Hitler was suicidal

Hitler ended his life in the Berlin bunker by committing suicide. If he had been captured by the Soviet troops he would have been mercilessly tortured. There were rumors afloat that Stalin intended to keep him in a cage. So it was for the best that he committed suicide. But his life had a nearness to suicide that went beyond his bunker suicide. His first girlfriend Angela Raubal committed suicide after a heated argument with Hitler. Hitler’s long time mistress, Eva Braun, was hospitalized for attempting suicide during the first years of their relationship. During the thirties in the Third Reich women were reported to have committed suicide in response to the overwhelming power of his leadership. Moreover, Hitler had a “total victory or suicide” strategy in war–according to Ian Kershaw. The German Fuehrer once claimed that every German soldier should keep one bullet in reserve and use it for suicide rather than surrender to the enemy. So Hitler was not only homicidal but suicidal. There was an aura of death around Hitler’s life.

Hitler was homicidal

Hitler had all kinds of reasons for killing innocent people. He killed mentally ill and retarded people because they were supposedly unworthy of life. He killed Jews because they were supposedly the destroyers of culture. He killed 85 fellow Nazis on the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 in a preemptive strike. In 1942, he killed all males over 16 in the village of Lidice, Czechoslovakia for harboring the assasins of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich. It is interesting that all these killings were done through intermediaries and not personally by Hitler. Even as a soldier in WWI he was a runner and not involved directly in killing anyone. Why was Hitler so bloodthirsty? My mentor from my college days claimed that Hitler was brutal because “too many hounds means death to the hare”.  She meant by this that Hitler had too many enemies to make survival very likely. His resonse was to rely on brutality. But this only explains his behavoir after the turning point of the war in Stalingrad. He was brutal and homicidal from the beginning. Charles Bracelin Flood, the author of the excellent book Hitler: The Path to Power  claims that Hitler brutalized people because he himself was beaten by his father as a child. We see often in psychology that child abusers were often abused themselves as a child. Certainly, this is armchair psychology by Flood. But it is interesting to note that Hitler in Mein Kampf claimed that he loved his mother and respected his father. Is it possible that he respected but did not also love his father because he was periodically beaten? Dr. Morel, Hitler’s long time physician, claimed that Hitler never showed any signs of mental illness. But he was probably driven to be brutal towards people because his father had brutalized him. He had a vicious character trait that did not border on mental illness.