Ron Rosenbaum: Everything You Need To Know About Hitler's "Missing" Testicle
Somebody make it stop. This incessant fixation on Hitler's sexuality, on his alleged perversity. I think it's fair to say that the very apex of cultural stupidity in our era is the compulsive conjunction of Hitler and sex. He was a "predatory" homosexual. He engaged in excretory practices with his underage half-niece. And, one of the most enduring, a myth I thought I had refuted once and for all but that now rears its head again: Hitler had only one testicle.
Isn't it obvious by now what this is about? Our need to prove that Hitler was not "normal," thus not like us, normal human nature thereby exculpated from producing a Hitler. It fills a need to reassure ourselves there is no Hitler potential in human potential. We're off the hook.
But despite the obviousness of it, it just doesn't stop....
ven novels and films about Nazis that don't feature Hitler somehow seem to have an unnatural quotient of sex. Take The Reader, the German best-seller (surprise!) and Oprah favorite in which a woman who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard later is subsequently sexually voracious with a teenage boy. Sex you will be able to see in great quantities in the soon-to-be-released film. Alas, the book has taken in literati over here as well (with the notable exception of Cynthia Ozick, who contended that it was ultimately an exercise in exculpation that metaphorically depicted the German people as somehow unaware of what was being done in their name). The movie version offers a plentitude of nudity and simulated sex with a plentifully nude Kate Winslet as the Nazi war criminal.
I've tried to point out the sheer lack of historicity or profundity in our efforts to link Hitler (and Nazis in general) with unconventional sex. I touched on these themes a few years back in a Slate column on the Hitler-was-homosexual claim, a claim that implicitly linked homosexual behavior to Hitler's criminal pathology. And I devoted a chapter of my book Explaining Hitler to attempting to discredit the emblematic Hitler perversion rumor, the Geli Raubal story: an effort by Nazi defectors and Freudians to prove that Hitler was really, really bad because of an apocryphal sexual perversion he practiced with his half-niece, Geli, who committed suicide before he became Führer. (As if, if it weren't for all that, he'd have turned out OK.) But my efforts to disprove this tall tale didn't stop supposedly literary novelists such as Ron Hansen, Norman Mailer, and lesser lights from taking it seriously.
And now the "missing testicle" is back. One of the most widespread urban legends about Hitler is that he was monorchid, and the supposedly missing testicle has seemed—to many who should know better—not just a minor deformity but the key to Hitler's psyche....
Read entire article at Slate
Isn't it obvious by now what this is about? Our need to prove that Hitler was not "normal," thus not like us, normal human nature thereby exculpated from producing a Hitler. It fills a need to reassure ourselves there is no Hitler potential in human potential. We're off the hook.
But despite the obviousness of it, it just doesn't stop....
ven novels and films about Nazis that don't feature Hitler somehow seem to have an unnatural quotient of sex. Take The Reader, the German best-seller (surprise!) and Oprah favorite in which a woman who served as a Nazi concentration camp guard later is subsequently sexually voracious with a teenage boy. Sex you will be able to see in great quantities in the soon-to-be-released film. Alas, the book has taken in literati over here as well (with the notable exception of Cynthia Ozick, who contended that it was ultimately an exercise in exculpation that metaphorically depicted the German people as somehow unaware of what was being done in their name). The movie version offers a plentitude of nudity and simulated sex with a plentifully nude Kate Winslet as the Nazi war criminal.
I've tried to point out the sheer lack of historicity or profundity in our efforts to link Hitler (and Nazis in general) with unconventional sex. I touched on these themes a few years back in a Slate column on the Hitler-was-homosexual claim, a claim that implicitly linked homosexual behavior to Hitler's criminal pathology. And I devoted a chapter of my book Explaining Hitler to attempting to discredit the emblematic Hitler perversion rumor, the Geli Raubal story: an effort by Nazi defectors and Freudians to prove that Hitler was really, really bad because of an apocryphal sexual perversion he practiced with his half-niece, Geli, who committed suicide before he became Führer. (As if, if it weren't for all that, he'd have turned out OK.) But my efforts to disprove this tall tale didn't stop supposedly literary novelists such as Ron Hansen, Norman Mailer, and lesser lights from taking it seriously.
And now the "missing testicle" is back. One of the most widespread urban legends about Hitler is that he was monorchid, and the supposedly missing testicle has seemed—to many who should know better—not just a minor deformity but the key to Hitler's psyche....