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left leg have long trembled from anxiety. He is prone to dizziness, high blood pressure, and stomach cramps. The skin beneath his uniform is the whitest white, thanks to his fondness for remaining indoors and keeping a nocturnal schedule. And his energy is often so low that his longtime personal physician, the extremely obese and medically unorthodox Dr. Theodor Morell, makes it a practice to inject Hitler each day with methamphetamines. A second doctor, Dr. Erwin Geising, also places drops containing cocaine in each of the Führer’s dark blue eyes, in order to give the dictator a daily rush of euphoria.
    Despite recent German setbacks on the battlefield, the Wolf still has hope that his plans for global domination will yet be realized. His greatest goal is the eradication of the Jewish people, with whom he is obsessed, despite not having had any intentional contact with a Jew in twenty years. “This war can end two ways,” he said in a January 30, 1942, address to the German parliament. “Either the extermination of the Aryan peoples or the disappearance of Jewry from Europe.”
    Prior to the war, Hitler’s anti-Semitic policies led hundreds of thousands of Jewish citizens to emigrate from Germany, a number that includes 83 percent of all German Jews under the age of twenty-one. But no more were allowed to leave once the war began. Now, trapped within Germany and each of the countries that the Nazis have conquered, the remaining Europeans of Jewish ancestry are being systematically rounded up and murdered.
    Hitler fancies himself a military strategist, despite no formal training in field tactics. He takes full credit for Patton’s defeat at Fort Driant, because it was his decision to send reinforcements to Metz rather than let the city fall. He is also cheered by the news that Nazi scientists are developing a bomb with nuclear capacity, a weapon that would allow Hitler to wipe his enemies off the face of the earth. In addition, Hitler is quite sure that the audacious surprise attack he will unveil to his top commanders in a few hours will push the Allied armies back across France, and allow Germany to regain control of the European Theater.
    And most encouraging of all, Adolf Hitler is finally rid of those top generals who have long despised him. SS death squads were relentless in discovering the identities of each of the men who took part in the July 20 assassination plot, then hunting them down and taking them into custody. Some were shot immediately, which infuriated Hitler, because such a death was far too quick. On his orders, the others were hanged. The executions were done individually, with each man marched into a small room. They entered stripped to the waist, wearing handcuffs. The hangman’s noose was then draped over the condemned man’s shoulders and slowly pulled tight. The other end of the rope was thrown over a hook affixed high up on the wall and left to dangle. A cameraman filmed the event for Hitler’s enjoyment. To ensure maximum embarrassment when the graphic movie was shown, each man’s pants were yanked down to his ankles.
    Hitler originally suggested that the assassins be impaled on the hook, to be “hanged like cattle.” But that sort of death would not have allowed the plotters to suffer sufficiently. Instead, the hangman picked up the loose end of the rope and pulled it taut, using the hook as a pulley to lift the condemned man slowly off the ground. The executioner was in no hurry, and very often the hangings lasted fifteen minutes or more, with the victim’s airflow cut off and restored multiple times. Before dying, the accused had plenty of time to memorize the interior of the room: the whitewashed walls, the cognac bottle on the simple wooden table, the door through which he entered alive and would exit quite dead.
    Each execution was brutal, but the suffering was not enough for Adolf Hitler. He wanted even more revenge. Hitler then ordered the conspirators’ immediate families