Sex Lives of the Great Dictators (14 page)

A week later she still had not heard from him. She longed to fall ill so that he might feel guilty for neglecting her.

"Why do I have to bear all this?" she lamented. "If only I had never met him."

She began taking sleeping tablets so that she did not have to think about her plight. From this time on, she became addicted.

"Why doesn't the devil carry me off?" she wrote. "Hell must be infinitely preferable; to this... Why doesn't he stop tormenting me."

Things got worse. Heinrich Hoffmann told her that Hitler had found a replacement for her. "She is known as the Walkure and looks the part, including the legs. But these are the dimensions he prefers," Eva wrote.

This could have been either Winifred Wagner, whose father-in-law wrote "The Ride of the Valkyrie", or Unity Mitford, whose middle name was Valkyrie. Both were tall, full-breasted women, while Eva was slim with a small bust.

"He'll soon make her lose thirty pounds through worry," she wrote, "unless she has a gift for growing fat in adversity."

Eva wrote that her only concern was that Hitler had not had the courtesy to inform her that he had lost his heart to someone else. It can hardly have been a surprise to her. He was pictured in the newspapers daily with other attractive women.

"What happens to me must be a matter of indifference to him," she concludes. "I shall wait until 3 June, in other words a quarter of a year since our last meeting. Let no one say I am not patient. I sit here waiting while the sun mocks me through the window panes. That he should have so little understanding, and allow me to be humiliated in front of strangers. But men's pleasure..."

But she could not wait that long. On 28 May, she sent him another letter and decided that, if he did not reply by ten o'clock that night, she would kill herself. Even if he. was not seeing the Walkfire, there were so many others.

Eva received no reply - not before ten o'clock, not after. The following morning she took two dozen Phanodorm tablets and, within minutes, was unconscious.

She was discovered by her sister Ilse, who came round to return a dress she had

borrowed. Ilse called a doctor and Eva was revived. The whole incident was passed off as an accident, brought on by strain. But, soon after, Hitler found Eva a larger apartment on the outskirts of Munich and, later, the villa she wanted so much.

Around that time, Eva introduced Hitler to Dr Theo Morrell, who was a specialist in venereal diseases. He was Hitler's doctor up to his death in 1945. Morrell never admitted to treating Hitler for VD, but said he had been called in to treat eczema on his leg - a common site for a syphilitic tumour. The drugs he prescribed were also commonly given to patients in the last stage of syphilis.

Later, Eva asked Morrell to give Hitler something to increase his sexual potency. Morrell injected him with Orchikrin (emulsified bulls' testicles). It did not seem to do any good and Hitler never tried it again.

Throughout the war, Eva installed herself at Berghof, Hitler's retreat at Berchtesgaden.

There, she played at being the perfect little wife to her Adolf, when he could take time off from the war; but even at Berghof, she was a prisoner.

"His jealousy is peculiar and inhuman," she wrote in her diary.

He loved to see her naked and encouraged her to swim and sunbathe nude. He constantly hinted that it was "too hot for clothes", in the hope that she would strip for him. If he had time, he would undress her himself, with fumbling fingers that nearly drove her crazy with frustration.

He also liked to photograph her nude. Often he would take close-ups of her buttocks.

When taking intimate shots, he would be careful to photograph her from an obscenely low angle, explaining that he did not want anyone to recognize her if they fell into the wrong hands.

Hitler's commando chief, Otto Skorzeny, reported that Eva told him that Hitler "doesn't even bother to take his boots off, and sometimes we don't get into bed. We stretch out on the floor. On the floor he is very erotic."

There was little vaginal sex. Indeed, her medical records indicated that her vagina was too small for normal sex. But she desperately wanted children and had to undergo painful surgery to widen it. After the treatment was successfully completed, her gynaecologist died mysteriously, in a car accident. Despite the operation, their sex life did not become any more normal.

"He only needs me for certain purposes," she confided to her diary again. "This is idiotic."

In February 1945, when it was clear that the war was lost, Hitler ordered her to remain at Berghof. But being separated from her Adolf was more than she could bear. In April, she disobeyed him and got one of his official cars from Munich to drive her to his bunker in Berlin. She was almost killed by British dive bombers on the way. When she arrived he was so overjoyed that she was safe, that he did not have the heart to scold her.

With the tragedy in its last act, Goring sent an ultimatum, demanding that leadership of the Reich be handed over to him.

"Treachery," screamed Hitler.

He ridiculed Goring, saying it was well known that a bullet in the groin in World War I had left him impotent. That was why he was so fat. Goring's daughter bore a conspicuous likeness to Mussolini, Hitler said. Mussolini had stayed with Goring and Goring's wife Emmy had become particularly attached to him.

When news came that Himmler had defected, Hitler went into a blood-curdling tirade.

His body shook and his face became paralyzed. This rigor is another symptom associated with tertiary syphilis.

Some, mostly women, were still loyal to Hitler. Hanna Reitsch, the test pilot who proved the airworthiness of the V-1 flying bomb by flying it from a strap-on cockpit, made one last dash to be beside Hitler in his hour of need. She landed her plane under Russian gunfire in the avenue that ran down from the Brandenburg Gate. It is said that she had cooked up a plan to fly Hitler to Argentina, only to drop it when she discovered that he had Eva Braun with him in the bunker.

At midnight on 29 April, 1945, Hitler and Eva Braun married. They returned to his suite.

Next morning, while the newly-weds slept in late, Eva's brother-in-law, Hermann Fegelein, was shot on Hitler's orders. He had been caught leaving the bunker with a large amount of Swiss francs and a woman who spoke French. Eva had begged Hitler to spare his life - but it had done no good.

Later on 30 April, in Hitler's study, Eva and Hitler bit into vials of poison and shot each other in the head. Goebbels found them. Their bodies were taken out of the bunker, doused with petrol and set alight. They did not burn completely, though; there was enough left for the Russian doctors to carry out a post-mortem. In the autopsy, it was discovered that Hitler did indeed have only one ball, but it could not be determined whether he had been born that way or whether one of his testicles had been removed surgically - not an uncommon practice when syphilis reaches its third and fatal stage.

The great dictator was dead, but that is not quite the end of the story. During the early 1970s, the story circulated that Hitler had had a daughter. It was said that she was the offspring of Tillie Fleischer, the Nordic javelin thrower who had won two gold medals at the 1936 Olympics. After Leni Riefenstahl had filmed a delighted Fuhrer embracing the Nordic beauty they had an eight-month affair. Hitler gave Tillie a white Mercedes and a lakeside villa near Berlin; but when she became pregnant, he dropped her like a stone.

Tillie Fleischer married Dr Fitz Hoser, one of Hitler's aides, and they passed off Hitler's daughter, Gisela, as their own. When Gisela grew up, she married a Jew, the son of a French Rabbi who had died in Hitler's death camps, and she eventually converted to Judaism herself That would have been a rather ironic ending but it seems unlikely - it was Hitler, not Goring, who Magda Goebbels claimed had been rendered impotent by a bullet to the groin in World War I.

6 - THE THOUGHTS OF CHAIRMAN MAO

Although Mao Tse-tung aspired to be an emperor, he remained a peasant. He cared little for his personal appearance or hygiene. He ate smelly food, which tainted his breath, and chainsmoked 555 State Express until his teeth went black. He liked to talk openly about his bowel movements and would unself-consciously remove his trousers in front of guests on a hot day. In later life, he stopped cleaning his teeth altogether and they became covered in a green film. He also stopped washing, considering it a waste of time. Servants would wipe him down with a wet towel each night while he attended to state papers, read or talked.

Also in later life, a medical examination revealed that his foreskin was tight and difficult to pull back. His left testicle was smaller than normal and his right one undescended. It had remained in the abdominal cavity since childhood. When this was pointed out to him, he was sixty. Up until then, he had never realized that most men have two balls.

Born in 1893 in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a peasant farmer, Mao's first sexual experience occurred when he was still a teenager in his hometown. He had a youthful encounter with a twelve-year-old girl. In later years, Mao was fond of recalling this initiation. In 1962, Mao even arranged to meet her again, this woman to whom he had lost his virginity. By then, she was old and grey. He gave her two thousand yuan. When she left, he said wistfully: "How she's changed." What did he expect after more than fifty years.

However, the young Mao showed very little interest in sex. He was studious and

introverted throughout his youth, and underwent long periods of sexual abstinence while he concentrated on the great political problems of the day. His father was worried about his dreamy, romantic son and decided to shake him out of it. In 1908, he arranged for the fifteen-year-old Mao to marry a woman six years his senior. For the first-and only- time in his life, he went through a full traditional wedding ceremony. Afterwards, although the woman was moved into the Mao family house, he refused to live with his bride. She died in 1910. Later, he maintained that he never laid a hand on her.

During his late teens and early twenties, Mao and his friends were too committed to politics to think about sex. There were women in their circle, such as Tsai Chang who went on to become a Communist leader, but shyness and inhibiting social tradition meant that Mao had little time for romance.

Mao devoted his energies to becoming a full-time revolutionary in Peking and probably remained celibate until he met Tao Szu-yung, a brilliant student. The romance withered when they disagreed about politics and they went their separate ways. Then he met another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Yang Kai-hui. He wrote love poems to her - as he did to his other lovers. She was the daughter of a university professor, white-skinned, with deep-set eyes They entered into a trial marriage before formalizing the situation in 1921, when she gave birth to their first child. This may seem conventional enough to us, but in China at that time for a couple to choose each other, without reference to their parents, was truly revolutionary.

The war against Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang nationalist (and vehemently anti-

Communist) forces soon separated them. Mao left Yang and their children in Changsha for safety in 1927, while he established himself as a major revolutionary leader. Three years later, the Kuomintang seized Changsha. Yang was captured and executed when she refused to betray her husband. Their two boys fled to Shanghai where they had to fend for themselves on the streets. The younger son, Anqing, suffered from mental illness which was ascribed to the beatings he had suffered as a vagrant at the hands of the Shanghai police. The elder, Anying, was killed in an American air raid during the Korean war.

However, while Yang was sacrificing her life for her husband, Mao was already living with another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Ho Tzu-chen, a girl about half his age. She was eighteen; he was thirty-seven. When he first met his "revolutionary lovemate", as he called her, he described her as "attractive and refined". She spoke in a clear and measured way. Her eyes were a "pair of crystals". Meeting her gave him a feeling "as sweet as honey".

They married soon after Yang's death - though some reports say that they had already wed in the safety of a Soviet base before Yang gave her life for her husband. When it came to marriage and divorce, Mao was always a bit sloppy about the paperwork.

Rumours were soon circulating, perhaps put about by Mao's enemies, that Ho was

sexually dissatisfied with Mao, because he was so much older than her and constantly busy.

Mao wrote her a poem showing that he understood her frustration:

I am just eighteen, hair not yet white,

Stuck on Well Mountain, waiting for old age...

A messenger comes to the door and says:

"Commander Mao is busy at a meeting"

I have only my pillow, to comfort me in my loneliness,

My grassy bed grows cold as the night wears on

I should have married an elegant man,

and drawn pleasure from the hours.

Ho was Mao's companion on the Long March, which started in 1934. This was the two-

year, 6,000-mile trek from their soviet in South-east China to the Shaanxi province in North-west China which the Communist forces undertook to escape the nationalist Kuomintang.

Mao and Ho left their two children behind with a peasant family. They never discovered what happened to them. Ho gave birth to another two children during the Long March and

conceived a third. She had six children in all. Only one was male and, as far as they knew, only one, a daughter, Lin Min, survived.

It was during the Long March that Mao began to exhibit his peculiar lavatorial habits. He refused the offer of a commode, preferring to go into the fields with his bodyguards and dig a hole. Mao believed that his bowel movements were an inspiration to his troops.

Lavatories and bowel movements were a big thing for Mao, even after he came to power.

While many of his district leaders installed Western-style sit-down lavatories and soft Western mattresses in their residences, Mao preferred to travel with his hard wooden bed and a squat-style Chinese toilet. Even on a visit to Moscow, he would insist on squatting over a bedpan rather than use a decadent Russian sit-down loo.