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.