It has long been suspected that Hitler’s frenzied speeches were fuelled by cocaine and other powerful stimulants.

Now, the true extent of his drug habit has been laid bare in a daring new book that claims the Nazi leader was a gibbering “super-junkie” whose veins were all but destroyed by thousands of opiate injections in the dying days of World War Two.

According to Norman Ohler, an award-winning German author, the Fuhrer became addicted to a heroin-like substance called Eukodel which was prescribed following a nervous breakdown in 1944.

Mr Ohler’s book Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, which British historians have praised as a “remarkable” work of research, argues that the heroin-like opiate was largely to blame for Hitler’s erratic and paranoid behaviour towards the end of his life.