Biographical Note: Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Langer received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1935, and went to Vienna where he was analyzed by Anna Freud. When Austria was occupied by the Nazis in 1938, Langer helped many Jews and anti-Nazi activists escape, driving small groups of refugees over the boarder into Switzerland and obtaining US visas for many Austrian analysts. During the Second World War, he worked at the Office of Strategic Services on the Psychology of Nazism and wrote “The Mind of Adolf Hitler.” Top secret for almost 30 years, the psychoanalytic study based on documents and interviews with informants who had known Hitler was published in 1972 and translated to many languages. Walter Langer is also an author of “The Psychology and Human Living” (1943). He was the first non-M.D. member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society. Walter Charles Langer died in 1981, at the age of 82, in Sarasota, Florida.
Summary: the collection includes two manuscript boxes of articles, correspondence, photographs, newspaper clippings, two medallions, and an Honorable Discharge from the United States Army certificate of 1919. Langer biographical materials could also be found in the Gifford, Sanford and Oral History Interviews collections, which feature Dr. Gifford’s articles and talks about Walter Langer, his interview of Dr. Leonard Langer and a transcript of his interview of Walter Langer’s first wife Mrs. Juanita Franks. A group photograph including Walter Langer appears in the Bibring Photograph Collection, Bib II 176. BPSI also holds over a hundred of books and pamphlets from the Walter Langer personal library, and a portrait of Sigmund Freud, which Freud had autographed and presented to Langer in 1938 (Donated to BPSI by Walter’s nephew Leonard Langer).
Finding Aid for this collection is available here (viewing it requires Adobe Acrobat Reader).
Related BPSI Collections
Audiovisual Materials
Bibring Photograph Collection
BPSI Photograph Collection
Gifford, Sanford
Oral History Transcripts, 1961-2004
Related Archives
Adolf Hitler OSS – CIA files
Related Sites
Walter C. Langer Wikipedia Entry
A Psychological Analysis of Adolf Hitler (HTML version from Nizkor Project)
Inside the Mind of Adolf Hitler (BBC documentary about Walter Langer’s research, 2005)