Man and myth
Few know the name John Addison. In the early 1920s, however, the British diplomat, based in Germany, had the foresight to write these words:
“Although Herr Hitler would certainly appear to be an unbalanced person, it would yet be unwise to treat him as if he were a mere clown.”
Addison’s warning fell on deaf ears back home.
A decade later, after Adolf Hitler clawed his way to the top echelons of the German government, many who had viewed him as a buffoon became devoted sycophants.
“The majority of the new [Nazi] party members were bandwagon jumpers who joined in hopes of improving their career opportunities, not out of political conviction,” writes Volker Ullrich in “Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939.” “Another way of declaring political allegiance was to use the greeting ‘Heil Hitler,’ and ... the people most apt to use the new social address were those who had dismissed Hitler as a ‘clown’ just a few weeks earlier.”
Ullrich’s mammoth biography might not break ground in Hitler studies, but this first of two volumes is an assured and engrossing account of how a mercurial and mendacious parvenu became history’s most reviled dictator.
Marshaling a vast amount of historical detail whose steady accumulation quickens the pulse and induces a deepening sense of dread, Ullrich paints an indelible portrait of a lowly World War I private and failed artist who transforms himself into a political animal, then a belligerent, genocidal monster.
But as the German historian writes in his introduction, “My aim is to deconstruct the myth of Hitler, the ‘fascination with monstrosity’ that has so greatly influenced historical literature and public discussion of the Führer after 1945. In a sense, Hitler will be ‘normalised’ — although this will not make him seem more ‘normal.’ If anything, he will emerge as even more horrific.”
To this end, Ullrich succeeds. The image that comes into view is of a complex and highly contradictory figure. Hitler captivated millions with his hatefilled speeches, and his messianic posturing only boosted his popularity, but, as Ullrich writes, the dictator “still lived in fear of looking laughable. His megalomania was the flipside of his deep feelings of inferiority.”
Luck also played a large part in Hitler’s ascent. Six Nazis and four police officers were killed in his failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, but the party leader suffered only a dislocated shoulder. His subsequent prison sentence — abridged from five years to nine months — gave him time enough to write his popular “Mein Kampf ” behind bars and allowed him to regain his political footing once he was freed.
As easy as it is to assume that Hitler’s rise was inevitable, Ullrich’s book reminds us, too, that it wasn’t a foregone conclusion.
“The chairman of the NSDAP [National Socialist German Workers’ Party] profited from a unique constellation of crises that he was able to exploit cleverly and unscrupulously,” Ullrich writes. “He also benefited from his domestic adversaries’ tendency, from the very inception of his political career, to underestimate his abilities.”
Machiavellian in the extreme, Hitler practiced a supremely calculating form of politics that assured him the continued support of the public. In the aftermath of Kristallnacht — the 1938 pogrom in which Jews were the victims of “an explosion of sadism” — the dictator succeeded, in Ullrich’s words, in “passing himself off as the disengaged statesman far above any such unpleasantness, while delegating responsibility to his underlings.”
As to the so-called “Jewish question,” there was no ambiguity about the Nazis’ intentions.
“There were waves upon waves of discriminatory laws and edicts,” Ullrich writes. “One step at a time,” wrote Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s most loyal crony and the Reich Minister of Propaganda. “We’re not going to ease up until we’ve got rid of them.”
Ullrich’s biography is made all the richer with numerous little-known details. It’s hard, for instance, to shake the image of the Führer watching Mickey Mouse cartoons at the Berghof, his nouveau-riche Alpine retreat; Goebbels gave the Boss — as his underlings called him — 18 of the shorts as a Christmas present in 1937.
Other insights: In 1938, the Nazis contemplated sending Jews to Madagascar “or some place like it,” in Goebbels’ words. And Fritz Wiedemann, Hilter’s personal adjutant, was banished to San Francisco as consul general in 1939. (Wiedemann later spoke out against Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg trials.)
As extraordinary as Hitler’s ascent was, the seeds of his downfall lay in his earliest territorial conquests, as the chilling conclusion of Ullrich’s book makes clear. The second volume of his biography will take up the dictator’s military hubris, and that book will undoubtedly make for equally urgent reading.
For those who can’t wait that long, though, Norman Ohler, a German journalist and screenwriter, has written a revelatory work that considers Hitler’s career in a new light.
“Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” is that rare sort of book whose remarkable insight focuses on a subject that’s been overlooked, even disregarded by historians.
The thesis is this: Even though they “presented themselves as clean-cut and enforced a strict, ideologically underpinned anti-drug policy,” Ohler writes, the Nazis wholly embraced a little pill called Pervitin. The active ingredient in this Volksdroge, or “people’s drug,” was none other than methamphetamine, the powerful and long-lasting stimulant that causes brain cells to release neurotransmitters, raising one’s self-confidence and alertness.
The Wehrmacht — the armed forces of Nazi Germany — ordered 35 million of the pills to be produced for the army and the Luftwaffe, the air force, thus making it, the author notes, “the first army in the world to rely on a chemical drug.”
The drug’s benefits paid off early on: For the Germans’ surprise invasion of France in 1940 — the lightning-fast “blitzkrieg” through the Ardennes forest — “thousands of soldiers took the substance out of their field caps or were given it by their medical officers,” Ohler writes.
According to Otto F. Ranke, the director of the Reich’s Research Institute of Defence Physiology, Pervitin’s only possible negative side effect might put troops in “a belligerent mood” — not necessarily a bad thing for people whose job was to kill other people.
It wasn’t just the armed forces that were given substantial doses of mind-altering substances — a product of Germany’s burgeoning pharmaceutical industry that had helped much of the populace “flee into worlds of make-believe” after the nation’s defeat in World War I.
The Führer himself, Ohler argues, was for years administered cocktails of drugs on a regular basis. (The book would have been better served without such silly chapter titles as “Sieg High!” and “High Hitler.”)
“The myth of Hitler as an anti-drug teetotaler who made his own needs secondary was an essential part of Nazi ideology,” Ohler writes. “A myth was created that established itself in the public imagination but also among critical minds of the period, and still resonates today. This is a myth that demands to be deconstructed.”
Deconstruct he does. Bolstering his claim with numerous files he found in archives — “meticulous records were required in case anything happened to Hitler” — Ohler makes a strong case that one of the most powerful men on the planet — “Patient A,” as the dictator was known to his personal physician — became a junkie.
That physician, a rotund, “modish, egocentric” and “constantly sweating” man by the name of Theodor Morell, thought of himself as a “vitamin pioneer,” Ohler writes, and he sold the Führer on a stamina-promoting product he called Vitamulin, made from “rosehip powder, dried lemon, yeast extract, skimmed milk, and refined sugar.” Soon the doctor was routinely injecting the dictator with ghastly sounding mixtures that included steroids and hormones — by-products and derivatives of uterine blood, bulls’ testicles, and seminal vesicles and prostates of young bulls.
As Ohler dryly observes, “Even though he didn’t eat meat, Hitler surely could no longer be considered vegetarian.”
Morell treated the dictator from 1941 to 1945, and he regularly altered his concoctions. “There was psychological importance in the fact the combination of injections changed every day,” Ohler writes. “It meant that Hitler never had the impression of becoming dependent on a particular substance.”
All of which made it more possible, in 1943, for Morell to ease Patient A — increasingly beset by anxiety brought on by military losses — onto something stronger: cocaine and Eukodal. Manufactured by Merck in Germany’s “City of Science,” Darmstadt, Eukodal’s active ingredient is the highly addictive opioid oxycodone.
And so began Hitler’s steady decline into dependency. “The world could sink into rubble and ashes around him, and his actions cost millions of people their lives,” Ohler writes, “but the Führer felt more than justified when his artificial euphoria set in.”
Thankfully, Ohler is careful to not to establish a link between Hitler’s drug use and his motives. “Hitler did not murder because he was living in a haze,” he writes. “He knew exactly what he was doing.”
In the end, Hitler’s luck ran out, of course, and so did the drugs. Holed up in his bunker in Berlin in 1945, and without any “Eukodal left for a ‘golden shot,’ ” Ohler writes, the Supreme Judge of the German People chose another way out. He and his lover, Eva Braun, were quickly married. “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.”