Managed to dig up my copy of Who Cut the Cheese:
[QUOTE= Jim Dawson in Who Cut the Cheese?, pp. 15-16]
Hitler Gassed Himself to Death!
According to biographer John Toland, German dictator Adolf Hitler “suffered from meteorism, uncontrollable farting, a condition aggravated by his vegetarianism”. Hitler told a doctor in the early 1930s, “The cramps are so severe that sometimes I could scream out loud!” But in 1936 he found solace in a quack Berlin physician named Theodor Morell, who prescribed a steady dosage of Dr. Koester’s Anti-Gas Pills over the next eight years. These nostrums contained extracts of nux vomica (a seed containing strychnine) and belladonna (which contains atropine) - in other words, two deadly poisons.
“The Fuhrer…has had such stomach spasms and gas buildups ever since 1929,” Dr. Morell wrote in his diary in 1944. Hitler had originally quelled his gastrointestinal pains with Neo-Balestol, a medical repackaging of World War I gun-cleaning oil that soldiers had used for upset stomach in the trenches. But it contained a poison called fusel oil, and after suffering acute poisoning in 1934, Hitler quit taking Neo-Balestol and ordered it off the market. When Dr. Morell met Hitler two years later, he promised the Nazi leader, “I’ll have you healthy again in less than a year.”
Morell would later tell Allied interrogators that because of chronic gas trapped in the intestine, Hitler’s stomach rang with a drumlike note whenever he (Morell) tapped it with his fingers. According to one memorable notation in Morell’s notebook from May 30, 1943: “After eating a vegetable platter, constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before.”
By early 1941, when Hitler was directing Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, he was ingesting “120 to 150 anti-gas pills a week.” Finally, in late 1944, an army doctor named Erwin Giesling inquired about the six black little spheres he saw on Hitler’s breakfast platter. Checking the ingredients on the flat aluminum can of anti-fart medicine, Dr. Giesling saw that the 120 pills inside contained half a gram of strychnine and half a gram of atropine. He calculated that Hitler had been overdosing himself with poison every day. Checking E. Poulson’s Handbook of Pharmacology, Dr. Giesling read taht atropine “acts on the central nervous system, first as a stimulant, then as a paralyzer. In humans it primarily affects the forebrain, coupled with vivid flights of ideas, talkativeness, and restlessness, visual and aural hallucinations, and fits of delerium, which may be peaceful and serene but may equally degenerate into acts of violence and frenzy.” Strychnine, when taken over a period of time, can create, among other symptoms, euphoria and acute sensitivity to light and sounds. When Dr. Giesling experimented by taking the pills himself, he experienced irritability and extreme sensitivity to stimuli.
Dr. Theodor Morell was relieved of his duties and barely escaped with his own life, but Hitler’s health, thanks to his longtime daily blitzkriegs against his own farts, had already declined and his mind had deteriorated. he shot himself in his bunker six months later, in April 1945, as Russian troops were blasting their way into Berlin.
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