Blitzed
Page 22
The Final Poison
I’m not doing politics any more. It repels me so much.
—Adolf Hitler71
Göring, too, in a ridiculous camouflage uniform bursting at the seams, had fled to southern Germany. If he had to fall into anyone’s hands he wanted it to be the Americans, not the Soviets. Referring to Hitler’s inability to act, he sent a telegram from Bavaria to the bunker, emphasizing his ambitions to become Hitler’s successor. Hitler raged about his deputy, accusing him of weakness and betrayal. He had known for a long time, he said, that Göring was a morphine addict*—and stripped him of all positions and offices.
On April 27, Hitler gave his followers potassium cyanide, regretting in a broken voice that he could not offer them anything better. Goebbels’s wife, Magda, gave six of the capsules to her children. Patient A had his dog, Blondi, poisoned, as a test. He didn’t yet lay a hand upon himself. In his political testament, which he could barely sign because his hands were shaking so much, while dying of his own toxins he raged one last time against the Jews. He tried to blame them for everything and described them as “the poisoners of the world.”
Meanwhile methamphetamine was being handed out to kid-soldiers in front of the Olympic Stadium, to keep them from going haywire at the sight of the advancing tanks and heavy artillery of the Red Army. As his morning gift, Grand Admiral Dönitz had sent a declaration of loyalty to his Führer along with a Berlin-bound cargo of fresh recruits—destined for an early death, as they had never even been trained for urban fighting. In the center of the city, the bunker became the focus of the battles that were closing in on every side. There were explosions or implosions on every corner. Walls shook under the impacts. In the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler no longer ventured for a breath of fresh air, the soil was hurled incessantly into the air. Everywhere around, buildings burned and collapsed, while a firestorm sucked flames and smoke and oxygen upward.
The place where this downfall occurred was far from silent. It was an inferno, the end of a terrible journey, a phase of madness that had lasted for twelve years, in which men had been afraid of reality, had tried to flee it more and more, and in the process had brought the most terrible nightmares to fruition. During those final hours Hitler was devoured by his imaginary bacilli. Throughout the whole of his life he had tried to eliminate them, but it hadn’t worked. Now he planned a double suicide. He had engaged in intense discussions about the problem with his closest circle: what if his hand shook too much when he pulled the trigger? The man who had brought about so many terrible things would now escape responsibility, and because there was no Eukodal left for a “golden shot,” he opted for the bullet. Only the pistol is stronger than the needle. He hastily married Eva Braun, who had traveled “to the besieged city,” as Hitler dramatically described it in his personal testament.72 After the ghostly wedding ceremony spaghetti was served, with tomato sauce on the side, hydrogen cyanide for dessert, and a bullet in the brain from a 6.35 mm Walther.
On April 30, 1945, at about 3:30 p.m., Patient A perished from his own system of repressed reality, overdosing on his own poisonous mixture. His bid to make the world rise up in a state of total intoxication was condemned to failure from the outset. Germany, land of drugs, of escapism and world-weariness, had been looking for a super-junkie. And it had found him, in its darkest hour, in Adolf Hitler.
Morell’s Implosion
When Hitler’s suicide became public, obedient compatriots followed his example all over the Reich. Honor demanded it—or the fear of consequences. In the city of Neubrandenburg, for example, there were over 600 spontaneous suicides, in the little town of Neustrelitz 681—over 100,000 in Germany as a whole. Thirty-five army generals, six Luftwaffe generals, eight navy admirals, thirteen Waffen-SS generals, five police generals, eleven of the forty-three Gauleiter, leading heads of the Gestapo and of the Reich Security Main Office, some senior SS and police leaders: they all fled reality, following their Führer one last time. On May 8, 1945, the Wehrmacht surrendered. Some of the drugged-up underwater combatants from Heye’s K-Verbände weren’t aware of this and, high as kites, went on fighting for another four days and nights until May 12, in a war that had ceased to exist.73
In mid-May 1945 Theo Morell was tracked down by a New York Times reporter, Tania Long, to his hiding place in Bavaria. Her article appeared a few days later under the headline “Doctor Describes Hitler Injections.” Shortly afterward the former personal physician was taken prisoner by the Americans in Bad Reichenhall and remained there for almost two years. In his many interrogation sessions Morell spoke incoherently, frequently contradicting himself, and sank into long silences and deep depression. Everything he had built up, his one-man pharmaceutical empire, was destroyed; unlike many others, Morell did not make the transition into a new age.
His questioners learned little about Hitler; they couldn’t even bring accusations of war crimes against the completely feeble doctor, who sat apathetically in his cell and experienced episodes of paranoia in which he thought Himmler was after him as he had been during the doctors’ war. At any rate, he was no use as a witness for the Nuremberg trials. Apart from “I wish I wasn’t me,” barely a single coherent sentence issued from his mouth.74 So the Americans dismissed the bulky doctor with the dicky heart in the early summer of 1947 and dropped him off outside the central station in Munich. Morell cowered there, the once powerful man with the gold rods of Asclepius on his collar, now in a worn-out coat, shoeless on the bare cobbles, until a half-Jewish Red Cross nurse took pity on him and put him in a hospital in Tegernsee, where he died on May 26, 1948.
Acknowledgments
These learned gentlemen . . . will not neglect to find my ideas entirely ludicrous; or indeed, they will do better than that, they will elegantly ignore them completely. Do you know why? Because they say I’m not an expert.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1
Mutating from novelist to author of a nonfiction history book was a surprising and by no means natural process, but always a happy one. Some allies, friends, and confidants were closely involved in this transformation. It all began with the Berlin DJ Alexander Krämer, who told me the Nazis took loads of drugs—and wondered whether that might be developed as an idea for a film. We pursued this idea, and after Janina Findeisen suggested looking into the archives to find out the actual facts, it got exciting. I would like to give my warmest thanks to all the archivists who helped me in Berlin, Sachsenhausen, Koblenz, Marbach, Munich, Freiburg, Dachau, and Washington, DC. I received early inspiration from the historian Peter Steinkamp. Another expert whom I should particularly like to thank is Volker Hartmann of the Bundeswehr Medical Academy, and also Gorch Pieken, scientific director of the Bundeswehr’s Military History Museum in Dresden. My gratitude goes to Sylvie Lake and Douglas Gordon for their incomparable contributions, and also to Michael Stipe for helping me find the right English title—and to my very special agents, Tanja Howarth and Matthias Landwehr; my editors Lutz Dursthoff, Simon Winder, and Ben Hyman; and to Helge Malchow, my German publisher, who had the initial idea of setting this material out in a nonfiction book. Above all I am grateful to Hans Mommsen, the great late modern historian, who gave me a great deal of support. In any case, one thing has become apparent: a nonfiction book is a collective process. So I should like to thank everyone who helped me—whether they are mentioned here or not.
Notes
1. Methamphetamine, the Volksdroge (1933–1938)
1. There are still some prescription drugs based on methamphetamine, e.g., in the United States (such as the ADHD medication Desoxyn). Still, methamphetamine is broadly regulated according to international drug regulations, and in most cases is not available by prescription but only “tradeable” as a source material for the manufacture of medication. In Europe there is no legal drug based on methamphetamine, only on similar products such as methylphenidate and dextroamphetamine.
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2. Friedrich Dansauer and Adolf Rieth, Über
Morphinismus bei Kriegsbeschädigten, Berlin, 1931.
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3. In around 1885 the American chemist John Pemberton combined cocaine with caffeine to make a drink called Coca-Cola, which was soon sold as a panacea for all ills. Until 1903 the original Coke apparently contained up to 250 milligrams of cocaine per liter. Wilhelm Fleischhacker, “Fluch und Segen des Cocain,” Österreichische Apotheker-Zeitung, no. 26, 2006.
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4. See “Viel Spass mit Heroin,” Der Spiegel, 26/2000, pp. 184ff.
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5. See Werner Pieper’s brilliant anthology, Nazis on Speed: Drogen im 3. Reich, Birkenau-Löhrbach, 2002. Quoted on p. 47.
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6. Michael de Ridder, Heroin: vom Arzneimittel zur Droge, Frankfurt, 2000, p. 128.
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7. See Pieper, Nazis on Speed, pp. 26ff, and in this context also p. 205.
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8. BArch-Berlin R 1501, Akten betr. Vertrieb von Opium und Morphium, vol. 8, Bl. 502, September 15, 1922.
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9. Quoted from Tilmann Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik aus dem Geist der Rassehygiene: Deutsche Drogenpolitik von 1933 bis 1972, inaugural dissertation, Mannheim, 2006, p. 32.
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10. Auswärtiges Amt, AA/R 43309, note by Breitfeld (opium adviser in the AAO, March 10, 1935). Quoted in Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 32.
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11. Even respected liberal historians were involved in a deliberate falsification of the official files concerning the period leading up to the war. See Hans Mommsen, Aufstieg und Untergang der Republik von Weimar, 1918–1933, Berlin, 2000, p. 105.
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12. Klaus Mann, Der Wendepunkt, Reinbek, 1984. Quoted from Mel Gordon, Sündiges Berlin—Die zwanziger Jahre: Sex, Rausch, Untergang, Wittlich, 2011, p. 53 [Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, Port Townsend, WA, 2008].
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13. Pieper, Nazis on Speed, p. 175.
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14. Fritz von Ostini, “Neues Berliner Kommerslied,” also known as “Wir schnupfen und wir spritzen,” Jugend, no. 52 (1919).
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15. Kurt Pohlisch, “Die Verbreitung des chronischen Opiatmissbrauchs in Deutschland,” Monatsschrift für Psychiatrie und Neurologie, vol. 79 (1931), pp. 193–202, table II.
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16. The NSDAP did not have a party program in the traditional sense and never made a secret of its irrational approach. Its structures remained chaotic until the end. See Mommsen, Aufstieg und Untergang, p. 398.
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17. Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel, Neuwied am Rhein/West Berlin, 1959, p. 173.
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18. The statement is by Gregor Strasser. Quoted from Dieter Wellershoff, Der Ernstfall: Innenansichten des Krieges, Cologne, 2006, p. 57.
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19. Pieper, Nazis on Speed, p. 210.
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20. Ibid., p. 364.
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21. BArch-Berlin R1501/126497, Bl. 214, 215, 220.
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22. “Die Unterbringung dauert so lange als ihr Zweck es erfordert.” Quoted in Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 191. See also “Maßregeln der Sicherung und Besserung,” in §§42b, c RStGB: Unterbringung von straffälligen Süchtigen in Heil- und Pflege- oder Entziehungsanstalten. This regulation remained in force until October 1, 1953.
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23. Reichsärzteordnung, December 13, 1935. See also Pieper, Nazis on Speed, pp. 171 and 214, and Walter Martin Fraeb, Untergang der bürgerlich-rechtlichen Persönlichkeit im Rauschgiftmißbrauch, Berlin, 1937.
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24. Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 179.
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25. Ibid., p. 273.
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26. BArch-Berlin R58/473, Bl. 22 (microfiche).
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27. Quoted in Pieper, Nazis on Speed, p. 380.
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28. Ibid., pp. 186 and 491.
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29. Waldemar Freienstein, “Die gesetzlichen Grundlagen der Rauschgiftbekämpfung,” in Der öffentliche Gesundheitsdienst, vol. A (1936–37), pp. 209–18. See also Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 139.
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30. Ernst Gabriel, “Rauschgiftfrage und Rassenhygiene,” in Der öffentliche Gesundheitsdienst, Teilausgabe B, Bd. 4, pp. 245–53, quoted from Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 138. See also Pieper, Nazis on Speed, pp. 213ff.
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31. Ludwig Geiger, Die Morphin- und Kokainwelle nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg in Deutschland und ihre Vergleichbarkeit mit der heutigen Drogenwelle, Munich, 1975, pp. 49ff. See also Rainer Scheer, “Die nach Paragraph 42 RStGB verurteilten Menschen in Hadamar,” in Dorothee Roer and Dieter Henkel (eds.), Psychiatrie im Faschismus: Die Anstalt Hadamar, 1933–1945, Bonn, 1986, pp. 237–55, here p. 247. One prime example of this is the case of the dentist Dr. Hermann Wirsting, who was taken to Waldheim mental hospital in Saxony for compulsory therapy on April 15, 1940, and transported by ambulance to a euthanasia center only a day later. Cf. Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 262, and Henry Friedlander, Der Weg zum NS-Genozid: Von der Euthanasie zur Endlösung, Berlin, 1997, p. 191.
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32. Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945, Frankfurt am Main, 2003, p. 449.
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33. BArch-Berlin NS 20/140/8, Ärzteblatt für Niedersachsen, no. 5, 1939, pp. 79ff (Bruns, Erich). See Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 278.
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34. Quoted in Rudolph Binion, “. . . Dass Ihr mich gefunden habt”: Hitler und die Deutschen. Eine Psychohistorie, Stuttgart, 1978, p. 46.
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35. Viktor Reko, Magische Gifte: Rausch- und Betäubungsmittel der neuen Welt, Stuttgart, 1938. Tellingly, here is a remark from Reko’s fascistoid foreword, p. ix: “In twelve selected chapters a number of intoxicating substances are described that, like coca a few years ago, threaten to make their way from the circles of inferior races into civilized peoples.”
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36. Günther Hecht, “Alkohol und Rassenpolitik,” in Bekämpfung der Alkohol- und Tabakgefahren: Bericht der 2. Reichstagung Volksgesundheit und Genussgifte, Hauptamt für Volksgesundheit der NSDAP und Reichsstelle gegen den Alkohol- und Tabakmissbrauch, Berlin-Dahlem, 1939.
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37. Erwin Kosmehl, “Der sicherheitspolizeiliche Einsatz bei der Bekämpfung der Betäubungsmittelsucht,” in Gerhart Feuerstein, Suchtgiftbekämpfung: Ziele und Wege, Berlin, 1944, pp. 33–42, here p. 34.
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38. Pohlisch, “Die Verbreitung des chronischen Opiatmissbrauchs in Deutschland,” p. 72.
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39. Ernst Hiemer, Der Giftpilz: Ein Stürmerbuch für Jung und Alt, Nuremberg, 1937.
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40. Quoted in Pieper, Nazis on Speed, pp. 364ff.
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41. Forty-five percent of doctors, a disproportionately large number, were members of the NSDAP. See Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide, New York, 2000.
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42. The preparation is still on the market today, advertised with its unique natural effective ingredient, Escherichia coli Stamm Nissle 1917, and is used in the treatment of chronically inflamed intestinal conditions.
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43. Joseph Goebbels, leading article, Das Reich—Deutsche Wochenzeitung, December 31, 1944, pp. 1ff.
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44. Erwin Giesing, “Bericht über meine Behandlung bei Hitler,” Wiesbaden, June 12, 1945, Headquarters United States Forces European Theater Military Intelligence Service Center: OI—Consolidated Interrogation Report (CIR), National Archives, College Park, MD.
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45. “Today as in 1914 the German political and economic situation—a fortress besieged by the world—appears to demand a quick military decision through destructive strikes right at the start of host
ilities,” the committee chairman, Carl Krauch, said programmatically, anticipating the conception of Blitzkrieg. Quoted in Karl-Heinz Frieser, Die Blitzkrieg-Legende: der Westfeldzug 1940, Munich, 2012, p. 11.
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46. Propiophenon, a waste product from industrial chemistry, was brominated, then turned through treatment with methylamine and subsequent reduction into ephedrine, which through reduction with hydrogen iodide and phosphorus became methamphetamine. See Hans P. Kaufmann, Arzneimittel-Synthese, Heidelberg, 1953, p. 193.
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47. Reichspatentamt 1938: Patent Nr. 767.186, Klasse 12q, Gruppe 3, with the title “Method for Manufacturing Amines.” One tablet contained 3 milligrams of active ingredient.
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48. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep. 250-02-09/Nr. 218, advertising printed matter, undated. See also Holzer, Die Geburt der Drogenpolitik, p. 225.
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49. Quoted in Pieper, Nazis on Speed, pp. 118ff. That is 6 milligrams of methamphetamine distributed across the day—a dosage to which the body quickly becomes accustomed, which means that after a few days of use the effect is no longer felt as it was at the outset. The formation of tolerance leads to a so-called craving, the demand for a higher dosage to reattain the pleasant effects. If this pattern of consumption is allowed to get out of control, and the drug can no longer be given up without difficulty, addiction arises.
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50. C. Püllen, “Bedeutung des Pervitins (1-Phenyl-2-methylaminopropan) für die Chirurgie,” Chirurg, vol. 11 (1939), no. 13, pp. 485–92, here pp. 490 and 492. See also Pieper, Nazis on Speed, p. 119.
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51. F. Haffner, “Zur Pharmakologie und Praxis der Stimulantien,” Klinische Wochenschrift, vol. 18 (1938), no. 38, p. 1311. See also Pieper, Nazis on Speed, p. 119.
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