by Norman Ohler
Twenty minutes between phone call and application: most addicts can only dream of having such a dealer. Hitler valued his doctor’s constant availability, and on October 31, 1944, he praised him, saying that the “rapid intervention yesterday morning had led to a complete recovery.” Morell replied reassuringly: “If such a state should recur, he was to call straight away, even if it was the middle of the night. . . . It would give me the greatest pleasure to be able to help him.”182
Often during those last weeks in the Wolf’s Lair Patient A made use of his twenty-four-hour room service for even the hardest substances, and called Morell out even after midnight, shamelessly citing all kinds of tiny aches and pains or nervous strains. While an orderly brought the doctor’s bag back to the “drone barracks,” the doctor waited by his patient until the effects took hold. On November 8, 1944, when the high wasn’t strong enough, Morell generously added a little extra.
Wednesday 00.30. Suddenly awoken. All of a sudden the Führer has severe gas distension in his body. As he told me, at the moment he has to make the biggest decisions of his life, and this is putting an ever greater strain on his nerves. Intravenous Eukodal-Eupaverin initially eases the pain and the convulsions only partially. In response to his request for another half-injection, I have the bag brought back and see that I have injected only 0.01 Eukodal intravenously instead of 0.02. After another injection of 0.01 Eukodal intravenously the pains and the spasm immediately start to ease. The Führer thanked me effusively for this immediate assistance and was then completely happy.183
An addict notices immediately when he hasn’t been given the full batch. An addict knows nothing but the longing for the next, completely satisfying shot; every other aspect of existence disappears into the background, regardless of whether it is daytime or the middle of the night. In this period after the attempt on his life, when Hitler’s drug consumption reached record levels, the dictator finally lost his biochemical balance—and his health. Stauffenburg hadn’t killed him, but he had indirectly turned him into a drug addict. Hitler was degenerating. His face turned ochre, his eyelids sagged, the shaking of his limbs was getting worse and worse, and his concentration was clearly declining. Under Allied questioning after the war Hitler’s second surgeon, Hanskarl von Hasselbach, who referred disparagingly to Morell’s treatments as “witchcraft,”184 sketched the medical development as follows: until 1940 Hitler looked much younger than he really was, but after that he had aged rapidly. Until 1943 his outward appearance matched his age, but later his rapid physical decay became obvious.
The fact is, Eukodal was first used in 1943 but was injected so often between September and December 1944 that one must consider the possibility of a physical dependency. The happy fix came at a cost of unpleasant side-effects: insomnia, tremors, and constipation. Hitler suffered from all of them. As soon as the high began to ebb, his digestive tract reacted with “spastic obstipation” (severe constipation) and he had “no evacuation, painful wind.”185 At night he lay in bed with his eyes open: “Then I can’t go to sleep. . . . In the dark I keep seeing the General Staff maps in front of me, and my brain goes on working, and it takes hours before I can break free.”186 He claimed the only reason he couldn’t get to sleep was the British bombers flying over the Reich territory, but it was probably the drugs that were keeping him awake. To give him the rest he needed, Morell had to administer barbiturate-based narcotics like Luminal or Quadro-Nox. The cycle continued.
Probably as a consequence of the frequent Eukodal shots, Hitler’s digestion barely worked now, and as far as his intestinal complaints were concerned, he had reached the spot where Morell had started treating him with Mutaflor in 1936. Because of Patient A’s chronic constipation, he had to take chamomile suppositories, which provoked him “to the toilet. I had to stay outside (he even locked the door),” but it did no good: “The fluid didn’t stay inside; he immediately had to push it out again (unfortunately!). . . . Führer is supposed to try to sleep (without medication!).” The simplest bodily functions grew into strenuous physiological operations, which were recorded as conscientiously as if they were events at the front, as described in the Wehrmacht Oberkommando’s war diary: “From four until six four evacuations, two of which were weaker and two very strong. At the second, after the passing of an obstruction, explosive water evacuation. The third and fourth were very foul-smelling, and particularly the fourth (probably a decomposing agglomeration that had previously been left behind, and had become a cause of gases and the formation of toxic substances). Relatively improved condition and change of facial expression. He only called me to impart to me the happy news of the effect.”187
The Question of Guilt
On November 21, 1944, lunch was rice gruel and fried celery slices with mashed potato, after which the Wolf’s Lair closed. Hitler had been in his new superbunker for less than a fortnight, but the Russians were too close and headquarters had to be evacuated. With windows tinted to hide the landscape of bomb damage and too much reality, a carriage rattled off toward the Reich capital. It was the Führer’s special train Brandenburg and the stations it passed had been cleared of people. As Hitler saw no chance of prevailing against Stalin’s Red Army, he had given up on the East. As an alternative he was planning his second Ardennes offensive—dreamed up in September on cocaine—perhaps trying to repeat the Blitzkrieg miracle of the spring of 1940, or at least to change tack in the West so as to obtain a negotiated peace there at the last minute. The arrival in Berlin-Grunewald was at 5:20 in the morning, under conditions of strictest secrecy. The shorthand secretary recorded: “Confidential, Keep Silent!” Hitler, who was concerned about losing his voice because of a nodule on his vocal cords, spoke only in a whisper anyhow. His eyes were no longer focused on his surroundings and stared instead at imaginary points. Again and again he greedily sucked oxygen from a little portable army oxygen device that Morell had acquired for the journey. Seldom had Hitler’s mood been darker or grimmer. Everyone knew: the plan to repel the huge forces of the Americans and the British was illusionary, but the supreme commander continued as if he were certain of victory. In truth he was so badly affected “by the great agitation . . . caused by his distended stomach and seizures” that only Eukodal could help.188 A day later he also received 10 milligrams of morphine. Two days later, on November 24, 1944, Morell recorded: “I didn’t think injection was necessary. But Führer wants to have some for faster recovery.”189 Again, three days later, “the Führer wants to have injections because of imminent hard work.”190
But what effect was this uncontrolled consumption of multiple drugs having on Hitler’s intellect, on his mind? Was the dictator still compos mentis? The philosopher Walter Benjamin, who had experimented mainly with hashish but also with Eukodal a decade previously (orally, which considerably diminishes its addictive potential), described the psychological effect of being permanently intoxicated:
It is perhaps no self-deception if I say that in this state you develop an aversion to the open air, the (so to speak) Uranian atmosphere, and that the thought of the outside becomes almost a torture. It is . . . a dense spider’s web in which the events of the world are scattered around, suspended there like the bodies of dead insects sucked dry. You have no wish to leave this cave. Here, furthermore, the rudiments of an unfriendly attitude towards everyone present begin to take shape, as well as the fear that they might disturb you, drag you out into the open.191
The chemist and author Hermann Römpp wrote that long-term abuse of opiates causes “damage to the character and the will. . . . Intellectual creativity is impaired, although there is no actual loss of earlier intellectual possession. Even the most upstanding characters will not baulk at swindling and deceit.” Paranoia and a morbid mistrust of one’s immediate surroundings also arise.192
In fact, Hitler’s bunker mentality had discovered in Eukodal the ideal end-time drug for the hapless final battle. His numbness, his rigid view of the world, his tendency toward the fantastical and the unscrup
ulous transgression of all boundaries—all of this was ominously supported by the opioid that he used so frequently in the last quarter of 1944. During this time, when the Allies were entering the Reich from both East and West, the powerful narcotic erased any doubts about victory, any empathy for civilian victims, and made Hitler even more unfeeling about both himself and the outside world.
On this tranquillizing painkiller the Führer was fully in command of himself: this was the true Hitler, and that was how he had always been. The overestimation of his own significance and misjudgment of his opponents were both captured in his blueprint, Mein Kampf, published in 1925. His opioid addiction only cemented an already existing rigidification, a tendency to delegate violence, and contributed to the fact that in the last phase of the war and in the genocide of the Jews he never once thought of relenting.
So the goals and motives, the ideological fantasy world, were not the result of drugs but established much earlier. Hitler did not murder because he was living in a haze—quite the contrary: he remained sane until the end. His drug use did not impinge on his freedom to make decisions. Hitler was always the master of his senses, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He acted always in an alert and cold-blooded way. Within his system, based from the beginning on intoxication and a flight from reality, he acted systematically and with terrible consistency to the end. He was anything but insane. A classic case of actio libera in causa: he could go on taking as many drugs as he liked to keep himself in a state in which he could commit his crimes. It does not diminish his monstrous guilt.
4
* * *
The Wonder Drug
(1944–1945)
The evil wound, how to heal it?
—Richard Wagner, Tristan und Isolde1
In the second half of 1944 Hitler’s soldiers lost on all fronts. Paris fell to the Allies at the end of August. On August 23 the Wehrmacht had to move out of Greece and was in retreat across the whole of southern Europe. On September 11 American troops reached the German border near Trier. Wherever you looked, the blood-drained, exhausted, overpowered Wehrmacht was fighting a losing battle. Now only Pervitin helped soldiers either to keep going or to flee the enemy. One tank commander reported laconically: “We are driving without stopping until we’re out of Russia. We swap over every 100 kilometers, gulp down Pervitin, and stop to fill up.”2
Studies show that two thirds of those who take crystal meth excessively suffer from psychosis after three years.3 Since Pervitin and crystal meth have the same active ingredient, and countless soldiers had been taking it more or less regularly since the invasion of Poland, the Blitzkrieg on France, or the attack on the Soviet Union, we must assume psychotic side-effects, as well as the need to keep increasing the dosage to achieve a noticeable effect.4
It is no wonder that Pervitin fever should have flourished in 1944 as well. A letter from the Temmler Works to the General Commissar of Health and Medicine shows that even a few months before the end of the war the company requested distribution of the raw materials ephedrine, chloroform, and hydrochloric acid for the production of Pervitin. Four million tablets were to be pressed from these “for armament and war.”5 Because of the British bombings, the laboratories had been transferred to the little half-timbered town of Meisenheim in southwest Germany, to a brewery, in fact, where the two favorite drugs of the wartime Germans were now being manufactured under a single roof: beer and meth.6
The Luftwaffe didn’t stop using performance-enhancing drugs either; an official scientific and medical conference in July 1944 was devoted to that very subject.7 The army medical service also used Pervitin, namely for transporting the wounded. In November 1944 the senior doctors of the medical trains of Army Group A set up experiments in which they compared the effect of morphine with the effect of a cocktail of morphine and Pervitin. It turned out that even severely wounded patients could be kept in a “good state of mind” if they were given two Pervitin pills as well as an opiate injection.8 Their spirits improved as their desire to get better was intensified—which made their redeployment all the more likely.
But many soldiers didn’t want to be redeployed. They were exhausted, run down, and they needed longer and longer periods of recovery. For many the propaganda slogans about fighting to the last cartridge rang hollow. No more talk of eagerness, the mood was downcast.9 But there was no letting up. A typical daily order from Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt ended with him saying that the hour decreed that they must recklessly advance. One instruction from Supreme Command reads: “Stress and losses are possible. Medical considerations cannot be taken into account. The situation requires all it takes,” and this of course included chemicals.10
Ideology had long lost its hold, and the leadership could think of nothing to motivate their soldiers apart from the increasingly shallow-sounding formula of a “final victory.” So the Wehrmacht decided to develop new preparations that linked so powerfully with receptors in the central nervous system that even soldiers who were as good as dead would pull themselves together trying to mutate into victors on the battlefield. As fanciful as it seems, in parallel with the laborious efforts to develop a miracle weapon, amid the heavy losses of this final phase, the search for a miracle drug that would turn the tables by chemical means was now operating at full blast.
Onsite Visit: Medical Academy of the Bundeswehr, Munich
The Bundeswehr, the current German Army, bases its Medical Academy—the contemporary equivalent of the MA, where Ranke had undertaken his Pervitin experiments—in a former SS barracks. Instead of the questionable meth pusher of the Wehrmacht, I find myself talking to a friendly Dr. Volker Hartmann, who is the captain of the Navy Medical Corps. He leads me across the enormous military compound, past a tank emblazoned with a Red Cross insignia and a grounded medical helicopter. “Threat Level Alpha,” a sign announces. Hartmann is reassuring: this means “everything’s ok.” In line with this, Hartmann sets out his very personal vision of a future German Army, arguing in favor of entirely humanitarian deployments, without weapons. “The Germans can’t fight properly any more anyhow—and perhaps they shouldn’t. Our strengths lie elsewhere.” Hartmann, at any rate, has served almost everywhere: as a ship’s doctor on the training barque Gorch Fock, on a frigate off the coast of Lebanon, on a supply ship at the Horn of Africa, in Banda Aceh in Indonesia as part of the Bundeswehr’s tsunami relief, in Kosovo, and in Afghanistan. In Mazar-e-Sharif he was commander of the medical task force for the German medical service. When the head of a company requested the upper modafinil for operations against the Taliban, Hartmann refused to issue the prescription. Modafinil is a psychostimulant, and its precise mechanism of action is still unknown. In sport the substance is forbidden as a doping agent; school pupils and students sometimes use it as a smart drug to increase concentration and performance. “I didn’t want to be responsible for possibly addicted soldiers, quite apart from the ethical and political significance,” he says, explaining his decision. “I confiscated it all.”
The military and drugs is a field Hartmann has been working in for many years. Among other things, he revealed the extraordinary story of the German Navy’s attempts to develop a miracle drug during the final phase of the Second World War. He tells me about it when we meet for the second time, at Odeonsplatz in Munich, where on November 9, 1923, after a drink-sodden night in the Bürgerbräukeller, the Nazis failed in their attempted putsch. Now it is late September, a mild evening. The offshoots of the Oktoberfest are raging around us: a lot of people in traditional costume, a lot of beery good humor swills about in the air.
“When Hitler’s putsch happened the Bavarian police stood over there and fired,” Hartmann says, pointing at the spot. “One of the first Nazis to be fatally wounded had linked arms with Hitler and pulled him to the ground. At the same time Hitler’s bodyguard was peppered with bullets and fell on top of him. More than a dozen were shot dead on the spot, as were four policemen and a bystander. The onlookers charged in all directions. It was tot
al chaos. Hitler picked himself up and fled, barely hurt. Sometimes history is determined by chance.”
We sit down in the nearby Pfälzer Residenz Weinstube, a wine bar, whose facade bears a plaque to the four dead Bavarian policemen—the first victims of the Nazis. Inside we order a white wine spritzer—which during Oktoberfest, where beer reigns, almost seems heretical. Hartmann gets into his stride. It’s a dirty story about the navy, which likes to present a clean, proper appearance, trying hard to be a model of moral integrity.
The Quest for the Miracle Drug
The real war will never get in the books.
—Walt Whitman11
In the German Navy there was a senior officer called Hellmuth Heye. In the 1950s he stood for parliament on behalf of the conservative Christian Democratic Union, but on March 16, 1944, he still wanted to win the Second World War, and was sitting with two colleagues in a meeting room in the coastal city of Kiel. Heye was a commanding admiral of the so-called small battle units, the K-Verbände, and directly answerable to the naval supreme commander, Karl Dönitz, who, for a few days, would become Hitler’s successor in early May 1945. The situation at sea wasn’t promising for the “Imperial Navy,” as it chose to call itself in contrast with the “National Socialist Luftwaffe.” The battle in the Atlantic was lost. The British had cracked the radio code that the Germans assumed was unbreakable. Because of Allied air superiority and the resulting heavy losses, not to mention bad planning in the armaments industry, the U-boat war had to be suspended. Since then the Allies had been bringing in supplies from America to Britain, and preparing for the invasion of Normandy. That was precisely what Heye wanted to prevent with his new units in the spring of 1944.