The Naz*'s Shocking Dr*g Secret w/ Norman Ohler

They used one opioid especially Eukodal, which now is known as oxycodone, to increase his mental capacities. Actually, while you're high on that drug, you're quite sharp and you're quite charismatic. You feel really good and that well-being kind of transmits to other people who don't know why you're in such a good mood. Like, I read a lot of reports from very high-ranking generals, obviously officers, that they were so surprised that Hitler was so confident.

Well, the big joke of the book is that they actually were, and that they portrayed themselves always as teetotalers, and they were actually Germany's first anti-drug government. Yeah, so that was the Nazi propaganda, and that Nazi propaganda carried all the way through to the 80s. When I learned everything that was to learn about the so-called Third Reich in school or from my grandfather, drugs never played a role. Um, yeah, in contrast, the Nazis were obviously criticized for their horrible crimes. But then there was always, not always, but for example from my grandfather, there was the notion that at least they were law and order people, everyone was disciplined, everyone was, it was clean, it was like the German stereotypes were really working at their best.

Yeah, the virtues. I mean, we had Chancellor Schmidt in the 70s saying, 'With those secondary virtues, you can also run a concentration camp perfectly.' So, you know, the virtues in themselves even are questionable. But that image of Hitler, of being this person without a private life, this person just serving the people, to expose that as a lie, as propaganda, was part of the fun. And that fun, I mean, I had that hope when I heard that the Nazis took so many drugs. I didn't know it yet before I did the research. I just had hints. So when I then found out more and more going into the archives, especially several archives across Germany and the United States, I became quite excited to tell this more truthful tale actually about how fascism worked in Germany.

Well, it surprised me that he took a lot of drugs. And obviously that has consequences, consequences that no historian had ever looked at because no historian had ever examined what he actually had taken. And looking at the notes of his personal physician, Theodor Morell, was therefore very interesting because I could suddenly paint a more accurate picture of the most examined personality in history. So that was a lot of fun actually. I mean, just the process of being able to do that. What does it mean? What different picture did I come up with? That certainly is the interesting outcome. And that's, I mean, I didn't have any agenda, I was just curious to see what had actually happened, and without really judging it in a way, because there's nothing really to judge about Hitler. I mean, this also, the story that I tell in the end is the same story that we know. The Nazis are evil and they lose the war and they commit genocide and they commit all kinds of atrocities, and these crimes are not linked to their drug use. I mean, if I would have found that they were actually, you know, quite decent maybe right-wing politicians who then through drugs, you know, went on the wrong path, that would have been of course a different story. But that's not the story that I was able to research, luckily, you know, I guess. Or not luckily, it doesn't really matter. But for sure it's a fact that the ideology of National Socialism has nothing to do with drugs.

It's younger. It comes from Mein Kampf, Hitler's Bible, the National Socialist Bible basically, which was written without being under the influence of drugs. Drugs come into focus much later in the game, especially after 1941 when the war against the Soviet Union proves to be quite difficult and Hitler uses opioids for the first time. And then uses more and more drugs to stay in his Führerbunker basically, to still have this charisma as a tool that he had actually naturally before that. He was very, in Hollywood terms, good in the room, was able to convince people. But at a certain point in time during the war, it was basically impossible to convince the German high command that this way of leading the war was still working. But Hitler used one opioid especially, Eukodal, which now is known as oxycodone, to increase his mental capacities. Actually, while you're high on that drug, you're quite sharp and you're quite charismatic. You feel really good and that well-being kind of transmits to other people who don't know why you're in such a good mood. Like, I read a lot of reports from very high-ranking generals, obviously officers, that they were so surprised that Hitler was so confident, you know, so they actually started believing that he must know something, like he knows the bigger picture, he knows about wonder weapons being in development, which could have been true, you know, it could have been the nuclear bomb being almost ready or some other weapon that they didn't know of. So Hitler was using those drugs quite smartly in a way. I mean, he did improve his performance through them, or at least the appearance of a performance. So he was often like an actor going onto the stage and being able to convince through his performance that his policies would be the ones to follow, because there was a lot of resistance against Hitler also. You know, I mean, through the book Blitz I learned a lot about National Socialism. We all know the big picture. Yeah, the big picture, but the details are quite fascinating. So I became fascinated with that period. I had been fascinated before, but looking through the lens of drugs gave me an opportunity to really look at this group of men and how they interacted. And you know, so it was that the drugs, you know, it's unthinkable, you cannot really tell that story without drugs because Hitler was always on drugs after a certain point in time. I mean, he was quite sickly actually, right? This is what I picked up one thing from your book, that he needed constant medical attention. I mean, and he wasn't that old either. So it seems like the pressures of leading the country into war or possibly even just the side effects of various hormonal cocktails and other drugs that he was given just really kind of caused problems for him that he had to fix with more drugs.

Well, you know, you have to look at the kind of patient history closely and then you can see the development from basically a very healthy individual. There's lots of, there's one general, he summed it up saying Hitler looked until some year like 1939, I think it was, that this guy said he looked younger than he actually was. Then from 39 to 41 he looked kind of his age and after that he aged quite quickly and that had to do with the medications that he was taking. Until 41 he was basically using vitamins and supplements, things that we all use now. Maybe not as sophisticated as we do it now because we know more, but basically Morell, his personal physician, was a supplement freak and that was kind of new. He was also a very innovative guy, this doctor. He was into probiotics which no one talked about at the time. He was able to cure Hitler's constant bloating problems. So Hitler really created a trust in this doctor and then in 41 when he was sick for the first time since they had been together since 1936, first time in 5 years he was sick in August, not able to get out of bed during a crucial phase of the campaign against the Soviet Union, and he demanded from Morell to get something stronger than just vitamins, and that was an opioid. And then he took a liking to opioids and then they became quite experimental, these two guys. Hitler was an expert in everything, at least he believed so. So this was a new kind of hobby for him, how could he improve his performance even more? And he was conscious. He said it a few times that he had to take so many decisions in such a short time. You know, he was really like a high... you know, he was taking a lot of decisions. Yeah. He was a very powerful person. Very powerful because it was all tailored to him. You know, there was no delegation. He was micromanaging everything. Like he was getting on the officers' nerves by like talking about how long soldiers should sleep and what pillow they should use. Like his mind was racing and was never stopping. And that he tried to improve that by taking more and more experimental medications. And at the time, for example, that's a phase from 41 to 43. That was the big experimental phase when they did a lot of animal concoctions. So Hitler was not really a vegetarian at all, because he injected pig liver extract. I guess if you do that you're not a vegetarian anymore. But he didn't even realize that. So like, I mean, he knew what he was taking but he didn't realize for example that he was taking drugs. For him it was just medication that would enable him to do the work better for the German people. So Morell had his own, he built up his own kind of one-man pharmaceutical empire in occupied Czechoslovakia where he had one chemist, and this one chemist was working, cooking up new stuff.

Well, yeah. The idea was that in animals are very potent parts like glands, glands within the brain of animals or like organs which are, you know, powerful substances. So he had, but also you have to know a lot about it and Morell, you know, he tried out a lot. So, he was a total cowboy kind of, like he really liked Ukraine when Germany had occupied Ukraine because Ukraine had a very sophisticated slaughterhouse regime. The slaughterhouses in Ukraine were on a higher level than in Germany and even in the United States. Like they had invested in slaughterhouses and they were able to separate the organs of the slaughtered animals from the desired meat. And so Morell made sure that all the organs with all the hormones that the animals were producing were being sent with military trains back from Ukraine to his company in occupied Czech and then turned into medicines that would boost your energy level. Basically that was the idea. And at the time it was not very easy. It was actually impossible in 1943 to bring a new medicine onto the market because today we have the phase one, phase two, phase three tests that medicines have to go through. They also had something like this in Germany and during the war there was a war economy with certain regulations. It was not possible to do these tests because it was all tailored towards the war. So Morell was frustrated and he related this problem to Hitler and then Hitler said, kind of Trump style, he just said, 'I'm just going to use it and if it's good for me then it's good for everybody.' So Hitler voluntarily became the guinea pig of his doctor and was using crazy stuff. And I read reports of especially the pig's livers, they had to be cooled. This was very hot in Eastern Europe in the summer. So these livers are in containers and huge containers like lots of wagons of train, like huge quantities of pigs' livers taking days to get from Ukraine like in the war situation to Czechoslovakia and then they open it in Czechoslovakia and they were already like smelling quite bad but then they would sterilize them and make them into ampules and send them to Hitler and he was putting it into his vein. And so that was really unhealthy for him which he didn't realize or maybe he did and he didn't care. Or I mean, National Socialism is a self-destructive movement because fascism hates the other and why do you hate the other? Because you have a problem with yourself basically. So Hitler self-destructed. It was not like Morell was plotting to destroy Hitler's health. It was kind of Hitler doing it together with Morell to himself. And so that caused probably autoimmune diseases like Parkinson's, like Hitler's health really degenerated after 44. So it takes a while, you know, you take for over years, he got an injection every day. So with some weird stuff.

It's very dangerous to have a personal physician that gives you everything, if you are in a stressful position and if you like drugs, like Hitler really liked drugs. He also came upon cocaine at one point after Operation Valkyrie because he had blown eardrums and then another doctor, in German we say HNO doctor. Yeah, HNO. And um, wait, what do you say in English? Not mouth, throat, something like that. Ears, nose. Yeah, and throat specialist. He came in because Morell was just a general practitioner. So this new guy came in and he was using cocaine to numb the pain in the ears and Hitler immediately kind of realized, oh, this is an interesting drug. Maybe he had read something about cocaine. So he asked already during the first visit to have cocaine also being applied to his nose. So the Giesing was this military doctor. He was a bit shocked also how Hitler looked like, he had never seen Hitler and there's very nice reports that he wrote afterwards to the American intelligence after the war when Hitler would walk in for the first time and he basically saw a wreck coming like in pajamas and like slippers. And then this guy demanded cocaine and said for the first time, 'I can think clearly again.' And then he wanted cocaine all the time and then Giesing had to kind of say no to Hitler and was fired basically. So Morell, Hitler was dependent on Morell but Morell was also dependent on Hitler, like they were codependent. They had a toxic, in the truest sense of the word, relationship and that's kind of the fun of the book to read about that relationship because it's really sick. It's really nice to see how they both kind of go down together.

Yeah. I mean, the methamphetamine story is a big part of Blitz. There was one smallish paper, academic paper, a two-page paper about the methamphetamine use of the German army. And that was it. That was out there basically. And it claimed in the end that the Blitzkrieg was only possible through the use of methamphetamine, which is something I had never heard of. And I visited this academic who had done this research at the University of Ulm and then he was generous enough to tell me where exactly I had to look in the military archive of Germany for the full story that he just didn't have time to research. So that is the second kind of big story in Blitz, is the story of how a whole military apparatus drugged itself with methamphetamine. For example, when Germany invaded France, 35 million dosages of methamphetamine was swallowed and had tremendous success through that campaign, through that drug use, but also then in the end repercussions because methamphetamine is not really a sustainable substance. I mean, it gives you a strong high, but it also gives you a strong comedown. And that was a little bit underestimated by the German military apparatus, which is also fun to examine, you know, what exactly happened.

Well, there was no strategy to attack the West. But Hitler really wanted to attack the West, but that was an irrational decision that he had made and high command had blocked him over months after the victory against Poland which started the Second World War. They were kind of content and they said, 'We cannot win against the West like we won against Poland. It's impossible.' But then there was a meeting in February where three tank generals, one of them the later famous Rommel, tank general Rommel said to Hitler, 'We're not going to go through the Maginot line in the south and we're not going to go through North Belgium.' This is what happened. Those were the attack points of the First World War which led to a four-year stalemate where nobody basically won except the soldiers lost their lives. This was the big fear, this would happen again. We go through the Ardennes Mountains which is kind of the eye of the needle. It's a mountainous range in Belgium and which was not heavily fortified by the Western Allies because they didn't think that a whole army would fit through that eye of the needle. It was a crazy plan and it was crazy because the military cannot really move so fast. So they would get stuck. They would, you know, at night you have to set up your camp and by the time you set up your camp and rest for the night until the next morning you march again, news would have spread to the British and French defenders and then they would have come and crushed the German army in a pincer movement. So it was a completely insane plan basically. But because the Germans had methamphetamine, I mean it was kind of luck because Hitler said, 'Yeah, we'll do this.' And then the generals also, they didn't know about methamphetamine yet or they knew maybe about it from the Polish campaign, but it was still kind of vague. This was three months before it actually happened. So they were like this, they said this is the only problem. We have to continue marching at night for three days and three nights. Then we reach France quicker than the French and British can kind of retreat because they were actually standing closer to the German border. So we would be in their back and if we were in their back we can cut them off. This was what Churchill then called the sickle cut. But the generals said the only problem is it's very hard to stay awake for that period of time. No army has ever done this. And then Hitler said, 'Yeah, but the German soldier is a superhuman. Of course he can stay awake. I stayed awake for a week in the First World War.' Like this was kind of Hitler thinking or Hitler propaganda. But then actually what happened was that they evolved a methamphetamine program between February and May 10th when they attacked. So millions of pills. There was tests before like how long does it actually keep you up and then they thought it could work. So there was one guy, a professor who was responsible for developing this program, is his name, and his papers are all in military archives. So you can actually really see how he did it and this is, I mean, it's an interesting story. It's amazing to see how actually that pharmacological weapon as he called it was deployed and then he had to write a stimulant decree which went to all the medical officers. So they had to learn how to give the methamphetamine, how many pills, at what interval, what are the effects. And then it really worked, you know, it worked like a charm basically. And so the Germans invented a new form of warfare which was chemically enhanced warfare and the French and the British, they were like totally old school, you know, they were still fighting First World War and they were like, 'What are these guys doing?' They didn't understand the philosophy of the approach and also the erratic behavior which comes with excessive methamphetamine use. You know, if you go to a club after like three days and three nights, people are just, you know, they behave differently and an enemy that behaves completely differently than you expect the enemy to behave is very hard to deal with. So the French, they kind of collapsed, like they were just mentally not able to cope with this enemy. Also methamphetamine makes you fearless. So the German soldiers were like, after a few days everyone was afraid of them because they were not afraid of anything. So it was really a very effective, very effective strategy that...

Yeah, that was another idea that we, as we wasn't there, but what the general said, we will use the tanks as the vanguard of the movement. Usually I guess the tanks were used kind of as a backup, they were like slow. But they said the tanks are actually not slow and not slow, you know, they can go quite fast, you know, a tank can go I don't know 40, 50 km an hour which is fast if you go like through rugged terrain, like it's much faster than any movement of any other unit of the military. So that was the idea, to use the tanks in the forefront, put all the meth in the tanks and use the tanks kind of as crazy race cars like charging into enemy territory. It's a totally insane plan and it totally worked.

Yeah, it was an amazing victory which produced some of the first war crimes also. You have to, you know, be careful not to glorify what they did. They were basically committing a huge crime by invading a foreign territory, killing people on the way. There's reports of Rommel being totally high on crystal meth. That's why I call him Crystal Fox, making the British love him, call him the Desert Fox.

Yeah, he wasn't a Nazi. That's also interesting. I mean, quite a few people from the German Wehrmacht were not Nazis. They were high-ranking officers coming from Prussian families, like highly intellectual people. But they also got caught up, you know, in this rush, in this intoxication of war. And Rommel did commit war crimes already in France. There's one situation when he was charging at night and he was going through a village where the French had basically set up camp because the French also had a drug of choice which was red wine. Red wine had been used in the First World War quite successfully by the French because the First World War was very different. You know, you were in the trench, it was cold, it was raining, you needed some kind of booster, you know, so he drank a nice pot of red wine in the evening at least, you know, and then he could sleep better, you know. And so when they realized we're being attacked again, this is happening again. I write the precise numbers in the book. I think it was 3,400 tanks like lorries, trucks filled with red wine were moving from the French wine regions to the front lines. And every French soldier was allocated three-quarters of a liter of red wine per day.

Well, no, one bottle is about three-quarters of a...

So they were sleeping in this village and Rommel with his guys high on meth charging through and they didn't even see, you know, they couldn't even stop. So there's like reports where the tanks run over sleeping soldiers and that's so, that's kind of when the Wehrmacht was always very proud to be this like noble military apparatus with high standards, highly intelligent people. So, but they lost it, you know, they lost it in the intoxication of victory and you can see this with Rommel. But you know, Rommel then, you know, I think he's still respected by the British, for example, because at one point he turned against Hitler. There were quite a few generals that turned against Hitler at one point in the Russian campaign when they realized this guy is a madman. Mhm. But it took the high command quite a while after this amazing victory against the West, you know, that kind of lifted Hitler to like the status of a saint. You know, he's a military genius, even though it wasn't Hitler's idea with the meth, and he probably didn't even know about it. You know, the stimulant decree is signed by the highest officer from Brauchitsch and probably he would correspond everything he does with Hitler but Hitler's signature is not on the stimulant decree. So I don't know, I don't even think he really understood what was going on. I mean, he believed his own right? He thought, 'I am here to save the German nation and also to take over Europe and turn it into our Lebensraum.' And he believed that even up to a point where it was clearly not going to work. The fact that he got so far I think is almost one of these shocks of history which only happened because a couple of very unlikely things went right for them and wrong for everyone else.

Yeah, that's true. When Germany attacked Poland, the West could have attacked Germany from the West, but didn't do so. That was a big, I think, complaint also of the Polish that the West didn't really step in at all actually.

Because the German army after the Polish campaign was quite weak, even though they won, they had to renew a lot of machinery and, you know, the people were tired and also they were coming down from the meth because already in Poland they were using a lot of meth. It wasn't official yet. So people were using it privately but, you know, the army was quite tired in a way. So that would have been a good moment to attack but the West was still thinking it could contain Hitler. That is the big Chamberlain mistake. I think he was still Prime Minister of England until May of 1940 when Churchill came and he was a very aggressive, much more aggressive than Chamberlain.

Sure. He's just the lesser evil war criminal, you know.

Yeah. Pervitin is a pill with three milligrams of methamphetamine being made by the Temmler company. There were chocolates on the market but they were mostly for, they were advertised for housewives. They were by a company called Hildebrand and the Nazis had the policy basically of gender separation. The women should stay at home and take care of the house and the children and so at least they got the meth chocolate so they're more thorough with cleaning the home and happy. It's kind of mother's little helper for the woman who doesn't have any political rights. So that's the meth chocolate that was popular in Germany. And one little chocolate piece contained nine milligrams of meth, which is quite a lot.

But I tried to solve that but I don't know. Oh, I mean there is still a chocolate on the market today in Germany which contains caffeine and it has a round tin around it and that was already on the market back then and was I think used by tank people. But I think they, I mean to my knowledge, to my research, they just took the pills which were called also, like the pilots took the pills and the pills were called for the pilots Göring salts, the salt of Göring. So maybe they called the pills chocolate. I don't know, candies or...

Yeah, it's a joke name. I didn't see like special chocolate being manufactured for the tanks with methamphetamine in it. I never saw that.

Well, I expected more to be honest. But people were just kind of overwhelmed by the book and couldn't say anything against it somehow. Der Spiegel, Germany's supposedly leading magazine, they had a big story on it when the book came out saying, 'Oh, this is all like nothing new. We all knew this,' which is total crap because no one knew it, especially not the Spiegel, otherwise they would have reported on it long before. They were kind of pissed that they didn't find it out. I had the luck or I guess, you know, it was just the fact that the leading historian on National Socialism in Germany, Hans Mommsen, was a supporter of the book. He wrote, not a foreword but like a blur...

Yeah, something like that.

Epilogue. He wrote an epilogue, a suffix, but yeah, to the book. So that was support from like the leading German historians which was quite helpful. And then Ian...

Yeah, he was quite old but, you know, he was still helping me a lot with the research. I showed him all the stuff and he was quite amazed and he said that this explains performance shifts within Hitler that historians have not really been able to explain after 43 especially when Hitler's decisions become quite bad for the German military, quite good in a way because he would kind of have lost it. So that was a, it was kind of a mystery to historians why he went down like this, why he couldn't, you know, couldn't keep it up like he was able to do so before.

So Mommsen was very supportive and then also Ian Kershaw, the leading British historian on Hitler, who has written an amazing biography on Hitler. He praised the book. So that was quite important.

He hates it. He hates it because he didn't find it himself because he's next to Kershaw the other leading... well, it's funny actually, you could write a little piece on British historians, experts on National Socialism, because Britain won against Germany so the history is always told by the winner and there's like a few high-ranking British historians who know everything about National Socialism even though most of them can't speak German so it's kind of hard for them to read the original documents, I would imagine. But still, you know, they are good. You know, Kershaw is great, you know. I don't know if he speaks German, but his book's great, but Evans is not really... he's not really good. I never read anything of him that I like. I gave a speech once, a keynote at the World War II conference in New Orleans, which is like America's World War II conference with like thousands of delegates. And the keynote was amazing because I talked about my hometown which was an American base when I grew up. It's by Breiten in West Germany, was like the logistical headquarters of the US Army in Western Europe. And afterwards he was also there and he said, 'Yeah, good keynote, but still the book is not good.' He just can't allow an outsider to come into his playground. It would be the same as if someone who's never written a book writes the greatest novel and novelists would say, 'Oh, that's really bad.' Yeah, it's ridiculous, you know, but he's a small-minded man.

It's a dangerous review actually because it cuts down the sales, you know, because people actually believe that he's right.

No, it's an argument you could make, but it doesn't really correspond to what I have written. So maybe he didn't really read the book thoroughly enough. Maybe he just kind of saw like, oh, there's this German guy, he's not a historian, he just writes, 'The Nazis took all these drugs and then maybe that kind of lessens their responsibility or something.' Like I think he was like reading in his mind a book that he really hated. It's not the book I've written. And yeah, I elaborated on it before when I said, you know, that the ideology and the crimes and the planning and all of this has nothing to do with drugs.

Yeah, for me it was normal to write a novel about this. Only my publisher, smart as he was at the time, said you should write a non-fiction book because in a novel it's not really about the topic. It's about the characters, the relationships. And Hitler and Morell are terrible characters in a novel because you can't really, what do you want to invent? You know, I had so much juicy real stuff and then I invented scenes and it was just flatter than the actual juicy stuff, you know, the juice. It wasn't so as juicy as the facts. So it was the right decision to write a non-fiction book. The only challenge then was to write a non-boring non-fiction book which I then, you know, that was a literary task that was interesting to me because I'm a writer. I find it, I like challenges and that was the craft challenge for me to write a non-fiction book that is academically researched but still reads like a novel. But, you know, it's a fine line because you can also be so eloquent in your storytelling that people just believe what you write. And I think that maybe also Evans hated that, you know, because if you write like an academic book, it should be dry. It should be kind of dry and boring because it's only about the facts. But I don't really agree. I think even a book that really sticks to the facts like maybe this other one we can talk about for a second, Bohemians, which is the story of two people in Berlin and then suddenly fascism comes and they created the largest resistance network against the Nazis, Harro and Libertas, the Bohemians it's called in English because they were Bohemians. That was the challenge because I wanted to write a non-fiction book about them, invent nothing, but still it should read like a novel because if it doesn't read like a novel then no one's going to read it, you know.

But then also you don't want to invent anything like that's when Antony Beevor who was kind of my mentor at the time, he said to just don't invent anything. So don't invent anything but write it as well as you can. So that kind of, you have to balance that.

Who's the author? Jack Farweather, really recommend the book. And you have to do so much so you can get enough research, so you can get enough juicy details, because well, I mean, not everyone is Hitler, right? Almost any detail about Hitler is fascinating.

Where does this madness come from? Where does this self-belief, this crazy Jew hatred, like pathological? I've also heard theories that he had, which I think is quite credible, that he had ADHD.

Maybe, I don't know. It's possible. Yeah. Apparently, you know, he would be sometimes so energetic and so charismatic and a lot of the time he was also very lazy and didn't do any paperwork. He was disorganized but then also micromanaging, you know.

I don't know. Oh, I mean, the fascist character is interesting because the fascist character is coming back now. [gasps] It's like it's the non-psychedelic character, I would say.

It's someone who doesn't at all question him or herself, who's too afraid. Basically, it's a character of fear, unable to deal with criticism, just like Trump. Like Trump is not really the president of the Americans, he's only the president of his supporters. As soon as you criticize a person like that, everything falls apart and the person becomes aggressive.

And in the Nazis' case, or in Hitler's case, there was one time the wife of Baldur von Schirach, who had formed the Hitlerjugend, the Hitler Youth movement, a very important part of the so-called Third Reich. And she was having dinner with Hitler with her husband in the back of his mountain retreat and she said, 'Well, we're just coming back from Holland and we saw what the occupying German forces are doing to the Jews there and it's really horrible. I mean, they're treating them not as humans.'

Hitler is totally freaked out. Like he did not look at this woman anymore. He just made a sign that she should be removed from the table.

And they were never allowed again, you know, to dine with him. So that is the fascist character.

It addresses the lowest, or you know, not what it addresses, character traits that seem to be human, or that they are obviously human, but they're not really what we should be proud of as being human. I think as humans we should be proud if we are able to connect and if we're able to see the bigger picture that we're actually all one and that we are a crazy, fragile but highly intelligent species living on this planet and somehow we should be able to work out, you know, a solution that everyone can live happily and has like some kind of the same wealth and resources and freedom. That, you know, that is what I think makes us human.

But there's also this other side of us humans which is, you know, fear, aggression, hierarchy. It's very sad, you know, that we still have this and that it's now even in power in the most powerful country on earth.

No, I don't think so because I decided to become a chancellor in 2033.

Well, we have elections in 8 years, so maybe I win in 8 years and then...

I don't think so. You know, I will be very successful.

I would create my own party. I will enter with this new party, the Bundist, in four years. So I will get over the 5%, which is possible.

And then in 8 years, 100 years after Hitler won the chancellor, the seat of chancellor, [gasps] I think probably my party will be the second strongest after the AfD. Probably will be the strongest party but will not have an absolute majority.

So I will form a coalition probably with the left or the green party, even though the green party is moving towards the right, but maybe they could still, you know, I would still accept them in my coalition if they make me chancellor.

And then I would really, you know, turn this country around. I would basically destroy this country. That's why I would want to be a chancellor because I want to dismantle the nation-state system that is keeping the hierarchies. And so yeah, that's kind of my campaign in a nutshell. I will rule Germany in order to do kind of similar to Hitler actually. He destroyed Germany but I will dismantle it in a gentle way, you know.

No, not anarchy. I mean we have to acknowledge that we have identities which are closely connected to our culture and our language. And that is very important to humans and we should all respect that. That's why many people feel that is disrespected and that's why they're so much against foreigners, like they see this as a threat.

So it seems to be something that is really important to people. And also I come from a small town in West Germany which is part of a state and people speak the same dialect and I relate to these people and that's all totally fine. I just think that the abuse of power by the nation states which we are experiencing right now in the world has to be balanced by a planetary... basically we are moving towards a planetary society and there will be a planetary society maybe in 20 years, maybe in a hundred years.

There will be a different system and the nation states will still exist. But you know, right now we just have narratives, we have nationalistic narratives. Basically we are now here in Germany or we're now over there in England or this is America, maybe we have a Western narrative, but you know, it's sharply separated from the Russian and the Eastern, the Chinese and the Arab narrative.

We need a human narrative because we need to see that we actually are, you know, all on the same level and every human should have the right to live everywhere on this planet without disturbing, you know, without being a threat, you know.

Because people have always moved around. Like we are moving people, we're migrating people. We come from Africa, we moved into what we call now the Middle East through that Levantine corridor. We then colonized, settled in Europe and then we went to Asia. Like we are moving. So now to say like someone now from Africa cannot come to Europe, it's totally ridiculous. Of course everyone can come to Europe and I can live in Thailand, you know.

We need a planetary system with a basic probably minimum income for everybody and we need to reallocate the resources and billionaires should be outlawed. Because we have so much wealth, it's just a complete [__] through capitalism. Capitalism must go, you know, we must find a new way, which of course will still have capitalism, you know, that the drive, you know, if I do a lot, I can get a lot. I mean, that's important, you know, that's an incentive. So that obviously should stay.

And socialism as it was attempted by the Soviet Union and its satellites were certainly not a better alternative than the capitalism that we have right now. But there must be and there will be another way of organizing because people are quite good at organizing. We have a lot of new technologies at our disposal including artificial intelligence which is not bad in itself. It seems to be bad right now, like everyone thinks it's bad, but it's not really bad, you know, it can also be good. It can be a tool, but not how it is used right now. And it will come.

So we have to use it in a good way. We have to use plants in a good way. We have to, you know, get rid of governments basically telling us how we can strengthen our brains, which is what the war on drugs is trying to do. So I see a lot of... in Germany we say...

Yeah, we have a lot of room to improve and being chancellor of Germany will put me in a very powerful position to bring about change.

It's not good. It must be a big movement that is not focused on me. Could also be someone else. Yeah. But I do not have a name yet.

And also I mourn the prospect of doing it because I think I could win. I think I have a chance. But that also would mean that from now on I only talk about this and that's kind of horribly boring.

I want to continue writing books and I have [sighs] a new book in the process which is called Stone Sapiens, which is a new world history which kind of talks about the stuff that I just kind of talked about.

Well, drugs are basically part of our development always from the beginning. Without... if sapiens would never have used psychoactive plants like the Neanderthals probably didn't, there's no real evidence that they did. So they died out because they were too sober for the future. Basically we really were able to get smarter and transcend and move on. And we used very powerful medicines to do that. So we would not sit here right now without drugs. We would have died out long ago.

So it creates a completely different understanding of who we actually are as a species. That book...

Well, that's a small part of it. Yeah. But it's not only about how the frontal cortex evolved, which is because of a certain drug which I cannot give away because you have to read the book or you have to read my Substack. I'm writing a Stone Sapiens Substack right now where you can kind of see how the book evolves and where texts are being already issued creating a community. So I would...

Do you like it?

I'm creating a planetary network, you know, so I have to travel. I have to meet people.

Yeah. So it's writing, it's creating. Like writers have the talent, some of them at least, to create narratives that might inspire others. And I think we need narratives that go beyond what I call the national discourse or the Western discourse. We need inspiring narratives that show us that there's actually a good future possible.

We are very far away. We're terribly far away and a lot of suffering will happen before we get there, but I don't think this is the end, you know? I mean, this seems like the end. This seems like the apocalypse, but there will be other stages. I don't think we're going to die out in the next 20 years. I think we will have huge wars and problems, but I think we will be able to also have... it's a revolutionary situation right now. We need a planetary revolution and I think it's coming.

Eight years.

That's very interesting because it's kind of sad that... well, my position basically is that there is a historical responsibility for us Germans towards Israel. And I take that quite seriously. I find Israel fascinating. I've lived there for a while. I had a partner, she's a writer in Tel Aviv. But for me it was also always totally natural to cross to the other side and see the occupied territories.

So I was in... this was actually 20 years ago, even though it feels like yesterday sometimes, quite long ago, that I would use my German passport to cross back and forth. I was in Ramallah during the day and then at night I would meet my girlfriend in Tel Aviv and not many people were able to do that. Israelis are not allowed really into the occupied territories and Palestinians are not really allowed into Israel.

So I find the whole region extremely fascinating and the region is also very attractive. Like it really feels like this is a navel of the world, not the only navel, but it is a node. It has so much culture. It's so rich in intellect and in many things. So I find it highly tragic what is happening right now. And so I find it totally normal to speak about it.

And I find it highly unfortunate that many people think that you can only speak about it in one way by supporting Israel. I mean, it's changing right now. Slowly there's change that you can voice, you know, criticism of Israel and I think it's totally necessary, you know, because what's going on is absolutely horrendous.

And if you see Israel as our friend, maybe even closest friend, or like very good friend, let's say very good friend, I think you have the responsibility also to be honest to your friend and support your friend obviously, but also if your friend makes big mistakes, he should be able to say it.

And I think that could be also the role of German intellectuals to not be afraid of being cancelled or... I just don't accept it when I criticize the right-wing extremist criminal government of Israel, who is being investigated by the International Criminal Court, which is a body that I respect. I don't accept it if I voice my opinion about that and I'm being... no one has labeled me an anti-Semite yet, but some people I think it happened to them.

It's this kind of nature. It's this kind of trick, you know, like you're not allowed to say something against Israel because immediately you're being labeled an anti-Semite. I just don't accept that. So I say whatever I want. Yeah, I'm very open about it. And you know, I think with some intellectuals there might be, or public figures with this fear, there might be a bit of a nice German word for 'island of the right'. So...