Meanwhile, a practically codependent relationship developed between Hitler and Morell, especially during the war years. At first Morell used primarily digestive and vitamin pills to improve his patient’s productivity and relieve, at least temporarily, his fear of becoming seriously ill, but in the last four years of his life, Hitler’s intake of medicines rose to eighty-eight different substances, mostly stimulants and sedatives. Solving bodily problems by popping a pill seemed to satisfy the Nazi leader’s desire for a treatment that was as discreet as possible—he did not, apparently, allow medical exams in which he would have to get undressed. Ernst Hanfstaengl later went so far as to describe Hitler’s “practically spinsterish aversion to being seen without clothes on.”125 In fact, ever since the beginning of his political rise, Hitler was always concerned to minimize any access to his private life. Especially at the height of his power, the laboriously constructed legend of the “Führer” was not to be endangered by revealing any private needs and weaknesses. Hitler therefore swore by the discreet Morell; named him professor on December 24, 1938; remembered him with a tax-free endowment of 100,000 reichsmarks “on the occasion of January 30, 1943”; bestowed the “golden Party insignia” on him in February 1943; and helped in every imaginable way the pharmaceutical business that Morell ran in Hamburg and the Czech city of Olmütz. In brief: Hitler made him a very rich man.126
Moreover, there seems to have been hardly anyone around Hitler whom Morell did not also treat. Hitler personally made every member of his staff, and Eva Braun as well, go to see the personal physician at the least sign of any illness, apparently out of fear of catching it himself.127 Speer, Ribbentrop, Hess, Lammers, Below, and the secretaries, as well as members of the Wagner family in Bayreuth, Hitler’s longtime admirer the British aristocrat Unity Valkyrie Mitford, and the film director Leni Riefenstahl, were among Morell’s patients at Hitler’s behest.128 Air force adjutant Below admitted to having agreed to an examination from Morell only “unwillingly” in early 1938, but said that he came to know Morell as a “conscientious and passionate doctor” and could “better understand” why “Hitler trusted him.”129 Speer visited Morell, according to his own account, as early as 1936, shortly after Morell had come into contact with Hitler. At times Speer had even been, in his words, “Morell’s showpiece,” since “after a superficial examination” and the prescription of “intestinal bacteria, dextrose, vitamin, and hormone tablets,” he spread the word about the successful treatment, even though he had in fact been treated by another doctor in Berlin. Speer lied, in other words, in order to, as he put it, “avoid offending Hitler.”130
Eva Braun, who is not known to have suffered from any sickness more serious than the occasional cold, supposedly told Speer after an exam by Morell that Morell was “disgustingly dirty” and that she would “not let Morell treat her again.”131 We cannot know whether this corresponds to the truth, or whether Speer was retroactively making Eva Braun the star witness of his own argument against Morell. But why would she tell Speer—a man who himself zealously courted Hitler’s favor and had misled Hitler about having been healed by the personal physician—that Morell disgusted her? Once again, Speer’s explanations seem implausible and ultimately untrue.132 Ilse Hess, in a letter to the wife of Hess’s adjutant Alfred Leitgen, wrote on February 3, 1938, that the personal physician had “really helped” her husband and others “even with the heart issue.” “Miss Braun,” too, had had “very similar symptoms” but was now, thanks to Morell, “fit as a fiddle again.”133 Moreover, Morell’s few remaining files show that Eva Braun was still his patient in January 1944.134 She seems, in fact, to have joined Hitler when he underwent digestive cures during the war years.135 We can only assume that by virtue of her special position she was even more concerned than the others at the “court” to placate the notoriously suspicious and standoffish Hitler—even by involving herself in his physical ailments and showing her solidarity by taking part in Morell’s treatments.136 If only because of this closeness, she could never openly express disapproval, even if she did dislike the doctor and revealed to one of the secretaries in spring 1944 that she “didn’t trust him and hated him.”137
Not the least impressive example of how dangerous it was to oppose Morell was Karl Brandt, who, along with his team of accompanying physicians, flatly rejected Morell’s treatment methods. There was tension between the doctors from the beginning, with Brandt considering Morell a swindler and a quack.138 After a bitter but surreptitious competitive struggle lasting many years, Brandt finally claimed, in October 1944, that Morell’s pills were poisoning Hitler. He could not supply any proof, however, and so his intention to end Morell’s career backfired and Brandt himself was dismissed on October 10, 1944. Hitler saw the attack on Morell as a conspiracy and a betrayal of a man he trusted. And Brandt, who owed his rise entirely to Hitler’s good graces, now learned for himself what it meant to stand outside the “court.”139
Hermann Esser
In the broader Berghof circle must also be included Hermann Esser, an “old campaigner” and for many years a close friend of Hitler who used the familiar “du” with him. Esser was a member of the NSDAP since 1920, and already the editor in chief of the Völkischer Beobachter and Der Nationalsozialist, two Party newspapers, in his early twenties. In 1923 he rose to be the first head of propaganda in the Party, and from 1926 to 1932 he worked, again as editor in chief, for the weekly Illustrierter Beobachter, which was lavishly illustrated and which reported mainly on meetings, rallies, and marches of the NSDAP and the SS. Hitler’s rise to Chancellor brought the trained journalist, known as an aggressive speaker and radical anti-Semite, into office as the Bavarian Commerce Secretary from 1933 to 1935. Ernst Hanfstaengl, who described Esser as his friend, called him the “enfant terrible of the Party” and also probably its “most talented orator after Hitler.”140 Hitler met with Esser whenever he was in Bavaria; as Nicolaus von Below remarked, Esser was among the Nazi leader’s “Munich crowd.”141 He was a “mercenary type,” like Ernst Röhm and Max Amann, and belonged to the “hard core” around Hitler going back to the early days of the NSDAP. The phrase “Germany’s Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler”142—with which the cult of the “Führer” was born in 1922, taking Italian fascism as its model—comes from Esser. Hitler, in turn, held fast to his friendship with Esser, despite political as well as personal differences of opinion and even though Esser’s brutal, boorish personality had been controversial for a long time among many Party members.143 Albert Speer, too, remembers only reluctantly “those Bavarian vulgarians in Hitler’s retinue” whom he himself “always kept… at arm’s length.”144
After the war, when questioned about his National Socialist career, Hermann Esser stated (in Nuremberg on December 6, 1946) that there were arguments between himself and Hitler in 1934, resulting in his stepping down as minister and withdrawing from political life. He was not politically active anymore after 1935, he said, and also stopped attending the Party convention events in Nuremberg. He had merely accepted the nonpolitical position of “President of the Reich Tourism Association” in 1936.145 In addition, Esser claimed, he had disapproved of and criticized the Aryanization measures and other violent steps against Jews. When questioned about his book, first published in 1927 by the Party’s own press, Eher Verlag, and bearing the infamous title Die jüdische Weltpest: Kann ein Jude Staatsbürger sein? (The Jewish World Plague: Can a Jew Be a Citizen?), Esser talked his way out of it by saying that Alfred Rosenberg had given him all the content for the book. Even though Rosenberg was one of Esser’s fiercest opponents within the Party, at least in the 1920s, Esser now tried to suggest that the chief ideologue of the Party—who by that point had already been hanged as one of the main Nazi war criminals—was the actual author of the book.146 As for the new edition of the book that came out in 1939, shortly after the November pogrom of 1938, with the title Die jüdische Weltpest: Judendämmerung auf dem Erdball (The Jewish World Plague: Twilight of the Jews Across the Globe), Esser claimed not to know a thing about it. He had, he said, neither written the book nor ever seen it.147 The American interrogator summarized Esser’s testimony in his report by saying that he had been opposed to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 and that the “Jewish question” represented one of the reasons for his differences with Hitler.148