The closest we came to total disaster was when Hitler almost got the atomic bomb first.
In the spring of 1943, Walter C. Langer, a psychoanalyst at Harvard, received a query from William J. Donovan, the head of the U.S. government’s Office of Strategic Services, the covert-operations predecessor to the CIA. Donovan was interested in commissioning Langer to prepare a psychological profile of Adolf Hitler.
“What we need is a realistic appraisal of the German situation,” Donovan told Langer. “If Hitler is running the show, what kind of a person is he? What are his ambitions? How does he appear to the German people? What is he like with his associates?” The OSS chief wanted to understand Hitler’s “psychological make-up—the things that make him tick.” Donovan was especially keen to know how Hitler might respond to increasing adversity.
Hitler was used to winning. From 1933 to 1943, the Nazi leader had marched from one stunning political and military triumph to the next, securing the chancellorship, crushing the German constitutional order, annexing Austria, dismembering Czechoslovakia, and then invading Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, countries across North Africa, and Russia. Until 1943, Hitler had seemed to be an inexorable political and military force, smashing constitutional guardrails, shredding international treaties, breaking trade alliances, upending the international order, and ultimately plunging the entire world into war.
But then came military reversals that stopped Hitler in his tracks: El Alamein, in November 1942, then Stalingrad, in January 1943. Donovan wanted to know how Hitler would react—militarily, politically, personally—if the tides of war began to change. “Do you suppose you could come up with something along these lines?” Donovan asked Langer.
This was the first time the U.S. government would commission a psychological profile of a foreign leader to determine his possible future courses of action. Donovan was not interested in an academic study. Rather, he wanted a “realistic appraisal” that might provide actionable intelligence about what the führer might do next.
Langer engaged three fellow psychoanalysts—one from Harvard, one from the New School for Social Research, and one of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute—and set to work. He immersed himself in Hitler’s speeches and writings. He read both volumes of Mein Kampf front to back. He collected newspaper clippings and magazine articles. He interviewed former Hitler associates who had broken with the Nazi leader and were now living in exile.
“The world has come to know Adolph Hitler for his insatiable greed for power, his ruthlessness, cruelty and utter lack of feeling, his contempt for established institutions and his lack of moral restraints,” Langer wrote in framing the scope of his work. “In the course of relatively few years he has contrived to usurp such tremendous power that a few veiled threats, accusations or insinuations were enough to make the world tremble.” It was only when the world wearied of Hitler’s threats and bluster, “and concluded that it was all a bluff,” Langer wrote, that the Nazi leader had “initiated the most brutal and devastating war in history.”
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Hitler was a man, Langer was told repeatedly, with an insatiable ego who needed to be the center of attention, always, everywhere. Hitler saw himself as the ultimate authority in all matters regardless of their import or insignificance. “It makes little difference whether the field be economics, education, foreign affairs, propaganda, movies, music or women’s dress,” Langer reported. “In each and every field he believes himself to be an unquestioned authority.”
One former Hitler associate described to Langer what had happened when he tried to correct the Nazi leader about something. “I cannot be mistaken,” Hitler said. “What I do and say is historical.” Langer attributed this “infantile thinking” to an arrested emotional development that also resulted in frequent tantrums, both in private and public.
Langer heard repeated stories about Hitler’s unbridled rages against his staff. Otto Strasser, an early Nazi Party member who had broken with Hitler over economic policy, told Langer that Hitler regularly browbeat members of his inner circle. “Rage and abuse became the favorite weapons in his armory,” Langer wrote, along with public degradation, humiliation, and, occasionally, murder. Strasser’s brother Gregor Strasser, another Nazi Party member who had also broken with Hitler over policy matters, was killed on the Night of the Long Knives.
“Some of his closest associates have felt that he induces these rages consciously to frighten those around him,” Langer wrote. Hermann Rauschning, another early Nazi Party official, told Langer that some of Hitler’s “well-timed fits of rage” were intended to throw his entourage into confusion and submission.
Langer reported that Hitler used a social gathering attended by his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and his Luftwaffe chief, Hermann Göring, to disparage both with juvenile humor. “You all know what a volt is and an ampere, don’t you?” Hitler said to the assembled crowd. “But do you know what a goebbels, a goering are? A goebbels is the amount of nonsense a man speaks in an hour and a goering is the amount of metal that can be pinned on a man’s breast.”
Langer observed that Hitler used radio and rallies to spew lies and hatred, in order to manipulate public opinion. “Hitler’s speaking has been aptly described as a ‘verbal diarrhea,’” Langer wrote, and he reported that Rauschning had compared a Hitler speech to “an oral enema.”
Langer also heard much about Hitler’s obsession with women. “Hitler likes to be surrounded with pretty women and usually requests the moving picture companies to send over a number of actresses whenever there is a party in the Chancellory,” Langer wrote, supporting this with an Associated Press photograph of Hitler surrounded by young film stars.
Langer also cited unverified accounts of Hitler’s sexual proclivities and capacities, ranging from impotence to homosexuality to myriad perversions. Hitler, Langer wrote, “derives sexual gratification from the act of having a woman urinate or defecate on him.”
Although this was likely not the kind of “actionable intelligence” that the OSS chief had been seeking, Langer, schooled in Freudian psychology, devoted much of his report to psychoanalysis of the Nazi leader. “Hitler’s outstanding defense mechanism is one commonly called projection,” Langer wrote. “It is a technique by which the ego of an individual defends itself against unpleasant impulses, tendencies or characteristics by denying their existence in himself while he attributes them to others.”
As evidence, Langer noted that Hitler accused his political opponents of the “bombardment of lies” that Hitler himself assailed them with. Hitler’s hatred of the Jews, Langer theorized, emanated from hatred of himself: Hitler’s “own personal problems and conflicts were transferred from within himself to the external world where they assumed the proportions of racial and national conflicts.”
Langer attributed Hitler’s rages, hatreds, obsessions, and delusions to an unhappy childhood with a brutish father and an emotionally battered but loving mother. Langer also spent considerable time analyzing Hitler’s preoccupation with architectural projects—in particular, the Eagle’s Nest, outside Berchtesgaden, Germany.
“First there is a long hard road, then a heavily guarded entrance, a trip through a long tunnel to an extremely inaccessible place. There one can be alone, safe and undisturbed, and revel in the joys that Mother Nature bestows,” Langer wrote. “From a symbolic point of view one can easily imagine that this is a materialization of a child’s conception of the return to the womb.”
By october 1943, when Langer’s report was rushed to completion at Donovan’s insistence, Hitler was on his back heel but hardly finished. London was being pummelled. Rumors of a Wunderwaffe, a “miracle weapon,” that could change the course of the war proliferated. German physicists, led by Werner Heisenberg, were at work on an atomic bomb.
Göring had already developed a prototype for a delivery mechanism—the Messerschmitt Me 264, dubbed the “Amerika Bomber”—and Manhattan was its first target. Hitler “described the skyscrapers being turned into gigantic burning torches, collapsing upon one another, the glow of the exploding city illuminating the dark sky,” Hitler’s armament minister, Albert Speer, recalled. “With such range we could repay America a thousandfold for the destruction of our cities.”
Not until the final three pages of his long report did Langer provide the “realistic appraisal” of Hitler’s potential courses of action that Donovan had been seeking. Based on his interviews and his review of 11,000 pages of source materials, Langer discerned scenarios for Hitler’s possible reactions were he to face ultimate defeat. Langer thought it unlikely that Hitler would try to escape to another country, as dictators were known to do—because “nothing would break the myth” of Hitler as a great leader more assuredly than running away.
Although Langer doubted that Hitler would allow himself to fall into the hands of the Allies, he did not rule out the possibility that the führer’s warped personality could welcome such an outcome, citing the case of a 16th-century religious fanatic who, when his theocratic cult was disbanded, asked to be paraded around in a cage. “In Hitler’s case such an outcome seems remote,” Langer wrote, “but it is difficult to estimate the extent to which an extreme masochist will go in order to gratify these tendencies.”
Langer did think it possible that Hitler would sacrifice himself in combat. “When he is convinced that he cannot win, he may lead his troops into battle and expose himself as the fearless and fanatical leader,” Langer wrote. But it was equally likely, Langer concluded, that Hitler would suffer a complete nervous breakdown. “Hitler has many characteristics which border on the schizophrenic,” Langer continued. “This would not be an undesirable eventuality from our point of view since it would do much to undermine the Hitler legend.”
Langer presciently posited suicide as the most likely scenario. He knew that Hitler had always been a man whose “infantile thinking” drove him to extremes and blinded him to compromise. Hitler sacrificed an entire army at Stalingrad, and his entire Afrika Korps in Tunisia. Langer cited Hitler’s fatalistic fanaticism verbatim: “We shall not capitulate … no, never. We may be destroyed, but if we are, we shall drag a world with us … a world in flames.”
If anything, Langer suggested, the worse things got for Hitler, the more intransigent he would become. “He will fight as long as he can with any weapon or technique that can be conjured up to meet the emergency,” Langer concluded. “The course he will follow will almost certainly be the one that seems to him to be the surest road to immortality and that at the same time wreaks the greatest vengeance on a world he despises.” It is fortunate that Hitler never had access to a nuclear button.
