Hitler a super-junkie, waged war while high

Hitler was a drug addict who conducted war while blitzed. His Third Reich was steeped in cocaine, opiates, and methamphetamines. Drugged states somehow explain the superbustle of its factories and the stupor of invincibility of its storm troops. Recent researches by British and German historians show the dark secrets behind the Nazis’ pretensions to physical, mental, and moral purity.

The Fuehrer took daily injections of a cocktail of drugs to calm his nerves and energize himself, says Giles Milton in a study published in 2014. The drug dependence stretched for years, leaving his veins collapsed from needle pricks. To fuel the war machinery, drugs were rationed to workers in factories, housewives in cities, and millions of soldiers in the front, narrates Norman Ohler in a new book this month.

The separate researches point to a form of crystal meth mass-produced by Germany’s pharmaceutical plants. It seems to be the synthetic shabu ( methamphetamine hydrochloride), invented by a Japanese chemist in Oregon in 1931, and used to pump up Japanese shipyard and construction workers that decade.

Following, courtesy of BBC History Magazine, is an extract from Milton’s work, “When Hitler Took Cocaine”:

“The injections began shortly after breakfast. As soon as Adolf Hitler had finished his bowl of oatmeal and linseed oil he would summon his personal physician, Theodor Morell. The doctor would roll up the patient’s sleeve to inject an extraordinary cocktail of drugs, many of which are these days classed as dangerous, addictive and illegal. Every day for more than nine years, Dr. Morell administered amphetamines, barbiturates and opiates in such quantities that he became known as the Reichsmaster of Injections.

“Hitler had long suffered from ill health, including stomach cramps, diarrhea and such chronic flatulence that he had to leave the table after each meal to expel vast quantities of wind. His condition was aggravated by his unconventional diet. He had forsaken meat in 1931 after comparing eating ham to eating a human corpse. He only ate large quantities of watery vegetables, pureed or mashed to a pulp. Dr. Morell assured Hitler he had miracle drugs that could cure all of his problems. He began by administering little black tablets called Dr. Küster’s Anti- Gas pills. Hitler took 16 a day, unaware that they contained quantities of strychnine. Although they alleviated his wind temporarily they almost certainly triggered the attention lapses and sallow skin that were to mark his final years. Morell next prescribed a type of hydrolysed E.coli bacteria called Mutaflor, which seemed to further stabilize his bowels. Along with his stomach cramps, Hitler suffered morning grogginess. To alleviate this, Morell injected him with a watery fluid concocted from a powder kept in gold-foil packets. He never revealed the active ingredient in this medicine called Vitamultin, but it worked wonders on every occasion it was administered. Within a few minutes, Hitler would arise from his couch invigorated.

“Ernst-Günther Schenck, an SS doctor, grew suspicious of Dr. Morell’s miracle cures and managed to acquire one of the packets. Tested in a laboratory, it was found to be amphetamine. Hitler was untroubled by what he was given, so long as the drugs worked. He directed the invasion of Soviet Russia while being pumped with as many as eighty different drugs, including testosterone, opiates, sedatives and laxatives. According to the doctor’s medical notebooks, he also administered barbiturates, morphine, bull semen and probiotics.

“The most surprising drug Dr. Morell prescribed to the Fuehrer was cocaine. This was occasionally used for medical ailments in 1930s Germany, but always in extremely low dosages and at a concentration of less than one percent. Morell began administering cocaine to the Fuehrer by means of eyedrops. Aware that Hitler expected to feel better after taking his drugs, he put ten times the amount of cocaine into the drops. Such a concentrated dose may well have triggered the psychotic behavior that Hitler was to exhibit in later years.”

From the Indian Express is a review last week of Ohler’s “Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany”: “Hitler was a gibbering ‘super-junkie’ whose veins were all but destroyed by thousands of opiate injections and the Nazi dictator’s heavy reliance on drugs was behind his ‘increasingly erratic’ decision-making in later stages of World War II. According to awardwinning author Ohler, the Fuehrer became addicted to a heroin- like substance called Eukodel which was prescribed following a nervous breakdown in 1944.

“Ohler’s book, which British historians have praised as a ‘remarkable’ research, argues that the heroin- like opiate was largely to blame for Hitler’s erratic and paranoid behavior towards the end of his life. It brings to light extracts from the journal of Dr. Theo Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, who once complained he could no longer inject the drug as nearly all of his patient’s veins had collapsed.

“’I cancelled injections today, to give the previous puncture holes a chance to heal,’ one entry reads. ‘Left inside elbow good, right still has red dots (but not pustules), where injections were given,’ it says. Ohler said Hitler began the drugs regime after narrowly surviving the 1944 assassination attempt known as ‘ Operation Valkyrie’, in which the German resistance planted a bomb in a briefcase under his desk. The explosion shattered both of Hitler’s eardrums, riddled his body with splinters from a wooden table that shielded him from the blast and turned him into a nervous wreck. ‘I’m afraid that from 1944 onwards, Hitler did not spend a single day sober,’ Ohler writes: ‘Germany, land of drugs, had been looking for a super- junkie. And it had found him, in Adolf Hitler.’”

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The Fuehrer took a daily cocktail of cocaine, opiates, and meth, also rationed to the troops of the Third Reich.