When Hitler Took Cocaine and Lenin Lost His Brain (10 page)

But these days, they have to pay like everyone else.

 

24

The Very Strange Death of Alfred Loewenstein

In the early evening of 4 July 1928, a fabulously wealthy businessman named Alfred Loewenstein boarded his private plane at Croydon Airport. It was a routine flight that would take him across the English and French coastlines before landing at Brussels, where Loewenstein lived with his wife, Madeleine.

Loewenstein was instantly recognizable to the staff at the airport. Indeed he was recognizable wherever he went. He was a spectacularly wealthy entrepreneur; so wealthy that he was widely known as the world's richest man.

Already rich before the First World War, his fortune had increased dramatically in the peace that followed. His various companies provided electric power for developing countries and before long he was being sought out by presidents and prime ministers around the globe.

But he also had many enemies. In 1926, he established International Holdings and Investments, which raised huge amounts of capital from wealthy investors. By 1928, these investors wanted some return on their money. And they wanted it sooner rather than later.

Loewenstein was pleased to be flying home on that July day in 1928. It was a fine evening for flying with scarcely a cloud in the sky. The pilot, Donald Drew, assured him that it would be a smooth flight.

There was a total of six people on the plane, in addition to Alfred Loewenstein. Pilot Drew stood by the doorway of the aircraft as the passengers and crew boarded. The other people in the cabin included Fred Baxter, Loewenstein's loyal valet, and Arthur Hodgson, his male secretary. There were also two women, Eileen Clarke and Paula Bidalon, his stenographers.

In the cockpit were Drew and Robert Little, the aircraft mechanic. The cockpit was a sealed unit with only a porthole connecting it to the rest of the plane. Once the Fokker had taken off, Drew and Little had no direct access to the cabin.

Shortly after 6 p.m., the Fokker FVII, a small monoplane, set off down the grass runway. Within minutes the plane was airborne and climbing to its cruising altitude of 4,000 feet. Before long, everyone on board could see the Kent coastline below. A minute or so later, they were flying over the English Channel.

At the rear of the Fokker's cabin there was a windowless door that led into a small toilet. This room also had an exterior door. This door was clearly marked EXIT and was equipped with a spring-loaded latch controlled from inside. It took two strong men to open it in mid-air, due to the slipstream pressing against it.

Loewenstein spent the first half of the flight making notes. Then, as the plane headed out over the Channel, he went to the toilet compartment at the rear.

According to statements later made by Baxter ten minutes passed and he had still not returned to his seat. Baxter grew concerned and knocked on the toilet door. There was no answer.

Worried that Loewenstein might have been taken ill, he forced open the door. The toilet was empty. Alfred Loewenstein had disappeared into thin air.

An obvious course of action would have been for the plane to divert to the airstrip at St Inglevert, which lay between Calais and Dunkirk. Here, the pilot could have alerted the coastguard to Loewenstein's disappearance. Instead, Donald Drew landed the plane on what he believed to be a deserted beach near Dunkirk.

In actual fact, the beach was being used for training by a local army unit. When the soldiers saw the Fokker coming in to land, they began running along the beach to meet it. It took them six minutes to arrive at the stationary plane, by which time the passengers and crew had disembarked.

They were initially questioned by Lieutenant Marquailles, but he was unable to make any sense of what had happened. Pilot Drew behaved particularly strangely, evading his questions for half an hour until finally admitting that they had lost Alfred Loewenstein somewhere over the English Channel.

Drew was next interrogated by a professional detective named Inspector Bonnot. The inspector confessed to being extremely puzzled by what he was told. ‘A most unusual and mysterious case,' he said. ‘We have not yet made up our minds to any definite theory, but anything is possible.'

He didn't arrest anyone and even allowed the plane to continue its flight to St Inglevert and then back to Croydon.

The ensuing investigation was bungled from the outset. Loewenstein's body was finally retrieved near Boulogne on 19 July, more than two weeks after his disappearance. It was taken to Calais by fishing boat where his identity was confirmed by means of his wristwatch.

A post-mortem revealed he had a partial fracture of his skull and several broken bones. Forensic scientists concluded that he had been alive when he hit the water.

The mystery of how he fell to his death remained unanswered, though there are many theories. Some said the absent-minded Loewenstein had accidentally opened the wrong door and fallen to his death. This was most unlikely, given that it was virtually impossible to open the door in mid-flight.

Others said he'd committed suicide, perhaps because his corrupt business practices were about to be exposed.

A far more plausible and sinister explanation is that Loewenstein was forcibly thrown out of the plane by the valet and the male secretary, possibly at the behest of Loewenstein's wife, Madeleine. She had a very frosty relationship with her husband and was desperate to get her hands on his fortune.

One thing is clear: all six people on board were almost certainly privy to the murder. Indeed, they had probably planned it carefully in advance.

One theory as to why the Fokker landed on the beach was so that a new rear door – already stowed on board the plane – could be fitted to replace the one jettisoned over the Channel. This fits neatly with the story of a French fisherman who recalled seeing something like a parachute falling from the sky at precisely the moment Loewenstein went missing. This ‘parachute' was quite possibly the rear door.

If the door and Loewenstein were jettisoned over the Channel, it was the perfect crime. No one was ever charged with the murder, nor even directly accused. As for Loewenstein, he was so unpopular that he ended up being laid to rest in an unmarked grave.

Even his ‘grieving' widow, Madeleine, didn't show up. She doubtless had more important matters to attend to, organising and investing the fortune that she had just inherited.

 

PART IX

Not Enough Sex

Castrati: clean cut, penis and testicles severed Spadones: only testicles amputated Thlibiae: testicles crushed

THREE TYPES OF CHINESE CASTRATION

 

25

The Last Eunuch of China

He was just nine years of age when he took the decision that was to transform his life. Sun Yaoting had been chatting with an elderly eunuch who had become rich from serving the Chinese emperor. Soon afterwards, in the autumn of 1911, Sun decided to follow the same path. He asked his father to castrate him in order that he could serve Emperor Puyi, known to history as the ‘Last Emperor'.

It was a momentous decision. Unlike eunuchs in the Ottoman Empire, Chinese eunuchs had every bit of their genitals removed. It was an operation that caused not only excruciating pain, but led to a lifetime of sexual frustration, impotence and incontinence.

Sun remained undaunted. On the appointed day, he removed his clothes and lay completely still while his father bound up his hands and feet with rope. Then, with a single violent swoop of a razor, his father performed the operation. In a matter of seconds – and a torrent of blood – Sun had become a eunuch.

He was bandaged with oiled cloth to staunch the bleeding, but the pain was so agonizing that the young lad lay in a coma for three days. For eight weeks he was virtually paralysed and for months afterwards he was unable to walk because of the excruciating pain. But he eventually recovered from the loss of blood and looked forward to joining the emperor's royal household in the Forbidden City.

Emperor Puyi had more than a thousand eunuchs, many of whom wielded positions of great influence. The emperor rarely left the inner recesses of the palace, meaning that the eunuchs became crucial intermediaries between the outer bureaucratic world and the inner imperial one.

Puyi himself would later write of these ‘slaves', who attended him day and night. ‘They waited on me when I ate, dressed and slept. They accompanied me on my walks and to my lessons; they told me stories and had rewards and beatings from me, but they never left my presence. They were my slaves and they were my earliest teachers.'

This was the role to which Sun now aspired. He wanted to get the ear of the emperor in order that he might acquire power and influence.

But then came the news that was to leave him in a deep state of shock. The emperor had abdicated, the imperial court was being dismantled and Sun's castration had been in vain.

The dynasty did not die immediately and Sun was not left entirely without hope. He initially found employment with one of the emperor's uncles; later, he worked for Puyi's wife.

In the decades that followed, he was to serve the former imperial family with devotion. He accompanied them to Manchuria, where Puyi was installed as the puppet emperor of the Japanese colonial state of Manchukuo in 1932.

He was also witness to all the innermost secrets of the imperial household, such as the emperor's refusal to sleep with his wife on their wedding night and his obsession with a fellow eunuch, ‘who looked like a pretty girl with his tall, slim figure, handsome face and creamy white skin'.

Sun was luckier than the majority of the emperor's eunuchs, who had been abandoned by the court and left penniless. Some became outcasts in society. Many more committed suicide. Others sought sanctuary in the temples of Beijing.

Sun's own life took a downward turn in 1949, when the Communists came to power. Gone were the days when eunuchs were viewed with fear and admiration. Now they were despised as outmoded relics of China's feudal past.

During the Cultural Revolution, Sun lost his most treasured possession, his severed, pickled genitals. Eunuchs always kept them in a jar, in order that they could be buried together. It was believed that such a practice would guarantee their reincarnation as ‘whole' men. But Sun's genitals were thrown away like common garbage, causing him to weep openly.

Sun was to live another three decades, dying in 1996 at the age of ninety-four. He never recovered from the loss of his pickled ‘treasure'.

‘When I die,' he said sadly, ‘I will come back as a cat or a dog.'

 

Further Reading

Please note that some of the links referenced in this work may no longer be active.

1. Hitler's English Girlfriend

Litchfield, David R.,
Hitler's Valkyrie: The Uncensored Biography of Unity Mitford
(The History Press, 2013).

Lovell, Mary,
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family
(Norton, 2003).

Pryce-Jones, David,
Unity Mitford: A Quest
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1995).

2. Hitler's American Nephew

Brown, Jonathan & Duff, Oliver, ‘The Black Sheep of the Family? The Rise and Fall of Hitler's Scouse Nephew',
Independent
, 17 August 2006:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/the-black-sheep-of-the-family-the-rise-and-fall-of-hitlers-scouse-nephew-412206.html

Gardner, David,
The Last of the Hitlers
(BMM, 2001).

Kilgannon, Corey, ‘Three Quiet Brothers on Long Island, All of Them Related to Hitler',
New York Times
, 24 April 2006.

3. When Hitler Took Cocaine

Doyle, D., ‘Hitler's Medical Care', Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, 2005:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15825245

Heston, Leonard H.,
The Medical Casebook of Adolf Hitler: His Illnesses, Doctors and Drugs
(Cooper Square Publishers, New York, 2000).

Irving, David,
Adolf Hitler: The Secret Diaries of Hitler's Doctor
(Scribner, 1983).

Waite, Robert G. L.,
The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler
(Da Capo Press, New York, 1993).

4. A Corpse on Everest

Anker, Conrad & Roberts, David,
The Lost Explorer: Finding Mallory on Mount Everest
(Simon & Schuster, 1999).

Davis, Wade,
Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest
(Vintage, 2012).

Hemmleb, Jochen, Johnson, Larry A., Simonson, Eric R. & Nothdurft, William E.,
Ghosts of Everest: The Search for Mallory & Irvine
(Mountaineers Books, Seattle, 1999).

Hemmleb, Jochen, & Simonson, Eric R.,
Detectives on Everest: The Story of the 2001 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition
(Mountaineers Books, Seattle, 1999).

5. Drunk on the
Titanic

Encyclopedia Titanica:
http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/titanic-survivor/charles-john-joughin.html

Lord, Walter,
A Night to Remember
(Transworld, 1955).

Titanic Enquiry Project:
http://www.titanicinquiry.org/BOTInq/BOTInq06Joughin01.php

6. The Man Who Was Buried Alive

Bond, Michael,
The Power of Others
(Oneworld Publications, 2014).

Ice Cap Station:
http://www.icecapstation.com/august.html

Scott, Jeremy,
Dancing on Ice: A Stirring Tale of Adventure, Risk and Reckless Folly
(Old Street Publishing Ltd., London, 2008).

7. The Long War of Hiroo Onoda

Kawaguchi, Judith, ‘Words to Live By', interview with Hiroo Onoda in
Japan Times
, January 2007.

McFadden, Robert D., ‘Hiroo Onoda, Soldier Who Hid in Jungle for Decades, Dies at 91',
New York Times
, 17 January 2014.