The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Hitler’s Maladies and Their Impact on World War II: A Behavioral Neurologist’s View by Tom Hutton

Episode Date: April 15, 2023

Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II: A Behavioral Neurologist's View by Tom Hutton Toward the end of World War II, Hitler’s many health complications became even more pronounced, making an evil man yet more erratic and dangerous. While the subject of Hitler’s health has been catalogued previously, never has it been done so this thoroughly or with this level of up-to-date medical expertise. Tom Hutton’s new neurobehavioral analysis of Adolf Hitler draws from a lifetime of medical research and clinical experience to understand how the dictator’s particular medical history further warped a deformed personality and altered Hitler’s decision making. Dr. Hutton trained under the world-renowned neuropsychologist and father of modern neuropsychological assessment, Dr. Alexander Luria, giving him a uniquely qualified eye to undertake this most difficult assessment. While many books on the subject thumb through the annals of popular psychology to understand history’s most famous monsters, Dr. Hutton’s latest book uses contemporary clinical knowledge, lucidly synthesizing medical complexities for all audiences. Here Dr. Hutton undertakes a thorough medical history to elucidate a pivotal historical moment, examining how disease impacted Hitler’s destructive life.

You wanted the best? You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. It's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Welcome to the big big show my family and friends we certainly appreciate you guys being here you guys are the smartest audience in the world it really is i mean if you've listened to every show or most of the shows in the chris fa show especially those in recent memory of the

last uh i don't know four or five years we've been doing great brilliant authors and minds uh you have learned some amazing stuff and it has it if it has not made you smarter go back and listen to all the shows again and give us a five-star review on itunes today we're going to be talking about behavioral maladies we're talking about hitler and monsters and all that good stuff and some of the psychology that goes into why these people became the monsters they are i posted about this author in his book a few weeks ago when it first came to me the press copy came out and people were innately and extremely excited interested in this you know every day sometimes in the news we see monsters we see horrific events

we see people that probably worse maybe one time deemed good well-meaning people people that you would never suspect you know you hear that from the neighbors of these folks they go they seem like nice people you would never think that they would do this and somehow people take different turns in their lives that ends up building some incredible monsters that do destructive and horrific things to us today and even though we talk about history and sometimes it seems a long time ago we see these monsters in everyday life yesterday there was a shooting at a bank uh people lost their lives over the uh the monstrosity of someone who made some poor choices or maybe had some maladies uh there is a war going on right now between russia and the ukraine where one man uh putin has determined that

he will affect the the uh the alignment of world events and the horror and atrocities that will be dealt on other human beings in great sadness. So I'm always interested to have these authors that talk about history so that we can learn about history and maybe we can prevent these things from happening in the future. Today, we have an amazing guest on the show. He is the author of the newest book to come out February 28th, 2023, Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II, a behavioral neurologist. Neurologist? Am I saying that right, Tom? Neurologist. Neurologist.

He's going to diagnose me after the show and give me a lot of me, clearly. Hitler's maladies and their impact on World War II, a behavioral neurologist view. Tom Hutton, PhD and MD, I believe both, is on the show with us today. There you go. He's going to be a brilliant mind, and one of them is not me on the show. So that's why we asked for the guest to come on the show, so that we can make everyone smarter. And certainly they don't want to be listening brilliant mind and one of them is not me on the show so that's why we asked for the guest to come on the show so that we can make everyone smarter and uh certainly they don't want to be listening to me uh anyway getting into details on him he is an internationally recognized clinical and research neurologist and educator the past president of the texas neurological neurological

society uh you know i'm having some deviations in my neurology here, Tom. He has served as professor and vice chairman of the Department of Medical and Surgical Neurology at the Texas Tech School of Medicine. He now lives on his cattle ranch near Fredericksburg, Texas. Welcome to the show. Dr. Hutton, how are you? I'm fine, Chris, and thank you so much for asking me to come on your show. This is a great honor for me.

It's an honor to have you as well. We love great minds on the show because, as I mentioned before, I am not one of them. Probably mostly deserving, as you'll probably find on the show, of a lobotomy. So give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs. People can find me at TomHuttonMD.com. There you go. And he will be having me committed after the show, I'm sure. So, Tom, what motivated you on to write this book?

I've been interested in Adolf Hitler for 25 years. I suppose all of us growing up in our generation have been to a degree. But I learned about his Parkinson's disease fairly early on. That was my area of special interest and expertise. We were doing work in behavioral aspects of Parkinson's disease. And after a certain period of time, we learned our patients developed a certain neuropsychological change in their thinking. And we tracked Hitler's timing for his Parkinson's. We assumed that he must have had this malady.

And sure enough, we began looking into the historical information that was available. And his colleagues were talking about this. So that's how I got interested initially was through his Parkinson's disease. My book that came out in 2016, Carrying the Black Bag, A Neurologist's Bedside Tales, had a chapter on Adolf Hitler, particularly how his Parkinson's disease and this behavior affected the Battle of Normandy. Following the book, it was well received. My editor and others asked me if I could expand it into a full book and include his other ailments, such as his heart disease and his gastrointestinal, his drug usage, and other more minor diseases. That's how it really got me going. There you go. There you go. So, in the book, you pretty much cover his whole life. You cover his youth, where you start out the book, the early years, his analysis of behavior and his health.

Let's kind of chronicalize from beginning to end. Tell us where his beginnings were and where did the cracks start? I think they started very early. He had a very challenging relationship with his father, Chris. His father was alcoholic, abusive, extremely stubborn, and physically beat Adolph and his half-brother Alois Jr. frequently, and probably beat Adolph's mother as well, Clara. He loved his mother. Clara was a very warm, sensitive, loving person. He said in Mein Kampf, he honored his father, respected his father, but he really hated the man because of the abuse that was heaped upon him. His father would also humiliate him on a daily basis, and there was a very bad relationship within the household.

It must have been extremely tense with the mother trying to protect him and his father being abusive toward him. A lot of tension in the house. That probably was where his behavior began to change you know correct me if i'm wrong but it seems like you know we've had a lot of people on the show that talked about childhood traumas and the effect they've had and it's really interesting to me and i'm i'm no psychologist but it seems like a lot of a lot of things happen in childhood that can create some crazy paths in your life. Absolutely.

In the book, I tried to go into what has been written by various psychologists, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts. They all have their take on it and probably a constellation of findings come together and explain why he became so affected and became so grandiose, so narcissistic, even as a youth. All of these characteristics even increased as he got older. Did he have a narcissistic father per se? Was there any diagnosis of that i haven't seen anyone describe his father as as that but certainly there's a good likelihood that his father was quite narcissistic along with his extreme stubbornness and abusive behavior seen that movie um the uh

the uh you know narcissism kind of gets kicked around. I do want to say, you know, there's narcissistic tendencies. And sometimes someone isn't a full-blown narcissist, right? They just might have the tendencies of it. Is that true? Yes, I think that's true. Yeah. And it's interesting how we mirror, you know, when I grew up, there were things that I didn't like about my father.

And I said, you know, I had kind of a do as, don't do as he did. But in the end, there were a lot of things that I adopted without even realizing it. And a lot of his traits that I didn't like. And I didn't learn until they exhibited themselves sometimes with my own children which were my dogs that I was handling things in the same way he was and not healthy and so it's interesting to me how you know sometimes especially you know I don't know what a mother-daughter relationship is I've never been through that experience clearly but a father-son relationship is very interesting relationship and in how you

know i think books have been written probably psychological papers have been written in in in that whole relationship between a father and son and the dynamic that goes through the span of our lives yes i think what you were saying about the relationship with your father was also true of adolf and his father alois senior yeah they um just like oil and water they just didn't mix yeah there's it's it and i think a large part of it is and i think this is just obvious to everybody i mean you spend you you spend so much of your time around your parents and so you mirror who they are and you develop who they are, even though you're like, I don't want to be like dad doing this. He seems like he's not the best at it. But, you know, that's who we become.

We seek our relationships that do that. So what are the first cracks that you start to see with him? I mean, certainly growing up in an alcoholic environment, an abusive environment, as a child, you're always trying to figure out why does someone love me? It really puts you on the ropes of a boxing ring and you can't, you know, you're not equipped usually to understand, well, you know, dad has a problem and this sort of thing. You know, where does he go from there? I think it can be seen in his schoolwork. He did okay in elementary school, but shortly thereafter, he began having troubles. He was obviously bright, but he didn't apply himself, had to repeat several grades. Finally, when he got to high school, real school, he dropped out that last year.

And so he didn't even have a high school education. And that was really because he was not getting along well with his teachers he was doing pranks he was very unpopular he was a loner uh didn't have many friends at all one one friend really stood out uh but um so he was having more and more problems in school which is usually where the behavior starts and of course he didn't finish even his high school before he took off to Vienna, where he wanted to become a visual artist. So he wanted to become a visual artist. That's kind of interesting, because usually that's a very emotional thing to go after.

It's not a very masculine, logic, and rational thing. It's kind of interesting that he would go after that. not a very masculine logic and rational thing it's kind of interesting that you go after that it is it is he always wanted to be an artist and that was one of the major topics he and his father fought over his father wanted him to be a something like he a customs officer some sort of official but adolf just couldn't see that. He wanted to be an artist. And he did have talent. His teachers commented on his artistic ability. Although it's curious, he did landscapes and architecture pictures well, but when it came to putting a human face on or trying to do a portrait, he just didn't have it. He just didn't have the warmth in his pictures that you would need. And perhaps because of that, he was rejected twice by the Vienna Academy of Arts for lack of talent. Do you find that, you know, you kind of described, I think, this is a question to you, you kind of described some of the things that I hear in a lot of school shooters and things like

that. The loner uh the person who's isolated you know he has trouble especially in adolescence and you know there's some people with school shooters they're like yeah we kind of knew that guy was kind of probably pop someday because he was always alone he was always he always had trouble with the social skills but the emotion thing is is kind of interesting thing to me as well, because I, you know, we've had people on the show that are diagnosed a lot of school shooters and in a maleness being male and being a male operating your emotions as a feminine, as opposed to being logic seems to be a play into a lot of school shooters and people that go through mistrossities. But I don't know. I'm asking you that. Is that a thing or is it not a thing?

I'm not sure I can add much on school shooters. It's curious that Adolph, even early on, showed a tremendous rage, which, again, was his father showed a lot of rage. So, again, he picked up a lot of those characteristics that he really didn't like perhaps in his father, but yet continued to demonstrate those throughout his life. Yeah, the rage thing. That's always interesting.

The uncontrollability of it and the reaction of it, which is emotionalism on its face too, very feminine. The inability to control it, to not be stoic or have logic is interesting. So where does he go after he does the artist thing, and what sort of cracks do you see in his behavioral? He really kicked around Vienna for a number of years. He was a vagabond. He had very little income. He was actually copying postcards and selling them to tourists for a period of time just to support himself.

His mother died, and then his father died earlier, and so he was essentially an orphan, and he didn't do anything very productive until World War I broke out. And in 1914, he jumped at the opportunity to join a Bavarian regiment, the List Regiment, and he signed up and actually fought for four years in World War I. The army became like a family to him. Again, he was a loner. He wasn't particularly liked by his fellow troops but he was brave he ended up winning two iron crosses one of which was iron cross first class so he was running messages between the uh the rear up to where the troops were which had

to be dangerous work and he fulfilled his job well. He was respected for his bravery. There you go. Do you think he took any mental damage from the war, PTSD or anything like that? I don't know how he could have not done that. The trench warfare was so brutal, and he spent four years, which was longer than most of the troops ever spent and so you just wonder stepping over dead bodies injured people even though at the end of the day he could

go back to the rear and sleep with in some peace without being shot at yeah i mean that that world war one was horrific it was almost hand-to-hand combat sort of thing and trench warfare, as you said, and it was just moving from one trench to another. And it wasn't like the sort of wars we have nowadays where we drop bombs on you with a drone. You talk in the book about how, I think this is something people have always been interested in, did Hitler have Jewish blood it is there's a question about his grandfather Alois's father was he Jewish and the historians are split on that Chris I I tend to think the evidence may be slightly stronger that he did have a Jewish grandfather, but it's uncertain, but at least Adolf was worried enough about it throughout his life that he launched several investigations.

So it probably affected his behavior, whether or not he had truly was Jewish or not, I don't know. It sounds like he was fascinated or intrigued by it, or maybe he was concerned about or something very concerned about it very concerned he developed uh just virulent anti-semitism

actually when he was in vienna first time he had exposure to a large jewish population and even when he was in vienna and certainly in mein kampf he's just a virulent anti-Semitism comes through. That possibly is because there were a lot of Jewish students and professors at the academy. And he was rejected in favor of not only Jewish students, but other Austro-Hungarian immigrants that were coming in from the hinterlands into Vienna. And he became very, very angry again, raged about that. Didn't think those people should be trained. They weren't German.

They didn't speak German. The usual sort of tropes that he developed. You know, it's interesting to me when people are loners, when they have trouble socially. I've seen this close by in in cells um they they they tend to take their self-loathing and turn it into some sort of external hate and i'm no psychologist so correct me if i'm wrong but it seems like people who learn to hate and adopt hate of of another class of people or or other people um there's a self-loathing, there's a self-hatred, there's a deficiency in them that they feel, and instead of addressing it and dealing with it, they project it.

Does that sound like a... I think you're absolutely right. I think he projection, scapegoating was very prominent in his life. His father scapegoated, by the way, as well. But Adolf Hitler did that throughout his life, even to the point where he fired some very capable people for mistakes that he had made, but that he blamed them for.

Yeah. And of course, the whole anti... Go ahead. Of course, the whole anti-Semitism was that and his hatred for Slavic people. Wow. And so this starts about what age where he has this experience in Vienna? He would have, that was in 1904, 1905 to 1914 so he spent about nine years in vienna pretty much as a vagabond

working various odd jobs there was one story where he was on a outside platform and there was some some talk that his fellow worker is going to push him off of it. He really was most unpopular, probably because he liked to give lectures, and he was highly verbal, obviously. He was a great orator, became a great orator, but it made him very unpopular when he just would spout off these long sermons, political topics mainly. You talk in the book about Hitler's sexuality. Tell us a little bit about that because it's interesting how a man deals with that

in the past he takes. We did put a chapter in there on his sexuality trying to identify what was real and what might have been misinformation that was fed by the Allies. I think the biggest thing I'd say about Adolf Hitler was he was fairly asexual. There was some suggestion he might be homosexual. Probably better evidence that he was heterosexual. And he did probably have

a number of women, girlfriends throughout his life, but not an overwhelming number. He was very uncertain about that, whether or not it was his charisma or whether or not simply his office that attracted women. But it turned out to be a very poor choice for a boyfriend. Most of these women ended up committing suicide or attempting suicide jesus so that's never a good sign if that's not a good sign not very supportive um let me ask you this did he have uh did it take him a while to get into relationships with women like a lot of these

loners and people we see nowadays that have problems very early on in high school. They don't have girlfriends. They have trouble. They don't really kind of get into the whole sexuality and girlfriends until later in life. And even then, they're not well-liked because no one else likes them either. Yeah, it did seem to take him a while. He didn't have any girlfriends growing up to speak of her in Vienna that we're aware of. Then he had a relationship with his second cousin, put her up in an apartment when he was now in politics.

And perhaps other than his mother, the only other woman he really loved. And she committed suicide or else there were some rumors that perhaps he had had her killed. Wow. Perhaps because she had gone out and with a Jewish man. Yeah. The fear of loss, right? You find love in the fear of loss. I mean, like Jeffrey Dahmer sort of thing where,, where, uh, you know, you, you find

love and then you, you know, I, I've seen that with like, you know, a mother abandonment or father abandoned with children. They have a hard time if they get into relationships and that person leaves them, you know, they struggle with it. Very interesting in the psychology of it, you know, and, and most people, I think, you think you know they they get into relationships with the opposite sex or you know whatever their uh proclivities are for the other and and you know they develop those early on and and they start learning behaviors of of hopefully they're healthy and and uh you know getting along with the the opposite sex or the other person and uh it's interesting to me, like you see a lot of school shooters and stuff. They don't do that in high schools.

They're loners and they don't have girlfriends. They don't have, they kind of just, they're struggling to, I guess, adjust socially when it comes down to it. Yes, I think that's true. He had a hard time dealing with women. He could be charming in a small social setting, but he really didn't. He was a misogynist. He really didn't think that women should be in politics. The reason he liked Ava Braun was she was pretty empty-headed, and he could just completely forget about the politics.

There you go. You know, and that played, well, I don't want to assume this because you've done the research. My understanding is, you know, when the Nazis came to power, this whole familial thing, misogynist sort of nature, they were, you know, they really promoted the family sort of nature. They really promoted the family sort of element. There was this whole pushback to traditional family values and having a wife and kids and stuff. I was watching a documentary on this recently. Did that play into his misogyny or his anger at women? Maybe because he picks so many girlfriends. One of the problems with having childhood issues

is you pick bad people that aren't healthy in their minds either. Especially if his girlfriends are committing suicide, it's probably a sign that he's a bad picker of people or he picks people who are a mirror of his psychological problems. But did that play

maybe into, am I correct there that the Nazis, they kind of, my understanding is they went against sort of feminism and they went against Nazis or homosexuality and LGBTQ stuff. Yeah, very much so. They were very misogynistic. That's one of the things

he liked. They were very anti-Semitic. Of course, he liked that as well. They were very pan-Germany, greater Germany. He'd become a nationalist after World War I, and they were very much against the Treaty of Paris that caused Germany to owe $5 billion. And so the party that he initially spied on for the Weimar government

had that as his platform and those were all features that were very appealing to him and very misogynistic again there were no women within the party with any sort of responsibility yeah I saw this documentary recently I don't know how I tripped into it but it was one of those they talked about how the nazis you know started promoting the national sort of image and how everyone should have kids and babies and and they actually were doing some sort of baby making or baby having promotions sort of thing yes going on and so it was like it was hey, let's breed the nation back to whatever. That was part of his eugenics thing. They felt as if they had lost the cream of the crop

in World War I. And so in order to fill in, they strongly encouraged the women to have lots and lots of babies. And of course, that even gave rise to the Lebensborn movement in World War II where the SS troops were trying to breed as many young Nazis as they possibly could, and then to put those babies into the homes of Hitler supporters to raise. The eugenics movement was very large. Hitler was very much in support of eugenics. Yeah, and my understanding is he got that from us,

right? Henry Ford and, uh, Charles Lemberg, I think it was. Yeah. Yeah. It's,

I was, I read the book cast and I recommend people read it. And it's, it's really interesting how, uh, where we, we seem to be at the beginning of so many crises that we cause. Um,

it, it, it's very interesting. And you talk about, um, syphilis, heart disease, We seem to be at the beginning of so many crises that we cause. It's very interesting. And you talk about syphilis, heart disease, and Parkinson's. Let's talk about some of that. When did that start to come together and maybe have an effect on his mental health? The syphilis story is particularly interesting, and we go into that at some length. But I honestly, in the book, debunk syphilis in Hitler his neurological findings were not those of

someone with syphilis there's a particular variety of most severe form general paris's of the insane's the old term for it and he simply did not have the neurological signs for that. He certainly did have coronary artery disease, heart disease. That occurred when he was still in his 40s. And when he was at the Berghoff, he would like to climb up from his Berghoff residence up about 1500 feet to the house that was there. And he would get this crushing chest pain. And there are several examples of him suffering what almost certainly is angina. We don't recognize it as angina. And so he knew something was wrong.

And he was a fairly young man at that point, as I say, in his late 40s. His Parkinson's disease also came on when he was in his 40s, probably about 1933, 1934, where his first sign of Parkinson's disease. And these times are important because even though there was no treatment for coronary artery disease at the time, or no treatment really for Parkinson's disease, this was pre-Eldopa era

so that people would live only eight to ten years typically with a diagnosis of either heart disease or Parkinson's disease. I think that's relevant later on as to why he attacked the Soviet Union in 1941 rather than delay it until they were better prepared for war. There's a famous, I don't know if you've seen the meme where Hitler's shaking with his glasses as he's taking them off. I've always had the perception that it was rage. Maybe the portrayal is that he had Parkinson's. Did he have any of this sort of experience of Parkinson's with the shaking and stuff eventually? Oh, very much so, yes. It began initially in his left hand.

Shortly thereafter, it went to the right side. He was very tremulous in his hands, became very slow, became stooped. His facial expression went rather blank and so there are some videos particularly later in world war ii when the censorship was breaking down and a few videos slipped out of his parkinsonism which i think it's been known for decades that he had Parkinson's disease. Was he aware of that diagnosis or was he just pushing through it and not aware? He eventually was told the diagnosis very late in the game. His doctor, Theodore Murrell, documented in his case history his Parkinson's disease and actually started him on some medicine that may have helped his tremor somewhat.

Yeah. And then he, was he self-medicating that? Was that the reason, I believe he was into speed or meth or there was something, you know, stuff he was taking, I think at the end of his. He was, there were a number of medicines. He was on cocaine, methamphetamine, certainly various barbiturates. So he was taking a host of medicine. There were some 80 medicines that he had taken over a period of years, most by Theodore Morell.

There you go. That sounds like Fridays at my house. No, I'm just kidding. Don't do that. Don't do drugs. This is jokes. These are comedy. So we do on the show.

Don't do anything. Just lead a healthy life and eat salads. And that was interesting because I think he got pretty deep into it where he was pretty much operating on drugs all the time, wasn't he? He was. Morel was abetting this. He was shooting him up with methamphetamine. And then at night when he came down, took the the barbs to slow him up there were times when he was just almost immobile and morel would show up with his hypodermic and give

him a shot and miraculously he would wake up and become very animated again so he became very dependent on theodore morel probably why he kept around. Morell was very poorly thought of as a physician. He really didn't have any specialty, any special training. He was seen as a venereal disease doctor and was brought there for other reasons, for a friend of Adolf Hitler's, Hoffman, his photographer. But they hit up, became friends, and I'm sure they had something to talk about having both served in world war one and so he became his trusted medical advisor so it appears that he kind of starts having a stack of stuff you got ptsd you've got childhood trauma you've got relationship

issues you're mixing cocaine and meth and god knows what, and then you've got Parkinson's disease on top of that. That sounds like a combo for a lot of fun on a Friday night. I'm convinced, Chris, that his poor health impacted his performance, especially later in the war when things were going so badly and he was getting worse in terms of his Parkinson's disease and his heart disease and the medicines were increasing drastically, this had to have affected his behavior and his performance.

Mercifully, it made his performance much worse. And the whole, I mean, I imagine the horror of the monster of him wanting to exterminate Jews and everything else. I mean, I imagine a lot of this played into that. You would think so, yes. And yet he seemed pretty much unfazed by his brutality. I think he was psychopathic in that regard. He just sociopathic,

just did not have good feelings for the empathy, understanding of other people's hurts. Is there a lot of psychopathic that you find, you know, we see this in criminals a lot. You know, their

attitudes towards other human beings and their dismissal of seeing other people as human, sometimes the victimization themselves, a lot of that we see from childhood trauma and different issues in childhood, to me, I believe, emotionally too. Is that something we see in a lot of criminals and the childhood trauma that comes from them? Yes, the psychopaths, sociopaths, very common among criminals. They just don't seem to react in the same way as people who have a conscience.

Is there a connection to how they're raised and the experience they have as children? There has been a lot written about that. I probably should defer to a psychiatrist than a behavioral neurologist on that. I'll ask my psychiatrist when he sees me later today. Okay. There you go. What haven't we touched on that you'd like people to know about the book

that we can tease out some more? I think an interesting question has always been asked by the historians why did germany break the 1939 non-aggression pact with the soviet union and attack in in june of 1941 and there are some arguments that well maybe the the Soviet Union was particularly vulnerable because, after all, Stalin had purged the officer's corps. Yes, that's true. And Germany was finding getting the raw, the resources they needed from the Soviet Union somewhat more difficult. And the U.S. was beginning to rearm and were supplying Great Britain. I think on the other hand, though, when you look at how Germany was prepared,

they didn't even have a full complement of conventional weapons. The wonder weapons, which they eventually developed, they didn't have in 1941. The V1, V2 rockets, the sound-activated torpedoes, the jet bombers, jet planes, These were clearly superior to anything the Allies had. So the question is, what if he waited three, four years before he attacked? Clearly, that was his plan. That's where he was going to have his Lebensraum for the greater German nation. But I think, Chris, it's at least in part because his health became a, it demanded that he attack early. Had he waited until, say, mid-1940s, he wouldn't have survived in all likelihood. He could find out his life expectancy with heart disease and Parkinson's disease.

The German doctors knew that even though they couldn't affect it. So that I think that was a factor, a medical imperative that he start the war early. Of course, he was such a megalomaniac, he didn't think anyone else could lead the war except himself. And if he was able to win the war, then people after him could carry on. And there's a lot of lessons in the attack that he launched on the Soviets. I mean, the timing was horrific. The Soviets didn't have the proper coats to even go fight in a Soviet winter. And then trying to fight in a Soviet winter. I mean, I'm in Utah right now.

I don't go outside during winter. And so that ended up being a huge mistake. And then fighting two fronts, that's a great lesson in war. Having two fronts instead of one. Fighting from both sides and depleting your resources to go from two ways. Very interesting that way. Let me ask you this, because you said a very interesting thing about how maybe he knew that his time was limited, or maybe his Parkinson's would excel to a point that he would become

shaking and having trouble with motor skills and things. Or sometimes, I don't know, maybe you feel like your mind is closing on you and you feel trapped. There's kind of, with that parallel, I don't know how much you study what's going on with Putin, but there's rumors of him having maybe Parkinson's, maybe having cancer, maybe him taking drugs to fight off some sort of malady certainly in his 70s which many men you know start to decline heavily in their health in their 70s um and that megalomaniac connection of trying to make that final dent in the world you know there's people

have talked about how he has this peter the great accession and you know going out with one last big blast or something some sort of weird sort of make your mark on the world a maniacal sort of thing like these fuckers are going to remember you no matter what i don't know well i think certainly that was the case for adolf hitler that he rushed into the war because of the medical imperative and even when he started the war he and his generals disagreed about it Adolf Hitler had a strategy which actually might have worked had he stuck with it there was going to be the northern front and the southern front he was going to encircle the armies he was going to get the northern front and the southern front. He was going to encircle the armies. He was going to get the breadbasket Ukraine and go down and get the oil fields, the fuel, and starve out Moscow.

But his generals wanted to, on Clausewitz's strategy, go take the enemy's capital. And so, uncharacteristically, Adolf Hitler compromised with all three objectives. Leningrad was one that he was also going to do along with the southern attack. And he compromised, but interestingly enough, he had told his closest advisor he was going to cancel that attack on Moscow and just go with the northern and the southern. But something happened then in August and September that took him out of the planning room. He developed two acute gastrointestinal illnesses. The first one was probably a bacterial dysentery, which really laid him low. He had irritable bowel syndrome his whole life. Maybe

that made it worse, but it took him out for about a month as he was recovering from that then he appeared to have a gallbladder attack that took him out for another month as a result he didn't cancel that third attack on Moscow clearly over stretching his army and so I think his GI illnesses even though they were fairly brief had had an impact on that campaign, major impact. Maybe you want to play catch up or maybe you, you know, interesting. You know, there's a parallel there to the Russian, the Ukraine invasion, where they

tried to cut the head off and take the capital and And they stretched their things too far and underestimated horribly what happened. And I think everyone around the world anticipated that they would be able to pull that off within three days, three to five days. And the failure of that has had an impact on the war and how we strategize it. So it's interesting, those similar parallels that you have there. It really is. There are a lot of parallels there. Yeah. I love strategy and war and trying to understand things.

But I think the picture that you paint that's so great in the book is, you know, a lot of people study the strategy of the military and the war with Hitler. But, you know, once you merge that with his maladies and his psychological things and the drugs and the other things that are happening to him, you know, that paints a much bigger picture into the cause and effect of it all. Well, thank you, Chris. That's what I was really trying to do is his medical problems really haven't gotten that much attention. There have been some books written, but mostly they're rather turgid volumes, not accessible by the usual reader. And so I was going to,

I wanted to try to put this in language that was understandable while putting in the history. There's a lot of history there. And I think together it tells a broader story and it, it helps to make more sense of it. Yeah, it definitely does. They give a broader picture. Anything more you'd like to tease out on the book before we go? Only one thing,

uh, Chris, if I, if I may please historians have been afraid to even talk about his illnesses for fear that this would somehow reduce his culpability i don't think there's any reason in the world that it would reduce his culpability his anti-Semitism, his grandiosity, his cruelty, all of these were characteristics that were developed decades before he became physically ill. I think his illnesses impacted his performance, but they didn't cause his cruelty or his anti-Semitism. So I would just like to make sure that no one leaves this thinking that this in any way reduces his culpability for his,

his evil. Yeah. He foisted upon the world. There you go. You know, it's it to me when, when human beings fail, I mean,

there's a lot of different factors, a lot of different switches to be able to get flipped. I'm not sure switches are analogies, but yeah, there's a lot of different factors a lot of different switches maybe they get flipped i'm not sure switches are analogies but yeah there's it's important for us to study these people so that somehow we can maybe find out you know where they turn wrong you know i love collecting stories and learning lifelessness and and interesting on people as to how they go through this pathway or this forest of life and they choose one path or another and it each way they go down takes them through uh some sort something that might turn horrific or something it might turn beautiful or something that you know you never know and that's kind of the way it is but

there certainly seems to be a series of failures that take place that that create these monsters and certainly we'd like not to have as many monsters running around this world anymore if we could absolutely at least that's my policy i'm sick of it let's get rid of the monsters and try and all be better human beings uh so thank you very much for coming on the show tom i really love this stuff i think people really are intrigued by it and uh hopefully we can all just uh build a better world from the knowledge we can learn from it. Well, Chris, thank you so much for asking me to come on the show. You are the best. Thank you.

Well, thank you very much. And you've certainly appealed to my narcissism. Flatter will get you everywhere, sir. Tom, give me your.com so that people can find you on the interroad sleeve. Yes, it's TomHuttonMD.com. There you go. Thank you very much, Tom. Thanks for tuning in. You guys are the most brilliant audience in the world.

See how I played that into that? I'm trying to prove their narcissism as well. It's like, I listen to the Chris Voss Show. Buy your shirts online or whatever. I don't know. There aren't shirts online. Anyway, guys, go to YouTube.com, Goodreads.com, any place you see us on the interwebs or at the book, wherever fine books

are sold, Hitler's Maladies and Their Impact on World War II, a Behavioral Neurologics Neurologics? Neurologist. Neurologist! You know, it's the behavioral part that screws me up. Behavioral Neurologist View.

Available February 28th, 2023, wherever fine books are sold. Learn about this stuff. History is always done. And you probably have a special on the History Channel. They love Hitler. I mean, they don't love Hitler, but they like playing stuff about him. And I think that's what intrigues so many people is trying to figure

out, you know, what the hell went wrong. So there you go. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. And that should have us out, Tom.