Physician Extraordinary

by Revilo P. Oliver

I HAVE JUST RECEIVED a copy of a book that I overlooked for years, although it should have particularly attracted my attention. It is Adolf Hitler: the Medical Diaries, the Private Diaries of Dr. Theo Morell, edited by David Irving (London, Sidgwick & Jackson, s.a., [c. 1983?]).

In 1970-1971 I was concerned in an effort, on behalf of Dr. Röhrs, whose work I shall mention below, to locate Morell’s diaries in the labyrinthine archives of expropriated German material in Washington, D.C. The attempt was unsuccessful, and I was inclined to suspect, it seems unjustly, that the diaries were being intentionally kept secret.

The eminent historian, David Irving, was more fortunate. The diaries, which he had long sought in vain, were found in the files of the notorious Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (often called “Phew!”) in 1981 and finally sent to the National Archives.

The diaries are evidence in an important historical problem which, I am sorry to say, Mr. Irving has not directly confronted, and I am not sure whether his opinion is to be deduced from what he does not say.

When Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, he was a man of forty-three, and had survived experiences that permanently impair or ruin the health of many men. He had undergone great privations in his youth and early manhood; had been gassed and severely wounded in the First World War, in which he exhibited such courage that he, although only a corporal, was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. (1) And for eleven years he had dedicated himself to an arduous task that alone suffices to break the health of lesser men. (2) He converted a tiny group of assorted malcontents into a political party that won power with the ardent support of the overwhelming majority of the German people. That required not only political genius and the indefinable force of personality that we call charisma, but extraordinary powers of physical stamina, nervous energy, and mental vitality.

(1. A summary account of Hitler’s career can be found in any work of reference, e.g., the Columbia Encyclopaedia (the most complete work of its kind in one volume), and you will have no difficulty in seeing through the covering layer of Jewish slime that is mandatory in all publications that are intended for general sale to the misinformed public. There are innumerable works devoted to him alone. You will, of course, disregard the output of professional liars, such as Rauschnig’s Voice of Destruction, and Yiddish forgeries, such as “Thyssen’s” I Paid Hitler, but when you come to books written by men who were associated with Hitler, you must make careful allowance for the author’s natural self-interest, for what he felt obliged to say to avert persecution or murder, and finally for what was dictated by his timorous publisher to avoid boycott or ruin. I can think of no more concise an antidote to prevalent lies than the memorial issue of Liberty Bell dated 20 April 1989.)

(2. An acquaintance of mine was a close friend of the founder of one of the many ephemeral efforts to organize a popular movement that would make the United States again an independent nation; he quotes his friend as saying, “When I began, I did not consider myself even middle-aged [in his middle forties]; when I quit, four years later, I was an old man.”)

When Hitler came to power, he seemed to be, and probably was, in excellent physical health, and of his abundant nervous and intellectual energy there can be no doubt.

Although he bore a crushing and terrible burden of responsibility while he made a great, but impoverished and crippled, nation again prosperous and strong, although World Jewry, with its unappeasable hatred of our race, had immediately declared war on it, and bore an even greater burden after the world’s vampires succeeded in forcing on Germany a war against nations that were certainly more wealthy and apparently more powerful, there is no sure evidence that Hitler’s vitality was seriously impaired before July 1941, when, while visiting the Eastern Front, he contracted a contagious disease that is not infrequently lethal, producing prolonged and violent dysentery, persistent fever, nausea, occasional periods of fainting and temporary unconsciousness, physical prostration, and, it appears, coronary sclerosis. (3)

(3. The fatal timing of this virulent infection naturally arouses suspicion. None of the poisons in common use would produce the recorded symptoms, and while my very limited knowledge of toxicology does not extend to the more recherch‚, much less to the secret, poisons, I doubt that any pharmakon could have been the cause. If you are unwilling to accept the infection as a disastrous coincidence, you should think of the possible introduction of deadly bacteria in food as a means of disabling and possibly killing Hitler. Although it seems to have occurred to no one, the possibility that Hitler was the victim of an attempted bacteriological assassination should not be dismissed out of hand. The Courrier du Continent, September 1990, reports an article in Figaro by Mondher Sfar, an honest and courageous Jew, who knows that the “Holocaust” is just a gigantic hoax by the Zionist part of his race, and that the “gas chambers” were only containers for disinfecting the clothing of persons confined in the concentration camps. He cites the “Mitkiewicz Report” of 7 September 1943 as proof that a favorite weapon of the underground resistance to the German army of occupation in Poland was the use of the germs of typhus to contaminate anything that would come into the possession of the Germans, who, incidentally, were protecting Jews from Polish vengeance. (This underground consisted chiefly of Jews, many of whom had an inherited or acquired immunity to the dire disease, which was endemic among the Jews in Poland; see the article by Friedrich Paul Berg in Liberty Bell, May 1989. They could thus handle the germs of typhus with some confidence of impunity.) This proves the practice of bacteriological warfare in Poland, close to the Eastern Front that Hitler visited, and infections other than typhus could have been used for special efforts, perhaps seconded by German traitors, such as those which later attempted an assassination by planting a bomb near him. So far as I know, the disease that struck down Hitler could have been one of the several varieties of typhus. All varieties, if I am correctly informed, are caused by rickettsia (a peculiar kind of very minute bacteria), which in Poland was carried by the cherished body lice of which the heartless Germans so ruthlessly deprived the Jews and filthy Poles who had raised them on their unwashed bodies. The symptoms of typhus vary so widely in individual cases that no sure deduction can be drawn from Dr. Morell’s record, assuming that it is accurate. On the treatment of cases of typhus by German physicians, see the article (really a booklet) by Mr. Berg in Liberty Bell and his earlier article in the Journal for Historical Review, September 1986.)

Hitler was thus prostrated at the most critical juncture in the war, and he was unable to overrule and control his generals about the strategy to be employed in the thus-far victorious war against the Soviet Empire. It is quite likely that Göring was right in his belief that had Hitler’s original strategy been followed, “the eastern campaign would have been decided by early 1942 at the latest.” It would be one of history’s greatest ironies, if microscopic bacteria were responsible for the catastrophe that may have doomed our race and civilization.

From that infection, Hitler never fully recovered, and it at least contributed to recurrent maladies that occasionally prostrated him thereafter. His physique was shattered by the dastardly attempt to murder him on 20 July 1944, made by a pack of infamous traitors who are now honored as heroes by the pack of traitors that now misgovern the two thirds of Germany that were recently reunited. The injuries that he received were more serious than the public was permitted to know at the time, and from these also he never fully recovered.

To men who knew him in 1940 and 1941, Hitler appeared remarkably younger than his years; in the later part of 1944 he was a prematurely old man. According to Naval Captain Assmann, “The rot…set in on the 20th of July.” In his last days, Hitler was, in Irving’s summary, “a nervous ruin…a physical wreck who could barely walk, doing so with a stooped back and shuffling gait, his right leg dragging, his head shaking, and his left hand violently trembling on the limply dragging arm.” That he retained, at least at moments, his old lucidity is proved by the “testament” in which he, shortly before his death, warned the American people of the consequences of their crime against civilization. They, however, do not even honor him as a prophet.

This record inevitably raises the question to what extent Hitler’s physicians contributed to, or even caused, the rapid deterioration of his health and vitality. And that question focuses attention on Hitler’s favorite and personal physician, Dr. Theodore Morell. Captain Assmann, whom I quoted above, went on to say that “the rot…was made only worse by the questionable treatments and methods of Dr. Morell.”

The Captain, who had accompanied Hitler and, with him, survived the traitor’s bomb, was not a physician, but his opinion was shared by all of the physicians who treated Hitler during the war, and a group of them went to Hitler and emphatically warned him that Morell’s drugs were destroying him physically and perhaps mentally. The unexpected result was that Hitler affirmed his unlimited confidence in Morell and dismissed his critics, almost ruining some of them.

Unfortunately for our inquiry, the man best qualified to criticize Morell’s medication of Hitler, Professor Dr. Karl Brandt, was murdered by the Americans. His assistant and colleague, Dr. Hasselbach, survived the furor Americanus, but seems to have written no medical critique of Morell’s methods, although he, while admitting Morell’s success in curing nervous complaints, charged that “in many cases he [Morell] suggested to patients that they were suffering from a serious malady which he then successfully cured.” Professor Erwin Giesing, who tended Hitler immediately after the bomb plot and was close to him for two years, was alienated by what seemed to him Hitler’s unfair and irrational reaction to his concern and rather courageous attempt to warn Hitler against a favorite whom he regarded as a quack. (Hitler, in fact, accused the worried physicians of jealousy of Morell and professional dishonesty in intriguing to take his place.) He wrote, however, in an unpublished manuscript that Mr. Irving used, that “Morell converted the largely healthy man that Hitler had earlier been into one constantly plied with injections and fed with tablets which made Hitler more or less dependent on him; he played on Hitler’s neuropathic nature by spouting utter rubbish about how Hitler’s extremely heavy work load meant he was burning energy at the same rate as people in the tropics, and that the lost energy had to be replaced by all sorts of injections like iodine, vitamins, calcium, heart-and liver-extract, and hormones.”

The simplest question is one that commonly arises when celebrities in the theatre or arts die prematurely. One remembers that the actress called Marilyn Monroe, whose aspirations to become a Mrs. Kennedy were terminated by her sudden and mysterious death, had been treated by two physicians (one also a psychiatrist), who gave their patient potent drugs, one of which produced effects that were precisely antithetical to the effects of the other, thus naturally causing physical and nervous stresses that gravely affected her health and may have destroyed her emotional stability. More recently the death of an attractive though gullible actress has been imputed, in part, at least, to the work of her physicians.

A problem in medical ethics is presented by “society doctors,” who are often accused of pleasing the patient and perhaps multiplying treatments, even at the expense of his welfare. The accusations are sometimes, perhaps often, justified.

It was in the later 1950s, as I recall, that I met by chance a former student of mine, and when we had cocktails and dinner together, he was lavish in praise of his physician, who, he said, was a prominent “society doctor” and always made him “feel good.” I learned that whenever the man felt less than buoyant, he went to the physician, who gave him an hypodermic injection of cortisone (or could it have been coritsol?). If you are a physician, I need say no more. If you are not, I will add that while cortisone, by accelerating the metabolism of carbohydrates and fats, does produce a sense of euphoria, when a healthy man receives frequent injections of cortisone, the almost invariable result, according to my medical friends, is deterioration of both kidneys and liver, which may trigger a wide variety of diseases. (4) The man died about ten years later, but I did not learn the cause of his decease.

(4. Furthermore, all corticosteroids are believed temporarily to inhibit or suppress the body’s natural immune system.)

Morell was undoubtedly a very popular and prosperous “society doctor,” and proprietor of two profitable pharmaceutical plants, when he became Hitler’s personal physician and began almost constant attendance on him. (5) He was undeniably an aficionado of hypodermic syringes, and he continually injected his illustrious patient, sometimes daily, with glucose and a multitude of other drugs. In an appendix, Mr. Irving lists and briefly describes the physiological effects of the seventy-three drugs which Morell administered to Hitler in 1941-1945, according to Morell’s records. (6)

(5. The immediate occasion was Hitler’s frequent cases of nervous indigestion, which he himself sensibly recognized as probably caused by tension and worry. (A physician to whom I once mentioned the cases of Darwin, Carlyle, and perhaps one or two others, remarked, “Nervous indigestion is the occupational disease of men who work intensively with their brains, particularly if they do not take sufficient pleasurable exercise while excluding intellectual problems from their consciousness.”) Hitler was also suffering from eczema, which, too, is sometimes of psychosomatic origin. Morell undertook to cure him of both within a year. Hitler thought that he did, and was accordingly grateful to him, even while his own health was constantly declining.)

(6. The list strangely omits strychnine and atropine, perhaps because their effects are so well known, or perhaps because Irving relied on a Dr. Schmidt, who seems to have pronounced them harmless (in small doses). The list includes a drug called ‘Cortiron,’ which Morell gave by hypodermic “a few times.” I suspect that it may have been a corticosteroid, but do not know. Irving also notes that Morell often injected Hitler with a drug of unknown composition, called “Vitamultin-forte” in his records, presumably vitamins plus unnamed ingredients, but he does not speculate about what these may have been. Part of the compound could have been ‘Pervitin’; cf. Note 7 infra.)

Mr. Irving concluded that “Many of Morell’s medicines were quite harmless, and he injected the others in such minute quantities [i.e., the comparatively small doses recorded in the diary] they would have been virtually useless.” This despite the fact that one of these drugs, a sulphonamide (sulphamethylthiazol), manufactured by a Jewish pharmaceutical firm in Budapest in which Morell had a proprietary interest, was known as early as 1940 to damage the kidneys and nervous system, but Morell nevertheless administered it lavishly to all his patients, including Hitler, even for common colds, presumably hoping that its deleterious effects would be mitigated by a high intake of liquids. In this one instance, indeed, Hitler perceived how adversely the drug affected him and refused to take any more of it.

Granting that the drugs listed in the diary were not likely to harm at any one time in the small doses Morell records, routine administration of some of them very frequently and sometimes daily could have produced a cumulatively adverse physiological effect as well as a psychologically deleterious dependence on them. Mr. Irving seems to accept Morell’s clinical diary as an authentic record, although he notes that Morell compiled it and multiplied copies of if for use to defend himself, if he should be accused of misconduct. If Morell did dose Hitler with a noxious drug called ‘Pervitin’ (7) as Captain Assmann suspected, he would naturally have refrained from noting it in a record he was keeping to justify himself in a possible investigation.

(7. ‘Pervitin’ was the trade name of a stimulant similar to amphetamine; it was highly addictive and was found to cause serious and permanent damage, and was classified as one of the dangerous narcotics of which the use in Germany was restricted by law in 1941.)

The question is complicated by Morell’s personal traits. He had mastered the art of ingratiating himself with his patients and impressing them with the profundity of his iatric expertise, but he was personally unprepossessing, especially to Aryan eyes. He persistently denied, perhaps truthfully, that he was a Jew. (8) He had a swarthy complexion, was corpulent and even obese, and was a glutton who “ate like a pig.” He was timorous, and when Hitler traveled by air, his physician remained on the ground; that was how Drs. Brandt and Hasselbach, who were Hitler’s medical escorts, acquired their knowledge of him as a patient. (9)

(8. What the Americans did to Morell when he fell into their bloody hands is not evidence. Eichmann, whom God’s terrorists kidnapped in Argentina to show their contempt for Aryan governments and Aryan law, taken to the Holy Land, and eventually murdered to advertise their Holohoax, was almost certainly a Jew. The Chosen never hesitate to sacrifice members of their own race for the “good of the Jewish people,” and, of course, they have only contempt for their White tools, scrapping them as soon as they are no longer useful. Morell had many wealthy Jewish patients, some of whom he continued to treat for years after he became Hitler’s physician, and when he was first launched on his successful career in Berlin, he purchased a villa at Heringsdorf, a spa so infested with the Yids that Aryans shunned it. Neither of these facts is probative; they can be explained as natural in a “society doctor,” moderately wealthy by marriage and determined to become more wealthy professionally.)

(9. Dr. Giesing, an ophthalmologist and otologist, was the specialist who treated Hitler for injuries caused by the assassins’ bomb.)

Morell was a basically vulgar man. His childish vanity made him design for himself a polychrome uniform that would have won applause on the stage of a comic opera, and he was aggrieved when the Schutzstaffel would not permit him to adorn it with its proud symbol, the fulgurant SS. It was also vanity, no doubt, that made him the possessor of Germany’s only electron microscope, which he never used and probably did not know how to use.

He was mercenary, perhaps avaricious. He used his illustrious patient to force on the German army the doubtless salubrious vitamins manufactured by one of his pharmaceutical plants, (10) a drug that he falsely described as the equal of penicillin, and a worthless insecticide, manufactured in enormous amounts in a factory commandeered and given to Morell at Hitler’s order. (11) And Dr. Brandt, before the Americans murdered him, described Morell as a “greedy business man, not a physician,” and reported that Morell had proposed to send patients to him for surgical operations and mutual profit; although the practice is now common in the United States, Dr. Brandt thought it unethical and indignantly refused.

(10. He sold these vitamins, which contained ascorbic acid obtained from the Wehrmacht’s strategic reserves and lemon juice, probably from the same source, to the troops by the billion. On 23 January 1944, for example, his plant was working on orders for 460,000,000 vitaminic lozenges; on 29 April of that year, it was filling orders for 696,164,616 lozenges.)

(11. The exasperated Wehrmacht seems to have arranged for an empirical test of the marvelous and sickeningly malodorous insecticide; lice were confined in a box of the insecticide: “after twenty-four hours, the lice crawled out in rollicking spirits.”)

It will be obvious that if Morell was not a Sheeny, he certainly resembled one in both personality and conduct; he was the kind of individual whom healthy Aryans instinctively dislike and contemn. That fact must be taken into account in any sincere effort to judge him as Hitler’s physician.

It cannot be denied that Morell, quite apart from his success with psychosomatic patients, did effect genuine cures, largely because he was willing to employ new therapeutic agents, such as vitamins, (12) especially if they were manufactured by one of his pharmaceutical plants. It is also undeniable that Morell often behaved as a quack.

(12. I do not know what was the general attitude toward vitamins among German physicians at this time, except that Göring’s physician, Dr. Erich Hippke, knew how much of vitamins B and C were needed to meet an adult’s daily requirements. That suggests that the efficacy of vitamins was recognized in Germany. At about the same time, the American Medical Association was engaged in a campaign to laugh away the use of vitamins as a silly fad sponsored by crackpots to the detriment of the medical profession, since the useless substances could unfortunately be bought without a prescription. I remember that an honest and competent physician, whom I liked, was taken in by the Association’s propaganda, which ridiculed the notion that foodstuffs could affect health. He assured me that all one needed to do was eat in restaurants, all of which served balanced meals, planned by expert dieticians. He was taken aback when I asked him about lemons and scurvy.)

I think we must concede that Morell’s medical services were highly deleterious to his great patient. Mr. Irving twice remarks (pp. 140, 213) that on the rare occasions when Morell was ill or otherwise unable to attend Hitler, “his patient’s health seemed to improve quite rapidly.” Hitler, unfortunately, seems not to have drawn the inevitable inference from the fact that “as soon as Morell ceased visiting, Hitler’s health improved.”

Morell’s ascendancy over Hitler from the first until shortly before the end, (13) seems inexplicable, even when we know that the wily physician was wont to lecture Hitler on the magnitude of his burden of responsibility, and to avow that he, Morell, was the only physician in the world who understood the physical consequences of that burden and could enable Hitler to bear them. He even had the effrontery to claim that, but for him, Germany would have been finished in the first years of the war!

(13. When Hitler bade Morell to be gone, he was probably angered by the man’s pavidity. Morell eagerly availed himself of the opportunity to escape from the bunker under Berlin and was flown to a place of temporary safety. He probably regretted his escape after he fell into the hands of the Americans.)

Hitler was certainly not a fool, although he was often uncritically indulgent toward men whom he esteemed and in whom he had confidence, and, as an Aryan, felt an obligation of gratitude and loyalty to men who seemed (e.g., Admiral Canaris!) loyal and devoted to him. But how can he have failed to be repelled by Morell’s shameless vaunts? That, it seems to me, can be explained only as a continuation of the almost total ascendancy over Hitler that Morell established from the very first.

Disregarding the unverifiable report that Morell was a friend of Professor Haushofer, the friend and teacher of Rudolph Hess, and that Hitler thus knew him and accepted him as a patriotic German in the 1920s, long before he first became Morell’s patient in the later 1930s, that ascendancy, it seems to me, can be explained only by Morell’s early success in alleviating Hitler’s nervous indigestion and his unorthodox medication, which, although medically certain to be eventually disastrous, gave his patient a temporary surge of energy when he was weary, calmed him when he was anxious, and induced euphoria when he was worried. I think of the former student whom I mentioned above and his virtual addiction to cortisone. (14)

(14. Mr. Irving speaks of Hitler’s willingness to accept such unorthodox medication as connected with his general scepticism about the competence of professionals. He does not observe that when Hitler insisted on strategy that petrified the veteran generals of the Army, he was invariably right and the professionals were proved wrong. The one exception is not, strictly speaking, a question of military strategy. He certainly made an enormous and fatal blunder when he chivalrously permitted the shattered British army to escape from Dunkirk, and we in retrospect can see that at that point he lost the war (given, of course, the sequence of future events that were, at that time, unpredictable). Why he did so is less commonly understood. His knowledge of Britain had been almost entirely derived from English culture (literature, art, philosophy, science) and British history (i.e., what Britain had been in the past). Even that knowledge was severely limited because he did not read fluently or at all the requisite languages (English, French, Latin) and had never resided in England. (Although it is not applicable here, please note the distinction between residence and travel; mere travel in a foreign country, even if extensive, will not significantly augment your knowledge of it, and is quite likely to distort it.) With the exception of persons who have resided for some years in a foreign country, whether England or Arabia or Japan, and have paid close attention to quotidian events, especially in the behavior of its government (and that excludes most men who, for example, may have lectured at Oxford or been consultants on electronic equipment in Germany), our conception of a foreign country depends, first of all, on our knowledge of its culture and history (both largely of the past, and possibly obsolete now), and that in turn may well depend on our linguistic instinct; e.g., we have a preference either for languages that are analytical and only rarely form compounds (English, French, Latin) or languages that are synthetic and more or less freely admit compounds (German, Greek, Sanskrit). And even an extensive knowledge of a nation’s culture and history is not likely to disclose the extent of covert Jewish sabotage in either past or present. These facts must be taken into consideration before we judge Hitler for his fatal blunder.)

That Morell’s medication at least contributed greatly to, if it was not the primary cause of, the deterioration of Hitler’s health seems certain.

That poses the question whether he did so as a quack or deliberately as an enemy agent. That, astonishingly, is a question that Mr. Irving ignores, unless we are to assume that his silence is to be taken as a rejection of any suggestion of Morell’s guilt.

The historian’s evasion of the crucial question is the more astonishing since he cannot but have been aware of the impressive and medically explicit book by Dr. Hans-Dietrich Röhrs, who, as one of the last living members of the Reichsgesundheitsfhrung, undertook to establish what he regarded as an historically certain fact in his Hitler, die Zerstörung einer Persönlichkeit (Nekargemnd, Vowinckel, 1965), of which the second edition appeared under the title Hitler’s Krankheit (ibid., 1966). The first of these was translated into French, Portuguese, and perhaps other languages at the time, but no English translation has thus far appeared.

Hitler bore the awful responsibility of commanding the last great effort to save our race and civilization from the crazed members of that race who were determined to destroy both, and it is admittedly difficult, almost impossible, to estimate the effects of that burden on a conscientious and resolute man, but Dr. Röhrs, an eminent physician of long experience, on the basis of careful consideration of the slow alteration of Hitler’s health and personality, compared with the known effects of ‘Pervitin’ and similar narcotics, came to the conclusion that Morell deliberately and with malice prepense gradually poisoned Hitler to cause the defeat of Germany and of all that depended on that nation. The book will, I think, convince any objective reader that Dr. Röhrs’ conclusions must be taken into account.

I am equally astonished that Mr. Irving simply ignores another fact which can be variously explained, but cannot be simply disregarded by an historian.

Morell, as I have said, escaped from the bunker under Berlin, but he fell into the hands of the Americans, who not only subjected him to brutal interrogations, but tortured him atrociously. He was eventually imprisoned in Dachau, which is infamous, not for what the Germans are said to have done to Jews, but for what Americans there did to Germans. He said that, among other things, they pulled out his toenails, one by one. We may hope, of course, that the torturer was not an American, but one of the innumerable Sheenies in American uniforms and with commissioned rank that the Americans loosed on the German people, but we cannot be sure of that. After all, the Americans were engaged in a holy war for the holy people, and they normally lose all contact with humanity when they have been pumped up with righteousness.

Mr. Irving has seen the records of the interrogations to which Morell was subjected, and he must know that, according to reports which have never been questioned, Morell, when first arrested, averred that he loved Jews and that he had “deliberately poisoned” and destroyed Hitler with his drugs to procure the defeat of Germany.

Now, needless to say, that confession could be only a frightened man’s attempt to ingratiate himself with captors whose savagery he may have already suspected. And it is also possible that the atrocious tortures to which he was later subjected were attempts to elicit from him confessions that would implicate prominent Germans, defile the memory of the dead and traduce the living, whom the Americans intended to murder after an obscene parody of a trial to establish the legal rule that the comfort and whims of God’s People are divine law that supersedes all human laws, ethics, and even decency. (15)

(15. They may have wished to implicate all the Germans mentioned in Major Enloe’s article, which I mention below. Morell would doubtless have obliged, but, terrorized and apparently seriously ill, he would have been unable to invent plausible perjury about matters of which he knew nothing. The confession, whether true of false, gave rise to absurd stories. The New York Times 24 May 1945, reported from Flensburg that Morell had helped Hitler commit suicide by injecting him with a lethal drug, and had then, with the aid of Hitler’s adjutant, secretly buried the body. Of course, when Hitler died, Morell had run as far away as he could.)

Mr. Irving must have known of this purported confession. His silence is astounding, the more because he does know that Major Cortez Enloe of American Military Intelligence contributed to Collier’s, one of the two leading and most widely circulated weekly magazines, an article, published in the issue for 4 May 1946, in which he stated that “there is some evidence that Himmler, the Gestapo chief, Martin Bormann, Hitler’s executive officers, and the ill-famed Dr. Morell conspired in a plot slowly to poison the Führer…It is certain that the daily dose of drugs hastened the collapse of Hitler’s personality.”

If we are Aryans and uninfected by the lofty idealism of Bushy and his kind, we must feel, as does Mr. Irving, compassion for Morell. When his wife was finally permitted to see him for a few moments, under the supervision of two uniformed thugs who enjoyed insulting and mocking her, he was no longer sane and could only repeat over and over again that he thought her dead. Mr. Irving plausibly suggests that he had been subjected to one of the Americans’ favorite amusements. The prisoner was forced to listen, sometimes for hours, to piercing screams from the adjoining room, which, he was told, were the cries of his wife as she was being tortured and finally killed because he would not give them information he did not have — or just because they wanted some fun to relieve the monotony of their days.

Morell was no longer rational, could no longer read or write, could not speak intelligibly, and was partly paralysed when the Americans decided it wasn’t worthwhile to murder him, as they murdered a number of German physicians to create an atrocity story for the boobs back home. They simply dumped him in the waiting room of the railway station in Munich. He was eventually taken by a compassionate woman to the hospital in Tegernsee, where the human wreck ceased to live on 26 May 1948. (16)

(16. Note that if Morell’s condition after his release is correctly reported by Irving, that invalidates one point in Dr. Röhrs’ position: if a document submitted in Morell’s name from Tegernsee contains a statement or intimation that he deserved gratitude for having poisoned and destroyed Hitler, he cannot have been capable of making such a statement rationally. It also casts doubt on the purported interview with him published in the New York Times, 22 May 1945, according to which he denied such guilt but was paradoxically terrified because “the Gestapo, the SS, and Heinrich Himmler were out to get him.”)

We pity him, but there remains the confession, which might, after all, have been true, (17) and the record that Dr. Röhrs studied.

(17. The callous disposal of Morell does not indicate anything about the accuracy of the confession. Righteous idealists, unlike the wicked “Nazis,” never feel obligation or gratitude to their servants and simply scrap the tools when they are no longer useful. — Not all Americans were dehumanized. I am reliably informed that a certain Colonel Philby was at least human enough to be attracted by one of the prisoners, the famous German aviatrix, Hanna Reitsch, and to have wished to win her regard. He secretly showed her the text of Morell’s confession, and agreed to her suggestion that it should be submitted, under a seal of absolute secrecy for a century, to a committee of physicians competent to judge its accuracy. She said that he made that suggestion to the commander of the prison and immediately disappeared, having presumably been courtmartialed for his indiscretion or humanity. Furthermore, Professor Robert Kempner, a Jew who was one of the “prosecutors” who performed in the obscene farce that preceded the murders at Nuremberg, is said to have affirmed, as from official knowledge, that Morell deliberately drugged Hitler with ‘Pervitin’ and made him addicted to that and other narcotics, and furthermore injected massive doses of dextrose to darken his powers of judgment disastrously. I have not seen a copy of Kempner’s Das dritte Reich auf der Anklangebank, which may contain that statement.)

Dr. Röhr’s conclusions receive some substantiation from Morell’s known connections. His closest friend was a gynaecologist named Dr. Wohlgemuth, who was eventually discovered to have been a member of the famous Communist espionage and murder organization, “Die rote Kapelle,” and who somehow inherited Morell’s office on Kurfrstendamm. Morell’s friend and chief chemist at his pharmaceutical plant in Olmtz, Dr. Kurt Mulli, was identified, as Mr. Irving does not tell us, as a Communist (Jewish?) agent and accomplice in the escape of Dr. Otto John in 1954. A scrutiny of Morell’s circle of associates would probably reveal other connections. There is finally the consideration that Morell, even if a cynical quack, was sufficiently competent in medicine to know what effects his drugs would have on Hitler. Even if he did not administer ‘Pervitin’ or a similar drug in his unexplained “Vitamultin-forte,” he must have known the probable consequences of injecting a man with glucose and “harmless” drugs every day.

I do not affirm that Dr. Röhrs is correct. As I have said, every datum can be explained in more than one way. Morell’s diary may be either an accurate clinical record or precisely what a scoundrel or traitor would prepare as evidence of his innocence. The disease that struck down Hitler in July 1941, whether contracted by accident or murderously induced, may have inflicted damage that no therapeutic art could repair, or it may have given Morell an opportunity to intensify and prolong its effects, and thus to begin the destruction of Hitler’s body and mind in earnest. The same is true of the attempted assassination in July 1944, its effects augmented by the traumatic discovery of treason among his closest and most trusted associates, and the horror of having seen loyal friends horribly mutilated and dead or dying.

Dr. Röhrs, however, is a man of distinction and courage, and his work will impress you with his knowledge of pathology and his absolute honesty in his analysis of the record, whether or not he is right. I have written now because I want you to be aware of an important historical question, and, if you have read or will read Mr. Irving’s book, I urge you also to read the book by Dr. Röhrs that he so strangely fails to mention.

* * *

Source: Liberty Bell magazine, January 1991