A NEW UNDERSTANDING of how cells use oxygen was not the only thing Otto Warburg searched for while in medical school at Heidelberg. He also hoped to find a wife, and as Warburg was happy to point out, he had a number of options. “I can tell just by looking at her that she wants to marry me,” Warburg wrote to his sister, Lotte, about one young woman. The woman in question once asked Warburg where hysteria came from. If she had truly wanted to marry him, his response—“Great passion is always hysterical”—might have given her second thoughts.1
It’s not hard to understand why women may have fallen for Warburg. As a young man, he was dashingly handsome. His blue eyes, if capable of ferocity, often idled in dreaminess. And Warburg was always impeccably dressed. A self-proclaimed Anglophile—he said he liked the English because they tolerated eccentrics like him—Warburg traveled to England twice a year to purchase his tailored suits and riding gloves. Upon meeting him at his institute for the first time, one colleague, observing Warburg’s gray tweed trousers and elegant waistcoat, described him as “the picture of a nobleman of the British School.”2
His extraordinary self-involvement notwithstanding, Warburg could also be charming. He “had contempt for most of his fellow humans,” his cousin Eric Warburg observed, “but he had a good sense of humor.” When a journalist once asked Warburg if it was true that he was a great scientist but a rotten human being, Warburg said that he was glad it was put that way, as the reverse would be worse. On another occasion, a reporter arrived at Warburg’s institute unannounced to ask about his cancer research. Warburg answered the door himself and told the journalist, who didn’t recognize him, that Otto Warburg had died.3
The Nobel laureate Hans Krebs worked at Warburg’s institute as a young man and remained a friend and admirer of Warburg throughout his life. He knew Warburg as well as almost anyone. And yet, even Krebs found it hard to understand how Warburg could seem so fierce in one moment and so relaxed in the next. Krebs, remembering a sweet letter and gift Warburg had sent to his wife—Warburg addressed her in English as “Lady Krebs”—noted that Warburg could be particularly kind and considerate with women. Warburg had a number of female friends, and near the end of his life, he selected a woman, the University of Chicago biochemist Birgit Vennesland, to succeed him at his institute.4
But when Warburg was angry, which was often, women were not spared his ire. On Warburg’s request, Vennesland had once translated a German document about his long-standing dispute over the number of photons required to power photosynthesis. Though the original document referred to the debate as a “war,” Vennesland had used the word “argument.” Upon reading the translation, Warburg was pleased and praised Vennesland. “Since he was never prodigal with compliments, I felt pretty good,” Vennesland recalled.
The good feeling was short-lived. As Vennesland discovered, there was another side of Warburg, “a Warburg No. 2,” as she put it, “who acted as a censor.” This other Warburg was a man “of violent emotions.” When Warburg looked over the manuscript a second time, “Warburg No. 2” was reading it, and this Warburg noticed the change from “war” to “argument.” “I won’t use any of it,” he shouted.5
The young women who courted Warburg during his Heidelberg years seem to have been aware of “Warburg No. 2.” In one letter to Warburg, a law student confessed that she had half loved and half hated him. But now she was “begging for his love,” for any sign that he did not “despise” her any longer. Whether she ever received this sign from Warburg is unknown. When talk of marriage grew serious, Warburg told her that his financial situation made it impossible. And though Warburg did occasionally have financial disputes with his father, it was clearly an excuse. On another occasion, Warburg told Lotte that he wasn’t planning to marry and have children because his scientific work didn’t leave enough time to properly care for a family.
Warburg did meet at least one young woman he genuinely liked. After growing close with the woman over a four-week period, he proposed to her in a letter. The woman—her identity is unknown—struggled with the decision for three days, only to reject the proposal via a letter of her own. She feared, she wrote to Warburg, that it wasn’t “in her power” to make him happy—an intuition that was almost certainly correct.6
Shortly after receiving the rejection, Warburg wrote to Lotte that he had moved on. It was a typically Warburgian show of pride, but at least during this period of his life, Warburg was capable of vulnerability as well. In a 1912 letter to his fellow student, the future Nobel laureate Otto Meyerhof, Warburg seems to have said that he was worn down from work and struggling with his emotions. Though Warburg’s letter has not survived, Meyerhof responded with a recommendation for a psychotherapist who treated compulsive thoughts and mild cases of hysteria. He also suggested that Warburg try gymnastics.7
It was at about this time that one of Warburg’s medical professors suggested that he give lectures on his research to students, then a required step in the path to becoming a professor in a German university. Though Warburg would later give many public talks, as a young man the thought of lecturing was more than he could bear. In Warburg’s own telling of the story, he comes across as almost Bartleby-esque in his inexplicable refusals:
When I was young, my professor said, “The time has come. You have to give some lectures.”
I said, “I won’t.”
He said, “You must.”
I said, “I won’t.”
He said, “Oh come, just a few, not many, you can easily do it.”
I said, “I won’t.”
Warburg, laughing as he recounted the tale to a colleague, said that the medical faculty eventually held a meeting during which they concluded that Warburg suffered from paranoia and that nothing could be done about it.8
In his brief biography of Warburg, Hans Krebs wrote that Warburg’s attachment to science was “the dominant emotion of his adult life, virtually subjugating all other emotions.” But subjugation is never foolproof. “He has chosen to wear the mask of the unshakable, unflinching, not-to-be-moved man before the world,” Lotte wrote in her diary. “But there is something behind the mask, I am firmly convinced of that.”9
Warburg’s most revealing comment about his internal life slipped out during a conversation with a colleague who was telling him about a mutual acquaintance dealing with emotional struggles. Warburg’s advice: “Tell him not to think about anything but science—think about absolutely nothing else—only science.”
The man wasn’t even a scientist.10
THAT WARBURG SAW science as everything, as the solution even for emotional distress, is in part the story of a boy whose father was a celebrated physicist. But it is also the story of fin de siècle Germany. Warburg grew up during a period in which German science was conquering the world. He might have been more attached to science than almost anyone else, but his belief in science was a national phenomenon.
In the early nineteenth century, many of the various German-speaking states that would come to form the German Empire were poor and underdeveloped. As England and France raced into the industrial era, the German states lingered in a preindustrial world. And then, almost overnight, everything changed. The Germans, aware they had fallen behind, were anxious to catch up. And if the German states (unification would only come in 1871) didn’t have the natural resources or extractive colonial regimes of England and France, they had something else: a growing, well-educated population that believed in the transformative power of science. Germany, known at the start of the century as the “land of poets and thinkers,” became the land of steel production and synthetic dye manufacturing. By 1900, Germany had the largest economy in Europe. The pace of change could be dizzying. When Mark Twain visited Berlin in 1892, he anticipated “a dingy city in a marsh.” Instead he found a sparkling new metropolis that looked “as if it had been built last week.”11
As it industrialized, Germany also transformed itself into the world’s leading scientific nation. Between 1901 and the start of World War I in 1914, Germans won a third of the Nobel Prizes given out to scientists. Emil Fischer revolutionized organic chemistry. Max Planck stumbled into the quantum nature of energy. German bacteriologists identified the microbes responsible for one deadly infectious disease after another. Germany’s scientific dominance was so pronounced that German became the lingua franca of many scientific fields.
Perhaps the more surprising part of Warburg’s story isn’t that he was consumed by science but that he was consumed by cancer in particular. Photosynthesis and respiration, Warburg’s other fields of interest, were much more obvious choices. In studying how cells breathe and how plants harness the energy of the sun, Warburg remained in the realm of foundational science. Cancer brought Warburg into a world of patients and disease. Respiration and photosynthesis were measurement and math. Cancer was messy and human.
On one occasion, Warburg himself wavered in his commitment to studying cancer. He asked Walther Nernst, the Nobel laureate with whom he had briefly studied as a young scientist, whether he should focus on photosynthesis or cancer. “Do cancer research,” Nernst said. “Photosynthesis is working fine.”12
But if Warburg’s focus on cancer appears misplaced in the context of his scientific predilections, it makes sense in the context of modern Germany. For all the astonishing scientific and technological triumphs of the time, cancer was one challenge Germany could not overcome. Despite devoting more and more resources to cancer research in the late nineteenth century, more and more Germans were succumbing to the disease. In 1881, 65 out of every 100,000 Berlin residents died of cancer. By 1901, 65 had increased to 115. Ten years later, it was 138 per 100,000. Records from Munich, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and other areas followed the same pattern. Overall, Germany witnessed a 287 percent increase in the rate of cancer deaths from 1876 to 1910. Cancer was making a quiet mockery of the extraordinary march of German science.13
That, at least, is how it appeared to many German medical experts at the time. Others found it difficult to believe that the increase in cancer was real. Perhaps, one argument went, cancer deaths were rising not despite Germany’s mastery of science and medicine but because of it. The success against infectious diseases had made it possible for people to live longer, and given that cancer is strongly associated with aging, an older population inevitably meant more cancer. Better recordkeeping and more sophisticated means of diagnosing cancer, in turn, had made it easier to identify and count each new victim of the disease.
Even today such arguments sound like simple explanations of the increasing number of cancer deaths. And yet, a closer examination of the evidence makes the skeptical position seem much less obvious. The first reports that deaths from cancer were on the rise in Europe date to the 1840s, before the average life expectancy began to shoot up. And though life expectancy did begin to increase rapidly in the second half of that century, the numbers can be misleading. The dramatically longer life expectancies didn’t mean that Germany had a large population of elderly citizens for the first time. The increases in life expectancy were mostly due to a single factor: far more children were surviving childhood. Old age itself was not new to Europe and had not been for centuries. Between 1816 and 1849, the average life expectancy in the German states was 31 years, but someone who lived to age 20 could expect to live to 55, and many lived much longer.14
The percentage of the German population that was 65 or older did increase from 4.6 percent in 1871 to 5.8 percent in 1925, but cancer experts of the time understood that it was misleading to compare the number of cancer deaths in one year to the number of cancer deaths in another if there were more elderly people in one group. To account for this problem, they made statistical adjustments. And the “age-adjusted” or “standardized” cancer rates they produced did not make the increase in cancer deaths go away.15
Those who doubted that the rise of cancer was real could turn to another, more persuasive argument. It was possible that the number of deaths caused by cancer had not increased, but rather that the number of deaths attributed to cancer had. And more careful examinations and better tracking of cancer deaths are very likely a part of the story of the increasing prevalence of cancer. But this argument, too, had its weaknesses. For centuries, growths of all kinds—polyps, fibroid tumors, lesions caused by tuberculosis—had been considered cancer. As microscopic analysis of cancers became more common in the late nineteenth century, these conditions were recognized for what they were, meaning that more sophisticated diagnostic techniques could push the cancer rates down as well as up.
Moreover, the cancer statistics in dispute measured the number of people dying of cancer, not the number diagnosed with cancer. Doctors of the era had a difficult time detecting cancer at the early stages of the disease but a much less difficult time detecting the advanced cancers that kill people. As one indignant cancer expert put it in 1915, to suggest that the increase in cancer could be explained by a failure on the part of Germany’s rigorously trained physicians to identify cancer at the time of death was “equivalent to a charge of gross malpractice.”16
The best answer to skeptics could only be offered decades later. If the rising rates of cancer in Germany was only a result of older populations or more sophisticated diagnostic and recordkeeping practices, the sharp increase in cancer rates could have been expected to slow as the rise in life expectancy leveled off and physician and hospital practices grew more uniform. Instead, the cancer death rates only went up and up. In 1932, 87,000 Germans succumbed to cancer, making it the second-leading cause of death in Germany.17
Cancer rates were also rising across Europe and the United States. But no other country would respond to the emerging cancer crisis with the focus and determination of Germany. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, German researchers launched what amounted to the original war on cancer, becoming the first to identify one carcinogen after another, from sun exposure, to various industrial chemicals, to secondhand smoke. In 1900, Germany opened the world’s first state-sponsored cancer agency, becoming the first country to attempt to register all cases of cancer, as opposed to only cancer deaths.18
Otto Warburg once said that a scientist “must have the courage to attack the great unsolved problems of his time.” His model was Pasteur, and when Warburg opened his own institute, he commissioned an oil portrait of Pasteur and hung it in the library across from where he sat to write each day. Warburg turned to cancer research, ultimately, because it was the disease of his time and so the most direct route to a Pasteur-like acclaim. Science might have helped Warburg manage his psychological turmoil as a young man, but his research was never dispassionate. Cancer, for Warburg, was a path to glory.19
Otto Warburg, 1931.
THE RISE OF CANCER in Germany also explains the story of Frederick Hoffman, a slim, energetic German who moved to America in 1884. After a series of odd jobs, Hoffman found work as an actuary at the Prudential Insurance Company, where he noticed something peculiar in the firm’s files: the words “malignant neoplasm” were showing up more and more often in the records of recently deceased policyholders. Hoffman, likely already aware of medical reports pointing to a rise in cancer, decided to investigate and produce a report on the matter.20
By the time Hoffman completed his cancer report in 1915, it had turned into a book of over 800 pages filled with tables showing cancer death statistics from every corner of the world. The book, The Mortality from Cancer throughout the World, is believed to be the most comprehensive statistical accounting of a single disease ever assembled by that point in history. The mountain of scientific data that Hoffman collected led to a conclusion he found inescapable: the story of cancer in Germany was not unique to Germany. Cancer deaths were growing more common everywhere, “practically from year to year and from decade to decade.” Cancer, Hoffman wrote, was “increasing at a more or less alarming rate throughout the entire civilized world.”21
It was a sensational claim that reignited the debate as to whether the increase in cancer was real or merely a statistical mirage. But that cancer was rising in so-called “civilized” industrial societies was not even the most provocative argument Hoffman made. Even more striking than all the places where he found more cancer were all the places where he could find almost no cancer at all. Among the native populations Hoffman studied, cancer was either rare or unheard of.
Hoffman first rose to prominence in 1896 after publishing a grossly racist monograph in which he concluded that the health problems faced by the “American Negro,” such as high rates of tuberculosis, were due to a “constitutional weakness.” And though he publicly reversed this position years later, he was hardly inclined to see nonwhite populations as more robust. He believed that cancer was absent in indigenous populations because reports of the phenomenon had been accumulating for more than half a century.22
The first to issue such a report may have been Stanislas Tanchou, a French physician and veteran of Napoleon’s army. Tanchou was studying death registries in Europe in search of cancer trends when he learned of new data that appeared to fit with no trend at all. French colonial doctors in northern Africa could find almost no trace of the disease. One doctor who had established a hospital “in the midst of the Arabs” had failed to find “a genuine cancer” among the 10,000 patients he treated. Based on these reports and his own research, Tanchou arrived at a conclusion that he presented to the French Academy of Science in 1843. Cancer, he said, was like “insanity.” It “seems to increase with the progress of civilization.”23
Tanchou’s name would probably have been lost to history had he been the only one to notice that cancer was far more common in some populations than in others. But Tanchou was far from alone. In the following decades, frontier and missionary doctors from every part of the world—from Brazil to Fiji to Borneo—would report the same finding: cancer was either rare or nonexistent in places that hadn’t adopted Western lifestyles.24
These reports were typically compiled by physicians who had spent years, sometimes decades, working far from Western nations. After spending six and a half years treating a Bantu population of some 14,000 people in South Africa, the surgeon F. P. Fouché noted, in 1923, that he had not diagnosed a single cancer. What made the absence of cancer so odd, he reflected, was that cancer was “frequently seen among the white or European population” in the same region.25
This phenomenon would be observed again and again. In 1908, the prominent physical anthropologist Aleš Hrdlička authored a 460-page Smithsonian report on Native Americans of the southwestern United States and northern Mexico. Hrdlička, who held a medical degree, consulted with resident physicians. He heard of “tumors” and identified a few “of the fibroid variety,” but he did not see “a clear case” of cancer. Hrdlička also examined the remains of Native Americans but was unable to find “unequivocal signs of a malignant growth on an Indian bone.” If cancer existed at all among the population, Hrdlička wrote, it “must be extremely rare.” Six years later, Hoffman’s own survey of physicians at the Bureau of Indian Affairs turned up only two reports of cancer deaths among 63,000 Native Americans from different tribes.26
The virtual absence of cancer in the Arctic was yet another data point. In 1884, a whaling ship captain who was also a highly regarded amateur surgeon was asked by his brother, a doctor, to look for cancer among the “Eskimos” he encountered in the course of his travels through northern Alaska, Canada, and Siberia. The captain, George B. Leavitt, knew how to identify cancer and would sometimes diagnose members of his crew. But over a 15-year period during which he is estimated to have annually encountered 50,000 “natives,” he could not find a trace of the disease. It wasn’t that Leavitt never had the chance to examine the Inuit closely. On the contrary, as he told the Harvard-trained anthropologist and explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson—who, in 1960, wrote an entire book on the absence of cancer among non-Western populations—the Inuit actually liked to consult doctors.
Leavitt eventually gave up his search for cancer among these populations, convinced that he would never find a malignant growth on a native “Eskimo.” He would not be the last to look. After 11 years among the Inuit of northern Canada, the physician Samuel Hutton wrote that he had “not seen or heard of a case of malignant growth in an Eskimo.” As late as 1952, there were still no reported cases of cancer among Inuit following a traditional lifestyle.27
Perhaps the most famous physician to note the absence of cancer in a non-Western population was Albert Schweitzer, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate who studied medicine in Germany at the same time as Warburg, before moving to Gabon. The Gabonese, happy to have a German doctor among them, lined up to see Schweitzer. He estimated that he examined 2,000 patients during his first nine months in the country. “On my arrival in Gabon, in 1913, I was astonished to encounter no case of cancer,” Schweitzer would later write. “I can not, of course, say positively that there was no cancer at all. But, like other frontier doctors, I can only say that, if any cases existed, they must have been quite rare.”28
Nicholas Senn, a prominent Chicago surgeon and onetime president of the American Medical Association, was the rare medical expert who could attest to the absence of cancer in two very different parts of the globe. In 1905, Senn traveled to the Arctic with one of Robert Peary’s famous polar expeditions. The next year he traveled across Africa. “After closely observing the conditions of health” in both regions, Senn became “convinced that cancer is purely a disease of civilization.”29
Even as they accumulated in number, such reports became more difficult for many Western doctors to accept. The most common objection—that everyone in native populations died in their 30s, before cancer was typically diagnosed—was easy to refute. Hrdlička’s Smithsonian report, which found no cancer among Native American populations, also noted that the Native Americans included in the survey lived as long as the local whites (who would often get cancer).
The Irish physician and nutrition researcher Sir Robert McCarrison joined Britain’s Indian Medical Service in the first years of the twentieth century. He testified that he saw no cancer after nine years and more than 3,600 surgeries “in a remote part of the Himalayas, among isolated races far removed from the refinements of civilization.” According to McCarrison, who spent the last part of his career as the director of postgraduate medical education at Oxford, the problem wasn’t that the locals were dying young: “Certain of these races are of magnificent physique, preserving until late in life the characters of youth; they are unusually fertile and long-lived, and endowed with nervous systems of notable stability.”30
McCarrison may have romanticized the indigenous populations he treated, but his claims are consistent with contemporary research. A 2018 review of 12 hunter-gatherer and subsistence farming populations found that it was typical for those who survived into adulthood to live into their 60s and 70s or later. Researchers now believe that humans have been living into their 50s and beyond for at least 30,000 years, and the best evidence suggests that prior to the nineteenth century, cancer was a very rare disease. A 2018 study of 1,087 ancient Egyptian skeletons buried between 1,500 and 3,000 years ago found only six with cancer. A study of remains from a London crypt used between 1729 and 1857 found only a single cancer among 623 individuals.31
Cancer is also almost completely absent in written sources from antiquity. A disease believed to be breast cancer was described in an Egyptian papyrus that is thought to be some 4,500 years old, but as far as we know, cancer was not written about again for another 2,000 years. “Other diseases cycled violently through the globe, leaving behind their cryptic footprints in legends and documents,” Siddhartha Mukherjee writes in The Emperor of All Maladies. Cancer, by contrast, “virtually disappeared from ancient medical history.”32
The evidence points overwhelmingly in one direction: though cancer is an ancient disease that can be found throughout the animal kingdom, it remained fairly uncommon among humans until the nineteenth century. Cancer as we know it today, a disease that eventually afflicts one in every two American men and one in every three American women, might be partially explained by longer lives, but the more powerful explanation is not in how long we live but rather in how we live.
The doctors who worked in nonindustrialized regions over a century ago found no cancer when they arrived to treat native populations. They also saw that cancer would gradually arise as soon as local populations began to follow a more Western lifestyle. Albert Schweitzer would live in Africa for half a century, and over that period, some of the locals did get cancer. As Schweitzer saw it, local people were developing the disease as a consequence of “living more and more after the manner of the whites.” The Chicago surgeon Senn made the same observation. “The pure native never has cancer,” he said. “Only by gradual intermingling with the whites, are they susceptible.”33
But what within the Western lifestyle had set off the cancer explosion? As the British cancer authority Charles Powell White pointed out in 1908, it is possible that “no one factor in civilization” was responsible for the rise of cancer, but that it was “the condition as a whole that is at fault.” Cancer was likely caused by a combination of “unnatural and excessive food, unhealthy surroundings, indoor and sedentary occupations, and the mental anxiety and worry which are inseparable from civilized life.”34
White’s conclusion, that cancer is, essentially, inextricable from modern Western life was reasonable, given the evidence available to him. But in 1908, scientists still had little understanding of the cancer cell itself and so could not convincingly explain how anything causes the disease. When Warburg studied the breathing of sea urchin eggs that year, it was his first step toward bringing clarity to this confusing state, toward identifying a central mechanism that might explain all the different causes of cancer in a single stroke, just as Pasteur had explained all infectious diseases as a problem of microbes. Warburg didn’t yet have answers, but his path to greatness, he knew, was hidden inside a cancer cell.
THE AUSTRIANS across the border from Germany were recording the same increases in cancer deaths as other Western populations. In 1907, as Warburg was setting out to study the disease, a woman in Linz felt a sharp pain in her chest. The woman, Klara Hitler, summoned the family’s Jewish doctor, Eduard Bloch, who saw right away that she had breast cancer. Bloch remembered Klara as a “modest, kindly woman” with “brownish hair which she kept neatly plaited, and a long, oval face with beautifully expressive gray-blue eyes.” Not wanting to upset Klara, Bloch reported the news to her children.35
One of those children, Adolf, was 17 when Bloch delivered the news. Bloch remembered him as a “frail looking” boy who “lived within himself.” Hitler, a terrible student, had dropped out of school two years earlier. Though he was not working, he had been unwilling to help his widowed mother around the house. To the extent that Hitler had any ambition, it was to be a great artist; he stayed up all hours working on sketches of buildings and bridges.
By his teenage years, Hitler was already showing signs of the man he was to become. He was prone to fits of rage and quick to blame others for his failures. Hitler could be “like a volcano erupting,” August Kubizek, his one close friend from the time, remembered. “It was as though something strange, other-worldly, was bursting out of him.”36
When Bloch told him about his mother’s cancer, Hitler wept openly, his “long, sallow face” twisting in agony. “In almost forty years of practice, I have never seen a young man so utterly filled with pain and grief,” Bloch recalled years later.37
Though the prospect of losing his mother would have been devastating regardless of the cause, at the time cancer was an especially awful diagnosis. Because it was often diagnosed at an advanced stage, as was the case with Klara Hitler, the disease was frequently accompanied by infections and rotting flesh. A 1908 German book on caring for people with incurable cancer warned that contact with the “terrible-smelling secretions is revolting and also harbors a danger for those nearby.” A cancer diagnosis was a source of great shame, a secret to be kept from one’s neighbors.38
Klara Hitler underwent a double mastectomy. In the following months her condition improved. In September, Adolf left his mother behind in Linz and traveled to Vienna to take an entrance exam for the Academy of Fine Arts. He made it beyond the first round of elimination but was not among the 28 applicants who advanced to the third round.
Crushed by his rejection, Hitler returned to Linz in October of 1907 and soon received even worse news from Dr. Bloch. His mother’s cancer was back, and incurable. Decades later Kubizek would still remember Hitler’s reaction to the news.
His eyes blazed, his temper flared up. “Incurable—what do they mean by that?” he screamed. “Not that the malady is incurable, but that the doctors aren’t capable of curing it. My mother isn’t even old. Forty-seven isn’t an age where you give up hope. But as soon as the doctors can’t do anything, they call it incurable.”
I was familiar with my friend’s habit of turning everything he came across into a problem. But never had he spoken with such bitterness, with such passion as now. Suddenly it seemed to me as though Adolf, pale, excited, shaken to the core, stood there arguing and bargaining with Death, who remorselessly claimed its victim.39
Hitler pleaded with Dr. Bloch to do whatever possible to save his mother. Bloch turned to an experimental method, reopening Klara Hitler’s wounds and applying iodoform, a treatment thought to kill bacteria. Iodoform contains iodine. The treatments would have left Klara Hitler writhing in pain. Bloch returned to the Hitler home for 46 consecutive days, applying the iodoform again and again as young Adolf looked on.
Klara Hitler died during the night of December 21, 1907. When Bloch arrived in the morning, Hitler was sitting by his dead mother’s side. The mastery and control of life that Jacques Loeb and Otto Warburg sought through science, Hitler would later seek by other means.