Revealed at last, the dirt file on Hitler

October 8, 2005

A 1943 psychiatric dossier aimed to humiliate and destroy the German dictator, writes Gary Hughes.



NATCH the dictator and hold him prisoner to deny him the chance of becoming a martyr. Keep him in isolation, take humiliating photographs and film of him and release them to the public to discredit him. Portray him as a madman, label him the No. 1 world criminal and use him as an example to deter other "crack-brained fanatics".

It reads like the US military's blueprint for dealing with Saddam Hussein during the Iraq war. In fact it was the top secret advice given to the US military 62 years ago this month on how to deal with Adolf Hitler.

The recommendations were made in a remarkable 230-page dossier that provided a complete psychoanalysis of Hitler by world-renowned psychologist Dr Henry Murray from the Harvard Psychological Clinic.

The dossier, prepared for the US Government's Office of Strategic Services ?- the forerunner of the CIA ?- portrays Hitler as a cowardly, deeply disturbed personality racked by paranoia, schizophrenia, homophobia, impotence, masochism, hysteria and an Oedipus complex.

Hitler's "many weaknesses" included being frail and sickly, having a "large feminine component in his constitution", being emotionally dependent on his mother and suffering from "homosexual panic".

The dossier, prepared for the US Government's Office of Strategic Services ?- the forerunner of the CIA ?- portrays Hitler as a cowardly, deeply disturbed personality racked by paranoia, schizophrenia, homophobia, impotence, masochism, hysteria and an Oedipus complex.

Hitler's "many weaknesses" included being frail and sickly, having a "large feminine component in his constitution", being emotionally dependent on his mother and suffering from "homosexual panic".
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"Sexually he is a fully fledged masochist," the dossier says. "Hitler himself is impotent. He is unmarried and his old acquaintances say he is incapable of consummating the sexual act in a normal fashion."

But it goes beyond psychoanalysis, making predictions about Hitler's likely behaviour, advising how to undermine his public image and making recommendations about the way the German people should be treated after the war.

Murray, who died in 1988, had previously been used by the OSS to develop ways of selecting spies to work behind enemy lines during World War II. His analysis has now been released by Cornell University with the permission of his family.

Joe Siracusa, a lecturer in international studies at RMIT University, who plans to incorporate the dossier into a course on global security next year, says it is the first documented example of the military using psychoanalysis as part of an intelligence assessment.

Dr Siracusa first heard rumours about the existence of the dossier while studying in Vienna during the 1960s and has been hunting for a copy ever since.

The dossier was so secret that only 30 copies were made and Dr Siracusa said it would have been restricted to the highest levels of the US military and government, including then president Franklin Roosevelt and General Dwight Eisenhower.

"This is the first time where psychiatric observations drove policy," Dr Siracusa said.

"Murray analysed Hitler's mind, probing for weaknesses that could then be used against him or, at the very least, looking for ways to predict his next move. This is the classic marriage of medicine and statecraft."

The dossier repeatedly stressed the need to deny Hitler his dream of immortality by staging a dramatic and spectacular end to his life in the final days of the war. It predicted several ways Hitler might try to end his life, including blowing himself up on a mountain top, having himself killed by a Jew or shooting himself with a silver bullet. But the dossier left no doubt that Hitler would eventually seek death as the war was lost.

"A point to be remembered about Hitler is that he started his career at scratch, a nonentity with nothing to lose, and he selected a fanatical path for himself which requires as an ending complete success (omnipotence) or utter failure (death)," the dossier says. "No compromise is possible."

The most effective way of denying Hitler his dreams of everlasting glory was to take him alive and declare him insane, rather than put him on trial and execute him or sentence him to life in prison.

"A trial followed by execution, by life imprisonment or by exile will provide a tragic ending for the drama of Hitler's sensational career and thus contribute the element that is necessary to the resurrection and perpetuation of the Hitlerian legend," the dossier says. It suggested using propaganda as a means of tricking Hitler out of killing himself, including dropping pamphlets over Germany with cartoons showing the dictator using suicide as a "cowardly betrayal of his own people".

"He is very susceptible to ridicule and if the cartoons are clever enough to make suicide seem cowardly, grotesque or ridiculous, it may be enough to deter him," the dossier says.

Hitler eventually committed suicide alongside his wife of one day, Eva Braun, by shooting himself on April 30, 1945, in his command bunker in Berlin.

The dossier was unsympathetic towards Germans, predicting that at the end of the war there would be violent uprisings of slave labourers and civilians in occupied territories. "Much German blood will be spilled," the dossier predicted. "This is as it should be, a fitting Nemesis."

Dr Siracusa, who has written several books on diplomacy and war, said he was fascinated by the influence such a study would have had on US intelligence and the use to which that intelligence was put.

"Everyone seems to know what George Bush did with his intelligence on alleged weapons of mass destruction in his Iraqi policies," he said.

Dr Siracusa plans to use the dossier as part of his global security, technology and international security course to fill in the "missing dimension" of international affairs ?- intelligence.

"Particularly interesting is the manner in which Dr Murray conflates Hitler and the German people. There is no talk here about 'good Germans' and 'bad Germans'. For Dr Murray, the pioneer of personality psychology, they are all guilty," he says.

"There is one surprising omission in his analysis which emphasises Hitler's physical weaknesses, and that is there is no mention of Hitler winning the Iron Cross in World War 1, which was given for conspicuous service in warfare. I don't know if the Iron Cross is exactly up there with the Victoria Cross or the Medal of Honour, but I do know for certain they were not handed out lightly."

The Age