One of our all-might moderators /u/Georgy_K_Zhukov did a great write-up on the question Are There Any Reports On Hitler's Sex Life? and it is well worth a look at because it answers some of this question tangentially.

Part of the problem with answering this question, and likely the reason it is such a graveyard, is that Hitler very much kept the women in his life in the background. Much of the picture of his sex life is based upon postwar reminiscences and educated speculation. Hitler ordered all of Braun's personal correspondence with him destroyed before his suicide. Although some in the Western press caught on to the existence of Braun, the German press largely knew to avoid speculating upon his romantic attachments. This has given historians a very narrow source base upon which to extrapolate a larger picture of Hitler's romantic life.

One thing that is relatively clear is that Hitler always presented his own personal drives as wholly subordinate to the cause of National Socialism. In public, he was always a solitary figure and this meant the few women in his life were shunted far away from the limelight. At social events Braun attended, Hitler often maintained a very cool and distant reserve towards her. This coolness was in contrast to Braun's home movies at the Berghof, where Hitler struck a much more intimate and flirty tone with his paramour.

One of the important stepping stones for the politicization of Hitler's asexuality was the suicide of his niece, Geli Raubal. Her suicide in 1931 came at a very delicate time for Hitler and the double scandal of incest and a dubious death was damaging to Hitler's credibility as an emerging public figure of note in Germany. A number of newspapers affiliated with the left like the left-liberal Regensburger Echo used the story to portray Hitler as a weak and immoral figure. Within this context, Hitler knew he had to act soon. His lawyer threatened libel against the Münchener Post for implying that Hitler precipitated the suicide, which subsequently forced the paper to retract the story a day later. Six days after her death, Hitler declared to an NSDAP meeting in Hamburg "what has given me the most pains and cost me the most work is what I love best: our Volk." The NSDAP newspaper Der Angriff would over the next months continue to emphasize that Hitler had only one true mistress, the German nation, and he had subsumed all worldly desires to service his one true love. Although Hitler had cultivated this mystique of the lone individual before Raubal's suicide, the questions surrounding her death gave him an added impetus to reemphasize this facet of his public image. The 1932 authorized book The Hitler Nobody Knows provided an in depth look at Hitler's private life and presented a carefully crafter image of a domestic life characterized by a sober modesty. That image became dominant once he became Fuhrer and Hitler lorded over the idea that his superhuman tasks meant he did not need fulfill the base requirements of his fellow men. At holidays and his birthday, he tended to make a show of disdaining the need for the ostentatious presents that flooded the Chancellery.

This politically-motivated public indifference towards Raubal and Braun had the potential to greatly strain any relationship, however any firm conclusion on the nature of these relationships is largely speculative. The absence of direct documentation from any of the participants (Hitler, Raubal, Braun) means that historians have to construct a picture of Hitler's love life through scraps of information. It is a plausible hypothesis that Hitler's coldness and desire to control these women, which is apparent in his restrictions on their public appearance at state and party events, contributed to unhappiness and depression. These women were all significantly younger than Hitler and lacked any real political networks of their own and were thus dependent upon Hitler's largess. Yet there is also the possibility that Hitler's romantic life was relatively normal for a man of his position and era. Hitler was hardly the first politician to sideline his romantic life for political ends or be drawn towards younger partners. And while it is tempting to portray Hitler's control over these women as emblematic of his wider need for domination in all areas in his life, such a psychological portrait goes a bit too far given the paltry level of evidence. In some ways, when confronting the gravity of Hitler's crimes, it is psychologically easier to accept that he was perverted and distorted in all areas of his life, including romance. The idea that Hitler's love life was relatively normal, or at least not uncommon for his era and political position, is in some ways a more disturbing picture of Hitler to come to terms with than the idea of a sexually repressed and domineering monster.

Sources

Görtemaker, Heike B. Eva Braun: Life with Hitler. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011.

Kershaw, Ian. Hitler, 1936-45: Nemesis. New York: W.W. Norton, 2000.

Stratigakos, Despina. Hitler at Home. London: Yale University Press, 2015.