COCAINE AND METH FUELLED HITLER AND HIS WAR MACHINE, NEW BOOK CLAIMS.
DRUGS FUELLED NAZI WAR MACHINE: AUTHOR
By late 1944, Nazi Germany was facing Allied armies to the west and six million Soviets to the east. Overhead, enemy planes were hitting Germany with near-constant city-levelling bombing raids.
But at grim military briefings, generals found dictator Adolf Hitler upbeat, optimistic — euphoric even.
“I call it the Fuehrer- high; it makes you feel on top of the world even if the world is collapsing around you,” said German author Norman Ohler, speaking to the National Post by phone from Berlin.
His book, Blitzed, due to be published in Canada on Oct. 6, tells how Nazi Germany and Hitler spent a surprising amount of the Second World War in a drugfuelled haze.
“There’s not one sober day after the fall of 1941,” said Ohler of Hitler.
The dictator was constantly accompanied by Dr. Theodor Morell, his personal Doctor Feelgood. Morell kept Hitler topped up with regular injections of steroids, opioids and a stream of untested new drugs he cooked up specially for the Fuehrer.
“Every animal t hat was slaughtered in the Ukraine, all the organs would go to Morell, he would send them to his factory … and concoct hormonal doping agents to introduce into the bloodstream of Hitler,” said Ohler.
As an experiment, the author mused about getting a volunteer to spend a day taking the same amount of drugs as Hitler. He kiboshed the plan after surmising it would probably kill them.
Historians have found innumerable explanations to describe the Fuehrer’s increasingly erratic behaviour in the closing months of the war: stress, senility, the inevitable corruption of absolute power.
It becomes instantly explicable when considering that Nazi Germany was at the beck and call of a junkie.
Hitler rejected all talk of retreat or surrender. He had undying faith in questionable secret weapons to win the war. He entertained himself with delusional plans for a victorious postwar Reich, such as legalizing polygamy to repopulate as quickly as possible.
The German leader was in a drug- induced sleep during the critical hours of D- Day. He had been high on cocaine eyedrops for months before he decided to commit Germany’s dwindling armies in a Quixotic drive against U.S. forces in the Ardennes.
And in the end, as Soviet troops closed in around his Berlin headquarters, the Fuehrer spent his last hours suffering through crippling, hand-shaking waves of withdrawal.
“He was going cold turkey as he lost the Second World War,” said Ohler. “He was basically a wreck.”
Drugs, like sex, are a topic normally left out of history books. Fittingly, Ohler, normally a novelist, got the idea for Blitzed in a Berlin underground club.
A DJ friend versed in both party drugs and German history urged him to take a closer look at the pharmacological underpinnings of the Second World War.
The result was a German bestseller praised by renowned historian Ian Kershaw as a “serious piece of scholarship.”
Drugs and war have been intertwined for centuries. But Nazi Germany was the first country to hang whole military strategies on the energizing powers of a chemical drug.
In the First World War only 20 years earlier, a familiar pattern had emerged in attacks from either side: the offensive would start strong and then — after a few days — soldiers would get fatigued, the enemy would regroup and the battle would devolve into stalemate.
That’s why German generals planning the invasion of France decided to use vast quantities of Pervitin, an over-the-counter methamphetamine, to keep their soldiers awake for the 72 hours needed to strike a mortal blow to French defences.
Pervitin was a close cousin of modern-day crystal meth; the effect could be much the same as the modern street variety, particularly when soldiers popped up to nine pills at a time.
“In the proper dosage, one’s self- confidence is significantly elevated, and one’s fear of undertaking even difficult work is lowered,” reads an April 17, 1940, Wehrmacht order issued just before the invasion of France.
Three million German troops moved into France, Belgium and the Netherlands in the spring of 1940. Along with them were 35 million tablets of Pervitin to be used in overcoming sleep.
France’s stunning collapse has long been attributed to German blitzkrieg ( lightning war) tactics: sudden and overwhelming attacks by intense concentrations of tanks, artillery and aircraft. However, key to keeping the blitzkrieg going was a soldier who did not tire.
“I have no idea how it would have worked without Pervitin,” said Ohler, adding the sight of the hyper, meth- addled invaders enhanced the myth that the Germans had somehow created a kind of “super” soldier.
Meanwhile, a civilian populace similarly blasted on Pervitin was uniquely susceptible to the paranoia and glittering empty promises of fascism.
“Nazism was toxic, in the truest sense of the word. It has given the world a chemical legacy still with us today, a poison that won’t soon disappear,” Ohler writes in the book’s opening.
But as can be seen in any modern meth addict, methamphetamine exacts a high price for its initial burst of confidence and euphoria. Commanders soon noticed that strung-out troops took much longer to recuperate than their drug- free enemies. And as the war progressed, Pervitin-addicted soldiers experienced breakdowns and psychotic episodes.
In the prolonged campaigns of the Eastern Front, meanwhile, a sleepless, tweaked-out army suddenly became a liability.
“You can’t take Russia with crystal meth,” said Ohler.