Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler

Author:Norman Ohler
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780241256985
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-10-05T13:00:00+00:00

Eva Braun stands in for Leni Riefenstahl in capturing Hitler on film.

But when Eva Braun turned the camera off, the masks fell straight away, and she again started digging her fingernails into her forearm and biting her lips until they bled – while Hitler’s hand shook so much when he was drinking apple tea that the cup rattled on the saucer, embarrassing everyone. As for Morell, he was so run down by now that he could hardly climb a flight of stairs. Admittedly the personal physician found no rest, because everyone needed him. Going to see the fat doctor was part of bon ton. Meanwhile his patients had come to include all the top-ranking officials of the Reich and their allies: he treated Mussolini, who was given the code name ‘Patient D’; industrialists like Alfried Krupp or August Thyssen (fee for treatment 20,000 Reichsmarks114); many Gauleiter and Wehrmacht generals; Leni Riefenstahl, who was given morphine enemas; the SS chief, Himmler; the foreign minister, von Ribbentrop (‘Patient X’, or ‘Rippenshit’, as American Intelligence later nicknamed him); the Minister of Armaments, Albert Speer; the Japanese ambassador, General Hiroshi Oshima; and the wife of Reich Marshal Göring, who had injections on alternate days of ‘Vitamultin forte’ – whatever was hidden behind that label.

More and more influential National Socialists made the pilgrimage to Morell – even if it was only a way of announcing their closeness to Hitler and confirming their own position. Above all, of course, Hitler claimed the time of his personal physician, and Morell, who was himself in poor health by now, complained to the wife of the economics minister, Funk, another patient: ‘At all times of day and night I have to follow the instructions that I get from above. At the moment I drive up to the Führer at noon to possibly give him treatment, and come back to the hotel at almost two o’clock in the afternoon, to lie in bed all day so that I’m able to accompany the Führer again the following day.’ By now Morell was hooked on the needle himself, and his assistant, Dr Weber, had to travel from Berlin to the remote Berghof, as he ‘is the best at giving injections, and the only one guaranteed to find my veins’.115 What Morell was treating himself with is not recorded.

Illnesses, medicines and mass murder define everyday life at the Berghof in the first half of 1944. The bowling alley, still an attraction in the 1930s, was hardly used now. Camouflage nets hung over the famous panoramic window because of the constant fear of air raids; everyone vegetated in an eternal twilight, sitting around, either by a stove on the bench or in expensive armchairs, staring at the dust-gathering Gobelins: vampire-like figures who had a fear of natural light. Even when the sun shone outside, the electric lamps were burning inside. The thick carpets gave off a musty smell.

The supreme commander of the Navy came for the Führer’s fifty-fifth birthday: Grand Admiral Dönitz reported on

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