by Norman Ohler
Conti wouldn’t leave the matter alone. Stubbornly he fought for his ideological ideas of a poison-free Aryan nation. At the same time he misjudged the realities of the geopolitical competition of the Second World War, and its crying need for doping. In an act of desperation he engaged a scientist friend to write, under the headline “The Pervitin Problem,” the first major critical piece on the favorite drug of the Germans, regarding the dangers of the stimulant and its violently addictive properties. In typical Nazi terminology he called for Pervitin to be “eradicated wherever we find it,” and stressed that anyone who was addicted to it was “degenerate.”136
In fact the article touched a nerve in scientific circles, and cases of Pervitin dependency were now discussed more and more frequently, whether it was doctors who consumed several doses a day or medical students who took a similar number of tablets and were then unable to sleep for nights, scratching their skin bloody looking for imaginary vermin.137
In Germany the use of the substance now ran to over a million doses per month.*138 In February 1941 Conti again delivered a warning, this time in an internal memo to the Party: “I am following up with mounting concern the terrible abuse being practiced in the widest circles of the population. . . . This is an immediate danger to the health and future of our people.”139
At last the Reich Health Führer acted—or at least attempted to—and on June 12, 1941, made Pervitin subject to the Reich opium law. By doing so he officially declared the people’s drug to be an intoxicant.140 This act, however, did not lead to a restriction in its use. In fact it meant only a formal victory for Conti and his ideologically motivated officials. The Reich Health Führer, once one of the most powerful men in the National Socialist state, waged a lonely battle and went on to lose more and more influence. The population was less concerned with Conti’s campaign against drugs than it was with the mounting strains of the war, which were easier to endure with the help of the chemical stimulant, even if that meant becoming dependent on it. The Germans barely took any notice of the rigorous prohibition, let alone observed it. Civilian use even increased, by over 1.5 million units a year.141 In this way the drug revealed the internal contradictions of the National Socialist state and played a part in the process of its gradual self-dissolution. It wasn’t long before a total of over 100 million doses had reached German stomachs and bloodstreams.
Where use by the military was concerned, the date chosen for the ban on Pervitin was more than risky, because Germany was due to attack the Soviet Union ten days later, and the soldiers had developed a high tolerance by now. The Wehrmacht High Command, along with the Reich Ministry for Arms and Ammunition, endorsed by Göring, had even classified Pervitin as “decisive for the outcome of the war.”142 There was no trace of restriction. Drug use wasn’t the only thing about to explode in the summer of 1941.
Six weeks before the attack on the Soviet Union: “In agreement with Wehrmacht High Command and the Reich Ministry for Arms and Ammunition . . . Pervitin has been declared ‘crucial to the war.’”
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High Hitler: Patient A and His Personal Physician
(1941–1944)
The doctor’s task in peace and war—if it is done correctly—is always one of leadership in the truest sense of the word. . . . The relationship of trust between doctor and patient must be made in such a way that the doctor always and at all times has the feeling of standing over the patient. . . . Being a doctor means being the stronger of two.
—From the text of a speech by Theodor Morell1
The sometimes rather obscure guild of Hitler researchers is united by a desire finally to decipher the enigma of the dictator, probably the worst criminal and psychopath of all time. It looks like there is little progress. The public events have been grasped by biographers for decades; a wide range of literature of all kinds is fully available. Even though more has been written, and is still being written, about this person than about anyone else in the world, even though “the psychopathography of Adolf Hitler” is a psychiatric subject in its own right, which deals exclusively with notional psychological diseases of the man from Braunau, no one seems to have come to grips with the mystery; the dubious mythology burns on.
Could it be that in the literature on Hitler there is a blind spot, however diverse the research might have become? I am intervening here in a sort of trial based on circumstantial evidence over which scholars have been arguing for years—and which has also led to massive scandals and famous forgeries such as the so-called Hitler Diaries, published in Stern magazine a few decades ago. We should always remain suspicious of some sources. I cannot present a definite solution to the enigma but will offer a particular reading of the issues involved.
Anyone who wishes to approach Hitler should take a detour via Morell, the fat doctor in the light-brown gabardine coat. It was, after all, in the autumn of 1941—the point where the dip in Hitler’s performance became obvious, and where all the books on him reveal a vacuum because they can’t adequately explain that dip—that Morell ceases to be the curious, marginal figure of most historical accounts. In Joachim C. Fest’s nine-hundred-page biography Hitler, the physician is mentioned only seven times—the first instance no earlier than on page 535. The author’s accurate description of Hitler’s “narcotic trance”2 remains unexplained, and when Fest speaks of him becoming “fatally drug-dependent,”3 the extent and symptoms of that addiction are not touched upon. Fest claimed that nothing new about Hitler could possibly come out after the publication of his own work in 1973, because it had been proven that “we can expect no further material which could even begin to modify the picture of the era and its protagonists.”4 This has now been proven premature.
Even if history is attempting to shift the focus away from details about Hitler’s life to historical processes that influenced his rise and made him what he was, beside those quite reasonable endeavors there remains a vacuum that needs to be filled. It isn’t enough to speak blandly about “Dr. Morell’s colorful pills.”5 And when the British historian Ian Kershaw, himself an author of a famous Hitler biography, maintains that “the increased number of pills and injections provided every day by Dr. Morell—ninety varieties in all during the war and twenty-eight different pills each day—could not prevent Hitler’s physical deterioration,” he possibly confuses cause and effect.6
For the German historian Dr. Henrik Eberle matters are less ambiguous. He comes to the conclusion that the head of the German state was not at all addicted to drugs, and Morell had acted “entirely responsibly.”7 However, the doctor himself seems to contradict this statement. In his notes he records a conversation with his patient in the following terms: “I always had to carry out short treatments with high doses, and had to go to the boundaries of the permissible, even though many colleagues might have condemned me for it, but I did and can bear the responsibility, because if treatment had been suspended at the present time, Germany would have been brought to its knees.”8
So what did Hitler really take, and what is its significance? Can historical events and developments be linked to pharmacological preparations? For years Morell painstakingly recorded the medications he used to keep his patient constantly on the go. Meticulous records were required in case anything happened to Hitler, in which case Morell would have had to hand over his detailed reports to the Gestapo. This gave rise to an immense bundle of papers, unique in medical history, and overflowing with details. Anyone with the desire to decipher the collection has to visit several sites to put together the various fragments of the doctor’s estate. A chunk is in the Federal Archive in Koblenz, another part in the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich—and a third, significant, portion in Washington, DC.
Onsite Visit: National Archives, Washington, DC
Reminiscent of an ancient temple, the monumental archive building stands on Pennsylvania Avenue, in the innermost administrative district of the victorious power of the Second World War. The White House, on the sam
e street, is just a stone’s throw away. Words are chiseled into pale stone beside the entrance: “What is past is prologue.”
Inside there is an overwhelming sense of confusion. Finding documents isn’t easy; there are simply too many of them. Like an enormous vacuum cleaner, the armed forces and intelligence services of the United States sucked up mountains of files from the German Reich and deposited them in Washington and College Park in Maryland—the biggest archive building in the world. To help you find your way through the holdings, there are catalogues, computer hubs, and, most importantly, the personal help of archivists, who effortlessly manage to cope with such complicated German specialist terms as Reichssicherheitshauptamt.
From the very outset Paul Brown, who helps me with my Morell research, dampens my hopes of finding everything about Hitler’s personal physician here. He compares my investigations at the archive with skipping flat pebbles over the water. Total access, complete immersion doesn’t exist, he reckons. You simply cannot exhaust the whole of the National Archives, this vast belly of documents. History, in Brown’s view, always remains one thing: speculation drawing on the most relevant possible facts. Historical truth isn’t something he can offer me.
So much quickly becomes clear: soon after the end of the war Theo Morell was subject to investigations by the U.S. Secret Service, some of which were made accessible only a few years ago by the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act.9 The Americans tried to find out what part the doctor had played, whether he was involved in Hitler’s medical decline, which progressed rapidly from the autumn of 1941 onward, or whether he had even tried to poison Hitler. The handling of addictive drugs was the focus of their inquiry. Might we find simple answers here to something that was so difficult to understand? Or did the doctor put himself in the wrong by artificially doping up his patient?
From the summer of 1945 Morell was interrogated for two years, and according to his own account tortured—purportedly his toenails were pulled out to retrieve his secrets. But the U.S. military didn’t get much out of their prisoner. The secret files reveal the frustration of the interrogators, who report contradictory statements. In Morell’s Medical Assessment file it says:
He is communicative, often gets lost in meaningless trivia when making his statements, and tries to replace the very obvious gaps in his memory with fictions, which often leads to contradictory information. . . . At different times the patient’s psyche shows a completely different picture. . . . In the case of Professor Morell this is plainly a mild form of exogenous psychosis, caused by the fact of his imprisonment. This in no way limits his accountability. On the other hand, his credibility should not be viewed as complete because of the presence of memory gaps which he attempts to bridge with fictions.10
Morell, according to the file, was not willing or able to explain the relevance of his activities.
The statements of three German pharmacologists and doctors who were brought in as experts right after the war weren’t any help either.11 One of the investigations devoted to Morell, Special Report No. 53, entitled “The Rumored Poisoning of Hitler,” came to the conclusion that the doctor gave his patient neither enough poison nor enough narcotics to damage his health. Hitler’s astonishing physical and psychic decline was presumed to be due only to a huge amount of stress and his largely vegetarian diet.
Is this assessment correct? Or should it at least be read with caution, due to its proximity to the events, as well as its incomplete study of source material? The U.S. authorities had aimed to receive information to dispel the countless myths that had built up around Hitler.12 In these terms they—ostensibly—failed with Morell.
On closer examination the answers actually lie in Morell’s notes—although they are hidden and not always easy to interpret. Morell’s posthumous papers are a chaotic mass, consisting of scribbled pages from his prescription pads, file pages scattered with cryptic abbreviations, notebooks with barely legible handwriting, diaries filled from cover to cover, loose sheets of paper with observations and descriptions, countless business and personal letters. Entries are repeated, slightly changed, appear again in notebooks, on envelopes, on notes from a telephone pad. From August 1941 until April 1945 the doctor treated his patient on a more or less daily basis. There are accounts for 885 of these 1,349 days. Medications were recorded 1,100 times, as well as almost 800 injections, about one per recorded day. Every now and again the needles themselves are cleanly stuck on to the notes, as if to give an outward appearance of transparency and conscientious documentation. Morell was afraid of the Gestapo; he knew that personal physicians have always lived dangerously.
The result is a chaotic record, a jungle that is almost impossible for outsiders to penetrate, particularly if they have an imperfect command of the German language. Precisely in the alleged overprecision much remains sketchy, and on an attentive reading it becomes clear that some visits are not recorded. Was Morell, who normally kept his business papers meticulously in order, trying to hide something with this confused representation of events, which was incomplete while simulating completeness? Was he trying to keep a secret that he alone knew, and of which even his patient was unaware? When the war took a fateful turn for the Third Reich, what really happened between Hitler and his personal physician?
The Bunker Mentality
Whenever I was allowed to stay with you more often in headquarters last year, these visits have given me more than you, my Führer, can begin to guess. I have done everything within my power to pass on the abundance of strength that you conveyed to me to as many people as possible.
—Joseph Goebbels13
This entirely unique process cannot be understood with traditional concepts and moral categories.
—Percy Ernst Schramm14
To approach the truth of Hitler’s drug consumption it helps to imagine the place where he spent most of his time between the summer of 1941 and the autumn of 1944. A search for clues in eastern Poland: colossal exploded bunkers lie like crash-landed concrete spaceships in the light-drenched Masurian Forest. This is the “Wolfsschanze,” the Wolf’s Lair. Moss has climbed over everything and birch trees grow on the undulating roofs. Everywhere there are wide cracks you can climb into. Steel reinforcements jut and bend from the crumbling concrete. On every corner yellow signs have been set up in Polish, German, English: UWAGA!!! ACHTUNG!!! DANGER!!! Still the many tourists from all over the world, numbering almost a thousand a day, aren’t deterred. They clamber into gaping black holes, force their way into chinks, take videos and selfies . . . as if they’re searching for something.
Searching for traces: the former Führer Headquarters known as the Wolf’s Lair.
In the summer of 1941 the Wolfsschanze looked very different. The fortress, protected by mines in a ring between 165 and 500 feet wide, near the East Prussian town of Rastenburg, had just been established and was going into operation. Its core was initially formed by ten bunkers, the backs of which lay under six feet of concrete. This was where the sleeping areas were. The front was relatively less protected and was where the work spaces were set up. The mess hall where officers ate formed the middle of the camp, and resembled an ugly village pub. A revolutionary star was soon hung behind an ungainly wooden table that sat twenty people: a captured Red Army flag. Hitler arrived on the evening of June 23, 1941, one day after the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. It was from the Wolf’s Lair that he would direct “Operation Barbarossa,” factoring in no more than three months for its victorious conclusion. The soldiers didn’t even bring winter uniforms.
Because of this hubristic assessment, the location of the headquarters for the Russian campaign had been chosen more or less on a whim. They wouldn’t be staying long anyway, it was thought—just like they didn’t stay long in the previous headquarters, the Felsennest. This time, they would pay the price for their arrogance.
Even in the very first days there were complaints about the Wolfsschanze: it was hard to think of a less hospitable place than this boggy s
oil between stagnant lakes and marshy ponds. The Führer’s abode was soon decried as an airless, lightless camp in the forest, often swathed in fog, the ground contaminated with gasoline that had to be sprayed around the compound to keep the plague of mosquitoes down. A minor official wrote to his wife: “It would be difficult to come up with a more stupid spot. Damp, cold bunkers in which we shiver pitifully at night because of the constant roar of the electric air ventilation system, which causes a terrible draft. We sleep badly and wake up with a headache in the morning. Our linen and uniforms are always cold and damp.”15
“Bunker damp and unhealthy,” Morell recorded shortly after moving in. He was staying in cramped bunker number 9. A fan rotated on the ceiling but didn’t create any fresh air, just swirled the mustiness around: “Ideal temperature for the breeding of mold. My boots are mildewed, clothes clammy. Stenocardia, anemia, bunker psychosis.”16 Hitler didn’t seem to be bothered by any of that. He had already enjoyed the cave-dwelling life in the Felsennest, but it was with the Wolf’s Lair that he reached his dream destination: a remote retreat where his life was reduced entirely to the military events at the front. Over the next three years the Wolf’s Lair became the center of his life and grew to over a hundred different residential and administrative buildings as well as massive, reinforced-concrete bunkers, its own rail connection and airport. Over two thousand officers, private soldiers, and civilians remained there permanently. No one actually enjoyed the location except the man who was also known as the Boss. He claimed to feel perfectly at home in his bunker. The temperature was always cool and even, fresh air was pumped in. Morell also had an oxygen tank set up for him, “for inhalation and possible release into the bedroom. Führer very content, one might even say enthusiastic.”17