Dan Snow's History Hit - Getting Inside the Mind of Hitler
Episode Date: May 24, 2020No man knew Adolf Hitler as intimately as his trusted physician, Theodoor Morell. As part of Hitler's inner social circle, he assisted the leader in virtually everything for the entire war years. His ...unconventional treatments were famed in Germany, and Hitler so trusted the 'miracle' prescriptions that trains were stopped to allow the doctor to deliver injections with a steady hand. I was joined by Professor Frank McDonough, an internationally acclaimed expert on the Third Reich, who revealed the concoction of drugs which electrified and maimed the erratic mind of Fuhrer.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit.
You know, we can't go long on this podcast without getting Frank Madonna back on.
He is just one of the best. He's an academic, he's a writer, scholar, teacher.
Oh, and Twitter phenomenon as well. And he's a fantastic storyteller.
He is on the podcast this time talking about Hitler's health.
Hitler's mental and physical health, which let me tell you guys, it wasn't great.
It wasn't great, especially towards the end of the Second World War. So we cover these issues like was he full of drugs, all that kind of stuff. So enjoy this.
This was actually originally broadcast as a History Hit Live. As you know, I'm doing History
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tens of thousands of people that have been doing
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It's with Kate Lister.
We're talking about the history of sex in quarantine.
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tie myself in knots, trying not to say anything that will get me divorced when my wife listens
to the podcast. In the meantime, everyone, enjoy Frank McDonagh.
Frank, it's a privilege. It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you for coming on.
Nice to be here, Dan.
Let's get on with the big question. A lot of people will look at Hitler and think, you know, invaded Russia, dragged Germany down with him, obsessed with racial.
It's a throwaway comment. Oh, Hitler, that Hitler was mad. He was mad.
When you're writing about Hitler, do you see method in that matter or do you see a person that was mentally very disturbed?
Or do you see a person that was mentally very disturbed?
Not really, no.
I think the misconception with Hitler is,
obviously, we don't use the word mad anymore.
I'll use it as a shorthand, really, you know, for what people used to say about people being mad,
because at one time that was a common usage word, wasn't it?
Now, if you think about it, you know,
somebody who is walking down, I don't know, a common usage word, wasn't it? Now, if you think about it, you know, somebody who is
walking down, I don't know, Liverpool city centre with a Greggs pasty in his hand, and he says,
this is Buzz Aldrin. You know, you'd say that guy's not quite all there, right? But Hitler was
nothing like that. You know, Hitler actually was a person who could go into a beer hall,
actually was a person who could go into a beer hall, start to make conversations with people,
draw them into what he wanted to do, create a political party, negotiate with all kinds of people, including people in the beer hall, officers in the army, the local politicians.
So Hitler was the opposite of what we would call mad.
He was quite a person with a lot of wherewithal,
and he could actually be very charming.
We see this throughout his political career.
I mean, look at somebody like Sir Anthony Eden.
You know, when he met him, I think for the first time in 1934,
he was very impressed by Hitler.
You know, he said he had a real grasp of foreign relations. He was very charming. So somebody like Anthony Eden, you'd hardly say, oh, here's a man who's completely
gullible. Originally, he was taken in by Hitler's charm. To some extent, he charmed other people,
like, for example, the piano millionaire, Beckstein, got here to support the early nazi party again very well-heeled woman
very much part of the upper classes of bavaria and yet she sees hitler as you know a really
charming person she mentions this quite a lot so i think we've got to get away from this idea that
he was mad and the whole problem with hitler is that there's too much in these memoirs of people who
wrote after the war. You know, for example, his generals, you know, most of his generals go on
about his terrible temper. Now he was always uncontrollable. But often they were as just as
uncontrollable as him. These arguments that he had with his generals were quite bitter and it wasn't all one way either. Sometimes he came up with a perfectly rational argument and
they rejected it and sometimes he was proved right over arguments like that. The Battle of Kursk
is a good example. He actually really had cold feet over this and he was more or less pushed
into it by his generals. the attempt to take Moscow in 1941
Hitler didn't want to take Moscow he was more concerned about economic gains in the Caucasus
in the south they pushed him you know they pushed him on to take Moscow and when it was all over
he got angry you know anyone would get angry if you had a plan which was to go in another direction and
someone went in a different direction and you would prove right you'd have every right to be
angry I think and I think the anger of Hitler is over emphasized most people say that he was very
much under control his personality was under control if used anger, he often used it for effect. He would feign anger against people. Take he comes back in, Hitler's all nice, you know, have a cup of coffee.
How are you doing? Yeah, we'll get you home on my special train.
So, you know, that was Hitler. He's very manipulative.
But being manipulative doesn't make you mad.
And I think if we go too far down the Hitler was mad route or Hitler had you know serious mental problems then we end
up in mitigation don't we we end up saying oh yes but because he had all these mitigating
circumstances maybe he didn't know what he was doing in that attack against the Soviet Union
maybe he really didn't know what was going on in the Holocaust you know you can end up absolving
him what a brilliant answer thank you very much frank
let's go back to hitler's childhood and you've just briefly was there anything there that people
have been poking around looking for instances where he may have developed this irrational
hatred of jewish people or people that weren't caucasian what kind of upbringing did he have
and were there any clues any useful bits for you as a historian to explain how he turned out? You know, if Freud's right, then your early life shapes the rest of your life. Now,
there's no doubt about that. We're all shaped by our early life. I don't know anyone who wasn't
influenced by their parents or their father and mother. Many people are influenced in their
politics. You know, in the end, you had all kinds of arguments with your dad about, you know, you
wanted to be, you know, a revolutionary. And then in the end, you turn into a liberal,
just like your dad. It's a bit like that. And I think with Hitler, his dad, although he painted
him as a lowly clerical worker, in fact, he was a customs official. He was basically a really
powerful member of the Habsburg Empire. He had a uniform. He was a customs official for the whole of the town
of Linz. Also, you know those kind of powers that are given to people who are customs officials.
They have lots of powers to go into people's houses, seize goods, etc. So his father had a
lot of responsibility. He was far from this lowly civil servant that Hitler portrayed him as. Now,
he was quite brutal. There's no doubt
there was beatings. We know that there were beatings in the early life because his half-sisters
say there were beatings as well. So he did rule the house with a rod of iron and the mother was
the sort of passive one. You know, this kind of old-fashioned Victorian relationship, you know,
the father administers the sort of punishment and the mother administers soothing medicine.
And that was the way Hitler's life was.
And he said something like in Mein Kampf,
I admired my father, but I didn't love him.
He had a difficulty in loving people,
although he did definitely love his mother.
There's no doubt about that.
You know, he had a very close relationship with his mother.
He was a mummy's boy. He did dote on his mother. There's no doubt about that. You know, he had a very close relationship with his mother. He was a mummy's boy. He did dote on his mother and his mother's death hit him really, really hard.
But in terms of his early life, you couldn't say that his early life was deprived. His father had
a detached house. His father was a beekeeper. They had their own honey. They had their two
domestic servants who lived there.
There was orchards in the garden, so he could go out and pick himself a pear or an apple. You look
at the photographs of him in the school. He doesn't look like somebody from the poorer sections of
society. In fact, it was a fee-paying school that he went to. So in other words, he went to what we
would call a public school. He glossed over all of that. He was always a reader.
He liked to read mainly history was his thing.
And he liked art as well.
He had an aptitude for art.
And he was very much more than a house painter.
You know, the famous line in the producers, you know,
Hitler, wear a house paint, one room, two coats, one afternoon.
He was much more than that.
And okay, he couldn't paint people,
which some people said, oh, that shows his detachment from people. And I think he was a
loner. I think he developed to be a loner. I think he had a close friend, Kubasek, who went to Vienna
with him and he sort of fell out with him for some reason that we don't know, possibly because he
felt ashamed by the fact that Kubasek got into
the Vienna School of Music he was a gifted pianist and Hitler didn't get into the Vienna School of
Art and they shared the flat together and after that Hitler disappeared maybe because he felt he
couldn't face him after he got turned down twice to get into the Vienna School of Art and we know
there's a big debate over his sexuality, isn't there?
You know, I mean, Lothar Mactan wrote a book called The Hidden Hitler.
And he argues quite persuasively, actually, that Hitler might have been gay.
And he produces a number of pieces of evidence for this, including this extract from Kubasek's book.
For example, they meet a local businessman in a hotel, him and Kubasek.
And after the end of the meeting,
Hitler says that the local businessman
stuck a card in his pocket
and said, you can come and meet me.
And the businessman offered to pay for the dinner.
So he met them in the streets and said,
do you want to come for dinner?
I'll pay.
So there's that instance.
There's another instance in the barn
where they're both naked
and Kubasek sort of wipes Hitler down. And he says something like Hitler could see that this
was quite a sexual moment. He laughed about it. And then there's a guy in the army called Hans
Mend who makes the allegation that he had a relationship with Hitler while he was in the army.
Then, of course, he brings in the after the war period.
He mentions all of these people who were in the early Nazi party, Ernst Röhm, for example,
who was definitely gay. And others, Dietrich Eckhart, you know, there were many others in
that early coterie of people who were gay. And when you think of the Nazi party's profile,
you wouldn't think of it as a group of gay men. But in fact, there was a higher
proportion of gay men in the Nazi Party, way higher in the group that Hitler knew than in the
population as a whole. You mentioned the war there, Frank. Let me just quickly ask about that. I mean,
Hitler was on the front line. He had actually a particularly dangerous role in the First War
and the trenches. Rather than his childhood, It was that experience, something that helped turn his mind towards these extreme and violent and terrible things.
Well, he says, doesn't he, in Mein Kampf, that when he went to Vienna, he'd never been
anti-Semitic at all, because he'd never seen and lints, he never saw any Jewish people.
But when he went to Vienna, a cosmopolitan city, he started to see Orthodox
Jews, and he could see that they were different. And once he saw that they were different,
he started to observe what they did, and he sort of had a low opinion of them then.
But he said it wasn't much beyond a sort of hatred of them, because they had a good life,
and he was living in a lodging house at the time. He was far from poor in Vienna. Again,
He was living in a lodging house at the time.
He was far from poor in Vienna.
Again, he bequeathed the occupational pension that his father had from the civil service.
So he's far from poor.
And he sold postcards there as well.
He says that he wasn't.
And also he went for musical evenings with a Jewish family.
So he definitely wasn't anti-Semitic beyond the norm.
You know, anti-Semitism was widespread in Vienna at the time. He wasn't more anti-Semitic beyond the norm. You know, anti-Semitism was widespread in Vienna at the time.
He wasn't more anti-Semitic.
During the war, none of his comrades in the trenches say that he was anti-Semitic.
They can't remember him mentioning the Jews at all.
They say he mentions communists and he's against them, but he doesn't mention Jews.
So we think that his anti-Semitism grew after the war.
Two things, really. He bought into this sort of fake document called the Protocols of Zion,
which brings out a kind of Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. And he says that he believed in
that. He also buys into the idea that it was Jews who conspired with communists to stab Germany in
the back at the front. So we had this kind of myth. Germany didn't lose the war. It lost the
home front and it was betrayed by these people that they're stabbing the back myth. And he
believed in that. And then we start to see that in his early days in Munich after the war, when he
becomes this beer hall speaker,
he speaks on the Jewish question quite a lot.
And he does blame them for being communists.
He's very much got this idea that Jews are very much connected
with being communists as well.
So it's like there's anti-Marxism and anti-Semitism get mixed together.
And of course, as he believes in this jewish world conspiracy
and as things go badly in germany of the great inflation the wall street crash he tends to see
the jews as fermenting international ideas and not national ideas so if you want to create a national
socialist state and not socialist in the kind of equality of people idea you know socialist in
terms of a community national community you're better than saying national socialist he could
have called it the national community party really he hijacks the concept of socialism
because it's popular he hijacks the red flag doesn doesn't he? Because he realises that's popular with the masses. So we can say that he doesn't become anti-Semitic until the war is over.
What about the war? Because he was brave in the war.
Was he a runner, a message carrier?
I think in the early part he had a bicycle and he would take messages.
It was a very dangerous thing to do.
He was taking messages from the officers to the front.
Artillery were banging and dropping all
around him. I think he got a motorcycle later on in the war. So he was a kind of motorcycle
messenger. He was awarded the Iron Cross. So he was definitely brave in the war. I don't think
there's any doubt about that. And all of his comrades say that he became incredibly patriotic.
Was he damaged by those experiences? Not particularly. I mean, I think it's a little bit like that thing,
you know, when you go back to your childhood
and your teenage years,
you know, maybe it wasn't that great,
but, you know, he used to play football in a team and all that.
I think he liked the camaraderie
because he'd never really had a coterie of friends like that.
So they weren't really friends,
but he felt part of something bigger than himself.
He was part of this great movement of
winning the war, fighting the war. And it was a very passionate thing for him. Whenever anybody
talked about the possibility of Germany losing the war, he'd blow up, you know, and say, you've got
to stay loyal, got to stay loyal to the Kaiser. So yeah, I think the war shaped in terms of, you
know, the idea of having a culture of people around him and really that group of people you know
built themselves into the Nazi party and the Nazi party was really full of
people who'd served in the First World War
somebody said how did you get in the Nazi party
you just showed people your medals from the war and if someone hadn't been in
the war he'd bring it up he kept bringing up
to chamberlain you didn't serve in the war he's a badge of sort of courage if you said in the war
and when he met lloyd george it was over the moon about lloyd george and the fact that he'd been the
war leader this great little man he said he changed the entire war you know and he really
admired lloyd george he spends a lot of time in my camp talking about Lloyd George.
That Welsh wizard, he said, he transformed propaganda.
If you want to learn about propaganda, he said,
watch Lloyd George in the first world war and read his speeches.
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echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week So in fact, what does he learn when he does become leader?
1933, let's take his sort of leadership before the outbreak of the Second World War in September 39.
How does he cope with being leader?
Does he change? Does he rely on alcohol like Churchill or cups of tea?
What's his health like in his mental state?
Well, I think Hitler was a reluctant leader to begin with.
I mean, he says before the sort of Munich Beer Hall coup
that ends in a disaster and he ends up in prison for treason,
he says, I just want to be the drummer.
He mentions that a lot.
He wants to be the drummer of the movement,
you know
the man who does all the speeches but he wanted at that time somebody else to take the leadership
of it so in a sense he was like kind of reluctant leader then he becomes the leader and then he
realizes mainly through the power of his oratory his organization and propaganda he starts to think
you know i'm pretty good at this, you know, and he realizes he's
an excellent speaker. Like anybody who's a good speaker, you know, he knows it. He sort of knows
he's a good performer and that he'll get a good reaction from it. So I think that he sort of
builds himself up into this lead and he starts to believe in this Fiora principle, the idea of the
leader must have total power. He starts to believe that
by the early 30s, that he's a kind of man of destiny. And he keeps saying, luck will always
save me. He said that to Goering, luck will always save me. And in many cases, you know,
there is a lot of luck that goes on throughout his life. He does get lucky loads and loads of times.
I only have to mention the two assassination attempts. You know, he leaves the Beer Hall, you know, in 1939, 13 minutes before the bomb goes off.
Somehow he doesn't get killed in the bomb attack by Stauffenberg in 1944. He does get lucky in that
way. You know, Hindenburg dies conveniently so he can take total control of Germany. So he did
have a lot of luck on the way, I think.
But when he becomes leader in 1933,
I think he does have some idea of what he wants to do,
and he does believe that he can transform Germany.
So in a way, he's a self-made man, a kind of autodidact.
He thinks, I know better than these people.
They don't rate me very highly they think I'm someone
crude from Bavaria and they think I speak in this sort of you know obvious dialect but they don't
realize you know I've got native wit I'm well organized I can run rings around these bourgeois
politicians and in a sense he does run rings around these bourgeois politicians, but he's an impressive person in the cabinet.
We see that in the cabinet, first of all, when he starts to run the cabinet.
Franz von Papen, who is the vice-chancellor, he famously said,
you know, we'll have Hitler squeaking in the corner after six months
and he'll be dancing to our tune, the conservative tune, we'll control him.
And after three months, Hitler has won round Hindenburg, who first of all is very dubious
about whether he should become Führer at all. And now Hindenburg really believes in him, you know,
after this fantastic day in Potsdam in March, where they celebrate Frederick the Great in this
day of Potsdam. And on that day, Hitler goes down on one knee and he shakes Hindenburg's hand.
And Goebbels is nearby.
And Goebbels said, I could see the old man was in tears.
And Papen said, within three months, it completely pushed me aside, Hindenburg.
And he felt that Hitler was the man he could trust.
And also, he said, in the cabinet, I could start to see that my arguments
didn't carry as much weight as Hitler.
And he said, Hitler was a master of facts.
And he said, he dominated the cabinet.
And he would put forward his point of view
and he would win people around to his point of view.
He said, it wasn't a matter of pushing his ideas.
He had persuasive arguments to back them up.
And what about his personal health?
Does the famous and controversial Dr. Morell,
does he come into Hitler's life at this point?
There's a number of things about Hitler.
Number one, he was always a hypochondriac.
Whatever was going around, he'd have it.
He was always taking a lot of sort of prescription medications,
even before he became Führer. He had stomach problems. He had
pain in his stomach all the time. He had digestive problems. Some people say, you know, he might have
had hepatitis at one time. Hepatitis was very common. Some people think he might have had a
gallbladder condition, which was never treated because he had some of the pain and the sort of
infection that is associated with that.
So early on, he doesn't have a kind of personal doctor.
He kind of self-medicates himself.
There's no hint early on.
He doesn't drink alcohol.
Again, he doesn't drink alcohol because anyone with a sensitive stomach,
they can't take too much alcohol.
They sort of shy away from too much alcohol.
So he shied away from alcohol.
So he wasn't a drinker. But Dr Morell comes on the scene Dr Morell comes on the scene for a rather strange reason
his personal photographer Heinrich Hoffman who introduced him to Eva Braun she was his assistant
in the photographic studio so So he found him a girlfriend.
And he also finds him a doctor because Hoffman has venereal disease.
And Morel is an expert on this.
So he goes to see him and he says, I went to see him.
He cured me.
He doesn't mention it was for venereal disease because Hoffman is married. It's not something he wanted everybody to know.
And he said, well, bring him to the Berghof.
Let him examine me.
So he examines him.
People say, oh, he was like a kind of drug dealer.
But that would be incorrect, really, because what he was also an expert in was homeopathic medicine.
So he was very much into this idea.
I mean, I take a load of vitamins every morning.
I'm not sure really whether if I stop them and make any difference you know but i sort of
believe in some of them you know that's a good vitamin that's good vitamin d or whatever and
hitler was very much like that you know give me a vitamin what is it he wanted to give him vitamin
because there was talk that it calmed you down it was kind of a natural sedative so he had like a
combination of vitamins and what made it different was he would deliver them intravenously so hitler one minute
would be sort of you know really like this next minute oh hello you know he'd jump up so this
vitamin boost he kind of liked now we think then that he started to add a drug called pervertin
which is an amphetamine really so then he added that to the vitamins and then he was really you
know up all night but he also gave him multi-floor tablets for his stomach and this multi-floor was
a weird tablet really you know it was made from the excretia of Bulgarian peasants I always used
to say not only did he talk shit he actually used to take it three times a day so he was taking these tablets
and they did have an initial effect some people said maybe it was a placebo effect he'd been told
that morel was a bit of a genius bit of a witch doctor then he starts to take these
viscerum injections now he takes this tablet his indigestion goes away his pain goes away he says
this man's a genius so he keeps them morel with him all the way to the rest of the Third Reich.
He has this personal doctor who prescribes him all kinds of things.
Now, you could say it's a little bit like Elvis and Michael Jackson.
Once you've got a personal doctor and he can write you a prescription,
well, you know, the tendency is to say, oh, you know, I've got this pain here,
you know, I've got this pain here.
For example, he has a problem with his eye.
Morel gives him these eye drops which have cocaine in them.
Sometimes he hasn't got anything wrong with his eye and he says, can I have them eye drops again?
And so Morel says, no, you're only supposed to take them, you know, for like a couple of days to stop your eyes being bloodshot.
And he says, oh, you know, but they do do me good, but they make me feel good.
So there's like a kind of indication that he sees a drug
and then he sort of likes what it gives him.
And that goes on.
By the middle of the war, he's taken about,
could be like 40 different medications that he's taken in one form or another.
Just pause briefly to talk about Pertivin, which you mentioned.
So it's like speed, amphetamines.
How widespread was it generally?
I mean, was this something that helped
the famous soldiers of the wehrmacht march into battle that bit quicker and a bit more aggressively
yeah yeah these medications amphetamines now it's an illegal drug isn't a class a drug but then
this perversion you could get it at the chemist in america the similar drug was called benzadrine
there's a famous rhyme about this woman needs
her Benzadrine to keep her kitchen clean or something like that. And it's got this idea
that, you know, you can get a boost out of that. And as we know, lots of drugs, cocaine was like
a legal drug for a long, long time. And it wasn't a lot of cough medicine. As we know, there was
alcohol, wasn't it? You know, you can always remember your granny or your great granny saying,
give me more of that cough medicine, you know, because it was a little bit like
port or something like that. So that was widespread. You could buy it at a local chemist.
It wasn't illegal. So a lot of German soldiers were using it. And then the German army realized
that, you know, in the tank battles, the perversion, you know, when you're riding on a
tank and you want to go for all night on a tank to keep the momentum of an offensive it was a good thing so early on they
were a bit dubious the commanders and the doctors who were attached to the regiments but then they
started to say give them more let's get more so we see like orders for quite a lot of this pervert
and go into the german army in the second World War. So they are on that.
But as we know, I think RAF pilots, they had amphetamines. And also, I think it was worked
out that injections of vitamin B helped RAF pilots because it calmed people down. I think that the
use of drugs can be over-exaggerated. Whether it makes a difference, I think sort of brings out
what's already there, doesn't it?
You read these monologues when he's lecturing Mussolini or talking to people over dinner.
It does sometimes sound a bit like he's been on something.
And do you think that did affect decision making? I suppose it must have done.
People who were sort of close to him, sort of assistants, Hans Linger, for example,
he said that he saw him every morning after he had this
injection from Dr. Morell. And he said he was a transformed man. All of a sudden, he said he'd go
in there because his natural inclination, you know, Hitler was a kind of down person, really.
He wasn't like an up person. But then he said after he had these injections, it was like, come
on, what are we doing today? Right, come on, let's invade Poland.
I didn't quite say that, but he sort of did really become animated over that.
And obviously, as the war went on and paranoia is part of some of the side effects of amphetamines.
I think he always was paranoid anyway.
I think he had some paranoia in him anyway.
He's always worrying about people plotting against him so that was already there you know
it's I mean Stalin was even worse wasn't he I mean more paranoia than Hitler but
I don't think it really affected his decision-making in terms of he knew what
he wanted to do he had the kind of framework of what he wanted to do and
obviously he changed his course all the time
as the war develops i think he gets physically ill i think some of these illnesses that he's
had maybe it's the gallstones maybe it's stomach problems they get worse he's an insomniac and that
gets worse as well i think he's suffering from a kind of form of depression as well.
He likes to keep himself on his own a lot.
During the war, he starts to go on his own a lot.
And he likes a kind of darkened room.
These are all classic symptoms of somebody who's depressed.
If you feel depressed, you don't want to see the sunshine, do you?
You want to be in the darkness if you're depressed.
That's certainly an aspect of him, I think.
It starts to affect him.
I do think, I mean, there is an argument for this. After 1943, not only does the German campaign
start to falter in the Second World War, but Hitler starts to falter. He starts to lose his nerve.
There's no doubt after Stalingrad, he not the same person he starts to worry about you know
the decisions that he's making look at the battle of Kersk comes close after the battle of Stalingrad
and he's very tentative now he's very worried about what he should do and you see that with
all of the decisions then the generals are pushing him to go one way he's pushing to go another way
that's where the argument comes from because he's sort of getting tired out and i think in 44 with operation bagration in june the attack by the soviet union
on the eastern front then there's the d-day landing going through the whole of france
and by september he collapses you know morel says he probably had a heart attack
and then there's a big debate some of his doctors see him and he's in bed he's
taken to his bed and it looks then as though he's had a complete nervous collapse and a physical
collapse he might have had a heart attack on top of that and then there's a big debate with his
doctors where there's this guy shank comes to see him and he's a bit worried about his condition he
sees all these bottles of pills around his bed.
And he says, what's all these bottles of pills?
He said, they're prescription medications from Dr. Morel.
Anyway, he goes out and he says to the doctor, can I have a list of all of his medications, please?
I'd just like to see exactly what he's on.
He starts to ask Morel.
You know, Morel's not used to this, is he?
You know, he's a personal doctor, so he's got somebody coming into his lair in this way he takes a tablet called eucadyl I don't know
what it's called now it's probably like those serious pain medications that you might get if
you went into hospital a sort of opiate but not as high as morphine and he takes this and he quite
likes it and he looks at it and he finds that there's some strychnine in it.
So Schenck goes back and he says to him,
done a laboratory test on this drug and there's some strychnine in it.
I think he's poisoning you.
So Hitler goes away.
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are new episodes every week thinks about it and then this is the other thing about Hitler he has an immense loyalty to people
you know if you were his friend over 20 or 30 years something went wrong in your life he'd
stick with you he'd normally stick with you unless you know he had to abandon you there was no
no chance of sticking with you and what he does is Morel says unless you know he had to abandon you there was no no chance of
sticking with you and what he does is morel says this is rubbish he says let me take it away i'll
do my own laboratory test independently he says so he comes back and he says yes fiora there is
five percent of strychnine right it helps the other ingredients to deliver the pain medication
he said this is not unusual he said
you know in certain medications there's a little bit of what seems like a poison he said at the
level of five percent this couldn't possibly poison you whatsoever first thing hitler does
he sacks shank he says go away i don't believe you i think what you're trying to do he said
is become my personal doctor and then he sacks brand. Brandt, who's been with him for like 10 years.
He sacks him as well.
And he says, you're in on it as well.
You're in on this conspiracy to undermine Dr. Morell.
And Dr. Morell survives right to the end of the war.
Well, Hitler almost didn't survive to the end of the war.
As you just mentioned there, 1944 must have been extraordinarily difficult for him.
Not only defeats in the East and West, but there's an assassination attempt that comes very close to taking his life.
We're all familiar with the memes of Hitler in his bunker from the extraordinary film Downfall.
It shows Hitler breaking down. I mean, how accurate is that?
The famous one where they sort of repeat it, you know, when he tells all of his generals,
you all leave the room, you know, and then he sort of throws his pen down.
That really did happen. That is true.
And it happened because he'd ordered, this is where the generals come in,
he'd ordered a counteroffensive outside Berlin that didn't happen.
And so what happened was one of the generals tells him
that the counteroffensive that you ordered, it never happened.
It was only in your mind that it happened.
Well, of course, when he he realizes they're lying to him and also after the bomb plot he's had enough
of people who are plotting against him he loses the plot i don't think that tirade when you think
of where it comes in this kind of chronology i don't think that it was completely unjustified
to be angry there's no reason to go into the kind
of anger that he displayed but most of the generals said that was the worst they'd ever seen him
so in other words if that was the worst they'd ever seen him then they must have been exaggerating
about all the other arguments that went on and it wasn't as though these generals like Manstein you
know Manstein could stand up for himself. He was a soul,
he was a skillful general. You couldn't tell Manstein what to do. And a lot of these German
generals were brought up in that Prussian tradition of, we decide where the armies go.
And they couldn't face the idea that a politician was telling them what to do.
Just lastly then, he was a broken man, he was
not sleeping, he felt like a failure, all those things. Should we describe Hitler in those last
months as a drug addict? I think we could say that he was dependent on drugs. I think a drug addict,
you'd have to say that they aren't just dependent on drugs. They're dependent on what the drugs do to them. There is
an element of getting high. Now, I don't think that Hitler ever saw these drugs that he was
taking in that way. Maybe you could say that he liked the feeling that they gave him. I do think
that he felt that they took down his anxiety. I feel as though he felt it was more of a medical
than a kind of recreational thing.
So drug addiction for Hitler wasn't a kind of recreational thing. Let's take drugs and let's
get high. He wanted to take them because he thought they'd dampen down the anxiety and the
feelings. And there are a lot of drugs that he's taken that do seem like antidepressants in one
way or another. And a cocktail of drugs.
You know, he did have serious illnesses by then.
You know, he did have lots of pain.
He had constant headaches.
He had these stomach problems.
So it wasn't as if he didn't need some drugs.
I just don't think we can have him, you know,
as a sort of drug addict where we think
that he was taking the drugs just purely to get high on them.
I don't think he did that.
Therefore, he may have been kidding himself that it wasn't an addiction i would say it was a dependency rather than an addiction
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