Blitzed

by Norman Ohler

  The last large-scale attack by the Luftwaffe ended fatally on the morning of January 1, 1945. Almost a thousand planes launched for one final gasp. But in spite of strict secrecy the Allied fighters and anti-aircraft defenses reacted very effectively, and several dozen Luftwaffe pilots turned out to have had their last ever rations of Pervitin. It was on the return flight of the ones who had escaped the enemy that the true disaster happened. The German planes came under heavy fire from their own anti-aircraft gunners, who had not been informed about the mission. In this macabre way the Luftwaffe destroyed itself against its own cloudy sky. After that there were no more missions worthy of the name.

  On January 2, 1945, the first workday of the New Year, which was the last year for National Socialism, Hitler felt “well, apart from the tension of the current offensive. He asked about getting rid of the tremor in his left hand; tranquillizers needed but cannot be given because they would inhibit his powers of reason, on which the demands are constant and intense and of the greatest importance.”52

  This entry represents a turning point, because afterward Eukodal was not administered again. Had Morell recognized at last how lost Hitler was in unreal domains? Or did he want to reduce the quantity of drugs for a quite different reason, because he had a new concern: their increasing scarcity? The British were repeatedly bombing the pharmaceutical factories of the Reich and causing severe damage to German manufacturing capacities. Two weeks before Christmas the manufacturer of Eukodal and cocaine, the Darmstadt-based Merck Company, was hit. Seventy percent of its facilities were in ruins. One employee reported: “During this time the bulk of the workforce—2,292 Germans and about 700 foreigners—were busy trying to bring order to the chaos of destruction. . . . Productivity was, taken overall, extraordinarily low, as almost two thirds of working time was lost to air raids.”53 Could it be that Morell’s supplies had run out and there were no more on the way?

  On January 16, 1945, the Eagle’s Eyrie was evacuated; the second Ardennes offensive had failed pitifully. Dispirited, patient and doctor took the train to the capital, retreated along with the Führer’s inner circle into the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, and thus reached the final stage in their denial of reality. Once Morell had complained in a letter that he had only been in Berlin for a few days over the past few years, and hadn’t seen his wife for six months. Now he was back on the Havel and the Spree—but buried away under the ground like a mole. On January 17, 1945, a day after their arrival, Warsaw was seized by the Red Army. Stalin’s troops were advancing inexorably.

  Last Exit Bunker

  On January 30, 1945, exactly twelve years after the National Socialists first seized power, the Red Army created a bridgehead west of the Oder and directly threatened Berlin. At the briefing session on the same day, which was followed by his final radio address, Hitler appeared in a euphoric mood once again.

  On February 3, 1945, 2,264 tons of bombs fell on the Reich capital. Thousands of people died. The U-Bahn was hit in fifty places at once; a packed overground train was struck just as it was leaving Belle-Alliance-Platz (now Hallesches Tor). The sky had a blood-red glow; the survivors hurried through dense palls of smoke. At Schlesisches Tor, another underground station, a big banner hung for a few hours: “We want peace one way or the other!”54 The Military Medical Academy on Invalidenstasse, where Otto Ranke had once researched, now stood with charred roof beams, empty window frames, and bomb craters on the sports ground. The remains of the walls still smoked. The sirens wailed constantly, the anti-aircraft guns fired, the hellish dance constantly renewed itself, and people lay in slit trenches.55 Eleven days later the center of Dresden, where hundreds of thousands of refugees were huddled, was flattened from the air.

  Meanwhile the drug depot in the Führer’s bunker was emptying. At least this could be a possible explanation of why Morell’s notes cease to mention the formerly beloved substances. On February 18 he wrote: “F. wants to try and get by without tranquillizers.”56 Apart from a few ampoules of his home-brewed parasite liver preparation, there now seemed to be hardly anything left.57 The symptoms that Hitler showed during those weeks indicate withdrawal: the tremors were getting worse and his body was going into rapid decline. At his final speech to the district leaders on February 24, 1945, he had finally lost his power of suggestion. He made a pitiful impression on his visitors, stood bowed, drooling. His announcements about the navy’s new miracle weapon, Heye’s small battle units, which would bring about the great miracle of a turn in the war’s fortunes, now fell on deaf ears. The same day Morell wrote to the Reich Ministry of the Interior with a request for the release of new steroids made to his own recipe: two adrenal gland and pituitary gland preparations.58 This wildly unreal request did not receive a reply. One possible reason for Morell’s urging was that since there were hardly any pharmaceuticals left in the whole of Berlin, he was finding it increasingly difficult to honor prescriptions for Patient A. His assistants scoured the rubble-strewn city: “It could only be processed and filled in the 6th pharmacy (1st at Zoo), where it was prepared for collection tomorrow. . . . Medication is very hard to get hold of even for the main medical depot of the SS main office. Most are discontinuing supplies because the factories have been bombed out.”59

  The worst thing that could happen to a dealer happened to Morell. His source had run dry. It is the cardinal sin of the provider to suddenly be out of the product. “For four to five days the patient has been extremely pensive and has a weary, exhausted appearance. He wants to try and manage without tranquillizers,” said Morell, commenting on the shortage, and added with a note of concern: “The Führer is acting rather strangely toward me, short and in an irritable mood.”60 None of this is proof, yet it is a set of clues that suggest that in the last quarter of 1944 Hitler had become addicted to Eukodal—and now yearned for the narcotic. It was unlikely he voiced such a wish aloud or explicitly in those final weeks in the bunker at the Reich Chancellery. But the signs indicate that he was gradually understanding what he had allowed to happen to him, and what a pharmacological blind alley he had ended up in.

  The end of the final battle was approaching, and Hitler had lost his high, his Führer’s rush, once and for all. He dragged himself painfully along the low passageways of the catacombs, thrust his torso forward, pulled his legs after him, tipped to the right, supported himself on the bare wall, and shuffled back from sitting room to conference room. All his energy for self-stylization had gone: whatever the reason for his abstinence from Eukodal, without the drug all that was left behind was a shell of a man whose uniform was spattered with rice gruel. Without the substances to which his body had become accustomed, his system ceased producing endorphins. His dopamine and serotonin balance suffered along with his sympathetic nervous system. There was no feeling of well-being now, no protection against the menacing outside world. All that remained was oversensitivity. The concrete walls might still have been standing, but the chemical bunker had been dissolved.

  Now the Führer had irrevocably entered the reality of his lost war. Everything weighed on him all of a sudden, and as an infinitely heavier burden than before—naked as he was without the hormones of happiness. Eukodal could have helped him now. In a second he would move from total pain to total paradise, and experience the most powerful emotions. Euphoria would flood through him, he could regain his faith and motivate everyone else to emerge victorious from the war. But Eukodal no longer existed for him, and without intoxication the last briefing sessions in March and April 1945 were so depressing as to be terrible. The generals seemed to be trying to hoodwink him all the time. The thing that could never have happened was happening, history was repeating itself, the military had stopped obeying their supreme commander, and he constantly thought he was being sabotaged. Hitler started shouting, waving his arms around, raging, raving, his face so distorted that it was barely recognizable. It was only through aggression that he could defend himself against the traitors he sensed everywhere.

  Goebbels
, who now barely left his boss’s side, openly addressed this decay and certified that Hitler was not in the condition that he should have been. Meanwhile the propaganda minister was highly critical of Morell’s methods of treatment: Hitler’s body was shaking and had been doped repeatedly with all manner of pills and narcotics. On several occasions, Goebbels noted, he had wondered whether the prophylactic injections, which should have been trying to prevent every illness as soon as the first symptoms appeared, were not in fact making too big a demand on Hitler’s health, and his life.

  At six o’clock in the morning, after the military briefing, during which he had fumbled ceaselessly with his empty pillbox, Patient A lay completely exhausted and apathetic on a small sofa, filled only with the single thought that the best meal of the day was on its way: a mug of hot chocolate and cakes, three plates full of them. Sugar was the final drug: one more minute release of dopamine, one more small reward for the soul. Those bright blue eyes, once so hypnotic, were now dull. Crumbs stuck to his purple lips: a sweet-eating human ruin wrapped in slack skin. His body felt numb, as if he were no longer present in it. His temperature was always high. Every so often he’d go into the oxygen tent.

  The sight of Hitler now only caused revulsion or at best pity. Everyone circled around him, trying in vain to make him feel good. Still his condition kept deteriorating. In the past all his loyal followers had been nervous at the first cough or sniffle; now his tooth enamel was decaying, his gums were drying up, and his ruinous teeth were falling out. His brain, irreversibly damaged by neurotoxins, was no longer receiving stimulation: all the receptors that the transmitters could have filled were switched off. Everything had stopped working, the old delusory loops were just repeating themselves in his head: the paranoia, the panic about the red pustules, about the Jews, the Bolsheviks, the whisky drinker Churchill. Terrible headaches set in. He started digging into his yellow skin with a pair of golden tweezers, with aggressive, nervous movements, to get rid of the bacteria that had presumably passed through his body’s boundaries and entered his system, and were now destroying him from within. Morell wanted to try bloodletting to bring the patient some kind of relief, but because of the fatty, hormone-saturated pig’s liver injections his blood had become as thick as jelly and clotted immediately, so the measure failed. Hitler, with one last trace of gallows humor, suggested that they might at least be able to make “Führer-blood sausage” out of it.61

  Patient A wheezed pitifully as he endured his withdrawal. He trembled with anxiety from head to toe, he chewed the air, he lost weight, his kidneys were failing, and so too was his circulation. He could barely concentrate now. He was tormented by a painful yearning: an unquenchable thirst from each cell of his body. His left upper eyelid was so swollen that he couldn’t see out of his left eye, and he kept pressing and rubbing at it. But “the Führer does not want to wear an eye-patch.”62 He only left the bunker for a short time, venturing into the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where he stumbled over rubble and the dusty wind circled him like the cloak of defeat. He dragged himself back inside. There was Streuselkuchen, each piece specially crumbled for him. Without a functioning set of teeth he slurped up the sweets, too much air entering his gut as he did so. Everyone in his entourage threw something into the Führer-machine that they themselves had bred, that they themselves had developed. The broken robot rattled once more, issued a pointless military order, avenged himself on someone, or passed death sentences on close colleagues like Karl Brandt, his former surgeon who had fallen into disfavor in the war between the doctors.

  The historian Sebastian Haffner is mistaken when he describes the reports of Hitler’s physical decay in the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery as “hopelessly overdrawn.”63 In fact they are not precise or far-reaching enough, because they do not take sufficiently into account the possible moment of withdrawal. It is difficult to produce a diagnosis at this distance in time given the incomplete nature of the material. It is as if Hitler were less concerned with the loss of the world war than with the physical torments that he himself was going through, and which would not stop until his suicide.

  At this point the potentate still stood by his personal physician. When on March 3, 1945, he undertook one last journey to the front at the Oder River, thirty miles east of Berlin, he forbade Morell to come with him for safety reasons. The physician noted, not without some pride: “Because we might have suffered serious injuries through accidents and low-flying planes. If something happened to me, he would not have a doctor. . . . It was far more important to him while he was traveling that he would always find me at home waiting for him.”64

  But how long would that home still exist? On March 7 the Americans crossed the bridge at Remagen and thus the Rhine. In the East Danzig fell to the Russians, likewise Vienna to the south. At this point Morell was treating Hitler more or less at random, administering vitamins and galvanic treatments against general nerve damage. The Führer—who had, characteristically, never gone near any of Berlin’s great specialist clinics like the Charité Hospital—now presented an utterly squalid image, which helps to explain his last great destructive experiment. On March 19, 1945, he issued the so-called Nero decree, which took his nihilism to the limit. Hitler ordered nothing less than the complete destruction of Germany: “All military transport and communication facilities, industrial establishments and supply depots, as well as anything else of value within Reich territory . . . are to be destroyed.”65 All locks, weirs, dams, canal bridges, and harbor facilities were to be blown up, all electric cables pulled up, all banks and any remaining cultural monuments were to be leveled. Because of a lack of resources this final product of his hatred was never fully realized. The German Reich’s destructive powers were finally spent, and the supplies in Hitler’s medicine cabinet were similarly exhausted.

  On April 8, Morell informed his patient that there were no more Vitamultin bars left. The supplies that still existed were now injected: obscure substances such as strophantose I and II, Benerva forte, Betabion forte, Omnadin—hastily requisitioned remnants. Substances hardly anyone had heard of were suddenly injected every two days. In the late phase of the war, these drugs were thrown onto the chemical front, in the same way as the fourteen-year-olds who had just been sitting at their school desks were now manning the Flak.

  On April 16, 1945, the direct assault on Berlin began. Four days later Patient A celebrated his last birthday. Morell’s hands were shaking and he had a blackout when he was trying to give Hitler his birthday injection. Attending physician Stumpfegger was summoned and applied everything the drug cabinet still had to offer: “Strophantose, Betabion forte i.v. plus Harmin,” the latter an alkaloid made from Syrian rue.66 Together with this, Morell added rather desperately: “I replaced the heart capsules with liver, which is intended to achieve a highly stimulating effect.”67

  The Dismissal

  I will leave all the men of history behind me. I want to be the greatest, even if the whole German people perishes in the process!

  —Adolf Hitler to Theodor Morell68

  The next day, while the Russians shelled the city center with their “Stalin organs,” Hitler’s personal physician was sacked. What was the point of a dealer who was out of stuff, and in such poor shape that he couldn’t even give an injection? “Do you think me a fool?” Hitler yelled at the dumbfounded Morell, who was paying him a visit carrying a tray with a caffeine injection that he’d managed to drum up from somewhere. “You probably want to give me morphine,” Hitler raged. When Morell protested, his patient grabbed him by the collar and spat: “Go home, take off your uniform and act as if you’ve never seen me!”69 Crazy advice, because Morell’s villa at the Havel River had been bombed out, the windows of his practice on the Kurfürstendamm were nailed up with cardboard, the partition wall in the waiting room had collapsed. With almost comical haste the plump doctor, after briefly collapsing at Hitler’s feet when Hitler threatened to have him shot, left the bunker and climbed the thirty-seven steps to
ground level. Panting and clutching his heart, he threw himself into the last available official vehicle and wept like a child. A Condor plane took off at two o’clock in the afternoon, with the distraught doctor inside. Flying low over Russian lines and burning villages, the pilot braved searchlights and anti-aircraft fire to cross the American line at Partenkirchen, and after a considerable amount of searching about landed on a still usable runway at Neubiberg military airport south of Munich.

  Morell’s destination was the little town of Bayrisch Gmain near Berchtesgaden, to which he had evacuated his research laboratory. For a few days there he acted as if all was somehow well, frantically immersed himself in his correspondence, attended to his collapsing pharmaceutical business, tried to operate his half-assembled electron microscope—a present from Hitler—and spoke with his last remaining employee. Probably already in a state of quasi-insanity, he asked the revenue office for a deadline extension on his profit, corporation, and business tax declaration, “since due to staff difficulties we are unable to deliver our final version any sooner.”70