Not To Hate But To Love That Is What I Am Here For: My Path Through The Hell Of The Third Reich

It looks like it might be awaiting royal guests. But the sign at the entrance reads: Under the ribbed vaults of a large hall, I join an audience of A blonde woman wearing a satin dress stands up to sing German and Russian patriotic songs. Another AfD member follows. He uses the word Mitteldeutschland central Germany in reference to former East Germany — as if more German territories lie beyond the Oder-Neisse line which has marked the border with Poland since the second world war.

I am the granddaughter of a German member of the Nazi party and of a French gendarme who served under the Vichy regime, which collaborated with the Nazis. My German grandfather was not an ideological National Socialist — he joined out of opportunism and for convenience. He was persuasive with small groups, but he electrified large audiences.

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But his speeches malevolently twisted hope into some gnarled ghastly entities, and appealed to the latent, darkest prejudices of Germans. It is true that in the German people, as a mysterious Providence and centuries of experience had moulded them up to that time, he found a natural instrument which he was able to shape to his own sinister ends. But without Adolf Hitler, who was possessed of a demonic personality, a granite will, uncanny instincts, a cold ruthlessness, a remarkable intellect, a soaring imagination and — until the end, when, drunk with power and success, he overreached himself — an amazing capacity to size up people and situations, there almost certainly would never have been a Third Reich.

Revolutionaries seized power in the cities of Munich, Hanover and Cologne.

Adolf Hitler, recuperating in a military hospital, reacted violently to this news. Hitler was neither its pre-destined nor its obvious conclusion. But I refuse the notion that the police are protective troops for Jewish stores. No, the police protect whoever comes into Germany legitimately, but it does not exist for the purpose of protecting Jewish money-lenders. If you call that murder, then I am the murderer.

You had imagined that that was all that we wanted We want more — we want all. Your hearts are our goal, it is your souls that we want. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? The whole educational system, theatre, film, literature, the press and broadcasting — all these will be used as a means to this end.

It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built.

But the invasion of France was made possible by the drugs. No drugs, no invasion. When Hitler heard about the plan to invade through Ardennes, he loved it [the allies were massed in northern Belgium]. But the high command said: But then the stimulant decree was released, and that enabled them to stay awake for three days and three nights.

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Thereafter, drugs were regarded as an effective weapon by high command, one that could be deployed against the greatest odds. In , for instance, when it was increasingly clear that victory against the allies was all but impossible, the German navy developed a range of one-man U-boats; the fantastical idea was that these pint-sized submarines would make their way up the Thames estuary. But since they could only be used if the lone marines piloting them could stay awake for days at a time, Dr Gerhard Orzechowski, the head pharmacologist of the naval supreme command on the Baltic, had no choice but to begin working on the development of a new super-medication — a cocaine chewing gum that would be the hardest drug German soldiers had ever taken.

It was tested at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, on a track used to trial new shoe soles for German factories; prisoners were required to walk — and walk — until they dropped. He had never heard about it before. You must, somehow, exceed your own strength. Meanwhile, in Berlin, Hitler was experiencing his own unreality, with his only ally in the world his podgy, insecure personal physician, Dr Morell. In the late 20s, Morell had grown a thriving private practice in Berlin, his reputation built on the modish vitamin injections he liked to give his patients.

When Hitler fell seriously ill in , however, the vitamin injections that Morell had counted on no longer had any effect — and so he began to ramp things up. Did Morell deliberately turn Hitler into an addict? When those around him tried to remove Morell in the fall of , Hitler stood up for him — though by then, he knew that if he was to go, he [Hitler] would be finished.

They got along very well.

Morell loved to give injections, and Hitler liked to have them. He was time-pressed; he thought he was going to die young. Someone quotes him as saying to Morell: But mostly, they talked about it in oblique terms. Maybe he was trying to block it off from his mind. And like any dealer, Morell was never going to say: The effect of the drugs could appear to onlookers to be little short of miraculous.

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The next, he would be ranting unstoppably at Mussolini. In Italy, Blitzed will come with an extra chapter. After the Germans installed him as the puppet leader of the Republic of Italy in , they ordered him to be put under the eyes of the doctor. Again, he returns with a document in his hand. But he was being given the same drugs as Hitler. Every week there was a doctorly report.