Little known facts about two dictators

So lockdowns are being decreed by the hour as that most evil of evils, Covid 19 strikes Sri Lanka in its second onslaught. The first was so efficiently stymied by the Presidential Task Force but the present contagion is among ordinary people going about their everyday business. Thus the much dreaded state of social contagion.

With it the mind is impregnated with induced fear of dictatorship and an all powerful President who can just say off with its head to the PM, Parliament and all 225 MPs and single- handedly appoint all heads, including judges of the highest court; and one has to stomach the explanation that we the voters voted for the 20th Amendment when we cast our vote for the SLPP contestants. So according to the political pundits of a certain hue, the government is doing what the voters wanted and they are hurriedly attempting to make the 20A law and an accepted adjunct to the Constitution, till it is overhauled to correspond to 20A in its entirety!

To distract the mind I took a book that had been lying on my shelf for long. It encouraged dipping in at random having hundreds of snippets of people ranging from tyrants to heroes; women and natural disasters. You name it or him/her, and the book obliges with an anecdote. Authored by Giles Milton it is: Fascinating Footnotes from History. On the cover is added the fact that the Daily Mail judges ‘he hits the bullseye’ while The Spectator says he has a ‘terrific eye for detail that brings the past to life’.

Adolf Hitler

Surprise! Surprise! Hitler had an English girlfriend. I thought Giles Milton was writing imaginary fiction, but no, it’s historical narration judging from praise excerpts.

Unity Valkyrie Mitford, a young Brit girl of no beauty and less clout, admired the rising Hitler so much that she had to go to Munich. With her father’s permission she journeyed to the city in 1934. There she tailed Hitler, who was then seen much in public and sat every noon at the Osteria Bavaria which the Fuhrer patronized. Finally she succeeded in being invited to his table and then became a constant companion to the jealousy of his mistress Eva Braun. She wrote in her dairy: “She is known as the Valkyrie and looks the part, including her legs. I, the mistress of the greatest man in Germany and the whole world, I sit here waiting while the sun mocks me through the window panes.” Unity was popular as she openly derided the Jews.

MI5 alerted itself. Even after war was declared the woman refused to leave Germany. But knowing MI5 planned to get her back to England to try her for treason and considering what it would do to Hitler, she shot herself in a park with a pearl handled pistol Hitler had gifted her. Only injured, she was treated in a Munich hospital; bills paid by Hitler. Then she was transferred to Switzerland where her sister Deborah arrived to take her home to Swinbrook, Oxfordshire. She was later able to walk but died of meningitis in 1948. That’s the official story of her end. The gossipy one is of course spicier. She was taken to a private hospital in Oxford where she delivered Hitler’s love child, who, Milton writes, may be walking about anonymous as war time births were sometimes not registered.

Another story that is pertinent to us at this stage of druggies being caught by the shoal is that Hitler had been injected a cocktail of drugs including strychnine, amphatemine and cocaine which Hitler came to rely on increasingly. Other pills – testosterone, opiates, sedatives, laxatives, were all piled in by his personal doctor –Theodor Morell – who was devoted to him. Other medical men turned suspicious but by now Hitler was hooked, and even had Morell inject him the extract of young bulls’ prostrate glands when he was to spend nights with Eva Braun. He suffered stomach cramps, flatulence and other disorders.

Reading about this I remembered an incident of two large a dose of stimulant taken by an ageing politico which became a public secret! We used to hear of a miracle worker by the name of Dr White, (wasn’t it?) who even medically assisted some cricketers. Others were skeptical and refused him. Also, a wise woman recently opined that probably Trump became euphoric taking all those not completely tested drugs for Covid 19. Otherwise how explain his being driven around the hospital he was in to wave to crowds. Crazy!

Joseph Stalin

The other most hated dictator is also written about in the chapter The mysterious death of Joseph Stalin with two other stories. Milton writes that Stalin suffered unusually high blood pressure which caused dizziness but went ahead with his crowded schedules including naming of persons to be eliminated, often dragged out at night. Those were human purges of the most horrendous kind. One night Stalin invited several persons to his dacha and went on drinking light wine and talking till 4.00 am. Three duty guards were present and the dacha’s deputy commander. Stalin always gave the order for his guests to leave; dictator that he was. They could not move out on their own initiative. One guard – Khrustalev – then told the others that Stalin had ordered them to retire to bed as he would not need them. They became alarmed when even at midday, Stalin had not awakened. But they dared not disturb him.

When finally they did, they found Stalin lying on the ground, dazed. Politburo members Beria and Malenkov were summoned but took long to arrive. By now he was vomiting blood. Doctors were summoned but they were terrified to examine the man. (Such the fate of dictators!) Svetlana, his daughter. arrived and later said: “The death agony was terrible. It was a horrible look – either mad or angry and full of fear of death.” Death was due to natural causes it was stated. But modern analysis suggests otherwise; vomiting blood could not be caused by high blood pressure which causes haemorrhage in the brain. It was later proven that Beria had mixed Stalin’s diluted wine with tasteless, warfarin, a blood thinner which had just become available in Russia in the 1950s.

These tales are far removed from us, and our times, but not exactly so. They are told not to merely pass the time or fill this column with an article. They are pertinent as history is prone to repeat itself. We had poisoning of three Russians, the latest an opposition leader to Putin.

We have persons becoming too confident and too power hungry meeting with ignoble ends. Even quirky historical stories have relevance. One sure lesson is that the higher you ride and the bigger the ego grows, the more horrendous the final downfall is. The worst is, you are not mourned or remembered with affection and gratitude.