Norman Ohler: Blitzed, Tripped, and How Drugs Shaped History

Is it working? Yes, it's working. Well, thank you so much for having me here. It's quite amazing. I had only known Patagonia as this kind of literary topos that Bruce Chatwin invented with his book. And now suddenly I am in Patagonia. Yesterday I was in Berlin and then I spent like 16 hours just plane time. I mean, you've all come here, so it's not a big deal, but I'm just still — my soul is maybe still somewhere else. I don't know. Let's see. Let's hope that the soul will come also for this talk, because it's all about the soul. Yeah. About my work. I mean, it's literature. So I'm very happy actually to be at Edge City and also learn about Edge City. I find it highly fascinating. We just chatted about the idea of the network state, which is also something that I've been fantasizing about the whole time. So I'm very curious about what we're going to speak about today.

Well, I am a novelist, so I invent things, you know, I write stories and I published three novels when I was — well, started in my 20s and they came out one after the other. And then I was about to write the fourth book, but I was living in Berlin and suddenly I was taking a lot of drugs actually, to be honest, going to clubs because my best friend owned and still owns Club der Visionaere. I don't know if you are familiar with that club. There's someone up here that has a fan in the audience. Club der Visionaere. So I've spent a lot of time in Club der Visionaere. Not in the club, but only in the office that was — I mean, it was not really an office. It was a very wild place. And I didn't write for like 12 years. No book was published. My father told me I should switch profession and it's not going anywhere. And it really didn't go anywhere because I just started books but I couldn't finish them because I already had the next great crazy ideas for the next book. But what I did, and this I realized later on, I really did proper drug research. I really understood drugs. It takes a while, you know, to go really to the bottom of it because then I was really ready when I asked — after like 10 years of not finishing anything — I asked my friend Alex, who's the brother of Gregor and a DJ, resident DJ at Club der Visionaere. I said, 'What should I write about? You know, what will ever make a book again?' He said, 'Well, just write about Nazis and drugs.' And I'm like, 'But Nazis didn't take any drugs.' And this came out of a deep understanding of National Socialism because I've been growing up in West Germany. And we learn a lot about — at least we did learn a lot about National Socialism. Like we were really educated, like the credo of West Germany was this should never happen again. So we have to know what fascism is. So we like get it, you know, in school. We actually learned quite a lot. But there was never any talk about drugs because no one really knew about it. But Alex said, 'No, they took drugs.' And I said, 'How do you know? I mean, what's this? You know, you're on drugs yourself right now.' He said, 'Yeah, sure, I'm on drugs.' But they did take drugs because — this morning, what, this evening or last night or something? This was in 2010. A friend of his who is an antique dealer had bought an old medicine cabinet and he just told me this like two days ago. I always thought it was from an old apartment but he corrected me two days ago. I asked him how does it actually — how was that again? It was a medicine — like just like a cupboard from an old pharmacy. This pharmacy went bankrupt or something and then he just bought like the old furniture from this pharmacy in West Berlin and it still had in 2010 original Pervitin tablet — I mean, packages of Pervitin tablets. And this antique dealer, being a good friend of Alex, he took them because it said on the package that they contain methamphetamine. And his — methamphetamine from — but these were from the '40s. But he wanted to try if it's really like German chemical quality product and they worked really well. And I met him actually — I filmed him a few years after, like after the book was already out. I met this guy for the first time. I only had heard of him from Alex and he told me that he and his boyfriend took like methamphetamine for like a month from this pharmacy and they just said — he said it was the best month we have ever had, like we were so productive that we had the best sex and then we partied. And because this is not crystal meth basically. This is methamphetamine a German pharmaceutical company invented this in '38, patented it, and it was like one pill had three milligrams of methamphetamine. It's still a bad drug but it was a high quality bad drug basically. But I only had heard this from Alex. So Alex also took it in 2010 and he said this is really like — this was quite strong actually. So I became interested because I realized, well, there was a product in the '40s that contained pure methamphetamine and this went against everything I had learned as a kid about National Socialism. So I Googled, there was not much on it, but there was one historian from a southern German university and he had examined how methamphetamine was being abused by or used by the German military and how that led to the successful Blitzkrieg campaigns. And he had concluded in this like two — just a two-page academic text, his conclusion was the Blitzkrieg would never have been possible without methamphetamine. And that was quite a radical statement because no one in Germany had ever heard of this, you know, no one in the world had ever heard of this and it's a big piece of the puzzle of World War II. So I decided then to actually go and meet that historian first and he was very open about his research and he said, 'Yeah, there's a lot more. I just don't have the time.' And he told me exactly where in the military archive of Germany to look for the files, where because there was one professor responsible for the whole meth program for the German army. So I found everything. Like I was in the military archive for a few days and I had like information that no one had ever seen before and I thought this is great for a novel. Like I'm going to write like how the guys were in the tanks on meth like charging into France and how then it all crashed. And it's a great story, tragic real event, but great story for a novel I thought. But then my publisher — and I wrote a 1,000-page novel. Like I was partly on methamphetamine myself because I wanted to test it. I'd never taken it before. I asked my weed dealer. I told her, 'Can you get meth?' And she's like, 'No, that's bad stuff. I don't want to touch it.' Then like a week later, she said, 'Okay, I know a guy.' And he brought — 'I have a gram for you.' So I had a gram of meth. I thought of Paul Schrader, the author of Taxi Driver, one of my favorite movies, who had kept a loaded handgun in his drawer just to be like on edge while he was writing it. So I thought that this would be like my loaded gun would be like one gram of crystal meth. And I took it myself, which made me write a lot. And I also realized something, that it's not really good for writing because you just produce a lot but your self-criticism is lower because you feel like you have such a high. So it's not really good. So the novel was not so good but I had a thousand pages and I presented it very proudly to my publisher and he said, well, it's okay, you know, but he was really fascinated by the topic obviously. He said you have to write a non-fiction book. And I was like kind of for two days I was like not really happy about this suggestion because I thought non-fiction books are boring and I had never written one. And I said to him, 'They're boring.' And he said, 'Not necessarily. Only German historians write boring non-fiction books. If you already look to England or America, there's already a trend of writing kind of fluent and novel-like non-fiction books.' And then I kind of reinvented the genre. I wrote a page-turning non-fiction book about Nazis and drugs. Everything in that book, Blitzed, has sources, is correct. It's like an academic apparatus in the book but still reads — it's a fun read. I love — I mean, I think it's a funny story actually and that this is kind of the genesis of Blitzed. It's not funny, but it is entertaining because it tells a story that we all know — World War II — in a different way with the same outcome, but still it's told in a different way that makes you actually understand it much better. You're much closer to what actually happened. That was fascinating to me. I never planned this, but it just happened.

I thought every historian does that. I thought all historians always go to the archives, but later I found out no historian does that because it's too much work. They're too lazy. They just basically use other work and create their own work from other secondary sources. To actually go to the primary sources is like unusual.

I mean, I was stoned a lot in the archives, which is kind of nice because the archives are such kind of boring places in a way, but if you're stoned, it becomes a bit surreal and the archive really comes through the original documents and also your fantasy kind of goes wild when you

I mean, the interesting — or the irony of the story is that the Nazis actually did portray themselves as teetotalers. Hitler was — the cult around Hitler had always this focus that he had no private life, was totally drug-free, didn't drink alcohol, was a vegetarian, was just like a saintly servant of the German people. That was the propaganda. And the Nazis officially were an anti-drug government. They were actually the first anti-drug government in the world, basically. I mean, you could say that the Catholic Church — and we come later to Sapiens, which is like a broader view — but the Catholic Church also was an anti-drug regime already, you know, much, much earlier. But in the 20th century, Nazi Germany was the first modern state that had a very strict anti-drug policy. And then they took all these drugs. That's kind of the irony because they were obviously a capitalist, high-performance-driven society system. So when in 1936 during the Olympic Games an African-American athlete named Jesse Owens won, I think, six gold medals and was faster than the German superhumans, there was rumor that he must have been on something. The '36 Olympics were the last Olympics without any doping checks at all. You could basically take whatever you wanted. And so they said like he's — and Benzedrine was already on the market. Benzedrine is an American amphetamine. So and there's never proof that Owens actually took Benzedrine. Maybe he did, but no one ever proved it, but there was the rumor. And then this German chemist, he said, 'We — this can never happen again. We must invent a better amphetamine.' And he invented methamphetamine. I mean, it had been already synthesized in 1917 in Tokyo, but he found and he researched this. No one knew about this. It's just a Japanese chemist once made methamphetamine but nothing came out of it. So he, the Temmler company in Berlin with his chief chemist Hauschild, made a new — he found a new way to synthesize methamphetamine. It came onto the market in Germany. It was a big success because it was just — it was like today now we all drink coffee or something, you know, every day we take something to increase our performance or most of us anyhow. And in Germany there was nothing really on the market. Germany didn't have many colonies compared to other European powers, Western powers especially, so coffee was not really available. And suddenly there was methamphetamine and it became hugely popular. In 1938, they even came quite quickly a methamphetamine-laced chocolate onto the market where one little piece had 9 milligrams of methamphetamine. And this was marketed especially for women because the Nazis wanted women to just kind of stay at home, clean the house and make like all these boring things at home. So at least they had methamphetamine-laced chocolate. There was like posters of this very happy German housewife high on crystal meth basically cleaning the house really well, I would imagine. While the men, you know, they had fun, you know, going to war on meth, you know. It was like a real separation that worked for National Socialism because actually then there was one professor responsible for performance enhancement of the Wehrmacht, the German army, and he had taken methamphetamine himself, Pervitin, that was the brand name, and he liked it himself. And then he read the first studies that had been done in German universities which had come to the conclusion that it lowers your fear level and it decreases your need to sleep. And he thought these two things are perfect for a soldier. And it's actually still being used today by — you know, I've spoken with — like I took in the summer I took Ibogaine with US Special Forces vets and they had told me that they also when they had to go on longer missions they always take an amphetamine, not maybe necessarily methamphetamine, but stimulant chemicals. These amphetamine stimulants are very good — not good, but effective for soldiers. So the German army really got into it and they got into it at a point when Hitler, who was determined to attack the West, was again and again confronted with the resistance of high command because the people in high command in Germany were highly intellectual, rational Prussian generals who said, 'We don't have a strategy. We — what? There's the French army. French army was supposed to be the best army in the world. And the British military also very good military. Together they will of course win against us, same as in World War I. So what's the strategy?' But Hitler just had this like obsession: we have to attack in the West after beating Poland. Now we have to beat the West. So then there were three tank generals who said Germany could go through the Ardennes mountains because the French and British troops were in the north of Belgium and in south of France but not really in the Ardennes mountains, which is a small mountain region in Belgium, and no one had ever thought of like moving a whole army through this eye of a needle basically. And Hitler said, 'Yeah, that's what we have to do.' And then they said the only problem is we have to like march for three days and three nights without stopping so they don't come from the north and the south and kind of crush us in the middle. So how is this possible? Because a human being cannot stay awake for three days and three nights. We have to rest at night. And Hitler just said, 'No, the German soldier can do anything. Never has to rest. I don't have to rest. They don't have to rest.' Which is — you know, you have to rest. But then the methamphetamine — then the Ranke, this professor, like when he heard about this problem that was unsolvable, he said, 'Well, now we're going to use this meth — use methamphetamine and we're just going to make it possible.' And so they kind of put everything on the methamphetamine card and ordered 35 million dosages which were then distributed on May 10th. So May 10th, there were millions of German soldiers, especially the tank soldiers, swallowing methamphetamine. And then the advance was very successful. They actually — the tank general Guderian, who was one of the three next to Rommel, famous, these three tank generals who invented this plan, he said to his men, 'I asked you to stay awake for three days and three nights.' Who actually stayed awake for 17 days and 17 nights, which is probably an exaggeration even on meth. You know, my friend Alex, the DJ, he could do like five days and five nights. I don't know if 17 is possible, but that's how the Blitzkrieg was basically invented — or it just happened. It was not really invented. It kind of happened. So it kind of — they stumbled into this like strategy and it really worked out. And I described this in the book and no military historian had ever described it this way, had ever figured this out basically how it worked. But then they said, 'This is exactly how it worked.' And you can actually see in the archives like how many pills were distributed, in which way to the medical officers, which divisions were taking how many pills. It's very well documented because the Germans are very good at documenting everything.

Well, human beings don't really want to kill other human beings and also even Germans don't want to invade like foreign countries all the time. It's a very unnatural thing to do. And I read quite a few reports about like depression just before May 10th. No one wanted to go to war. Like the morale was really low because everyone thought it's going to end like World War I when there was just a stalemate for four years. They were in the trenches and this is like totally senseless and totally ridiculous. And so no one wanted to fight. But when the methamphetamine kicked in — and it kicked in like it was basically like everyone was taking it and there was this movement of the tanks and they were going like into enemy territory and suddenly the mood completely changed and they became euphoric. And also on methamphetamine you kind of — it's not like on a psychedelic where you broaden your consciousness or your horizon, you narrow it actually. So it becomes narrow and then you don't question — I mean, they didn't question it. They were like 18-year-old German guys already indoctrinated anyhow, you know. So they just went with it. Like they just went with it and they were successful and they kind of got into like the intoxication of warfare. So it really worked, you know. It was a chemical enhancement of the indoctrination basically, right? It's like the first drug was the propaganda of National Socialism and the second was the Pervitin on top of it.

I mean, just to round up this story with Rommel because you mentioned Rommel. Rommel is this famous tank general. I mean, later became famous. He's like a legend in Great Britain because he was fighting Montgomery in the desert. That's why he's called the Desert Fox in North Africa. But Rommel really liked crystal meth. That's why I call him the Crystal Fox in the book. But you can see with Rommel when he took — and his division took crystal meth and didn't stop at night, they were also — that this was what — because the Wehrmacht was kind of — they thought of themselves as this honorary military apparatus that would, you know, apply all the rules and be an ethical army. But when they were on crystal meth charging into France, they started to commit war crimes. Like there's this report about Rommel going through a village, a French village at night where the French army had basically camped because the French army also had a drug of choice which was red wine, which had been quite successful for them in World War I because red wine does kind of boost your morale or makes you feel better, but only like if you're fighting in the trenches and it's cold and rainy. But if you're like fighting an enemy that's on crystal meth, it doesn't really work because it does make you tired in the evening. So the French guys were sleeping and then Rommel, like high on crystal meth, charging through and just running over them and not really even noticing I guess that they were like running over sleeping soldiers like on the side of the road. So this is when it kind of changes and war crimes start to happen already in France. And then when Germany invades the Soviet Union, this is when the army really becomes a criminal or terrorist organization I would say and commits war crimes like non-stop. Yeah. So Hitler himself — when I said to this military historian that I'm also going to examine Hitler, he said, 'No, Hitler is just — this is not real. This is this kind of yellow press. Hitler — why Hitler?' But Hitler was and is really interesting because he's at the head of the state. And when I checked out the records of his doctor at the federal archives in Germany, I could see the record of when they were looked at in the last — since the war ended. And I had been like the third person to look at them. So Hitler, being the most examined historical figure in the world, having this doctor that was with him every day and he spent more time with Morell, his personal physician, than with any other person. And Morell like meticulously makes notes of every day he spent with Hitler and what he gave and what he injected at what time and what military decisions had to be made or what other decisions and how Hitler was before the injection and afterwards. And no one had ever looked at the stuff. That was quite amazing. I was quite happy when I realized that because I was like — I would like literally be a fly on the wall and I'd never been so interested in Hitler. I guess, you know, it's interesting somehow, but like the first thing I read was a report of the SS describing this kind of overweight doctor Morell coming and going with Hitler into this room, closing the door and then coming back out with a syringe and then washing the syringe in the wash basin of the SS and like no one knew what he was doing inside. And I became really curious like what did he do inside? What drugs did Hitler take? How did that change his behavior basically or his strategies? And everything was actually there. Everything was there in these notes which were kind of hard to read because doctors always have a terrible handwriting, but the archivist gave me like a magnifying glass. And then my drug research from Club der Visionaere really paid off because Hitler was taking like stuff that I could only evaluate because I knew drugs basically. I mean, one of the most interesting substances was Eukodal, and Eukodal is now known as oxycodone. And actually Eukodal I didn't know, but Alex — I showed him the copies, the DJ Alex, he said, 'What? He took Eukodal? Are you insane?' I said, 'What is Eukodal?' He said, 'Well, it's oxycodone.' And he took 20 milligrams intravenously. That's like the highest high you can imagine. And then you can like tell a story, you know, much better if he like goes into a meeting with his high command military briefing and just injects oxycodone 20 milligrams intravenously before, then you can understand better why generals were still impressed with his like charisma and his like total conviction that this is going to go like this way and this way. So it's quite interesting actually.

Well, oxycodone is the opioid that created the opioid crisis in the United States. It's a painkiller. But that's why if you just take the pill, it just kind of numbs you and you kind of have a warm feeling, I guess, and you're not really concerned with anything anymore, with any problem. But if you — that's why some people crush the pills and sniff them or like the hardest — you know, the strongest effects obviously when you inject it. When you inject oxycodone then you have a really euphoric-making high that also gives you mental clarity. So it's not like a — you're not drowsy in any way. You're like really like you feel like — I've never taken it, but Alex described it to me and Morell described how Hitler was feeling. You basically feel like on top of the world and you're really — this is how you're supposed to feel. Like it gives you a high that I guess Hitler really appreciated because he became a junkie. He used it every second day after a while and really could in a way project that charisma that he originally had but kind of lost when all the battles were lost. So then he started using this chemically — this artificial charisma. That's how he used it like a pharmacological weapon to boost himself.

Yeah. This was in 1943, July. And Morell, the doctor, was not really — I mean, he was not a pro-opioid kind of guy. He was just a doctor that believed that through medications you can improve someone's performance. That was — he was a VIP doctor in Berlin. He would like give actresses or like anybody who would pay his high prices, he would give injections. Basically was an avant-garde feel-good doctor. And he had given Hitler mostly vitamins until '41. In '41 he started giving opioids once in a while. Hitler had had the flu in '41 during a very intense time in the Russian campaign. So Hitler wanted more than vitamins and he received an opioid for the first time which made him able to go into the briefing and, you know, make the decision. And then in '43, Mussolini, the Italian dictator basically had enough of the war and wanted to leave. And so they had like a crucial meeting between the two dictators and Hitler was kind of upset and depressed that he — like he didn't want to go into the meeting because Hitler was also like avoiding — he also liked to like stay home and basically do nothing and kind of talk about philosophy and architecture. But now he had to really like convince Mussolini that he would stay and this is all, you know, very important. So he asked Morell again to give him something very strong this time and Morell gave him this Eukodal, this oxycodone. And Hitler liked it so much that on the way to the plane he already asked for the second dose. He got addicted to stuff quite quickly and from that moment on he was a big Eukodal fan. But Eukodal really was a drug back in the days that was used by many doctors especially who had access to it and who knew the effect. So it was also like writers would take Eukodal. Apparently it was a very pleasant high, just the only problem with Eukodal is it makes you addictive obviously because opioid.

Well, there are like a few reports and they all say that Hitler was so high on this Eukodal that he spoke basically non-stop for like three hours and Mussolini was not able to even like say that he was like considering to leave the war effort, to leave the Axis of Evil. So Hitler was really kind of riding the high and speaking non-stop and then Mussolini just never had the chance to actually make his arguments and Italy stayed until, you know, another year or two years until they finally left the war. In the evening, [Morell] wrote in his notebook, 'I think I made history today.'

Yeah.

Well, next to all the vitamins and the opioids, there was another form of drugs that Hitler really liked and those were hormone cocktails that were made from slaughtered animals. And when Germany had occupied the Ukraine, Morell had the monopoly on all the organs of all the slaughtered animals in the Ukraine. They were all shipped to his pharmaceutical company and there he made — he experimented with like pig's liver extracts and like weird glands from sheep that he turned into medicines that were supposed to boost your energy level. And Hitler was very happy to play like the guinea pig basically for Morell because these medicines could not be brought onto the market because it was a war economy. So Hitler said, 'I'm going to test them all myself and then if I like them, they can be brought onto the market.' And he basically ruined his health with these hormone concoctions because they're quite dangerous and they were also fabricated under dubious hygienic conditions. It's really quite weird actually. I mean, the weirdness of National Socialism you could kind of see the absurdity and the perversity like just in Hitler's drug-taking. So he basically self-ruined his health. National Socialism also being fascism, being a self-destructive system because it's full of hate towards the other. So that hate — you know, why do you hate the other? Because you basically hate yourself. I mean, National Socialism was a self-destructive movement. So Hitler was also a self-destructive person. So Morell and Hitler, they were kind of teaming up to — I mean, Morell later on had like — he was like afraid that like Nazis would kill him because he basically ruined Hitler without wanting to do that, but Hitler kind of demanded more and more drugs and Morell wanted to experiment and wanted to test out more and more different stuff. So what was your question? I'm sorry.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. So for me it's pretty clear that the degeneration of the health came from the self-medication. This movie The Downfall, I don't know if you know this movie. It's not bad, but it totally — it doesn't discuss the drugs at all. So it kind of misses the point because no historian actually has an explanation for why did this somewhat healthy person suddenly become a very, very unhealthy — like a wreck. You know, Hitler in the end was like a wreck. He was like shaking and talking nonsense basically. And this has a lot to do with drugs and then also with opioid withdrawal because when he goes to the bunker in 1945 there's no more opioid available because the British bombing raids had also destroyed the Temmler company who was producing the Eukodal. And apparently there's like an entry in Morell's diary in like February 1945 how he's — and he really was a very heavy man — and he describes how he's like riding on a motorcycle through bombed-out Berlin going from pharmacy to pharmacy trying to find opioids for Hitler. So this is a Hollywood scene I would say and he couldn't find it anymore. So Hitler really becomes — kind of has cold turkey and kind of withdraws — he loses World War II and he withdraws from opioids. So he really felt like shit basically, which is poetic justice, I guess.