POX: Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis

Excerpt from Hitler chapter:

Rumors abound in Hitler’s own time that he was infected by a Jewish prostitute in Vienna. All fall into the category of hearsay, sometimes several times removed. Of what use is it to track such rumors? They certainly don’t in any way “prove” that Hitler had syphilis, in fact their very elusiveness almost detracts from the argument. And yet they add to the Hitler story from another angle: if rumors were rife that Hitler had been infected with syphilis as a youth, then Hitler’s generals and SS operatives would have heard them and would have been warily watching his rapid physical and mental decline in the last years for the signs of tertiary syphilis: so they were. It is in establishing that context that such rumors become significant in relation to the question of syphilis in Hitler’s last years.

The well-known and respected London syphilologist T. Anwyl-Davies revealed a story told to him by two men who claimed to have been infected by the same Jewish prostitute as Hitler. His witnesses would rightly be discredited in a court of law—their story was told over a bottle of wine late at night—but it remains of interest that this reputable authority believed
Hitler was in the tertiary stage of disease at the end of the war. Wiesenthal, avidly on the trail of the Hitler-syphilis connection, acknowledged the hear-say aspect of what he unearthed, and concluded: “As a criminal investigator, however, I would say that two sources at a considerable distance from each other have nevertheless come up with clues which conform astonishingly well. Clues which, if it were a criminal case, would induce me to follow them up.”
Wiesenthal’s clues deserve following up. Why has the question of syphilis drawn so little attention by researchers, he asks? He speculates that the old Nazis would bridle at the besmirching of their idol, while others would resist seeing complex events reduced to one person’s pathological degeneration. He puzzles at the same time over his own curious reluctance to see Hitler as a syphilitic. Hitler’s dreadful physical and mental condition in the bunker at the end of the war invokes us to circle back to the beginning. The search for syphilis in Hitler’s story begins, then, with Putzi Hansfstaengl.

Putzi befriended Hitler after he heard him mesmerize a beer hall audience in 1922. He invited Hitler to his rich home, lent him money to buy two American presses to print the Nazi newspaper, entertained him on the piano. Having played for pre-game rallies when he was a student at Harvard, Putzi translated the Harvard football chant "Fight! Fight! Fight!" to “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!" Hitler, imitating a Harvard cheerleader, marched around the Hanfstaengl living room giving the cheer that would be repeated on an elaborate scale at the Nuremberg rallies.

Putzi (who was 6’4”) became Hitler’s foreign press secretary. He remained a loyal but unruly follower until long after the rise to power. His story is the stuff of Hollywood Nazi movies. He escaped what he thought was a plot engineered by Hitler to have him shot while parachuting from a plane. On his escape route, he spent a number of hours being interviewed by C.G. Jung. He ended up in Washington writing psychological profiles of Hitler and the Nazi inner circle for his old friend from the Harvard Club, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1957 he published Hitler: The Missing Years, an account of his observations of Hitler's degeneration from the popular orator whose eloquence gave him hope for a return to the comfortable and traditional values of his youth to a power-hungry demonic monster and murderer surrounded by ignorant fanatics and criminals: except, of course, Putzi himself. Here he observed that Hitler did not seem to have had "orthodox" sexual relations with any woman as long as he had known him. He speculated that Hitler was the repressed, masturbating type, an impotent man with tremendous nervous energy, of an uncertain and strange sexual constitution, both sadistic and masochistic. "I felt Hitler was a case of a man who was neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, neither fully homosexual nor fully heterosexual," he wrote. "You can drink very weak tea, or very thin absinthe and you can suffer from very diluted sex-inversion."
He added, almost casually: "Hitler's repressed homosexuality probably dated from the time when he caught syphilis in Vienna about 1908."

While doing research for his book Hitler among the Germans in the early 1970s, Rudolph Binion visited Putzi at his villa in Munich to identify some obscure names in the records of Hitler's early entourage. He recalled his meeting: “Putzi, if anyone, knew Hitler’s sexual constitution because of his snoopiness and his closeness to Hitler when Hitler was less in the limelight than after the Putsch. He told me Hitler had contracted syphilis from a whore in Vienna because (hold tight!) he didn't know enough not to ejaculate.

“Whereas Putzi began by explaining Hitler's sexuality as post-syphilitic, he soon switched to talking about his own fear of ejaculating into prostitutes as a youngster: ‘We had to hold it in, to pull back at the last moment,’ he said with big eyes, muted, husky voice, and histrionic clutching of my arms, to evoke the psycho-moral ordeal his generation was pitiably up against, but Hitler was too green to know he should pull back in the nick of time.’ It was all bizarre: an explanation of Hitler's trouble turned into a plaint over Putzi's (alias his whole generation's, including Hitler's) ordeal, and that with no trace of pride or contentment in having survived the ordeal triumphantly where Hitler had failed.”

How could Putzi or Hitler have believed that only ejaculation could result in infection? Only three years had elapsed since Fritz Schaudinn first viewed the pale spirochete of syphilis under his microscope and established a specific agent of contagion. Many biologically incorrect ideas about how syphilis spread were still part of the popular knowledge. The idea that ejaculating could result in infection arose from a centuries-old belief that syphilis could only enter a flaccid penis. François Ranchin, a member of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier in the seventeenth century, wrote a treatise on the Great Pox in which he warned that to avoid contamination by a “fallen woman” it is necessary “that the member be erect, not soft or limp, because otherwise it drinks the infection in like a sponge, and preservatives are almost useless.” Putzi’s comment makes sense relative to the beliefs of the time.

In Landsberg prison after the Beer Hall Putsch, Hitler wrote thirteen pages in Mein Kampf about syphilis being the direst threat to the future of the race. A passage about prostitution seems especially confessional in light of Putzi’s recollection: “And the upshot of it all is that the man who gets an unpleasant surprise later can, even by thoroughly wracking his brains, not recall his kind benefactress, which should not be surprising in a city like Berlin or even Munich. In addition, it must be considered that we often have to deal with visitors from the provinces who are completely befuddled by all the magic of the city.” Was Hitler himself a visitor from the provinces completely befuddled by the magic of the city? Did he get such an unpleasant surprise?