by Norman Ohler
Everything was back to normal at dinnertime. Hitler had once again demonstrated his moral superiority by describing his guests’ beef bouillon as “corpse brew,” ate some Harz mountain cheese, with spinach pudding, stuffed gherkins, barley gruel, kohlrabi balls, and six Vitamultin bars, as well as Euflat and anti-gas pills for his flatulence, and pig’s heart muscle extract in phosphoric acid as a general tonic. After dinner the supposed vegetarian dozed off briefly while gripping his knife, his hands folded over his belly. His magical doctor’s terrible table manners were still the stuff of legend: having downed his obligatory glass of port, Morell also leaned back in his armchair and closed his eyes behind his thick spectacle lenses—as always, he closed them from bottom to top, a feared, gruesome-looking oddity of Morell’s. Both men had weak hearts, and both were gradually growing old.
Eva Braun had lit the fire and put on an American jazz record. She wanted to watch Gone with the Wind for the thousandth time because of her affinity for Clark Gable, her favorite actor. With stolen gold from Jewish fillings lining his mouth, Reichsleiter Bormann brushed the idea aside with a cynical smile: “The Führer doesn’t need the relaxation of a movie . . . what he needs is a powerful shot.”120 Morell gave a start, thought someone was talking to him, was ashamed of his sleepiness, and quickly told everyone a story from the old days, from his time as a ship’s doctor in Africa, which they all knew anyway. Then apple cake was served. After eating, Hitler’s stomach cramps were eased with Eukodal in his private quarters: “When I put this into your vein, please start slowly counting. Once you have reached fifteen, you won’t feel any more pain.”121
In the weeks after his birthday, while the Red Army prepared “Operation Bagration,” which would free their way to East Prussia from the end of June 1944, Hitler’s health deteriorated further. Eva, usually accompanied by her Scotch terriers, Stasi and Negus, was more and more appalled by the worsening appearance and increasingly frail constitution of her long-term lover. When she criticized him for walking with a stoop he tried to play down his unstoppable decline by joking that he was carrying heavy keys in his pocket. His knees were now obviously trembling when he stood on the balcony for more than a few moments, the two of them looking out on a clear day at the reddening sky above far-off, burning Munich, and Eva wondering fearfully whether her smart little house, which Hitler had bought for her in the elegant district of Bogenhausen, was still standing. Hitler was nearly finished off, and Goebbels had probably seldom lied more shamelessly when he wrote in his diary entry for June 6, 1944, the day of the Allied Normandy landings: “Professor Morell is helping me a little to improve the slightly weakened state of my health. He has also been a strong support to the Führer’s health recently. At my meeting with the Führer I can confirm that he looks dazzling, and that he is in good spirits.”122
In fact Hitler’s mood on D-Day—another nail in the coffin for the Nazi state—was subject to severe fluctuations. At nine in the morning he is said to have bellowed across the breakfast room: “Is this the invasion or isn’t it?”* When Morell hurried over and gave him an injection of “x,” he calmed down, suddenly appeared affable and lighthearted, enjoyed the day and the fine weather, and clapped everyone he met jovially on the shoulder.123 At the midday briefing, in spite of the looming military disaster, to everyone’s astonishment he revealed a beaming face, and at the lunch that followed—semolina dumpling soup, mushrooms in a ring of rice, apfelstrudel—he fell into one of his endless, distracted monologues. This time it was about elephants, which were the strongest animals in existence, and which, like him, abhorred meat. Next Hitler described in detail the horrors of a slaughterhouse he had visited in occupied Poland. Girls in rubber boots had waded in blood up to their ankles. Meanwhile, Morell was preparing his next injection, made from the glands of slaughtered animals.
On the evening of June 6 Hitler still didn’t believe that the invasion on the Atlantic north coast was actually happening but was satisfied with the idea that this was just a mock assault, a decoy maneuver designed to provoke him into overhasty reactions. This was not the case. In fact the Allies had established themselves along substantial stretches of coast by the end of the day and taken the Germans by surprise. The Western Front opened up. In military terms the German Reich now had no chance at all. But there was something that cheered Hitler up that day: Goebbels had at last given up smoking.
On July 14, 1944, the Führer left his Berghof, forever. During the flight to the Wolf’s Lair the curtains remained closed. Patient A had: “flu and conjunctivitis in both eyes. Head-water [hydrocephalus] has flowed into his left eye.”124 He was given an adrenalin solution as well as reports on the advances of the Allies through France, the approach of the Red Army toward the border of the Reich, and the latest bombing raids on German cities. He struggled to put on his reading glasses to be able to decipher all the bad news. He didn’t look down from the plane window.
Operation Valkyrie and Its Pharmacological Consequences
The park around the Wolf’s Lair was resplendent with lush green, the summer was hot, the forest shimmered, and Theo Morell fastened a facial mosquito net over the visor of his fantastical uniform cap. The wooden barracks of the Führer’s headquarters had been given a splinter shield of strong reinforcing walls, Goebbels was smoking again, and on July 20, 1944: “Patient A 11:14 injection as always.”125 On the file card the procedure is recorded as “x.”
Pharmacologically pepped up, Hitler ran to the ground-floor building in which the military briefing was being held on this fateful day. Some officers were already waiting outside the door. The dictator drew his strong eyebrows together so that the ridge above them became more defined, and shook hands with everyone around him. He then stepped into the interior of the barrack, whose windows were open against the oppressive heat. While the remaining twenty-four participants were grouped around a long oak table, he alone sat down on a stool and began to play with a magnifying glass. Lieutenant General Adolf Heusinger, who stood on his right, morbidly described the desolate situation on the Eastern Front. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, who had arrived a little late, shook hands with Hitler, shoved his brown briefcase under the table, as close to his target as possible. A little later he left the room again, inconspicuously. At 12:41 an admiral walked to one of the windows to get fresh air. Hitler bent low over the table so that he could get a better view of the map, resting his chin on his hand, his elbow on the tabletop. It was 12:42. The general was explaining: “If the army group doesn’t come back from Lake Peipus at last, there will be a catastrophe—” There was a terrible explosion.
“I saw a bright, clear, jetting infernal flame, and thought to myself that it could only be an English explosive. German explosives do not have such an intense bright-yellow flame.”126 Hitler’s own description of events sounds strangely detached, as if spoken from behind a veil. The blast sent him flying from the middle of the room to the door. Wired on “x,” the dictator may have experienced the explosion as if wrapped up in cotton wool, and felt as invulnerable as Wagner’s Siegfried—while all around him the seriously wounded officers fought for their lives, their hair in flames. As if he were just a bystander, he reported that a moment later, “I couldn’t see anything clearly through the thick smoke. I saw only a few figures lying in the haze and moving. I was lying in the barrack, near the left door post; on top of me a few slats and beams. But I was able to get up and go on my own. I was just a little dizzy and slightly dazed.”127
Morell heard the explosion from his workspace and immediately assumed it must be a bomb. Moments later Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, came rushing in: the professor had to come quickly to the Führer. The physician hastily picked up his black case and lumbered heavily out into the sultry summer air. A general lay on the floor with one leg torn off and one eye lost. Morell wanted to stop and tend to him, but Linge dragged him on: the Führer was more important.
It didn’t take them long to reach Hitler, who presented a grotesque picture, smili
ng blithely and sitting on his bed even though his forehead was bloody, his hair was burnt off at the back of his scalp, and there was a saucer-sized burn on his calf: “Keitel and Warlimont led me to my bunker,” the dictator reported with a lively, almost cheerful expression: “On the way I saw that my trousers were badly torn, and that bare flesh was visible everywhere. Then I washed, because my face looked like a Moor’s—and then changed my clothes.”128
When Hitler pointed out that Mussolini was coming for an important state visit in two hours, Morell took out his tools and injected “x” again. That it was just glucose and not an effective painkiller seems hardly likely. Patient A had dozens of splinters in his body, and these now had to be removed individually—a painful procedure. But Hitler wasn’t bothered. His two burst eardrums were bleeding, but even that didn’t trouble him, and he impressed everyone with his apparent courage.
On the medical file for Patient A, Morell recorded that Hitler hadn’t been agitated in the slightest. His pulse was normal, as always. Nonetheless the physician recommended that he stay in bed. But Hitler, full of beans from his injection, was already standing in freshly polished boots and announced that it was ridiculous for a healthy man to receive guests in bed. Wrapped in a bulging black cloak, he went to the Wolf’s Lair railway station and waited impatiently for Mussolini, who said, dumbfounded by Hitler’s apparent physical integrity: “That was a sign from heaven!”129
In reality Hitler had been more severely affected than it at first appeared. He had lost his hearing almost entirely and he began to have severe pains in his arms and legs as the effects of “x” abated in the evening. Blood was still flowing uninterruptedly from both ears. Psychologically the attack had devastating consequences. In the traditional day-on/day-off rhythm, Patient A now received his “x” against the pain and the shock to his nerves. In this critical phase after the attempted coup he couldn’t afford to miss a dose. However, the presentation of Hitler as an invincible, even invulnerable hero didn’t always work. When he welcomed a group of army officers a week later, their excited cries of “Heil Hitler!” died away when they laid eyes on him as he entered the room. All of a sudden the gap between the fiction of the Führer and the real-life Hitler was all too apparent.
From the attempt on Hitler’s life to the move from the Wolf’s Lair: Patient A’s increasing drug abuse.
At Last, Cocaine!
O night! I took some cocaine
and blood dispersion is under way,
hair turns grey, the years flee,
I must, I must in ardor
blossom once again before I decay.
—Gottfried Benn130
Because of the injury to both eardrums, word was sent to the nearby reserve field hospital to bring Dr. Erwin Giesing, an ear, nose, and throat specialist, to the Wolf’s Lair. He, too, quickly realized what was happening in the senior echelons. Although he had been told, before their first meeting, that Hitler was a kind of “powerful, mystical Superman,” it was a bent, halting figure that he met, wearing a dark-blue striped dressing gown and slippers on his bare feet.131 Giesing described his impressions precisely:
The face was pale, slightly swollen, and there were large bags under both bloodshot eyes. The eyes did not make the fascinating impression so often ascribed to them in the press. I was particularly struck by the wrinkles from either side of the nose to the outer corner of the mouth, and by the dry, slightly cracked lips. His hair was already clearly mixed with grey and rather unkempt. The face was well shaven, but with somewhat withered skin, which I attributed to fatigue. The speech was unnaturally loud and tended toward a shout, and later became somewhat hoarse. . . . An aged, almost depleted, and exhausted man, who had to make do with what was left of his strength.132
In a neurological respect, the specialist diagnosed the patient as normal: no hallucinations, no incontinence, functioning memory, and sense of time and space. “Emotionally unstable, however—either love or hate. Constant flux of thoughts, his statements always relevant. . . . the Führer’s psychological condition is very complex.”133
Examining Hitler’s burst eardrums, Giesing found a marked sickle-shaped tear in the right ear and a smaller injury in the left. When treating the sensitive tissue with acid, he admired Hitler’s extraordinary impassivity. He felt no pain any more, Patient A boasted. And, in any case, pain only existed to make people harder. Giesing couldn’t have guessed that perhaps he didn’t feel the pain because he had been given drugs by his personal physician shortly beforehand. There were no discussions between the two doctors. And while Giesing learned nothing from Morell about what he had administered, Morell had no idea what the new doctor was prescribing to the patient: “I was not briefed by ear specialist Dr. Giesing,” Morell noted sourly.134 The two doctors disliked each other from the first moment. When Morell approached Giesing, on his arrival, with the words, “Who are you? Who called you? Why didn’t you report to me?” Giesing fired back: “As an officer I only have to report to my military superiors, not to you, a civilian.”135 After that the top dog refused to even look at the newly recruited specialist.
Giesing described the personal physician on another occasion with little sympathy and an acid pen:
Morell comes in, distinctly short of breath and panting. He shakes only Hitler’s hand and asks agitatedly whether anything in particular happened during the night. Hitler says no. He slept well, and even digested the previous night’s salad without any difficulty. Then, with the help of Linge, he takes off his coat, sits back down in his armchair, and pulls up his left sleeve. Morell gives Hitler the injections. He pulls the needle out again and wipes the puncture site with a handkerchief. Then he leaves the room and goes into the office, holding in his right hand the used syringe and in the left empty ampoules, one large and two small. He goes with the ampoules and a syringe into the adjacent orderlies’ bathroom, rinses the syringe out himself, and destroys the empty ampoules by throwing them into the toilet. Then he washes his hands, comes back into the office, and says goodbye to everyone present.136
But Giesing didn’t come to his Führer empty-handed either. His favorite remedy for treating pains in the ear, nose, and throat area was cocaine, the very substance the Nazis abhorred as a “Jewish degeneration drug.” This choice is not as unusual as it might seem as not many alternatives for local anesthesia were available at the time,137 and cocaine was stocked as a medicine in every pharmacy. If we can believe Giesing, the only source in this case, between July 22 and October 7, 1944, on seventy-five days, he administered the substance over fifty times in the form of nose and throat dabs, a highly effective surface application. This was pure, first-class stuff, the famous Merck cocaine, delivered from Berlin by courier train as an extremely psychoactive 10 percent “cocaine solution” in a sealed bottle, responsibly signed for by the SS pharmacist in line with the regulations of the Reich Security Main Office. In the Wolf’s Lair Hitler’s valet kept it locked up under his personal care.
Again, this obvious application of drugs is barely noticed by Hitler’s biographers, even though it is worth mentioning because of its strong euphorigenic potential for the critical phase after the assassination attempt.138 The procedure went like this: in the morning Assistant Surgeon Karl Brandt brought his colleague Giesing to a tent behind the guest bunker, where they went through the strict security measures in place since July 20. Giesing’s bags were emptied, every instrument was examined; even the lightbulbs of the otoscope were taken out and screwed back in again. Giesing had to hand over his uniform cap and his dagger, empty out the contents of his trouser and jacket pockets onto the table, and turn out his pockets. He got only his handkerchief and keys back, and his fountain pen and pencil were returned afterward. He was frisked from top to bottom. Cocaine was left out of these rigid controls; it was already inside. Now Linge, the valet, went into action, taking the bottle out of the drug cabinet in the orderly room and inviting Giesing to make his examination.139
Patient A expressed his gratitud
e for this variation in the menu. According to Giesing’s report he claimed that “on cocaine he felt considerably lighter and carefree, and that he could also think more clearly.” The doctor explained to him that the psychotropic wave was the “medicinal effect on the swollen nasal mucous membrane, and that it was now easier to breathe through the nose. The effect usually lasted between four and six hours. He might have a slight cocaine sniff afterward, but it would stop after a short time.” Hitler supposedly asked whether this swabbed application could not be made once or twice a day—even when the aural passages requiring treatment were healed again after September 10. Giesing, who saw his star in the ascendant, agreed, but claims to have pointed out to the patient that all cocaine was absorbed by the nasal mucous membrane and passed into the blood supply, so he had to warn against too high a dose. But Hitler went on requesting this application, and during the next few days, in spite of profuse perspiration, he confirmed the success: “It’s a good thing you’re here, doctor. This cocaine is wonderful, and I’m glad that you’ve found the right remedy. Free me from these headaches again for a while.”140