Could Hitler have been gay?

That Adolf Hitler's sex-life was somewhat odd was fairly generally known. But was he gay? Well, "up to a point, Lord Copper". It is a most fitting phrase, because Professor Machtan's book is the kind that lay reviewers describe as " thoroughly researched". It does have pages of footnotes, separately translated we are told (though not why) by Suzanne Eckhart. But familiarity with the sources cited shows that Professor Machtan has only consulted them up to the point where they seemed to support his convictions, and not any further. He certainly never deals with elements in them which do not fit his convictions. Nor with their overall credibility, which varies.

Nor does he seem to understand 20th century male-male relationships, except in sexual terms. He is quite unable to grasp how ordinary soldiers made very close friends with their buddies, even out of danger. He does not understand how often ordinary soldiers refused promotion because it would take them away from "the lads".

In his view Hitler, refused promotion, or was refused it in the German army during the First World War, because he was suspected of homosexuality. He has not discovered the document citing Hitler's bravery, awarding him the Iron Cross, First Class, although it was published in the 1960s. And he is utterly unable to distinguish between malicious gossip, persons seeking to make a fast buck by writing memoirs of the "I was Hitler's puff-ball" kind, and persons for whom any male friendship must be homosexual. And he switches backwards and forwards between "homosexual" and "homo-erotic" (which, so far as I can see, means that any strong friendship between men, from Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, not to mention Laurel and Hardy, Flanagan and Allen, or any other couple of close male friends one knows, has a suspect element in it). In the first half of the twentieth century, given the separate education of the sexes, and the domination of most of the professions by men, very close friendships between men, often of a lifetime's duration, were the statistical norm.

Hitler was, by all accounts, a loner. His relations with his father, bad in essence, were worsened by his father's death before he had even run halfway through his adolescence. One man emerged to claim a close friendship with him, both at school and in Hitler's early years in Vienna. No-one can check on the veracity of his memoirs which appeared in the 1950s. But one thing is clear; he came on to Hitler.

Not the other way round. It would be unusual if, during Hitler's adolescence, he did not experiment with homosexuality first.

A number of people tried to blackmail Hitler with allegations of homosexuality in the army and the party. When Hitler emerged as a political force at the end of the 1920s, his enemies on the Left, both in Germany and abroad, did their best to blacken his name; but in vain. The stories had no more impact than those which attributed to him a Jewish grandmother.

Professor Machtan documents all these efforts in impressive detail. But they are simply efforts; the countermeasures they called up were quite mild; by Hitler's standards, that is. They were, of course, potentially as damaging, whether true or false. But not all documents automatically record the truth.

He also documents in full the active homosexual element in the Nazi movement; though here again he brings in more names than are easily credible: Rudolf Hess, for example. He really goes to town on the homosexual leadership of Hitler's SA, whom Hitler purged on the famous Night of the Long Knives, Roehm, Stennes, and so on; some were caught in bed with their catamites. But he does nothing to upset the general view that this was a pre-emptive strike against the Nazi Left Wing, who wanted a real revolution, and the displacement of the army officers by a people's army.

I would be interested in his comments on the allegation that Soviet forensic experts examining Hitler's corpse confirmed what every marching Tommy had sung, that he only had one testicle. Would this not explain his physical shyness, visible in every film that Eva Braun shot of him?

Donald Cameron Watt's edition of Hitler's Mein Kampf is published by Pimlico at £18.