Hitler: Vegetarianism as folly.

Hitler became vegetarian because of an enthymeme:
Elephants are the strongest animals, elephants are vegetarian thus vegetables make you strong thus eating meat makes you weak thus I have to become a vegetarian.

Hitler was not a generally ignorant person: He knew Shakespeare and Wagner almost by heart, he knew much about architecture, German mythology and history, military matters. He knew much about unworthy subjects like Satanism, Occultism (though he was not himself an occultist), Black magic, Spiritism, Reincarnation and other cheap stuff.

But about biology he really knew almost nothing. The whole racial science is a pipedream. About the elephants, nobody explained to Hitler that a male adult needs to eat from 150 to 200kg of leaves a day just to maintain its basal metabolism.

Anyway Hitler chose vegetarianism and this vegetarianism had devastating effects on his physical and mental health.

How so? Well, his vegetarian diet gave him much flatulencies.  Nobody told Hitler that by the year 2000 the cows would produce as much CO2 as all the cars on earth.
And flatulencies became Hitler's main concern (more than Germany or the Jews) because Hitler was a man of very polite manners. As many of the people who encountered him said, he had the polite manners of a Viennese butler.

Some of my friends would easily imagine a tropical dictator letting his flatulencies escape with ease. But Hitler was a self-conscious and self constructed persona. He built his persona like an architect builds a monument. To him a flatulence would be a taint to his glory.

Hitler looks angry in most of his portraits because he was retaining his flatulencies.

As retaining became a more and more difficult solution, Hitler was happy to find in 1938 Dr. Morell. Dr. Morell stank like a skunk, because he rarely or never washed himself. Even members of Hitler's entourage dared to complain about Morell's bodily odours, and Hitler said "I don’t call him to me because of his odours, I call him to me because he keeps me healthy".

Indeed Morell solved Hitler flatulencies problem but at a great cost for his patients health: Hitler was taking 90 different drugs, 27 of which he took daily. Among the drugs he took daily there where hefty amounts of cocaine and methamphetamine.

I'm not saying that these drugs made him mad but they surely didn't calm down his madness.

He will take these drugs uninterruptedly from late 1936 up to his suicide in 1945. The daily consumption of this drugs will give him a chronic and progressive iatrogenic Parkinson disorder that made him look at the end, 20 years older than he was.

It's interesting to note that the whole Wermacht was taking methamphetamines. The Wehrmacht consumed 35 millions of tablets between April and June 1940.







See:
Neumann, H-J, Eberle, H. War Hitler krank?, Bastai Lübe, Köln, 2009
Rayback, T. Hitler's private library, Vintage, New York, 2008
Ulrich, A."The Nazi Death Machine: Hitler's Drugged Soldiers", Spiegel Online, 6/5/2005
Ohler, N. Der totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Köln, 2015
Perry, P. Methamphetamine Was the Secret to Hitler’s Blitzkrieg Successes