by Norman Ohler
Artificial oxygen supply, protective bunker walls: if it outwardly appeared as if the German supreme commander was somewhat close to the action on the front, he was indeed further removed from the realities of war than ever before. This determination to hide himself away (nothing unusual really, for dictators) would have disastrous consequences. Over the previous years the world had always bent to Hitler’s will, helping him to achieve incredible victories that had further reinforced his position of power. But as soon as he encountered genuine Russian resistance that couldn’t be removed with a sweep of the hand, “the greatest commander of all time” retreated further and further into his world of make-believe. The microcosm of the Wolf’s Lair was nothing more than a bubble made of concrete and steel.
The Soviet Union, as was already clear in July 1941, defended itself bitterly against Hitler’s megalomaniac fantasies. Even though the Germans conquered huge amounts of territory in the early weeks of the murderous campaign, and took hundreds of thousands of Red Army soldiers prisoner, as more and more space opened up in front of the Wehrmacht, more and more Russian reserves were coming in. Sure: Hitler’s troops were winning one battle after another, and advanced quickly, encircling the enemy on a huge scale and causing comprehensive chaos, just as planned. But the Red Army simply behaved as if it hadn’t even noticed these setbacks. That “sickly house of cards,” Hitler’s term for Russia, refused to collapse. Battles were fought ruthlessly on both sides from the very beginning, and for the first time in this war the Germans suffered great losses within a very short time.
Even the doping that had been deployed for this gigantic Blitzkrieg advance wasn’t much help. The drugs had been delivered to the tank troops, and one army group alone consumed the crazy amount of almost 30 million tablets within only a few months.18 But Pervitin didn’t bring about a quick victory. Soon the spoonful of time was paid for dearly. The Germans eventually had to rest—while the Red Army brought in new divisions from its massive hinterland.
During this crucial early phase, in August 1941, Hitler fell ill for the first time in years. As he did at eleven o’clock every morning, his valet, Heinz Linge, already permanently pallid from life in the bunker, knocked at the door of bunker number 13. But Hitler stayed in bed. He had fever and diarrhea, was shivering, and had severe pains in his limbs. Dysentery was presumed.
“Summoned by telephone to come to the Führer straight away. Sudden dizziness.”19 The news of his patient’s collapse reached Morell through telephone line 190 in the so-called drone barracks, a claustrophobically cramped, practically unlit working space that he had to share with the son of Hoffmann, the Reich photographer. The doctor quickly looked around for his black bag—the room was full of medications and photographic equipment—stepped outside, and hurried to Hitler, whom he found slouched in his bed, collapsed in on himself like a marionette. He was demanding immediate relief from his pain, because he wanted to go to the briefing and had serious decisions to make.
This time vitamins and glucose didn’t work as they had done before. Nervously and with excessive haste Morell prepared a mixture of Vitamultin and calcium, and combined it with the steroid glyconorm, a hormone preparation that he had manufactured himself, which consisted of extract of cardiac muscle, adrenal cortex, and the liver and pancreas of pigs and other farm animals. It was a doping agent. The injection did not go as smoothly as usual: “Bent needle during jab.”20 To combat the stinging pains caused by the mishap Hitler was given twenty drops of dolantin, an opioid whose effects are similar to those of morphine.* But the dysentery-like diarrhea persisted. Patient A had to keep to his bed and didn’t appear during the military briefing held in Keitel and Jodl’s bunker at twelve o’clock. Dictator unfit for service: a sensation in operational headquarters. “Führer very irritable,” Morell wrote that evening, describing his failure. “Have never experienced such hostility toward myself.”21 Undeterred, the physician stuck to his pharmacological refresher course, and soon the injections started working; the dysentery was vanquished. The very next day Hitler took part in the meetings with the generals again, and was immediately determined to make up for his one-day collapse. The old conflict between him and the General Staff, which had used his absence to act on its own initiative, flared up again. It concerned the continued thrust of the attack. Unlike their leader, the generals saw Moscow as their paramount goal. They planned to take the Russian capital in a decisive battle and win the war by that means. But the freshly cured Hitler had a different strategy. He divided the troops up to conquer Leningrad in the north, cutting the Soviet Union off from the Baltic, while at the same time Army Group South was to advance via the Ukraine into the Caucasus to take the oil resources that were of crucial importance to the war economy.
This crisis deeply affected the doctor and his concept of “immediate recovery.” So that Patient A didn’t end up in the sick bay again and fall behind, Morell administered a harder course of prophylactic injections and went on to prescribe more and more remedies in ever-changing concentrations.22 He barely made any diagnoses but instead constantly added to his “basic medicinal treatment.”†
This soon included such diverse substances as Tonophosphan, a metabolic stimulant made by the company Hoechst, chiefly used nowadays in veterinary medicine; the hormone-rich and immune-system-boosting body-building supplement Homoseran, a by-product of uterine blood;23 the sexual hormone Testoviron to combat declining libido and vitality; and Orchikrin, a derivative of bulls’ testicles, which is supposed to be a cure for depression. Another substance used was called Prostakrinum and was made from seminal vesicles and the prostates of young bulls.
Even though he didn’t eat meat, Hitler surely could no longer be considered vegetarian. From autumn 1941 onward, more and more highly concentrated animal substances began to circulate in his bloodstream. The purpose of these supplements was to compensate for states of psychological and physical exhaustion, or to prevent them in advance by reinforcing the body’s defenses; however, as a result of the constantly changing applications and the rising doses that followed, Hitler’s natural immune system was soon replaced by an artificial protective shield. This made Morell increasingly indispensable.
This approach to the dictator’s health could be compared to using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. In the few walks that Hitler still took in the fresh air of Restricted Area 1 at the Wolf’s Lair, the doctor always went with him, and a few steps behind followed an assistant with the doctor’s bag. The consistency with which this long-term medication was applied is apparent from a train journey in August 1941. Hitler and Mussolini were on their way to the front: a twenty-four-hour journey through Eastern Europe where mass murder was ubiquitous. They passed close by Kamianets-Podilskyi in western Ukraine, where over 23,600 Jews had just been shot by the SS and a German police battalion—it was the first murder of all the Jews belonging to a whole region.
So that Patient A did not have to miss a single injection en route, the Führer’s special train stopped in the open countryside, as no injection could be given on the juddering train. The armed anti-aircraft wagon was immediately put at the ready. Morell quickly opened his fat-bellied medical bag, took out the set of ampoules wrapped in black leather, removed their napped metal plates, opened the zip fastener of the case in which the syringe was kept, tipped the first ampoule over, stuck in the needle, and drew out the fluid. He swiftly bound Hitler’s snow-white, almost hairless arm, wiped the sweat from his own forehead, and jabbed in the syringe: first in the vein, then, quickly, a second intramuscular injection. Morell proudly described the unusual pit stop: “Train stopped mid-journey for glucose i.v. then Tonophosphan forte and Vitamultin Calcium i.m. to the Führer. All done in eight minutes.”24
Such a process was not a one-off event; it was the norm. The injections increasingly determined the course of the day: over time the Führer’s medical mixture was enriched by over eighty different, and often unconventional, hormone preparations, steroids, quack remedies, and balms.* 2
5 There was psychological importance in the fact that the combination of injections changed every day. It meant that Hitler never had the impression of becoming dependent on a particular substance. It was Morell’s overall package that he could no longer do without. In his personal physician he had found a perfect tool for self-medication and self-adjustment that he increasingly began to abuse.
This polytoxicomania, which developed in the second half of 1941, sounds bizarre, even for an age in which steroid and hormone research could not begin to guess the effects of the complex interactions of these highly potent substances on the human constitution. Hitler understood less than anyone what was going on in his body. He had always been interested in medication but had never acquired any medical knowledge. As a drug consumer, as well as a general, he remained an eternal dilettante and allowed himself to be guided by spontaneous suggestions without first understanding basic principles. This was to prove disastrous in the end, for him at least. His natural intuition, which had served him well so often until the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, left him when the injections began to throw his body into chaos. Tolerances build up with intense consumption and the body accustoms itself to substances; doses have to be increased or the effect declines, and the dictator couldn’t bear declining effects.
In this respect Morell didn’t help the patient in his care. The doctor doesn’t seem to have given much thought to problematic interactions—a failure in medical responsibility. An opportunist, a sycophant like so many others, he was too insecure to threaten his advantageous position by imposing a critical form of care on his leader. While in these autumn months of 1941 the systematic murder of the Jews took its course and the Wehrmacht waged a criminal war of annihilation in Russia that would cause millions of casualties, the National Socialist reign of terror was slowly poisoning itself from within.
Eastern Rush
My findings have given me the deepest impression that the Führer is in good health.
—Joseph Goebbels26
On October 2, 1941, the war diary of Wehrmacht High Command records: “At dawn Army Group Middle went on the offensive in fine autumn weather.”27 Now the attack on the Russian capital was belatedly under way. In a huge battle at Vyazma, halfway between Smolensk and Moscow, a staggering 670,000 Red Army soldiers were taken prisoner. In the Wolf’s Lair some were already declaring victory. But the Germans had lost valuable time and squandered their efforts too much in other theaters of war to be able to take Stalin’s power center in a swift operation. When the weather got worse, the advancing soldiers got stuck in the morass: “Persistent rain, fog. Serious deterioration in the tracks, making all movements and supplies more difficult,” the German Army leadership reported at the end of October.28 The possibility of defeat was suggested for the first time.
Hitler reacted stoically to the critical situation. When the Red Army launched a counteroffensive with fresh Siberian elite divisions in the early winter, he ignored all appeals from generals to let the troops fall back to avoid further defeats. Instead, on December 16, 1941, he issued a fateful order, which had disastrous long-term effects: hold the line at all costs. Any form of retreat without his express permission was forbidden from now on. The German military, formerly feared because of its unpredictable dynamism, had lost all spontaneity. The astonishing successes of the mobile combat that opened the war were a thing of the past. It is telling that Guderian (who in the spring of 1940 had been partly responsible for the Western campaign victory thanks to his unconventional, consistent disobedience) was now accused by Hitler of standing too close to events when the Panzer general tried to persuade his supreme commander to take back the front lines close to Moscow.
Hitler’s only prescription at this point was “fanatical resistance,” with no regard for casualties—and with no regard in fact for the reality of the front. In this first winter of the Eastern war the Wehrmacht was therefore severely beaten, and in Moscow the church bells rang confidently. Orthodox priests hurried from house to house, from hut to hut, in full regalia and with raised crucifixes, to drum up men and women, young and old, to make the ultimate sacrifice for sacred Russian soil. All over the Soviet Union pictures flickered across screens showing Red Army soldiers putting on quilted clothing and shoes made of felt, while German prisoners without coats or gloves performed a macabre dance, barefoot on the icy ground, to try to keep from freezing to death.
Hopeless situations accumulated for the aggressors. Often the only thing that helped was Pervitin. One of many examples: in the fishing village of Vzvad, on the southern shore of Lake Ilmen, between Moscow and Leningrad, the Germans were encircled, their lodgings set on fire, rations arriving only sporadically from the ice-cold air. One last, tiny window of escape was open, and five hundred exhausted men loaded with heavy bags and machine guns over their shoulders began a fourteen-hour night march through waist-deep snow. Soon many men were, as the official Wehrmacht report has it, in “a state of extreme exhaustion. . . . The snow-fall had stopped from around midnight, and the sky was filled with stars. Enervated soldiers wanted to lie down in the snow; in spite of energetic pep talks their willpower could not be revived. Such men were each given 2 Pervitin tablets. After half an hour the first men confirmed that they felt better. They marched in an orderly fashion again, back in line.”29 This reveals that by now the uppers were not used primarily for storming and conquering, but above all for endurance and survival.30 The tide had turned.
A Former Medical Officer Speaks
“I always had lots of it,” Ottheinz Schultesteinberg, who trained at the Military Academy between 1940 and 1942, reports on his deployment as a medical officer in Russia: “The stuff was just doled out. The motto was, come and get it!” The ninety-four-year-old, who now lives on Lake Starnberg near Munich, remembers the war that took him to Stalingrad as if it were yesterday. We meet on the terrace of a Croatian restaurant in the town of Feldafing: “I didn’t take Pervitin myself, or at least not often, just once to try it. To know what I was prescribing,” he says. “And I can tell you: it worked. It kept you awake, mercilessly. We knew it was addictive, and that it had side-effects: psychoses, nervous excitement, a loss of strength. And in Russia, it was a war of attrition, positional warfare. In such circumstances Pervitin was no use: it just exhausted you. You eventually had to catch up on the rest you’d missed. Sleep deprivation simply didn’t bring any tactical advantages any more.”31
They knew about these problems in Berlin. The Reich Health Führer, Leo Conti, and his Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions were still attempting to draw up a complete record of all drug-dependent soldiers. He issued a directive to the Wehrmacht and the SS to the effect that all fighters who had been discharged were to be graded according to their possible affinity for drugs, to decide whether they should be given compulsory therapy or whether they should be “expeditiously identified as unregenerate or incurable.”32 That sounded both drastic and menacing, so the Wehrmacht neglected to comply: it reported such cases rarely or not at all. The intense military situation did not lead to punishment for drug consumption, and the army even deliberately recruited staff from Conti’s office to fight at the front—which further hindered his anti-drug campaign.
In the Führer’s headquarters it dawned on some at the end of 1941 that victory was no longer possible. The chief of staff, Franz Halder, summed up the situation: “We have reached the end of our strength.”33 The Blitzkrieg strategy had tried to reverse the existing power relations through surprise, and this had failed, along with Hitler’s whole concept of war, built from the very beginning on the sand of speculation. The Germans could not survive lengthy attritional warfare against the Russians, who were both superior in numbers and by now also increasingly better equipped. It was a sobering realization with new conclusions to be drawn. But the Führer was in denial. He had severed relations with geopolitical reality; more and more poor decisions followed. If the supreme commander had enjoyed successes before the autumn of 1941, his fortune
s had now changed.
As if reality could be duped by simply refusing to acknowledge the obvious facts, in December 1941 an exhausted Germany, already fighting on several fronts, irrationally declared war on the well-rested industrial giant, the United States. Hitler, wildly overestimating himself, had assumed supreme command of the armed forces, thus expropriating Brauchitsch’s task. Ceasing to understand the world, he was plainly no longer able to consider the matter in a sober fashion. In his own words, with Operation Barbarossa he felt as if he were “pushing open a door to a dark room never seen before, without knowing what lies behind it.”34 Hitler was also plunged into literal darkness, as Morell wrote: “On top of everything, a life in a bunker without daylight.”35 In this murkiness nothing could touch the unhinged dictator and he could ignore reality completely. The only thing that penetrated his mental armor now was the needle of his personal physician injecting hormonal doping agents into his bloodstream. “Tragic that the Führer is closing himself off from life like this, and leading such a disproportionately unhealthy existence,” Goebbels wrote in his diary. “He no longer gets any fresh air, he doesn’t take any kind of relaxation, he just sits in his bunker.”36
