The War on Desire, From the Nazis to the Manosphere

Sexual shame and perceived rejection drive men to violence

Artwork: “INCELFührer of the SS” by the author, Joe Duncan. Original photo of Himmler in uniform colorized by the author, licensed under Creative Commons 3.0 Germany from the German Bundesarchiv (German State Archive).

The cell was damp and sterile, the air heavy with mold and the last whiffs of something sour—perhaps the fear-drenched sweat, perhaps the slow, emotional decay that had tormented him since his capture by the authorities had recently upended his life. He tried to escape in a frantic dash, taking up a fake identification in hopes that he could slip out of the country and not be held accountable for his crimes. But he was caught before he could reach the border, and now he sat on the edge of a wooden bench, his round spectacles slightly askew as he waited for the doctor to visit him.

The guards had been circling for hours, watching, waiting, like vultures gliding their ominous spirals around a wounded animal. His hands trembled, not only with fear, but with something darker—maybe a fractured pride, a puffed-up dignity crumbling like ash. Then, a man came in and, in an unmistakably British accent.

"Name?"

"Heinrich Hitzinger," he lied again, almost reflexively, but his voice lacked conviction. They knew. The game was up. Medical exams would soon confirm his identity. First, he would be questioned by the British Army. After some back-and-forth, he rapidly changed strategies, giving up the lie, and barked at the British officer, Captain Thomas Sylvester, “I am Reich Minister Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, and I want to talk to Eisenhower.” Incredulous, Captain Sylvester replied, with classic British humor, “And I’m Winston Churchill.”

With his identify confirmed, he was shipped off to a safehouse to be held until he could face trial. He was checked for “SS cough drops,” cyanide capsules that Nazi Germans carried with them to commit suicide rather than face justice, before undergoing his medical exam. The doctor asked to look into his mouth, but he refused, turning away and looking shamefully downward as he bit into the pill he’d hidden in his mouth.

The cyanide capsule—cleverly hidden in the gap between his molars—had just broken. His body seized. His eyes widened, then glazed. The guards recoiled. No shots, no final speech. Just a violent, pathetic end in a British cell. Just like that, on May 23rd, 1945, Heinrich Himmler, chief architect of the Holocaust and Reichsführer of the SS, was dead. ¹

Newspaper announcing Himmler’s suicide, 1945, Fair Use.

I sense some of you are wondering why an article about sexuality starts with one of the most notorious mass murderers of the 21st-century. The answer is quite simple, really: underlying Himmler’s ideology wasn’t just racist delusions of political grandeur, but a deep and profound sexual anxiety. And that anxiety, left unexamined, curdled and metastasized into a worldview built on supposed domination, purity, and an existential fear of the feminine.

We all know what happened from there.

Last year, a reader asked me how to spot aggressive, destructive men before being ensnared in the sticky spider’s web of manipulation and abuse. After much thought, a ton of drafts, and uncanny amounts of reading, I’d like to answer that question and Himmler is a perfect case study in what I, after years and years of studying human sexuality daily, think are the biggest red flags (and they’re everywhere).²

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Young Himmler and the Manosphere

The parallels between Himmler and today’s Manosphere movement are striking, as is Himmler’s path from the average, confused, early-20th-century German boy to someone who committed atrocities on a scale never seen before or since.

Unquestionably, Himmler was one of the most destructive people of the twentieth century, a century that had a lot of really fucked up people, from Ted Bundy to Adolf Hitler, the man who turned Himmler into his own pathetic lapdog.

But, unlike Hitler, Himmler isn’t a historical ghost; he hasn’t been mythologized to the point of fiction like Bundy and, crucially, Himmler didn’t just march and murder in a svelte, Hugo-Boss uniform—he wrote obsessively. He documented his meals, his fights, his crushes, and his insecurities across at least sixteen years (from what I’ve read and confirmed as authentic). He left a long paper trail of letters and diaries for those of us with the patience to go through them, and, let me tell you—they’re eerily familiar.

Echoes of the same confused thoughts show up in forums today, reverberations of the same self-pitying tone plastered all over the Manosphere that ring out like a duet—ballads to the awkward, horny confusion most of us begrudgingly endured in our teenage years—being sung in pitch-perfect harmony a century apart.

That’s because before he was an architect of genocide, Himmler was a young boy trying to figure girls out. He felt rejected, insecure, isolated, uneasy, and overwhelmed. He was conflicted about his relationships with women, confused, insecure, sometimes excited, and brimming with self-exploration. The guy went through the same struggles most young men do, and while this isn’t an attempt to humanize Himmler—quite the opposite—the point is to give us a guide to see how and why young men can go so awry. And, because Himmler’s same twisted traits exist in people today, it’ll give us a good idea what to watch out for.