Adolf Hitler never had any doubt about where a woman's place was – in the home, looking after the family and providing support to their menfolk on the political and military battlefronts.

His Third Reich was one of the most male-supremacist regimes in history, based on a concept of hyper-masculinity expressed through 'toughness' and 'hardness'.

'Men make history!' he proclaimed. 'The more masculine a man is, the more effective he will be.'

Women retained the vote in Nazi Germany, but they had no independent political role because the Nazis believed they were incapable of decision-making or even political judgment. Hitler let them continue to vote only to reinforce the impression he wanted to give the world – that the entire adult population of Germany was solidly behind him.

It is perhaps because of this inherent misogyny that many of his biographers have presented him as being cold, unemotional, asexual and afraid of women. There seems a general agreement that Hitler was a man without a personal life, devoid of normal human feeling, who threw himself into politics not least as a way of escaping his inner emptiness.

'He lacked the courage for a private life,' says one. Another wrote of Hitler's 'disturbed sexuality, his recoiling from physical contact, his inability to forge genuine friendship and his emptiness in human relations'. A third declared: 'Hitler did not have a private life.'

These biographers were, perhaps unconsciously, echoing Hitler himself, who insisted repeatedly that he had sacrificed his private life and happiness for Germany. Single and, as far as the public was concerned, without a life-partner, he was 'married to Germany'.

But the truth is somewhat different.

Yes, he cultivated the image of himself as a loner. And yes, the more he emphasised his charismatic, suprahistorical nature the more he concealed his feelings behind the mask of the 'great man'. Yet behind the scenes he craved human company.

For an historian to venture down this road invites criticism for daring to humanise Hitler. But that must be done. To categorise him as a monster misses the point. Hitler was a human being, and the terrible things he instigated therefore raise difficult and troubling questions about what it means to be human.

The same goes for those who so eagerly did his bidding – the Goerings, Himmlers, Eichmanns and so on. They were not psychopaths, nor were they insane, despite the portrayal of many of them as such in historical literature.

From very early on in his rise as a politician, Hitler created a kind of private court for himself. His burning, uncompromising belief in himself and his ideas drew people in, often disarming even those who were initially sceptical about him.

Hitler was mesmerising. Anyone who came into his presence almost invariably found themselves overwhelmed – they hung on his every word, impressed by his apparent calmness and self-control. Followers spoke with some awe of his blue eyes, which he had a disconcerting habit of fixing on them with a stare, sometimes warm, sometimes cold, always hypnotic.

And flock to him they did. His entourage grew so that by the time he was appointed Reich Chancellor in 1932 it included those with military, paramilitary and ultra-nationalist backgrounds. He established an aura of unquestioning obedience and unchallenged leadership.

Those drawn into his inner circle by his undoubted charisma included a number of women. They were generally older, wealthy and well-situated, such as Winifred Wagner. She was the English-born wife of the composer Richard Wagner's son Siegfried and ran the annual Bayreuth Festival, which she allowed Hitler to turn into something of a Nazi event.

But there are also accounts of his admiration for younger – indeed, much younger – women.

Hitler had always been susceptible to feminine charm, though was uneasy in pursuing women.

His best friend during his teenage years was August Kubizek, a music student, who reported that the young Adolf fell in love with a girl called Stefanie, but was too shy to do anything about it.

And though Hitler's strict, bourgeois, moral opinions, inculcated in him by his parents, kept him away from brothels and street-walkers, who were used by many of his contemporaries, Kubizek considered his friend's sexuality 'absolutely normal'.

Years later, among those young women Hitler courted were Maria Reiter, who worked in a hotel where he stayed, and Henriette Hoffmann, daughter of his personal photographer. True to form, he apparently made clumsy attempts to seduce them, which they seem uniformly to have rejected.

More serious was his relationship with Angela 'Geli' Raubal, daughter of his half-sister. Just 20 years old, Geli was 39-year-old Hitler's regular companion from 1928 on trips and at political events. In October 1929 she moved into his Munich apartment. But the jealous restrictions that he imposed on her independence eventually became unbearable and, two years later, she was found dead on the apartment floor, blood streaming from a gunshot wound to her lung with a pistol next to her right hand.

The post-mortem left no doubt that she had committed suicide.

Wild rumours about Geli's relationship with Hitler circulated, encouraged by his political enemies, but Hitler and the people around him managed largely to keep them out of the media, claiming that she had accidentally shot herself while playing with the weapon. This seems unlikely, since she appears to have been familiar enough with guns, but the damage limitation worked.

Hitler was briefly upset, but after secretly laying flowers on Geli's grave he barely mentioned her again.

Eighteen months later, in the spring of 1931, he fell in love with the elegant Magda Quandt. Well-educated and from a well-off background, she had split from her industrialist husband with whom she had a son. The divorce settlement left her as a woman of substantial independent means.

She had joined the Nazi Party and met propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. He had a strong sex-drive and had conducted several affairs during the 1920s, some more serious than others, but in Magda he found a kindred spirit.

They were on the brink of getting married when he introduced her to Hitler, and it quickly became clear that the party leader was smitten, leaving Goebbels consumed by jealousy and suspicion.

The delicate situation clearly could not last. It was resolved by Magda, who forced the issue by bringing forward the date of her wedding, informing Hitler of her intention. 'Hitler [is] resigned,' reported a relieved Goebbels in his diary: 'He really is very lonely. Has no luck with women.'

But then the trio came to an arrangement. Magda would remain married to Goebbels, but was to function platonically in public as Hitler's companion when the occasion demanded.

'We will all three be good to each other,' Goebbels wrote. 'He [Hitler] intends to be our most loyal friend. He wishes me the best of luck; he has tears in his big, astonished eyes.'

As a result, Hitler became a regular visitor to the Goebbels, who signalled their closeness to him

by giving each of their children a name beginning with 'H' – Helga, Hildegard, Helmut, Holdine, Hedwig and Heidrun.

By now Hitler had made the acquaintance of 20-year-old Eva Braun, a young woman from a petit­-bourgeois family who worked in the studio of his photographer.

They began an affair in 1932, after the death of Geli Raubal – though not before Hitler had her ancestry checked to make sure it was 'Aryan'.

There's little doubt it was a sexual relationship – his medical records indicate he took a sexual stimulant made from bull's testicles when he was with her.

However, Hitler did not allow Eva to be seen with him on public occasions. Feeling both hemmed in and neglected, she twice tried

to commit suicide, which threatened another scandal. Hitler gave in and allowed her to appear with him in public, though billed as a 'secretary' or 'staff member'.

He settled her into a flat in Munich near his own, and eventually provided her with accommodation in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. Over time she played hostess in the Berghof, Hitler's rural retreat in the Bavarian Alps, where she filmed home movies in colour showing him relaxing with his entourage.

But there was no question of marriage or children, and her role, indeed, her entire existence, remained carefully concealed from the public until the very end. He was, as he continued to insist, 'married to Germany'.

Meanwhile, among his inner circle he could indulge his private enthusiasms – cinema, Wagner's music, fast cars and planning huge, elaborate public buildings to glorify his greatness.

Sometime these passions found their way into policy. For example, his dislike of tobacco smoke led to a ban on smoking in Nazi buildings. But he kept his vegetarianism and his teetotalism to himself, as well as his frequent indulgence in cream cakes.

From within the safe space offered by this surrogate family of friends and intimates, Hitler plotted war with the rest of the world, the elimination of a whole race of human beings in the Holocaust and the transformation of the German people into merciless killers.

Some of those close to him stayed with him to the bitter end. However, as the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, others deserted him – Hermann Goering, his second in command, moved to replace him as Fuhrer, and Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the Holo­caust, tried to do a deal with the enemy. But as the Soviets' Red Army closed in, Magda and Josef Goebbels joined Hitler in his last-ditch bunker under the Reich Chancellery. They took with them their six children – the youngest just four years old. They would remain united in death.

It was Hitler who took the decision, after being shown photos of the naked corpse of Italy's dictator Mussolini hanging upside down from a petrol station gantry next to that of his mistress. He told his staff he was determined to avoid a similar fate – he would kill himself and his body was to be burned until no trace remained.

With death certain, there was nothing to lose in yielding to the ever-loyal Eva Braun's longstanding wish that he should marry her. They went through a formal, legal wedding, with him certifying, as he was obliged to by his own laws, that he was of Aryan descent.

There was a brief champagne reception before Hitler dictated to his secretary, in an almost mechanical monotone, a last testament in which he blamed everything on the conspiratorial machinations of 'world Jewry'.

Hitler then retired with Eva to his study. Sometime later, his valet, gingerly opening the door, saw Hitler's lifeless body slumped on the sofa, blood oozing from a gunshot wound in his right temple.

Eva Braun (now Eva Hitler) was beside him, a strong smell of bitter almonds coming from her corpse: she had taken cyanide.

The Goebbels followed suit, in the most barbaric fashion.

They got the SS dentist Helmut Kunz to inject their six children with morphine, after which either he, or Hitler's physician Ludwig Stumpfegger, put cyanide capsules into their mouths and crushed them, killing them instantly.

After murdering their children, the couple bit on cyanide capsules and killed themselves.

Magda explained in an earlier letter to her adult son from her first marriage: 'We have now only one aim, loyalty unto death to the Fuhrer. That we can end our lives with him is a mercy of fate that we never dared hope for.

'The world after the Fuhrer and National Socialism will not be worth living in, and therefore I have taken my children away. They are too dear to endure what is coming next. A merciful God will understand my intentions in delivering them from it.'

It was the end for the Fuhrer and the end of the Third Reich that he had built and then destroyed.

© Richard J. Evans lAdapted from Hitler's People by Richard J. Evans (Allen Lane, £35). To order a copy for £29.75 (offer valid to 21/09/24; UK p&p free on orders over £25) go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.