Occasionally, as with Hitler’s attitude to sex, Hanfstaengl resorted to pure psycho-babble for Roosevelt, as when Hitler was accused of being an ‘egocentric and masturbatic Narcissus with the craving for the unfindable woman and occasional hysterical outbursts of a sado-masochistic nature’. He said that Hitler used to quote the Russian proverb, ‘If you go to a woman, don’t forget your whip.’ Roosevelt nicknamed these reports his ‘Hitler Bedtime Stories’, and Hanfstaengl steadily kept them coming until the project was finally wound up in July 1944. Quite how much of them Roosevelt actually believed, and how important it was that he should know that Hitler believed that toothbrush moustaches would become all the rage — ‘If it is not fashionable now, it will be later because I wear it!’ — we will never know.
Part of the enjoyment of The Unknown Hitler lies in trying to divine how much was true and how much Hanfstaengl was simply making up in order to ingratiate himself with the Allies and escape post-war retribution for his earlier Nazism. In the event, after a brief period of de-Nazification — which clearly didn’t work since he remained anti-Semitic to the end of his life — this imaginative moral nullity was granted his freedom. Although he could never bring himself to acknowledge it, he had been saved by a practical joke.
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