The Jew That Hitler Saved

The darkest question hanging over recent history is perhaps one for which there may never be a satisfactory answer: What drove Adolf Hitler’s desire to exterminate Europe’s Jews?

For those who subscribe to the Oedipal musings of Freud, the root cause is predictable: Blame Hitler’s mother. But there are others who would relieve Klara Hitler of such atrocious parental responsibility and look instead to the Hitler family physician, an Austrian Jew by the name of Eduard Bloch. Because Klara died under Dr. Bloch’s care, the thinking goes, Adolf, then 18, blamed the doctor—and by extension, the Jews. A viable theory, except for one conflicting detail: Bloch was the only Jew whom Hitler allowed to leave Austria before implementing the Final Solution.

Bloch was born in 1872 in the tiny village of Frauenburg. He studied medicine in Prague, joined the army as a military doctor and in 1899 was assigned to Linz, where he established a practice. Among his patients were the recently widowed Klara Hitler and her children.

In 1907 Klara came to Bloch complaining of chest pain, and he discovered a cancerous tumor in her breast. Bloch relayed the particulars of his sessions with the Hitler family during this time—as well as anecdotes of Adolf—in an extensive interview he gave to Colliers Weekly after immigrating to the United States in 1940 and settling with his family in the Bronx. The article, “My Patient, Hitler,” appeared in two parts in March of 1941.

In it the doctor described Hitler’s “touching” reaction to the news of his mother’s bleak prognosis: “His long, sallow face was contorted. Tears flowed from his eyes. Did his mother, he asked, have no chance?”

As Klara’s health declined, Bloch appears, at least by his own account, to have been a strong shoulder for the Hitlers to lean on, guiding them through to the sad end. When it came, the depth of Hitler’s emotion moved him. “In all my career I have never seen anyone so prostrate with grief as Adolf Hitler.” A few days after the funeral, Klara’s children came calling to express their thanks. “[Adolf] stepped forward and took my hand. Looking into my eyes, he said: ‘I shall be grateful to you forever.’”

That Hitler meant what he said was evident from two postcards he sent to Bloch from Vienna. The first was signed, “Yours, always faithfully, Adolf Hitler.” The second, a New Year’s greeting hand-painted by the aspiring artist himself, read: “The Hitler family sends you the best wishes for a Happy New Year. In everlasting thankfulness, Adolf Hitler.”

In fact, Hitler held Bloch in such high esteem that in 1937, after a Nazi party conference in Nuremberg, he asked those in attendance from Linz for news of his old doctor, whom he called an Edeljude—a noble Jew. This declaration is said to have ruffled his companions, but Hitler insisted: “If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question.”

Today, Hitler’s model Jew is a little-known character in Holocaust history, yet at the time neither Bloch nor his relationship to the rising Fuehrer was a great secret. The final interview Dr. Bloch gave was in 1942 to noted psychoanalysts William C. Langer and Gertrud M. Kurth, who were compiling a psychological file on Adolf Hitler for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA.

In 1947, Kurth published an article, “The Jew and Adolf Hitler,” and speculated that Hitler’s hatred of Jews might have been ignited by one particular Jew, based on her observation that Hitler never referred to Jews in the plural, only as “the Jew.” Her hypothesis later struck a chord with a Brandeis University historian, Rudolph Binion, who was studying audiotapes of Hitler’s speeches and Hitler’s personal file in the Nazi archives. After analyzing speeches, police reports and army documents and reviewing the dictator’s choice of words when speaking of the Jews—“the poisoner,” “the cancer,” “the profiteer”—Binion decided to try to identify “the Jew.” When he discovered a photostat of the bill for Klara’s final treatment—which included purchases of Iodiform, a dangerous drug then mistakenly thought to be a cure-all—and a photograph of Bloch among Hitler’s personal papers, Binion felt he’d found his answer.

“He was a profiteer,” Binion says. “He collected his money on Christmas Eve and charged full price. He administered Iodiform, which poisoned her. There was no question. Bloch is the cancer and the poison.”

Reviewing Bloch’s records, Binion concluded that the doctor had overused Iodiform in a final attempt to heal Klara. His intentions were good, Binion feels, and indeed Adolf probably bullied him into taking such aggressive measures. “The idea was, ‘She’s dying anyway so try something, anything, it can’t make it worse,’” he says. “But in a sense it did, and she died in agony.”

On the surface Hitler felt Bloch had done all he could for his mother. “Consciously, Hitler was devoted to Bloch,” Binion says. But “the hatred that emerges is unconscious. He made Bloch into ‘the Jew,’ while personally exempting him from the generalization.” Binion is convinced that Bloch’s 1940 exit from Europe was approved directly by Hitler. Bloch was able to leave, he says; no other Jew from Linz ever could.

Whether or not this is a viable line of thinking, the affection between Fuehrer and Jew was, and remained, mutual. “Even today,” Bloch told Colliers, “I cannot help thinking of him in terms of his grief and not in terms of what he has done to this world.” In the doctor’s defense, he died in 1945, likely never learning the full extent of the horrors that the “fine young man” he knew would perpetrate—and from what, exactly, he himself was spared.—Rebecca Frankel