Sex & the Swastika

[Doug Millison]

Anybody else see_Sex & the Swastika_, a documentary that aired in the U.S.
on the History Channel last night? It focused on the "black propaganda"
created by the U.S. and British intelligence services (fake radio station
broadcasts and leaflets) that built on actual news of sexual excesses of
Nazi leaders, and the OSS psychoanalytical study of Hitler by Walter
Langer, which (as depicted in the documentary at least), centered on the
relationship of Hitler and his niece, Geli Raubal. After dancing around the
issue, the documentary finally said that Langer had concluded that Raubal's
role included that of "urinating and defecating" on Hitler as a way of
giving him sexual satisfaction.  Langer apparently went on to speculate
that Hitler's masochism lead to a "return of the repressed" scenario that
would account for the violence he unleashed, as well as to his defeat and
ultimate suicide (I don't pretend to be psychoanalytically sophisticated
and roughly paraphrase here what was a fairly simplistic point in the
documentary). This information was closely held during WWII, apparently --
outside OSS circles, only shared with top leaders (Churchill and
Roosevelt).  I don't know when  the OSS study of Hitler was first made
public, or if this sort of speculation about Hitler was broadly circulated
in the 60s when TRP was writing GR -- but it would seem to add another
dimension to TRP's portrayal of Pudding's fetish, if we could assume that
TRP might be consciously playing with a characterization of Hitler that
might have been known in circles to which TRP might have had entree due to
his family background and connections.

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