Walter Langer

Walter Langer was a Cambridge, Massachusetts psychoanalyst whose older brother William had taken leave from a chair of history at Harvard to head OSS Research and Analysis. General William Donovan gave Langer the job of psychoanalyzing Adolf Hitler to uncover vulnerabilities that could be covertly exploited. Donovan told Langer to go ahead despite the obvious limitations of conducting analysis without direct access to the patient.¹

Pre-War Recruitment

Four months before Pearl Harbor, Donovan had enlisted Langer to put together a nationwide network of analysts to study the morale of the country's young men, who, it was widely feared, were not enthusiastic about fighting a foreign war. Pearl Harbor seemed to solve this morale problem, but Langer stayed with Donovan as a part-time psychoanalytic consultant.¹

The Hitler Profile

With a small research staff, Langer examined everything he could find on Hitler and interviewed a number of people who had known the German leader. Aware of the severe limitations on his information, but left no choice by General Donovan, Langer plowed ahead and wrote up a final study. It pegged Hitler as a "neurotic psychopath" and proceeded to dissect the Führer's psyche. Langer, since retired to Florida, believed he came "pretty close" to describing the real Adolf Hitler. He was particularly proud of his predictions that the Nazi leader would become increasingly disturbed as Germany suffered more and more defeats and that he would commit suicide rather than face capture.¹

Operational Applications

Langer's profile noted Hitler's "large feminine component," "extreme sentimentality," and masochistic tendencies. He wrote that Hitler was "masochistic in the extreme inasmuch as he derives sexual pleasure from punishment inflicted on his own body. There is every reason to suppose that during his early years, instead of identifying himself with his father as most boys do, he identified with his mother." He added that Hitler's "extreme sentimentality, his emotionality, his occasional softness, and his weeping, even after he became Chancellor, may be regarded as manifestations of a fundamental pattern that undoubtedly had its origin in his relationship to his mother."¹

Stanley Lovell seized upon one of Langer's ideas, that Hitler might have feminine tendencies, and got permission from the OSS hierarchy to try to push the Führer over the gender line: "The hope was that his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano." Lovell used OSS agent networks to try to slip female sex hormones into Hitler's food, but nothing apparently came of it.¹

The Mind of Adolf Hitler: Publication and Specific Predictions

The full report, titled "A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend," remained classified for nearly three decades. Basic Books published it in 1972 as The Mind of Adolf Hitler: The Secret Wartime Report, edited by Walter C. Langer himself, with an introduction explaining its original context and subsequent history. The 1972 publication became a bestseller.

The report's most famous predictions proved accurate. Langer's central conclusion was that Hitler would "become more and more neurotic" as Germany's military position deteriorated and that suicide was "the most plausible outcome" when defeat became undeniable. He predicted Hitler would show increasingly rare public appearances, intensifying emotional outbursts, and would contemplate no surrender, capitulation, or peace negotiations. He also identified the possibility of a military coup against Hitler well before the failed July 1944 assassination attempt. The report's diagnosis was "neurotic psychopath bordering on schizophrenia."²

Gittinger's Extension of Langer's Methods

Langer's indirect analytical method, conducting psychological assessment without direct access to the subject, would later be refined by John Gittinger within the CIA. Gittinger built an office that extended Langer's approach into a systematic tool for evaluating foreign leaders and planning covert operations, making personality analysis an integral part of Agency tradecraft.¹