Original subtitles

(ominous music)

He was supposed to be

the supreme leader of a master race.

A paragon of physical and mental health,

to lead Germany to a glorious future.

But behind the Fuhrer facade was a fragile pill popper.

Dependent on a dubious daily diet

of injections, tablets, and tonics.

In just a few years, the almighty Fuhrer

was reduced to a feeble trembling figure.

Much of the Fuhrers medical history was lost, but not all.

A series of intriguing records and letters

have come to light, revealing Hitler's medical secrets.

Evidence of drug abuse, sex stimulants

and psychological breakdowns.

At the center of it all, the Fuhrer's infamous

personal physician, Dr. Theodore Morell.

When the American interrogators of Morell

found out all the different 28 treatments he was giving

like the ground bull testes and the semen

and the prostate glands and so on.

Some of them wondered whether he was a double agent.

Whether he had purposefully in a way made Hitler

so much dysfunctional that he couldn't win.

He couldn't achieve what he wanted.

Theodore Morell was the Fuhrer's trusted

personal doctor for nine years.

Hitler heaped praise and honors upon him.

But other Nazi doctors despised him,

dismissed him as a quack and blamed him

for the dictator's dramatic deterioration.

Other Nazi doctors within Hitler's circle

poured scorn upon Morell.

Described him as a quack, a charlatan, complete phony

and insinuated that he had done a lot of damage to Hitler.

After the war the obese doctor confessed

to administering a cocktail of drugs,

opiates, morphine, barbiturates and possibly amphetamines.

Leading to speculation that his treatment

caused the dictator's extreme behavior.

We call it rapid cycling, constant, rapid cycling.

I don't think that Hitler had a day of normal mood,

in my reading of this, from about 1942 to 1945.

Sensational evidence has emerged

of a Fuhrer off his face.

A hapless hypochondriac, a high Hitler.

Many illicit drugs dealt

on the city streets of today are not new.

According to a Boston-based professor,

medical records suggest Hitler was amping

up on amphetamines long before the war.

There's a good deal of evidence

that Hitler started taking amphetamines in the 1930s.

Amphetamines came out during that decade,

they were widely prescribed for depression.

They were the first available real treatments

for depression in the modern age.

Not only did Hitler get it,

Churchill got it for his depressions.

Kennedy later got it as well.

So lots of people were getting amphetamines.

The research suggests the Fuhrer's moods

would have mirrored the dramatic Alpine scenery

around his Bavarian bolthole,

exhilarating peaks and deep dark valleys.

Amphetamines making an existing illness much worse.

The problem is not that Hitler got amphetamines.

That's not it.

It's not that Hitler was an amphetamine addict,

which people have brought up.

It's that Hitler had bipolar disorder

and he got amphetamines which worsened his bipolar disorder.

That's the issue.

It's the interaction between the amphetamines

and the bipolar disorder.

And that's never been described before.

And I think that could explain a lot of why

Hitler changed in the late 1930s and 1940s.

Other tantalizing evidence has emerged

pointing to a possible march to mental deterioration.

Much has been made of the mass hysteria and delusion

of those who flocked to his rallies.

But it seems possible that Hitler himself

suffered a fateful breakdown long before he became Fuhrer.

The great warrior had been rejected

by his native Austrian army in the first world war.

Hitler joined the Germans and later claimed he was wounded,

blinded in a British gas attack.

In the last phases of the war,

about two thirds to three quarters

of all the shells fired were gas shells.

It had become a gas war.

Mustard gas does cause temporary blindness

sometimes longer term blindness

and there is evidence that Hitler suffered

from conjunctivitis after the attack.

The Austrian volunteer was evacuated

to the sanctuary of a military hospital in Pasewalk,

far from the front lines, to the north of Berlin.

During his recovery, the war ended

and the embellishment of his exploits in the trenches began.

Hitler described his alleged wounding as a decisive moment,

a political awakening, in his rambling manifesto,

"Mein Kampf", or My Struggle.

(dramatic music)

"The more I tried to clearly understand

these incredible events, the more I felt

the burning shame of deep indignation and disgrace.

What was the pain in my eyes compared to this misery?

So I decided to become a politician."

In his own accounts this was the moment

where the world went black,

everything collapsed that he lived for

and where he realized then

that the Jews were the hated enemy behind all this.

And it's at that moment, he said,

"I took the decision to enter politics."

But other evidence suggests that Hitler

wasn't blinded by gas,

but by a kind of nervous breakdown or hysterical blindness.

We now know that in all probability

Hitler didn't lose his eyesight through mustard gas

but that it was a psychosomatic blindness.

Hitler's alleged hysterical breakdown

was detailed in a report compiled for American intelligence

during the second world war.

It also described the dictator as neurotic,

bordering on psychotic with masochistic tendencies

and strong sexual perversions.

And recently more evidence has emerged about Hitler's

blindness and breakdown in the first world war.

It's a letter in which a renowned German neurosurgeon

says he'd seen Hitler's medical file

and that the dictator was treated

for a psychiatric disorder that can cause blindness,

It's quite interesting that Hitler

who later portrayed himself as invincible,

that even he could no longer carry on in the autumn of 1918,

that his nerves could no longer take the strain

and that it led to this loss of sight.

Perhaps Hitler covered up

what at that time was considered shameful,

that he was too weak or feeble-minded to fight.

Neuropaths were stigmatized at the time.

And even today people suffering from depression, burnout,

or other psychological illnesses

are not altogether accepted.

And in the Weimar Republic, this would have been

a real stigma and would have made Hitler unelectable.

But other historians refute the idea

that Hitler suffered a shameful breakdown

that he was desperate to hide.

Hitler didn't really have anything

very embarrassing to hide.

He had everything to gain by saying that he'd had

some kind of break down at the end of the first world war

because he identified himself with Germany

and Germany had some kind of breakdown

at the end of the first world war.

So there's nothing really there to cover up at all.

Admission records for the first war military

hospital at Pasewalk still exist in a Berlin archive.

According to the register private Adolf Hitler

was admitted for gas poisoning.

The admission records for the military hospital Pasewalk

are clear, gas poisoning, that's it.

There was never any talk of psychological illness.

Intriguingly, soldiers were also treated

for psychological disorders

and venereal disease at Pasewalk.

When you look at the hospital records

you can see that there were people with gas injuries.

Also those with psychological disorders.

But more than any other,

there were people with sexually transmitted diseases.

Perhaps this was a source

for the rumors that Hitler had syphilis,

but there's no evidence for this or other lurid claims,

like the story about the dictator only having one testicle.

This comes from a silly song the British troops

used to sing called "Colonel Bogey."

And it's just a joke.

There are again medical examination records from the 1930s,

early 40s that show he was fully equipped, as it were.

There's another rumor that spread that his penis

was bitten off by a goat when he was a child.

There's absolutely no evidence of that either.

But there does seem to be evidence

pointing to some kind of mental condition

and a sinister coverup.

The historian Thomas Weber claims that Hitler was treated

by a neurologist at Pasewalk, Dr. Edmund Forster.

He suspects that Forster's apparent suicide in 1933

was murder, to cover up Hitler's

potentially damaging mental breakdown.

But fellow historian, Henrik Erbele is among the doubters.

Edmund Forster who later became

quite a famous neurologist didn't treat Adolf Hitler.

Forster was never in Pasewalk. That's quite clear.

He wasn't there.

Hitler's alleged hysterical breakdown

remains the subject of debate, but there's little doubt

that the tale of a sudden political awakening

was mere propaganda.

Hitler was blinded by mustard gas poisoning

I think is correct and the effects of that

must've been horrible and that intensified

the bitterness that he felt towards everything

that had happened, but he wasn't anti-Semite

and now all at once, he was.

That doesn't seem to me to be a realistic.

However far-fetched his story was,

millions fell for it.

Hitler's rambling manifesto became a best seller.

But not everyone was convinced.

Many were mesmerized by the dictators extreme rants.

Others saw them as signs of psychological illness.

As well as rumors of a first war breakdown,

another alleged report of unstable behavior

emerged from his time as a failed artist in Austria.

Hitler's childhood friend August Kubizek

published his memoirs after the second world war.

One scene painted a portrait of a disturbed young man

who would go on to become Fuhrer.

"Adolf had reached an almost ecstatic state,

but then he described the future

which was filled with threats and danger.

And at the same time, he was obviously fighting the tears."

If one takes a psychiatric textbook description

of depression and mania, and then reads Kubizek's account

of what Hitler was like as a young man,

it's hard not to see almost a direct translation.

Perhaps August Kubizek

witnessed a moment of mania,

an insight into a deluded mind that would lead Germany

and much of Europe to destruction.

Hitler continued to sacrifice his people

long after many of his generals

and the wider population realized the war was lost.

But was it mental illness and drug abuse that led Hitler

to destroy himself and the Nazi empire he created?

He was either severely depressed or overly optimistic,

completely unrealistic about the reality of the war.

And I think that constant back and forth of his mania

and depression throughout the last few years of the war

was an effect of the interaction

with the amphetamines and the bipolar disorder.

But Kubizek's account

of Hitler's apparent psychotic episode

could be no more than a rewriting of history.

Perhaps he felt compelled to be more critical

of his childhood friend after he'd lost the war.

He initially remembered him very positively

and then he had to rewrite the book.

That means it is a very disparate memoir.

He tried to adjust it according to the zeitgeist.

I think the book isn't entirely implausible,

but Kubizek's statements wouldn't be enough for me

to come up with a medical diagnosis.

But then again, I am a historian.

If Hitler was manic depressive,

it didn't stop him from reaching the summit

of absolute power.

His Bavarian retreat was off limits to all

but the closest cronies.

Like secret girlfriend Eva Braun and Dr. Theodore Morell.

Morell treated the rich and famous on Berlin's prestigious

Kurfurstendamm, specializing in venereal disease.

He treated Hitler's personal photographer,

Heinrich Hoffmann, for gonorrhea.

When the Fuhrer had an apparently incurable condition,

Hoffman knew who to recommend.

In 1936, he was suffering from a problem of eczema

which his medical advisors could not deal with very well.

And Hoffman recommended Morell whom he knew.

Morell treated him, the eczema went away

and he had a very comforting, soothing bedside manner,

which Hitler liked.

As well as eczema the Fuhrer was stricken

with stomach cramps and chronic flatulence.

Hitler tended to talk while he was eating,

thus ingesting air and that made him belch quite a lot.

And he had irritable bowel syndrome as we would now call it.

Hitler liked pea soup in particular.

And Morell tried to cut down on the amount

of pea soup he ate because that's another thing

that contributed to his flatulence.

Morell prescribed a so-called probiotic,

containing non-harmful bacteria.

The cramps and eczema apparently receded.

The delighted dictator appointed him

as his personal physician, to the disgust of his cronies.

Dr. Morell was a rather unpleasant person,

at least most people in Hitler's entourage

found him unpleasant.

He was overweight.

He was a bit of a slob.

He was a noisy, messy eater.

He was something of a glutton who shoved food down himself.

He had a rather strong and unpleasant body odor,

but Hitler when he was faced with criticisms

of Dr. Morell of this kind said,

"I don't employ Dr. Morell for his fragrance.

I employ him to look after my health."

The already affluent doctor

became a high flyer.

He landed the title of professor

and a property on the exclusive Schwanenwerder Island

on the outskirts of Berlin.

He joined the top dogs of the Nazi elite

like Albert Speer and Josef Goebbels,

who'd moved into the homes of Jewish millionaires.

Even though she described Morell as "Disgusting.

His office, a pig sty,", Eva Braun still visited him.

Eva Braun was very careful to cultivate the people

who were powerful in Hitler's circle,

as she herself came to gain more influence over the years.

And Morell was certainly from 1936 onwards,

one of the key people in Hitler's entourage

whom she needed to make friends with.

Perhaps the Fuhrer's girlfriend

also benefited from Morell's medicine bag.

As well as pills and potions

he gave Hitler sex hormone injections,

some extracted from the prostate glands of young bulls.

Was it ammunition the Nazi dictator needed

to mount amorous offensives in the bedroom?

They basically increased vigor.

The testosterone was used to strengthen sexual virility.

The question is, if Morell was looking into that for Hitler.

Hitler's relationship

with girlfriend Eva Braun was a state secret.

She was 23 years younger.

Morell's notes suggest he may have provided the boost

his Fuhrer needed to keep up with his frisky Fraulein.

If you look at when he gave Hitler

a preparation called Testoviron

which is a kind of testosterone preparation,

it is usually before Hitler goes

and spends the night with Eva Braun.

Eva Braun was young, fit, Hitler was much older.

He was very lazy and I'm sure he asked Dr. Morell

to help him along when he went to bed with Eva Braun.

But Hitler's passion was war

and the conquest of Europe.

The status of the Fuhrer's personal physician

advanced along with the German army.

Hitler paraded before the propaganda cameras

after the defeat of France.

Theodore Morell resplendent in uniform

was grinning right by his side.

Perhaps it was jealousy that gave

the portly doctor a novel nickname.

There was a terrific proliferation

of grandiose titles in the Third Reich.

Almost everyone was Reich master of this

or Reich master of that.

Goering called Morell the Reich master of the injection

or Reichsspritzenmeister.

The general consensus of Morell's peers

was that he was incompetent.

He was a private physician in Berlin

who just treated wealthy people.

And when Hitler established that personal relationship

with Morell and developed the trust in Morell,

Hitler wouldn't let anyone else do anything about it.

While others mocked Morell,

Hitler grew more dependent on him and his daily jabs.

He gave him an injections of glucose

because he felt that Hitler needed strengthening.

He needed building up a bit.

Hitler was a vegetarian who had a fairly miserable diet.

We have the menus that were made up for him

for Christmas day, for example, which are just terrible.

Morell's vast menu of medications

seemed even worse.

Strychnine or rat poison in the Fuhrer's anti gas pills

and oil originally used to clean gun barrels

in another gastric medication

that had been banned for human consumption.

Yet it may have been Hitler's dietary obsessions

that exacerbated his stomach cramps,

bloating and excess gas.

Perhaps a dull vegetarian diet of muesli, mashed potato

and soups made his agonizing flatulence even worse.

Apple cake was one of the Fuhrer's rare indulgences.

And while he seems to have swallowed whatever

Morell administered, exercise was out of the question.

Morell was always trying to get Hitler to exercise.

And Hitler just said he didn't have the time.

When Hitler was on the Obersalzberg in his mountain retreat

in Bavaria, he did go for walks in the fresh mountain air

but it was always downhill.

And when he got to the bottom of the hill,

he had a car taking him up again.

While his chauffeur drove him uphills,

it seems amphetamines may have lifted the Fuhrer

when he was weary or feeling low.

Morell occasionally prescribed amphetamines for Hitler

when he thought he was being too lethargic

or not energetic enough.

If so, Hitler wasn't the only one blitzed

during the Blitzkrieg.

Pervitin was a methamphetamine delivering an explosive high.

It was given to the German troops who invaded France

through the narrow valleys of the Ardenne

driving their tanks through in long lines

over three or four days to keep the tank drivers awake.

They called it panzersjokolade or tank chocolate.

Well, it was also known as stukka tablets

from the dive bombers, given to the pilots.

The war had only just begun

when millions of the high octane amphetamine pills

were sent to the front lines in Poland.

Hitler's sweet tooth is well documented,

but did the Fuhrer's fancy extend to Pervitin?

The amphetamine is only mentioned once in Morell's records.

That's where Morell writes about what he's given Hitler.

He mentions the word Pervitin.

Just that single time in the entire diary.

Others have used this as a springboard.

One historian suspects it's a mix-up,

a word that looks like Pervitin

was really something very different.

There was a remedy called Parandrin in the Third Reich,

it was a testosterone based product, licensed in 1937.

It's a sex hormone. And that's what it was.

It means Parandrin and not Pervitin.

Whatever fueled his drive

Hitler was riding high in 1941.

He launched more than 3 million troops

into a devastating surprise attack on the Soviet Union.

Morell moved in and established pharmaceutical factories

in the Czech Republic and the Ukraine.

He made various medicines for the German army.

One of them was even advertised on a Nazi newsreel.

(man speaking German)

I don't know if Morell abused his power.

He certainly enjoyed his power

because it brought him great wealth.

When he was able to build those large pharmaceutical

factories he was able to get

great wealth from those factories.

And so having that personal relationship with Hitler

was economically important to him.

Fired up with Pervitin and perhaps dusted

with professor Morell's anti-lice powder,

the German army seemed unstoppable.

Hitler advanced eastwards, directing his generals

from a new headquarters in East Prussia.

The so-called Wolf's Lair.

But just when the Fuhrer seemed to be flying high,

the dictator was brought down by a sudden bout of dizziness.

Morell recorded an emergency call in his notes.

"7th of August, 1941, been summoned by telephone.

Am to go to the Fuhrer at once,

he has suddenly felt dizzy."

Diagnosing dysentery and high blood pressure,

Morell also ordered an ECG or electrocardiogram.

The results were sent to a heart specialist.

The alarming verdict was coronary sclerosis,

a potentially deadly narrowing of the major heart vessels.

It was a disastrous diagnosis for patient A.

The Fuhrer, at risk of a heart attack

at one of the most critical stages of the war.

The electrocardiogram showed

he had an abnormally high blood pressure.

And that's something that he did not want anybody

to know about, he wanted that to be kept quiet

and Morell kept very quiet about it.

Morell administered nitroglycerin pills,

which can ease but do not cure heart problems.

He feared the worst, but modern analysis

suggests Hitler's heart was probably okay.

Hitler did not have a serious heart condition.

He suffered from high blood pressure,

but it wasn't of a level that would cause heart attacks.

There's one record of him having a fainting fit.

But just to call that a heart attack is an exaggeration.

There's no evidence for it.

A week after his faint spell

Hitler was back on his feet.

His heart didn't fail him, but the same couldn't be said

for his once unstoppable legions.

German forces were fighting an increasingly

desperate battle on the Eastern front.

The vital arteries of supply became overstretched

across the vast Soviet steppes.

The German advance froze in icy winters.

The Russians fought back and as the tables turned,

the strain was etched on the Fuhrer's face.

Propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels noted,

"In three and a half years Hitler seems to have aged 15."

Yet while his troops capitulated,

the dictators health held out.

His sixth army was crushed at Stalingrad.

In contrast, the Fuhrer appeared to be fighting fit.

Following the costly defeat at Stalingrad

where one could have expected him to collapse

he's hardly affected by it at all.

It was almost perverse.

After the battle of Stalingrad,

Hitler was healthier than he'd been for years.

Perhaps it was because Hitler was high

like some of his soldiers on the battlefields below.

There was one infamous instance where the Fuhrer

appeared to be flying on some kind of amphetamine high.

Months after the defeat of Stalingrad

Hitler faced another disaster unfolding in Italy.

As allied troops advanced from landings in Sicily

in July, 1943, the Fuhrer met his wavering

Axis ally Benito Mussolini in Northern Italy.

Hitler was determined to stop

the Italian dictator changing sides.

The meeting shattered the regal setting

of the stately Villa Pagani Gaggia.

We can be pretty sure that Morell gave some tablets

to Hitler when he went to see Mussolini

because all the descriptions of him at that meeting,

are he's just hyperactive, completely hyper in every way,

talking, gabbling, clearly on speed.

Even news of the Allied bombing of Rome

didn't stop Hitler talking.

An officer in the German entourage later wrote

"Embarrassed. People turned away."

Perhaps an explanation lay inside the gold wrapper

of yet another medication from Dr. Morell.

At that time Hitler was on six tablets

of Vitamultin every day.

And what was in Vitamultin changed

according to what Morell wanted.

All the reports we have of that meeting with Mussolini

when Hitler was waving his arms about

and talking 15 to the dozen and so on, do suggest

that he may well have had a dose of amphetamines beforehand.

The mysterious Vitamultin

was one of up to 28 different potions and pills

Hitler swallowed every day,

but none of them could relieve

the terminal defeat that lay ahead.

The Allies landed in Normandy in June, 1944.

Hitler's besieged armies were now fighting

a war on three fronts.

The Russians were closing in

on his Wolf's Lair headquarters in East Prussia.

Yet the Fuhrer continued to direct a losing battle,

unaware that some of his own generals

were conspiring against him.

The Wolf's Lair was supposed to be impregnable,

yet the conspirators were able to place a bomb

under the table next to the Fuhrer himself.

(reporter speaking German)

With Hitler out of the way, the army officers

behind the plot had planned to announce their coup

to the country, but it was Hitler who appeared

on the news reels, alive and in control.

Getting on with the business

of directing the war and his Axis ally Mussolini.

Hitler was very lucky.

He was standing behind a very heavy wooden table.

The hut was rather flimsy.

So a lot of the blast was dissipated

through the floor and through the walls.

The blast certainly did catch Hitler.

It burst his eardrums and he had for some time afterward

severe headaches and hearing loss.

He was able to act immediately afterwards

very decisively to stop the plot

and have the people who had organized it arrested.

While the arrest and torture

of hundreds of suspects was underway.

Hitler was filmed visiting his fellow survivors,

an ear injury clearly visible.

The Fuhrer's doctor, Theodore Morell

was not immediately at hand.

According to one report, Hitler was briefly treated

by ear, nose and throat specialist Dr. Erwin Geising.

His notes and x-rays of Hitler's head have survived.

Dr. Geising made a series of detailed claims

about the Fuhrer's medical treatment after the war.

But the surgeon was apparently dismissed

soon after his initial treatment of Hitler

and seems to have spent little time with him.

Nevertheless, Geising claimed that the dictator's eardrums

were perforated and that there was a lot of blood

in the right ear canal.

An x-ray also showed a white area

on the left side of Hitler's face,

a blockage suggesting chronic sinusitis.

To ease the pain Geising claimed the Fuhrer

was given nose drops containing cocaine.

Apparently the surgeon did not share Dr. Morell's respect

for patient confidentiality.

He claimed that the Fuhrer couldn't get enough

of the supercharged nose drops ,telling him,

"Doctor, put some more cocaine in my nose."

There's no evidence at all

that Hitler was addicted to cocaine.

These reports came from Dr. Geising after the war

and they're not credible in any way.

To put it bluntly, he was a liar.

After the war Erwin Geising

was an outspoken critic of Hitler's personal physician.

He's also alleged to have secretly sampled

the anti-gas pills Morell administered

to combat the dictator's agonizing flatulence.

He is said to have suffered the same irritability

and chronic stomach cramps that afflicted the Fuhrer.

The ingredients included strychnine,

also used in rat poison.

In small quantities, strychnine works as a stimulant.

In higher doses it can cause seizures and eventually death.

Hitler's surgeon Karl Brandt

was another vociferous critic.

Apparently horrified that Morell fed the Fuhrer strychnine.

Karl Brandt was the most prominent physician

in Hitler's circle.

He clearly thought that Morell was incompetent.

He was worried that Morell was poisoning Hitler in some way.

Karl Brandt openly accused Morell of negligence

and tried to have him dismissed.

Morell is said to have apologized profusely.

Hitler remained fiercely loyal to his personal physician

who recorded his Fuhrer's

alleged statement of support in his notes.

"That these fools didn't even think

about what they would have done to me.

They must have known that you have saved my life

several times over the last eight years.

And how did I fare before that?

All the doctors summoned had failed."

Those who tried to have Morell sacked

including Karl Brandt were themselves dismissed.

And there may be some justification

in Hitler's support for Morell.

There's no evidence that Morell was trying to kill Hitler.

On the contrary, the dosage

of the pills that he prescribed for Hitler

contained 0.0046 of a gram of strychnine per pill

which is half the medically recommended dose

of this particular kind of pill.

All the remedies that he gave were medically conventional

in medically conventional quantities.

But there was one critical condition

that Dr. Morell was late in diagnosing.

A debilitating disease that mirrored

the collapse of Hitler's crumbling Reich.

By March, 1945, the Red Army had already

reached the banks of the Oder River, within reach of Berlin.

The Eastern Front had collapsed, defeat was inevitable.

While the shattered remnants of the SS

and army units made their last stands,

Hitler went underground in a vast concrete bunker

under the Reich Chancellery building in Berlin.

(announcer speaking German)

It was one of the last times the Fuhrer

would be seen alive outside of his bunker.

The propaganda film was supposed to show

Hitler still in command,

decorating brave young defenders of the Reich,

but a critical part of the footage was deemed unfit

for viewing, cut and presumably supposed to be destroyed.

But this footage survived.

It was found in an East German film laboratory in the 1970s.

The clip clearly shows the shaking

Hitler could no longer control.

Hitler began to show symptoms

of Parkinson's disease during the war.

He had a shake in his left hand

and for a time that was cured as it were,

by the bomb that went off in July 20th, 1944.

As he said, "That's not the way I would choose of curing it"

But soon after that, the shaking came back

in his right side, he began to drag his feet and shuffle.

He began to speak in a more flat,

less animated sort of way normally,

though fits of rage could still bring out the old Hitler.

A comparison of newsreel footage

shows how Parkinson's disease took hold.

to the left in 1940, Hitler stands upright,

agile and in control.

To the right in 1944,

the Fuhrer is stooped and relatively slow.

Morell first noted Hitler's tremor in 1941

and put it down to stress.

It was only in the final days of the war

that he made the correct diagnosis,

shaking palsy or Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's can impair thought processes

as well as posture and muscle control.

But witnesses claim Hitler's mind was sharp to the end.

What we can't see is any diminution

of mental energy or emotional energy.

There's one occasion when Hitler broke down

towards the end of the war and admitted everything is lost.

It's all going down the tubes and told Speer

that he and Eva Braun were going to commit suicide

rather than fall into enemy hands.

But then he pulled himself together and maintained

this facade of belief that everything was going to be okay.

I don't think that drugs or medical treatments

had anything to do with that at all.

But outside his bunker, it was not okay.

By April, 1945 the first Soviet units had reached Berlin.

Street by street, the Red Army closed in

for the final assault.

The Third Reich was finished.

There was no cure for the crushing defeat inflicted above.

Hitler finally dismissed his personal physician

who was also ill, having suffered several strokes.

Dr. Morell made it onto one

of the last planes out of Berlin.

He was eventually captured and interrogated

but not implicated in any war crimes.

He died in Bavaria three years later.

Hitler's former surgeon, Karl Brandt tried to discredit

Morell during and after the war,

but it was he who was accused of the slaughter

of the mentally and physically ill, including children.

This is how people like Brandt could try and explain

after 1945, the Holocaust, the crimes of Hitler

for which he, as a leading medical official

in the mass murder of the mentally handicapped

and ill wasn't actually himself partly responsible.

Brandt was found guilty of crimes against humanity

and executed in 1948.

SS Dr. Ludwig Stumpfegger also treated Hitler

and was involved in brutal death camp experiments.

He died in the ruins of Berlin.

Another key figure in the Fuhrer's medical care

was his dentist Hugo Blaschke.

It seems that the concentration camp system

may also have played a part in Nazi dentistry.

Like other top Nazis,

Hitler needed gold crowns and fillings.

An x-ray of the dictator's skull shows jaws full of metal.

These are metal caps and bridges.

They don't let the x-rays pass through.

That's why you see them in white.

When Hitler met Blaschke

he'd already lost a lot of teeth.

He had seven of his own teeth in the upper jaw

and 10 in the lower jaw.

He really should have had to wear dentures, but he couldn't.

And didn't want to imagine that they could fall out

of his mouth during one of his speeches.

Hugo Blaschke was the man

who looked after Hitler's teeth.

He starred in one of Eva Braun's home movies

wearing the uniform of an SS general.

An incriminating document shows that Dr. Blaschke

got his gold from the corpses of those murdered

in the concentration camps.

By 1943, he amassed a staggering 50 kilograms,

around two and a half million US dollars worth

in today's prices.

50,000 grams, it says.

You use about one to four grams of gold for one cap.

So if you calculate a bridge of three elements

for each person that would mean 5,600 to 5,700 people

who had gold teeth pulled out before or after their deaths.

Pulled from the jaws of murdered victims

the gold was recycled and used for Blaschke's dental work.

Hitler's secretary Christa Schroder

also had caps of Blaschke's gold.

As for Hitler, while he had caps,

there's no proof they were fitted during the Holocaust.

Adolf Hitler's medical care was dominated by the portly

doctor dubbed Reichs master of injections, Theodore Morell.

He fed the Fuhrer a vast array of preparations,

pills, drugs, and hormones but it's unlikely

that any of them had an effect on Hitler's sanity.

48 hours before his death he dictated his will,

as lucid and alert has ever.

His thought processes had not been affected

and his mental capabilities were normal.

Morell was accused of criminal negligence

but his treatments did not make Hitler lose his mind

or the war.

What he did lose was a sense of reality.

He just could not believe that Germany

was being completely defeated.

He was still directing the war as the supreme commander

and he held meetings with his generals

and he would move the counters representing armies

around on the map and so on.

And the generals would say behind his back

because they didn't really dare to tell him,

well there's no troops there.

You know, they've all gone.

Or there's only a few hundred,

not the thousands that he thinks.

There is no proof that Hitler

was mentally ill or drug addicted.

The dictator was afflicted with Parkinson's disease,

but there's no evidence that it had any bearing

on his military or political decisions.

The alternative is harder to swallow.

The man who destroyed millions of lives

did so in the belief that his actions

were sane and rational.

The war didn't happen and the Jews were not wiped out

because Hitler was ill,

but because most Germans followed his decisions.

Hitler always knew what he was doing.

He was compos mentis right up to the end.

Of course, it's very convenient to Germans after the war

who could say Hitler was a madman.

We weren't responsible.

He wasn't responsible.

We can all kind of let ourselves off the hook.

So I think it's very important to realize

that he was in all crucial, key, basic respects,

perfectly sane.

whether his ideology was rational

is a completely different question.

We'd like to think somebody who could do such monstrous

things and commit such terrible crimes must be insane.

And it poses much deeper and more difficult questions

to us when we admit that he was not insane.

(ominous music)