Hitler's Psychology: Psychobiography and Mental Illness Analysis

Interdisciplinary Methods and Sources

One weakness of Robert G.L. Waite's classic work of psychobiography and psychohistory, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (1993), is that no written evidence survives from any psychologist or psychiatrist who actually examined Hitler, although his political opponents in Germany allegedly possessed reports from military psychiatrists in the First World War indicating that Hitler was never promoted above private first class because of mental and emotional instability. In spite of this gap in the evidence, Waite offered a convincing medical and psychological portrait of Hitler, gathering considerable material to demonstrate the irrationality of his subject, whom he diagnosed as a borderline psychotic.

George Victor, in Hitler: The Pathology of Evil (2007), claimed that Hitler had a depressive nervous breakdown in 1909 and a schizophrenic breakdown in 1918, when he was hospitalized at the Pasewalk military hospital near Berlin. In A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi found that Hitler suffered from bipolar disorder — or manic-depression — as did his alcoholic father Alois, and that even though Adolf did not drink, his mental illness was exacerbated by chronic use of amphetamines, steroids, and opiates such as OxyContin.

From a medical point of view, Martin Housden (2000) found evidence that Hitler suffered from moderate Parkinson's disease, as well as high blood pressure and arteriosclerosis, which probably increased his depression, paranoia, and cognitive decay. His physical and mental health was further damaged by daily methamphetamine injections administered by Dr. Theodor Morell, which made him more aggressive and paranoid. Housden also agrees that Hitler's father was an abusive alcoholic and that Hitler suffered a mental breakdown in 1918 that caused hysterical blindness and muteness.

Hitler did have a courageous record as a soldier in World War I, as J.F. Williams noted in the military history Corporal Hitler and the Great War, 1914–1918 (2005). He even received the Iron Cross First Class, which was rarely awarded to enlisted men in the German Army. In later years, Hitler frequently said that he enjoyed soldiering more than any other profession, and his military experience greatly influenced Nazi ideology and worldview, including its glorification of war, militarism, aggression, and heroic self-sacrifice. In addition, Hitler was very likely suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) after four years on the Western Front, which contributed to his breakdown when he learned of Germany's defeat in 1918.

As Robert Rosenbaum points out in Explaining Hitler (1998), certain myths about the Nazi leader's background, personality, and psychosexual makeup have persisted since the 1920s and 1930s. Among these were stories that he had only one testicle; that he forced his niece Geli Raubal to urinate and defecate on him during sex and murdered her in 1931 when she tried to escape from him; or that his father Alois was half-Jewish. None of these explanations of Hitler's personality and psychology are supported by real evidence, any more than claims that he was homosexual, impotent, or suffering from tertiary syphilis.

His family doctor, Eduard Bloch, who treated Klara Hitler for breast cancer, reported that young Adolf Hitler was a very quiet, polite young man who was devoted to his mother and suffered from no obvious physical or mental abnormalities, though he seemed depressed and withdrawn. In Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of his Views on Architecture and Music, Shree Zalampas describes how Freudians such as Erik Erikson and Walter Langer diagnosed Hitler as a paranoid narcissist and psychopath (or sociopath), tracing this to his abusive and dysfunctional childhood. Alfred Adler argued that Hitler's real childhood trauma was an inferiority complex in relation to his father, which caused him to live in his own fantasy world of gods and heroes, in which he played the central role.

Key Facts and Medical Evidence

From an interdisciplinary viewpoint, historians, political scientists, and international relations theorists generally assume that most states and their leaders are rational actors who make decisions on the basis of calculated self-interest, although there is considerable debate about the rationality of Adolf Hitler. Physicians, psychologists, and psychiatrists have almost invariably found that Hitler was mentally ill to at least some degree, and that his psychological problems were worsened by physical illness and drug addiction as he aged. All of these professionals have applied their specialized expertise to the Hitler problem in order to determine the medical and psychological factors that contributed to his personality and political ideology. Given the lack of direct evidence beyond the reports of Hitler's own physicians and the reports of German Army psychiatrists, any attempt to describe his possible mental illness is necessarily speculative — but not blindly so.

Some facts are clear enough: his father Alois was an abusive, authoritarian parent who probably suffered from alcoholism and manic depression. Hitler never loved him as he loved his mother Klara, but instead feared him and found his public drunkenness embarrassing. Alois physically abused his children and left Hitler with a lifelong disdain for alcohol and alcoholics, which he regarded as a genetic aberration. Most sources also agree that young Hitler was depressed, isolated, and withdrawn, and tended to live in a fantasy world, although there is no consensus about exactly how far along the spectrum he was toward actual psychosis or schizophrenia.

He was by all accounts a courageous soldier for four years during World War I and suffered a nervous breakdown in 1918 upon learning of Germany's defeat. This resulted in psychosomatic or hysterical blindness and muteness, which his treating psychiatrist addressed with hypnosis. Another important factor after Hitler became dictator was his treatment by Dr. Theodor Morell, who injected him with steroids and amphetamines, likely increasing Hitler's paranoid and aggressive tendencies as well as accelerating cognitive deterioration. All of these factors together almost certainly influenced his more irrational, aggressive, and destructive decisions, his lack of human empathy for the millions of his victims, and his decision to commit suicide when all was lost — taking as many others with him as possible.

Hitler's Childhood and Family Background

Very little reliable information is actually known about Hitler's childhood beyond the basic facts that he hated the abusive, alcoholic Alois and loved his mother Klara. He always carried his mother's picture with him right to the end of his life and frequently admitted that he feared his father. Hitler's racist and militaristic ideology was based on his own delusions and paranoia, and his obsessions about Jews infecting the body of the "healthy" Aryan Volk are well-documented. Waite traces these back to Hitler's unfavorable childhood circumstances — the abusive, alcoholic, and authoritarian father and the idealized mother who died of cancer when he was still an adolescent.

In Hitler's mind, the blonde, timid, and submissive Klara was symbolic of Germany, and many of his female relationships were with younger women who resembled his mother. Klara may also have felt guilty about marrying her older male relative Alois, whom she usually referred to as "uncle" (Zalampas, 1990, p. 116). Ian Kershaw and other biographers noted that Hitler hated his "authoritarian, overbearing, domineering" father Alois, and also that he copied most of his traits (Kershaw, 2008, p. 3). Alois may have been manic-depressive as well as alcoholic; in his manic phases he moved his family seventeen times over the years (Ghaemi, 2011, Chapter 13). Hitler recalled that even when he was twelve or thirteen, Klara would send him to the bar to bring Alois home, and he would have to prop his father up as he staggered down the street. He recalled this experience as so humiliating and embarrassing that he could hardly think about it, but it gave him profoundly negative views about alcohol (Housden, 2000, p. 169).

Young Hitler also hated school and any form of organization or routine work, living instead in an escapist fantasy world in which he was a great artist or a cowboy fighting Native Americans on the American frontier. All of these traits — "indolent lifestyle, the grandiosity of fantasy, the lack of discipline for systematic work" — stayed with Hitler for the rest of his life (Kershaw, 2008, p. 11). Even in his youth, he was fascinated with Wagner and nationalistic myths of Nordic gods and heroes, and imagined himself as a great leader or artistic genius. As Albert Speer observed, Hitler had a talent for drawing buildings but never the human figure, which is why he was not admitted to the Vienna Art Academy (Zalampas, 1990, p. 128). Even though Speer was the closest friend Hitler had — if he ever had any — he "felt he never really knew the man." His other close associates also regarded him as "aloof and contradictory, someone who protected his inner core," and he left no diary and very few personal letters (Housden, 2000, p. 166).

Personality, Psychopathology, and Behavior

Robert G.L. Waite argued in The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler that the Führer of the Third Reich was probably suffering from severe psychopathology — such as paranoia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, or borderline personality disturbances — which led to irrational decisions in both foreign and domestic policy. His hatred of the Jews and others he regarded as "inferior" was downright maniacal, obsessive, and pathological, as was his inability to love or trust any other human being except perhaps his mother Klara. His military planning lacked any rational, long-range strategic vision and ultimately assembled an Allied coalition against Germany that even Hitler sometimes acknowledged could not be defeated.

From a psychiatric viewpoint, Hitler may have been a borderline or schizoid personality, exhibiting both neurotic and psychotic symptoms, and his "fantastic view of the world…had very little relationship to external reality" (Waite, 1993, p. 359). Coming from an abusive, dysfunctional family, young Hitler developed into an isolated, alienated loner prone to fantasies and delusions that may well have been psychotic or schizophrenic at times — particularly after Germany's defeat in November 1918. This seems to have been a key turning point, since the politician and warlord that the world came to know emerged only after the breakdown and collapse of 1918. His passionate ideological hatred of Jews and Communists became clearly defined after this time, and even if those hatreds had already existed in Vienna or Linz, he would have been in no position to act on them. After 1918, none of these ideas changed even slightly until his suicide in the Führerbunker in 1945.

Dr. Eduard Bloch, a Jewish physician in Linz who often practiced charity medicine, treated both Alois and Klara Hitler in their final illnesses. Hitler always referred to him as a "noble" or "honorable" Jew who was not to be harmed when the Germans annexed Austria in 1938. When interviewed by U.S. intelligence officers after he immigrated to New York in 1940, Bloch remembered young Adolf as "a nice, pleasant boy" with the very formal manners expected of Germans in those times. He had no physical deformities and no obvious signs of mental abnormalities or aberrations, although he did seem rather melancholy and withdrawn. Hitler was very devoted to his mother and stayed in a room next to hers as she lay dying, ready to wait on her night and day.

Bloch denied that there was any hint of incest or abnormal attachment, only that Hitler was extremely moved when Klara died. He also said that Alois and Klara would have "rolled over in their graves" if they had seen what he had become, but he had never seen any evidence that young Adolf Hitler was a monster, sadist, or madman. This may well be true, and it is therefore among the most disturbing conclusions of all — Adolf Hitler was not born predisposed to evil in any outwardly visible way (Rosenbaum, 1998, p. 147). Ron Rosenbaum could also find no evidence that Hitler had a "profound, concealed and deeply disturbing sexual secret that explains his otherwise inexplicable pathology," such as being sexually abused by Alois, engaging in incest with Klara, or pursuing perverted sex with his niece Geli (Rosenbaum, 1998, p. 141).

References

Ghaemi, N. (2011). A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links between Leadership and Mental Illness. Penguin Press.

Housden, M. (2000). Hitler: Study of a Revolutionary? Routledge.

Kershaw, I. (2008). Hitler: A Biography. Norton.

Rosenbaum, R. (1998). Explaining Hitler: The Search for the Origins of His Evil. HarperCollins.

Victor, G. (2007). Hitler: The Pathology of Evil. Potomac Books.

Waite, R.G.L. (1993). The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler. De Capo Press.

Williams, J.F. (2005). Corporal Hitler and the Great War, 1914–1918: The List Regiment. Frank Cass.

Zalampas, S.O. (1990). Adolf Hitler: A Psychological Interpretation of his Views on Architecture and Music. Bowling Green State University Popular Press.