Mental illness, not British attack, blinded Hitler, says Thomas Weber

London: Adolf Hitler’s temporary loss of sight was actually caused by a mental disorder known as ‘hysterical blindness’, and not by a British mustard gas attack as a heroic First World War soldier as he had claimed, a new research has revealed.

The Nazi leader described in his book Mein Kampf how the British had attacked in October 1918 south of Ypres using a “yellow gas unknown to us”.

By morning, his eyes “were like glowing coals, and all was darkness around me,” he wrote in the book.

But now historian Dr Thomas Weber, of the University of Aberdeen, has uncovered a series of unpublished letters between two American neurologists from 1943, which debunk Hitler’s claim....