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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: mike_holmans@cix.compulink.co.uk ("Mike Holmans")
Subject: Re: Hitler's alleged vegetarianism
Date: Fri, 3 May 1996 21:04:58 GMT

OK, I started it with:
> On Hitler's birthday, the Guardian Food & Drink column contains this:
>
> Adolf Hitler, despite those persistent rumours, never was a vegetarian.
> Rynn Berry, author of Famous Vegetarians And Their Favourite Recipes,
> reported last year that he found the canard popping up once again when
> he wrote to the New York Times about the belief that "there will never
> be any peace in the world so long as we eat animals". In the
> correspondence that followed, Dr Richard H Schwartz, author of Judaism
> and Vegetarianism, pointed out that Hitler would go on the occasional
> vegetarian binge with the aim of counteracting sweatiness and
> flatulence. Anothe contributor turned up the Gourmet Cooking School
> Cookbook, in which Dione Lucas, a hotel chef in Hamburg before WW2,
> recalls Hitler several times ordering his favourite dish of stuffed and
> roasted squab (baby pigeon). She also gives the recipe.
>
> The FAQ doesn't contain the entry
> F. Hitler was a vegetarian
> so maybe we can discuss this one.
>

So I'd better report back.

A letter appeared in the following week's Guardian Weekend mag, to the effect that of course he was a vegetarian: Alan Bullock's authoritative "Hitler, A Study in Tyranny" pointed out that Hitler ordered his cook to prepare him a vegetarian diet.

Well, the Bullock tome wasn't in the library today, but something else was: _The Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler_, Leonard and Renate Heston, William Kimber & Co, 1979, ISBN 0 7183 0436 5. Leonard Heston was then Professor of Psychiatry at Univ of Minnesota, his wife was a German speaking registered nurse. The book was compiled by examining German archives, and attempts to provide Hitler's medical history. Skimming the later chapters, they look to be full of long words which only appear in medical dictionaries, but the early bit was quite intelligible.

It yields:

"Starting in the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler began experiencing episodes of sharp, cramping pain in his right upper abdomen. The pain appeared shortly after meals, and when it did, Hitler would usually leave the room. Sometimes he returned 'after the spasm had passed', as Albert Speer described it, and sometimes he did not return at all. 'After every meal the pain begins!' Hitler exclaimed in exasperation. Occasionally the pain began during a meal, and Hitler, obviously greatly distressed, would leave the table. He also complained of abdominal distension accompanied by duller pain and frequent belching. From the start, the cramping pain appeared for no evident reason and then disappeared after a time. There were days marked by incapacitating pain, days with only nagging soreness, and intervals of weeks to months without pain. But the pain always returned, and it was to do so for the rest of his life. He was in his early forties at the time and he had never before been seriously ill.

... Although Hitler did ask for opinions, no one could convince him to undergo the needed examinations for his abdominal pain.

What he did do about his illness was entirely in character: he treated himself. Gradually, he adopted an eccentric diet that was nearly vegetarian. Guided, no doubt, by the effects of particular foods on his pain, he eliminated rich pastries and meat and continued to eliminate foods until his basic diet was vegetables and cereal - a major change for a man who had a reputation as a lover of cakes and sweets. 'Even bread and butter gave him trouble. Zwieback, honey, mushrooms, curds, and yogurt became his standard diet.' At times, even milk products were eliminated and some vegetables, especially cabbage and beans, were also troublesome. Though occasionally he lapsed and would again try the rich foods he previously had enjoyed, Hitler generally followed a very stringent diet from the middle 1930s on."

So everyone is right, and all shall have prizes.

Hitler wasn't a vegetarian, *was* a big fan of roasted game birds, but didn't eat them because they made him feel extremely ill, at least while he was Fuehrer (as if that weren't enough in itself), and was virtually indistinguishable from a vegetarian in the last 10-12 years of his life.

Make of that what you will.

Mike "I'll just take some mushrooms and a glass of yogurt. Oh, and then the Sudetenland" Holmans

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Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
From: mike_holmans@cix.compulink.co.uk ("Mike Holmans")
Subject: Re: Hitler: not really a vegetarian (repost of cite)
Date: Sun, 19 May 1996 10:29:24 GMT

Helge Moulding suggested:
> To report a data point, albeit of limited voracity, on the issue
> of the origins of present day German healthfood diet (Naturkost).
>
> I talked to my mom, who was born in Germany in 1934. She was way
> too young to remember anything but the last few years of the war.
> She says that she'd always listen when adults talked, and doesn't
> remember ever hearing anyone talk about Hitler's miraculous diet.
> So maybe the Nazi spindoctors didn't push the story.

The Heston & Heston book, in a bit I didn't quote, makes it clear that at the time he started on this diet, in the early years of his Fuehrership, Hitler felt he could not be seen to be ill. >
> She also says that my grandfather's vegetarian diet originated in
> an earlier German healthfood fad, which predated Hitler's vegetarianism
> by about twenty years (when my grandfather was in his thirties).
> So the probable status is
>
> Fb. Hitler's vegetarian diet was well publicized, and is considered a
> health diet by present day Germans, although the connection to Hitler is
> lost.

Agreed.

> Tb. Hitler picked an existing health fad to treat himself, as did many
> other Germans before and since who wanted to eat "healthy."

I don't agree with this, though. H&H, as I read it, says that he reached his eventual diet by a process of trial and error, noticing which foods gave him guts-aches and which didn't, not that he followed a pre-existing plan. He occasionally, when the pangs abated, tried the richer foods he preferred, but desisted when the pain returned. His yogurt, curd, mushroom and crispbread diet's similarity to Naturkost seems to me to be coincidental, if unsurprising given its blandness of taste and texture.

Mike "bet he didn't shell out RM750*10^12 on a Porsche either" Holmans