Do you listen to punk rock? I'll listen to The Sex Pistols. Yeah, when I saw you, my initial reaction was like, this is like a kind of a grungy German punk rock dude.
Well, but a literary punk rock kind of dude. If you say grunge, I saw actually one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York, and then I was in the grocery store, like an organic store, and they announced that Kurt Cobain had shot himself. And that day I received a music tape from Berlin with electronic music, and I kind of concluded all this punk rock grunge stuff, that's dead, and the new music is electronic music. So that's actually why I moved back from New York, where I was living in '95, to Berlin.
Really? Yeah. And then you started listening to techno in Europe?
I don't know, I just went to clubs in Berlin which were playing techno music, which was new at the time.
You know, it all exploded right around then. Yeah. I thought it was, they call it house music though, right? That's what it was called.
Well, no, there's different kinds of electronic music. House is one, techno is another, then drum and bass came. So it was a big kind of flourishing culture which at one point stagnated, I think. It just stagnated, but I think it's still fascinating. But at the time it was like new. So yes, I don't know where we're trying to go, but this is...
We're not trying, we're not trying, we're just going. I'm happy. Good, me too. Your shirt is amazing. That's the meth that the Nazis were taking on your shirt, right? The Pervitin.
Yeah, I mean, I like the branding, the design also. The name is very good. It's a good brand name for methamphetamine, Pervitin, because it's the word 'perverse' kind of in it. Yeah, which it is a perverse, you know, toxin, I would say, methamphetamine.
Yeah, the saying, that famous saying that everything goes back to the Nazis couldn't be more true. Even the drugs go back to the Nazis.
Well, I mean, somehow it's not surprising because they were really interested in performance enhancement. You know, the Nazi movement was a very modern movement. They were applying the newest technology, the newest forms of propaganda, the newest medicine. So they were on the cutting edge of everything.
That's correct, but they didn't have empathy and they didn't have the right morals, so that can always be a problem. A very efficient system can also go off the rails. You need some kind of, I guess you would call it morals, a term that Nazis hated, but what do you do without morals? Then you just become kind of a soulless machine that can go anywhere and up big in a big way too, you know. Yeah. So you've written two books on the history of drug use in the Third Reich, right? You've written the first one, which was Blitzed, which was all about the amphetamines and the uppers and all the kind of stuff that Hitler's doctor was giving him. And the second one was Tripped, which was more about the psychedelics and the LSD research they were doing, trying to find truth serums, which is eventually what the CIA got its hands on in the Cold War. First of all, how did you get into writing and what made you want to write a book about Hitler doing meth?
Actually, we have to be very precise what we say. Hitler was actually not into meth. The German Army was into meth. They were really methed up, but he didn't do it, no, because he thought this is for the foot soldier, just the robot that has to function, because that's what meth does. It just releases neurotransmitters and you just follow orders. But it's not the drug to use to answer the most complex questions. You don't do that on meth. So Hitler wasn't using meth. He was using a certain opioid, which is actually the same one that is now being used in America excessively, which is oxycodone.
It's called, right? Or OxyContin? I always confuse the difference between oxycodone and OxyContin.
That's a good question. I'm not sure. I think codone. I'm not sure. Okay, I think codone comes from codeine, which is like a syrup, and the contin is just, I think that has a time release in it somehow.
Yes, I think so. So that was Hitler's favorite drug, actually, that opioid, which at the time was a German product called Eukodal. So it was a German product. It wasn't a crazy, you know, illegal drug that he was taking. Yeah. Wasn't he mixing it with... or no, maybe he was speedballing it with coke, right?
Yeah, he was doing that, okay, but only for like two months. Then he stopped the coke. He wasn't a coke guy. No, he was an opioid guy.
Okay. Usually they go hand in hand with those kind of dudes.
I don't know. I mean, I think, but yeah, maybe. But his doctor, like his personal physician, Morell, he was the opioid guy. He always gave him the oxycodone. And a new doctor came in after the bomb attack on July 20th, Operation Valkyrie, a new doctor, an ear specialist, because Hitler's eardrums were blown in the explosion done by the bomb of Stauffenberg. Oh, yeah. And this ear doctor brought the cocaine, because cocaine was like also an anesthetic against pain, and he had pain, so he received the cocaine. But the doctor realized immediately that Hitler loved also the high of the cocaine. Like this guy wrote a report that I found in the National Archives in Washington. It's quite funny. Like he realized immediately that Hitler is like a totally drug... like some people really like drugs, take a lot, experiment with it, and Hitler was one of these guys. I mean, and the doctor realized that immediately when Hitler was demanding more and more coke. And then Hitler was happy when the guy left and Morell came and gave him the opioid. So he was kind of speedballing for a while. But then this other doctor fell out of favor because he was actually trying to get into Morell's role, which he didn't succeed, so he had to leave. So also the cocaine left, so Hitler remained with opioids.
And didn't they get the coke from one of like the biggest pharmaceutical companies that's still around today, wasn't it?
Well, that's Merck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Merck's cocaine was apparently the best in the world. It was very famous. Peru's annual production of coca leaves was shipped to the Hamburg harbor and then processed by Merck into the finest cocaine in the world.
Wow. Do they still make it?
Not anymore. I know they use cocaine for like certain surgeries.
Yeah, right. Actually every pharmacy has cocaine. Like, there's eye drops containing cocaine?
No way. Yeah, but it's in a very small quantity. So back then cocaine was actually a big hit. You know, it was a very successful product because it was so famous, the Merck cocaine. There were product pirates in China that faked the label of the Merck cocaine and put it on different cocaine bottles, but none was as good as the original.
They were trying to make knockoff coke with the Merck label, kind of like they make fake Nike Jordans.
Yeah, right. Yeah, probably get it in Bangkok at the market or something.
Huh. So, um, how did you first become interested in all this stuff and start writing about it?
Well, I grew up in West Germany, and we were... West Germany was considered the world champion in dealing with its shitty past. Like we were always getting educated about it, which I actually thought was good, because it would be weird to grow up in Germany and not know about the Holocaust. Right. That would be a weird way of dealing with it. But it's also a possible way, like Japan is not looking at it like Germany does. Like Germany has an obsession with looking at it. Right. So I grew up kind of knowing a lot about fascism and the Third Reich, and it was always... there was always like this image created of like a law and order system where like everything was disciplined, and so like it has nothing to do with drugs. You know, the Nazis are too square to take drugs, basically. It's not... and no one ever combined this. So a friend of mine then in 2010 found all Pervitin packages in an old East Berlin apartment, which were still there from the '40s, and he took them and he still could feel the methamphetamine effect, and he told me the story. That's kind of how it started.
This was like 70-something years out.
Yeah, that's what they used to mean with like quality coming from Germany, you know. Pharmaceutical company Temmler makes Pervitin in the '40s, and some guy finds it in 2010, he uses it and tells me that it was really quite strong, actually.
And he's a DJ, so he knows his drugs. He could really evaluate it.
He took three in a row because he liked them so much, and he said after the third meth pill from Nazi Germany he really felt like a strong drug effect. So that's what got me researching, you know, because that's pretty interesting. You know, no historian had ever evaluated that.
He's DJing at like nightclubs all night long. You got to stay awake, so why not take some Nazi meth?
Well, I mean, yeah, he would take probably meth anyhow, you know. So right. But so he was interested because if people take meth today, they usually snort lines, right? That's the crystal meth that comes from... they just take... I mean, the most sophisticated version of meth now, which everyone takes, is Adderall.
Pretty much every kid in college... is that meth or is that amphetamine? Isn't it pretty... is it similar or no?
Now, well, methamphetamine is like a stronger sort of amphetamine, and I've heard that Adderall is methamphetamine, but I'm actually not quite... I'm not sure what is the difference between Adderall and meth. Adderall and methamphetamine are both stimulant drugs that belong to the amphetamine class, but they have distinct differences in their chemical structures. Methamphetamine has an additional methyl group, which makes it more potent and able to cross the blood-brain barrier more quickly.
Okay, meth is like a Porsche and amphetamine is like a Volkswagen or something. That's how you can compare it.
Right, right, right. And the Pervitin was like a Lamborghini, like a golden Lamborghini.
Well, not... I mean, actually it was like a folk pill, because it was like a pill for everybody. It wasn't like you take one pill and you go like insane. It was like you take one pill and you have like, you know, you can just drive a bit, your engine is a bit stronger, let's put it that way. But it's still the same kind of... so it enhances your performance, and that's why it became very popular. You know, it wasn't like now we're drinking... we're drinking kratom. I got this whole... entire table is loaded with drugs.
Yeah, right. Legal drugs mostly. So it was not so unusual actually to take a pill of meth, because also at the time they didn't have so many substances at their availability as we have now. You know, it was in the late '30s. So when Pervitin came onto the market, people, you know, liked it, they talked about it, everyone would use it.
Yeah. So, and not just soldiers and people in the military, like everyday people, business people were using it. It was a kind of like a common thing for folks.
Yeah. Also it wasn't so available or popular to go into like a coffee shop. I mean, there were coffee shops, but not as many as today. And I think especially women would often not go into coffee shops, because the cafes were male-dominated, which they still are in some parts of the world. So it's not so... what do you take? You know, you take methamphetamine. I can understand it. I probably would have taken it back then.
Yeah, because also it's beneficial in a dictatorship that's all about functionality, to function. You know, you don't... and methamphetamine is a good... it's a stimulant that makes you, you know, it makes you... it doesn't make you think, right? It makes you just kind of like a machine.
Like, machine is a bit exaggerated. Well, I mean, I've done Adderall before and I know the feeling. I hate it. I hate it. You kind of can't stop.
Right, right. It kind of kills creativity and it makes you just want to get more things done and like get more stuff checked off the checklist.
Yeah, I don't think, for example, amphetamine is a good drug for writing, because you do write a lot, but it lowers your ability to self-criticize yourself, because you just feel too good and you just do it too fast, and that's not what literature is actually about. You know, you have to be very subtle in each step you take forward. So amphetamine... I'm surprised like some writers can write stuff on amphetamines, like Philip K. Dick was writing on amphetamines.
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Oh yeah, that's crazy. Especially, but also On the Road was written on amphetamines by Kerouac, supposedly in two weeks without sleep, which is possible because you can actually write a lot of pages quite quickly.
Wasn't Stephen King also doing loads of coke when he was writing some of his books, like Cujo?
I'm not familiar with that. I could imagine it.
I'm pretty sure he was. I'm pretty sure he was like drinking like crazy and doing... Freud was developing a lot of his theories on coke also.
Freud, my favorite philosopher. Sherlock Holmes was created probably on coke by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I think himself used coke to solve his cases.
Yeah, but I'm also not a Sherlock Holmes specialist.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just a Hitler specialist. Some of the most prolific, most famous works in history were done by authors who were bombed on drugs. Like, just from the last couple people we mentioned, right? Like that's... Did you, when you were writing this, did you try any of these drugs and try to dive deeper into the literature and understand them better?
Actually I did, because I thought I have to make this experience to write about it.
Yeah, I would do the same thing. I would think so.
I was a bit, to be honest, a bit afraid to use crystal meth, because I had heard... I was also, you know, introduced to this by mostly American anti-drug propaganda, which says if you take crystal meth... like I was a US high school student in the late '80s, so this was, I think, Reagan was still president, so it was like 'just say no', and if you take crystal meth once, you will automatically be addicted like forever. Right. That was kind of what I had in mind, which is total bullshit. I mean, but so I asked my grass dealer at the time, marijuana was still illegal in Germany, 'Can you help me find, like, I just want to have like one sample of crystal meth.' I was kind of, and still am, a fan of Taxi Driver. It's one of my favorite movies. And Schrader, when he wrote it, he had a gun in his writing desk, in the drawer, to be kind of closer to the vibration of his story. So I thought it's good to have like a gram of crystal meth with me. Yeah. But she said no, I don't want to bring it, because she was a weed dealer, and weed and crystal meth, they don't go together. Like, they're totally different animals, basically. But she said, 'I know a guy, he has crystal meth.' And then she asked him, and he actually brought me one gram. And he brought a Xerox copy of the old Pervitin patent that they made on methamphetamine. He Xeroxed that and gave it with the gram, without knowing that I was researching this book.
Oh, shit. So he was like some kind of crystal meth dealer that was like a history buff or freak or whatever and wanted to educate where it came from.
It's kind of funny. I don't... and I took it also to try it.
What was it like versus what did you expect it to be like? Because usually those two are vastly different.
Well, I know the effects of amphetamines, just like legal amphetamines, but also illegal amphetamines. So I was expecting it to have this effect, but stronger. And that's exactly what it is. So the effect in itself can be quite interesting and pleasurable. You know, you're not going to feel bad on crystal meth, you know, while the high lasts. But the problem for me was once the high receded, I actually felt worse than I had felt before I took it. And that's something I don't like. So it didn't really become my drug, basically. I thought this coming down effect is a very bad structure for a drug effect, basically. Which is different with a psychedelic drug. You have the problematic experience in the beginning when the psychedelic drug starts to kick in, but then once you're stable, it's going to be great, and there's no like hang up afterwards.
Yeah, I think that feels much healthier to me.
It feels almost like psychedelics and mushrooms and LSD, they almost feel like Godly, like you're getting closer to God in some way. And cocaine and crystal meth and stimulants almost are like the devil. It's like you're going to hell because it borrows your... it sucks up all your dopamine. So you feel like dog shit when you're done, and you either need more to keep that thing going, stay on the wagon, quite horrible actually, or you're going to dive off head first. So what else did you... did you actually get a hold of any of the Pervitin, or how do you say it, Pervitin?
No, I've never taken it myself, because my friend, he took everything he found. It was actually a couple, they were and still are antique dealers, and they found it, and they took it amongst themselves. Like I spoke to the guy, he said, 'For one month we were taking methamphetamine like every day. It was great.' Wow. So that pill actually from the company Temmler, which is Pervitin, it was probably a good product, you know. It did lead obviously to addiction and problems, but in terms of performance enhancement, it's a very good product.
Yeah, seems like it worked.
I mean, well, no, I mean, in the end it didn't really work, but it works for specific tasks while it happens. But it doesn't work in the long run. It works in the short run, but not in the long run. And a war was in this case a long war. The only chance for the Nazis to win this war was if everything becomes Blitzkrieg, if every campaign is a quick campaign like the one against the West. Yeah. Because that's how long the Pervitin works. It works like for one, two months, and you can stay awake the whole time. The whole army is like fighting like mad, you know, but then they come down. So if this victory has been achieved after like two months, they cannot sustain it. So they're like sprinting instead of running a marathon. They're trying to run as fast as they can. That was the new idea. You sprint, you don't go slow.
Right, right. Which is kind of shock and awe. It's a very modern approach. I mean, it's very... it's a progressive military approach, I would say, but it only works in certain situations. I just read a report on... I forget who sent it to me. I think Travis Kitchens sent me this report, and it was about how the Russians in the Ukraine war are using a certain kind of methamphetamine that Russia is giving their soldiers. Like they're all jacked on meth. Yeah. I forget the name of it. It's like a newer version. There was a brand name for it.
Yes, right now in the war, the Russians are freaking jacked on meth. What was the name of that drug? Captagon. Oh, have you heard of that?
Yeah. Captagon is interesting because Captagon was made by the Assad regime in Syria. That's how they kept themselves in power. And they had obviously strong ties with Russia. Assad is now in Moscow.
So it kind of makes sense that this Captagon was made probably even in Syria and then brought to the Russian troops, because it is a good fighting drug. It's not good for the... you know, it's not healthy and not good for the soldier, but it might be beneficial if used intelligently. Can you Google Captagon? Captagon ingredients, or like what is in Captagon? It's just a different form of amphetamine, right? But is it actually methamphetamine or is it just amphetamine? Fenethylline. Okay, it's just an amphetamine. They can contain amphetamines and caffeine, but it's a very strong amphetamine. Very strong amphetamine. So it's not... meth is stronger. Well, yeah, I'm sure. So this is actually, I think, a pill of Pervitin would have been stronger than a pill of Captagon.
Yeah, I'm sure. I'm sure it would have been.
Yeah, because the Nazis always wanted the strongest. You know, even though it wasn't a Nazi invention, it was just a German invention of its pharmaceutical company. It has nothing to do with the Nazi party.
Yeah, just a product. Drugs are neutral.
Also, there's in that same report that I read, they're saying that they're giving ibogaine to the soldiers on the Ukrainian side. And I don't think it's just... the report was saying that it was for brain injuries and for PTSD, but I think they're also using it on the battlefield for things like edge detection and stress and combat fatigue. So that's an interesting thing. And I know DARPA, I've read some stories that DARPA has been funding psychedelic research for soldiers, not just for after the war, but for when they're in war. Like how can psychedelics enhance a soldier moving through the battlefield and shooting and being more accurate with his shots or things like that, you know.
I spoke with the doctor of the Orlando Magic team after the NBA game about psychedelics, whether it's good also for basketball players. And the problem is that basketball, just as I think fighting in a war is, is a lot about motor precision, and that could be not enhanced through psychedelics, which maybe make you think too long. Or, you know, on the battlefield, I think you have to react. You don't need complex thought processes. I think you need it maybe... yeah, maybe for strategy, you know, for generals it might be good to see it in a different way.
And I think actually, now that you mentioned that, I think what I heard about DARPA studying this stuff was they're trying to take the trip out of it. So you get the benefits of visual acuity and edge detection and other things without having the trip. Right. So maybe that would have some benefits to it if they were able to alter it somehow.
Yeah, this story only says that they're using it for PTSD and anxiety, but what I read and what I heard from Dana was they're using it... he's trying to fly it into Ukraine with other stuff that David Nichols is working on with DARPA, trying to take the trip out of this stuff for enhancing soldiers on the battlefield while they're in it.
It's very interesting, especially with ibogaine, because ibogaine is so unexamined yet. And but I would imagine that it's probably quite healthy for the brain to use ibogaine.
So an army on the one side using amphetamines, if it's true, then this would be the Russian army, and another army using ibogaine, of course, looks much better for the Ukrainian side because it's a much smarter, more sustainable way of being.
Yeah, because ibogaine is good for your brain while amphetamine is not good for your brain in the long term, right? Yeah. So when you wrote your first book, you didn't do it the way typical authors do. Like I've had a lot of people on this podcast that talk about JFK and they write books about JFK, and the vast majority of them, in fact all of them except for one of them, when they write their books, they read other people's books to come up with their ideas and to write about, you know, to come up with their material and they rework it or whatever. Very rarely when somebody writes a story or a book do they actually go to the sources of things. And if I'm not mistaken, when you were writing your first book, you weren't basing this off any other writer's book or any sort of previous research. You were doing it sort of like going to the grassroots of this stuff.
Well, I mean, once my friend told me about having all these Pervitin pills and being like stoned on methamphetamine...
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I became interested in it, and then I started researching it. Actually, I wanted to write a novel, but then my publisher said this topic is too interesting to turn into a novel. It should be a non-fiction book. So I had never written a non-fiction book before, but I had written three novels. So I thought, okay, now I can't invent anything anymore. That kind of sucks, because I like to invent things for novels, obviously. It's why you write a novel, right? So my first idea was to write a novel, but then the publisher said no, it must be a non-fiction book. And he was right with his decision. It must be a non-fiction book, because if it's a novel about Nazis and drugs, you as the reader, you don't know if it's true or whether I imagined it. Yeah. So in a non-fiction book, this is not the case. So for me it was... I don't know, what was your question? I'm sorry.
I was just asking you about like the research process, like you didn't go and read other books to come up with your...
So I was trying to figure out what is a non-fiction book, how do you write a non-fiction book, which is obviously, you know, if you find out something, it must be the original materials. So for me, actually my girlfriend at the time, she said you should go to the archives, and it immediately clicked and it made sense to me, you know, that I really want to find out the actual truth. And from that, in the beginning I wanted to construct a novel, but later on I made it into a non-fiction book, but I wanted to actually know the truth. And I mean, there was one book out at the time by actually a friend of mine, but it was more like a random collection of, you know, articles he found on drugs in the Third Reich, but it wasn't really structured.
It was like a treasure trove.
Yeah, so I kind of started expanding on this. And especially everything changed when I met a historian who had researched this for a paper, and he told me where in the archives to actually find it, because it's very difficult to find stuff in the archives. Because at the time, like this archive about the military, about World War II, these documents were filed probably sometime in the '50s. They were all collected and then filed, but they didn't file them for drugs. Like they didn't read through where was methamphetamine used, then we make a note that if anyone ever in the future searches for this keyword drugs, he will find these papers. Because the archivist didn't think of drugs as a relevant category. So you have a big archive and probably you have a lot of documents relating to drugs, but how do you find them? So I was lucky enough that a scientist who had researched this before told me exactly.
So he shared his knowledge. It's actually quite important people share that knowledge.
Yeah, which is kind of a spirit probably amongst researchers, because most people don't research. It's kind of a secret cult if you actually go to the archive. It's very fun, you know, and everyone is kind of friendly because you're like such on the fringe, but at the same time you're like at the center of it all, because only at the archive are the documents, you know, in their original form. You know, they have not been processed by, let's say, books.
Yeah, so being a historian just copying passages in books of others or ideas in other books, I mean, you can probably write a compelling book, but it's more interesting to try to find these documents, I guess.
I was also lucky to find them, you know. It's not so easy.
I bet it's way more exciting to do it that way because you feel like you're probably getting something out that hasn't been out before, right? Yeah, right. The world hasn't seen this shit yet. Like that's a lot of work to do to actually go somewhere physically, dig through paperwork, ancient paperwork, versus just like looking up some shit online on a directory.
Well, and also you find different things in the archive because what's in the archive is not online. Like it's really, you have to find stuff. And sometimes you don't find stuff. There's actually people whose job this is, the historical detectives. You can hire them. You can like say... I met one guy in the National Archives in DC, and he said his client wants him to find out why a relative of his, a US soldier, died falling out of a window in Heidelberg in summer of 1945. There's like all the information, then he goes to the archive to actually find that story.
Wow. If he's good, he'll find it. It seems highly improbable, actually.
Very. Oh yeah, I bet. But who knows how good a detective you are. So I have like the side hobby, which is like hobby... I'm like a hobby detective also, but basically I'm a writer. Yeah. Sometimes it has the shape of non-fiction books and sometimes the shape of novels. Both are great. I mean, both forms are interesting.
Yeah, I bet. You like what, like the difference between writing about stuff that you're finding in archives, like how is that process different versus like just writing?
Well, when you find something in an archive, there's no one that helps you at first to evaluate what you've seen. Like the problem with Hitler plus drugs was the writing of Morell, who shot him these drugs, his personal physician, is a bit hard to read. Like most doctors' handwriting is hard to read for some reason. They kind of want to hide stuff all the time. Like his is hard to read. And the Americans who investigated his papers, they misread Eukodal. They thought it's Eukodal, which doesn't exist. So it was just... that's how it was filed, but it was never examined. So when I found this, I also didn't know what is Eukodal. You know, I just found it, and I also showed it to Alex, my friend, the DJ, who told me first about Nazis and drugs, because he became like an advisor, because he's such a knowledgeable guy on history and on drugs. He's like the perfect, actually like a Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson situation. And he's like, 'Eukodal, are you insane? Hitler took Eukodal. This is like the heaviest, most euphoric-making opioid. He shot like 20 milligrams intravenously. Are you crazy? You don't realize what this means.' So that's, yeah, thanks to Alex at this point.
And what exactly was Eukodal?
Well, that's the oxycodone. That's the... that was the drug that defined Hitler, basically.
Oh, that was his favorite drug. Yeah. So is that the drug that he first took before that famous meeting with Mussolini? Yeah, you pull out of the...
Yeah, that was like in July 1943 or something, right? Right. Mussolini wanted to kind of leave the war because it was not looking so good for the Axis of Evil. So he wanted to become like neutral, and Hitler hated that idea. And so he was very nervous before the meeting. And Morell describes him as depressed. So it's like he was depressed and it was not really happening. It didn't. And as the Führer, you can't be depressed. I mean, that was also John F. Kennedy's problem. He was suffering from depression, and as a US president, you can't be depressed. You know, can you say, maybe you can say, 'Sorry, American people, I'm depressed today. I don't want to take any big decisions. I hope everything's going to be cool.' But like Kennedy didn't do that. So he was taking medicine. Same obviously for Hitler. So before that meeting with Mussolini, he was taking Eukodal for the first time, and intravenously, because I think Morell tried to keep that a bit away from Hitler, because he was realizing once Hitler tastes those opioids, it's not going to stop. Yeah. Which is then exactly what happened. So Morell was in the difficult position of having to administer these opioids on a regular basis, kind of making his patient, who's also the leader of Germany, into an addict, which he must have known. Because Hitler wanted these opioids when he wanted them. He just wanted them. He didn't want to argue. You can't argue with Hitler about anything, especially not about when he wants his opioids. So Morell just gave him the opioids. So it's an interesting Hitler biography that's kind of enclosed in this Blitzed book.
So Morell, what was his first name?
Theo Morell. How much would you say, how much literature was there on him that you had to read?
I mean, first of all, I researched where that stuff was, and that's in one archive in Koblenz in Germany, the Federal Archive. And then I went there, and I could see the history of recent checkouts of this material of Theo Morell, the personal physician of Hitler. And it had only been checked out like three times since the end of the war or something.
Wow. Wow. Really? So no one actually thought of doing what I did.
And I thought that would be like standard for a historian, you know.
Right, because Morell played a very important role. He was like with Hitler all the time. Like they were close.
Very close buddies, and he wouldn't leave home without him.
Not really, because he's your... I mean, eventually he's basically your dealer, you know, because he shoots, he injects you with a very strong opioid into your vein, you know, every other day. So that becomes a very important person to you, you know.
So without this Morell story, you can't really understand the Hitler story, I would say.
That's fascinating, actually.
There's some stuff I left out which concerned Hitler's shit. Like Hitler's shit is examined by this doctor, and there's like tons of writings about it and what's in there and whether it's bad for him or good for him and his shit. Yeah, it was always sent to a certain lab in...
Bavaria, even during the war, it was like a special career. Why did they do that?
Because the Führer had to be healthy, so it was all about the health. You know, H Hitler also means Health to Hitler. So it was like the the health, the status of this person's health was kind of the status of the whole, you know, so-called Third Reich.
He was a vegetarian, wasn't he?
Well, I mean, I discovered that he had basically three drug phases, which was '36 to '41 mostly like vitamins and harmless stuff, and '41 to '43 he used a lot of animal concoctions like pigs' liver extract injected and thyroid glands extract that he used. Like he became a bit crazy because Morel was like inventing new medicines. Morel had had his own pharmaceutical company, so he was like inventing stimulants. Like you take the most something from the animal, it could be a stimulant, you know. So he was he was using a lot of animal products basically. I don't know if you could technically call that a vegetarian. He didn't eat it, it wasn't it wasn't in his diet, but he was blasting it into his veins.
Yeah, so he's like even more of a...
Like I don't know if he realized this, that technically speaking, I think he's not a vegetarian. So that I also uncovered this, by the way, that he's not a vegetarian, but only through your help, because I didn't even think about it anymore.
That's so weird that they were studying his [__] and sending off his [__] to labs to see how... I would shoot a movie on the Third Reich on Blitz. Uh, that Blitz is not a movie. That it's very strange to me. That's because that's like it's has a lot of good scenes, and one of them would be, you know, the [__] moving through the front lines and moving all across Germany and then being examined by the, you know, German scientists and reports are written which are now in the archive and on Hitler's poop.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, [__] was a big part of the movement. I mean, it's a brown movement. Yeah, yeah.
No, you must have a fascination with [__]. Um, that famous video of him at the Olympics, I think in like '36 or think I think it was, where he's like gyrating back and forth. What what was he on in that video? Do you know?
Um, well, I I mean, I studied Morel's writings, and Morel's writings are very extensive. Like almost about every day he wrote like how Hitler looked, and not only how the [__] was, what he said, what how his skin, the color of his skin. Like he writes a lot, but um um he never, yeah, he never he never he doesn't mention this thing. So I kind of think it looks a bit unnatural. It looks sped up, doesn't it?
Yeah, I think it's definitely sped up. I think it's not natural.
My research actually uh would say that um this this is not a this is a fake video. Uh, because at the time Hitler had no problems. He was very healthy. He was also a younger looking...
How old was he here? Do you know?
Um, not off the top of my head, but he was pretty young. But he looks he looks older in this. He doesn't. Something's off with this, but that's just my gut feeling.
Um, what do you mean is off? How you think? How do you think it's fake?
Just the movement doesn't seem natural. I think it's it's I think it was done by a director.
Oh, really? Interesting. So someone staged this and recreated it?
I think it's digitally manipulated to look this way. Maybe he was moving a bit, and maybe there's a way to kind of speed that up. And they definitely sped it up. You can tell by the guys in the background. Just, you know, maybe he was nervous doing like this, but if you speed that up, it looks already weird. So for me, this video is nothing basically.
Maybe he's just got to pee really bad.
Maybe, yeah. That's kind of what I do when I have to take a when I have to pee.
I have some insight on on the sped up stuff. Hang on, hang on. Steve, can you um see when this video was uploaded, by the way?
Oh, this one? This one is three years ago.
Okay, yeah, could have easily been faked. What do you think? What's your what's your video analysis on this one, Stevo?
Uh, so uh, film cameras back in the day, um, if they were cheap or small or portable, they were hand-cranked, which means that the the the speed of the of the film going through it is dictated by your hand movement. And so when you play that back on a machine that plays it back at 24 frames a second, it's typically sped up. You're going to you're not going to speed your your speed is never going to be as consistent or as fast as, you know, a machine. And you'll see that a lot with like the Charlie Chaplin videos and stuff.
Oh, okay, interesting. That's why every the black and the old black and white stuff looks sped up. So '36 was before he was really experimenting hardcore with...
Yeah, that's when he met Morel.
That's when he met him in '36. Yeah, so he was he was basically on nothing, huh?
Yeah, but he could still, you know, behave oddly. Who knows? He's an odd guy. But he was on nothing in '36, at least Morel doesn't write about it. Maybe he gave him something, but it's a slow increase of maybe...
No, methamphetamine wasn't invented yet.
Done the math. It wasn't invented yet. No. Was Coke invented yet? Yeah. When was Coke invented?
Uh, I don't know. Um, we would have to look at when like, for example, Merck patented Coke, but that was older. Um, methamphetamine was patented in October '37. 1856 by a German chemist, Friedrich Gäedcke.
The Germans invented all the drugs, of course.
The Germans invented everything, just drugs and cars and time machines and spaceships. Flying saucers apparently came from them too.
Yes, yeah. Rockets. Um, isolated active alkaloid from the coca leaf.
How crazy is the coca leaf? It's illegal. It's illegal to own a coca leaf in the United States of America.
Yeah, I landed once in an airport in in Cusco, Peru, and I was given a coca tea as a welcome present so I could like deal with the the elevation.
Yeah, they yeah they use it for...
It was pretty cool at the airport. You drink a...
How crazy is that, right? For altitude sickness.
It's a I think it's actually quite healthy, the coca leaf. Yeah, but it's just like a stimulant. It's like a it's like a normal stimulant, but um we're not allowed to have it here because we might mix it with gasoline and other chemicals and try to produce [__] cocaine.
But the so the soldiers in war, they weren't necessarily giving the soldiers cocaine because cocaine, I'm sure, would be too hard to manage. You you have to constantly be taking it, ripping lines all day long. And it's not like with the Pervitin, the methamphetamine, you can take it one pill and I'm sure it lasts for hours.
Well, I mean, they did. You know, they wrote a so-called stimulant decree, which kind of says, you know, when you should, you know, you should take the first dose before it starts.
Oh, really? So they had like a guidebook for it?
Yeah, they had a it's the stimulant decree. Uh, it's also in the archives. It's um like I think it's okay. The stimulant decree was a significant order issued by the German Army High Command on April 1940, which mandated the production and distribution of stimulants to the military personnel. The decree was crucial in enabling soldiers to stay awake for extended periods of time, which was seen as essential for the success of military operations. For instance, during the invasion of France in 1940, soldiers were instructed to take Pervitin, a form of methamphetamine, in intervals to maintain alertness.
Did they source your book here? And strategic positioning. Wow, yeah, they cite Blitz. Oh, look at that. At least one of them. Look at that. Yeah, Blitz is the first one. Good [__].
Yeah, I kind of uncovered it, I guess, but basically Alex uncovered it, the detail.
