Weblog von Hans-Wolfgang

DOCTORS OF DOOM

As the 20th century progressed, the numbers of unhinged medics seemed to rise dramatically, and by World War II we appeared to be in the mad house. Dr Marcel Petiot managed to despatch at least 27 people at his house in Paris, between 1939-45. He admitted killing a further 36 ‘Gestapo collaborators’ (a strange claim, as almost all his victims were Jews) when the police arrived to discover the remains in his clogged-up basement furnace. But Nazi Europe was the medical madman’s paradise.

Dr Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’ at Auschwitz, is too big a horror. Like his crazed colleague, Dr Sigmund Rascher, who froze people to death and liquidised their brains in his altitude chambers at Dachau, Mengele had the blessing of the State in the enthusiasm of his boss, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler.

Himmler, a failed chicken farmer and would-be homeopathic herbalist (every concentration camp had to have a herb garden), was in awe of medics. He used them to serve all of his wild theories about race. Noses were measured, the statistics of Jewish skulls catalogued, and new strains of drugs and plants were sought with which to ethnically ‘cleanse’ the empire for his beloved Führer. Like Hitler, Himmler was a non-smoking teetotaller with an avid interest in vegetarianism and medical science. A sufferer throughout his life from stomach cramps and other psychosomatic illnesses, he would daily confide in his own physician and masseur, Felix Kersten. He would tell the increasingly worried physiotherapist of his wild medical theories and plans for mass-sterilization, of returning the people of the Reich to the old morals and folk medicine of some mythic past, a past which existed only in Himmler’s close-cropped skull.

Cigarettes were frowned upon by the Nazis – and even forbidden in the Luftwaffe – but that versatile vegetarian standby, the Soya bean, (commonly regarded in the SS as ‘Nazi beans’), along with wholemeal bread, was extolled. And long before the fitness-crazy Yuppies of the 1980s discovered Perrier water, the Death’s Head legions of the Third Reich drank gallons of sparkling aqua vita. Almost all the production of mineral water in occupied Europe from the mid-1930s to the end of the war was directly controlled by the SS. However, anyone gullible enough to revise their opinion of Nazi Germany’s contribution to the history of public health should consider how the architect of the Final Solution dealt with his own well-being – and in particular the way this steered the careers of the Führer’s personal physicians.

Morell had obtained sulphanilamide from Hungary, and felt confident that an injection could restore the Nazi lensman’s health. To Hoffman’s undying gratitude, the jab had a totally recuperative effect. Hitler had a lot of time for his photographer; his opinions on art were well regarded and he put the Führer in touch with Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law, Frau Winifred Wagner, and introduced him to the love of his life, Eva Braun.

On their innumerable journeys to art galleries in Hoffman’s car, the photographer took every opportunity to extol Dr Morell’s medical prowess. Adolf Hitler, non-smoker, vegetarian and tee-totaller, never considered himself to be the healthiest of men. Eventually he invited Morell to the Berghof at Obersalzberg to give him a full medical examination.

Morell immediately knew he had the best meal-ticket in the Reich. His diagnosis was that Hitler’s nervous and digestive system was exhausted, and he recommended a 12 month course of phosphorous, dextrose, hormones and vitamins. Most of these treatments would be given via Morell’s favourite method – injection. Hitler was impressed: "I shall follow his prescriptions to the letter," he said. Within weeks of the first injections, Hitler developed a nasty rash, but as this subsided he claimed that his health was unmistakably improving. Morell could do no wrong.

This did not go down well with Hitler’s existing personal physician, Dr Karl Brandt. Brandt had come into the Führer’s circle two years earlier in August 1933, when Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, and his adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner, were involved in a car crash. Dr Brandt was 29, not long out of medical school, yet his treatment of the patients filled Hitler with admiration. Within two years he was a full-time member of the Berghof staff. Still only in his early thirties, he was given the rank of Waffen-SS-Gruppenführer (Major General). But Brandt’s plaudits did not end there. With no regard to the young doctor’s inexperience, Hitler made him Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation. To Brandt, Morell, with his sleazy, opportunist background, seemed little more than a quack.

Within less than a decade the crafty quack had become a millionaire. But his star was on the wane. Goering couldn’t stand him. Eva Braun was shocked and disgusted both by his filthy habits and his unhygienic office. Hitler’s skin, due to the constant assault of Morell’s needles, had taken on a distinctively unhealthy pallor. Karl Brandt took every opportunity to express the opinion that Morell’s ‘treatments’ were killing the Führer. By 1944, Hitler’s health was indeed a cause for concern; he showed symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, with shaking hands and feet along with vile outbursts of temper.

William L Shirer, in his epic Rise and Fall of The Third Reich, tells of Hitler’s behaviour on the afternoon of 20 July 1944, only hours after Stauffenberg’s bomb had failed to blow him to Kingdom Come. Someone had mentioned the earlier Roehm plot of 30 June 1934. "Mention of this aroused Hitler – who had been sitting morosely sucking brightly coloured medicinal pills supplied by his quack physician, Dr Theodor Morell – to a fine fury. Eyewitnesses say he leaped from his chair, foam on his lips, and screamed and raged... "

As the Reich’s – and Morell’s – days were numbered, Dr Karl Brandt was able to wield his stethoscope unhindered; but not for long. Enter the Führer’s physician number three: Dr Ludwig Stumpfegger. Here the dark shadow of Heinrich Himmler falls once more across the medical record. At the Hohenlychen clinic of Professor Karl Gebhardt – whose infamous and horrific experiments with gas and gangrene would send him to the gallows on 2 June 1948 – Himmler expressed his concern about Hitler’s health. In October 1944, Gebhardt dispatched his 29-year-old assistant Ludwig Stumpfegger, a physical giant of a man and a skilled orthopædic surgeon, to Hitler’s HQ on the Eastern front. Stumpfegger was totally devoted to Hitler, staying with the Führer to the bitter end in the Berlin Bunker.

In those bizarre final days of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’, Hitler’s relationship with his doctors remained as close and as volatile as ever. Whilst Dr Morell was counting his reichsmarks and pondering over what would become of his ‘medical’ empire, Dr Karl Brandt’s fortunes took a nasty dive. Two weeks before Hitler’s suicide in Berlin, the news was received at the bunker that Brandt had sent his wife and child to Thuringia so that they could surrender to the Allies. Hitler interpreted this as treason, and called for the doctor to be court-martialled. Held prisoner in Berlin, Brandt was sentenced to death. He was saved, however, by Himmler, who stalled by calling for new witnesses. By 30 April, Hitler was dead and Brandt thought he was off the hook.

Shortly after the Führer’s suicide, Ludwig Stumpfegger, Martin Bormann and others attempted to flee the bunker. Artur Axmann, leader of the Hitler Youth, later claimed that on 1 May 1945, he had seen the corpse of Stumpfegger alongside that of Bormann – both shot by the Russians – near the aptly-named Invalidenstrasse railway bridge in Berlin – "outstretched on their backs with the moonlight on their faces."

Brandt’s lofty SS position and complicity in evil medical experimentation ensured the full wrath of the Allies at Nuremberg. On 2 June 1948 the one-time Reich Commissioner for Health and Sanitation climbed the gallows with Stumpfegger’s old boss, Professor Gebhardt. The month before, the old quack himself, Dr Morrell, had died, relatively peacefully, at the age of 58 at Tegernsee. In a last bold move to establish his niche in medical history, Morell claimed that it was he who had invented penicillin and his secret had been stolen by the British Secret Service and given to Alexander Fleming. How on earth our brave agents had come to leave chocolate vitamins, Russian Lice Powder or even bull’s testicles in the dangerous hands of the enemy will remain a mystery.

Outside the hospital, Sauerbruch lived out a lavish lifestyle of nightclubs, restaurants, and women; he cared little about the political turmoil developing in the country. Inside the operating theatre, he behaved with increasing tyranny; arrogant, abusive and quite intolerant of mistakes. His staff grew to dread his flashes of anger, learning when to be silent or to step back before he lashed out while clutching a scalpel.

But no one denied his skill and devotion. His fame grew alongside his list of notable patients – Mussolini, Lenin, General Ludendorff, President Hindenberg and the King of Greece – and yet he found time to conduct hundreds of operations for the poor, waiving his fees.

During the war, he trained doctors in field surgery and received the Knight’s Cross from Hitler. After the war, in April 1949, Sauerbruch was summoned to a tribunal, charged with collaboration with the Nazis. Defending his award, he said: "I accepted it for all German doctors. It was given to me because I did my duty as a physician." Despite storming out of the proceedings after delivering a rambling three-hour rant, he was exonerated.

By this time, the 74-year-old Sauerbruch had been reappointed as nominal head of the Charité, now located in the Communist sector of East Berlin. The beginning of the end came when, that year, in a meeting with Dr Friedrich Hall, chief supervisor of the sector’s medical facilities, Sauerbruch kept losing the thread of the discussion and talking, instead, about dead relatives as though they still lived.

Alarmed, Dr Hall asked questions at the Charité, only to find that a string of complaints from hospital staff about Sauerbruch’s mental decline had been suppressed by senior medical authorities because he was their biggest magnet for donations and fund drives. Hall was in Sauerbruch’s office when the next breech occurred. Sauerbruch’s chief assistant burst into the room to say that a patient’s cerebral tumour was finally exposed to view and that in his opinion the prognosis was bad. Sauerbruch leapt to his feet and rushed to the theatre. Within minutes he returned, waving a bloody mass in his fist, saying to the horrified Hall: "Look! They think they are surgeons! I went right in and pulled it out. The finger is still the surgeon’s best instrument."

By the time the luckless patient died, two days later, Hall’s report was on the desk of Dr Josef Naas, Communist Director of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin. Naas’s verdict was chilling; he refused to discipline Sauerbruch or bar him from surgical duties, saying: "In the coming struggle of the proletariat… millions will lose their lives… It is trivial whether Sauerbruch kills a few dozen people on his operating table. We need the name of Sauerbruch!."

Stricken with cerebral sclerosis himself, Saurbruch’s fatal blunders occurred more frequently. During a spleen operation, he tore the organ badly; in a successful removal of a cancer in a boy’s stomach, he forgot to reattach the intestine before closing up; then he bungled the removal of a gastric tumour. For the first time in its venerable existence, the Charité was facing suits for medical negligence and so, in November 1949, Sauerbruch was forced to retire.

The poor, undeterred, flocked to his home on Hertatstrasse and, fuelled by flattery, arrogance and resentment, Sauerbruch performed dangerous operations on the dining table in his sitting room. He made no attempt to sterilise his old instruments and finished with needle and thread from his wife’s sewing basket. Without anæsthetics he removed varicose veins from legs, cancers from breasts and even tumours from brains. The wonder is that the death toll was not higher.

His last patient was Frau Irmgard Liebig, 41, with a cancer in her throat. Years earlier Sauerbruch had removed her cancerous breast and she recalled his kindness towards her family at the time. Her faith in him was so strong, she endured grievous incisions to her throat without anæsthetic and without crying out. Sauerbruch’s wife was so horrified by the scene, she phoned the medical authorities to come and stop the butchery.

Frau Liebig lingered in agony until her death on 19 October 1951. By then Dr Sauerbruch had, himself, escaped legal retribution; he died four months previously, on 2 June 1951, of a cerebral hæmorrhage. It is said that as he breathed his last, his fingers moved on the edge of the blanket as though he was stitching an incision.