Petrelis Files

NYT: Hitler's Rumored Homosexuality

From the introduction in Sunday's Week in Review excerpts of reports on Germany's Nazi leader recently sold at auction:

MORE than 60 years after Adolf Hitler died, the details of his private life still grip the public imagination. Some additional glimpses emerged from a British intelligence report sold last week by the English auction house Mullock’s. Written by an unnamed British agent and dated May 3, 1945 — three days after Hitler’s death — it summarizes the interrogation of a German lieutenant colonel who was a staff member at Hitler’s headquarters in Berlin during World War II. Known only as “PW” (prisoner of war), he had observed Hitler at close quarters, dining with him at least 30 times. ...

One of the entries in the reports broaches a subject that always makes me uncomfortable, largely because I simply don't believe enough proof has ever been gathered and presented, raising the mere possibility that this dictator could have had homosexual tendencies, mentions rumors circulating at the time:

“Quite often he would retire into this privacy with some woman whom he esteemed very much (during later years particularly with a Miss Braun whose relationship to Hitler is quite unknown). It is not believed that in these sessions with women Hitler’s attitude intensified to any more than a platonic relationship. (The rumors about his homosexuality and other abnormal obsessions were rumors and nothing more. ...)”

Just one more bit of trivia to place in the "Was Hitler Gay?" file.