Word: hitler
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...Although Hitler tried to portray his early years as serene, Langer postulated from Hitler's character and writings that his father must have been a drunken, menacing brute. (Interviews in the 1950s with neighbors of the Hitler family substantiated this professional hunch, Historian Waite reports.) Because children view the universe in the light of their home experience, Hitler probably saw the whole world as "extremely dangerous, uncertain and unjust." This was the origin of his sense of powerlessness...
Even more devastating to Hitler was a feeling of inferiority that stemmed in part from sexual difficulties. Hitler was tormented by fear of genital injury.* He was uncomfortable with women and often said he would never marry because Germany was his only bride. Though Hitler was "probably impotent," Langer found no reliable evidence of overt homosexuality. "His perversion," Langer wrote, "is an extreme form of masochism in which the individual derives sexual gratification from having women urinate or defecate...
...woman claimed to have shared a perverse relationship with Hitler: his niece, Geli Raubal. Their liaison caused much gossip and ended in Geli's mysterious death-perhaps by her own hand, perhaps by Hitler's. At least one other woman admitted to firsthand experience of Hitler's masochism, though in a less extreme form. The actress Rene Mueller told her director that on an evening when she had expected to have intercourse with Hitler, he instead threw himself on the floor, begged her to kick him and became excited when she finally complied. Rene later killed herself...
...first Hitler accepted his fate passively. In Vienna before World War I, he could have supported himself modestly by painting watercolors, but he chose to live in poverty, sleep in flophouses, and beg for money on the street. "He seemed to enjoy being dirty and even filthy," Langer said. After the defeat of Germany in World War I, Hitler began to feel it his mission to lead his country to greatness, and he invented a new personality for himself that was strong enough to do it. This "Führer personality," Langer noted, "is a grossly exaggerated and distorted conception...
...Hitler found a second way of freeing himself from these tendencies: he attributed them, along with everything else that he hated and feared, to the Jews. The Jew became a symbol of sex, disease, his perversion-and even the tormenting guilt that perversion caused him. Conscience, he ranted, was "dirty and degrading," "a Jewish invention," and "a blemish like circumcision." For Hitler, Langer wrote, getting rid of Jews means getting rid of his own unconscious inner difficulties...