First he poisoned his favorite dog Wolf. Then he took his new wife to his private quarters and sat down on a sofa beside her. Before them was a coffee table on which were a vase of roses, a vial of cyanide and his 7.65 Walther automatic pistol. He did not use the gun. Instead he swallowed the cyanide, and as he struggled for air, his wife shot him in the left temple with her own weapon, a 6.35 Walther. Then she poisoned herself.
According to Williams College Historian Robert G.L. Waite, that is how Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun died in Berlin in 1945. Their bizarre deaths came as no surprise to Psychoanalyst Walter Langer. Two years earlier, he had predicted the German leader's suicide in a secret study prepared at the request of the Office of Strategic Services. Intended as an aid to Allied war planners, the study was classified "secret" and tucked away in the National Archives for years. Now it has been declassified and will be published this week as The Mind of Adolf Hitler (Basic Books; $10). In a postscript to the book, Waite praises Langer's use of psychoanalytic principles to investigate Hitler's psyche. The technique, he says, led not only to predictions of uncanny accuracy but to insights never provided by historians relying on traditional research methods.
Langer, who is now retired and living in Florida, tapped three major sources: he conducted exhaustive interviews with people who had known Hitler; he used "The Hitler sourcebook" (1,100 pages of biographical data compiled by three analytically trained assistants); and he carefully studied Mein Kampf. His conclusion: Hitler was "probably a neurotic psychopath bordering on schizophrenia," or, in simpler terms, the Fuhrer was not insane but was emotionally sick and lacked normal inhibitions against antisocial behavior. A desperately unhappy man, he was beset by fears, doubts, loneliness and guilt, and spent his whole life in an unsuccessful attempt to compensate for feelings of helplessness and inferiority.
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 on him."