Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

By Norman Ohler

A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich” (Washington Post).

The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers.

In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin—administered by his personal doctor.

Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.

“Delightfully nuts.”—The New Yorker

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781328664099

Norman Ohler

Norman Ohler is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed, the non-fiction book The Bohemians about resistance against Hitler in Berlin, as well as the novels Die Quotenmaschine (the world’s first hypertext novel), Mitte, Stadt des Goldes (translated into English as Ponte City), as well as the historical crime novel Die Gleichung des Lebens. He was cowriter of the script for Wim Wenders’s film Palermo Shooting. He lives in Berlin.

Book preview

First Mariner Books edition 2018

Copyright © 2015 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne Germany

Copyright © 2015 by Norman Ohler

Translation copyright © 2016 by Shaun Whiteside

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [e-mail] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhco.com

First published in the German language as Der Totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich by Norman Ohler with an afterword by Hans Mommsen. Published by arrangement with Penguin Books Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ohler, Norman, author. | Whiteside, Shaun, translator.

Title: Drugs in the Third Reich / Norman Ohler ; translated by Shaun Whiteside.

Other titles: Totale Rausch. English

Description: First U.S. edition. | Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2017] | Translated from the German. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016056346 | ISBN 9781328663795 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781328915344 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Nazis—Drug use. | Drugs—Germany—History—20th century. | Pharmaceutical industry—Germany—History—20th century. | Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945—Drug use. | Soldiers—Drug use—Germany—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Germany.

Classification: LCC HV5840.G3 O3513 2017 | DDC 362.29/95094309044—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056346

Photo credits appear on page 272.

Cover design by Albert Tang

Cover photograph © Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

eISBN 978-1-328-66409-9

v4.1018

A political system devoted to decline instinctively does much to speed up that process.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

1

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Methamphetamine, the Volksdroge

(1933–1938)

National Socialism was toxic, in the truest sense of the word. It gave the world a chemical legacy that still affects us today: a poison that refuses to disappear. On one hand, the Nazis presented themselves as clean-cut and enforced a strict, ideologically underpinned anti-drug policy with propagandistic pomp and draconian punishments. On the other hand, a particularly potent and perfidious substance became a popular product under Hitler. This drug carved out a great career for itself all over the German Reich, and later in the occupied countries of Europe. Under the trademark Pervitin, this little pill became the accepted Volksdroge, or people’s drug, and was on sale in every pharmacy. It wasn’t until 1939 that its use was restricted by making Pervitin prescription-only, and the pill was not subjected to regulation until the Reich Opium Law in 1941.

Its active ingredient, methamphetamine, is now either illegal or strictly regulated,¹ but with the number of consumers currently at over 100 million and rising, it counts today as our most popular poison. Produced in hidden labs by chemical amateurs, usually in adulterated form, this substance has come to be known as crystal meth. Usually ingested nasally in high doses, the crystalline form of this so-called horror drug has gained unimaginable popularity all over Europe, with an exponential number of first-time users. This upper, with its dangerously powerful kick, is used as a party drug, for boosting performance in the workplace, in offices, even in parliaments and at universities. It banishes both sleep and hunger while promising euphoria, but in the form of crystal meth* it is a potentially destructive and highly addictive substance. Hardly anyone knows about its original rise in Nazi Germany.

Breaking Bad: The Drug Lab of the Reich

Under a clean-swept summer sky stretching over both industrial zones and uniform housing, I take the suburban train southeast, to the edge of Berlin. In order to find the remnants of the Temmler factory I have to get out at Adlershof, which nowadays calls itself Germany’s most modern technology park. Avoiding the campus, I strike off across an urban no-man’s-land, skirting dilapidated factory buildings and passing through a wilderness of crumbling brick and rusty steel.

The Temmler factory moved here in 1933. It was only one year later that Albert Mendel (the Jewish co-owner of the Tempelhof Chemical Factory) was expropriated by the racist laws of the regime and Temmler took over his share, quickly expanding the business. These were good times for the German chemical industry (or at least for its Aryan members), and pharmaceutical development boomed. Research was tirelessly conducted on new, pioneering substances that would ease the pain of modern humanity or sedate its troubles. Many of the resulting pharmacological innovations shape the way we consume medicine today.

The Temmler factory in Berlin-Johannisthal, then . . . and now (following images).

By now the former Temmler factory in Berlin-Johannisthal has fallen into ruin. There is no sign of its prosperous past, of a time when millions of Pervitin pills a week were being pressed. The grounds lie unused, a dead property. Crossing a deserted parking lot, I make my way through a wildly overgrown patch of forest and over a wall stuck with broken bits of glass designed to deter intruders. Between ferns and saplings stands the old wooden witch’s house of the founder, Theodor Temmler, once the nucleus of the company. Behind dense alder bushes looms a forsaken brick building. A window is broken enough for me to be able to climb through, stumbling into a long dark corridor. Mildew and mold grow from the walls and ceilings. At the end of the hallway a door stands beckoning, half open, encrusted with flaking green paint. Beyond the door, daylight peers through two shattered, lead-framed industrial windows. An abandoned bird’s nest hides in the corner. Chipped white tiles reach all the way to the high ceiling, which is furnished with circular air vents.

This is the former laboratory of Dr. Fritz Hauschild, head of pharmacology at Temmler from 1937 until 1941, who was in search of a new type of medicine, a performance-enhancing drug. This is the former drug lab of the Third Reich. Here, in porcelain crucibles attached to pipes and glass coolers, the chemists boiled up their flawless matter. Lids rattled on potbellied flasks, orange steam released with a sharp hiss while emulsions crackled and white-gloved fingers made adjustments. Here the methamphetamine produced was of a quality that even Walter White, the drug cook in the TV series Breaking Bad, which depicts meth as a symbol of our times, could only have dreamed of.

Prologue in the Nineteenth Century: The Father of All Drugs

Voluntary dependence is the finest state.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To understand the historical relevance of methamphetamine and other substances to the Nazi state, we must go back before the beginning of the Third Reich. The development of modern societies is bound as tightly with the creation and distribution of drugs as the economy is with advances in technology. In 1805 Goethe wrote Faust in classicist Weimar, and by poetic means perfected one of his theses, that the genesis of man is itself drug-induced: I change my brain, therefore I am. At the same time, in the rather less glamorous town of Paderborn in Westphalia, the pharmaceutical assistant Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner performed experiments with opium poppies, whose thickened sap anesthetized pain more effectively than anything else. Goethe wanted to explore through artistic and dramatic channels what it is that holds the core of the world together—Sertürner, on the other hand, wanted to solve a major, millennium-old problem that has plagued our species to a parallel degree.

It was a concrete challenge for the brilliant twenty-one-year-old chemist: depending on the conditions they are grown in, the active ingredient in opium poppies is present in varying concentrations. Sometimes the bitter sap does not ease the pain quite strongly enough, and other times it can lead to an unintended overdose and fatal poisoning. Thrown back entirely on his own devices, just as the opiate laudanum consumed Goethe in his study, Sertürner made an astonishing discovery: he succeeded in isolating morphine, the crucial alkaloid in opium, a kind of pharmacological Mephistopheles that instantly magics pain away. Not only a turning point in the history of pharmacology, this was also one of the most important events of the early nineteenth century, not to mention human history as a whole. Pain, that irritable companion, could now be assuaged, indeed removed, in precise doses. All over Europe, apothecaries had to the best of their ability (and their consciences) pressed pills from the ingredients of their own herb gardens or from the deliveries of women who foraged in hedgerows. These homegrown chemists now developed within only a few years into veritable factories, with established pharmacological standards.* Morphine was not only a method of easing life’s woes; it was also big business.

In Darmstadt the owner of the Engel-Apotheke, Emanuel Merck, stood out as a pioneer of this development. In 1827 he set out his business model of supplying alkaloids and other medications in unvarying quality. This was the birth not only of the Merck Company, which still thrives today, but of the modern pharmaceutical industry as a whole. When injections were invented in 1850, there was no stopping the victory parade of morphine. The painkiller was used in the American Civil War of 1861–65 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Soon morphine fixes were doing the rounds as normal procedure.² The change was crucial; the pain of even seriously injured soldiers could now be kept within bounds. This made a different scale of war possible: fighters who before would have been ruled out for a long time by an injury were soon coddled back to health and thrust onto the front line once again.

With morphine, also known as morphium, the development of pain relief and anesthesia reached a crucial climax, both in the army and in civil society. From the worker to the nobleman, the supposed panacea took the whole world by storm, from Europe via Asia and all the way to America. In drugstores across the United States, two active ingredients were available without prescription: fluids containing morphine calmed people down, while drinks containing cocaine, such as in the early days Vin Mariani, a Bordeaux containing coca extract, and even Coca-Cola,³ were used to counter low moods, as a hedonistic source of euphoria, and also as a local anesthetic. This was only the start. The industry soon needed to diversify; it craved new products. On August 10, 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a chemist with the Bayer Company, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid from willow bark; it went on sale as Aspirin and conquered the globe. Eleven days later the same man invented another substance that was also to become world famous: diacetyl morphine, a derivative of morphine—the first designer drug. Trademarked as Heroin, it entered the market and began its own campaign. Heroin is a fine business, the directors of Bayer announced proudly and advertised the substance as a remedy for headaches, for general indisposition, and also as a cough syrup for children. It was even recommended to babies for colic or sleeping problems.⁴

Business wasn’t just booming for Bayer. In the last third of the nineteenth century several new pharmaceutical hotspots developed along the Rhine. Unlike other, more traditional industries, the chemical industry didn’t require as much in terms of overhead to get business going, only needing relatively little equipment and raw material. Even small operations promised high profit margins. What was most important was intuition and specialist knowledge on the part of the developers, and Germany, rich in human capital, was able to fall back on an inexhaustible stock of excellent chemists and engineers, trained in what was at the time the best education system in the world. The network of universities and technical colleges was recognized as exemplary: science and business worked hand in hand. Research was being carried out at top speed, and a multitude of patents were being developed. Where the chemical industry was concerned, Germany was the workshop of the world. Made in Germany became a guarantee of quality, especially for drugs.

Germany, the Global Dealer

This didn’t change after the First World War. While France and Great Britain were able to acquire natural stimulants such as coffee, tea, vanilla, pepper, and other natural medicines from colonies overseas, Germany, which lost its (comparatively sparse) colonial possessions under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, had to find other ways—stimulants had to be produced synthetically. In fact, Germany was in dire need of artificial assistance: the war had inflicted deep wounds and caused the nation both physical and psychic pain. In the 1920s drugs became more and more important for the despondent population between the Baltic Sea and the Alps. The desire for sedation led to self-education and there soon emerged no shortage of know-how for the production of a remedy.

The course was set for a thriving pharmaceutical industry. Many of the chemical substances that we know today were developed and patented within a very short period of time. German companies became leaders in the global market. Not only did they produce the most medicines, but they also provided the lion’s share of chemical raw materials for their manufacture throughout the world. A new economy came into being, and the picturesque Rhine Valley became a Chemical Valley of sorts. Previously unknown little outfits prospered overnight and grew into influential players. In 1925 the bigger chemical factories joined together to form IG Farben, one of the most powerful companies in the world, with headquarters in Frankfurt. Opiates above all were still a German specialty. In 1926 the country was top of the morphine-producing states and world champion when it came to exporting heroin: 98 percent of the production went abroad.⁵ Between 1925 and 1930, 91 tons of morphine were produced, 40 percent of global production.⁶ Under the obligations of the Versailles Treaty, Germany reluctantly signed the League of Nations International Opium Convention in 1925, which regulated the trade. It was not ratified in Berlin until 1929. The local alkaloid industry still processed just over 200 tons of opium in 1928.⁷

The Germans were world leaders in another class of substances as well: the companies Merck, Boehringer, and Knoll controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine market. Merck’s cocaine, from the city of Darmstadt, was seen as the best product in the world, and commercial pirates in China printed fake Merck labels by the million.⁸ Hamburg was the major European marketplace for raw cocaine: every year thousands of pounds were imported legally through its port. Peru sold its entire annual production of raw cocaine, over five tons, almost exclusively to Germany for further processing. The influential Fachgruppe Opium und Kokain (Expert Group on Opium and Cocaine), put together by the German drug manufacturers, worked tirelessly on a close integration of the government and the pharmaceuticals industry. Two cartels, each consisting of a handful of companies, divided up between them the lucrative market of the entire world,⁹ the so-called cocaine convention and opiates convention. Merck was the business leader in both cases.¹⁰ The young Weimar Republic, swimming in consciousness-altering and intoxicating substances, delivered heroin and cocaine to the four corners of the world and rose to become a global dealer.

The Chemical Twenties

This scientific and economic development also resonated with the spirit of the age. Artificial paradises were in vogue in the Weimar Republic. People chose to flee into worlds of make-believe rather than engage with the often less rosy reality—a phenomenon that more or less defined this very first democracy on German soil, both politically and culturally. Many were reluctant to admit the true reasons for the military defeat and repressed the shared responsibility of the imperial German establishment for the fiasco of the First World War. The malicious legend of the stab in the back gained currency, claiming the German Army had only lost the war because of internal sabotage from the left.¹¹

These escapist tendencies often found expression either in sheer hatred or in cultural excess, most of all in Berlin. Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz identified the city as the Whore of Babylon, with an incomparably grubby underworld, a place seeking salvation in the most appalling, barely imaginable, excesses, particularly drugs. Berlin nightlife, oh boy, oh boy, the world has never seen the like! We used to have a great army, now we’ve got great perversities! wrote the author Klaus Mann.¹² The city on the Spree became synonymous with moral reprehensibility. When Germany’s currency collapsed—in autumn of 1923 one U.S. dollar was worth 4.2 billion marks—all moral values seemed to plummet with it as well.

Everything whirled apart in a toxicological frenzy. The icon of the age, the actress and dancer Anita Berber, dipped white rose petals in a cocktail of chloroform and ether at breakfast, before sucking them clean. Films about cocaine or morphine were showing in the cinemas, and all drugs were available on street corners without prescription. Forty percent of Berlin doctors were said to be addicted to morphine.¹³ In Friedrichstrasse Chinese traders from the former German-leased territory of Tsingtao ran opium dens. Illegal nightclubs opened in the back rooms of the Mitte district. Smugglers distributed flyers at Anhalter Station, advertising illegal dance parties and beauty evenings. Big clubs like the famous Haus Vaterland, on Potsdamer Platz, and Ballhaus Resi, notorious for its extravagant promiscuity, on Blumenstrasse, attracted potential fun-lovers in droves, as did smaller establishments like the Kakadu Bar or the Weisse Maus, where masks were distributed on the way in to guarantee the anonymity of the guests. An early form of sex-and-drugs tourism from Western neighbors and the United States began, because everything in Berlin was as cheap as it was exciting.

The world war was lost, and everything seemed permitted: the metropolis mutated into the experimental capital of Europe. Posters on house walls warned in shrill Expressionist script: Berlin, take a breath / bear in mind your dance partner is death! The police couldn’t keep up: order collapsed first sporadically, then chronically, and the culture of pleasure filled the vacuum as best it could, as illustrated in a song of the times:

Once not so very long ago

Sweet alcohol, that beast,

Brought warmth and sweetness to our lives,

But then the price increased.

And so cocaine and morphine

Berliners now select.

Let lightning flashes rage outside

We snort and we inject! . . .

At dinner in the restaurant

The waiter brings the tin

Of coke for us to feast upon—

Forget whisky and gin!

Let drowsy morphine take its

Subcutaneous effect

Upon our nervous system—

We snort and we inject!

These medications aren’t allowed,

Of course, they’re quite forbidden.

But even such illicit treats

Are very seldom hidden.

Euphoria awaits us

And though, as we suspect,

Our foes can’t wait to shoot us down,

We snort and we inject!

And if we snort ourselves to death

Or into the asylum,

Our days are going downhill fast—

How better to beguile ’em?

Europe’s a madhouse anyway,

No need for genuflecting;

The only way to Paradise

Is snorting and injecting!¹⁴

In 1928 in Berlin alone 160 pounds of morphine and heroin were sold quite legally by prescription over the pharmacist’s counter.¹⁵ Anyone who could afford it took cocaine, the ultimate weapon for intensifying the moment. Coke spread like wildfire and symbolized the extravagance of the age. On the other hand, it was viewed as a degenerate poison, and disapproved of by both Communists and Nazis, who were fighting for power in the streets. There was violent opposition to the free-and-easy zeitgeist: German nationalists railed against moral decay and similar attacks were heard from the conservatives. Though Berlin’s new status as a cultural metropolis was accepted with pride, the bourgeoisie, which was losing status in the 1920s, showed its insecurity through its radical condemnation of mass pleasure culture, decried as decadently Western.

Worst of all, the National Socialists agitated against the pharmacological quest for salvation of the Weimar period. Their brazen rejection of the parliamentary system, of democracy, as well as of the urban culture of a society that was opening up to the world, was expressed through tub-thumping slogans directed against the degenerate state of the hated Jewish Republic.

The Nazis had their own recipe for healing the people: they promised ideological salvation. For them there could be only one legitimate form of inebriation: the swastika. National Socialism strove for a transcendental state of being as well; the Nazi world of illusions into which the Germans were to be enticed often used techniques of intoxication. World-historical decisions, according to Hitler’s inflammatory text Mein Kampf, had to be brought about in states of euphoric enthusiasm or hysteria. So the Nazi Party (NSDAP) distinguished itself on one hand with populist arguments and on the other with torch parades, flag consecrations, rapturous announcements, and public speeches aimed at achieving a state of collective ecstasy. These were supplemented with the violent frenzies of the Brownshirts (SA) during the early Kampfzeit, or period of struggle, often fueled by the abuse of alcohol.* Realpolitik tended to be dismissed as unheroic cattle trading: the idea was to replace politics with a state of social intoxication.¹⁶ If the Weimar Republic can be seen in psychohistorical terms as a repressed society, its supposed antagonists, the National Socialists, were at the head of that trend. They hated drugs because they wanted to be like a drug themselves.

Switching Power Means Switching Substances

. . . while the abstinent Führer was silent.

—Günter Grass¹⁷

During the Weimar period Hitler’s inner circle had already managed to establish an image of him as a man working tirelessly, putting his life completely at the service of his people. A picture was created of an unassailable leader-figure, entirely devoted to the Herculean task of gaining control of Germany’s social contradictions and problems, and to ironing out the negative consequences of the lost world war. One of Hitler’s allies reported in 1930: He is all genius and body. And he mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.¹⁸ Hitler allegedly didn’t even allow himself coffee and legend had it that after the First World War he threw his last pack of cigarettes into the Danube near Linz; from then onward, supposedly, no poisons would enter his body.

We teetotalers have—let it be mentioned in passing—a particular reason to be grateful to our Führer, if we bear in mind what a model his personal lifestyle and his position on intoxicants can be for everyone, reads an announcement from an abstinence association.¹⁹ The Reich Chancellor: ostensibly a pure person, remote from all worldly pleasures, entirely without a private life. An existence apparently informed by self-denial and long-lasting self-sacrifice, a model for an entirely healthy existence. The myth of Hitler as an anti-drug teetotaler who made his own needs secondary was an essential part of Nazi ideology and was presented again and again by the mass media. A myth was created that established itself in the public imagination but also among critical minds of the period, and still resonates today. This is a myth that demands to be deconstructed.

Following their seizure of power on January 30, 1933, the National Socialists suffocated the eccentric pleasure-seeking culture of the Weimar Republic. Drugs were made taboo, as they made it possible to experience unrealities other than the ones promulgated by the National Socialists. Seductive poisons²⁰ had no place in a system in which only the Führer was supposed to do the seducing. The path taken by the authorities in their so-called Rauschgiftbekämpfung, or war on drugs, lay less in an intensification of the opium law, which was simply adopted from the Weimar Republic,²¹ than in several new regulations that served the central National Socialist idea of racial hygiene. The term Droge—drug—which at one point meant nothing more than dried plant parts,* was given negative connotations. Drug consumption was stigmatized and—with the help of quickly established new divisions of the criminal police—severely penalized. This new emphasis came into force as early as November 1933, when the Reichstag passed a law that allowed the imprisonment of addicts in a closed institution for up to two years, although that period of confinement could be extended indefinitely by legal decree.²² Further measures ensured that doctors who consumed drugs would be forbidden to work for up to five years. Medical confidentiality was considered breakable when it came to detecting consumers of illegal substances. The chairman of the Berlin Medical Council decreed that every doctor had to file a drug report when a patient was prescribed narcotics for longer than three weeks, because public security is endangered by chronic alkaloid abuse in almost every case.²³ If a report to that effect came in, two experts examined the patient in question. If they found that hereditary factors were satisfactory, immediate compulsory withdrawal was imposed. Although in the Weimar Republic slow or gradual withdrawal had been used, now addicts were to be subjected to the horrors of going cold turkey.²⁴ If assessment of the hereditary factors yielded a negative result, the judge could order confinement for an unspecified duration. Drug users soon ended up in concentration camps.²⁵

Your identity card at the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions could be a matter of life and death. You were defined by a number (as a dealer, prescription forger, Eukodal addict, artist, etc.) and a color (purple: Jew; red: held for drying out, etc.).

Every German was also ordered to convey observations about drug-addicted acquaintances and family members, so that corrective action can be taken immediately.²⁶ Filing systems were put in place in order to establish a thorough record, enabling the Nazis to use their war against drugs to feed into a surveillance state quite soon after they came to power. The dictatorship extended its so-called health leadership into every corner of the Reich: in every administrative district there was an anti-drug consortium. Doctors, pharmacists, social security authorities, and representatives of the law such as the army and the police were all involved, as well as members of the National Socialist People’s Welfare, establishing a full-blown anti-drug web. Its threads converged in the Reich Health Office in Berlin, in Principal Department II of the Reich Committee for the People’s Health. A duty of health was postulated, which would go hand in hand with the total containment of all demonstrable physical, social and mental damage that could be inflicted by alcohol and tobacco. Cigarette advertising was severely restricted, and drug prohibitions were put in place to block any remaining breaches of moral codes in our people.²⁷

In autumn 1935 a new Marital

Reviews for Blitzed

[ericcostello-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The title is sightly misleading, in that the book only really looks at three case studies; one, the use by Adolf Hitler of an appalling cocktail of medications, something that's been known but is presented in an organized fashion here; two, the use by the German armed forces of stimulants, something that's also been known but is presented in an organized fashion here; and three, the use of a particular medication, Pervitin, which I don't think has really been presented before. The book doesn't really go into whether or not the regime tried to fight drugs or booze, except touching on it tangentially. Still, an interesting book.

[write5review · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Opioid Crisis … in Nazi Germany

Norman Ohler puts forth a straightforward thesis: Nazi Germany, top to bottom, military included, suffered a generalized addiction to opioids, particularly methamphetamine, marketed as Pervitin; the chief dopehead was Hitler; the head doper was Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician. Ohler cites reams of original research dug out of Nazi files (Nazis were big documentarians) to support his proposition. In many ways, he presents a very appealing case, something like, if you will allow, The General Theory of Nazi Inhumanity, or The General Theory of German Blindness, depending on whether you can’t allow yourself to believe rational people capable of committing massive atrocities, or you wish to excuse how a nation could allow millions to be slaughtered in fulfillment of a political ideology.

This doesn’t discount the value of Ohler’s research and presentation, but it does mean readers need to approach it cautiously and not allow themselves to be sweep up in it as a unifying theory. The real value here may be that Ohler, a novelist outsider, gives impetus for historians of all disciplines—medical, military, political, and social—to take a closer look at drug use in pre- and Nazi Germany and perhaps eventually incorporate it into their more expansive and inclusive histories and biographies of the times and the people.

In his text, supported by hundreds of footnotes, Ohler covers the development of the drug industry in Germany preceding the rise of the Nazis and WWII. He shows how methamphetamine captured the imagination of people, got branded as Pervitin, and then smartly packaged and sold to doctors and the general public. Reading Ohler’s colorful recounting, you could easily believe the entire country in the 1930s was guzzling down Pervitin in tablet form and mixed with foods, such as chocolates. If you didn’t know how damaging meth is, you might find the whole affair amusing.

He goes on to show how Pervitin wormed its way into the military as a stimulant for pushing soldiers beyond normal human endurance to create an impression of supermen at war. Ohler’s portrayals of selected military engagements, among them the storming of Poland and the overrunning of France, do give you pause. But no drug works forever, as your body builds tolerances, initiating a vicious and deadly cycle in search of the first ecstatic high. In other words, even if meth may have played a roll in winning some encounters, eventually it became a debilitating addictive failure, as Ohler points out.

Then there is Hitler himself, the man portrayed to Germans as pure of body and the mightier for it; who, with his Nazi cohorts, propagandized for a healthy society and the banishment of drugs, bad eating habits, and nasty “unnatural” sex. Ohler devotes half the book to the Leader and his personal physician, who over time morphed into Hitler’s personal drug supplier, always at his side, always ready with a pill, with an injection of morphine and later on an opioid cousin, Eukodal. That Hitler was in the thrall of medical concoctions to mitigate any number of unsettling maladies, especially of the alimentary canal, is well known. Many also accept he became an addict. Ohler posits complete and debilitating addiction that extended to Hitler’s thought processes and decision-making ability; in short, Hitler behaved irrationally. Though Ohler takes a paragraph to militate against the pages of evidence he has presented, the impression a reader takes away is the opposite, that in fact Hitler became unhinged and borderline insane, particularly in the 1940s, concluding in a complete break from reality and the fanatical about destroying his own country.

So, readers interested in Hitler, in Nazi Germany, in German military performance in WWII, and the destructive effects of rampant drug use, all will find Ohler’s book informative and riveting. However, until historians of all types take up his lead and more closely scrutinize what he has brought forcefully to the forefront, that Germany descended into a suggestible stupefaction to condone murderous ways and stepped into the abyss at the beckoning of a madman, as opposed to rational people behaving knowledgeably in all ways contrary to that rationality, well, this will have to await much further study.

[enoch_elijah_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A Review of "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich" By Norman OhlerBlitzed was a fascinating read. One of my special areas of interest is the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and of the influence wielded by Adolf Hitler. In the many books I’ve read on subject there were always hints of drug addictions and Nazi interest in the occult. In this book, Norman Ohler has done a fantastic job of bringing the former to light. With an entire book devoted to the subject, the reader is introduced to the particulars of how some of today’s well known drugs were discovered and used in the early 20th century, and how they came to be tested, used, and abused in Nazi Germany. The book can sometimes be slow but not so slow that I was tempted to give up on it. I’m glad I finished it since it gave me a better understanding of how drugs influenced some of the leaders and how they provided a boost to the common soldier. Anyhow, I recommend this book. Not just because it clarifies so much of our understanding of the Nazi state, but because it demonstrates how some of the challenges we face today in terms of drug addiction began. Be aware though...this is a book on Nazi Germany. As you can imagine, there will be many stories on how the effect of these drugs were tested. Some on German soldiers, some on civilians, but the worst on those who were considered quite expendable: the Jews. It is not easy to read some of these passages. But it is important to remember that this happened in modern times and in a supposedly civilized western European nation. Read it, you won’t regret it.

[sandydog1_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well researched, but it left many questions unanswered. Emphasis was on Hitler's addictions based on review of notes. It got boring after a while. A lesser, and more interesting theme was the fate of the average German soldier/addict. Meth use among the Luftwaffe, tankers and mini submariners and, during Blitzkrieg, is mentioned. But what goes up, must come down. Is there any documentation of exactly how German meth heads performed, as told by American or Soviet troops? What about withdrawals among German prisoners? What about notes and interviews of the average cranked up SS soldier or tank commander? With crank being dispensed like candy, that story would have been much more interesting. Overall, an exciting book and William Burroughs was right, "Leave it to the Nazis.."

[rdwhitenack · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Audiobook. I had no idea drugs were so prevalent in WWII. Definitely explains some of the behaviors. An eye opening book about the power of these drugs. One could arguably make the case that the Axis powers, i.e. Germany, lost the war because of a reliance on these drugs. Hitler was dependent on many drugs at the time of his death and the author does an excellent job retelling the story of how it got to that point. The author is careful to explain, and at one point explicitly describes how the drugs were not at fault for his madness, and that he was a murderous sociopath far prior to his dependency. The dependency sped things along.

[villemezbrown · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

With a tendency to be sensationalistic and overblown, this doesn't seem to be a particularly rigorous or wholly credible history, but it sure is fun, and I had a "feels right" gut check as I finished. The author uses the evidence of prevalent drug use in Germany not to excuse the Nazis but to explain some of the inexplicable early gains and later day bad decisions they made during the war. Hitler and his nation follow the early powerful highs and inflated confidence then the eventual long-term burnout, desperation and decay that is the fate of a drug addict.

[dwhatson-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

While Hitler's political ambitions were already well underway, one cannot wonder how much Dr Morell's drug cocktails influenced the outcome of WW2. The alleged widespread use of methamphetamine by Germany's military and the civilian population is truly disturbing. Furthermore, the power that Morrel gains during the war, as Hitler's personal physician, combined with the horror stories of methamphetamine use during combat make this book a fascinating read.

[terran_9 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a fascinating, well-researched account of drug use by Germans, including Hitler, during WWII. In spite of portraying himself as a clean-living healthy specimen of the master race, Hitler was , in reality, dying of his drug addiction by the end of the war. It doesn't excuse the horrendous actions he ordered done in any way, nor does the author excuse Hitler from any blame. The author's findings do offer a different picture of the conduct of the war and go a long way to explain some of the inexplicable decisions Hitler made.

[jeffv_19 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

We all know about how revolutionary and effective the blitzkrieg was early in WWII. What I didn't realize was the widespread drugs that made the blitz possible. For the most part, German soldiers and tank crews were tweaked on crystal meth; allowing them to operate for days at a time without sleep. It is almost funny than when Hitler ordered a halt to the advance in France because it was going too quickly, the orders failed to reach general Heinz Guderian because he had already moved on and secured the next objective.This book chronicles the millions of doses of crystal meth and other narcotics doles out by Reich physicians, but also the Fuhrer's descent in to addiction at the hands of his person physician, Dr. Morrell. As Hitler became more and more dependent, the more erratic he became, and the gradual fall ensued. It's really surprising how much success and failure can be tied to systematic drug abuse, more so because ideologically the party was very much against such thing. Hitler was a self-styled teetotaler and felt strongly that a street sweeper who enjoys his drink needs to look no further to the reason why he is but a street sweeper. With drug addiction comes reality distortion, and as Hitler succumbed, the rest of the enterprise went down the toilet as well. Ridiculous orders had to be carried out under the threat of execution, and many of those who knew the collective Stuka was auguring into the ground were powerless to help. As troops developed a tolerance to the drugs they were given, their performance started to suffer and they fell victim to their increasingly experienced, sober counterparts. There are many reasons the Third Reich did not succeed, but this book makes a compelling case that being stoned out of their gourd was probably a leading cause.

[emresevinc · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a surprising, fascinating, and pharmacological look at one of the darkest periods in our modern history! Before this book, I didn't know anything about the drug use in Nazi Germany, and didn't have any idea about the role played by various powerful stimulants and painkillers both at various level of the army, and in the last few years of Hitler.I'm neither a historian with expertise on II. World War Germany, neither the history of pharmacology, therefore, I can't be certain to a great extent whether the author's interpretation of a part of the archives are impeccable. Nevertheless, I applaud the effort taken because of the fresh perspective it provides. Even though the book's focus seems more tilted towards Hitler's addiction to and abuse of drugs, his relationship with his personal physician that gave all these drugs, and how this extraordinary situation made his already delusional state even worse, resulting in the suffering of millions of innocent people, I still wish the book gave more information about the usage of drugs in the army. There are of course striking example, for example the desperate final attempts of German navy, to use such powerful drugs so carelessly and unscientifically, leading to some soldiers not being able to sleep for four days! But I think there are other parts of the archive to be covered from this perspective in order to enhance our understanding.If you're interested how human mind is affected by drugs that modify the biological mechanisms taking place in the brain, how mind state altering chemicals can be put to weird and evil uses, what crazy side effects can occur, and how blind political and delusional ambition can take knowledge and use it in an ignorant way to cause a lot of suffering, you'll find many of your questions answered in this book. And even though it's a non-fiction, it'll feel more like a page-turner thriller; another achievement by the author.

[shrike58 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I will cheerfully admit that I approached this book in something of a salacious mood, as how could one do otherwise with the subject matter? Consisting of about 10% coverage of German narcotic culture, 30% coverage of the use of narcotics as a force multiplier by the German military, and 60% detailed examination of the destructive relationship between Hitler and Theodor Morrell (a society "feel-good" physician), where Ohler provides one with blow-by-blow coverage of the toll Morrell's drugs and quack remedies took of Hitler's health. The ultimate impact one is left with is not that of decadent amusement but a reinforcement of the horror of the experience of the Third Reich; I certainly did not find the accusation that Ohler is simply providing another alibi for the crimes of the Nazi regime to be justified. Ohler is quick to point out that the angle he is covering is only part of the story, but it's a part that has been downplayed in political and military history.Here's the thing, as an American there is a certain shock of recognition here with the current American scene with its fun-house mirror coverage of political events, the denial of scientific analysis as a tool to explain reality, of its galloping epidemic of drug abuse, and the withdrawal of many people into various sorts of digital virtual worlds. Heaven help your society if a negative feed-back cycle of addictive behavior takes hold.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Sensationally written, but then again the topic is pretty sensational. Ohler argues that a drug-taking culture, heroin and cocaine specifically, was a big part of Weimar life—Germany was the biggest producer of medical-grade heroin and cocaine by far, and popular culture often referred to taking those drugs (“Europe’s a madhouse anyway/No need for genuflecting/The only way to Paradise/is snorting and injecting!”). “Heroin is a fine business,” the directors of Bayer said, while Merck, Boehringer and Kroll controlled 80% of the global cocaine market. The Nazis purported to crack down (they wanted their ideology to be the key drug, Ohler says), putting drug users in concentration camps and associating Jews with toxins and narcotics. But the Nazis also heavily used—and mandated the use by troops of—meth, under the name Pervitin, which Ohler argues was key to the Blitz, allowing troops to fight or drive for hours and to overwhelm French and other opponents who thought them inhumanly uninhibited. Their judgment was impaired and they became addicted, but what mattered that to Hitler, who became as arrogant as if he were likewise high? (Heinrich Böll wrote from the front: “Music is sometimes really a great consolation to me (not forgetting Pervitin, which provides a wonderful service—particularly during air raids at night.) Pervitin wasn’t the only source—back at home, there were even meth-spiked chocolates, with five times the dose of a Pervitin pill. But it didn’t work so well in the war of attrition on the Russian front, where going sleepless for hours no longer brought tactical advantages. Hitler’s personal supplier diverted resources from supplying the troops to keep himself in the animal parts he used to make his nostrums. Elsewhere, the Wehrmacht experimented on concentration camp prisoners to find the right combination of Eukodal, cocaine, Pervitin, and morphine derivatives to make soldiers fight on past all sense and physical resources—“the strongest known substances in the world, thrown together at random” out of laxity and desperation. Victims in the camps knew they had to keep marching or die, and the naval staff doctor reported success: “On this medication, state of mind and will are largely eliminated.” The navy gave the resulting gum to young, barely trained sailors who mostly just died. At Auschwitz, the tests focused on brainwashing and consciousness control, experiments that were later continued in the US.The last chunk of the book is taken up with Hitler’s own growing drug addiction, which apparently included a lot of cocaine and oxycodone (under the name Eukodal), together comprising the classic speedball, mixing sedation and stimulation. (From William Burroughs: “[Eukodal] is like a combination of junk and [cocaine]. Trust the Germans to concoct some truly awful shit.”) Near the end, his doctor wanted to try bloodletting, but “because of the fatty, hormone-saturated pig’s liver injections his blood had become as thick as jelly and clotted immediately, so the measure failed.”

[versionperson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A quick and enthralling read, bustling with immense details and footnotes. It makes some generalisations here and there, but overall this is fantastic.