As time went on, Morell naturally had to resort to stronger drugs and shorter intervals in order to maintain Hitler’s performance. On top of this, he had to prescribe sedatives to calm the jangled nerves, so that Hitler was exposed to a permanent process of physiological stress. The consequences of this constant interference with his body processes by at times as many as twenty-eight different drugs became evident during the war, when the strain of events, the loss of sleep, the monotony of the vegetarian diet, and his troglodyte’s existence in the bunker world of headquarters, intensified the effects of the medicines. In August, 1941, Hitler complained of bouts of weakness, nausea and chills and fever. Swellings formed on his leg, quite possibly a reaction against the years of artificial regulation of his body. From this time on, at any rate, spells of exhaustion appeared with greater frequency. After Stalingrad he took a drug against depressive moods every other day.61 Thereafter, he could no longer endure bright light, and for this reason had a cap with a greatly enlarged vizor made for his walks outdoors. Sometimes he complained about disturbed balance: “I always have the feeling of tipping to the right.”62
In spite of the visible changes in his exterior, his bowed back, his rapidly graying hair, he retained to the end an unusual capacity for work. Quite rightly, he himself attributed his remarkable energy to Morell’s efforts, overlooking the extent to which he was consuming his physical reserves. After the war, Professor Karl Brandt, who was a member of Hitler’s medical staff, said that the effect of Morell’s treatment was to “draw on what one might call life for years in advance” and that it had seemed as if Hitler “every year aged not a year but four or five years.” Hence the sudden and premature graying and his shattered appearance. In the euphorias produced by his drugs he seemed to glow like a wraith.
It would therefore be a mistake to attribute the symptoms of degeneration, the crises and fitful outbursts on Hitler’s part, to structural changes in his personality. The abuse of his physical potential and the consumption of his reserves partly covered over and partly intensified the existing elements, but did not cause—as has sometimes been asserted—the destruction of a hitherto intact personality.63 This is the qualification that must be placed on all the disputes over the effects of the strychnine contained in some of Morell’s drugs, or whether Hitler suffered from Parkinson’s disease (paralysis agitans), or whether the trembling of his left arm, the stooped posture, and his locomotive difficulties were of psychosomatic origin. However shadowy he looked outwardly, masklike in his rigidity, leaning on a cane as he moved about headquarters, he was still the man he had once been. What is so staggering in his appearance during those last years is not so much his rapid aging as the consistency—bordering on paralysis—with which he took up and carried out his early obsessions.
He was a person who continually needed artificial charging. In a sense Morell’s drugs and medicines replaced the old stimulus of mass ovations. As noted above, Hitler shrank from the public after Stalingrad and in fact delivered only two more major speeches. Soon after the beginning of the war, he had begun this withdrawal, and all the propaganda efforts to create a mythology out of his remoteness was a poor substitute for the former sense cf his omnipresence, by which the regime had been able to tap a vein of energy, spontaneity, and spirit of sacrifice in the German people. Now this potential for affecting the masses was gone. For fear of losing his aura of invincibility, Hitler would not set foot in the shattered cities; for the same reason he would not face the masses after the defeats, although he presumably sensed that this shrinking could lose him not only power over men’s minds but also the source of his own energies. “Everything I am, I am through you alone,” he occasionally had cried to the masses. Beyond all the aspects of techniques of power, he had thereby been affirming a constitutional, almost a physiological dependency. For the rhetorical excesses in which he had indulged from the first, uncertain appearances in Munich beer halls all the way to the painful, determined efforts of the last two years, never had as their sole purpose the rousing of the energies of others. They served also to rally his own forces and were, beyond all political occasions and ends, a means of self-preservation. In one of his last great speeches he prepared the country for his coming silence by pointing to the momentousness of the events at the front: “What need is there for me to do much talking now?” But among his intimates he later complained that he no longer trusted himself to speak before 10,000 persons and declared that he probably would never again be able to deliver a major speech. The conception of the end of his career as an orator was associated with the idea of the end in general, of death.64
Along with this retreat from the public, Hitler’s peculiar weakness as a leader became apparent for the first time. Ever since the days of his rise he had always maintained his superiority by the charisma of the demagogue and by tactical ingenuity. But in this stage of the war he had to meet other demands on leadership. The principle of rival authorities—the domestic intrigues and struggles, this whole chaos of powers that he had constructed around him in preceding years and manipulated with Machiavellian skill—was scarcely appropriate for the struggle against a resolute enemy. It turned out to be one of the fateful weaknesses of the regime. For it consumed the energies that the fight against the outside antagonist required and finally led to a condition approaching total anarchy. In the military field alone there were the theaters of war under the parallel authority of the High Command of the armed forces (OKW) and High Command of the army (OKH), the undefined special position of Göring, the authority of Hitler and the SS, which cut across all other channels of command, the confusion of all kinds of army divisions, grenadier units, air force infantry formations, the SS-in-arms, and the militia, each accessible to various official channels. On top of all this, finally, there was the relationship to the troops of allied countries, a relationship undermined by mutual distrust. The administrative structure in occupied Europe was similarly confused; new forms of domination were constantly being developed, from outright annexation through protectorate, government general, and civil administration. Hardly ever has a centering of all power in a single person ended in such total and blatant disorganization.
It is by no means clear, however, whether Hitler ever really recognized the ruinous effects of his style of leadership. Rational classifications, structural arrangements, any kind of quiet authority, were fundamentally so alien to him that until literally the last days of the war he repeatedly encouraged his entourage to feud over positions, competences, and ridiculous questions of rank. There are indications that he had more confidence in the hunger for power and the egotism manifested in such quarrels than in all possible unselfish attitudes, because they comported with his view of the world. The very objectivity of specialists made him suspicious of them. And so he tried to wage the war as far as possible without their help, without consultation, without the relevant documentation, without logistical calculations; he tried to wage the war in the anachronistic style of the solitary commanders of antiquity—and lost it.