Was Adolf Hitler bisexual?

Adolf Hitler was a bisexual sadomasochist with a crush on his cross-dressing deputy. At least, that’s according to a declassified US intelligence report into the dictator’s personal life, compiled in 1942.

The dossier was put together by Henry Field for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the modern CIA. Field, an anthropologist in civilian life, was “tasked with trawling through any information he could find about German top brass, including Hitler himself”, says the Daily Mail.

The report was intended to offer President Franklin D. Roosevelt as much insight as possible into the enemy, and covered everything from Hitler’s eating habits to his taste in music.

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Predictably, though, it is Field’s speculations on the Fuhrer’s sexuality which have attracted the most attention.

The anthropologist said that information he had obtained led him to believe that Hitler was “a sadomasochistic type of man with possibly even a homosexual streak in him”.

Much of the information on Hitler’s sex life came from Ernst Sedgwick Hanfstaengl, a close friend of the dictator throughout his rise to prominence in the 1920s and early 1930s who fled to the UK after falling out of the Fuhrer’s favour.

Hanfstaengl told US operatives that the Viennese hostel where Hitler lived as a young artist had “the reputation of being a place where elderly men went in search of young men for homosexual pleasures”, although there is no evidence of Hitler’s involvement in such trysts.

There were even rumours of a sexual attraction between Hitler and his deputy Rudolf Hess, who was said to have “attended balls dressed in female attire”, apparently earning him the nickname “Fraulein Anna” from fellow party members.

In summary, Field writes that Hitler’s “sex life is dual as is his political outlook” - just as in his political life he “is both Socialist and fervent Nationalist”, in his personal life he “is both homosexual and heterosexual”.

However, gay website LGBTQ Nation cautions that the report should be taken with a large grain of salt, and that it “contains laughably bad psychological analysis”, including speculation that Hitler’s mother “quite possibly enjoyed” being physically abused by his father.

Field’s report was just one of several OSS dossiers compiled during the Second World War which variously claimed the Nazi dictator was gay, asexual or a fetishist. His sexuality has been a subject of intense speculation among historians ever since.

Keen to project an image of single-minded devotion to Germany, Hitler kept his personal and romantic life hidden from the public in his lifetime. His only confirmed sexual relationship was with Eva Braun, whom he married shortly before their joint suicide as Allied forces closed in on Berlin.