101 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
View submission: Was Hitler a virgin?
It is reasonably grounded and non-speculative to say that he did have a sex life and he was not an asexual being or devoid of sexuality, but
This comes off almost as a case of burying the lede
https://time.com/archive/6802272/foreign-news-uneven-romance/
It was their first stormy kiss. “I was so happy I wished I could die,” says Maria. On the way back to the car, Hitler told her that his ideal was to marry and have blond children, but that he must save Germany first.... <later>
Maria got the idea and soon ran off to Munich. There was a touching reconciliation on Hitler’s sofa and one breathless Liebesnacht—night of love. Peis quoted Maria: “I let him do what he wanted. I was never so happy.”
Is there any evidence that these are misrepresentation? Or any evidence or reason to be doubted ?
Similarly
Braun biographer Heike Görtemaker notes that the couple enjoyed a normal sex life.
Is evidence via/from his partners that vitiated, by lack of records or conflicting testimony .? Especially when the question is not about the kind of sex he preferred but a simple : was he a Virgin?
Comment by Georgy_K_Zhukov at 04/11/2024 at 03:23 UTC*
46 upvotes, 1 direct replies
So as far as Maria Reiter goes, there is no reason to doubt that she and Hitler had some sort of relationship. We even have some of his letters to her, which are quite useful for historians in constructing Hitler's views of women, such as Kershaw, which I'll quote again from another follow-up:
Like his father, he preferred women much younger than himself – girls he could dominate, who would be obedient playthings but not get in the way.
In any case, as for 'burying the lede', you aren't necessarily wrong, since as noted I was adapting a broader answer on Hitler's sexuality. Perhaps if it hadn't been late at night I would have done a more extensive rewrite to swap the order in which things are covered ('the basic facts we know and *then* the wild speculation), but maybe not, since I think the inherent context which leads to the question of "Was Hitler a virgin?" is so tied up in that wild speculation that the question by its nature means an answer to be grounded in that context of wild speculation, so there is a usefulness in structuring it as "crazy first and then reality second". But of course, even the more 'mundane' discussion of Hitler's sex life outside of the really crazy stuff like watersports does require a critical eye.
We basically have two sources that really come close to concrete information about Hitler's sex life in a practical sense. Reiter's is one of them, but while her interview has some uses in the broad strokes, many of the specific claims are problematic to take at face value. I wouldn't, for instance, rely on her description of their "first stormy kiss" as reliable myself, even if I would not doubt, more generally, that they did kiss. And then the second is Braun, since while I don't believe Braun ever wrote down something explicit herself, we do at least have some hearsay, stuff later recounted by others noting a relationship which included sexual activity (largely, I believe, from post-war claims by her childhood friend Herta Schneider and her sister Gretl). After that, we're essentially relying on outside observers with varying degrees of access, and of course none of whom were *in* the bedroom too. Add to this that especially in the early days of the relationship, speculation on its nature was a popular topic for the inner circle, and claims of being the one to 'really know' the truth were tied into claims about being the one closest to the Führer. A number of associates of Hitler were subjected to extensive interrogations after the war, or wrote memoirs some time later, and they provide a picture that *generally* points to people being aware the relationship was sexual, but even then there are contradictions. These are mostly what Görtemaker is relying on in her biography, going through a number of those accounts, and weighing their reliability.
I would in a literal sense agree with her, as the evidence, taken on the whole, would support a sexual relationship (although not *all* those close to him would agree), but of course two things are with noting. The first is that insofar as I would use normal, I would mean it that they were a couple, who had sex with within a relationship, and I wouldn't use "normal" as commentary on how he liked it. It isn't a commentary on how vanilla Hitler was, which remains inherently speculative, and largely why I have tried to mostly avoid *definitive* statements. The second is that there *are* contradictions in those accounts and we also need to keep in mind that most of them are coming from associates with positive views on Hitler, and a vested interest in trying to *counter* the insinuations made by his enemies.
By way of example of both of these, I would point to Heinz Linge, Hitler's valet, who published a memoir in the '80s. And while he makes a fairly explicit reference to Hitler and Braun having a sex life, Linge remained fairly positive about Hitler even in his later life, and it is very clear that he wrote much of the memoir specifically in defense of his boss, which includes allegations about perverted sexuality. Does that mean we should toss it out automatically? No... but likewise describing their sex life as "especially active on occasion" demands a critical eye and does require some separating out of "Linge knew Hitler had sex" versus "Linge inflating Hitler's sexual prowess and magnetism to push back against claims which he didn't appreciate".
It also needs to be balanced that at least some people who did know of Braun, such as Hitler's secretary Christa Schroeder, believed the relationship to be a sexless one! The evidence is not very strong that she is *right*, to be sure. She seems to have essentially bought into the public persona of selfless sacrifice. She writes in her memoir about the claim about Hitler fathering a child in France, which is now disproven (but quite recent when she was writing in the early '80s), to recognize that maybe he had engaged in sexual relations *once upon a time*, but that:
[...] it seems likely from the moment when he decided to become a politician that Hitler renounced such pleasures. For Hitler, gratification came from the ecstasy of the masses. He was erotic with the women by whom he surrounded himself, but never sexual. ‘My lover is Germany’, he emphasized repeatedly.
There are a few reasons Schroeder's account doesn't feel right, but we also can't *completely* ignore it (and she did claim corroboration from several other people on this, including Braun's hairdresser). After all, she was around him a great deal, and it feels odd that Hitler and Braun could be going at it like rabbits and she *never* picked up on that. So taken together, offers one reason to consider tempering Linge's claims down a bit. Also in contrast to the picture offered by Linge was Nerin Gun, one of the earliest biographers of Braun, based his analysis on interviews with surviving family members and friends of *Braun* (primarily an 'unnamed' source but implied, I believe, to be Schneider), and painted a picture of a 'normal' sex life, per se, but characterized actual sexual intimacy as relatively rare, as well as also noting that even with family and close friends Braun was "extremely reserved, even a trifle mysterious" about her sex life with Hitler, which only helps to emphasize just why there always seems to be so much range of speculation even still.
And so *all of that* is basically a long, roundabout way of saying evidence is sparse, a bit muddled, and sometimes from questionable sources of the information, and makes definitive statements hard to do, since we don't have direct, first person accounts that can be considered reliable from Hitler or any of his alleged lovers.