I volunteer at the public library once a week. After story time is over I go into the community room with a pile of new acquisitions and I put protective plastic covers on the dust jackets before the books go into circulation. Many people assume library book jackets are covered in plastic by machines! But it is done by human beings such as myself, who are not paid to do it but who enjoy doing their bit for the public good, often in the third person.
So last week my pile of new acquisitions included a reissue of Hugh Trevor-Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. Life in these United States has been really dispiriting lately and a book about the brutal end of a murdering fuckhead seemed like the juiciest, most satisfying hate read I could think of, so I picked it up and started flipping through it. I mean, pardon me for hoping that the Nazi-idolizers in our country’s own leadershipshould get a taste of their own poison, you know? If history repeats itself, I’d like a little preview of the end of all this!
Growing up with a father obsessed with WWII* I know that A. Hitler, noted vegetarian, had a giant sweet tooth and no one to stop him from eating multiple slices of cake every night until two in the morning**. Unsurprisingly for a man in a stressful leadership position whose diet was completely insufficient for adult needs, H. often complained of indigestion, so his doctor had prescribed some herbal pills to take with each meal, the dosage being no more than two pills per meal, eight pills a day max. But since A. Hitler, irritable bowel-having cake lover, was a very busy man trying to erase the existence of both the Jews and Russia, he put his valet in charge of doling out the tummy pills.
As you can imagine, this valet was going to do whatever his boss, a verified mass murderer, asked him to do. So at breakfast when Hitler said Give me my pills, he gave Hitler two pills, and at lunch when Hitler said Give me four pills, he gave him four pills, and at dinner when dude said My stomach still pains me, woe, the valet gave him all the pills, Here, take them, take them all, don’t murder me.
Unfortunately (??!) Hitler’s “natural” “vegetarian” anti-cramping digestive aids for his irritable colon contained Strychnos nux vomica (strychnine) and Donnatal (belladonna). These are two ancient medicines that have some benefit in very small amounts but they’re also well-known poisons, and when you exceed a therapeutic amount of poison you’re not going to get better faster, you’re going to die quicker. Also, even in small doses strychnine and belladonna both can cause crazy mood swings, painful muscle spasms, and skin discoloration, all of which Hitler was experiencing. Beyond his normal amount of yelling and murder-ordering, his skin was now also visibly mottled.
One night a visiting surgeon took one look at Hitler and knew something was terribly wrong. He asked the valet if he could examine the stomach pills H. had been prescribed, and once he saw what was in them he told H. that he needed to stop taking them ASAP.
Now, you might think that one of Europe’s most feared and murderous leaders would be grateful for a surgeon’s effort to save his miserable fuckhead life. But he was not! The delusions of narcissism must know no bounds, since apparently H. believed it was impossible for him to die before his plan was complete, or maybe his mystical delusions convinced him that he was spiritually unkillable. He just couldn’t visualizehis own death, you know, man? He could only visualize your death, and yours and yours and yours. So, furious and ungrateful, for his bowels were still so irritable, H. rather incomprehensibly accused the surgeon of “having lost faith in victory” (?!). How could a non-famous surgeon believe in his own medical training and try to tell Certified Shiny Boot-lover and Genius A. Hitler that mere pills could harm him, him, a well-known visionary murdering fuckhead. So instead of saying Thanks, I’ll stop taking them and try something else, Hitler ordered the surgeon to be dragged off to prison and executed.
Then everyone went back to losing the war and forgot all about the surgeon in prison, and Hitler put a bullet through his own skull, perhaps to punish himself for losing faith in victory, or perhaps because his dear friend Mussolini had been strung up by his heels and H. figured he was better off offing himself than being dragged through the streets by a Russian mob, his body desecrated and his spirit set free to rot in hell for all eternity. The war was soon over and the surgeon was released from prison by the allies. I don’t know what happened to him after that, I couldn’t read any further because it was lunchtime and I still had a pile of books to cover.
I did find a used copy of the Hitler book online and I bought it, hoping to finish the story, but history turns out to be depressing as fuck sometimes, and we have enough of that going in real life. So I shelved it and instead I read Julia Child’s My Life in France, which was a truly joyful book about a woman who was the complete opposite of Hitler, a person who really knew how to enjoy life, mainly by feeding people AND NOT STARVING THEM.
* My dad had a huge library of books about that war, many written in German, and talk at the dinner table often turned into a history lecture, but to be fair my dad would have made an excellent teacher and I ended up learning more than a lot of other girls my age about how concentration camps worked.
** Were the joys of life itself not sweet enough for you, Adolf?!?