The Celibacy of Adolph Hitler

Were Eva Braun and Adolph Hitler just friends or "lovers" in the full sexual sense. In "Eva Braun: Life With Hitler," German historian Heike Gortemaker assembles all of the evidence on this question. She presents the testimony of those closest to the two of them as it was left to us in the post-war investigations,in conversations, and in written memoirs. It is definite: we do not know. Half of their friends and collaborators are sure they were abstinent, the other half equally certain they were physically intimate. There is not hard evidence either way. Hitler's sexuality will probably always remain in the closet. In public, even with close friends, they demonstrated no signs of tender affection. Gortemaker stresses forcefully that Hitler himself rejected marriage in order to cultivate, quite self-consciously, a celibate image: as "Furher" he sensed that as father and spouse of the German Volk, he must transcend the ordinary bonds of marriage, wife, family and children in order to be available, as a transcendent demi-god, to the people themselves. He particularly realized that as a celibate he would elicit a stronger response from women, including mothers, as a symbolic spouse and father to their children. Surprisingly, in light of the evidence, Gortemaker concludes that he had a "normal" sexual relationship with the attractive blonde. This involves a leap well beyond the evidence which is absolutely inconclusive. My own guess would be that they did not consummate their love because my presumption would be that a man so deformed, in his soul, will, emotions and intellect, by hatred and megalomania could hardly have been "normal" in his sexuality, which is always infused by emotion, will, purpose and passion. To me, it is more probably that he suffered some form of impotence in the area of genuine man-woman intimacy. For my purpose, however, the more significant reality is his brilliant intuition of the moral/cultural value of his public celibacy. He realized that only as a celibate could he transcend the particularity and limitation of normal marriage in order to consummate a mystical, spiritual union with the Volk. We see here a perverse image of the celibacy of our Savior and as well as that of His mother, and that of the consecrated-evangelical life and the Catholic priesthood. Genius that he was, he realized that his transcendence of normal sexual, married life would equip him for an extraordinaryly broad and deep spiritual union with the nation. Gortemaker holds that many of his most loyal collaborators held to belief in his celibacy, even if it was an illusion, because it was constitutive of the overall messianic myth of the "Fuhrer." We have learned from Rene Girard that we are made to imitate God and that if we do not imitate him in the loving, filial manner of His Son, we will do so in the hateful, disobedient manner of Lucifer. And so, we find in the celibacy of Hitler, real or not, a perverse imitation of the genuine self-sacrficial, all-inclusive, transcendent-yet-incarnate-unto-suffering-and-death chastity of Christ, his priests and those who consecrate themselves, women and men, to Him.