Linking the Holocaust to Adolf Hitler’s sexual problems—ranging from incest to deformed genitalia—seems to be a favorite parlor game for historians and psychologists and is now the subject of Norman Mailer’s controversial new novel, The Castle in the Forest. But, as Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler (which is one of the books that inspired Mailer to write his latest book), argues, blaming Hitler’s violent hatred towards Jews on theories of sexual perversion may be nothing more than Freudian psychoanalysis based on scant evidence and post-war rumor. In particular, he examines the “evidence” surrounding Hitler’s supposed incestuous relationship with his niece, Angela “Geli” Raubal (who may or may not have committed suicide on the eve of Hitler’s entry into German politics), and hopes that Mailer won’t take the “easy” way out by pinning all of Hitler’s hatred on sexual theories.

What does it all matter in the scheme of things? The trouble with the sexual explanation of Hitler, with almost all sexual explanations, is that they are reductionist: They leave out the political dimension, the cultural and ideological dimension of causation. They leave out nineteen centuries of European religious anti-Semitism that laid the groundwork for Hitler; they leave out the proliferation of ninteenth-century German “racial science” that propagated the notion, indeed virtually invented the notion—of “racial,” biological, anti-Semitism—of Judaism as a genetic disease that couldn’t be cured by mere conversion as in the past. Because it was “in the blood,” it could be cured only by extermination.