The Mind of Adolf Hitler - Content and Conclusions

Content and Conclusions

The report used many sources to profile Hitler, including a number of informants, including Hitler's nephew, William Patrick Hitler, his family physician, Dr. Eduard Bloch, Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hermann Rauschning, Princess Stephanie von Hohenlohe, Otto Strasser, Friedlinde Wagner, and Kurt Ludecke. The so-called "Hitler Source Book" which was appended to the wartime report, ran over one thousand pages and was indexed against the report. The groundbreaking study was the pioneer of offender profiling and political psychology, today commonly used by many countries as part of assessing international relations.

In addition to predicting that if defeat for Germany was near, Hitler would most likely choose suicide, Langer's report stated that Hitler was "probably impotent" as far as heterosexual relations were concerned and that there was a possibility that Hitler had participated in a homosexual relationship. The report stated that:

he belief that Hitler is homosexual has probably developed (a) from the fact that he does show so many feminine characteristics, and (b) from the fact that there were so many homosexuals in the Party during the early days and many continue to occupy important positions. It is probably true that Hitler calls Foerster "Bubi", which is a common nickname employed by homosexuals in addressing their partners. This alone, however, is not adequate proof that he has actually indulged in homosexual practices with Foerster, who is known to be a homosexual.

Langer's report also concluded that Hitler loved pornography and masochistic sex, and in particular that he had "coprophagic tendencies or their milder manifestations" in his heterosexual relationships, and masochistically derived "sexual gratification from the act of having a woman urinate or defecate on him." Langer concluded that Hitler was "probably a neurotic psychopath bordering on schizophrenia."

The report briefly mentions some claims that a Rothschild fathered Alois Hitler – Adolf's father, who was illegitimate – when Hitler's paternal grandmother, Maria Schicklgruber, supposedly worked as a house servant in Vienna, but concludes "rom a purely scientific point of view ... it is sounder not to base our reconstruction on such slim evidence but to seek firmer foundations." While there are numerous statements in the report that have proven, on further investigation, to be erroneous, it is nevertheless an invaluable study piece for any serious historian of the Third Reich. The bibliography of the report contains close to 400 entries.

In a review of The Mind of Adolf Hitler for The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Martin Waugh concluded that Langer's work was important "because of its value to the historian; because it was a 'first' for this country's intelligence services; and because of the official recognition of psychoanalysis the assignment implied."