Shrinkwrapped Fuhrer

More than 100 biographies and 10 times as many studies have been devoted to Adolf Hitler in the last 65 years, which vastly exceeds what has been written about other 20th century figures, including Lenin, Stalin, Churchill and FDR. Only Jesus Christ, Robert Harris wrote in “Selling Hitler,” has had more words devoted to him than Adolf Hitler. This vast output has been steady, but at times it has assumed wave-like proportions. Already in the 1970s, literary pundits talked about a Hitler-Welle or “Hitler-wave” because suddenly, it seemed, every conceivable aspect of the Fuhrer’s character and personality had been scrutinized by a host of historians, journalists, psychologists and medical experts, informing us that Hitler was a psychopath, a paranoid schizophrenic, a psychotic paranoid, a malignant sadomasochist, a drug addict, a victim of organic brain disease or Parkinson’s disease or a perverted sexual deviant.

With the recent spate of Hitler books, it appears that we may be in for a second Hitler-Welle, except that this one has a distinctly postmodernist twist. It no longer provides insight into Hitler himself but into the ruminating minds of the people who have written about him. What we are now getting are histories about the history of Adolf Hitler rather than traditional works of historical re-creation. Historians seem to be talking more about themselves than their subject. The history of Hitler has become the history of the theories about him, which is likely to widen the distance between Hitler and those of us trying to understand the terrifying nature of the evil that possessed him.

“Hitler: Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet,” however, is a refreshing exception to this apparent trend of deconstructing Hitler with the tools of textual criticism. Fritz Redlich’s work belongs to an older generation of writers that personally experienced the evils of Nazism and tried to explain them with the conventional methods of scientific understanding widely practiced at the time and still relevant to us today. The author, a psychiatrist who was driven out of his native Austria in 1938, has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Yale and UCLA. His strength resides in his psychiatric skills, which are indispensable to anyone who wants to understand Hitler.

Redlich offers us a pathography, a study of the life and character of Hitler as influenced by medical or mental illnesses. He believes that the medical symptoms of historical figures can be studied with reliable objectivity, though he admits that purely psychological problems are more intractable to disinterested analysis. He subscribes to what he calls “operationalism,” which holds that theories and concepts must be extracted from empirical investigation and analysis. In this spirit, he divides the book into two parts: “Hitler’s Life from Birth to Death” and “Review, Comments and Interpretations.” The idea is to give us the facts and then to derive theories and interpretations from them.

Although Redlich starts out with the best of intentions, he has difficulty in keeping to his original plan of separating fact from interpretation. The “facts” about Hitler and Nazi Germany in Part 1 of the book, which is really a conventional narrative about the rise and fall of Hitler, are almost immediately subjected to interpretation, as the author mingles biography, political history and medical-psychiatric analysis. Part 2 is really the heart and soul of Redlich’s position, which can be framed by three interrelated questions he poses about Hitler: To what extent did his physical and mental disorders cause his behavior? What was the relationship between his psychopathology and his belief system, particularly his virulent Judeophobia? And was Hitler’s evil the result of a debilitating medical-psychiatric condition over which he had no control?

Sifting through a bewildering variety of theories that have been advanced to explain Hitler, Redlich proceeds fairly, sensibly and with a great deal of humility, admitting that his own judgments are often speculative and merely one piece in this complicated jigsaw puzzle. With his psychiatric training, Redlich exhibits the skills of a detective, seeing his subject from a distance and recognizing that much information can be gleaned only from indirect testimony. In fact, from a medical point of view, Hitler was in fairly good health throughout his political career, except for the last three years of the war. Although his private physician, Theodor Morell, whom Redlich calls a charlatan and a pill pusher, used Hitler as a guinea pig for all sorts of exotic treatments, there is little evidence to show that Hitler was rendered incapable of functioning because Morell had incapacitated him or, as some medical historians have charged, turned him into an amphetamine addict. The evidence, Redlich insists, does not permit us to conclude that Hitler’s strategic errors were the result of drug abuse.

Redlich debunks several prominent psychological diagnoses; he does not believe, for example, that Hitler was a borderline personality nor that he was a sociopathic personality, nor that he was schizophrenic. He admits that Hitler showed elements of various personality disorders: He was certainly narcissistic, malignantly aggressive, hysterical, paranoid and haunted by a host of phobias, but none of these disorders can stand by themselves as a primary diagnosis of his destructive behavior. What, then, specifically ailed the Fuhrer?

Redlich identifies three serious medical and psychiatric problems and tries to show how they colored Hitler’s personality and belief system. On the basis of carefully conducted studies of Hitler’s movements and reflexes, he accepts that Hitler had primary Parkinson’s disease, although it manifested itself too late to incapacitate him or affect his decision-making. Analysis of several electrocardiograms administered by Hitler’s doctors also reveals evidence of coronary heart disease, and other tests show giant cell arteritis, an auto-immune disease that causes chronic inflammation of the arteries, with headaches and visual problems.

But the most explosive argument in the book, which lends weight to the “phallic hypothesis” suggested by some authors, is Redlich’s claim that Hitler suffered from spina bifida occulta, a condition that causes dysfunctions of the genitalia and, in Hitler’s case, a congenital defect in which the opening of the urethra is located on the underside of the penis. Hitler’s alleged sexual aberrations, mentioned in many biographies, could therefore be attributed to a sexual impairment of possible medical as well as psychological origin. But how does the author know all this? Only indirectly, it seems, from Morell’s diaries in which Hitler and Morell are recorded as discussing the problem of spina bifida occulta, an undocumented visit Hitler allegedly paid to a urologist (Dr. Kielleuthner) in 1919, Hitler’s washing compulsions and his consistent refusals to let his doctors examine his genitalia.

It is tempting to dismiss such speculative theories were it not for the fact that Hitler’s condition seems to have been accompanied by serious psychological obsessions. Rejecting earlier theories that tried to account for Hitler’s aberrant ideas, especially his Jew hatred, by rooting them in either a psychotic episode or a classic oedipal conflict, Redlich offers what he calls the “degeneration-salvation hypothesis.” According to Redlich, Hitler was excessively preoccupied with heredity and degeneration, believing that his condition was caused by syphilis, which he believed was a Jewish disease that undermines healthy nations and races. Hitler projected his fears of personal deformity and infection onto the Jews, Redlich writes, and he “became possessed with the idea of saving the Germans, and eventually all of humanity, from the great scourges--syphilis, Judaism and its offspring Christianity . . . “

In implementing his racial utopia and exterminating the Jews, Hitler rose to his self-proclaimed historical role as redemptive prophet. If any label fits him, Redlich argues, it is that of a destructive prophet who created a redemptive ideology out of his own paranoid complex and brilliantly normalized it as a noble creed for millions of Germans. Redlich seems to feel that Hitler believed his own delusions, that he was not just a psychopathic liar or a Machiavellian.

It is with this point that Redlich enters dangerous terrain. Deluded by paranoid fantasies, was Hitler really responsible for his actions or was he the victim of medical and psychological problems? He certainly was a victim of Parkinson’s and giant cell arteritis, but these medical conditions, Redlich claims, did not significantly affect his personality. It was otherwise with Hitler’s congenital lesion and the connected belief that he was infected by syphilis. Hitler incorporated this delusion into his highly paranoid mentality and created a viciously destructive ideology in which Jews were seen as infectious disease carriers.

Sticking too closely to his empirical data and being overly cautious of venturing beyond it, Redlich leaves us begging for more information, stronger judgments and, above all, for more compelling explanations that could tell us just how Hitler’s medical and psychological conditions turned him into the most destructive monster of the 20th century.

Redlich’s conclusion seems too restrained and frustratingly tentative, but perhaps this is the best we can expect from someone who approaches the problem of evil from a medical rather than a theological or philosophic perspective. Redlich mercifully spares us, however, from one of the more irritating pitfalls of some psychological practitioners and their followers--the theory of victimization. He shrewdly avoids making Hitler a victim, judging him mentally competent to have stood trial at Nuremberg for his crimes. If he was mentally competent, what sort of man, then, was Hitler? Redlich’s answer, which comes in the last sentence of the book, retreats back into the mystery: Hitler was “ein schlechter Mensch--an evil man.” Ironically, it is a judgment that no science of psychiatry can substantiate.