A new book has delved into the personal life of Adolf Hitler, painting him as a cocaine, methamphetamine and opiate-crazed drug addict incapable of going about his daily routine without the help of uppers.
Author Norman Ohler writes in his bestseller 'Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich' that at the later stages of the dictator's life, his "veins were so wrecked" his physician could hardly penetrate them.
When he did, "it actually made a crunching noise."
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Grim. Other stories concern simpler anecdotes, like how on a visit to his "frozen cloud-cuckoo-land" vacation mountain home in Obersalzberg, Hitler spent his time impersonating "sounds made by different machine guns used in the Second World War" when watching ravens. "Whether he did so high or not," Ohler writes. "We cannot tell."
Hitler's use began in 1941 with steroid and animal hormone injections. As the war drew on, his personal physician Theodor Morell would supply the Nazi leader with harder shit.
He soon began to rely on "heightened feeling(s) that corresponded so perfectly to his own image of greatness - and that reality no longer supplied," Ohler writes.
Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Image: PA
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As it happened, Hitler's wife Eva Braun shared his love is opiates and insisted on doing every drug he has doing to be "on the same wavelength as her lover."
After "date nights", Hitler would turn down physical exams so his doctor wouldn't see the "wounds on his body from Eva's aggressive sexual behavior."
Before long, though, the drugs turned the man insular.
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"In his isolation, all pleasure and energy previously received from the attention of a cheering crowd had to be replaced by chemicals," Ohler writes. "Between the autumn of 1941, when he started being given hormone and steroid injections, and the second half of 1944, Hitler hardly enjoyed a sober day."
Ohler also refutes the belief that Hitler suffered from Parkinson's disease, claiming that the hand tremors caught on film were merely the signs of terrible withdrawal.
Without the gear, Ohler writes, "all that was left behind was a shell of a man whose uniform was spattered with rice gruel."
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