FOR decades, Adolf Hitler's sexual proclivities have been a matter of idle curiosity among historians of the Nazi period. Now a German academic claims to have uncovered evidence showing almost beyond doubt that the führer was gay.
Rumours have long persisted that the Nazi dictator's persecution of homosexuals may have been driven in part by an attempt to mask his own sexual leanings. Lothar Machtan, professor of modern history at Bremen University, said years of research had thrown up enough proof to show Hitler preferred men to women
The findings, contained in the book, Hitler's Secret: The Double Life of a Dictator, to be launched at the Frankfurt book fair this week, appear to cast new light on the 1934 assassination of Ernst Röhm, the openly homosexual head of the Brown Shirts.
Machtan says that, starting in his youth, Hitler had several homosexual relationships, some with male prostitutes. "One must be very careful with the expression 'homosexual activities' because we do not know how Hitler lived them out," Machtan said. "But until the late 1920s Hitler had a range of homoerotic friendships. Many of them were characterised by contemporaries as homosexual."
In his twenties Hitler lived in Vienna - the most openly daring and sophisticated European capital of the day. His closest friend was August Kubizek; the pair shared an apartment for four months in a known homosexual area of Vienna. Both delighted in wearing the same clothes.
"People take us for brothers. That's what we would like to be," Kubizek wrote in a letter found by Machtan. In another, Kubizek recalls that they were once reunited on a railway station and he greeted Hitler with a kiss. "He led me straight away to where he lived. Where I was meant to spend the night."
So open was Hitler about such relationships, Machtan claims, that they came to the attention of Austrian police, who compiled a dossier on them. It contained reports from rent boys picked up by Hitler. "I spent the entire night with him," said a 22-year-old named only as Joseph. Another, Michael, 18, told the police he was unemployed; because he needed money to feed his family, he agreed to go with Hitler to his house "and left in the morning".
Machtan claims that during the first world war, Hitler took Ernst Schmidt, a fellow soldier, as a lover. In one document he found other soldiers' talk of Hitler and his "male whore Schmidt". They were so disgusted about what was going on that several of them daubed black shoe polish on Hitler's genitals.
The book also questions the nature of Hitler's close relationship with Rudolf Hess when they were imprisoned in Landsberg jail in 1924. On his release Hitler apparently declared to Ernst Hanfstaengl, his foreign affairs press secretary: "Ach, my Rudi, my Hesserl [his nickname for Hess]. Isn't it terrible he is still locked up?"
Hanfstaengl, who had tried in vain to interest Hitler in eligible women, remarked to his son, Egon, in later years that Hess had found Hitler "a profoundly sexually attractive animal".
"This mixture of the erotic and sexual goes a long way to explain how a shifty character like Hitler could develop such a charisma that even intelligent people were impressed," Machtan said. "Their attraction to Hitler was probably an indefinable glamorous eroticism."
Further evidence for Machtan's theory appeared to come from claims by Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, when he was interrogated after the war, that the führer kept a photograph of Julius Schreck, his driver, next to one of his mother in his private quarters. Shreck died in 1936. "His love for Hitler was boundless," Hess wrote.
Machtan said it was partially fear of being blackmailed over his past that drove Hitler to assassinate Röhm. Röhm had founded the Nazi party with Hitler and the two were inseparable. "Röhm knew not only the dubious start of Hitler's political career, he knew also - as one of the very few - of his homosexuality," Machtan said.
The killing marked the start of Hitler's systematic persecution of homosexuals - thousands of whom were killed, alongside Jews, gypsies and members of other minority groups that did not fit into the Nazi leader's vision of the Aryan race.
The great irony of Hitler's sexual leanings is that by all accounts he was probably impotent. While he may have slept with both men and women, few of his relationships appear to have been consummated.
Dr Lothar Machtan, a professor of history at Germany's University of Bremen, writes in his new book, Hitler's Secret - The Double Life of a Dictator, that the Nazi leader as a youth cultivated close, affectionate relationships with a number of men that had heavily erotic overtones.
"We can say that Hitler had several homoerotic friendships up through the 1920s," Machtan told Die Welt newspaper.
"Many of them would be described by people today as homosexual."
He said Hitler during this period belonged to a circle of male friends in the southern German city of Munich that had a "homosexual orientation".
There was no definitive "proof" that Hitler had sex with men, Machtan said. But he asserted there was clear circumstantial evidence of homoerotic relationships throughout Hitler's early life.
Machtan said his theory was relevant to the study of the history of the Nazi period both in terms of the new light it shed on Hitler as a man and the role it might have played in the Fuehrer's political decisions.
"From 1930 on, Hitler felt that he could be blackmailed for his past," Machtan said.
"From that point, he was forced again and again to defend himself against such attempts."
Machtan writes that Hitler's later relationship with Eva Braun, his companion during the length of his rule whom he married shortly before their double suicide in 1945, was only for show and probably never consummated.
Rumours about Hitler's possible homosexuality have surfaced repeatedly since World War II, but Machtan said he presented fresh accounts and previously unpublished documents that led new credence to the theory.
The book, which attracted extensive attention in Germany's weekend press, will be presented this week at the giant Frankfurt Book Fair.
Machtan, 52, has been a professor at the University of Bremen since 1989, specialising in 19th and 20th century history. He is the author of a successful 1998 biography of the first chancellor of the German empire, Otto von Bismarck.
The Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest event of its kind, will run October 9-15 and draw more than 6,600 exhibitors from 105 countries to Germany's financial capital.
Eyewitness accounts from Hitler's former lovers, and historical documents that for the first time illuminate rumours that have circulated for over half a century, are disclosed in Hitler's Secret: The Double Life of a Dictator .
The respected German historian Lothar Machtan even claims in his book that Hitler ordered the deaths of several high-ranking Nazis to prevent the secret of his homosexuality from surfacing.
Ernst Röhm, the leader of Hitler's Sturm Abteilung or Storm Troopers, tried to blackmail Hitler by threatening to reveal his sexuality. Röhm, who was also gay, was murdered as a result, according to Machtan, a history teacher at Bremen University.
He refers to scores of historical documents to support his thesis. In 1915, the young Hitler was a dispatch rider at the front in France. Years later, yet before Hitler became infamous, one of his fellow soldiers, Hans Mend, wrote in his memoirs: 'At night, Hitler lay with Schmidl, his male whore.' Schmidl, otherwise known as Ernst Schmidt, and Hitler were 'inseparable lovers' for five years, according to Machtan.
Hitler's service notes read that as a result of the love affair there was reluctance among senior officers to promote him. According to Erich Ebermeier, a lawyer and writer who viewed Hitler's military files years later: 'Despite his bravery towards the enemy, because of his homosexual activity he lost out on a promotion to non-commissioned officer.'
Police reports from Munich after the First World War also suggest that Hitler was pursued by police because of his sexual orientation. 'As a "brown" [fascist] activist, Hitler managed to lure many young men to his side, but not only for political reasons,' says Machtan.
According to a Munich police protocol from the early part of the 20th century, a 22-year-old man called Joseph told the police: 'I spent the whole night with him.' Another, Michael, who was 18, told them: 'I had been unemployed for months, and my mother and my brother were always hungry, so, at his request, I accompanied the man to his home.' Another, a boy called Franz, said: 'He asked me if I'd like to stay with him and he told me his name was Adolf Hitler.'
The police reports were collected by Otto von Lossow, a German army general who took part in suppressing the Hitler putsch in 1923. He kept the Munich police file for years, as, he described it, 'a form of personal life insurance'. If Hitler had attempted to push him aside, he would have blackmailed him with the information, he said. The police documents were published some years ago in Rome by Eugen Dollmann, a close friend of Heinrich Himmler's and also Hitler's interpreter. But because his book never appeared in German, the startling information remained largely overlooked by historians.
Machtan says that Hitler was particularly drawn to Rudolf Hess, his deputy, who was known in party circles as 'black Emma' and with whom he had spent months in Landsberg prison.
Why, then, did the Nazis persecute homosexuals, sending hundreds of thousands of them to their deaths in labour camps and the gas chambers?
'Hitler himself never condemned homosexuality, but he allowed the persecution of gays in order to disguise his own true colours,' Machtan says.