Tessa Harris tells the true story behind her latest novel The Paris Notebook, featuring Hitler’s psychiatrist and his quest to expose his patient as an evil tyrant.
Not a lot of people know of the existence of Adolph Hitler’s psychiatrist. Up until a couple of years ago, that included me. It was when I was researching my second novel set during World War Two, The Light We Left Behind, that I began looking into the of psychiatry. My novel was set in a secret camp called Trent Park, stately home just north of London. Run by British Intelligence, and more like a hotel than a prison, it was where top German generals were held in luxury. Unbeknown to them, however, these luxuries came at a price. Their every word was being recorded by secret microphones. In this way they inadvertently spilled an awful lot of beans to the Allies, such as troop movements, secret weapons, and, most shockingly, extermination camps.
Trent Park employed a team of psychiatrists and psychotherapists, although very little is known about who these people were. While researching the relatively new science of psychotherapy, I wondered what it might be like to psychoanalyse Adolph Hitler. On a whim I typed ‘Hitler’s psychiatrist’ into the search engine and, lo and behold, much to my surprise, the name Dr Edmund Forster came up. So, the most reviled man in history, responsible for the death of millions, did have a psychiatrist. How could I not read on? At first, I stupidly supposed that this doctor would be a Nazi sympathiser who happily flattered the Führer’s ego. How wrong I was. What I turned up about Dr Forster was more extraordinary than I could possibly have imagined.
My initial research took me to Rudolph Hess, Hitler’s deputy, who was arrested when he flew solo to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate the United Kingdom’s exit from the Second World War. Having a powerful Nazi in captivity presented an unmissable opportunity to the Allies to see what made such a man tick, so leading psychiatrists and psychologists were called in to study him.
At the same time, the American secret services, the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), commissioned a psychoanalytic report on Hitler, which was submitted in late 1943 or early 1944. One of those interviewed during this research was German psychiatrist Dr Karl Kroner, then in exile in Iceland. Kroner put it on record that Hitler had been treated for a psychological disorder by one of his respected colleagues – a Dr Edmund Forster. (Titled ‘A Psychological Analysis of Adolph Hitler: His Life and Legend’ by Walter Langer, the 165-page document was classified ‘secret’ until 1968, but is now widely available.)
Now back to Dr Forster. He had the misfortune of treating Lance Corporal Adolf Hitler after a British gas attack in World War One. His story is said to have formed the basis of a novel entitled The Eyewitness, which was written in 1938 by a Jewish émigré, then living in Paris, called Ernst Weiss. Some academics believe that Forster’s original notes formed the basis of this fictional work. Indeed, there are striking similarities between passages in The Eyewitness and episodes in Forster’s own life. For example, the psychiatrist’s patient in the novel is only referred to as AH, a man suffering from hysterical blindness, who is eventually cured by hypnosis, but with terrible consequences. When AHrises to power in Germany, he orders all his medical records to be destroyed. The psychiatrist in the novel is imprisoned, then forced to flee to Paris.
In reality, Edmund Forster wasn’t so lucky. He was a man of huge integrity and seeing his former patient rise to power in such a ruthless manner troubled him greatly. He wanted to publish Hitler’s medical records but knew if he did so in Germany, he would be risking his own life, so he sought help from a group of Jewish émigrés living in France. Journeying to Paris with his written-up notes, Edmund Forster is believed to have passed them on to a group of anti-fascist German writers in 1933. One of them was Ernst Weiss. As for Forster himself, he became increasingly isolated in his profession and was repeatedly discredited. In 1933, he was relieved of his post at a hospital and, shortly after, was found with a bullet through his brain. Officially, he took his own life, although he may well have been murdered, alongside several other doctors who treated Hitler over the years. It’s a tragic story among so many tragedies, but I hope you agree it’s one worth telling.
If you’d like to learn more about Dr Forster, I recommend Dr David Lewis’s fascinating book Triumph of the Will: How Two Men Hypnotised Hitler and Changed the World. As for Forster’s original medical notes on Hitler, presuming they survived, Dr Lewis says they are most likely hidden in a Swiss bank vault. If they ever do come to light, they will be of momentous historical significance. Until then, writers of fiction like me, can only speculate and fill in the gaps with our imagination.
The Paris Notebook is out now.
