Blitzed

by Norman Ohler

  Since the start of the Führer’s rapid physical decline these internecine struggles between the doctors turned into a proxy war for succession at the top of the Nazi state. The situation was becoming worse: Himmler told Brandt he could easily imagine that Morell had tried to kill Hitler. The Reichsführer-SS called the physician to his office and coldly informed him that he had himself sent so many people to the gallows that he no longer cared about one more. At the same time, in Berlin, the head of the Gestapo, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, summoned Morell’s locum, Dr. Weber, from the Kurfürstendamm to a hearing at the Reich Security Main Office on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Weber tried to exonerate his boss, and voiced his opinion that a plot was utterly out of the question. He claimed Morell was far too fearful for such a thing.

  Finally the chemical analysis of the disputed medication was made available. The result: its atropine and strychnine content was far too small to poison anyone, even in the massive quantities that Hitler had been given. It was a comprehensive victory for Morell. “I would like the matter involving the anti-gas pills to be forgotten once and for all,” Hitler stated, ending the affair. “You can say what you like against Morell—he is and remains my only personal physician, and I trust him completely.”161 Giesing received a reprimand, and Hitler dismissed him with the words that all Germans were freely able to choose their doctors, including himself, the Führer. Furthermore, it was well known that it was the patient’s faith in his doctor’s methods that contributed to his cure. Hitler would stay with the doctor he was familiar with, and brushed aside all references to Morell’s lax treatment of the syringe: “I know that Morell’s new method is not yet internationally recognized, and that Morell is still in the research stage with certain matters, without having reached a firm conclusion about them. But that has been the case with all medical innovations. I have no worries that Morell will not make his own way, and I will immediately give him financial support for his work if he needs it.”162

  Himmler, a dedicated sycophant, immediately changed tack: “Yes, gentlemen,” he explained to Hasselbach and Giesing, “You are not diplomats. You know that the Führer has implicit trust in Morell, and that should not be shaken.” When Hasselbach protested that any medical or even civil court could at least accuse Morell of negligent bodily harm, Himmler turned abrasive: “Professor, you are forgetting that as interior minister I am also head of the supreme health authority. And I don’t want Morell to be brought to trial.”163 The head of the SS dismissed Giesing’s objection that Hitler was the only head of state in the world who took between 120 and 150 tablets and received between 8 and 10 injections every week.

  The tide had turned once and for all against Giesing, who was given a check from Bormann for ten thousand reichsmarks in compensation for his work. Both Hasselbach and the influential Brandt were out of luck as well, also damaging the latter’s confidant Speer, who had his eye on Hitler’s succession. The three doctors had to leave headquarters. Morell was the only one who stayed behind. On October 8, 1944, he rejoiced in the happy news: “The Führer told me that Brandt had only to meet his obligations in Berlin.”164 Patient A stood firmly by his supplier. Just as every addict adores his dealer, Hitler was unable to leave the generous doctor who provided him with everything he needed.

  The dictator told his physician: “These idiots didn’t even think about what they were doing to me! I would suddenly have been standing there without a doctor, and these people should have known that during the eight years you have been with me you have saved my life several times. And how I was before! All doctors who were dragged in failed. I’m not an ungrateful person, my dear doctor. If we are both lucky enough to make it through the war, then you’ll see how well I will reward you!”165

  Morell’s confident reply can also be read as an attempt to justify himself to posterity, because the physician put it baldly on record: “My Führer, if a normal doctor had treated you during that time, then you would have been taken away from your work for so long that the Reich would have perished.” According to Morell’s own account, Hitler peered at him with a long, grateful gaze and shook his hand: “My dear doctor, I am glad and happy that I have you.”166

  The war between the doctors was thus shelved. Patient A had put a stop to a premature dismissal. The price he paid was the continued destruction of his health by a personal physician who had been confirmed in his post. To calm his nerves the head of state received “Eukodal, Eupaverin. Glucose i.v. plus Homoseran i.m.”167

  Self-Obliteration

  Life in headquarters is now such that one can write little about it, as the conditions are more or less all internal in nature. I look forward to being able to tell you that the Führer is fit and well, and concerned day and night with how he can improve and master the fate of Germany. I am still very close to the front in the East.

  —From a letter from Theodor Morell168

  Just like the potent substances in Hitler’s blood supply, his existence itself, which had seemed solid for so long, dissolved gradually into Nirvana. This is a development worth following if we are both to understand how the formerly energetic Führer was transformed into a human ruin, and to gauge how this process interacted with historical events.

  In the last quarter of 1944, while the fronts closed in on all sides, the vise tightened, intestinal cramps intensified, and Hitler managed to survive his little remaining time by taking strong narcotics and erecting a pharmacological barricade around himself. The deluded totalitarian system that he himself had created did not allow for a sober Führer. Since he was convinced that he alone could realize all the ambitious goals of National Socialism during his own lifetime, and did not trust any potential successor to establish the German World Reich, he could under no circumstances give up. With Morell’s drugs, he could keep going and maintain his tunnel vision. Under no circumstances did Hitler want to come down from his megalomaniac Führer-trip, in spite of the disastrous military situation. He refused to come to his senses: if so, he would be obliged to notice the vanity, the madness, of the whole enterprise. In complete denial, he couldn’t allow himself to doubt his battle, waged against the whole world, or even lose his taste for the war, which he himself had unleashed and already lost long ago. Remorselessly the needle penetrated his skin, the plunger was pulled back, the stuff shot into the veins, and he escaped again into self-delusion.

  The fact was that between the autumn of 1941, when he started being given hormone and steroid injections, and the second half of 1944, when first the cocaine and then above all the Eukodal kicked in, Hitler hardly enjoyed a sober day. This helped him to never break out of his own closed system, never to awaken from the nightmare, until the very end. The chasm was definitive and irreparable: as soon as any psychological bridge to reality was tentatively rebuilt, it was immediately blown up by a further pharmacological explosion.

  Drugs were fuel and a stand-in for a lack of commitment: by now he found that his illusions could be bolstered only by narcotics. He traveled from headquarters to headquarters, from bunker to bunker, from disinhibition to disinhibition—unbounded, homeless, always on his way to the next futile military action, the next fix that would let him repress all consequences, while ignoring all possible side-effects. He moved in a permanent fog: a doped-up performance athlete unable to stop—until the inevitable collapse.

  The Superbunker

  My dear old friend, I hope I can still call you that, even though you’re now an international celebrity. But I know your character. The German people are very grateful to you for your beneficial work, as we would be lost if the strong hand was missing. And that this hand has remained strong until today is your inextinguishable merit.

  —From a letter to Theodor Morell169

  To better protect himself against future attempts on his life, infections, or any other kind of attack, on the afternoon of November 8, 1944, Patient A moved into a brand-new refuge within the Führer’s Restricted Area at the Wolf’s Lair. Instead of the usual six-foot-thick concrete
ceilings, this one had a twenty-three-foot-thick concrete gravel casing. The windowless block didn’t have any direct ventilation and looked like an ancient Egyptian tomb. The quantities of material exceeded many times over the usable space that they surrounded. Hitler worked, slept, and vegetated there, in total isolation, locked in his delusion and living off his own substance. He himself could see only positive sides to the new habitation, which seemed to have fallen into the forest like a monstrous foreign body from the sky. The dictator happily stated he now had more room to walk about inside. Morell calculated the Führer’s sleeping and working area was eight hundred cubic feet larger than in the old bunker. Of course, the doctor always had access to the otherwise isolated sarcophagus-like building, to inject him “intravenously with Eukodal for excessive stress” to celebrate the move.170

  Morell had known for a long time the state of his patient and how quickly Hitler was going downhill, or turning in on himself, and how much people were talking about it. Letters that the doctor wrote to his wife, various Gauleiter, and old acquaintances during the late autumn of 1944 express the desperate desire to depict reality other than it was. This also included mailing the daily menus from the Wolf’s Lair. These were supposed to provide proof to outsiders of Hitler’s “simple and reasonable way of life.”171 Whereas he had never previously mentioned his patient’s health to third parties, he now communicated an ostentatiously good mood to all and sundry. A collection of his lines: “My high-up patient is very well. . . . My most important patient is always very well. . . . An improvement is fully in place. . . . I am glad that my patient’s health is in a good state. . . . My patient’s health is very good, and I hope I will be able to keep him in his old, fresh state for the German people for a long time to come. Apart from the Duce I have in fact been able to heal several other heads of state and can actually be very contented with the success of my medical efficacy.”172

  But Patient A was not at all well. In fact Morell could only simulate, stage-manage, inject back into shape a healthy Hitler for increasingly shorter intervals. Often Hitler lay pale and haggard on a simple field bed in his new concrete residence, in his white nightshirt under a military blanket. An adjustable lamp was suspended over his head; a bedside table and a low rack were packed to the brim with sheets of paper, situation maps, open books, and urgent reports. In the midst of this chaos was a telephone that never rang. The light-grey walls gave off the bleak smell of unset concrete. The bed was scattered with broken pencils. Lost somewhere among the mess were nickel-framed glasses he was ashamed of because he could no longer put them on by himself due to the extreme tremors in his hands. Nonetheless, Morell wrote, “I can report that the F. is full of beans. . . . It is my greatest joy, reassurance, and satisfaction that my patient is very well, and that with his vigor and freshness he is a match for any task, and could master any crisis. . . . It may be of some comfort to you if I can assure you that our Führer is in a good state of health.”173

  From teetotaler to junkie.

  But as soon as the effect of the Eukodal waned, the trembling began, and in the last few weeks of 1944 only grew in intensity. Soon it came to dominate all discussions of the state of Hitler’s health. Aware of this, the ashen Führer tried with all his strength to suppress the shaking, which only made it worse. The saluting arm held stiffly and tirelessly aloft was now a thing of the past. Nervous, violent vibrations of all his extremities had taken over. “Left hand very strong tremor,” wrote Morell. Then: “Increased tremor in the right hand.” Or: “The left leg is not trembling now, but the left arm and the left hand are.”174 Hitler buried his fingers in his coat pockets to conceal the fact. By now it could hardly have been described as trembling, as it had graduated to shaking. His entourage was seriously alarmed. Panzer General Heinz Guderian, now head of the Army General Staff, reported that Hitler had to put his right hand on his left and his right leg over his left leg to make the shaking less visible when he was sitting down. Hitler’s hand vibrated, oscillated, and maneuvered of its own free will so much that many people thought it was intentional. If he folded his arms in front of his chest, his whole torso was set in motion. Morell recommended baths and rest. Hitler asked “if he couldn’t be given injections for it.”175

  But injections wouldn’t alleviate the problem. Quite the contrary. In search of the cause for his trembling limbs and stooped posture, medical historians have diagnosed the dictator as suffering from arteriosclerotic Parkinson’s disease, a shaking palsy probably provoked by an autoimmune disorder. With Parkinson’s, the body’s neurons are mistaken for foreign bodies by the immune system and attacked—the possible result of his having consumed outrageous preparations made of animal hormones. The consequences are that dopamine-producing nerve cells wither and there is a lack of nourishment to the essential nuclei of the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for learning and control processes. In his notes Morell also expressed a suspicion of Parkinson’s, although not until April 1945.176 There is no way of telling whether the diagnosis is accurate. Another, perhaps supplementary explanation is that Hitler’s notorious shaking was the direct effect of his unchecked drug consumption.

  At any rate Morell was not allowed to leave his patient alone during this phase. On the one hand the physician was now leading his leader, but on the other he had become his prisoner. No one could imagine the grief this position caused him, he complained. For years he hadn’t been able to move far from Hitler, he hadn’t been his own master for a long time, and he was forced to neglect everything in his own life: his beloved wife, his practice on the Kurfürstendamm, the factories and research laboratories in Olmütz and Hamburg. Even when his brother died, Morell was not given permission to go to the funeral, as he had become indispensable. Hitler swiftly countered each of his suggestions: “After I informed him of the death of my brother, the F. was very concerned about my trip, as the West was in severe danger. I suggested a plane (this was out of the question, as there were always large numbers of hostile fighter planes in the skies), car (I wouldn’t be able to bear such a long journey, in spite of my reassurances to the contrary), railways (can only be used conditionally, due to air raids).”177

  Hitler flatly refused the locum suggested by Morell for the brief period of his absence: he suspected that the SS doctor Ludwig Stumpfegger “might not give such good injections.” Or might the reason have been that Stumpfegger didn’t know the secret of “x”? Morell insisted on retaining one last scrap of his own private family life. Despite all attempts to keep him in the Wolf’s Lair, he did travel to his brother’s funeral and on the way back called in briefly on his wife in Berlin. Hitler gave him a bodyguard from the Reich Security Service and became more indignant than ever after the return of his doctor: “3.30 p.m. with the Führer: patient unfriendly, no questions. . . . Major rebuff.” Morell quickly got his needles out, took a deep breath, wiped the pearls of sweat from his forehead, and stuck the point of the platinum needle into his patient’s forearm: “Glucose i.v. plus Vitamultin forte, Glyconorm, Tonophosphan.” Hitler put his left hand on his belt buckle and breathed out noisily, hunched his shoulders, and pursed his thin, pinched lips, which made his mouth look even smaller. Then his face relaxed, and Morell skillfully massaged the swallowed air up from Hitler’s belly. They were already back on the same wavelength.178

  Track Marks

  While the Red Army was taking more and more towns in East Prussia in November 1944, Hitler’s veins were so wrecked that even the expert shot-giver Morell could hardly penetrate them. The skin of the veins, perforated too many times, was inflamed, scarred, and a peculiar shade of brown. Morell had to take a break: “I canceled injections today, to give the previous puncture holes a chance to heal. Left inside elbow good, right still has red dots (but not pustules), where injections were given. F. says this wasn’t the case before.”179

  It actually made a crunching noise every time Morell gave him a shot. Each jab created a new wound that joined the previous one, and it produced an elon
gated, growing crust, what junkies call “track marks,” when one jab is followed by the next to form an unlovely line. Even Hitler was gradually becoming nervous and worrying about what the huge number of injections was doing to him: “When I gave him the intravenous injection the Führer thought I wasn’t rubbing the area long enough with alcohol so that he often developed small red pustules at the needle holes.” But Morell had another explanation for the condition: “Blood low in oxygen, from months sitting in the bunker with no daylight or fresh air, and venous, as becomes apparent when applying a tourniquet, and consequently not sufficiently coagulable, and the needle hole staying red.” Hitler remained suspicious: “Führer still attributes this to bacteria, and thinks bacteria might be entering his body with the injections.”180

  Out of necessity, Morell wanted to stop the orgy of shots for a while. But in the end Hitler swept all qualms aside and his auto-aggressive qualities came to the fore. In spite of the unpleasantness that the countless injections caused him, he didn’t stop demanding them, and when receiving his doctor the first thing he said was that he didn’t need treatment but that he did need an injection:

  Six o’clock in the morning: I am to go to the patient immediately. . . . There in twenty minutes. Führer had worked through the night and had a very momentous decision to make, which had left him deeply irritable. The anxiety had become increasingly powerful until at last, quite suddenly, as always when he became very agitated, a convulsion had set in. He didn’t want an examination, as that only intensified the pain. I quickly prepared a combined injection of Eupaverin and Eukodal and administered it intravenously, which was very difficult given the many recent inoculations; but in the process I observed that we must spare the veins for a while. As I had to pause before giving him the injection, relaxation took place during the injection and the pain was gone. The F. was very happy about it and gratefully shook my hand.181