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One 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. According to Langer, Eva Braun tried twice to take her life before her final successful attempt, and another Hitler intimate, Unity Mitford, also tried suicide. "Rather an unusual record for a man who has had so few affairs with women," Langer wryly observed.
At 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 of masculinity" and "shows all the earmarks of a reaction formation created unconsciously as a cover-up for deep-lying tendencies that he despises."
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.
To Langer, the difference between Hitler and other psychopaths was "his ability to convince others that he is what he is not." He could never quite convince himself, however, because the Führer personality never permanently supplanted his old self. Hitler, Langer said, "is not a single personality but two that inhabit the same body. The one is very soft and sentimental and indecisive. The other is hard, cruel and decisive. The first weeps at the death of a canary; the second cries that 'there will be no peace in the land until a body hangs from every lamppost!' "
That duality led to the horrible excesses that occurred in Nazi Germany's twilight. "As Germany suffers successive defeats, Hitler will become more and more neurotic," Psychoanalyst Langer warned the OSS. "Each defeat will shake his confidence and limit his opportunities for proving his own greatness to himself. He will probably try to compensate for his vulnerability by stressing his brutality and ruthlessness."