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 

Asylum for the Criminally

Insane

For the remaining twenty years of his life Hermann Göring
would wage a grim and not always successful struggle against the
evil dictatorship of the morphine addiction to which his Aus-
trian surgeons had introduced him. It was not a public battle.
He fought, lost, and won this tragic campaign in the privacy of
his own soul. When he assured Erhard Milch in  that he had
defeated the craving, it was probably true; but when his air-
force generals saw him in later years, his eyes glazed and face
masklike, it was clear to them that the tyrant morphine had oc-
cupied his body once again.
To those familiar with the drug’s effects on the human
frame, the case of Hermann Göring provided all the circum-
stantial evidence they needed. Morphine is capable of rendering
a person of honest character completely untrustworthy, of pro-