Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

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 show more 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. show less

A bizarre history of the compulsory drug use of Hitler and his army. This is a slice of history I was not familiar with. Part of the effectiveness of blitzkrieg was that the soldiers were hopped on meth. Not an insignificant part of Hitler's failure was due to his unravelling mental health as he self-medicated into paranoid oblivion. The Nazi's were also conducting drug related experiments on the prisoners in their various camps. This was a fascinating book which uncovers a shocking element of WWII that I've never heard discussed before.

You wouldn't think it would be possible to write new and fascinating stuff on Hitler and the Second World War nowadays, but somehow people keep managing it. Norman Ohler's racy but well-researched contribution to this field, Blitzed, is compelling from first page to last. In less than 300 pages, Ohler looks at the German prosecution of the war from the surprisingly fruitful perspective of drug abuse.

This is done in four long chapters (each split up into shorter sections to make it accessible). The first chapter goes into the pre-war background of drugged Germany: its social acceptance of uppers, its pioneering chemical industry, and the Nazis' hypocritical public campaign against the culture. The second chapter goes into the use of hard show more drugs by German soldiers, with Ohler arguing that its extensive deployment – as a matter of official policy – was responsible for the success of the early 'blitzkrieg' operations of 1940-1, allowing soldiers to go days without rest and at a constant peak of hyper-aggression, bamboozling their enemies. The third chapter delves into Hitler's relationship with his personal physician, Dr Morell, and his increasing dependency on drug cocktails – cocaine, meth, oxy, and plenty besides. The fourth chapter is a sort of amalgam of the previous two, not only looking at German attempts to create a 'miracle drug' alongside their other 'miracle weapons', but also into Hitler's physiological decline in the final year of the war.

It is constantly fascinating. Ohler's thesis, in short, is that much of the course of the war in Europe was heavily influenced by the use of hard drugs by both the military rank-and-file and the Nazi hierarchy, and he backs it up with a lot of footnoted archival research. With a background as a journalist and novelist rather than an academic historian, Ohler writes engagingly. One passage on page 87, which juxtaposes the explosive violence of the blitzkrieg invasion of May 1940 with the explosive violence of meth 'in German brains', is particularly well done.

That said, the book is far from the final word, and must be read critically. A number of prominent historians have lambasted the book – the most frequent claim being that it makes gross generalizations, lacking the sense of proportion that distinguishes a truly sober and collaborative history book – with Professor Richard J. Evans going so far as to call it a book for the 'alternative facts' generation, suggesting that it dangerously seeks to absolve Germany of its moral responsibility by claiming neither Hitler or the German populace were of sound mind. Evans has also noted that in the English edition of Blitzed, the preface from the German edition (where Ohler admits he took a 'skewed perspective', the better to illuminate) has been inexplicably removed. Other historians, it should be said, have praised the book – including Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor – but there's plenty of lebensraum for scepticism.

Certainly, the book lacks some judiciousness. Ohler has an attractive idea – that drugs determined the course of the war – and he really runs with it. No doubt there are occasions where drug abuse did play an important part (Hitler's meeting with Mussolini that kept Italy in the war, for example (pg. 171)) and many more where it was a factor. But if you were to read Blitzed without any awareness of historical arguments and orthodoxy, you would think that the war could be explained away solely by methamphetamine, with no regard for military strategy, technology, geopolitics, personality, chance, or any of the other things that historians weigh up when trying to explain complex events. Even if Ohler doesn't mean for it to be the case, his narrative deployment and use of language certainly encourages the panacea, if you read it too uncritically. Despite his extensive primary source research, Ohler is no historian when it comes to sober judgement. When he dismissively claims the 'Halt Order' at Dunkirk "cannot be explained rationally" (pg. 100), or erroneously claims that Spitfires "conquered the sky" during the same operation (pg. 101), he shows himself to be more of a journalist; a historian would, at the very least, tie off these loose ends. The RAF did not establish air superiority over Dunkirk – as the bitter Stuka-strafed soldiers on the beach attested quite vocally – and there are legitimate arguments to be made about why the Halt Order was called – British resistance was increased, Guderian's supply line was dangerously over-run, the 'blitzkrieg' strategy was unproven, there was a risk of a French counterattack as had happened in the First World War, and so on. Take Ohler's pill and enjoy the trip, but be aware of the risk.

Nevertheless, Blitzed brings a breath of fresh air to the often dry and bleak genre of Third Reich scholarship. It forces you to look at well-established historical events through a new and refreshing lens, even if you don't go all the way with the author's conclusions. It still has an aura of pop-psychology about it, despite its extensive research (on the Acknowledgements page, for example, Ohler says the idea for the book came from a DJ, whilst the title was suggested by Michael Stipe of R.E.M.), but if Blitzed is more Jon Ronson than Ian Kershaw, there's still a place for that. The book is chillingly contemporary, with ordinary soldiers and civilians taking drugs just to get them through the day, or risk losing out to those who do seize this short-term advantage. One cannot read of the German development of big pharma, of synthesized drugs like heroin and uppers and oxy, without thinking of the sickness of our modern society. And hanging over it all like a malignant poison is Hitler, the rat-like tweaker, emerging with chemical aid from his pathetic self-pity to clap "everyone he met jovially on the shoulder" (pg. 189), as he scurries about, burning the world around him. show less

Norman Ohler was not trained as a professional historian but this German novelist and scriptwriter has done a superb job in giving new insight into the Second World War and into Hitler's regime through original research. He looks at both through the prism of drug abuse.

Perhaps some of his claims may be a trifle exaggerated because of lack of context but the three main themes are well argued: that German early military success, wartime errors of judgement by Hitler and the complicity of the German navy in concentration camp abuses were all related to drugs.

In the case of drug use by the German military he makes a good case that the Blitzkrieg method of warfare owed a great deal to a deliberate use of drugs that had been normalised in show more Germany by commercial interests under Weimar and which continued to be used under the Nazis.

He implies further that the weaknesses of the Germany military later (on the Eastern Front) may be partly put down to the 'lows' created by a drug dependency that decreased capacity over time. This latter must remain 'unproven' but the evidence for very high drug use to avoid sleep in 1940 is clear.

The heart of the book, however, is the story of the malpractice of Hitler's personal physician, Morell, in solving short term problems of attention and drive with injections of substances that effectively turned Hitler into a 'junkie' in successive stages during the Second World War.

Most of this claim is fully evidenced. Even the circumstantial evidence is more than plausible. Hitler's mental state was deteriorating month by month and year by year because his doctor was giving him cocktails of drugs that merely created the conditions for more drugs.

If this is so (we are 99% convinced), then what becomes really interesting is not that Hitler was incapable of sound judgment but the total ineffectiveness of the officials around him to do anything about it. Some did see that something was wrong but none could act to reverse the process.

There is something tragically eternal about this situation, well known to students of the worst Roman Emperors. Power is demanding. The means to make it less demanding have costs on frail flesh (leaders are not Gods) but no one dare bring power to account. The situation worsens.

The point here is that Ohler rewrites the whole history of the war and the regime because, although it is probable that Germany could never have won in the long run, the cataclysmic manner of the defeat and the lack of ways out for negotiation might be partly put down to the work of a cowardly quack.

The final account of how the German Navy in the last days of the war, desperate for answers to the impending defeat of Germany, became collusive in monstrous drug trials to help send teenagers on near-kamikaze missions is a coda, a foot note, to the main story.

Like so many drug stories, the underlying themes are cynical greed and desperation. The cynical greed is that of the interwar German equivalent of today's Big Pharma and of a third rate Berlin doctor who 'struck lucky' when he solved a problem for the Fuhrer and made what he could of that.

But we also have the desperation required for survival under Weimar, the desperate gamble of Guderian's Bilitzkrieg, the desperate attempt of Hitler to stay psychologically and physically on top and the desperation of Doenitz's navy to play a role in defeating the coming Allied onslaught.

This heady cocktail of demand and supply is that of all criminal and legitimate pharamecutical call-and-response relationships between pushers and users. Once the user becomes a junkie, the pusher is in control. The pusher is not one to see the big picture or be moral and do the right thing.

If Ohler is right, then we need to factor in part of the German population, a significant part of its military and its wartime Leader as 'de facto' junkies with all the inability to see straight of the junkie. You have to ask which other war leaders today and in the past have also been victims of their dealers.

I, for one, am not convinced that this thesis of Ohler's alone is sufficient or sole explanation for German irrational exuberant behaviour and eventual collapse in the 1930s and early 1940s but the book makes a good argument for it being a very important contributing factor. show less

Norman Ohler is a novelist, so this is a very readable account of drugs in Nazi Germany, with special emphasis on (a) Hitler's drug use via his physician Theodor Morell and (b) the use of drugs, especially methamphetamines (particularly sold under the brand name Pervitin), by soldiers, sailors, and officers during the war. There are some other side topics, but these two dominate. Ohler's main theses are: (a) that Hitler was addicted to and reliant on a whole cocktail of drugs administered via syringe by the quackish Morell, especially Eukodal (a trade name for oxycodone), and that Hitler's quirks, decision-making, and physical degradation can be attributed in whole or part to these drugs. (Ohler goes out of his way to maintain, however, show more that Hitler and the Nazis are still responsible for their decisions and actions.) And, (b) the performance of German troops can be partially explained by their reliance on drugs: the blitzkrieg of France was aided by soldiers hopped up on meth and were go go go for two or three days straight, blindsiding the French and British.

It appears to be well-researched and well-cited. Some useful illustrations. At times, Ohler gets novelistic and journalistic, instead of historianistic. He puts himself into the research story a few times, and is fond of a turn of phrase here and there. This book is an interesting new window into the Third Reich and, taken with some grains of salt, is essential for a complete understanding of the blitz and Hitler's health (and psychopathy).

Fun fact: Michael Stipe helped suggest to Ohler the punny title for the book in English (p. 227). show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less