Despite sexuality study, real ‘Fuhrer’ stays hidden

Was Adolf Hitler gay? Having seen “The Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler’s Sexuality,” which premieres tonight on Cinemax -- creepily timed to coincide with the subject’s 115th birthday -- I am prepared to answer this question with a categorical “maybe.” In either case, there is a question that this film does not really address, and thus does not really answer: “So what if he was?”

Directed by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato -- whose previous documentaries, including “Monica in Black and White,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” “Party Monster” and the current Bravo series “Show Biz Moms and Dads,” have dealt with human oddities of a less consequential nature -- “The Hidden Fuhrer” takes as its subject a book by German historian Lothar Machtan which claims that Hitler was a closeted homosexual. As its somewhat equivocal title implies, the film does not treat Machtan’s reading as gospel, even while it is organized essentially to make his case. It’s both a history of Hitler as a possible homosexual and a portrait -- well, sketch is closer to it -- of academic disagreement.

Machtan appears here, among copious film clips, often in adversarial banter with sociologist Rudiger Lautmann, a mentor and colleague, who dismisses Machtan’s theories. Some of Lautmann’s objections are laughably weak -- he argues that Hitler couldn’t have been gay, since he was adored by women, and “women can tell if a man is gay,” to which I can only say, “Rock Hudson.” But other on-screen commentators are equally dismissive, and to judge by the film alone, Machtan’s case does seem to be founded mostly on hearsay of the “so-and-so said that Hitler said” variety.

Yet there are enough such reports and other curious coincidences -- whether or not he was a gay man, Hitler certainly knew a few, including his onetime right arm, Ernst Rohm, leader of the storm troopers -- that the fair-minded viewer will at least consider the possibility that Machtan’s right.

The evidence presented here represents, of course, only a small and selective sliver of a mountain of scholarship; more than 120,000 books have been written about the Austrian corporal since his death in 1945. As do many academics -- and most everyone else -- Machtan has the tendency to interpret data in the light of his views and to trust the sources that best serve his cause. Where other commentators might see “male bonding” or hero worship, he sees unquestionable sexual desire.

Some of his formulations are dangerously syllogistic: Gay men like opera, Hitler liked opera, therefore.... What evidence is missing, Hitler is suspected of destroying, while his persecution of homosexuals, thousands of whom died in concentration camps, becomes further proof of his (fatally repressed or cleverly concealed) homosexuality.

Neither Machtan nor the filmmakers argue here that Hitler’s policies and politics were a direct product of his sexuality -- and rightly so. Hitler’s gayness or lack of it tells us nothing substantial about the havoc he wreaked. You might as well blame the Holocaust on the Vienna Institute for Fine Arts, which denied him admission. Indeed, the film makes a stronger, if incidental, case for Hitler as a twisted aesthete, working upon the larger canvas of Germany and its people.

“Can Hitler be explained? Perhaps it’s foolish or immoral to even try,” one commentator opines, but it will doubtless be attempted 120,000 more times in the next 60 years.

Hitler will remain forever a subject of fascination and study -- all the more so for being ultimately unfathomable. If he’d been gay and happy about it, his life might have all turned out differently; but it might not have. If he’d kept up with his art, he might have been another Thomas Kinkaid, but that isn’t what happened.

Remarking upon the dictator’s highly theatricized public appearances, in which “the whole body becomes like a phallus and it’s on display,” “psychohistorian” Peter Lowenberg speculates that, had Hitler led a fulfilling “private sexual life, he might not have needed the stadium in Nuremberg.”

But we’ll never know.

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‘The Hidden Fuhrer: Debating the Enigma of Hitler’s Sexuality’

Where: Cinemax

When: 7-8:30 tonight

Rating: The network has rated the film TV-PG (may not be suitable for young children).

Executive producers, Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. Directors, Andre Heller and Othmar Schmiderer.