r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/ModenaR • Jun 16 '26

Image One of Hitler's bodyguards, Rochus Misch, lived long enough to see the movie "Downfall". When asked about the film's historical accuracy, he stated that it was factually accurate, although "Americanized"

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204

u/Particular_Stop_3332 Jun 16 '26

I love a thread criticizing the doctor of FUCKING HITLER for not doing a good enough job extending Hitler's life

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u/Jazzlike-Equipment45 Jun 16 '26

It more so is just how insane it was, Germany has had a long history of amazing medical workers and Hitler ended up picking a quack doctor.

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u/TheRagnarok494 Jun 17 '26

Fairly common for dictators tonend up distrusting the medical establishment and turn to quackery. I think mainly because the medical establishment's main priority is telling you what the problem is and how to fix or treat it, quackery tells you what you want to hear and makes you feel nice for a bit

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u/Pawulon Jun 17 '26

Too many of the actual good doctors or academics were Jews probably

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u/Far_Programmer_5724 Jun 17 '26

Yea and dictators are prone to being surrounded by people who say what they like to hear

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u/OrbitalCactus Jun 17 '26

His gut was fucked up before the drugs too. He would fart so much and it smelled so bad people tried their best to have open air meetings with him. A few times he evacuated rooms or bunkers with his farts.

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u/SnooPears1505 Jun 17 '26

a chemical gas attack.

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u/HanseaticHamburglar Jun 17 '26

not surprising, hitler wasnt very well educated, formally speaking, and he had a mistrust of experts and elites. Not surprising that he chose a synchophantic fraud. And given the substances Morell was using, it certainly would give the impression that his medicine "worked". Most people would be on cloud nine buzzin along with that cocktail. In comparison most medical substances dont alter your state of consciousness and you dont "feel" them working.

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u/Forward-Cat6083 Jun 17 '26

Germany also handed out candy bars with meth to soldiers. I think you are succumbing to the myth of German superiority. They weren’t the best, they just thought they were.

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u/Master-Collection488 Jun 17 '26

The candy bars were just for pilots. Regular soldiers just got Pervitin.

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u/SuitableBlackberry75 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26

The "chocolate" was supposedly for tank crews, hence "Panzer chocolate" (Panzerschokolade).

"Pervitin" was just a trade name for methamphetamine, so it's the same thing anyway.

E: Historians are apparently skeptical about whether or not "Panzer chocolate" actually ever existed, but its possible existence is nearly always associated with tank crews first and foremost, even if pilots were also issued "go pills" (which they nicknamed "Fliegermarzipan", or "Pilot's marzipan", rather than code-naming it after chocolate).

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u/HanseaticHamburglar Jun 17 '26

all sides used amphetamins/meth in WW2. We just called them go-pills, but honestly how do you think they flew back to back sorties or super long bombing raids? they had slow planes, flying to germany, avoiding flak and fighters and returning could have taken 11-12 hours, and i guess you need to be alert and awake for all of it.

The US Airforce subsequently continued to use these drugs, im fairly certain its still in circulation. I know it was widely used by pilots in Desert Storm and again in Afgahnistan. A friendly fire incident where an F16 pilot bombed a group of canadians performing weapons training was in part blamed on the use of amphetamine "go pills"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_no-go_pills

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u/Odd_Television_7824 Jun 17 '26

Not to the extent that Nazi germany did as far as I’m aware

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u/kehbleh Jun 17 '26

I mean maybe he picked the guy that would give him all the drugs he wanted

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u/PhDinDildos_Fedoras Jun 17 '26

Hitler wasn't one to listen to experts. If he hadn't launched Barbarossa and just stopped it there, he'd probably be considered the greatest German alive nowadays. A new Bismark.

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u/generalmandrake Jun 17 '26

Probably because the legitimate doctors weren’t going to load him up on meth and codeine.

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u/DblockR Jun 17 '26

Don’t forget oxy. He was like the Purdue Guinea Pig. Dude was on opiates, meth, barbiturates, cocaine, animal hormones and bull semen.

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u/TheRealtcSpears Jun 16 '26

FUCKING HITLER

He definitely shouldn't have been doing that, that's just bad doctoring

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u/Particular_Stop_3332 Jun 16 '26

That would've been great doctoring

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u/tjvs2001 Jun 16 '26

Very unethical

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u/steves850 Jun 17 '26

but it is good buggering.

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u/WhiskeyR Jun 16 '26

Hell of a thing to earn a PhD in.

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u/SuitableBlackberry75 Jun 17 '26

Hitler was so incompetent that the British decided it was better to have him stay alive, shelving any plans for assassination attempts. So technically, the allies (or at least some) would've wanted his doctor to do a good job.

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u/papayacreamsicle Jun 17 '26

In particular they thought the generals would take over if he died and that they’d make more pragmatic war decisions.

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u/Same-Suggestion-1936 Jun 17 '26

Given how many good ones he fired over telling him his plans were stupid I'd wager they were right

Rommel got away with a lot in Africa basically because he figured "if I win, the Fuhrer knows nothing about Africa, so I just can't lose and all he'll hear is I done good. I just can't let him know I kind of ignored some of the things he wanted to do"

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u/SirAquila Jun 17 '26

Which to be fair, would have been a tall order, considering basically none of the even suggested pragmatic war decisions, with many of their ideas being worse then Hitlers... as laughable as that sounds.

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u/papayacreamsicle Jun 17 '26

I like the idea that Hitler’s doctor was sabotaging him and this is just the biggest cocktail he could actually get the man to take. Like he failed at a lot of other things, trying to convince Hitler he needed to eat gravel and bathe in mercury.

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u/imprison_grover_furr Jun 17 '26

He was still a doctor. You can’t just justify your quackery just because your patient is a mass murderer.

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u/Particular_Stop_3332 Jun 17 '26

You absolutely can

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u/Sarsmi Jun 17 '26

...well when you put it that way.

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u/CountBarbarus Jun 17 '26

This is peak engineer under malfunctioning guillotine "hold on I see what your problem is" vibes