If the doctor had cut a few more millimeters with his scalpel and fatally injured his patient, who was lying in front of him at the Chancellor’s office in Berlin on May 23, 1935, he could have prevented immeasurable suffering and saved millions of people from death.
Hitler was treated several times by Carl Otto von Aiken, a ENT specialist, the German physician had treated him for 10 years since 1935, the Swiss media reported. Aiken, who found them while searching for family archives for a school project, von Aiken died in 1960. British historian Richard J. Evans, an expert on German history, said it was a guarantee of the authenticity of the unpublished letters. Hitler from a serious illness.
“If there is anything wrong, I must definitely know,” Hitler told the doctor after their first consultation in May 1935, according to the letters. The paper reported that the letters also show the importance Hitler attached to his voice, which he used in speeches to encourage support for his regime.
One analysis of the voice problem was postponed until after a pre-planned speech, according to the letters, when von Aiken advised Hitler that he should let his voice rest after the procedure. In his letters von Aiken never doubted that he treated a man whose actions led to the killing of millions of people in the Holocaust and World War II, the Swiss newspaper reported.
Carl Otto von Aiken, then 62, had the power to change the world, but he decided to remain a doctor. When the doctor was asked by Russian investigators after the war why he did not kill Hitler, von Aiken said: “I was his doctor, not his killer.” Hitler died by suicide in a bunker in Berlin in 1945, shortly before the end of the war.
The great-grandson Robert Dopgen said he was in a history class, and his high school teacher talked about Hitler’s personal doctor, he recalled that one of his family also treated Hitler. He decided to do family research and look for what this doctor knows about Hitler’s atrocities. He was concerned about whether von Aiken should have acted differently. After all, “we are not only responsible for what we do, but also for what we do not do” he said.
With the help of his mother, journalist Valerie Vandenburg, Dupgen coordinated previously unpublished correspondence in which the doctor proudly reported in detail about his meetings with Hitler, they searched for files, interviewed relatives and recounted the life and work of this doctor, who sacrificed much for his career. To Hitler himself. He looked Hitler in the throat, but closed his eyes to his racist fanaticism.
When Hitler seized power, his obsession with racial purity spread in hospitals. From 1939, under the pseudonym “Action T4”, sick people and those in need of medical care, systematically became an “existential burden to the world”, they were called “parasites on the German political body” and executed in a murder program of about 250,000 people, which were a burden On the terrible Aryan race.
Former president of the German Medical Association Jurg-Dietrich Hoffa, who examined doctors’ involvement in Nazi “euthanasia” policies, was also certain that the killings could not have taken place without the active participation or at least passive consent of German doctors. Hoppe concluded that physicians are driven not only by cowardice or opportunism, but by conviction. “The vast majority of doctors were silent or agreed.”
It is difficult to judge whether Carl Otto von Aiken supported Hitler’s racism. According to a study by the Swiss Nino Robert Dopgen and his mother, he joined the Nazi Medical Association at the end of February 20, 1942. However, what is certain is that as a member of the Berlin Faculty of Medicine from 1933, he watched his Jewish medical colleagues expelled and disappear. As a physician, von Aiken no longer served humanity but the Fuhrer, but did he have any other choice the question begs ?.
According to the study, Hitler’s friends carefully examined von Aiken’s political views before allowing him to approach their Fuhrer neck with a scalpel in hand.
In one of the conversations Hitler asked him: “When can you do the surgery?” Von Aiken replied: “If you want right away.”
Hitler: “I still have to finish a big speech I’m going to deliver in a few days.” Von Aiken: “By no means, after the procedure you should completely let your voice rest for a few days.” Hitler: “Then you can only approach me after the speech.”
It is possible that von Aiken exaggerated with these dialogues in letters to impress his cousin and exaggerate in his role. But Hitler, it is a fact, was very pleased with him. The first successful analysis of Hitler’s vocal cords, led Hitler to respond “happily” as von Aiken wrote to his cousin, in documented conversations dozens of consultations and meetings until Hitler’s death and the end of the war.
Hitler was not the only one impressed by the skills of an ENT doctor. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s incitement man, wrote in his diary in late June 1935 after von Aiken re-examined Hitler: “He has fully recovered. We feared throat cancer. Now it was a harmless tumor.” In August of that year, Hitler complained of “burning pain” and was convinced he had swallowed a thorn. He invited von Aiken to Oberzelzberg and then, on September 10, to the party congress, where Hitler enacted the Nuremberg Laws, the basis for the persecution of the Jews.
When Klaus Graf von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944 and his eardrum exploded due to the force of the bomb, von Aiken was again called upon to treat Hitler. The investigation reveals that Hitler, the hypochondriac, was terrified of dying young, and surrounded himself with many medical professionals, but was so confident in the skills of his ENT doctor that he believed only von Aiken could save him. “He is the only one who can do that,” Hitler quoted on November 22, 1944.