I Was Hitler's Doctor (Pulp History)

Hitler, Pulp Magazines, Comic Strips and Marilyn Monroe

The Curious Pulp Publishing Involvement of Samuel Roth

Pulp magazine advertisements present mazes of mysteries to modern eyes.  A life- sized tank for $1.95! It has to be cardboard. What the hell is a Sea Monkey, really? Could Charles Atlas really turn a wimp into a man in just seven days? And then there are the books with the odd claims. Unusual in both topic and longevity of presentation was:

The above is from a 1942 copy of Speed Mystery. The ad ran, in various presentations, from 1941 through the early 1960s. Written by psychiatrist Eric Krueger, with a forward by famous muck-raking novelist Upton Sinclair, and a preface by former Nazi party organizer Otto Strasser, I Was Hitler’s Doctor is a firsthand account of the inner life of one of the greatest monsters of the twentieth century. Spanning fifteen years, the book covers Hitler’s treatment during the period (1919-1934) in which he rose from absolute obscurity to right before taking total control of Germany.

Dr. Krueger first meets Hitler as a charity case. He has been brought to Krueger by an army pal, after having first been denied treatment by a Jewish doctor who demanded payment. As it should turn out, the future leader of the Nazis is suffering from the “French disease” or the clap.  From that point on Hitler becomes a repeat customer, eventually a paying customer and finally a somewhat frequent customer. Not only does Krueger become Hitler’s shrink, he is also his personal physician--and on occasion, Hitler becomes a source of referrals. It’s a continual relationship, by its nature intimate, but it is hardly personal. From the very start Hitler’s knee-jerk anti-Semitism obstructs any possible friendship from sprouting between he and Krueger. 

To put it mildly, Hitler has issues. Mostly weenie issues. Hitler cannot decide which of  the sexes his weenie likes. Hitler is the catcher in a homosexual relationship with brown shirt leader Captain Roehm—whom he later has killed. Hitler engaged in black mass-like orgies , which sometimes got a little out of hand; “He had used a bayonet knife to cut a bleeding swastika between the breasts of a female cultist, and then in a moment of erotic madness, he had made a homicidal attack upon the young blonde girl, whom he rushed to me for treatment.” (I said he was a source of referrals.) Lots of Hitler’s female companions wind up in as bad of shape, or worse. Hitler sees the whole sex and death thing as interwoven. Even Hitler’s hatred of the Jews can be traced to this. Per Krueger, Hitler traces his Jew hating to an incident in which the young Hitler came upon his mother as she was being defiled in the garden by a fat Jewish grocer. At one point Hitler voices the wish that this  garden still existed so that it could be washed with the blood of dead Jews. 

Actually Hitler has as many reasons for hating Jews as he does episodes of kinky depraved sex. It’s sort of a paired theme in this book. Another oddity is that both Krueger and Hitler speak fluent psychobabble. Well, they are Germans.

I always wondered what happened to this book. Had Krueger come out of hiding after WWII he would have made a fortune as a lecturer on the rubber chicken circuit. One would think that  this book would be mandatory reading in history classes or in psychology programs. Today the book is technically out of print. (*1) Although not at all rare in any condition, a copy will cost $25 used. It is occasionally cited, but no longer in that wide of circulation. And for reasons that I will explain later, it has not been made into a movie.

I Was Hitler’s Doctor is a fraud. It wasn’t exposed in its time, but that is primarily because it was never taken all that seriously. The reason Kurt Krueger never surfaced is because he never existed. Neither Upton Sinclair nor Strasser ever met him—and say so in their portions of the book. I have my doubts that either actually read the book.

Any close reading of I Was Hitler’s Doctor reveals the true orientation of the narrative. This is not history--this is smut. It’s depraved smut, at that. I Was Hitler’s Doctor reads like a series of Penthouse letters—if Penthouse allowed child molesting, blood letting, and homosexual activity. Far be it for me to complain about someone defaming Hitler—because he’s already Hitler—but I always suspected that this was propaganda. (Full disclosure: I am a Two Nut—a ‘Hitler had one testicle’ denier.) Having now researched this book, I can confidently state that the majority of it is pure fiction, although not propaganda. Instead, it belongs to ancient genre of pulp fiction. Unfortunately defaming Hitler is this book’s only grace. But it’s not a saving one. This book is very poorly written—and not because it’s porn. It’s bad because it’s bad. 

First released in 1939 as Inside Hitler, the book is primarily the work of David Plotkin with not enough editorial assistance from publisher Samuel Roth. Sources are sketchy, primarily because the book was released at several different times and was distributed mainly by mail order, but I Was Hitler’s Doctor  may have sold somewhere around two hundred thousand copies. It is the second in a series of five similar books commissioned by Roth and seems to have been the most successful of the lot. The idea behind these  books is to weave a defaming fiction around a well known person. The first book using this gimmick, The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags (1931), wove a wild conspiracy theory around the then sitting president and was a best seller. It supposedly helped lead to Hoover’s defeat, despite having been disavowed by its author and categorically debunked. In I Was Hitler’s Doctor, the element of depraved sex was added to the mix, an element it shares with two of the five other similar books Roth produced later.

Plotkin has been described as a “not very good” writer. In I Was Hitler’s Doctor, he lives up to that standard. Like Roth, Plotkin is a poet.(*2) Plotkin is also a lawyer, which perhaps explains his fondness for run-on sentences. Besides writing two of the other books in Roth’s defamation series, he composed a pair of reference works, one on maxims and another about proverbs. His other credits are My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village (pretending to be Maxwell Bodenheim and listed as an editor under his pen name David Kin) and Women Without Men: True Tales of Lesbian Love. Mostly Plotkin is a smut writer.

Plotkin’s contributions to Roth’s books are a little hard to trace, since Roth is the sole copyright owner of everything commissioned under his many imprints. The galleys, assignment of copyright and manuscripts for I Was Hitler’s Doctor and Inside Hitler are listed in Roth’s publishing papers at Columbia University. Roth’s records indicate that he didn’t work on I Was Hitler’s Doctor or any of the other slander books. Roth also only seems to write fiction about himself. Our best guess is that this is Plotkin’s work. It’s his style.

And what a style it is! Never has a book about Hitler had less to do with the historical Hitler. What we have here is a Dime Novel version of Adolph Hitler—or a Tijuana Bible version. It brings to mind the old Jesse James dime novels, wherein no form of violence or depravity, no matter how improbable, is beyond the prowess of the main character. (*3) Similarly, I Was Hitler’s Doctor seems to have been composed between bong hits. What new depraved sex thing will Hitler do next? If you are waiting for a dissertation on how in fascism the faschi replace the bourgeoisie in communist mechanism, forget it. Unless it involves his penis, Hitler isn’t interested. With the exception of one instance that might not have been public knowledge circa 1938, this narrative is unmoored to any of the events in the historical Hitler’s life.

The sole bit of verification regarding any incident recounted in this book comes from Otto Strasser and involves Hitler’s niece Geli Raubel. Again, even here what Strasser knows is extrapolated from. Hitler’s 15 year old niece did commit suicide. Per Strasser, his brother was with Hitler when he was informed of her suicide. His brother supposedly stopped Hitler from taking his own life in reaction to the news of her death. That Hitler and Geli were lovers is not something that Strasser knows—although the book goes into living color detail on the subject. This isn’t at all what Strasser is affirming in his very short forward. 

One might wonder why Strasser or Upton Sinclair put their names on this thing. My best guess is that both needed money—and neither had any love of Hitler. At the time Strasser is penning his forward, he is under house arrest in Canada, a ward of the state. The 63 year old Sinclair wasn’t in as bad of shape, but his last published work Mental Telegraph (1930) was an account of his wife’s telepathic powers. Sinclair’s fortunes would improve with the publication of the first novel in the Lanny Budd series, however in 1939 he is fairly hard up. Sinclair seems to be cashing in on what was left of his reputation.

Oddly, Sinclair and Stasser are often listed as the co-writers of I Was Hitler’s Doctor. This is a packaging related deliberate deception. Together they contribute under twenty pages of a book running several hundred. David Kin or David Potkin is only listed on some editions, and then as a translator. The real literary force behind this is publisher Samuel Roth. It was constructed via methods of his unique invention.

Samuel Roth’s story is by turns inspirational, then courageous and then depraved. Roth is allegedly a wonderful poet. I have not seen his work nor would I be a person to judge. Whatever his aspirations may have been—and he had a few—he made his living primarily as an insanely committed pornographer.

Born in what is now Poland in 1893, Roth and his family emigrated to New York. His family was poor and he seems to have been on his own from his teenage years on, literally living on the streets of the Lower East Side. He learned English. He drifted into the publishing field. (*4) Thanks to connections he made with some rather left wing illuminati, and specifically Frank Tannenbaum, he was given a scholarship to Columbia University. While at Columbia he edited a poetry magazine called The Lyric.(*5)

In fairly short order, he was published as both a poet and a novelist.  Roth became  a widely acclaimed rising literary light of the early 1920s. All of which is wonderful, however as the later Mario Puzo will tell you, it doesn’t pay too many bills. Sometime after finishing Columbia and jutting around the world a bit, he began supporting himself  teaching immigrants conversational English. This grew into a school and a sizable business. Roth then plowed the profits from this business into establishing a book store and a small press operation.

Although there is little literary evidence to cite, it is obvious from Roth’s business records that he was a very polished mail order operator. Like the majority of the pulp and comic book publishers we cover here, he was involved in the smut business. Roth makes references to knowing about the under the counter market on several occasions. Many histories seem to imply that he turned to smut peddling after suffering reverses in the literary field. My thinking is the opposite. The porn game at that time was all trade secrets and connections. He’s too slick of an operator to have just fallen into it. And it somewhat explains his literary bent.

While continuing with his own literary work and running a book store, Roth publishes a literary magazine and makes his first stab into the commercial field. His first commercial magazine is a slick entitled Beau, which I am told is extremely similar to what Esquire used to be. It’s commentary on the passing scene, poetry, fiction and the odd picture of naked women. No, Playboy didn’t invent the men’s magazine. Playboy didn’t even invent the idea of classing the whole thing up with literary padding. Neither really did Roth, although his is one of the more literary attempts. Beau struck an off chord by being both too highbrow and too smutty at the same time.

I have made mention of Flapper Fiction in previous postings. In brief, Flapper Fiction has a lot of unsentimental graphic depictions of sexual activity in it. It floats a thousand pulp magazine boats in the 1920s and gives rise to the first flush of paperback books and is the reason for the start of the Commuter Lending Libraries.  But Flapper Fiction is the popular fiction version of it. There is also a literary art house version of it, which has being unsentimental about sex as its starting point and then just gets darker from there. This is what Roth is publishing.

I am going to use the words “James Joyce” here with caution. Joyce’s book Ulysses could only be distributed in the United States in a very censored form. Roth took it upon himself to put the raunchy parts back in and publish it in his literary magazine Two Worlds. Without taking sides here, all I am going to say is that all hell broke loose, lit world speaking. (*6) Joyce’s agent and publisher arranged an international protest against Roth, which ruined Roth’s name in lit circles. Roth also, without permission, published a uncensored version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. When his version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover turned out to be a hit, Roth commissioned a sequel and published it.(7*) Now that he was officially “that Pirate Roth” there was no stopping him.

Sort of. There was a way to stop him, which I will go into later.

Roth continued in this idiom, quite prosperously, until 1929. Like many people in the investor class, Roth was wiped out in the stock market crash and wound up in bankruptcy.  The conjecture of others is that this was a huge blow to his psyche and that the damage of this is what inspired him to write The Jews Must Live.

The Jews Must Live is commonly considered an antisemitic tract. It’s all the worse for having been written by a Jew. . Roth is said to have done a fairly comprehensive job of disparaging the Jewish race and culture.(*8)  Released in 1933, it seems to ratify the Nazi cause. Supposedly Roth was very embarrassed by the book later.

I have my doubts. First, unlike many of Roth’s literary works, The Jews Must Live is self-published. Second, he published it in several editions, including one called The Jews Must Live For Christmas Gifts. Finally, found in his papers are advertisements for the book which he placed in several right wing magazines as late as 1964.

Samuel Roth is one odd guy. And he publishes some odd people, too—including antisemites, fetishists, pedophiles and creeps of all stripes. He doesn’t seem too repentant about any of it. We have no primary source, other than the bankruptcy itself, that states that Roth was wiped out by the crash. Quite the contrary, since by 1931 he’s able to broadly release his slam job on President Hoover.

The release of The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags marks the end of Roth’s career as a retail hardbound publisher. He may have made a mint off it, but he has good reasons to stay low. From this point on he pulls a Martin Goodman and starts parading his business under dozens of names. He also gets back into the magazine business. 

This is a Zinger, a pulp porn magazine. At its center are a dozen or so black and white photos of naked women. Padded between the photos and the cover is newspaper-like stock, a typical pulp magazine of the period. As far as Zingers go, Parisian Nights was fairly successful, having more than thirty editions through the 1930s. Many a pulp empire was founded on Zingers alone. We know that this one is Roth’s. He may have had others.

Beyond being a pulp publisher, he was also an advertiser. He sold girlie photos--lots of them. I Was Hitler’s Doctor was not his only mail order book.(*9)  Other titles include:

Diaititis: Cancer Prevention and Cure

Drink and Stay Sober

Everybody’s Pleasure

Golden Treasury of Wit and Wisdom

Living Dolls

The Peephole of the Present

Unusual Classics

Picasso For Children

Sex Can Be Fun As Well As Useful & Educational

The Sexual Conduct of Men and Women

Tina and Jimmy Learn How They Were Born

Jack The Ripper—With Illustrations

And he seems to have owned the fabled Skin-Edge and Micro Edge mail order blades businesses. Undoubtedly there’s more. We do know he produced two other magazines, with fairly healthy runs. 

American Aphrodite is along the same lines that Two Worlds had been.  It’s graphic sex fiction with some graphics of naked women thrown in. The photos are far tamer than the text. The magazine started as a quarterly in 1951 and logged twenty issues through 1955.

 Good Times here is a somewhat kink related retail smut magazine. As opposed to literary fiction, it ran mostly genre fiction, including science fiction.  Although off center, it’s a fairly typical  men’s magazine of the time. It seems to have started in 1952 and survived at least until 1955.

Given the clandestine nature of Roth’s business, it’s impossible to tell if these are the only magazines that he was publishing during the 1950s. I have also excluded much of his known literary output of the time, since it strays away from our subject.  It’s all fringe-worthy for the time, but not all of it is darkness. Roth published a lot of homosexual liberation fiction along with his stable of cut rate Lolita’s.

He’s very much of an author’s publisher, outside of the works he commissions. The majority of the commissioned works are intended to score some quick cash. I have labeled these books as being a part of a series, because they all use the same formula, but they were not released as such. The follow up to I Was Hitler’s Doctor was My Sister and I, supposedly by Friedrich Nietzsche but actually composed by David Plotkin. Although it might make some intellectual sense to go after Neitzsche following Hitler, the two are hardly in the same league as far as commercial draw is concerned. Weirdly, the Neitzsche book is still in print and has not been as widely debunked. The actual next book in the series, this time also by Plotkin writing as David Kin, was The Plot Against America, which follows more the tone of The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags than it does I Was Hitler’s Doctor. It’s a pack of lies sans the sex about Senator Burton K. Wheeler. After this clunker streak, Roth plied the formula one last time with 1962’s Violations of the Child Marilyn Monroe by “Her Psychiatrist Friend”-- an attempt to cash in on the actress’s suicide. 

The most common reader’s reaction to I Was Hitler’s Doctor that I’ve seen is “I couldn’t get through it.” Like Violations of the Child Marilyn Monroe and My Sister and I, the multiple scenes of child molestation, torture sex and other bloody kink is too much for most people to tolerate. (Plotkin’s My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village and Women Without Men is more of the same.)  You wouldn’t be reading such things if they were clearly presented as fiction. But you are reading about such things, for fun, because you think it’s true and because it’s supposedly about a famous person. Luring you into reading such things, for recreation—as a backdoor examination of your own dark side—is the entirety of Roth’s artistic intent.

All in all, pretty disgusting. That said, no real children were actually molested and no one was physically harmed. It’s all fiction. As for the smutty photos Roth peddled, they were the same stuff everyone else sold. He did not commission photo shoots.  The pictures, at least, were not kiddie porn.  Roth is part of the same smut affinity orbit that spat out Betty Page. It’s niche smut.

To touch on how he got stopped, the authorities were not fond of Samuel Roth. He served five terms in prison for smut peddling, including a four year term while he was in his middle sixties. His businesses were wiped out, his assets seized, several times. It wasn’t just about making money. Publishing this type of material was his cause. And he paid the price for it numerous times. Today if Roth is remembered at all,  it is in relation to the Supreme Court Case on obscenity which sent him up the river for the last time. Perhaps that is fitting.

Note: We Don’t Know Everything. The majority of Mr. Roth’s work is beyond the scope of our blog. I’m covering him only as a pulp magazine publisher and advertiser. I included only as much of Roth’s backstory as I felt it merited.

Note: I swear I had no idea this involved Zingers or Marilyn Monroe when I started this. It was just the next thing in my bin of blog ideas. It’s a small universe.

Note: It is not the intention of this blog to cover the history of Zingers. We cover Zinger publishers only if they also do something else. Although somewhat intertwined, our beat is the history of pulp fiction, not the history of porn.

(*1) Is I Was Hitler’s Doctor still in print? Amazon has it as POD. The copyright should still be in force and it is clearly still owned by whomever Roth assigned his business to. And Roth did sell his business to someone.

(*2) David George Plotkin appears to have been primarily a lawyer who dabbled in writing. His publishing credits start to peter out after 1933. During the early 1930s he was a columnist and gag cartoon writer.

(*3) IWas Hitler’s Doctor belongs as an example of Big Lie Newsfiction in the variety of smut. The smut kind dates back to the Dime Novels, most of which were about Jesse James. By the time I Was Hitler’s Doctor was released, Tijuana Bibles featuring comic strips of famous people drawn doing depraved things were common. I Was Hitler’s Doctor may be the first long form work in this genre.

(*4) Was Roth in publishing before he went to college? Sources conflict, however where else is he going to meet all of these leftist pals of his. The publishing sector was huge in New York at the time. I believe his stunning and comprehensive knowledge of the smut trade pre-dated his literary life.

(*5) Was The Lyric a school sponsored magazine? Sources conflict. The fact that Roth retained its business records with his papers indicates that it is one of his publications.

(*6) James Joyce’s heroic stand against Samuel Roth. Joyce and Random House certainly won the fight, but I am not sure if Roth was much more than a foil here. As the result of Roth’s pirate efforts, Random House was able to release the book in uncensored form. And Roth had no problem attracting authors as a result of this shunning.

(*7) Lady Chatterley’s Sequel. The pirate commissioning of a sequel is a Roth innovaton. I suspect Roth may have also been responsible for the various porn-ed up versions of the classics which were sold through the pulps.

(*8) Is The Jews Must Live a racist screed? I have not read the book, however from the description it seems to fit in with the rest of Roth’s writings. Roth was at odds with the Zionists and favored his own form of Dispora vision. So it does not seem to be that much of a departure. On the other hand, he pimped it out to right wing nut jobs, so it may be.

(*9) Roth published other books. Although porn may have paid the bills,  the majority of Roth’s book publishing was in the literary genre. Not all of it was sex lit. As a publisher, his subject range was rather broad.