Sex & the Swastika

[Doug Millison]

Rosenbaum refers to Pynchon often enough in his New York Observer column to
make me think he knows that it's Katje who does the Geli (Raubal)  deed in
GR. You could always ask him, of course. I imagine his telephone is listed
and he might even answer reader mail generated by his column.

Pynchon's play with character names is deep,  the subject of more than one
learned article. More than one scholar has taken the time and made the
effort to trace out astonishing connections -- especially political and
historical --  to Pynchon's character names, or, more precisely, half names
(first name, last name). After all, if he used the name Geli for the
character who does what Katje does for Pudding (and what, it appears, Geli
Raubal did for Hitler), it would hardly be fiction any more, and he'd lose
the ambiguity of  wondering which real world folks "Pudding" might allude
to.

What I'd like to know is, when this OSS psychoanalytic assessment of Hitler
became broadly known outside intelligence and super-hepcat political
circles. In this case, and in others (apparent knowledge of CIA dirty
tricks and deeds with LSD testing on unsuspecting subjects in the 50s,
which, as I've posted before, TRP seems to parody in Slothrop's "truth
serum" trials), TRP would seem to have had access to some rather privileged
information. Maybe by the '60s everybody and his brother knew the contents
of that OSS assessment of Hitler, I don't know.  As I understand it,
however, most of the dirty truths about the U.S. intelligence community
didn't surface until the 1970s as a result of the Church (?)  Committee
hearings and some ground-breaking investigative journalism (McCoy's _The
Politics of Heroin_, John Marks' _The Search for the Manchurian Candidate_,
etc.).

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