Hitler Used Performance Enhancing Drugs

Adolf Hitler, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly left (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The other night I watched the film The King’s Speech, and in one scene, a newsreel segment, King George the VI was watching a broadcast of one of Hitler’s tirades before hundreds of thousands of Germans,, with the usual show of might evinced by hundreds of thousands of goose-stepping troops, tanks, and armaments. Hitler’s impassioned vitriol and hysterical body language suggested a man on an annoying, under ordinary circumstances, speed jag, a bombardment of words delivered along with a salivary spritz. King George, played by Colin Firth, was asked what Hitler was saying by Princess Margaret, and he stated he didn’t know but whatever he said he did it quite effectively.

In his book, A First-Rate Madness, Nassir Ghaemi, MD, a professor at Tufts University Medical School and head of their mood disorder clinic, discussed in detail, Hitler’s use of methamphetamine, barbiturates, morphine, and anabolic steroids. His physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, began treating Hitler with amphetamine, along with Goering and other members of the Reich in 1937. In addition, to consuming amphetamine tablets throughout the day, Hitler mainlined methamphetamine three times per day. Thus, it can be said that Hitler was using performance enhancing drugs at an unprecedented rate and this scenario lends credence to the old saw that speed indeed kills and in this case in a fashion probably never conceived by those who spawned the maxim that has become so prevalent in our lexicon. It's clear that the use of amphetamine and anabolic steroids fed directly into Hitler's paranoia and I wonder how much these drugs played in Hitler's grandiose final solution and what would have been the course of WW II if Dr. Morell did not supply Hitler with drugs that enhanced the Fuhrer's underlying pathology.

King George V with generals (Photo credit: Astral Pax)

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