Thirty days at the shooting house: the strange case of Dr. Edmund Forster and Adolf Hitler

Abstract

In 1918, in a military reserve hospital located in the small pomeranian town of Pasewalk, the neuropsychiatrist Prof. Edmund Forster treated an Austrian caporal called Adolf Hitler, suffering from a war neurosis (hysterical blindness), by means of suggestive techniques. Soon after the Hitler's ascension to the power in the Nazi Germany, in 1933, Dr. Forster met with a group of exiled writers living in Paris and secretly gave them information about the case. The writer Ernst Weiss, also he a physician, latter used this information in order to produce his novel "The Eye Witness", which would be published only in 1963. In strange circumstances, Prof. Forster committed suicide after successive defamatory statements in 1933. Weiss also committed suicide in 1940, when German troops invaded Paris. The Gestapo murdered several other persons involved in the Hitler's medical chart.