According to Secret Weapons: Technology, Science and the Race to Win World War II, by Professor Brian Ford of Cardiff University, British intelligence want to lace Adolf Hitler’s food with estrogen to turn him into a woman, London’s Daily Mail reported on Monday: “Agents planned to smuggle doses of oestrogen into his food to make him less aggressive and more like his docile younger sister Paula, who worked as a secretary.”
The war seemed to have no end in sight, the Mail reported, so an “Allied plot to turn Herr Hitler into Her Hitler was just one of a number of nutty ideas cooked up to break the stalemate.”
Sex Hormones
The Mail reported that the Estrogen Plan would have been a long-term project, but the the Brits were ready to proceed because scientists had learned the importance of sex hormones.
Ford told the Mail, “Research had showed the importance of sex hormones — they were beginning to be used in sex therapy in London.”
“The Allies hoped to smuggle oestrogen into Hitler’s food and change his sex so he would become more feminine and less aggressive.”
Professor Ford, a fellow at Cardiff University and a pioneer of popular science, said the Government gave serious consideration to the plan, and that it was perfectly plausible. British spies were already in place and poised to carry out the plot.
The good thing about estrogen, Ford told the Mail, was that Nazi scientists would not have detected it. “Hitler had testers who used to taste his meals so there was no mileage in putting poison in his food because they would immediately fall victim to it.”
Sex hormones were a different matter.
They affected you only if you took them for months on end, so no one would have realised the hormones were in the food.
The question is whether estrogen would have done much good, given that Hitler was suffering the effects of tertiary syphilis. Author Deborah Hayden reported Hitler’s condition in her book , Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis.
The evidence for that, she argued, is in Hitler’s autobiography, Mein Kampf. E. Michael Jones, the editor of Culture Wars, dealt with Hitler’s syphilis in detail in a review of Hayden’s book. Expostulating on Hayden’s theory that syphilis changed world history, and Hayden’s best evidence, Jones wrote, is Hitler:
The best test case for Hayden’s theory that syphilis changed the course of history is Adolf Hitler…. If the internal evidence of an autobiographical text has any significance, then the obsessions which get expressed in Mein Kampf give a clear indication that Hitler had syphilis, that he probably contracted it from a Jewish prostitute, and that he extrapolated from that experience a theory of race hatred that would, in Hayden’s terms, change the course of history.
[Hitler] according to Hayden: “begins the syphilis section in Mein Kampf by blaming Jewish newspapers for spreading poisonous ideas, using a metaphor: ‘This poison was able to penetrate the bloodstream of our people unhindered to do its work, and the state did not possess the power to master the disease’.” . . .
Hitler concludes the syphilis section of Mein Kampf by claiming that “The struggle against syphilis and the prostitution which prepares the way for it is one of the most gigantic tasks of humanity.” The failure of leadership in the Weimar Republic led to the “syphilization of our people.” As a result, “the question of combating syphilis” becomes a national defense issue. It is “the task of the nation” because “Everything-future or ruin-depended upon the solution to this question.”
Hayden also reported that Hitler was given to “paranoid rages,” another sign of tertiary syphilis. In The Rise And Fall of the Third Reich, William Shirer described Hitler rages as so bizarre that he dropped to the floor and chewed the carpet:
Hitler was in highly nervous state. On the morning of the twenty-second I was having breakfast on the terrace of the Hotel Dressen, where the talks were to take place, when Hitler strode past on his way down to the riverbank to inspect his yacht. He seemed to have a peculiar tic. Every few steps he cocked his right shoulder nervously, his left leg snapping up as he did so. He had ugly, black patches under his eyes. He seemed to be, as I noted in my diary that evening, on the edge of a nervous breakdown. "Teppichfresser!" muttered my German companion, an editor who secretly despised the Nazis. And he explained that Hitler had been in such a maniacal mood over the Czechs the last few days that on more than one occasion he had lost control of himself completely, hurling himself to the floor and chewing the edge of the carpet. Hence the term "carpet eater." The evening before, while talking with some of the party leaders at the Dreesen, I had heard the expression applied to the Fuehrer — in whispers, of course.
Crazy Nazi Plots
The Nazis hatched bizarre plots as well, the Mail reported. Their plans included “poison sausages, chocolate and Nescafe if they lost the war, leaving them where they would be found by Allied troops.”
As well,
Secret files published earlier this year revealed a network of Nazi saboteurs who were prepared to fight to create a Fourth Reich in the event that Hitler’s empire crumbled.
Four German agents arrested in northern France in March 1945 revealed the range of poisons developed by Nazi scientists.
They included cigarettes to be offered to Allies by spies. They would give the smoker a headache, and the spy would then offer an "aspirin" to his victim which was in fact poison which would kill within ten minutes.
Photo of Adolf Hitler: AP Images