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.
In other words, he was a Jew who had been saved by Hitler— from Hitler. This became the conundrum of his life.
What Bloch told Langer in his two interviews with him—a second conversation occurred a few weeks later—can be found in the OSS’s Hitler profile, a 300-page document which was declassified only in 2001, and which, with its disquisitions on Hitler’s voice, eye-colour, childhood and uneasy sexuality, prefigured an entire industry of lurid psycho-historical speculation. Titled A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler: His Life and Legend, the document is organized into five parts: 1) Hitler—as he believes himself to be; 2) Hitler—as the German people know him; 3) Hitler—as his associates know him; 4) Hitler—as he knows himself; 5) Psychological analysis and reconstruction (with a long concluding subsection on his ‘probable behaviour in the future’). There is an extensive bibliography and a complementary sourcebook, in which Langer discusses the reliability of much of the evidence on which he has been working.
From his comments in the sourcebook, it is clear that Langer was as sceptical as he was intrigued by the doctor’s remarkable story. It wasn’t the first time Bloch had told it. Soon after he reached New York in January 1941, Bloch had given a long, detailed interview about his experiences with the Hitler family to Collier’s, the weekly magazine. The interview was published over two weeks in March that year in the form of a piece in the first person (‘as told to J. D. Ratcliff). America was then neutral in the European war; Pearl Harbor was still nine months away. By the time Langer met Bloch, however, Hitler was no longer a merely disquieting transatlantic phenomenon. The world had come to know him, as Langer wrote in his introduction to the profile, for his ‘insatiable greed for power, his ruthlessness, cruelty and utter lack-of-feeling, his contempt for established institutions and his lack of moral restraints’.
Langer didn’t doubt that Hitler would one day be defeated, and moral order restored. But how to prevent ‘similar eruptions’ in the future? There was only one clear answer: ‘We must discover the psychological streams which nourish this destructive state of mind in order that we may divert them into channels which will permit a further evolution of our form of civilization.’
A meeting with Bloch offered Langer an opportunity to paddle in these psychological streams, to return to the primal scene of Hitler’s childhood and adolescence and to what the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper later called ‘the darkest, the most formative, and therefore in some sense, the most interesting period’ of Hitler’s life. Langer believed that Bloch was particularly well placed to provide insight into the years, sometimes since mythologized as the missing years, when, from 1908 to 1913, Hitler was a striving but unsuccessful young painter in Vienna. And what did Bloch tell him? That Hitler had been ‘a nice pleasant youth’.
‘Favours were granted me which I feel sure were accorded no other Jew in all Germany and Austria,’ he told Langer. Hitler had honoured an earlier promise of gratitude for the doctor’s care of his mother; he had helped him escape persecution in Austria and smoothed his passage to America. There is no other reported instance of Hitler intervening to save the life of, or of extending compassion to, a Jew, certainly not once he took power in Germany. In this, Bloch was uniquely chosen.
Dr Bloch was to remain forever a stranger to America. It wasn’t his natural home, nor did he wish it to be—it was where his life narrowed and reduced. To the end, he was a cosmopolitan servant of the old Habsburg empire, who is revealed in photographs to have an old world dandyish charm—a wide-brimmed hat, stiff collars, elaborate double cuffs, a cigarette in hand, a moustache that twisted at the edges like a bow tie. This is what we know about his early life. He was born in 1872 into an assimilated bourgeois Jewish family in Frauenburg, a small German-speaking village in southern Bohemia—which, he said, had been ‘under three flags’ in his lifetime: Austrian, Czechoslovakian and German. He studied medicine in Prague and then, once qualified as a general practitioner, he joined the Austrian army as a military doctor. In 1899, he was ‘ordered to Linz’, the provincial capital of Upper Austria and the home town of Adolf Hitler, where, on completing his army service, he decided to stay on; in 1903, he married a local Jewish girl, Emilie Kafka, a distant relative of Franz Kafka, and opened his own public practice.