The Vengeance of Rome Read Free

differently it could easily have been the year that ended Hitler’s political career. Geli was Hitler’s half-niece, and shared an apartment with him in Munich. According to the official accounts, she shot herself with Hitler’s automatic. One speculation is that he somehow shot her himself, but a speeding ticket seems to have provided an alibi for Hitler here. Another theory is that a person or persons in his immediate circle did the killing for him. Geli had started to look like serious trouble. She had apparently been free on more than one occasion with her favours, and seems to have had an affair with Hitler’s chauffeur. She wanted to go to Vienna for ‘voice coaching’, whatever that actually meant; Hitler very much did not want her to do that. He of course had vivid memories of how sordid a marginal life in the arts in Vienna could be. Nude drawings of Geli by Hitler were said to have come to light at the time, images whose pornographic implications could have proved problematic. A number have subsequently emerged on the open market—they appear incompetent enough to be authentic. The kindliest interpretation is that Hitler engaged in a semi-incestuous dalliance, and let his avuncular propensities get the better of him. The unkindest interpretation is that Hitler pursued his interests in the most startling of sexual improprieties: coprophilia. With a particular emphasis on undinism.
    The question of Hitler’s sexuality, how twisted it might have been, and whether that offers some sort of clue as to the monstrosity of his other activities, seems to have been with us from the beginning. The psychologist Langer was commissioned by the American government to write a report on Hitler at the time of the war, and he concluded that the boy from Linz evidently had some pretty rum ways with him in the bedroom. An astonishing number of Hitler’s female intimates committed suicide: Geli Raubal, Inge Ley, Renate Mueller, and Suzi Liptauer. Mimi Reiter tried unsuccessfully to hang herself in 1928. Eva Braun tried to kill herself in 1932 and again in 1935. She succeeded with Hitler’s assistance in 1945, but by then they were both newly married, so it was less an attempt to get away from him than to get away from everyone else. Poor Unity Mitford (who had no physical relations with her beloved Führer) shot herself through the head on the outbreak of war and had to be shipped home to her family inOxfordshire, where she lived on for years, mourning the blindness of Britain in not understanding the greatness of her modern Siegfried.
    Every so often the rumours would arise, then as now: Hitler expected unnatural, indeed disgusting things, from his women. Most appear to have been so repelled that they could never bring themselves to speak of the matter, except obliquely. According to these accounts, Hitler was aware of Nietzsche’s injunction: ‘Going to see a woman? Take your whip.’ But he appears to have placed the whip in the hands of the woman as soon as he was over the threshold. The name of the game would seem to have been: humiliation, discipline, chastisement, degradation. And the most sordid part of all is the last one, the part that appears to have involved coprophilia.
    And so in goes our hero Pyat. Geli Raubal’s death is here fictionally explained. The account is plausible enough, as a close political associate tries to quieten the half-niece with whom Hitler had been having his insalubrious sexual entanglement for some time by then. She had been walking around all that day clutching a dead canary, according to the records, as if she had just been down a coalmine checking for methane. And by the following morning the poor little bird herself would be found dead. Hovering around here is the curiously repellent Father Stempfle, Geli’s confessor and a Nazi sympathiser on a grand scale. Is it possible he passed secrets on from the confessional, so that Hitler knew