How Hitler's Flatulence Defeated Nazi Germany

After the Second World War, a common joke was that Adolf Hitler was the best general the Allies ever had. His string of disastrous decisions, from halting his forces around Dunkirk, delaying his invasion of Russia, and refusing to pull the 6th Army out of Stalingrad, handed the advantage to his enemies time and time again - to the point that Operation Foxley, a 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler at his home in the Bavarian Alps, was cancelled for fear the Fuhrer would be replaced by a more competent leader.  But while Hitler’s military judgement was shaky from the start, it grew significantly worse as the war dragged on and the Fuhrer’s mental and physical health sharply declined. In April 1945, while Hitler was holed up in his Berlin Fuhrerbunker as the Red Army closed in on the city, SS doctor Ernst-Günther Schenck remembered being shocked at the leader’s condition, describing him as a “living corpse, a dead soul.”  “His spine was hunched, his shoulder blades protruded from his bent back, and he collapsed his shoulders like a turtle.… I was looking into the eye of death.”  Shuffling and stumbling around like a man far older than his 56 years, his hands trembling so violently he could no longer write his own name, and his mood swinging wildly between wild euphoria and unstoppable rage, the once vigorous leader of Nazi Germany had become a mental and physical wreck, a mere shell of his former self whose irrational decisions likely helped end the Second World War far earlier than it otherwise would have. But what caused this dramatic collapse? For decades historians and medical professionals have proposed a variety of candidates for Hitler’s particular ailments, from Parkinson’s to tertiary neurosyphilis, but there may be another, even stranger explanation, and it all has to do with Adolf Hitler being extremely gassy. The Third Reich, as fanatically driven by ideology as it was, was always a mess of contradictions. Though Nazi ideology lionized the blonde, blue-eyed Aryan, few top Nazis - including Heinrich Himmler, Martin Bormann, Herman Göring, Josef Göbels, and Hitler himself remotely resembled this ideal. Even the infamous SS, the organization most obsessed with racial purity, eventually recruited entire legions of Muslims from the Balkans and Hindus and Sikhs from India into its ranks. But perhaps the most surprising contradiction of all was that Hitler’s personal doctor, Theodor Morell, the man with arguably the greatest and most intimate access to the Fuhrer, was half-Jewish. Born in 1886, the balding, overweight Morell served as a ship’s doctor and Army physician during WWI before establishing a general practice on Berlin’s fashionable Kurfürstendamm street. There he amassed a clientele of mainly wealthy high-society patients whose mostly non-existent ailments responded well to flattery, homeopathy, and a variety of elaborate quack cures Morell concocted himself. Hitler met Morell by chance at a Christmas party in 1936, and while the doctor repelled the Fuhrer’s inner circle with his poor hygiene, repulsive body odour, and unpleasant demeanour, Hitler took an instant liking to him as he promised to cure one of the leader’s most long-standing and embarrassing health complaints. Author: Gilles Messier Host/Editor: Daven Hiskey Producer: Samuel Avila