Study Finds Hitler Had Artery Illness : Medicine: UCLA professor says disease does not explain dictator’s crimes, but may have reinforced his belief that he would not live long.

Adolf Hitler likely suffered a malady that inflames arteries and reduces blood flow to the head, heart and liver, according to a study by a UCLA psychiatry professor who said he also confirmed that the dictator used stimulants and had Parkinson’s disease.

The ailments cannot be blamed for the German tyrant’s crimes, but they might have aggravated his longstanding belief that he would not live long and needed to accomplish his goals quickly, said Dr. Fritz C. Redlich, whose study appears in today’s Archives of Internal Medicine.

Scholars had suspected that Hitler misused amphetamine stimulants before his suicide. They knew he had liver, heart and stomach troubles, including severe flatulence, and displayed the shaking characteristic of Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative nerve disorder.

Symptoms cited in his doctor’s records indicate that Hitler also had giant cell arteritis, an artery inflammation disease, and its common form, temporal arteritis, or inflamed arteries in the scalp over the temples, Redlich wrote.

“It was simply overlooked” by other researchers and unrecognized by Hitler’s doctor, said Redlich, professor emeritus of psychiatry at UCLA and former dean of the Yale University School of Medicine.

Redlich, 82, has spent eight years compiling Hitler’s health history for future publication by Oxford University Press. He interviewed people who knew Hitler and read thousands of documents at the National Archives, including the 1941-45 letters and diary of Hitler’s wartime physician, Dr. Theodor Morell.

Hitler’s symptoms included malaise, headaches, impaired vision, fever, weight loss, tenderness, oversensitivity to sunlight and an enlarged artery over one temple--all consistent with arteritis, Redlich said.

The disease, which can narrow arteries, also might explain Hitler’s heart disease, abdominal pain and liver troubles, he said.

“It’s plausible--a reasonable hypothesis,” said Dr. Gene Hunder, rheumatology chairman at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic.

Giant cell arteritis is named for enlarged cells in inflamed artery walls. It afflicts one in 500 people over age 50, and gradually goes away by itself, Hunder said. The cause is unknown.

Hitler refused to let doctors X-ray his chest or abdomen or examine his genitals.

Redlich said people who knew Hitler wrote of confused, very excited behavior during 1939-42, “convincing evidence” that Hitler took amphetamines.

Tremors and other signs of Parkinson’s long have been noted in newsreels of Hitler. Redlich found that Morell diagnosed Parkinson’s two weeks before Hitler died.

The study concluded that “neither Parkinson’s disease nor the diagnosis of . . . arteritis explains any of Hitler’s crimes and mistakes.”

But Redlich said that since writing the study, he has “changed my mind a little bit.” Although Hitler was healthy until mid-1941, “it is possible there is some sort of connection between physical illness and the fact he rushed into the war and genocide,” Redlich said.

Peter Loewenberg, a UCLA professor of history and political psychology, said he “would go slow” on concluding that Hitler’s health problems were linked to his genocide campaign against millions of Jews “because historians haven’t found any specific document where Hitler ordered the genocide.”

But Redlich’s careful research “is a major step forward” and gives historians “a chance to scrupulously correlate the state of Hitler’s health with his decision-making,” including the puzzling decision to declare war on the United States after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, Loewenberg said.

Hitler was not legally insane but was “very disturbed . . . and I’m trying to find out what made him disturbed,” Redlich said. “So far I have no definitive answer.”

Redlich said Hitler’s doctor, Morell, “was on the border of being a charlatan,” treating Hitler with opiates, cocaine, barbiturates, laxatives, leeches, vitamins, tonics, useless hormones and sugar water injections.