Posted on 03/30/2005 7:12:00 PM PST by neverdem
He was a feminine boy, averse to manual work, who was "annoyingly subservient" to superior officers as a young soldier and had nightmares that were "very suggestive of homosexual panic." The mass killings that he later perpetrated stemmed in part from a desperate loathing of his own submissive weakness, and the humiliations of being beaten by a sadistic father.
What is believed to be the first psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the Office of Strategic Services, a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency, was posted this month by Cornell University Law Library on its Web site (www.lawschool.cornell.edu/library/donovan/hitler/). Although declassified some years ago, the report, written in 1943, has not been widely cited or available to the public, historians and librarians at Cornell say.
The library published the analysis after receiving permission from a relative of its author, the late Dr. Henry A. Murray, a prominent personality expert at Harvard in the middle of the last century. The document's release was reported on Tuesday on the Fox News program "The Big Story With John Gibson."
"For a long time, people thought there was only one psychological profile of Hitler commissioned by the O.S.S.," said Dr. Jerrold M. Post, a professor of psychiatry at George Washington University and the founder of the C.I.A.'s psychological branch, referring to a wartime report by Dr. Walter C. Langer that formed the basis of his 1972 book, "The Mind of Adolf Hitler."
Dr. Langer, a noted psychoanalyst, died in 1981. Dr. Murray was among several psychoanalysts who had worked with him in profiling Hitler for the O.S.S., and the Murray profile was apparently incorporated into the later, more definitive Langer account.
It is clear that this earlier profile added to the definitive profile of Hitler, Dr. Post said, "and very few people have known that it even exists."
Dr. Post said he came upon a draft of the Murray profile in 2000 while researching a book of his own, "The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaders."
Some experts, including Dr. Post himself, are not convinced that the report is without significant shortcomings.
The posted document is a condensed version of Dr. Murray's evaluation, a mixture of psychoanalytic theorizing, speculation and lurid detail about Hitler's life that could have come from a crime novel. In an authoritative voice, Dr. Murray diagnoses in Hitler neurosis, hysteria, paranoia, Oedipal tendencies, schizophrenia, "infinite self-abasement" and "syphilophobia," which he describes as a fear of contamination of the blood through contact with a woman. But the document refers only vaguely to its sources, and presents no scientific evidence for its findings.
"There's a whole lot of what we would now think of as psychobabble in Murray's article," Dr. Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University School of Medicine, said after reviewing the profile. One example, Dr. Stone said, is "the suggestion that as a child Hitler witnessed his mother and father having sex, which in those days was given great weight as a source of psychological turmoil." Such an effect has since been discredited.
Dr. Murray did not have the benefit of genetic studies, or of more carefully distinguished categories of mental illness established later.
"Almost anyone who appeared crazy was called schizophrenic back then," Dr. Stone said, "and people didn't make distinctions between schizophrenia, for example, and manic depression."
In a more recent psychological profile, the neurologist and psychiatrist Dr. Fritz Redlich argued in his 1998 book, "Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet," that while troubled and with paranoid tendencies, Hitler had probably not been mentally ill. Even during the war, many historians were very skeptical of efforts to explain, with what they described as armchair psychoanalysis, acts of transcendent cruelty.
Dr. Murray himself was a controversial figure. Having returned to Harvard after the war, he was involved in psychological experiments in 1959-62 in which a stress test similar to one the O.S.S. had used to assess recruits was administered to student volunteers. Among them was the young Theodore J. Kaczynski, a precocious student at Harvard who later became known as the Unabomber. Lawyers for Mr. Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty in 1998 to letter bomb attacks that killed 3 people and wounded 28 others, traced some of his emotional instability and fear of mind control to those tests.
Still, historians say, the spirit of Hitler is alive, and infused with morbid detail, in Dr. Murray's pages. The growing boy, a frustrated romantic who loved painting castles and temples, and who was enthralled with architecture, also developed "a profound admiration, envy and emulation of his father's masculine power and a contempt for his mother's feminine submissiveness and weakness," Dr. Murray wrote.
"Thus," the profile says, "both parents were ambivalent to him: his father was hated and respected; his mother was loved and depreciated. Hitler's conspicuous actions have all been in imitation of his father, not his mother."
The assessment also includes advice for how the Allies should handle Hitler if he was captured (secretly film him, replete with sound track, in his cell so that the world would witness his rantings) and what name to give him when talking to his defeated countrymen (False Prophet or False Messiah at first; Corporal Satan or World Criminal No. 1 later). As for how Hitler's life would play out in the absence of capture, Dr. Murray predicted suicide.
"There is a powerful compulsion in him to sacrifice himself and all of Germany to the revengeful annihilation of Western culture, to die, dragging all of Europe with him into the abyss," Dr. Murray wrote.
Barring a deadly coup or insanity, Dr. Murray speculated, Hitler would arrange to have himself killed by a German or a Jew, to complete the myth of the hero betrayed. Or he would retreat to his bunker and, in dramatic fashion, shoot himself.
In the spring of 1945, as far as historians can determine, that is exactly what he did.
None of that refutes the extensive evidence that he was indeed homosexual. As for Roehm who believes Hitler had any objection to his obvious and totally public homosexual life of which Hitler was completely aware having worked closely with the man for nearly fifteen years. Roehm was killed when it became politically expedient to mollify the Wehrmacht. The mock outrage was mere theatrics like most of the Nazi statements involving virtue.
One of my professors once said "If Hitler had never been born, he still would have been leader of post WW1 Germany. " After thinking about it, I had to concur.
Roehm's homosexuality had nothing whatsoever to do with his being killed duting the Night of the Long Knives.
Hitler needed the backing of the army brass, and they refused to give it as long as the SA remained a threat. Roehm had outlived his usefulness and had been clamoring for more power in the new regime.
The Nazi's "Oh, my they were homosexuals!?!" is akin to Capt. Louis Renault (Claude Rains) saying, "I'm shocked, SHOCKED that there is gambling going on here......."
Only homosexuals of certain political or racial bents were in the camps. Homos built the early Nazi movement and were quite welcome until they became politically inexpedient to associate with and when Hitler was taking steps to hide his own early period within that cult.
The report is flawed, so how much did Wild Bill act on the information?
That is quite true. The Nazis were extremely tolerant of homosexuality (and all sexual deviancy, for that matter). Few, if any, homosexuals were interred in camps exclusively because of their sexual preference.
Exactly. Hitler had dossiers prepared on the private lives of anyone of importance in Germany thus was completely aware of all this sort of thing.
Preciate it.
Hmmmmm......
******
Hmmmmm......
John Kerry has relatives in France - and I believe there was talk of a name change in 1946 or so. Hmmmm.... ;-)
Nazism persecuted effeminate gays, butch gays were promoted.
He made a student's living painting postcards. Some talent, but did not get into art school. Had a lifelong interest in architecture, especially design of bunkers.
Yeah, a real genius, getting rewarded by golden showers. Too bad der Fuhrer wasn't pithed like a frog!
I'm always interested in expanding my knowledge and would appreciate it if you would direct me to sources that on an point by point basis rebut the wartime psychological profiles. There are also the accounts of survivors to rebut.
Pointing to Roehms killing in 1934 is unconvincing as gay-on-gay violence is quite common. Also, In addition to a consolidation of power, the killings in the early to mid-1930's also expunged Hitlers past.
Nothing you have written would rule out Hitler doing it with dogs during his years in Vienna, either - except the complete lack of any evidence.
I suspect this means you aren't interested in a serious discussion of the topic.
Where did you find information about Hitler having a son!??!?
Time Magazine ran a story on him when he died, around 1979. That is where I first saw it. He really DID look like his father.
If you search the web dilligently you'll find information on him. I tried Googling just now, but came up with so many irrelevant sites I gave up.
A clear definition of sexuality is first needed. I'm taking the opposing view just for the heck of it.
A lie? How do you know I wasn't stating nonsense just to see where the argument would go?
If you think the concept itself is a lie, you'll need some examples and support for the position. I'll take whatever position makes the most sense at this moment.
I'm really confused about this whole gayness thing. It may be one of the most confusing subjects in existence.
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