AN EVIL CHEMISTRY
As the Reich crumbled around him, Hitler’s craving for ‘wonder drugs’ was limitless. Then he shared his secret with lover Eva Braun, and created...
ADOLF HITLER was holed up in the Berghof, his frozen cloud-cuckoo-land of a home in Obersalzberg, in Bavaria, with his lover Eva Braun. Through the course of the war he had become a super-junkie, addicted to cocaine, hooked on the heroin-like drug eukodal, and a toxic cocktail of vitamins, animal hormones and narcotics supplied by a doctor known as ‘the Reich injection master’.
However, since defeat at Stalingrad he had barely set foot outside the door, so terrified was he of the snow. It was now February 1944 and, as his army was retreating from Ukraine, the British were bombing Berlin and many of his allies were abandoning him.
Yet Hitler, who previously had been so ill he spent his time watching ravens and performing wearying impersonations of different machine-gun sounds, had a new lease of life. His personal physialso cian, Theodor Morell, who the Fuhrer had recently awarded the Knight’s Cross of the War Merit Cross, had just given him a new vitamin and hormone injection.
Before the injection, Morell’s ‘Patient A’ was ‘very tired and exhausted, without sleep’. Afterwards he was ‘very fresh – Fuhrer extremely pleased!’
Hitler had another reason to be happy. Morell was also treating Eva Braun – ‘Patient B’. She demanded the same medication as Patient A in order to be on the same wavelength as her lover, who was 22 years her senior. Hitler received testosterone for his libido, while Braun was given medication to suppress menstruation so that their chemistry was right, and they could at least enjoy some sexual success in the momentary breaks between increasingly lengthy military briefings. That was what Hitler strived for.
On occasion, he even claimed that relationships outside marriage were in many respects superior, since they were rooted in natural sexual attraction.
He seemed convinced of the beneficial effect of physical love: without sex, he claimed, there was no art, no painting and no music. No civilised nation, Catholic Italy included, could manage without extramarital intercourse. Morell provided indirect information about the kind of copulation performed at the Berghof, when he stated after the war that Hitler had sometimes cancelled medical investigations to conceal wounds on his body from Eva Braun’s aggressive sexual behaviour. Caring for the Fuhrer was exhausting work.
Morell was so run-down that he could hardly climb a flight of stairs. The personal physician found no rest, because everyone – not just Hitler and his lover – needed him.
His patients had come to include all the top-ranking officials of the Reich and their allies: he treated Mussolini, who was given the codename ‘Patient D’; industrialists such as like Alfried Krupp or August Thyssen (fee for treatment: 20,000 Reichsmarks); many Gauleiter and Wehrmacht generals; Leni Riefenstahl, the film director and actress, who was given morphine enemas; SS chief Heinrich Himmler; foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop (‘Patient X’), the Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer; Japanese ambassador General Hiroshi Oshima; and the wife of Reich Marshal Hermann Goring, who had injections on alternate days of ‘Vitamultin forte’ – whatever was hidden behind that label.
More and more influential National Socialists made the pilgrimage to Morell – even if it was only a way of announcing their closeness to Hitler and confirming their own position.
But it was the Fuhrer himself who demanded the most of his personal physician, and Morell, who was himself in poor health by now, complained to the wife of the economics minister, Walther Funk, another patient: ‘At all times of day and night I have to follow the instructions that I get from above.
‘At the moment I drive up to the Fuhrer at noon to possibly give him treatment, and come back to the hotel at almost two o’clock in the afternoon, to lie in bed all day so that I’m able to accompany the Fuhrer again the following day.’
By now Morell was hooked on the needle himself, and his assistant, Dr Weber, had to travel from Berlin to the remote Berghof, as he ‘is the best at giving injections, and the only one guaranteed to find my veins’. What Morell was treating himself with is not recorded.
Hitler’s sexual pick-me-up was only temporary. While the Red Army was taking more and more towns in East Prussia in November 1944, Hitler’s own 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 cancelled 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.’
Each jab created a new wound that joined the previous one, and it produced an elongated, growing crust – what addicts call track marks.
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 Fuhrer thought I wasn’t rubbing the area long enough with alcohol so that he often developed small red pustules at the needle holes.’
Hitler’s favourite poison was eukodal, a potent mixture containing an opioid called oxycodon, synthesised from opium. But when the drug waned, the trembling began, and in the last few weeks of 1944 only grew in intensity. Morell expressed a suspicion that Hitler was suffering from Parkinson’s. There is no way of telling whether this was accurate.
Another explanation is that Hitler’s notorious shaking was the direct effect of his unchecked drug consumption. DRUG use was widespread across the fighting forces of the Reich – for its new recruits, and even its prisoners.
From autumn 1944, when German hopes rested on a new device, the Seehund (Seal) mini-submarines, that could sail to the Thames Estuary and the beaches of Normandy in order to blow up Allied ships, Nazi leaders developed cocaine chewing gum to keep sailors awake.
It was decided to test the drug on prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp just north of Berlin.
They were given astonishingly high doses of drugs: 50-100 milligrams of pure cocaine in pill form, 20 milligrams in chewing gum, or 20 milligrams of Pervitin (effectively crystal meth) as chewing gum. Thirty minutes later the effect set in, and prisoners were forced to march on the camp’s testing track – an ordeal that
They could at least enjoy sexual success between long war briefings
would last to the end of the night. Between 4am and 5am, having spent seven or eight hours tramping in the dark, most of them gave up ‘because they were footsore’.
One camp inmate later described the experiments: ‘Just now a singular patrol is marching round and round the parade ground interminably. All are kitted up and sing and whistle as they walk. That’s the “pill patrol”. They’re being used to test out a new energy pill. How long can they keep going full steam on it?
‘After the first 48 hours it’s said that most of them had given up and collapsed, although the theory is that after taking this pill one can perform the impossible.’
The Germans certainly hoped so. In December 1944, 5,000 members of the Hitler Youth, most of them teenagers and some as young as 12, were signed up and driven to the ports to man the mini-submarines.
Reporting for duty, they were given their special rations: hastily manufactured Pervitin tablets or cocainespiked chewing gum. The young sailors were fuelled by the hardest drugs that serving military personnel had ever taken, but the submarine campaign was a failure. The drugged submariners were torpedo fodder for the Allies and died wretchedly, like kittens drowned in a sack. HITLER was not the only one suffering the side effects of too much drug use. Hermann Goring, the second most powerful man in Germany, had developed a severe morphine addiction. ‘Moring’, as he was secretly nicknamed, liked to take his craftsman-made syringe with its gold ring out of a light-brown deerhide case, pull it open, draw back the sleeve of his green velvet dressing gown, bind his arm, narrow his eyes to find the right spot, and give himself a massive injection.
It was all the more reckless given that his taste for narcotics had led to a disastrous strategic decision. Shortly before Dunkirk in 1940, in his blissfully opium-soaked brain he decided that the glorious victory over the Allies should under no circumstances be left to the arrogant leaders of the army (the Wehrmacht). The German generals, Goring feared, would otherwise win such respect among the people that they might undermine his own position as well as Hitler’s.
His pilots just needed an open target – the Wehrmacht tanks had to retreat a bit to stay out of the danger zone. This order – a demand that German tanks withdraw from Dunkirk – still puzzles historians today. When the British saw what was happening, they could hardly believe their luck. Within a very short time, hundreds of rescue ships arrived: Royal Navy destroyers and other warships, launches, even packet steamers and confiscated private yachts, a colourfully assorted armada ceaselessly coming and going. The Allied troops crossed makeshift bridges made of lorries with planks laid on the top and made their getaway through the miraculous loophole of Dunkirk.
Goring’s high-handed plan to snatch victory from the air was a failure from the very beginning. The Reich Marshal had overestimated himself in his morphine dream, in which his dive-bombing Stukas were sinking over a thousand of the British rescue boats.
But at the end of May, clouds had gathered and obstructed their view. The RAF, whose bases were much closer, also played their trump card: suddenly Spitfires appeared from above and conquered the sky. The commander-in-chief of the army, Walther von Brauchitsch, stood in the map-house of the German HQ, about to have a nervous breakdown. He implored Hitler to be allowed to strike again and bring the campaign to an end. But the dictator refused to budge. He would show the army. He and no one else would wage this war.
More than 340,000 British, French and Belgian soldiers escaped. The Allies averted a total defeat. THE revelations about the drug misuse of Hitler and his generals do not diminish his or their monstrous guilt.
Hitler did not murder because he was living in a haze – quite the contrary: he remained sane until the end. When there was no eukodal left for a ‘golden shot’, he opted for the bullet.
He hastily married Braun and celebrated with a plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce on the side, a hydrogen cyanide capsule for Eva’s dessert and, for himself, a bullet in the brain from his 6.35mm Walther.
On April 30, 1945, at about 3.30pm, Hitler, Patient A, perished, leaving behind a nation that had overdosed on his own poisonous creed.
Germany, land of drugs, of escapism and world weariness, had been led to doom by a super-junkie. © Kiepenheuer & Witsch 2015. Translation © Shaun Whiteside 2016.
Blitzed: Drugs In Nazi Germany, by Norman Ohler, translated by Shaun Whiteside, is published by Allen Lane on October 6, priced £20. Offer price £15 (25 per cent discount) until September 18. Pre-order at mailbookshop.co.uk or call 0844 571 0640 – p&p is free on orders over £15.