by Norman Ohler
In January 1942, at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, the preconditions for the “final solution of the Jewish question” were drawn up. Hitler’s method now became rigidly fixated on genocide. There was a convincing reason for the frantic insistence on refusing to give up any conquered territory: to keep the chimneys of the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibór, Chełmno (Kulmhof), Majdanek, and Bełżec smoking for as long as possible, to hold all positions—until all the Jews were dead. Patient A, who was radically distancing himself from the human conventions of living, was determined to bring his war on the defenseless to a satisfactory conclusion.
Planet “Werwolf”
I envy you for being able to experience the great world-historical events in the Führer’s headquarters. The Führer’s genius, his timely intervention and the structuring of our Wehrmacht, thought through with the greatest precision in every direction, ensure that we can look into the future with great confidence. . . . May it be granted to him to preserve perfect health, so that he receives the strength to achieve even his last goals for his people.
—From a letter to Theodor Morell37
In July 1942 the geographical reach of the Third Reich extended from the North Cape in Norway to North Africa and the Middle East. The plateau of the National Socialist expansion trip had been achieved—while the signs were already pointing to defeat. That summer saw the beginning of “Operation Reinhard,” the systematic killing of over 2 million Jews and 50,000 Sinti and Roma in occupied Poland. At the same time a large-scale move was taking place: the Nazi leadership shifted from the Wolf’s Lair to brand-new headquarters, a few miles from Vinnytsia, a small city in rural western Ukraine.
The change of location was something of an ostentatious display, little more than a farce designed to convince the leadership that they were moving closer to the front, closer to the action. But the main line of battle was still a comfortable distance of hundreds of miles from this camp of huts, which had been quickly assembled in the forest. Here the power circle was even safely removed from the massive bombing raids on German cities by the British—Lübeck, Rostock, Stuttgart, and above all Cologne had already suffered severe attacks. Hitler’s avoidance of the political and social realities was perfectly in line with this new central command post, this non-place in nowhere, this high-tech location in the sticks where he could more easily dope himself up and remove himself from reality. There hadn’t been a solid home in his life, like his former flat on Prinzregentenplatz in Munich, for quite some time. The newly appointed armaments minister, Albert Speer, described the new headquarters in the Ukraine as an “arrangement of bungalows, a small pine forest, a parklike garden.”38 The stumps of the felled trees were painted green to match the landscape, the parking lots were shadily protected in the undergrowth. It almost sounds like a holiday in the countryside, a rest home. But it was from these two handfuls of log cabins and barracks surrounded by tall oaks that a war was waged more cruel than any waged before. Hitler christened his new headquarters for mass murder “Werwolf,” or Werewolf, a somewhat suitable name for this zone of unreality. Monstrous events were planned and ordered from here while its inhabitants remained secluded from the world, and stuck strictly to their ritualized daily routine.* 39 Here Hitler, with billions of crazed bacteria in his gut, could go on fearing microbes while his soldiers in the steppes and marshes of Russia became acquainted with infectious diseases from Volhynia fever to tularemia and malaria.
By now Morell was essential to the dictator and wouldn’t leave him even at military briefings, even though as a civilian doctor he had no business there and received skeptical looks from the generals. At these meetings, which were held twice a day, the world was abstracted into procedures and military maps. Even in fine weather the windows were closed and the curtains drawn. In spite of the freshness of the forest outside, the atmosphere in Werwolf headquarters was always stuffy. At this point Hitler took advice only from people who were as ignorant of the situation at the front as he was himself.40 The great hour of the yes-men had arrived, embodied in the form of the gnarled and rigid Field Marshal Keitel, who was secretly mocked as “Lakaitel”—“Keitel the lackey.”
On July 23, 1942, thirteen months after the start of the Russian campaign, Hitler made another strategic blunder when he ordered in Army Directive 45 that German forces be divided again, this time in the south of the Soviet Union. Army Group A was to advance on the oil-rich city of Baku in Azerbaijan, Army Group B via the Volga city of Stalingrad to the Caspian Sea. A front originally 500 miles wide, deep inside enemy territory, was thus extended to a barely tenable 2,500 miles. The army leadership protested vehemently, and beneath the blazing Ukrainian sun, with temperatures from 113° to 122°F, there were unparalleled expressions of rage. Halder would later say that Hitler’s military decisions gave “full power to wishful thinking.”41 Speer, the armaments minister, spoke of a “special kind of derangement with which everyone in Hitler’s immediate entourage regarded the inevitable end.” Military planning had parted company with reality long ago. Schaulagen—“show briefings”—was the name given unofficially to these prettified military meetings: “Rose-tinted reports from army positions lead us to fear that the critical situation is not being fully acknowledged.”42
Hitler’s personal physician, Theodor Morell (to the left behind his patient).
When Erich von Manstein, inventor of the “sickle cut,” conqueror of the Crimea, and now promoted to the rank of field marshal, spoke about the critical situation in the southern part of the Eastern Front, the official Oberkommando log stated: “As before, no full decisions are being made. It is as if the Führer is not capable of it.”43 Hitler no longer tolerated generals who argued rationally, who in his opinion only ever wanted to talk everything down. From now on he childishly refused to shake hands with Colonel General Jodl (who was the only member of army command who was not a patient of Morell). Hitler no longer attended communal meals but retired completely to his log cabin, which he only ever left after dark. When he did fly to the front in mid-August 1942 to get an idea of the military reality, he immediately got terribly sunburnt—“His whole face burnt dark red, great burns on his forehead, severe pains”44—and was extremely glad when he was back in his sheltered hut.
By now, he had more or less given up delivering public speeches. The historian and author Sebastian Haffner describes the retreat of Hitler, formerly a master of publicity: “He had methodically replaced sobriety with mass intoxication. One might say that he had prescribed himself to the Germans for six years as a drug—which he then suddenly withdrew from them in wartime.”45 Hitler now missed those ecstasies that his appearances had previously prompted, and which had always amounted to a new injection of the pepped-up feeling that was so important to his self-esteem. In his isolation, all pleasure and energy previously received from the attention of a cheering crowd had to be replaced by chemicals—further cocooning the dictator. “He was a person who continually needed artificial charging. In a sense Morell’s drugs and medicines replaced the old stimulus of mass ovations.”46
By now Hitler paid scarcely any attention to affairs of state. He preferred to stay up all night, seldom went to bed before six o’clock, and what he liked best of all was talking to Speer about grandiose architectural projects—although these were now purely illusory. Even his loyal arms minister and favorite architect, who described his collaboration with Hitler as the “years of intoxication,” and as a real master of repression still raved about the “heady stimulus that comes with leadership,” had to acknowledge that Hitler “frequently took flight from reality and entered his world of fantasy.”47
This remoteness from truth would have serious effects on the course of the war. Hitler often sent his units into battle without any notion of their equipment, fighting power, or supplies. But at the same time he was minutely concerned, to the chagrin of the army, with all tactical questions, right down to battalion level, and thought he was indispensable in every respect.
* Every word uttered at the military briefings was now being recorded in shorthand so that he could later call generals to heel if they tried to sidestep his increasingly unrealistic orders.
Hitler had been a military dilettante since the order to halt at Dunkirk; now he became a fantasist, while his armies lost themselves in the wastes of Abkhazia and the Kalmuk Steppe, advanced all the way to the Black Sea, and erected a vainly fluttering swastika flag on the Elbrus massif in the Caucasus at an altitude of 18,481 feet. In the summer of 1942 Hitler’s absorption of injections rose to such a level that Morell had to put in a special order for syringes for the Führer’s headquarters at the Engel pharmacy in Berlin.48
In the autumn of 1942 Rommel, who had switched from Crystal Fox to Desert Fox, was getting into desperate straits in Africa against the British under Bernard Montgomery. At the same time Stalingrad was becoming more and more of a psychopathic fixation, given the city’s diminishing strategic significance. Hitler was unnecessarily stylizing the progressively dramatic events there into a mythically overcharged fateful battle. His health was going rapidly downhill, while on the Volga the siege was closing in on General Friedrich Paulus’s 6th Army. German soldiers were perishing in the thousands due to hunger, cold, and Russian shells. “Intestinal gases, halitosis, discomfort,”49 Morell noted of his patient on December 9, 1942, the day when it became apparent that Göring’s grandiloquent and unrealistic promise to supply food and fuel for the besieged troops in Stalingrad by means of an air drop had been broken.
A letter from the Engel pharmacy to Morell: “For the supply of the ordered syringes I request the issuing of a prescription or a certificate showing that the syringes are needed for the Fuhrer’s headquarters. Only on receipt of this certificate can the syringes be prepared. With very best regards, Heil Hitler!”
A week later Patient A asked his personal physician for advice. Göring had told him he took a medication called Cardiazol when he felt weak and dizzy. Hitler wanted to know “whether that would also be good for him, the Führer, if he felt a bit funny at important occasions.”50 But Morell refused: for him, Cardiazol, a circulatory stimulant for which it is difficult to give precise dosages, and which also raises the blood pressure and can easily lead to seizures, was too risky for Hitler, who now had heart problems. But the doctor had understood the message: his boss was asking for stronger remedies to help calm his nerves over the intensifying crisis in Stalingrad. Morell would soon rise to the challenge.
Slaughterhouse Ukraine
You must be healthy, you must stay away from that which poisons your bodies. We need a sober people! In future the German will be judged entirely by the works of his mind and the strength of his health.
—Adolf Hitler51
Based on the continuing success of his Vitamultin bars, Theo Morell had taken over one of the biggest cooking-oil manufacturers in the former Czechoslovakia, the Heikorn Company in Olmütz (Olomouc) in Moravia, which had been stolen from its Jewish owners. Hitler had organized this special bonus for him in person.* 52 The purchase price was 120,000 reichsmarks—a ludicrous amount for the lucrative property that the physician converted into the main manufacturing site of his company, Hamma. In his notes he wrote: “It will never again be so cheap to make an acquisition. . . . The Aryanized factory goes to me.”53 Over a thousand employees made such diverse products as poppy seed oil, mustard, scouring powder, and the anti-louse powder Russla, which Morell had developed himself and which was largely ineffective but still compulsory for the Wehrmacht. The core business was vitamin and hormone preparations. In order to keep this going the ambitious doctor and mercantile exploiter of Nazi terror needed a constant source of supplies.
Five miles south of Werwolf was the city of Vinnytsia, with its huge and very modern slaughterhouse. The American company Swift had built it shortly before the start of the war to the latest technical specifications and modeled it on the abattoirs of Chicago. All of Ukraine’s slaughtering was supposed to be centralized here and everything was fully automated, including the collection of the enormous quantities of blood produced. Morell was impressed: there was nothing like this even in Germany, where “valuable proteins were still washed away,” as he recorded in his notes.54 The doctor decided to take advantage of this modern facility, and while Hitler barricaded himself away in his hut in the woods from a world that he was currently setting on fire, the self-made pharmacist Morell used the war in the Ukraine to extend his enterprises. Sensing a huge source of business, he developed a plan that was as simple as it was brazen. He informed Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi chief ideologist and Reich minister for the occupied Eastern zones, that he wanted to found an “organotherapeutic factory”: “If I am granted the accruals, it will be possible for me to supply the whole of the East with hormones.”55 By “accruals,” Morell meant thyroid glands, adrenal glands, testicles, prostates, ovaries, Cowper’s glands, gall bladders, hearts, and lungs—nothing less than all the glands and organs as well as all the bones of all the animals slaughtered in Vinnytsia.
From a business point of view this was a fantastic opportunity to exploit raw materials for the manufacture of doping agents and steroids. Morell was moving restlessly through the occupied country during these weeks to organize his dirty deals. He wanted the right to process all leftovers. He even wanted to recycle the blood of the slaughtered animals for the manufacture of a new nutritional preparation, which was to consist of dried blood and vegetables (mostly carrots).56 “I’m often very tired from all the driving,” he wrote to his wife. “I cover 300 km every other day, sometimes every day. And that on bad Russian cobbled roads.”57 He planned to drain every last drop of blood from occupied Ukraine to the literal marrow and had taken unscrupulousness to a new level. Increasingly unabashed, he used his consolidated position of power at the court as his own kind of official government department. The Gauleiter (district leader) Erich Koch, the Reich Commissar of the Ukraine (known as “Little Stalin” because of his brutality, and also a patient of Morell’s), was only too happy to cooperate: wherever animals were slaughtered the doctor would henceforth be authorized to “collect the waste products required for the manufacture of organotherapeutic medications . . . and supply them for the desired application.”58 Morell expressed his thanks and immediately announced further plans: “Once I have glands and internal organ matters in order, I will appraise the medical herbs and drugs of the Ukraine. You will see that the organization will be a great success.”59
He quickly set up the “Ukrainian Pharma-Works, Vinnytsia Plant, Manufacturer of Organotherapeutic and Plant Products—Drugs Export.” The firm was immediately set on an expansion course. Morell was not satisfied with western Ukraine but had his eye on the lucrative industrial zone in the Donets Basin. He also set his sights on the steppes by the Black Sea and the Crimea. There he planned to plant “medical herbs on a large scale, to participate in a strong German economy.”60
He was particularly keen on Kharkov, the metropolis in the eastern Ukraine taken by the 6th Army back in October 1941 as a strategically important city, the fourth largest in the Soviet Union. Since its occupation by the Wehrmacht Germany had imposed death and destruction on the city: two thirds of the buildings had been destroyed and the number of inhabitants reduced from 1.5 million to 190,000. Soviet citizens had been thrown from their balconies and hanged in hallways and the doorways of banks and hotels.61 In the ravine of Drobytsky Yar, SS-Sonderkommando 4a, a unit of Einsatzgruppe C, along with Orp Battalion 314, had carried out a massacre of the Jewish population: 15,000 people were shot; women and children had also been killed in gas wagons. Many inhabitants of Kharkov were transported to Germany as forced laborers, and when an attempt was made by the Red Army to liberate the city in May 1942, some 240,000 Soviet soldiers were imprisoned. None of that bothered Morell in the slightest. On the contrary, the desperate situation of Kharkov seemed to inspire him: “It’s an unusually interesting task, in a city that has changed possession several times, to take anything that can pos
sibly be taken from it for the war economy,” he wrote to Koch.62 When he learned that there was an institute of endocrinology in Kharkov that specialized in the treatment of internal secretory glands, Morell turned to Koch again: “As the institute which belonged to the Russian state is pointless without a supply of glands, and you have been so kind as to allow these bodily organs to me when slaughter takes place, I should like to ask permission to buy this institute and to start the processing of the glands and the manufacture of the materials that are so urgently needed in Germany.”63
The answer came the same day by telephone: Morell could have his institute; it was “transferred” to him. The instruction was now issued to all eighteen abattoirs in the Ukraine: “According to the decree of the Reich Commissar of the Ukraine organs accruing in the abattoirs . . . are to be delivered exclusively and continuously to the Ukrain. Pharma-Works. They should be freed of fat, frozen two hours after slaughter to –15 degrees or brought to the lowest possible temperature.”64
Nothing now stood in the way of the new development and mass production of hormone preparations. The doctor wallowed in these prospects, treasuring his own personal exploitation of the Eastern Front: “We need all that we can get from glands.”65 Things could never be more favorable: “I hope that the vacuum drying equipment and the extraction devices will soon arrive. Then the large-scale business can begin.”66