The Search for Dr Bloch

Early in 1943, an operative of the Office of Strategic Services or OSS, the wartime precursor of the CIA, made his way to an unkempt attic apartment on the fifth floor of a building in Creston Avenue, the Bronx. The operative, Walter C. Langer, was compiling what would become the world’s first psychological profile of Adolf Hitler, and that day he took with him Gertrude Kurth, a psychotherapist who was also acting as his translator. Together they climbed the stairs to see a seventy-one-year-old doctor who two years earlier had fled from Austria to New York: a Jew, Dr Eduard Bloch. Dr Bloch had an interesting story to tell. He had known Hitler at first hand; nearly forty years before he had been the Hitler family’s doctor. He had treated Hitler’s mother, Klara, during her final illness, as well as the young Hitler himself for various routine ailments. Obviously, in any study of Hitler’s personality the evidence of such an intimate witness to illness and trauma—his mother’s death had grieved Hitler deeply—could be important. No less interesting—though its relevance to Langer’s research might be debatable—was Dr Bloch’s account of how he had escaped the usual fate of Austrian Jews in 1940. Hitler personally, he told Langer and Kurth, had intervened to allow his departure.