Did a hypnotist who treated Adolf Hitler for shell shock in 1918 by using his ‘desire to be like a God’ help spark the Second World War?

Adolf Hitler was turned into a murderous dictator by a hypnotist trying to cure him of the effects of a gas attack in World War I. Hitler claimed, in his infamous work Mein Kampf, to have been attacked with mustard gas by British troops in Belgium. He said the British had attacked in October 1918 south of Ypres using a ‘yellow gas… unknown to us’. [Oh the irony!]

David Lewis, who wrote the book Triumph of the Will? (a reference to a Nazi propaganda film) says that in 1918, Hitler was rushed to hospital apparently blind. Doctors did not think he had physical eye injuries but diagnosed ‘hysterical blindness’ and sent him for treatment with German medic Dr Edmund Forster. Forster is claimed to have treated Hitler for ‘hysterical blindness’ by appealing to his ‘desire to be like a God’.

The German doctor is claimed to have told him: ‘With your symptoms, an ordinary person would be blind for life. But for a person with exceptional strength of will-power and spiritual energy there are no limits. You know Germany now needs people who have energy and faith in themselves.‘ The book claims that Hitler’s vision was restored as a result of the ‘treatment’ and suggests that it led him on the path to dictatorship.

The ‘treatment’ is said to have inspired Hitler to think he had a mission to lead Germany to greatness, potentially setting in motion the events which led to his rise to power and ended with the horrors of the Holocaust and World War II. Dr Forster is claimed to have committed suicide on January 30 1933, the year Hitler came to power, supposedly to protect his family and to try to remove any trace of the episode after realising the consequences of what had happened.

Hitler was appointed Chancellor, and within months had turned Germany into a one-party dictatorship.