility there was a Jew in his family tree)?

Here's Dr. Bromberg's strained link:

In 1928, "Hitler was deeply and more openly involved with ... his niece Geli. About the same time he was preparing a work which became known as Hitler's Secret Book published for the first time thirty-three years later. In this book he associated his hatred of Jews with ideas about blood and race for the first time. His sexual interest in his niece must have inevitably stirred in Hitler thoughts of incest and fears of harming her and possible progeny by what he believed might result: the corruption of her blood [by the putative "Jewish blood" Hitler believed he'd been tainted with—in Bromberg's view]. All these ideas and wishes he projected onto the Jews ..."

And so by ignoring certain realities (Hitler had invoked blood and race long before 1928) and by making certain unwarranted assumptions (Hitler believed he had Jewish blood; he was sexually involved with Geli) ... Voila! Poor Geli Raubal becomes the unwitting cause of the Holocaust.

This stew of misinformation and sexual innuendo by a reputable Freudian alone should warn many away from trying to make the Geli Raubal episode the decisive one in the history of Hitler and the Holocaust.

Wouldn't it be more daring to attempt to create a relationship between Hitler and Raubal that wasn't either sexual or decisive in shaping his subsequent political career?

One of the few historians to entertain the possibility that sex has been overemphasized in Hitler explanation is John Lukacs, who has argued (in The Hitler of History) that Hitler wasn't that interested in sex. And there is just no reliable evidence of any of the outré perversions attributed to Hitler and Geli.

But one thing I've learned about Hitler explanation: The shakier the evidence, the more hidden from view, the more attractive an explanation becomes as a secret key to Hitler's psyche.

What does it all matter in the scheme of things? The trouble with the sexual explanation of Hitler, with almost all sexual explanations, is that they are reductionist: They leave out the political dimension, the cultural and ideological dimension of causation. They leave out 19 centuries of European religious anti-Semitism that laid the groundwork for Hitler; they leave out the proliferation of 19th-century German "racial science" that propagated the notion, indeed virtually invented the notion—of "racial," biological, anti-Semitism—of Judaism as a genetic disease that couldn't be cured by mere conversion as in the past. Because it was "in the blood," it could be cured only by extermination.

It exculpates German culture that was so receptive to the murderous hate-filled rants of Hitler. It exculpates powerful influences on Hitler such as our own Henry Ford, whose book The International Jew shaped his thought and served as a template for Mein Kampf.

If only it were that easy, explaining Hitler's political pathology as the product of sexual pathology.