Adolf Hitler's hysterical blindness: history of a medical report

Abstract

In 1918, in a military reserve hospital located in the small Pomeranian town of Pasewalk, the neuropsychiatrist Prof. Edmund Forster treated Adolf Hitler, an Austrian caporal suffering from a war neurosis (hysterical blindness), using 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 the information about the case. The writer Ernst Weiss, that was also a physician, latter used this information in order to produce his roman “The Eye Witness”, which would be published only in 1963. In 1933, Prof. Forster committed suicide in strange circunstances after successive defamatory statements against him. Also Weiss committed suicide in 1940, when German troops invaded Paris. The Gestapo also murdered several other persons involved in the Hitler’s medical chart.