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WASHINGTON -- Let's take a break from current events and go straight to some intriguing topics that are hard to cram into weekly columns.
The centenarian Queen Mother's much-covered passing in England earlier this month triggered your trusty scribe's dig through some boxes for a recent but obscure book on Adolf Hitler that helps explain why the Brits aren't goose-stepping and speaking German today. I found it.
The Queen Mum was much appreciated by the English in life and death for displaying her quiet fortitude in helping lead them through World War II and the horrific nightly Nazi bombings. The remembered volume is called "Hitler's Fatal Sickness and Other Secrets of the Nazi Leaders," published by Hippocrene Books.
The octogenarian author -- a New York City physician who practiced well into his 80s -- waited more than half a century to write it. But it still carries relevance, given claims by some historians, including Pat Buchanan, that Hitler posed no direct threat to the United States, and that Franklin D. Roosevelt safely could have let us sit out World War II.
John K. Lattimer was an Army surgical specialist when the war ended, commanding hospital trains as American divisions fought their way across Europe. He was assigned to the Nuremberg war crimes trials, where he examined, treated, and got to know well several of the Third Reich's surviving Nazi leaders.
The doctor's conversations with these frank and candid about-to-die men don't lend much credence to the theory that America could rest on its heels, content to watch from afar as Hitler's war machine and Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union duked it out to military exhaustion on the eastern front.
"If Hitler had occupied England and had achieved bases in South America from cooperative governments there," wrote Lattimer, "it would have been very difficult for the United States to mount any real resistance to the Germans. Hitler's ever-expanding high-tech submarine fleet would have made sea lanes difficult to maintain."
So why didn't Hitler invade England in 1940 when his success was almost certain? The "Fatal Sickness" in the book's title is key to explaining that. It was Parkinson's disease -- the illness of Muhammad Ali, Michael Fox, Janet Reno, and probably Pope John Paul II. It is much in the news these days, but six decades ago it had no treatment and little research had been done. It is Lattimer's conclusion that Hitler had the disease.
"It is my feeling that someone told him in 1940 that he had an incurable disease and that his time was very limited. He then decided that he would have to move up his timetable for world domination by attacking Russia sooner, rather than later, which he did, with disastrous consequences. ... The revelation that his days were numbered must have come just about the time of the British evacuation at Dunkirk."
The author thought Hitler "decided to forget England and to gamble at over-running Russia before he had secured the Middle Eastern oil fields. Despite the numerous perils, Hitler took the chance -- and lost."
"Hitler had won his war (if he had stuck to his strategy) about a year-and-a-half before we even got into it," Lattimer said in an interview. "The British later acknowledged they had been at his mercy."
The doctor believed Hitler developed a tremor in his left hand as early as 1923 (when he was 34) and still in prison after his abortive Beer Hall Putsch. As we can recall from standard Third Reich photos (the ones you see on the History Channel almost nightly), somewhere around 1932 Hitler, desperate to conceal any signs of weakness, began gripping one hand with the other -- likely so he could suppress the tremor. He would also clutch rolled-up papers or his gloves in his left hand, or grip the buckle of his big leather belt. By 1934, at 45, he had stopped using his left arm completely, except in the mornings when he was fresh and rested.
Few knew this. There was no live television. Newsreel photographers were forbidden to show views of his shaking left hand. Even the home movies of his devoted mistress Eva Braun never show his hands. As the war ended, however, and censorship broke down, a newsreel team showed Hitler greeting youthful soldiers in the garden of his wrecked Chancellery -- his left hand rolling in gross tremor.
About five years ago, Dr. Abraham Lieberman, a Florida neurologist and medical director of the National Parkinson Foundation, saw the film and put forth the Parkinson's disease theory in medical journal articles. Lieberman also noted that, by 1944, Hitler's bold, expansive signature had shrunken to a tiny, jammed scrawl -- a Parkinson symptom called "micrographia" -- suggesting that, by the close of the war, the disease had affected both Hitler's arms.
Lattimer remembered Hitler's cohorts describing to him how the Fuhrer would clutch their arms to drag himself up from a sitting position, and how in 1945, when the end was near, they had to position benches in the corridors of the bunker, so he could rest every few feet. Lattimer called Lieberman and got his permission to expand on the Parkinson's theory in his book.
Hitler, according to colleagues, also displayed some other classic symptoms of Parkinson's -- constipation, excessive sweating, flatulence, eyeball rolling, and transient fits of incredible rage in which he would actually foam at the mouth. The author surmised that Hitler's Parkinson's disease resulted -- as many cases do -- from a bout with encephalitis, a brain inflammation which was epidemic during World War I, when Hitler was a young corporal in the German army.
At the end of that conflict, Hitler was hospitalized with an episode of blindness -- which he blamed on British chlorine gas -- regained his sight, then went blind again. Lieberman's research shows six percent of patients hospitalized with encephalitis report temporary blindness.
"The fanatic simplifies matters: He is immune to doubt and to hesitation. Intellectual exercise is distasteful, and the art and beauty of dialogue alien to him. Other people's ideas or theories are of no use to him. He is never bothered by difficult problems: A decree or a bullet solves them ... immediately. The fanatic feels nothing but disdain toward intellectuals who spend precious time analyzing, dissecting, beating philosophical notions and hypotheses. What matters to the fanatic is the outcome -- not the way leading there," he wrote.
Wiesel, who survived the concentration camps, stated that memory is a powerful weapon and explained why trying to ignore terrorism with nothing more than politically correct hope won't make it go away: "To live through a catastrophe is bad; to forget it is worse."
Highly absorbent clay that is light yet still stifles dust and odor is now worth more -- literally -- than some semi-precious minerals. And near Reno, Nev., a great legal scrap has erupted over plans by the planet's largest producer of kitty litter to scoop out a giant open-pit mine where that exceedingly rare clay is abundant and near the surface. There is enough of the clumpable clay there for two lucrative decades of making fastidious cats purr and please their proud owners.
The makers of Cat's Pride, Fresh Step and Special Kitty have a claim on public land near Reno that is administered by the federal Bureau of Land Management -- a hug-and-happy agency whose current motto in respect to mining the earth seems to be: "Here's Your Shovel -- Have a Ball!"
But the commissioners of Washoe County, urged on by environmentalist groups, have stiff-armed the kitty litter barons with a slim 3-2 vote denying permits for the open mine and processing plant. It would be too close to residential areas in the Reno suburbs and to a nearby Indian reservation, they argue.
Lawyers for the lords of kitty litter counter that under the ancient federal law -- signed by President Ulysses Grant to encourage mindless western expansion -- they can dig wherever they want without local permission and without paying royalties to taxpayers.
The public mining miasma has been a bubbling controversy here for years. In President Clinton's first term, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and now-retired Democratic senator Dale Bumpers of Arkansas tried to reform and modernize the much-criticized law.
The effort kicked over a hornets' nest of well-heeled mining lobbyists and produced a bill so tepid that Clinton vetoed it -- preferring instead to stop mining abuse on public lands through administrative decree and executive orders.
Don't count on that strategy today. The Bush administration has already rescinded Clinton's protective orders. Smart money here is on the felines. Meow.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 23 2002 |