Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, March 22, 1993 TAG: 9303220008
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
HITLER SUFFERED INFLAMED ARTERIES, STUDY CONCLUDES
Adolf Hitler likely suffered from a malady that inflames arteries and reduces blood flow to the head, heart and liver, but that and other ailments can't be blamed for his crimes, says a new study.However, they might have aggravated his longstanding belief that he wouldn't live long and needed to accomplish his goals quickly, Dr. Fritz Redlich, the Hitler study's author, said Sunday.
Scholars knew Hitler had liver, heart and stomach troubles, took numerous drugs, and displayed the shaking characteristic of Parkinson's disease, a degenerative nerve disorder.
But symptoms cited in his doctor's records indicate Hitler also had giant cell arteritis, an artery inflammation disease, said the study published in today's issue of the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.
"It was simply overlooked" by other researchers and unrecognized by Hitler's doctor, said Redlich, professor emeritus of psychiatry at the University of California, Los Angeles, and former dean of Yale University School of Medicine.
Hitler's symptoms included malaise, headaches, impaired vision, fever, weight loss, sensitivity to sunlight, tenderness and an enlarged artery over one temple - all consistent with arteritis in the scalp, Redlich said.
Inflamed arteries elsewhere in the body also might explain Hitler's heart disease, abdominal pain and liver troubles, he said.
Redlich, 82, has spent eight years compiling Hitler's health history for future publication by Oxford University Press. He interviewed people who knew Hitler and read thousands of documents at the National Archives, including the 1941-45 letters and diary of Hitler's wartime physician, Dr. Theodor Morell.
Redlich said Morell "was on the border of being a charlatan," treating Hitler with opiates, cocaine, barbiturates, laxatives, leeches, vitamins, tonics, useless hormones and sugar-water injections.
Hitler refused to let doctors X-ray his chest or abdomen.
He also wouldn't let doctors examine his genitals. Perhaps it was because he was born with one testicle, as stated by a Soviet autopsy; that autopsy was questioned by a recent French study. But Redlich said Hitler asked his doctor questions that suggest he had some other genital deformity.
Redlich said people who knew Hitler wrote of confused, very excited behavior during 1939-42, "convincing evidence" Hitler took amphetamines.
Tremors and other signs of Parkinson's long have been noted in newsreels. And Morell diagnosed Parkinson's two weeks before Hitler died.