The Story of Hitler’s Illnesses
The following is an article from
Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
What
was it that caused Adolf Hitler’s physical and mental health to
collapse in the closing days of World War II? He was losing the war, of
course- surely that had a great deal to do with it. But for more than 60
years, historians have wondered if there was more to it than that.
THE LEADER
On
April 21, 1945, an SS physician named Ernst-Günther Schenck was
summoned to Adolph Hitler’s bunker in Berlin and ordered to stock it
with food. By that time, Germany’s war was hopelessly lost -most of the
country was already in Allied hands. Soviet troops had almost completely
circled Berlin and were battling their way into the center of the city.
Rather than flee, Hitler decided to make his final stand in his
führerbunker in the heart of the Nazi capital. He would remain there until the end, which for him was just nine days away.
Like
all Germans, Dr. Schenck had been fed a steady diet of photographs,
films, and propaganda posters of Hitler since the dictator had come to
power in 1933. But the man he saw in the bunker looked nothing like
those images. The 56-year-old Hitler “was a living corpse, a dead soul,”
Schenck remembered in a 1985 interview. “His spine was hunched, his
shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his
shoulders like a turtle… I was looking into the eyes of death.”
OLD MAN
Even
more shocking than the way Hitler looked was the way he moved about the
bunker. He walked with the slow, halting shuffle of a man thirty years
older, dragging his left leg behind him as he went. He couldn’t go more
than a few steps without grabbing onto something for support.
Hitler’s
head, arms, and entire left side trembled and jerked uncontrollably. No
longer able to write his own name, he signed important documents with a
rubber stamp. He had always insisted on shaving himself -the murderer
of millions could not stand the thought of another man holding a razor
to his throat- but his trembling hands made that impossible, too. He
could not lift food to his mouth without spilling it down the front of
his uniform and could not take a seat without help -after he shuffled up
to a table, an aide pushed a chair behind him, and he plopped down into
it.
Hitler’s mental state had deteriorated as well. His
thinking was muddled, his memory was failing, and his emotions whipsawed
back and forth between long bouts of irrational euphoria (especially
irrational considering how close Germany was to defeat) and fits of
screaming, uncontrollable rage that lasted for hours.
DIAGNOSES
Schenck
remained in Berlin until the end. On April 29, Hitler married his
longtime mistress, Eva Braun, and the following day the pair committed
suicide in the führerbunker. Germany surrendered unconditionally on May
7.
Der Führerbunker.
After
the war, Schenck spent a decade in Soviet prison camps. He never forgot
what he saw in the führerbunker, and after his release he spent years
poring over Hitler’s medical records in an attempt to discover just what
had caused the dictator’s health to decline so rapidly in the final
years and months of his life.
He was not alone in this effort- in
the more than 60 years since the end of the war, many historians,
physicians, and World War II buffs have done the same thing. What caused
Hitler’s collapse -was it Parkinson’s disease? Tertiary syphilis? Giant
cell arteritis? Countless theories have been advanced to explain
Hitler’s physical and mental decline, and after all this time the
experts are no closer to agreeing than they were on the day he died.
THE CURE THAT ILLS
One
of the more bizarre theories was advanced by some of Hitler’s own
doctors in July 1944. The diagnosis came about by chance, after a
visiting ear, nose, and throat specialist named Dr. Erwin Geising
happened to notice six tiny black pills -“Doctor Koester’s Anti-Gas
Pills”- sitting on the Führer’s breakfast tray next to his porridge, dry
bread, and orange juice. After spotting the pills, Geising did
something that Hitler’s own personal physician, an eccentric quack named
Dr. Theodore Morell, had apparently never bothered to do: He examined
the tin the pills came in and actually
read the label to see
what was in them. Geising was stunned by what he read. Could it be? Was
the Führer bring poisoned by the pills he took to control his
meteorism -powerful attacks of uncontrollable farting?
GUT FEELING
Hitler
had suffered from digestive problems his entire life. Since childhood
he’d been prone to crippling, painful stomach cramps during times of
emotional distress. By the time he’d reached his early 40s, the cramping
had become more frequent, often accompanied by violent bouts of
farting, along with alternate bouts of diarrhea and constipation.
The
farting attacks are one of the reasons Hitler became a vegetarian in
the early 1930s: He didn’t trust doctors, so rather than seek
professional help for his condition he tried to treat it himself by
eliminating meat, rich foods, milk, and butter from his diet in favor of
raw and cooked vegetables and whole grains.
STILL FARTIN’
Increasing
the fiber in his diet did not improve Hitler’s condition; if anything
it made him even gassier than he’d been before. (But the vegetarian diet
may have made his farts less smelly, and he may have been willing to
settle for
that.) By the mid-1930s, Hitler was the ruler of
Germany… and still farting like a horse. His attacks were most severe
right after meals; during dinner parties it was common for him to
suddenly leap up from the table and disappear into his private quarters,
leaving stunned guests to wonder why the Führer had gone and when he
might be back. On many nights he did not return at all.
In 1936
Hitler happened to meet Dr. Morell at a Christmas party. After pulling
the doctor aside, Hitler poured out his problems, describing his
intestinal distress and his eczema: itchy, inflamed skin on his shins,
so painful that he could not put on his boots. By now Hitler had given
up on trying to cure himself and allowed Germany’s best doctors to
examine him. They put him on a diet of tea and dry toast, but all that
did was leave him feeling weak and exhausted. Morell listened
attentively …and then promised to cure both problems within a year.
Hitler decided to give him a try.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS
By
the mid-1930s, the Nazis had already begun destroying what before their
rise had been one of the most advanced medical communities in the
world. At the same time that they undermined the scientific
underpinnings of the German medical establishment with their loony
racial theories and crackpot pseudoscience, the Nazis were driving
German Jews out of the profession, along with any “Aryan” Germans who
opposed Nazism. And yet for all the damage the Nazis did to German
medicine, there were still plenty of skilled, capable doctors from whom
Hitler could choose his personal physician. So it’s all the more
remarkable that he chose someone as peculiar and incompetent as Dr.
Theodore Morell.
DOC MEDIOC-RITY
Morell’s
resume left a lot to be desired. A onetime ship’s doctor who served as
an army physician during World War I, he opened a general practice on
the fashionable Kurfürstendamm street in Berlin after the war and
counted a lot of society figures -politicians, actors, artists,
nightclub singers- among his patients. With the exception of occasional
cases of bad skin, impotence, or venereal disease, Morell shied away
from treating people who were genuinely ill, referring these cases to
other doctors while he built up a clientele of fashionable, big-spending
patients whose largely psychosomatic illnesses responded well to his
close attention, flattery, and ineffective quack treatments.
Morell’s
skill at coddling his patients was masterful, but his abilities as a
physician were clearly deficient, to the point of putting their health
at risk. “In practice he was occasionally careless,” biographer John
Toland writes in
Adolph Hitler. “He was known to have wrapped a
patient’s arm with a bandage he just used to wipe a table, and to
inject the same needle without sterilization into two patients.”
“MADE” IN BULGARIA
In
addition to overseeing his practice, Morell served on the board of
Hageda, a pharmaceutical company that manufactured a strange mediation
called Mutaflor, whose active ingredient was live bacteria cultured from
the fecal matter of “a Bulgarian peasant of the most vigorous stock.”
Mutaflor
was intended to treat digestive disorders- the theory being that
digestive problems were caused when healthy bacteria, which lived in
the intestinal tract and were essential to good digestion, were killed
off or crowded out by unhealthy bacteria. Ingesting the cultured dung
of a vigorous, clean-living Bulgarian peasant, the theory went, would
reintroduce beneficial bacteria into an unhealthy digestive tract and
restore proper function.
That was the theory, and while it
sounded
pretty good, in truth it was literally a load of crap, and good German
doctors knew it. Not so Dr. Morell -and because he had a financial
interest in the company that made Metaflor, he prescribed the pills to
virtually all his patients, whether they suffered from digestive
complaints of not. Hitler
did suffer from digestive complaints,
of course, and Morell soon had the Führer taking regular doses of
Mutaflor …plus two tablets of Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills at every
meal.
PRIMARY PHYSICIAN
Hitler’s
intestinal ailments were intermittent and, as had been the case during
his childhood, still had a considerable psychological component: He
suffered from attacks of cramps and farting during times of stress, then
when things calmed down his symptoms abated. After he placed himself
under Morell’s care, it was just a matter of time before his condition
improved, and when relief finally came a few months later -at about the
same time his eczema began to clear up- Hitler naturally attributed his
deliverance to Morell.
The “cure” was only temporary, but no
matter -the Führer had finally found a doctor he could believe in.
“Nobody has ever before told me so clearly and precisely what was wrong
with me,” Hitler told his chief architect, Albert Speer. “His method of
cure is so logical that I have the greatest confidence in him. I shall
follow his prescription to the letter.” Morell would remain by Hitler’s
side until almost the very end.
HEAVEN SCENT
Hitler took to Morel
l
immediately, but the Führer’s inner circle despised the doctor from the
start, and not just because he was an obvious quack- he was also an
extremely unpleasant person to be around. The morbidly obese Morell did
not bathe regularly: His skin and hair were greasy, his fingernails
often filthy, and when his powerful body odor and bad breath weren’t
enough to clear the room, his propensity for belching and farting in
polite company usually did the trick. “He has an appetite as big as his
belly and gives not only visual but audible expression of it,” Speer
observed.
Even Eva Braun found Morell repulsive, but Hitler
didn’t care. When she and others complained about his offensive body
odor, the Führer brushed them off. “I do not employ him for his
fragrance, but to look after my health,” he’d say. (Who knows? Maybe
Hitler liked having another farter in the room, so that no one who
“smelt it” could tell for sure who’d “dealt it.”)
TAKE THIS…AND THIS…AND THIS
In
those early days, Morell’s influence on Hitler was fairly benign; the
stinky doctor limited himself to giving diet tips and, of course,
prescribing Mutaflor and Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills. But over time he
became more controlling over what Hitler was allowed to eat, and the
number and strength of medications he prescribed increased dramatically.
In the years to come he would prescribe enzymes, liver extracts,
stimulants, hormones, painkillers, sedatives, tranquilizers, muscle
relaxants, morphine derivatives (to induce constipation), laxatives (to
relieve it), and other drugs by the dozen.
According to one
estimate, by the early 1940s, Hitler was taking 92 different kinds of
drugs, including 63 different pills and skin lotions. Some medicines
were taken only when specific complaints arose, but others were taken
every day. By the summer of 1941, Hitler was popping between 120 and 150
pills a week on average. And on top of all the pills, Morell also
administered injections -as many as 10 a day, sometimes more. So many,
in fact, that even Herman Goering, Hitler’s heir apparent and himself a
morphine addict, was startled by their frequency and took to calling
Morell the “Reich Injection Master.”
Nobody knew for sure what
Morell was giving Hitler. There were other physicians in the Führer’s
service- two surgeons, Dr. Karl Brandt and Dr. Hans Karl von Hasselbach,
traveled with Hitler in case he ever needed emergency surgery, and
other specialists, such as visiting ear, nose, and throat doctor Erwin
Geising, were called on from time to time to treat specific complaints.
But none knew what Morell was really up to. Any physician worth his salt
would have been alarmed by all the injections Morell was administering.
But when Brandt or anyone else asked him what was in the shots or why
Hitler needed so many, he shrugged them off as vitamins of glucose
(sugar) injections, or answered cryptically, “I give him what he needs.”
THE ONE-TWO PUNCH
Considering
all the medications that Morell was administering to Hitler, why was it
Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills that finally prompted the other physicians
to act? It may have been the simple fact that they came in a tin. Most
of the pills and shots that Hitler took were unidentified and
mysterious, but Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills came in a little metal
container (like Altoids heath mints or Sucrets throat lozenges) that
identified them by name and even listed the active ingredients: gentian,
belladonna, and an extract of something called
nux vomica.
The
gentian was harmless enough. But the presence of the other two
ingredients in the pills, plus the revelation that Hitler, on top of all
his other medications, was popping as many as 20 of the anti-gas pills a
day, was startling. Even if Dr. Morell
had read the label on the tin, he might not have known that
nux vomica is a seed that contains a large amount of
strychnine, commonly used as the active ingredient in rat poison. Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade, contains
atropine, a toxic substance that can cause excitement, confusion, hallucinations, coma, and death if taken in large quantities.
That’s
what alarmed Dr. Geising when he saw the six black pills sitting on
Hitler’s breakfast tray that morning in July 1944: Without even
realizing it, Hitler’s own personal physician had exposed him on a daily
basis to significant doses of not one, but
two deadly poisons.
DER GUINEA PIG
By
then it was obvious to everyone around him that Hitelr’s physical and
mental state were deteriorating. His tremor had become quite pronounced,
his memory was slipping, and his mood swings were intensifying. Geising
wondered if the rat poison in the fart pills was the cause of some or
all of these symptoms. He popped a few tablets himself… and when he
began to experience some of the same symptoms, including irritability
and stomach cramps, he shared his theory with Hitler’s surgeons, Dr.
Brandt and Dr. von Hasselbach.
THE PLOT THICKENS
Brandt
and von Hasselbach had never liked Dr. Morell and had no faith in his
abilities, and like Dr. Geising they were concerned for the state of
Hitler’s health. Now, they thought, they had an opportunity to get rid
of Morell once and for all and give the Führer the proper medical care
he clearly needed. But if they thought getting rid of Morell would be
easy once his incompetence was exposed, they soon learned how mistaken
they were. When Brandt told Hitler what was in the pills he was popping
like candy, he not only took Morell’s side, he
fired Brandt and
von Hasselbach for daring to interfere with Morell, and he told the
visiting Dr. Geising that his services were no longer needed.
Even
though Morell was as stunned as everyone else to learn that he’d been
medicating the Führer with rat poison, Hitler himself didn’t seem to
mind. “I myself always thought they were just charcoal tablets for
soaking up my intestinal gases, and I always felt rather pleasant after
taking them,” he explained.
And though it was Morell’s
responsibility to keep track of how many of the pills Hitler was taking,
Hitler himself ignored Morell’s instruction to take only two at a time
and had begun taking six or more before each meal. The dictator didn’t
blame the pills for his stomach cramps, either, since those dated back
to his childhood.
Now that Hitler understood that the fart pills were potentially dangerous, he stopped taking so many… but his health did
not improve. His physical and mental decline not only continued, it accelerated.
So what was the true cause of his collapse?
Der Führerbunker after the war.
BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD
All
doubts about the safety of Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills were resolved
when some of them were sent to a lab for analysis. The fart pills were
found to contain small enough doses of strychnine and atropine that
Hitler would have had to consume 30 pills or more -all in one sitting-
for them to pose a threat to his health. He never took more than 6 at a
time, and never more than 20 over the course of a day. Strychnine is
quickly neutralized by the human body and does not accumulate in body
tissues; because of this, nonlethal doses such as those contained in Dr.
Koester’s pills can be taken for years on end with little or no ill
effect. (Still, don’t try it at home!)
Neither the rat poison nor
the peasant poop had done Hitler much good… but they hadn’t done him
much harm, either. But the intravenous injections that Morell
administered to Hitler beginning in the late 1930s were a different
story. Morell was very secretive about what was in the Führer’s regular
daily shots; in his surviving medical records he never suggests that
they contain anything other than vitamins or glucose. Some of the
injections undoubtably contained these relatively innocuous ingredients,
but not all of them. There’s considerable evidence to suggest
that many of the shots Morell administered contained something much more
powerful -and that they, not the Mutaflor or Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas
Pills, were responsible for the collapse in Hitler’s health at the end
of his life.
GOOOOOOD MORNING!
Dr. Morell, Hitler, and Mrs. Morell.
Some
of the most convincing pieces of evidence are the eyewitness accounts
of how Hitler responded to the intravenous injections. In the late
1930s, the shots were administered infrequently, usually just before an
important meeting or a major speech, when Hitler wanted a quick boost.
But by late 1941, they were being administered every morning, before
Hitler had even gotten out of bed, as part of his daily routine.
Hitler’s valets, secretaries, and other close aides occasionally
witnessed the shots being administered, and after the war they all
described how the sleepy and sometimes completely exhausted Führer
responded to all the injections instantly, sometimes even while the
needle was still in his arm: One moment he was groggy and
uncommunicative, and the very next moment he was fully alert and sitting
up in bed, contentedly chatting away with whoever was in the room.
Ordinary vitamins and glucose didn’t produce the instant surge of energy
that Hitler experienced, even when injected directly into the veins.
THANK YOU SIR, MAY I HAVE ANOTHER
By
1943 Hitler was receiving two shots a day, more if the news from the
front was especially bad. As the years progressed -and the tide of the
war turned against Germany- Hitler called on Morell more and more
frequently to give him the injections. By late 1944, the doctor was
administering so many shots that he was having trouble finding fresh
areas in Hitler’s needle-pocked arms to give new injections.
As
Morell confided to an assistant, Hitler’s tolerance for whatever was in
the shots had increased so dramatically over time that Morell had to
increase the dosage from 2 cubic centimeters per injection to 4, then
10, then eventually to 16 cc -an increase of 700 percent- for the
injections to have the desired effect.
As Dr. Leonard Heston and Renate Heston point out in their book
The Medical Case of Adolph Hitler,
human tolerance for vitamins and glucose does not change over time. The
fact that Hitler was building up a tolerance for the injections is
further evidence that they contained a drug of some kind.
THE DRUG CULTURE
When you compare this evidence to the eyewitness accounts of Hitler’s instant response to the drug, a likely candidate for
which
drug he was taking begins to emerge. “The effects described,” the
Hestons write, “are characteristic of an injection of a stimulant drug
of the amphetamine group or cocaine, and are not compatible with any
other drug.” Of the two possibilities, “amphetamine …is much more
probable because its injectable form was readily available, while
injectable cocaine was an illegal drug… Also, the effects of amphetamine
last two or three hours, while the action of cocaine is much more
rapidly terminated. The effects on Hitler were relatively long-lasting.”
SIDE EFFECTS
Hitler and Eva Braun, 1945.
Amphetamines
give the user a surge in energy and an improvement in mood, just as
witnesses to Hitler’s injections described. But they are now illegal for
a very good reason: They’re terribly addictive and they have numerous
debilitating negative side effects that more than outweigh the handful
of desirable affects.
When taken even in moderate amounts,
amphetamines can cause insomnia -which Hitler suffered from- and loss of
appetite. As dosages increase, so do the number and intensity of the
side effects. Psychological side effects associated with amphetamine
toxicity include euphoria, irritability, paranoia, impulsiveness, loss
of emotional control, and rigid thinking that is often marked by an
obsession with minor, unimportant details at the expense of the larger
picture. Because these symptoms impair the user’s ability to perceive
events and the surrounding environment rationally, decision making also
suffers.
NO SURRENDER
Hitler suffered
from all these symptoms and, at least as far as his generals were
concerned, his thinking did indeed become impaired, especially his
ability to make intelligent, rational decisions. A number of the
generals assigned to Hitler’s headquarters were convinced he was losing
his mind.
One of the reasons the war in Europe ended in the
spring of 1945 and not many months or even years later is that even as
the tide of war turned against Germany, Hitler irrationally demanded
that his battlefield commanders hold every inch of ground they had
conquered, even when their situations became hopeless. In late 1942, for
example, General Friedrich von Paulus, commander of the Sixth Army,
requested permission to withdraw his troops from the Russian city of
Stalingrad to avoid being surrounded by a superior force of Russian
troops. Hitler, who by now was receiving shots every day, responded with
a lunatic reply that the Sixth Army could withdraw from Stalingrad,
“provided that it could still hold Stalingrad.” Unable to think of a way
to abandon a position and hang onto it at the same time, von
Paulus dutifully remained remained in the city. Stalingrad was
surrounded a few weeks later, and in January 1943, the Sixth Army
surrendered. As many as 800,000 Axis troops died in the Battle of
Stalingrad, and when it ended, 90,000 soldiers who survived it were
marched off to Siberia. All but 6,000 perished.
Stalingrad.
Had
Hitler allowed von Paulus to withdraw to a defensive position when
requested, hundreds of thousands of German soldiers would have lived to
fight another day, and the war might have dragged on for years. Instead,
Stalingrad marked the turning point of the war and the beginning of the
end for Nazi Germany. Who knows? We may have Dr. Morell and his
amphetamines to thank for the war ending when it did.
MIND…AND BODY
In
addition to the psychological side effects of amphetamine abuse, there
are physical side effects, among them twitching, tremors, and what are
called “stereotypes”: compulsive behaviors, such as repeated picking at
or biting one’s own skin. Hitler was twitchy, his head jerked
uncontrollably, and he had tremors in spades -the shaking that began in
his left hand soon spread down his left leg and then to his right hand.
He also exhibited at least two types of stereotypical behavior:
compulsively biting the skin around the nails of his thumbs, and picking
and scratching at the skin on the back of his neck until it became
infected.
The
trembling in Hitler’s left leg impaired his ability to walk normally,
but there may be another explanation for the slow, foot-dragging shuffle
and loss of motor function that he displayed at the end of his life.
Chronic amphetamine abuse takes a terrible toll on the cardiovascular
system and can cause both heart attacks and strokes. Electrocardiographs
taken of Hitler’s heart in July 1941 and again in September of 1943
show a deterioration in heart function between the two dates that is
consistent with a heart attack. And among Dr. Morell’s surviving medical
records is an article torn from a June 1943 medical journal that may
provide another clue. Topic of the article: How to treat a heart attack.
Then
in February 1945, the Hestons write, “Hitler suffered at least one
small stroke; but he may have had several, and, indeed, his rapid
decline from this time onward suggests widespread cardiovascular
disease.” The odds of a healthy 56-year-old man suffering both a heart
attack
and one or more strokes are “distinctly improbable,” say
the Hestons: “The most parsimonious explanation, given the lack of
conclusive evidence, is to attribute both vascular events to the
injection of intravenous amphetamine.” By April 1945, Hitler was so
close to death that had he not killed himself, it may have been just a
matter of time before he dropped dead from amphetamine-induced “natural”
causes.
SO LONG?
Morell remained by
Hitler’s side until almost the very end …but not quite. Ironically, the
cause of Hitler’s falling-out with his beloved quack was an
injection:
Hitler had resigned himself to remaining in Berlin and committing
suicide before the city fell to the Russians. Many in the Führer’s inner
circle wanted him to escape to the mountains of southern Germany, where
it might have been possible for the remnants of the military, led by
Hitler, to hold out indefinitely. Hitler would hear none of it. He was
determined to die in his capital, but he feared that his subordinates
would drug him and take him out of Berlin against his will. And who
better to administer the drugs than Morell? When the doctor came to
Hitler on April 21 with yet another syringe filled with who-knows-what
(probably just more amphetamines), the raging, paranoid Führer fired him
on the spot. Not that Morell minded- by then the bombs were dropping on
the führerbunker 24 hours a day, and he was desperate for an excuse to
escape.
Der Führerbunker, 1947.
LAST GASP
Morell
did make it out of Berlin, and he survived the war, but not by much. A
few days after fleeing the city, he checked into a hospital complaining
of heart problems. On July 17, 1945, he was arrested by the Americans
and imprisoned. After investigators determined he was not guilty of any
war crimes, he was released. Morell’s health continued to deteriorate,
and by June 1947 he was back in the hospital, where he remained
bedridden until May 1948, when he died shortly after suffering a stroke.
