When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain Read Free

invigorated and full of energy.
    Ernst-Günther Schenck, an SS doctor, grew suspicious of Dr Morell’s miracle cures and managed to acquire one of the packets. When tested in a laboratory, it was found to be amphetamine.
    Hitler was untroubled by what he was given, just so long as the drugs worked. It was not long before he became so dependent on Morell’s ‘cures’ that he placed all his health problems entirely in the doctor’s hands, with disastrous long-term consequences. He directed the invasion of Soviet Russia while being pumped with as many as eighty different drugs, including testosterone, opiates, sedatives and laxatives. According to the doctor’s medical notebooks, he also administered barbiturates, morphine, bull semen and probiotics.
    The most surprising drug that Dr Morell prescribed to the Führer was cocaine. This was occasionally used for medical ailments in 1930s Germany, but always in extremely low dosages and at a concentration of less than one per cent. Morell began administering cocaine to the Führer by means of eye-drops. Aware that Hitler expected to feel better after taking his drugs, he put ten times the amount of cocaine into the drops. Such a concentrated dose may well have triggered the psychotic behaviour that Hitler was to experience in his later years.
    The Führer found cocaine extremely efficacious. According to a cache of medical documents that came to light in America in 2012 (including a forty-seven-page report written by Morell and other doctors who attended the Führer), Hitler soon began to ‘crave’ the drug. It was a clear sign that he was developing a serious addiction. As well as the eye-drops, he now began to snort powdered cocaine ‘to clear his sinuses and soothe his throat’.
    Cocaine may have induced a feeling of well-being but it did nothing to boost the Führer’s lack of sexual drive. To overcome this embarrassing condition, Morell began giving him virility injections. These contained extracts from the prostate glands of young bulls. Morell also prescribed a medicine called Testoviron, a medication derived from testosterone. Hitler would have himself injected before spending the night with Eva Braun.
    The long-term effect of taking such drugs, particularly amphetamines, led to increasingly erratic behaviour. The most visible manifestation of this came at a meeting between Hitler and Mussolini in northern Italy. As Hitler tried to persuade his Italian counterpart not to change sides in the war, he became wildly hysterical. According to Third Reich historian Richard Evans: ‘We can be pretty sure Morell gave some tablets to Hitler when he went to see Mussolini … [he was] completely hyper in every way, talking, gabbling, clearly on speed.’
    As the war drew to a close, Hitler was in very poor health. Dependent on drugs, his arms were so punctured with hypodermic marks that Eva Braun accused Morell of being an ‘injection quack’. He had turned Hitler into an addict. Yet the doctor continued to hero-worship his beloved Führer and remained with him in his Berlin bunker until almost the end.
    Dr Morell was captured by the Americans soon after the fall of the Third Reich and interrogated for more than two years. One of the officers who questioned him was disgusted by his lack of personal hygiene.
    Morell was never charged with war crimes and he died of a stroke in 1948, shortly after his release from prison. He left behind a cache of medical notebooks that reveal the extraordinary drug addiction of his favourite patient.
    It is ironic that the man charged with restoring Hitler to good health probably did more than anyone else to contribute to his decline.

 
    PART II
    Jeez, It’s Cold Out There
    Insurance claims for pets on the Titanic
    who drowned in icy seawater
    ROBERT W. DANIEL

    One pedigree French bulldog named Gamin de Pycombe: $750
    WILLIAM CARTER

    One King Charles Spaniel and one