The professor who twice put the scalpel down Hitler’s throat

Under his scalpel he had the power of life and death over the greatest criminal in history. And history could have really changed that. Instead, he was faithful to the Hippocratic Oath. The sliding doors opened several times and closed just as many times for the professor Carl Otto von Eicken and for the patient Adolf Hitler. The first in 1935. The Nazi dictator had undergone a visit to the famous otolaryngologist in May, and had begun thus: “If I have something serious in my throat I must know it”. The Führer, who had been in power for two years after winning the 1933 elections, complained of problems that undermined not only his voice but also the oratory with which he subjugated the Germans, dragging them towards his ideas. Eicken was an authentic authority on the subject and his word was that of an authoritative specialist recognized as such not only in Germany.

After the consultation, the doctor made the diagnosis and prescribed the treatment: a small one surgical operation to remove a polypto be postponed from an important rally because then the vocal cords could not be subjected to strain during the convalescence period. Eicken was then 62 years old, he was outside the small magic circle of doctors who cared for Hitler – Theodor Morell, Werner Haase and Ludwig Stumpfegger – but none of these had as deep a scientific knowledge in that particular branch as he did. Hitler had agreed to entrust his throat, his life and Nazi policy to that luminary, who removed an octopus, restoring his full functioning as a mass mobiliser. The dictator who would scare the world was terrified of disease.

The voice as a weapon of mass seduction in rallies

The Eicken affair came to light only a few years ago in Switzerland, thanks to the doctor’s great-grandson who in June 2022 published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung am Sonntag parts of some letters he sent to a cousin which demonstrate two operations to which Hitler underwent over a decade and other specialist visits. Robert Dopgen had found the letters during some research in the family archive. From this correspondence emerges not only the dictator’s concern for his state of health, but also the fear of losing his weapon of mass seduction through his voice. Eicken also raises awareness of the moral dilemma of caring for a man responsible for unspeakable crimes and the tragedy of World War II and the Shoah. It was the same question the Soviets had asked him during interrogations at the end of the conflict. He took refuge behind the moral principle that is the basis of medicine, with the Hippocratic oath: lives are saved, not taken.

A luminary professor of otolaryngology at the University of Berlin from 1922 to 1950

Otolaryngologist and otologisttrained at the Universities of Kiel, Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg, Friborg and Ginevrastudent of authentic luminaries and a luminary in his own right, Eicken had been a university professor and rector in 1920 in Giessen, appointed professor in Berlin in 1922 where he remained until 1950 when he was seventy-seven years old, and director of the Charité clinic considered an excellence in Europe. Specialists still know him today because some types of throat and laryngeal exams bear the name of the Eicken Method, and also because his writings had international diffusion at the time.

Medical science subservient to Nazism

Hitler’s coming to power also shocked the world of medicine. Jewish doctors were immediately no longer able to hold public positions, and in 1935 they were deprived of German citizenship, students were prevented from graduating in medicine and those who were already qualified had their qualifications to practice the profession revoked. Three years after Eicken’s first surgery to remove a polyp in the Führer’s throat no Jew could even be called a doctor.

Nazism introduced state eugenicswith forced sterilization and the elimination of those considered unworthy by the Aryan race. There were large sectors of the academic and scientific world that endorsed these theories and applied them, with adhesions and compromises. The so-called “racial hygiene” was one of the cornerstones of Nazi public health, with all its aberrations. On the eve of the war, in 1939, the universities provided for the mandatory exam in “medical ethics”, cornerstone of the principle that the individual had value only as a member of the community, the Volk, destined to dominate the world. It does not appear from any document that Eicken was involved with the Nazi system, unlike those doctors who were part of Hitler’s “heavenly court”, who however did not have his expertise in that particular scientific branch. And so the dictator, in the midst of the world conflict and after a series of check-ups, turned to him again for a further operation in November 1944 for the removal of a polyp on the left vocal cord.

Red Army specialists hunting for the Führer’s doctors

After the fall of Berlin in May 1945, the Soviets laid their hands on anyone who had had anything to do with Hitler, and in particular his doctors, who were supposed to confirm that the burnt corpse in the garden of the Chancellery bunker was really him. They also reached Eicken, who confirmed that he had twice had the man who had put the world on fire and caused a catastrophe with 60 million deaths under the surgical knife. They asked him why he hadn’t ended the life of such a monster, giving a twist to the story. If in 1935 what Hitler would have caused was perhaps unimaginable, by the end of 1944 it was all or almost entirely evident, and the Wehrmacht officers themselves had attempted to eliminate him on 20 July 1944 by exploding a bomb in Rastenburg. The reprisal had been a bloodbath. But Eicken did his duty as a doctor, and this is exactly what he replied to the specialists of the political section of the Red Army: “I am a doctor, not a murderer.” He was not removed from his professorship at the University of Berlin, which he left in 1950 but only due to age limits. On 29 June 1960, at the age of 87, Eicken passed away from heart failure in Heilbronn where he had spent his last years as a pensioner at his daughters’ home.