Was Hitler Ill? A Final Diagnosis by Hans-Joachim Neumann, Henrik Eberle (review)

Much has been written, almost all of it speculative, about whether, or to what extent, Adolf Hitler suffered from chronic diseases or psychiatric disorders. Eberle, a historian, and Hans-Joachim Neumann, a distinguished medical expert from Berlin, have joined hands in a fruitful interdisciplinary exercise to put an end to the perennial effort to link Hitler’s aggressive nationalism and genocidal racism to some kind of physical or mental condition. The result will be welcomed by all serious scholars of the Third Reich, though the authors’ conclusions will probably do little to dent the faith of those with a commitment to explaining Hitler’s actions as the product of medical dysfunction.

The first part of the book, which explores the current mythology surrounding Hitler’s physical and mental state, is generally, and sensibly, dismissive of almost all of it—any hint of recurrent genetic conditions in Hitler’s family, of Hitler’s alleged homosexuality or sexual perversity (though it is probably unprovable), of his contracting venereal disease, and of his having only one testicle. The discussion of possible pathological states that have usually been ascribed rather than proved is full and convincing, though the authors might have given some attention to the current interest in the idea of “the Nazi mind,” as explored in Pick’s recent study.¹

The rest of the book examines in close detail, using the surviving evidence, the history of Hitler’s health throughout his public political life. The principal source is the diary of Theodor Morell, his personal physician, who kept careful notes on Hitler’s illnesses, treatments, and medicines. The evidence shows that Hitler was not always well, suffering from chronic irritable bowel syndrome, exacerbated by periods of stress, and other stomach conditions the origin of which appears to have been psychosomatic. He also suffered from insomnia, again prompted by stress. Neumann suggests that Hitler almost certainly suffered some effects of Parkinson’s disease, visible in the tremors in his left arm, though other aspects of the condition seem to have been absent. The gastric conditions were treatable, though tension must account for many of them. In terms of possible psychiatric conditions, the authors freely admit the difficulties in reconstructing the mental state of someone long dead with any clinical precision, but they find no evidence that Hitler suffered from any form of serious psychological disorder. He was, they suggest, throughout the dictatorship “healthy and accountable” (190).

These conclusions certainly reinforce what most common-sense analyses of Hitler’s physical and mental state have suggested. But the willingness of the two authors to throw out the most fantastic or speculative theories about Hitler’s psychiatric health leads them to abandon any attempt to describe his mental state. Even without any psychoanalytical presuppositions about the influence exerted on him by a doting mother and a harsh father (since millions of Europeans had the same inheritance), Hitler surely had a specific psychological make-up, elements of which may well have determined how he behaved, waxing and waning according to circumstances. Hitler may not have been insane in any scientific sense, but his personality was hardly irrelevant to his actions.

This matter raises a more serious problem, which the authors consider more fully in the last third of the book. Those who make a serious study of Hitler’s physical and mental states are usually looking for a connection between these states and his drive for war and genocide. It is by no means foolish to deny that Hitler’s genocide of the Jews was a byproduct of a chronic mental disorder. Neumann and Eberle argue that antisemitism was a cultural-historical construct in Germany of which Hitler was as much symptom as cause. They find little connection between Hitler’s actual ailments (particularly the gastric problems) and the course of the war. The same argument can be made for Winston Churchill or Franklin D. Roosevelt. Decisions in war are usually the result...