Hitler and the Jewish Prostitute

On October 13, 1918, Adolf Hitler was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack while on duty as a corporal during the Great War. Years later Hitler's head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, discovered a medical record of Hitler while he was hospitalized for the gas attack. The report noted various symptoms of syphilis were already present in the young Hitler, which may have intensified hallucinations and blindness associated with the gassing. Several authors and psychiatrists have investigated Hitler's sex life. He has been associated with bizarre sexual perversions though these charges have never been authenticated and could be the efforts of his political enemies; however, it does seem certain that he had numerous female acquaintances, including his niece. Some of his female companions were found dead of apparent suicides after having a relationship with him.[i]

Hitler's friend Putzi Hanfstaengl said that a Jewish prostitute infected the nineteen-year-old Hitler with syphilis during 1908 in Vienna, a claim disputed by numerous authors including Brigitte Hamann (Hitler's Vienna) who wrote that Hitler was not in Vienna but Linz at the time and had a syphilis test in 1940 that had a negative result. [ii] However, it is known that Hitler spent a considerable amount of time in some of the seedier parts of Vienna during his latter teens. In 1936, Hitler hired a personal doctor to attend to his needs. This private physician was known as a speicalist in syphilis and reported seeing symptoms of syphilis in HItler, specifically shin lesions and gastric crises.

Curiously, Hitler wrote 13 pages on syphilis in his autobiography Mein Kampf claiming it was a scourge of Germany that needed to be destroyed. He later told his lawyer Hans Frank he regretted writing about it. Hitler's obsession with the purity of the German race, and his possible infection with syphilis, takes on a new meaning when he obsessively wrote and spoke of "Jewish blood poisoning and race poisoning," and the contamination of "our blood" by the impure Jews. Later in his life he suffered with many ailments that were symptoms of maladies like syphilis, amphetamine abuse, and Parkinson's disease: eye trouble, tremors in limbs, and slurred speech.

One of the symptoms of syphilis is acute paranoia; the same kind exhibited in Hitler at the end of World War II when he told his friend and Minister of Munitions and Arms Albert Speer to kill all prisoners and order Nazi generals to destroy any land occupied by Germany before the Allies could capture it. Author Deborah Hayden notes that Hitler's paranoia, most likely fueled by syphilis, was demonstrated in his propensity to shout for hours in anger, foaming "at the mouth, and rolled on the floor. Some sources say he even chewed on the carpet."

Sources

Cauthorne, Nigel. The Sex Lives of the Great Dictators, Prion, London, 1996.

Hayden, Deborah. Pox - Genius, Madness, and the Mysteries of Syphilis, Basic Books, New York, 2003.

Hamann, Brigitte. Hitler's Vienna, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1999.

[i] Cauthorne, Nigel. The Sex Lives of the Great Dictators, Prion, London, 1996, p. 97.

[ii] Hamann, Brigitte. Hitler's Vienna, Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1999, p. 193. Josef Greiner's book Das Ende des Hitler Mythos (The End of the Hitler Myth), written in 1947, makes numerous amazing claims. Greiner claims to have known Hitler in Vienna in 1907-8 but Hamann writes that Hitler was in Linz at the time. Hamann asserts that Greiner's book is full of inaccuracies and outrageous claims that include his syphilis infection by a Jewish prostitute and his escape from the Fuhrer Bunker in May of 1945 via helicopter. Hamann cites a negative result of a Wasermann Test in 1940.