Hitler’s Hidden Drug Habit; Downton Abbey review – high Hitler, and hang Bates
‘Hitler has only got one ball. / The other is in the Albert Hall.” Not true, I’m afraid. It’s on the kitchen wall? And Göring’s are very small? No, the first line, re: Adolf’s monorchism – a lie, according to a 1945 dossier compiled by the US military based on Hitler’s medical files. “Sexual organs showed no indication of abnormality,” it reads.
Don’t worry, though. Because there’s plenty of other stuff about the Führer’s health and medical characteristics in this dossier and in the journals of his personal physician’s journals, on which this Secret History documentary Hitler’s Hidden Drug Habit is based, that shows tons of abnormality.
He had constant stomach cramps due to a vegetarian diet mainly consisting of beans, which had to be mashed up because of his rotting teeth. The beanz did their traditional thing (meanz flatulenz) too, of course; he may not have had any children (officially), or grandchildren, but he was a farter, and a gross farter, certainly not someone you’d want to be bunked up in a bunker with. Especially with the chronic halitosis as well. Mustard Gas Breath they (possibly) called him behind his back, because that was the only safe place to be. Poor Eva Braun, anyway.
Oh, and his stool, described in the medical records as “dirty grey-brown, very thin and mushy”. That’s not the stool of the leader of a master race, for whom bravura, confidence and youthful vigour was so central, is it?
So Hitler got himself this personal physician, Theodor Morell, whose journals are being seen here on British television for the first time. Morell was dodgy; not just a greedy opportunist and a chancer, but a quack and charlatan. He believed the cause of his master’s mushy grey stool was bad bacteria, and the cure was good bacteria from the gut of a healthy person. Which was extracted from the faeces of healthy young German soldiers (the Turd Reich). To be crude about it, eat scheisse, Herr Hitler.
Which Hitler did, and declared that it worked. Morrel had cured him and in doing so, gained the ear and the trust of the most powerful man in the world. He also applied leeches to the temples of the man he came to know as “Patient A”, and injected extract of bull semen to boost his testosterone levels (often before he was to see Eva at their Alpine residence, the Berghof, and perhaps before a major offensive such as the invasion of Poland). And he prescribed drugs. So many drugs. There were drugs to make Hitler go to sleep and other drugs to make him wake up again, downers and uppers, barbiturates and amphetamines, other artificial stimulants that act on the nervous system and induce seizures, glucose injections and morphine based painkillers for the stomach cramps. Heroin, basically. Crystal meth, too, which was actually used by millions of German soldiers, factory workers and housewives to help get them through the hardship of wartime Germany. Hitler wasn’t just breaking wind, he was breaking bad, all over Europe. The junk flowed through his veins as the Junkers flew overhead. Heil Begbie, basically.
Hardly surprising, then, that the Führer once ranted at Mussolini for two hours without stopping – he was whizzing off his Nazi tits; and that his left hand shook behind his back as he pinched the cherubic cheeks of young blond boys with his right; and that electrocardiograms in the files hint at coronary artery disease.
But also, given what Morell was putting into his patient, and that his close association – here he is in so much footage, sharing a joke at the signing of the surrender agreement for France, or partying among the inner circle at the Berghof (even though Eva wasn’t keen, apparently) – coincided with Hitler’s quest for world domination, it makes you wonder how much this relatively unknown quack has to answer for. Worrying and fascinating, and worryingly fascinating.
[H/T The Guardian]