The Meth in Their Madness
A book detailing rampant drug use by the Nazis is drawing praise and scorn
WHEN NORMAN OHLER was a kid growing up in Germany, he and his classmates got one of their early-and-often lessons on the Third Reich in school one day. Back home, Ohler asked his grandfather what role he had played in Nazi Germany. He recalls his grandfather disappeared for a few moments, then returned to hand him an envelope containing his Nazi Party membership booklet and a swastika pin. He didn’t say much, and Ohler says he was too young to know what to make of this odd “inheritance.” But he was aware that sometimes, when there was a problem in the democratic West Germany of the 1980s, his grandfather would say that “under Hitler, this never would have happened,” and that he always portrayed the Nazis as “clean-cut.”
Later, Ohler discovered that many Nazis, including Hitler, weren’t as clean-cut as Grandpa said, so he wrote a book about it, which was released in the U.S. in early March with the title Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. (It was a bestseller in Germany as Der Totale Rausch [The Total Intoxication], published in September 2015, and in the U.S. quickly debuted at the No. 12 spot on the New York Times best-seller list.) Ohler’s first nonfiction book argues—soon in more than two dozen languages—that under the Nazi regime, German civilians were high, their soldiers were high, and their Führer was high.
He traces all this back to his grandfather’s nostalgia for the “order” of Germany’s darkest era—common in 1980s West Germany—which made Ohler angry. As a teenager, he began hating Germany. He adopted leftist views and “looked for ways to resist right-wing developments,” he says. He decided that he could become a writer and journalist, “to uncover bad things in society and help the democratic process.”
He took university courses in philosophy and cultural sciences, studied journalism and published novels. He also wrote for film and spent time in Tel Aviv and Ramallah, where he interviewed Yasser Arafat about a month before the Palestinian leader’s death. He stumbled on the topic of drugs in Nazi Germany through his connection to Berlin’s thriving music scene. His friend the DJ Alex Krämer is a “pretty crazy guy. And a history buff too. And a drug buff. He really knows his drugs,” says Ohler, who has not been shy about sharing with the press that he too experimented with drugs in his 20s. Krämer told him that Nazis took “loads of drugs,” and recounted a story about some folks he met who had broken into a pharmacy in a former East German neighborhood and found an old stash of Pervitin, methamphetamine pills that were popular during Nazi times. When Krämer tried them, he got really high. “Then he realized that back in the Nazi days, people were actually using strong drugs.” They were “pure and potent.”
Ohler started developing characters for a novel and visiting archives so that he could get the facts about Nazi drug use right. “But what I found in the archives made me change my mind about the genre of the book I wanted to write,” he says. “I thought this material is too,” he
pauses, searching for the right description, “brisante, as we say in German, is too hot to water it down in a fictional work.”
With guidance from Hans Mommsen, a wellknown German historian, Ohler continued his research, interviewing experts and visiting archives in Berlin, Koblenz, Munich, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. He wanted to write about all aspects of drug use and incorporated into Blitzed sections on the history of pharmaceutical development in Germany back to the 1800s, the experimentation and excesses of the interwar Weimar Republic, the prevalence of Pervitin in German society, the consumption of the drug in the military, the importance of meth in keeping troops energized during the early blitzkriegs, and the frantic Nazi efforts to invent a wonder drug as defeat in World War II became inevitable, including an experiment by the navy that had concentration camp prisoners march for hours on end to test new concoctions.
The longest chunk of his book focuses on Hitler and his relationship with Theodor Morell, who was appointed by the dictator as his personal physician in 1936 and accompanied him ever more closely almost until the end of his life. Morell began treating his patient by injecting Hitler with various vitamins, but in time added animal hormones and finally stronger substances, including Eukodal, whose active ingredient is the opioid oxycodone. Ohler says a second doctor visited Hitler after Claus von Stauffenberg tried to assassinate the Fuhrer with an exploding briefcase in 1944. He treated the Führer’s burst eardrums with applications of high-grade cocaine, something Hitler apparently grew quite fond of.
The book’s jacket proudly sports praise from Ian Kershaw—a British historian focusing on 20th-century Germany and a prominent biographer of Adolf Hitler—who called Blitzed “very good and extremely interesting... a serious piece of scholarship, very well researched.”
But other historians took issue with both Ohler’s means and ends. Nikolaus Wachsmann, a professor of history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps, started out with a gentle critique in his piece for the Financial Times, saying Ohler’s account “overstates its case,” and then got more severe, saying he “[eschews] nuance for headlines” and “appears to mix fact and fiction.” He ended his assessment harshly, saying that Ohler’s “diligent research… is buried beneath the breathless prose.” Richard J. Evans, historian and author, wrote in The Guardian that Ohler makes “sweeping generalizations” that are “wildly implausible.” He called the book “crass” and “morally and politically dangerous,” but conceded the author “diligently researched in the German federal archives and other relevant collections.”
What Wachsmann called “breathless prose” Ohler defends as his attempt to reach a broad audience. He says he has read many German history books that are “horribly boring,” and he wanted to bring his sensibilities as a novelist to the task. “I tried to combine academic research with the style of writing that I appreciate. I really didn’t want to write a boring book.”
“IN THE NAZI DAYS, PEOPLE WERE USING STRONG DRUGS… PURE AND POTENT.”