What the Nazis did with methamphetamines and psychedelics | Norman Ohler | FULL INTERVIEW

For a long war, methamphetamine is quite bad. For a short war, it's quite good. Good, of course, in a neutral, you know, just from a military perspective.

Thank you. Very happy to be here.

I mean, we all know that Berlin was a crazy city in the 20s, but that drug use and especially drug abuse was also rampant in the so-called Third Reich was kind of new. This is what I examined in Blitzed, which came out a few years ago. And I guess up until that point, no one really knew how widely drugs were abused by the Nazis. I also didn't know. I mean, I knew when I started the research and when I wrote the book, because it's kind of ironic and contradictory since the Nazis presented themselves as a prohibitionist regime. It was actually a big part of their propaganda that they were anti-drug.

They were the first anti-drug government Germany ever had. But I mean before in the Weimar Republic, it was quite open and maybe crazy. And the Nazis always hated that. They hated that individual expression of, you know, drug taking and thinking whatever you want to think. So when they took power in '33, they threw drug addicts or drug users, I guess, into the first concentration camps and combined anti-drug policy with anti-Semitic policies quite early. They said the Jews in Germany, they take more drugs because they're nervous and the big city Jew is nervous. He takes morphine. So I never thought that they actually had used themselves drugs to quite an extent, especially for their army, for the Wehrmacht, when they took over quite a few countries in Europe. They were all high on crystal meth, which was then a legal drug. It came out in '38 in Germany. It was not stigmatized. It was on the market as Pervitin. It was a performance-enhancing medication. And so that whole story was very interesting to me when I researched it and then it turned into this book, Blitzed.

Yeah, Nazi Germany. Sorry.

Yeah, that's right. I mean also drugs are neutral is also a term that's defined by, for example, a government. So they didn't define methamphetamine as an illegal drug. It was just a medication you could buy in the pharmacy. So it's also interesting to examine it from that point of view.

Well, there was a professor working for the army who was responsible for performance enhancement and also developing gadgets for the army. He's kind of a Q character, the Q from James Bond. And he read studies that were done by German universities in '38 that methamphetamine, which was new and therefore it was examined by universities first, clinical studies, methamphetamine would reduce fear and would reduce the need to sleep. And that for him was interesting because he thought the number one enemy of the German soldier is fatigue.

And he thought that if you could turn an army, if you could create another like two, three hours at the end of a day, you know, where the army is still capable of fighting while the enemy is tired, then you would have a tactical advantage. And this is what happened. So the first speed advances in German called Blitzkrieg, they were fueled by millions of dosages of methamphetamine. So Germany would not have been able to overrun France and actually the British military within like 17 days in the spring of 1940 without 35 million dosages of methamphetamine. It would not have been possible. So the whole Second World War would have been very different, probably with the outcome of Germany losing it. But maybe not, you know, maybe they would have made a peace agreement or something, you know. So the methamphetamine did completely change the course of the war.

I mean, methamphetamine is great while you're on it, but you're not on it indefinitely. At one point, it starts to wear off, then you could take another one. So that's how addiction, you know, creates itself. And a lot of German soldiers became addicted to methamphetamine.

But in the Western campaign, as it's called from the German perspective against France and Great Britain, this wasn't really a problem because it was over quite quickly. So they could rest afterwards. They could go to the beaches of France and rest, you know. So it was quite successful in that campaign. But it created in Hitler a kind of feeling of total superiority, like he could do anything. So that also contributed to his decision to attack the Soviet Union. And Germany almost won in the fall of 1941, but then they didn't, and then it dragged on, and the war was not over within three months, which would have been the only option on methamphetamine, that you finish it in the first like two, three months and then you have to take a rest because you cannot take methamphetamine for four years. But the war against the Soviet Union dragged on for another four, well, it was about four years. So eventually the effects became negative for the German army because, you know, I read lots of reports of soldiers becoming depressed if they didn't take methamphetamine. On the other hand, you can't take it all the time. You know, you build up a tolerance. It's just not physiologically possible. So for a long war methamphetamine is quite bad. For a short war it's quite good. Good, of course, in a neutral, you know, just from a military perspective.

It's quite interesting and I looked at the papers of his personal physician which are stored in the national archives and actually no one had ever looked at it which is totally crazy because this physician, Theodor Morell, is his name. He spent more time with Hitler than anyone else. He was a very close personal physician, like they were always together because Hitler didn't have any friends basically. No one liked him really or he didn't allow closeness because he was such a weirdo. But Morell was also a weirdo. He was also like a singular character. He was quite chubby and big and he had terrible eating habits. No one liked him. But Hitler liked him because no one liked him. And there was also no one behind Morell. He was not part of an organization. He was just a private doctor. And somehow these two guys got along and Morell started giving Hitler injections on a daily basis starting already in 1936. But in the beginning Morell was a vitamin nut, like he loved vitamins which at the time was kind of unknown. Today we all love vitamins. But he really believed that vitamins make you healthier. And Hitler also believed it and he was never sick for the five years until '41. And he kind of got dependent on these daily injections of vitamins and glucose and all kinds of stuff that he thought would help his health. And then in '41 during the campaign actually against the Soviet Union, he became ill for the first time and he had the so-called Russian flu and he had high fever. He couldn't get out of bed, but he still wanted to go to the military briefing which was a crucial briefing because the German generals wanted to head towards Moscow while Hitler wanted to split up the troops and go to Leningrad and to the south to the oil fields of the Caucasus. And Morell gave him for the first time an opioid intravenously. And that's very different from receiving vitamin C if you receive a potent opioid especially intravenously. But Hitler loved the injection. He didn't take any pills. He didn't like pills, they were too slow to him. But injections are quick. So he actually, I don't know if you've ever received an intravenous injection of an opioid. It really works. Like if you have the flu, one minute later you don't have it anymore, or at least you don't feel it anymore. So Hitler just stood up and went to the briefing and he loved it and from that moment on he gets more and more opioids and once you start with injections of opioids you don't stop because the high apparently is so great, you feel really good, especially the one he took, which was Eukodal, which today is called oxycodone. It's like an opioid that doesn't make you sleepy but it actually makes you energetic and your thoughts are very clear and you have charisma and you're happy. So he became an opioid junkie basically. He never used Pervitin, the methamphetamine, that was just for the foot soldiers. So they would turn into fighting machines, but the opioid was for him the drug of his choice. I mean he never thought of it as a drug. For him it was just a medicine to make him functional.

Well, he was probably a person of natural charisma for a while because he was able to convince a lot of people just being natural with his ideas and with his way of communicating. But he lost that ability around '41, '42 and then especially when the war went really bad with the Soviet Union after Stalingrad, like no one took him that seriously anymore. I mean, everyone was still afraid of him, but especially the generals were not really sure that he would take the right decisions. But with the opioid, he was able to have stamina in the room or be good in the room, as they say in Hollywood. He became very convincing, but he needed the drug to be so convincing while before he didn't need the drug. So he kind of supplanted his lack of natural charisma with the artificial stimulation.