Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481

- Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs, actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains. If you, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. It becomes a stalemate, and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it's bloody, and nothing's happening. It's bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That's why the high command said, "No, we're not going to do it. It's stupid." But these three tank generals, they said, "Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains," and like Hitler, "Eh, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle," basically. And they said, "No, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that wait for the action to happen, and then support this somehow. We're going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We're going to overpower the enemy. We're going to be in France before they know it. We are already behind them, but it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights, and that was only possible if you don't stop." Suddenly, Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. Before that, he was kind of an outsider, like the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly, he became ...like- ..."Okay, tell us, how does it work?" And he gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case methamphetamine, how much should be taken, and at what intervals. This became a very big thing. And then Temmler had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines. And then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains. - The following is a conversation with Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. A book that investigates what role psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, played in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians, Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor, give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as, "Very well researched, serious piece of scholarship." And Antony Beevor describes it as, "Remarkable work of research." And it is indeed a remarkable work of research. Norman went deep into the archives using primary sources to uncover a perspective on Hitler and the Third Reich that has before this been mostly ignored by historians. He also wrote Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. And he's now working on a new book with the possible title of Stoned Sapiens, great title, looking at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here's Norman Ohler. Tell me the origin story of meth, methamphetamine, and Pervitin, its brand name drug version, in the context of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Let's start there. - I think you're right to ask about the context because without the context, it's not really understandable. So what was the situation? In the 20s, the Nazi movement basically started, and it started in Bavarian beer halls. So alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy that didn't drink was Hitler. He was a teetotaler, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich. So alcohol and National Socialism are very closely connected. At the same time, in the 20s, in Berlin, there was a completely different thing going on. People were taking all kinds of drugs. This had to do, actually, with the defeat of Germany in the First World War. I mean, the context is a big context. The Versailles Treaty had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty was written basically by the Western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. And I'm certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Versailles Treaty treated Germany somewhat unfairly. I mean, it laid all the blame on Germany. And, I mean, a war is a very complex thing, and the First World War to examine how it actually started is a very complex, you know, story, and there's many factors to it. But the Versailles Treaty just said it was Germany's fault, and then Germany had to do all these payments to the allies. It couldn't create a new economy. It couldn't have a new army. So it was — the economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap, and the people were also using substances that were very cheap in huge quantities. So while in Bavaria, they were drinking alcohol, and alcohol in the brain, stimulates behavior, group behavior: us against them. You can actually examine this. A neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. While in Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphine. There was cocaine, there was mescaline, there was ether. So people were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset. It was all... you know, you didn't behave in a way that some kind of authority would like you to behave in, because the authority had just lost the First World War and there was no real authority in Berlin. People were doing whatever they wanted to do, and they were intoxicating themselves in the way they wanted to do it. So the population, in a way, if you just look at Munich and Berlin, was growing apart. Like, there were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, and then there were these weird, diverse, LGBTQ, whatever kind of scene in Berlin. Like, actresses sniffing ether in the morning and then making crazy moves. - Could you speak to the nature of the motivation of the drug use in Berlin at the time? Was it rebellion? Was it a way to deal with the difficult economic depression? Was it just the natural thing that young people do to explore themselves, to understand the world, to develop their culture? Like, what do we understand about drug use there? - All of these factors come together. But it was the first time in modern history, in Germany at least, that there was no emperor. Like, before that, Kaiser Wilhelm, everything was very strict, you know? You had to... you couldn't go crazy, you know, as a young person. You couldn't be a young person. But now in the Weimar Republic in the '20s, you could. No one stopped you, so people went crazy. That's what made Berlin into the city that it still somehow is. And maybe later we talk about contemporary Berlin. It kind of... it's still has that vibe, you know? That's why people still come to Berlin. Drugs are cheap, you can move however you want, there's no authority. So that created a rift between the Nazis in Munich, and they always hated Berlin and what was going on in Berlin. So, for example, Goebbels, the later propaganda minister, he called the situation in Berlin the hated asphalt reality of Berlin. He hated that. And when the Nazis then were able to take power in 1933, one of the first things they did was to really prosecute people who were taking drugs, because they wanted to, you know, bring everyone back into the fold. And I think that's... You asked what was the reason for people taking so many drugs. They were accessible, they were cheap, but I think the most important thing is that they let you find yourself maybe, or lose yourself, you know? Also possible, you know? - Can we also talk about that here, because you have a connection to this place, Berlin, and this part of the world. Can you just briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even deeper the personal aspect of this? Because you understand the music of the people, the land, its history. There's something you can only really understand if you've been there and you have taken it in. And we'll return to this topic in multiple contexts, but in this particular way, as one human being who writes about this place, what's your own story? - I grew up in West Germany, and this was during the World War. And Berlin, the walled-in city, was always like a big fascination. There was a wall, there was actually a wall in the city preventing people to move into another part. And I was from the West, fortunate enough to be from the free West, so I could travel to Berlin and I could leave. I could look at it, and I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very vibey place. And then when the wall came down, I was still in school but I immediately got into the car of my parents and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. And then Berlin really, in the '90s, became a place that was very attractive to me and I moved there then in the '90s. I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York, and I loved New York before Giuliani became mayor. It was... He ruined the city. Before that, it was not gentrified. Or let's say he introduced gentrification, and gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in the ungentrified New York City for like 300 bucks a month rent, and everyone I knew was an artist. - You loved the diversity of it? - Yeah, I loved it. I wrote my first novel there. I took LSD for the first time in Downtown Manhattan on a Saturday night. - So you're kind of like a German Kerouac type character, but moved a few decades forward. - I wouldn't compare myself to another writer, but I think Kerouac is pretty cool. But he's an amphetamine writer. "On the Road" was apparently written in two weeks on amphetamines. And, but it's good. Amphetamines are not bad per se. We can also talk about these so-called bad drugs, you know, because basically they're neutral. But let's not lose the thread. - Yes. Yes. New York, Berlin- - Even though New York was- - Yes. - Oh, yeah. And then I was in New York. I was in a health food store, one of the first. Like, there weren't health food stores back then a lot, but there was one on First Avenue. And suddenly there was an announcement, which was unusual in the health food store. I think it was called Prana, Prana Foods. And the announcement was that Kurt Cobain had just shot himself. It was like... and I had been actually, and still am, a Nirvana fan. I've seen one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York City, and it was amazing. But he killed himself. And the next day, I received a music cassette from a friend of mine from Berlin with electronic music, and I realized that there had been a paradigm shift, obviously. Rock music with the hero on stage was dead. Now it was, you know, dance, electronic music, which a lot of people today think it's kind of simplistic music form, but it's actually a very highly intelligent music form. At least it was in the '90s. People were really experimenting with that music. That was the new music. That was actually the reason I moved to Berlin. I really decided I'd leave New York City. I'm going to move to Berlin. And then in Berlin, to answer your question, I fell in love with something that probably reminded me of the '20s, even though I wasn't there in the '20s. That really... The city was very open. The wall had just... was still, you know... I mean, it's a few years later, but still, the wall, it felt like it just came down. There was... Germany was... Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany. That was still in Bonn. So Berlin was a very cheap, and cultural, and crazy city, probably a bit like in the '20s, actually. And that's how I fell in love with it, and that's how I became interested in this electronic scene. I mean, I visited many dance venues then, so-called clubs. - Yeah, it's one of the hubs in the world of electronic music. - They claim that techno was kind of invented in Berlin, but it also comes from Detroit. So Detroit and Berlin are like the techno hubs, I would say. - Yeah, electronic music is a soundtrack for some of the most interesting experiences this earth has ever created, right? Just it gets people together in some interesting ways. So it's not just the music itself, it's the experiences that the music enables. - Well, in Germany, we had a situation that the wall actually kept people apart. People didn't know each other. But because the wall came down, people suddenly met in abandoned buildings in the center of Berlin, which had been owned by the socialist state of East Germany. The most famous club, Tresor... Tresor means, like, vault. It was the big vault with the big doors, so that's where Tresor was, the club. - It's so funny that the echo 100 years later, Berlin had all these left-wing partiers, young people using drugs, and then Munich with the beer, and then that's where Hitler came out. So is that what we're supposed to imagine in the early days of the Nazi party when Hitler's giving the speeches to just a handful of folks, they're all drunk? - Well, it is a fact that the movement came out of the Bürgerbräukeller. It's a certain restaurant pub in Munich, and that was not only a beer hall, that was also a political venue. And it was a right-wing venue. It was for right-wing populists. People like communists wouldn't use it, even though communists are in many ways quite similar to the right wing, especially back then. But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others. He could play with that, you know? - So drunk, aggressive towards others, but drunk in a group. - It constitutes the group also... ...if everyone is on the same alcohol level. You can just go to Oktoberfest in Munich, which is not a political thing, but everyone, you know, you can kind of sense how it originated. And actually, the first time the Nazis tried to grab power was the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. I mean, that's a historical event. It took place in 1923, and it was after a drunk night where they suddenly decided, "Now we're going to do it." So they came out of the Bürgerbräukeller, and they were all drunk except Hitler, and they just tried to overtake the Munich government, and they miserably failed because it was just a stupid drunk idea. They were like, "Yeah, let's just do it." And the Bavaria police, quite sober that day, they just, you know, shot them to the ground. Hitler was almost killed. He just jumped behind his bodyguard. Göring, during the Beer Hall Putsch was wounded in his stomach with a, I think, a gunshot. That's why he became a morphine addict. So this Beer Hall Putsch in '23 had severe effects. Also, they were sentenced to prison, and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison. - All these little events come together. It's so interesting that for them it was just life, but now we look back at these critical moments in history that turned the tides of human civilization, right? So Hitler could have died there, and these characters, Göring, that became larger than life— that influenced the lives and the deaths and the suffering of millions, all... First of all, it could have been stopped then, and whatever that means when you look back at history. But all those are just human beings developing their ideas, growing, developing groups, developing ideologies, and using drugs or drinking. - I mean, that's why I thought it's interesting, for example, to examine Hitler's drug use. When I announced that to a historian while I was doing research, he helped me a lot with methamphetamine and the army, a proper medicine historian from the University of Ulm. And then I said, "Now I'm interested in Hitler." He said, "No, don't. This is not interesting. This is not serious... His, his... "This is not serious history." But it's... You know, even Hitler was a person, you know? And if you understand, for example, the substance abuse of a person, of course you understand more about that person. And historians never had that idea before. Kershaw, for example, who is really a great... He's very knowledgeable about National Socialism. Like many British historians, they always know more about German history than the German historians, but Kershaw really does. I think he's, he's really good. But in his biography of Hitler, he just writes one sentence like, "And then he had a crazy doctor called Morell who gave him dubious medications and drugs," and he stops there, and then he goes on to describe whatever. - Yeah, we should say that Ian Kershaw is widely considered to be probably one of the greatest biographers of Hitler. - I think he wrote the best biography of Hitler. - Which is so important. Your work is really important because it opens a whole new perspective on the lives of the individuals and the machinery of the Nazi military that historians haven't looked at. It's so interesting that you can unlock those perspectives. And that's the underlying really, the foundation of our conversation today and of your work, is there are layers to this thing. You can look at the tactics of war and the strategic level of war, the operational level of war. You could look at the human suffering of war, the love stories. You could look at the hate, the psychology of propaganda, or you could look at the individual things, substances consumed by the individuals that make up the Nazi Party leadership and the soldiers. And all those are critically important to understand the war, right? And this piece of drug use and supplement use have been ignored by historians. - That was very surprising to me, you know. I didn't know this myself. I never planned to write this book. It kind of happened to me. And I decided to team up with the leading German historian on National Socialism, Hans Mommsen, who has passed away by now. He was quite old, but quite ready to be my mentor for this book, "Blitzed." And he was maybe even shocked when I came back from the military archive of Germany with a lot of copies, all relating to the systematic drug use of the German army, including an experiment done by the Navy, who had always pretended to be the clean, in German we say Waffengattung, weapon. Like you have the Army, you have the Air Force, you have the Navy, you have... And in Germany they had the SS. And the Navy always pretended to be like, "We weren't really Nazis. We were like," you know, the German Navy. We had our ethics code." But I found in the archive that the Navy did human experiments in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, trying to find a new wonder drug, because they had new, what they called "wonder weapons" or what Hitler called "wonder weapons." He always talked about these wonder weapons. Wonder weapons were basically mini submarines. One or two people would go in, staying underwater for up to a week and torpedoing, you know, Allied ships. So the Navy was trying to develop a drug that would keep you awake and combat-ready for seven days and seven nights without sleep and without, you know, burning out. Very difficult to find. So they hired a penalty unit in the concentration camp. They hired... The SS had a so-called "shoe-walking unit." It was a penalty unit within the concentration camp, testing shoe soles for the German shoe industry, walking for days. And then they would measure how the soles, you know, kept up in the stress. And they had different layers in the concentration camp, like all the surfaces the German soldiers would touch when they conquered Europe. So this is a very elaborate thing. If you go to the concentration camp today, it's a museum. You can still see that running track of the shoe runners unit. So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and, you know, chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing. And there's documents to it. And Mommsen, who knew everything about National Socialism, the old, you know, authority. And I'm like the young... I didn't study history. I just, you know, I just try to make sense, you know. But I present him all these documents. He's reading like from this Pill Patrol and he said, "Wow." He said, "We historians, we never do drugs. We don't understand drugs. This, we missed this." So he was very clear that we missed this. And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs. You can explain a lot of Hitler through the drugs, but you can also look at this point that historians so far had not been able to figure out basically. What happened to Hitler? Why did he get crazy? He was crazy, but why did he get so bad as a leader? Because he was very effective for a long time, and then there's this moment where it turns. - Yeah, the degeneration of decision-making. Psychology, behavior, all of that. You cannot understand that fully without understanding his drug use. And we should also say that some of the historians you mentioned, Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beevor, these legends of history, they all gave you compliments. So, Kershaw said that, "Your work is very good, extremely interesting, and a serious piece of well-researched history." Anthony Beevor said that it's a remarkable work of research. So, props to them. You have received a bunch of criticism from historians, but you've also received, obviously, a lot of props. I mean, Kershaw's, the legendary historian of Hitler, complimenting how deep your work is. That must feel good. Maybe this is a good moment to also, since we're talking about historians, to address some of the criticism. So, Richard Evans was also a great historian, has been one of the bigger critics. He said that your work is crass and dangerously inaccurate, and is morally and politically dangerous. I think that's grounded in the idea that if you say that, "Well, all the Nazi forces and Hitler were on drugs, so therefore their evil can be... They're not really evil. It's just accountability can be removed because they were using drugs." - Right. - And also another criticism of his, which I also understand and probably can steelman, is if you look too much through the singular lens of drugs, you can overemphasize it. You know, you can overemphasize how important it was as an explainer of the effectiveness of Blitzkrieg, for example. Because there is some... I mean, I should say there is something really compelling about a singular theory that explains everything, and you can fall in love with it too much as an explainer. So, can you steelman his criticism or a criticism you received, and also argue against it? - I think he's absolutely right that you shouldn't argue in a monacausal way. And this is actually what Mommsen also said to me, because, of course, I was enthusiastic about all my drug findings. And he said, "Don't argue in a monacausal way, especially the war." - There's a lot of variables, a lot of factors, a lot of things going on. - Yeah. So that sentence of his, "Don't argue in a monacausal way," that always stayed with me. And I think that, I didn't deviate from that path actually. But it was still interesting that Evans thought that I put too much emphasis on the drugs. I think it's a totally fine, you know, opinion. I would disagree. Otherwise, I wouldn't have written the book. What I can state here is that I invented nothing. In all of my three non-fiction books, nothing is invented. If you are a good writer, and I trained as a novelist, for me, it was also very unusual to write a non-fiction book. I wanted to write a novel about Nazis and drugs. My publisher said, "No, this is..." And he looked at the, you know, at the facts. He said, "Someone has to write the facts." So I said, "But non-fiction books are boring." He said, "Not necessarily. Maybe you can find a way to write it with your novelistic style, but based 100% on the facts." And that is like... In German we say "Spagat." How do you say that? A split, like when you do with your legs, like... It's hard, you know? Because with a very fluent, sophisticated language, you can easily overpower the reader. If I describe how the German guys, 19-year-old guys took the meth and went into the tank, and the meth started kicking in, five guys on meth after like one hour of ride into France, you can write that in a powerful way that if you are the reader, you would think, "Yeah. I mean, the Blitzkrieg without meth is unthinkable." - There is a bit of a... Man, I wish I found that kind of feeling for historians, right? Like, "How did I miss this piece?" So some historians, like great historians like Kershaw, obviously, see, they kind of give you a, like a slow clap, applaud. And some historians are a little bit skeptical, like, "This is a little too good." So totally understandable. And... - Also, they have different techniques to write texts like this. I used a totally different technique. And I have an apparatus, so it really feels like it could be an academic work. But still, it's written in a way that it kind of overpowers. It, it kind of colonializes the story in a weird way. I never thought about it like that. But while I was writing it, I was just trying to write it as well as I could. I didn't think about these questions we're talking about now. I just... I got carried away, obviously, but I never left the area of facts. - Yes. So we should talk about your process. That's also super fascinating. You went to the archives. You went to the sources. What's that take? What does it feel? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it entail? How much text is there? What language is it in? What's the process there? - I never thought of going to the archives. And my girlfriend at the time, she said, "You have to go to the archives." And she's an academic. So she... And I was like, "Yeah, okay. I'll go." "I'm fine. I'll check it out." And then when I met a historian, he claims that without methamphetamine, there would be no Blitzkrieg, no victory of Germany. Like he's mono-causal. But he was also extremely helpful to me, and he's an academic. He, he, he gave me the signatures, it's called in German, where you find stuff in the archives. Signature is like... Then it says like H2/538, something like this. And these were the files of Professor Ranke. And Professor Ranke was... He was the head of the Institute for Army Physiology. His job was to improve the performance of the soldier. of the soldier. And all of his stuff was filed in a certain place in the military archives, which in Germany is in Freiburg, in the south, in a small town, not in Berlin. Because Germany is a bit of a decentralized country. We don't want to put everything into Berlin again like the Nazis did. We try to avoid our mistakes. So the military archive is in Freiburg, and I went there. And because I had this signature, immediately I got original documents that were all relating to my research. I had the original. - What does it look like? Is it sheets of paper? - Yeah, it's like- - Like, it's not scanned, it's- - Well, it's different things. The guy who did the meth into the army, Professor Ranke. He was writing a war diary. That's what the name was, War Diaries. So every day he would write it by hand. So this war diary was given to me. - So you're reading that? So it's like dated? You have a date- - Yeah - ... the diary? - It was a bit funny with him because he took a lot of meth himself because he thought it was great. He just thought it increases your performance. By now, we know a little bit more that methamphetamine is not so healthy. Because you get used to it and you burn out, you get depressed, then you take more. Big problem. And he became depressed and burnt out, and he didn't realize it's because of the meth that he's describing to the whole German army. He made a convincing case. I can explain that in detail how that actually happened. But just to have his war diary was great, and then he would also type letters writing to the Company of Temmler, how fast they could produce stuff in which time. So you have all these original documents. You have like 500 documents and he writes reports, like, what happened in this battle on methamphetamine. There's a lot of stuff you can find in the archives if you find them. But, the tricky thing is that you can only look. You kind of look at a so-called find book. In the find book you cannot type in "drugs." It wouldn't find anything because at the time when they were taking all the notes from this doctor, his war diary, everything, they didn't put the label "drugs" there. They put the label his name, his position, World War II, French campaign, stuff like that. Because at the time they didn't know that I would at one point come and look for drugs in that. But he was the drug guy, but also they didn't realize he was the drug guy. No one realized that he was the drug guy. So it's not easy to find stuff in the archives. The archives you go to, it's a very Kafkaesque experience. You go into this building, and you have to understand the rules and you will never fully understand what's going on. Also, the archivists, they don't really know what's going on because there are so many documents. No one's read them all, you know? No one knows. History is just kind of lying there, somehow organized, somehow stored. - I mean, it does sound like a very Kafkaesque- - It's- - ... thing. - But it's great if you find something, but you can also sit there for a week and not find anything. - So what was the process for you? You're just reading, open-minded, trying to see if there's some truth here to be discovered? - Well, I have a friend. He's a DJ, and we talked about Berlin. We'll probably talk about it more, and he takes a lot of drugs and he knows his Let's put it that way, he knows his drugs. And one day he said to me when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next, he said, "The Nazis took a lot of drugs. You should write about that." And I said, "The Nazis didn't take drugs," because, you know, when you grow up in Germany, you get educated about the Nazis quite intensely, especially in West Germany. They teach you everything, but they don't teach you drugs. Now they do, maybe, you know. But it was not known, so the Nazis always had this aura of being law and order. No drugs, of course. No chaos. Everything... My grandfather, he was a Nazi, always said, "Well, at least there was discipline in the country. There was law and order." So this doesn't match with drugs, you know? - You know, I should also say I think that's the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling, that the Nazi ideology was all about law and order and purity, and surely they would not be doing drugs. So this really blew my mind. I think I wasn't quite ready, similar to Richard Evans. This is a big, like, okay, a narrative transforming into a deeper, more complicated understanding what Nazi forces and the Hitler inner circle actually looked like. - That's why I didn't believe Alex. - Always take the DJ, the drug expert, with a grain of salt. - I didn't believe him, but I said, "It's a great topic. Maybe I could invent it." He said, "No, we don't invent this. This is real." And I said, "How do you know?" And he said, "I have a friend." And I know this guy by now. I met him. He's an antique dealer in Berlin, and he had bought an old medicine chest in an old Berlin apartment. This was in 2010. And he found Pervitin tablets inside, which were the methamphetamine product that was marketed in Germany in the late '30s. And this guy, the antique dealer, took some tablets and they were quite old, you know, 70 years old, but they still had an effect on him. I later asked him, and he said, "Well, we took them for about a month. It was the greatest month we ever had. We had so much fun. We were so productive." 'Cause that methamphetamine back then was also a quality product. It was not crystal meth made in a trailer lab, you know? - So this is many decades later. - They were still potent. - Especially, Alex convinced me because Alex has a high tolerance and he said, "Okay, they still had some." So I said to him, "Can I have some also?" I took one and he's like, "And this was... We were standing in my writing tower, which is at the river in Berlin, and he was like, 'I took one, and I could feel something. Then I took another one,' and then it's, you know, 'I could feel more.' And then I took a third one. Typical Alex, he would take three, you know. Instead of just taking one, he took three methamphetamine tablets from the 40s. And he said, "And then I felt like..." And he looked at the river. There was a big cargo ship going by, and he said, "I felt like this ship." Suddenly there was this "Shoop" he said in German, like a motion that was like energy that was grabbing me, and I felt so powerful. And he told me this, and I was like, "Wow!" This is like... And I Googled, "Methamphetamine, Nazi Germany." This was in 2010. And there was this one professor at the University in Ulm who said, "The Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine." So I called up this guy and he said, "Sure, I'll meet you." And then he gave me the signature for the archive. Then I went to the archive, and then I really started to do my own research. Then I went to different archives, and I tried to find everything on Nazis and drugs. And that came... Everything is in the book. So that crazy meeting with Alex in my writing tower, that kind of got me on this research journey. - It makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives. Do you think there's stuff like that in there that we deeply don't understand? I mean about, for example, there's a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand maybe about the concentration camps, maybe about the Eastern Front, the interplay between Stalin and Hitler. Maybe about Britain that could be discovered in the letters, in the data that were completely missing. - I think so. And I think that also there are archives that are not open. Let's say the Vatican archive. Some secret archives that some very powerful structures have, structures that we might not even know, you know, now off the top of our head, which still have a huge influence. So I think that human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that's just one version. I think there are several versions, and I think that it goes much deeper and is much more interesting. So I guess this history is a very active thing, which I also didn't know. You know, I was writing historical non-fiction book, and I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool because history defines the future or is very connected. Our history teacher always said, "If we don't know where we come from, we cannot know where we go." And that is... That is, I think, true. That is what I now really am interested in for my next book. I'm trying to really understand human history. And obviously, I'm not the first. There are a few, you know, alternative historians that go like... Because you have to go back in time quite a bit, and then it's not easy to write about it, but it's very interesting to think about. And I would love to find the truth on Atlantis, which I don't believe in, actually, and we can also talk about that. But maybe there's an archive where we can actually see that they had this king ruling. I don't think this could be found, but, I think we can still also find a lot of documents, but I think especially in closed archives. So we won't find them. - You said a lot of really interesting things. It's so important to have people like you that do the daring work of going to the archives, the sources, the evidence and trying to find a thing that completely transforms history as we thought we understood it. That's revisionist history at its best. Revisionist history has a sort of negative connotation sometimes because you go to conspiratorial land without much evidence, and you're just being a rebel for rebels' sake. But when you ground it in data, and dare to challenge the historical narrative, that's really powerful. So, I should also mention that we've been just setting, laying out the context. - Yeah. We're still in the context phase. - In context phase. And for the next 10 hours, and maybe for the rest of our lives, we will be continuing just setting the context. But let us dare return to the original question of, Pervitin. How did that come about? Take me to 1930s Nazi Germany. The Munich and the Berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully. How did Pervitin come into the picture? - Well, the Nazis managed to grab power on January 30th, 1933, and they immediately became an anti-drug regime. That is important to them because the only intoxication they allow from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication; it's the ideological intoxication. So they quickly install concentration camps, which were, at the time, run by the SA, not the SS. The SS takes over later and turns the concentration camps into an industry. The first SA concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside. And some of the first people that landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users. Also, anti-Semitic policies were very important from day one for the Nazis, like they. Anti-Semitism is the defining pillar of National Socialism. of it, really. They quickly They connected anti-drug policies with anti-Semitic policies. They claimed the Jews in Germany, the German Jews were taking more drugs than the non-Jewish Germans. And National Socialism's goal was to purify the German body. So they saw the whole Volk, the Volk, the country, the people, the country, the people, as one body, and that has to be purified. and that has to be purified. So all Jews are poison. But not only Jews, everyone who thinks differently. Communists are also poison. Jews are the worst poison, but, you know, a lot of... Yeah, and then you create this clean body. And obviously drugs have no position in that. If you're addicted to drugs, that's weak, you know, you're a morphinist. You use cocaine, that's all degenerate, that's Jewish. Jewish doctors are all morphinists, you know? So Nazi Germany and Hitler was the shining example of the person who doesn't take drugs. He was, he didn't have a private life, he didn't even have a body. He just led the Volksbody, you know? So Hitler was not putting any poisons into him. He stopped smoking cigarettes in the '20s already. He never touched alcohol. - Vegetarian. - ...vegetarian, no caffeine even. So he was... That's what he was in the beginning. The story, of course, changes at a certain point in time, but he started as this. - As far as you understand, that's true? The beginning? - Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that this is true. Also, vegetarianism was a right-wing thing in Germany. It was an elitist thing. If you were a vegetarian, you had a higher frequency, which kind of gave you superiority over, let's say, these workers who need to eat the sausage so you can, you know, do the work. Like Wagner, the composer, he was vegetarian. Hitler was impressed by Wagner. So, vegetarianism, all... I think that's all true. I think Hitler was like that. And... And it's hard to be like that actually, and I think that gave him an attraction inside the movement to all drunk, you know, drunkards and Goering using morphine all the time because of his pain, he got used to morphine, because of his pain, he got used to morphine, so they were... The movement wasn't like this, but he was like this. So he was, He symbolized, but he symbolized that whole approach of cleanliness, like purity. So then how does methamphetamine come into the picture? It's totally absurd. That's why I thought it was fun researching this, because it doesn't make sense, you know? And, you know, they use this simple trick by, you know, defining what is an illegal drug and what is not. Because drugs don't have it written on them, "This is an illegal, dangerous drug." You know, drugs are basically neutral. These are molecules, you know? So the methamphetamine molecule was found in a Berlin-based company called the Temmler Company. And the head of Temmler, he was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an Afro-American athlete, Jesse Owens, was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes, you know? How can this be? So they thought that he was on something, because he won, I think, five gold medals. It was ridiculous. This was supposed to be Germany's games, you know, and then the Afro-American runs better than the Aryan ubermensch. So the only explanation is he took a drug. He probably took Benzedrine, which was illegal amphetamine, and there were also no doping checks at the Olympics. And if you're taking amphetamine, of course, you can run a bit faster maybe when it kicks in. That this has to do with the immense release of dopamine in the brain. But it was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs, but the head of the Temmler Company, he said, "We have to prevent this. We have to invent a better amphetamine. We have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine." So his main chemist, Fritz Hauschild, he did research and found that in 1917, in Tokyo, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine, and he remade that methamphetamine and they tested it among themselves, the chemists in the Berlin pharmaceutical lab, and they loved it. They made pure methamphetamine, and, you know, they had a really good time, and they were more active, they were talkative. That's what happens with methamphetamine. So the company really thought this is a great product, and they turned it into a product. They went to the patent bureaucracy and got the patent for methamphetamine, and then it quite quickly came onto the market. It was labeled as Pervitin, which is a great name, because it has like the perverse already in it. And this Pervitin was available in any pharmacy, so you didn't need a prescription. A child could go and buy 10 packs of pure methamphetamine. So methamphetamine was also very cheap, so it became quite popular because people, you know, talked about it. - Did they understand the side effects and negative effects of methamphetamine? Did they care? - They didn't really know what it was. I mean, I also went to the archive of that company also, of course. So they were like, "What is it good for?" Like, "I just feel great when I take it and I have more energy," and they didn't know if that could be a product. It was 1937, '38 when they were discovering it. - But also, how did they think about the fact that this is a drug? - Well, they called it a performance enhancer. - Got it. - Is drinking coffee in the morning a drug? I mean, it is a drug, but we don't think of it as a drug, you know. It's legal. And this was kind of how meth was treated in Germany. It was normal to use it. Like, you had a very important business meeting, of course, you would take a Pervitin. There's a movie by Billy Wilder called 1, 2, 3, a very good movie, and he shows... the American executive... The movie was set right after the end of the Second World War. So we see, I think it's a Coca-Cola executive, American, and he says to his secretary, "How should I have the morning coffee? I think half a Pervitin." So Pervitin was normal, it wasn't stigmatized. It was it was not the American "just say no" propaganda, where your teeth fall out and... I mean, it was a German quality product, people liked it. Of course, they did tests at universities. But most of them were quite positive. It reduces your fear. Today, we might, you know, look for different things, but this was also a performance-driven, totalitarian society moving towards war. So if someone takes Pervitin and says in the clinical tests at university, "I have- I'm not afraid of anything anymore." So that's positive. That's actually what got the guy who worked for the German army interested, because he read university reports. Like I also saw all of these reports. They were also in the military archive. So he's like, "Okay, you're not afraid anymore if you take methamphetamine. You don't need to sleep anymore. You don't need to eat so much, 'cause your appetite is lowered." Like, this is perfect for a soldier. Negative effects only became public in 1940, when the first Pervitin opponent, he was actually a relative of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, and later armament minister. He was this Speer psychologist. He was the first one who said, "Wait a minute. First of all, methamphetamine is against the Nazi ideology, because now we're all taking a drug to be high performers. We have to be high performers without a drug." And he also said, "You know this- the obvious, this is gonna make you addicted," et cetera. "This will, you know, create a tolerance." So only then the first negative reports came out. Before that, what Temmler did and then what the universities did, they all thought methamphetamine is really good. - So what was the process of convincing the German military, the Wehrmacht army, to use it at scale? - Well, Professor Ranke was employed by the army, so it was his job to find things that would improve the performance of the German soldier. I always imagined him like a James Bond character, like Q, who develops gadgets and stuff, because he also developed gadgets. So he was quite a... you know, he was an academic, but he was also a soldier, you know? He was employed, but he was basically running this institute, examining it. And he was so convinced that Pervitin is the answer to his question: how to beat the main opponent of the German soldier. And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer. So when he read these reports from universities, he did his own tests in the military academy with young medical officers. They came together at 8:00 PM in the evening, and then they received either methamphetamine, caffeine pill, or a placebo, or Benzedrine. They had different experiments, and he always concluded at the end, like they started at 8:00 PM and at 10:00 AM in the morning, one time he notes, the Pervitin people still want to go out and party, while the caffeine guys are sleeping on the bench. You know, it was clear that Pervitin is the strongest. It gives you the most energy, lets you work for the longest time. So he was convinced, but his superior, the Surgeon General of the German army, was an old school dude, and he didn't even react to these. Ranke would write letters, "We have to use this synthetic drug in the next campaign," which was against Poland, which he knew about. And because Pervitin was quite known in the civil society, people were using it already. So he even said, "A lot of soldiers will just take it with them, and we should control that." "We should make it an official drug." But the Surgeon General didn't understand. He didn't reply. So Germany attacked Poland without clear regulatory system on methamphetamine, and indeed, a lot of soldiers used it. And what Ranke then did was he requested from all the medical officers in the field in Poland. The war was over after a few weeks. But the German army was occupying Poland. He said, "Send me all reports, and tell me: Did your people take Pervitin and what were the effects?" And he collected all these reports, which are also studied in the military archive, and he came to the conclusion, "This is a really good fighting drug." And it probably is, because people are still using it today. Methamphetamine is still being used. And Ranke discovered this. He had everything in front of him. And Poland was beaten, and then Hitler wanted to attack the West. And the West was a different story than Poland, because the West was the world empire of Great Britain combined with "La Grande Armée," the strongest army in the world, the French army. These two combined, you know, how can you win that? Poland, they could overpower. They had, you know, a better army than Poland. But is the German Wehrmacht really better than both of these armies combined? His officers didn't think so. High Command said, "No, we're not going to attack the West. We're going to lose." And Hitler was fanatic about it, he really wanted to attack. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the West, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany. Because they really cared, you know? If you're High Command, you don't want to start a war that you're going to lose, you know? Very bad. - Can you just briefly give a sense of, do you think this is genius or insanity on Hitler's part to think that he can take on probably what's perceived to be the most powerful military in the world, which is the French military, or at least in Europe? - I think his hatred for the French was very, very deep. He really, he really wanted to go to war with them. It was an ideological, irrational decision. That's why he was not... He didn't hate the empire. He kind of looked down, he admired it and looked down on-- - You mean the British Empire? - But the French he really hated, and France had been the "Erbfeind," the genetic enemy of the German people, at least right-wingers would say so. There had been two wars. The first one Germany had won, then the First World War, Germany had lost. So Hitler wanted to kind of revenge and also stop the Treaty of Versailles. So he really needed to attack the West, at least in his mindset. But it was an irrational decision, and that's why High "No, we're not going to do it," basically. And Hitler's position at the time was not that he could do anything he wanted. I mean, high command is still a high command of the German Wehrmacht. That's a very old, you know, it's a tradition. It's... They, they do whatever they want, you know? But also, they have to obey Hitler's orders. So it's a power struggle, basically. But to invade France was a totally stupid idea, but it changed in the morning. On the morning of February 17th, 1940, Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountain, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. You... It becomes a stalemate and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it's bloody, and nothing's happening. It's a bad... But that was the only plan that they had. That's why the high It's stupid." But these three tank generals, they had kind of somehow they were able to sneak into Hitler's office, and they said, "Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes eye of a needle, basically?" And slow machines in the back that kind of wait for the action to happen and then, you know, I don't know, support it somehow. We're going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We're gonna overpower the enemy. We're gonna be in France before the French, who are stationed all with the British in northern Belgium and also on the Maginot Line, but not really in the Ardennes Mountains. That was hardly fortified because no one could imagine that Germany would go through there. And before they know it, we are already behind them, basically. We are already in France, and they're still hanging out in northern Belgium because it takes quite a while, you know, to travel. This was a different time also. So he was convinced, and he then ordered the attack. The attack would happen, but it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights. So the whole army, or at least, you know, the avant-garde of the machinery, had to be like a big part of the army, had to be in Sedan after three days and three nights. And that was only possible if you don't stop. And that was the problem. The sleep suddenly became a huge problem, and Hitler said, "When I was fighting in World War I, of course I could stay awake for a week. I'm a German." You know, even though he's not even German, he's Austrian. But that was a problem. Suddenly Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe of how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. So Ranke suddenly So Ranke suddenly became... Before that, he was kind of an outsider, a freak with a drug idea. Suddenly, he became, "Okay, tell us, how does it work?" And he gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case, methamphetamine. "How much should be taken? At what intervals? What are the side effects?" This became a very big thing. to the front lines, which were... No, not the front yet. They were stationed in the west of Germany. Then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine, and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains. - So the 35 million dosages for the French campaign. I mean, we could probably talk for many hours about this particular campaign, because it is, I think, it's fair to say, the most successful military campaign from the German side. - Ended with a big mistake, Dunkirk. - Dunkirk. - It was brilliant up until that point. That is the turning point. That was the first big mistake Hitler made, and it also had to do with drugs. - We'll talk about it, but let's just linger on this three days. - We should also mention that's where Blitzkrieg really shined. So it wasn't just the tanks, it was the infantry, it was the aircraft moving very fast behind the French lines. I mean, what can you speak to just the execution of that campaign and the role of drugs in it? And we should say it's a really bold strategic decision to use meth. I mean, it's a big risk. There are a lot of risks taken here, which could be seen as military genius or military insanity, or a mixture of both. - Well, they were very lucky that it all worked out. Also, the guys in the tanks could have all freaked out on the meth. It was never tested before, "Can you actually be in a combat situation, in a tank, in enemy territory, on meth? Can people actually cope with that and be better fighters?" - Going through the mountains... - It's insane, yeah. - ...against the biggest military in Europe. - Well, what meth does is... I read reports of a depressed atmosphere right before the attack started because they were afraid. They thought they would lose. They didn't want that. You know, soldiers, maybe some really hardcore Nazi soldiers, but most people were normal guys. They didn't want to start that. But once they had the methamphetamine, it kind of... you're in a party mood. So also, when you're in the tank, everyone likes it. It's rather an uplifting thing. They were really getting into it, and they really started fighting then. It's also intoxication, you know? It's a rush. - What does meth feel like? - Well, meth creates the so-called fight or flight modus. releases all the neurotransmitters in the brain which are released in situations of high danger, for example. So in a highly dangerous situation, you become very alert, so you can cope with the situation, if you're, like, under life threat and you don't even react to it, you're probably gonna be dead, you know? But the body does that, and methamphetamine does that. So you take a pill of methamphetamine or you snort a line of methamphetamine and you're like this. And, then it's the fight or flight mode. Either you run away like it's too much, you know? But on meth, you usually don't run away. You kind of think it's really cool what's happening. You like to move, you like to be with your pals, you like to, you know, be in a tank is great on meth. - So there is a party aspect to it? - I think it was very joyful for the German soldiers because it was springtime. They had immediate successes. And it wasn't heavy fighting, it was just being in the tank. I mean, there was, of course, fighting and there were also war crimes. And I read a report when Rommel, high on meth, at night, doesn't stop, of course, because they all, you know... They didn't stop at night, but every army usually stops at night. So the French army were stopping. They were in a village camping out, and the German, Rommel, was going with the tank through that village with his division, just running over people. And he was standing like in the open lid of the tank, and he was like, going through that thing, you know, and you know, like a berserk type of warrior. And that was when... That to me is a war crime. That is when the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in that push of Rommel through the French countryside. Because you don't do that, you know? Your enemy is sleeping. Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So, of course, at night, they're going to be sleepy on red wine, and the Germans were on meth and they were just running over them. There's descriptions of the chains of the tank becoming bloody. I don't think he did it, and he was like, "Oh my God, what did I just do? I'm sorry." "What am I doing here?" He was in the movie, you know? - This is the dark thing about human nature, that in war, if you dehumanize, if you allow your brain to dehumanize the enemy, the opponent, the humans on the other side, you can actually... I think hate can take over, and in that hate you can find pleasure when you murder the other. And people have written about this, they've talked about this. It's probably a thing that a person like me can't possibly comprehend unless they experienced it. And you have to be in the mania, in the hysteria, in the insanity intensity of war. - I mean, what Evans, for example, said is that, "I excuse the Germans of the war crimes because they were just in an intoxication." I understand that argument, but... And if you look at individual soldiers, it's quite tricky. Like, it's a 19-year-old guy, he's been drafted. And in Nazi Germany, if you don't go, you land in the concentration camp. So you can choose, you know, concentration camp or you just join the ranks and then you get Pervitin and then you invade France. There was a trial in Germany because someone said all soldiers are murderers. And I think then the German Bundeswehr sued him. "No, soldiers are not murderers." And he actually won in court. So it's legal in Germany to call every soldier a murderer. But it's a tricky question. - Yeah, I remember seeing this documentary on the ordinary people. I think there's also social pressure. Again, insane it is to say, I think the documentary, Ordinary People, was looking at the Germans that were a part of the shooting squads. And, you know, they didn't understand what they're signing up for, and they were told that they're free to leave once they understand what they're doing, and many of them didn't. And they didn't have hate for Jews or for the people who they're murdering. You are, again, a 19, 20-year-old young kid, like, it's so hard to comprehend the moral insanity that's happening all around you and you just kind of want to fit in. - I mean, that's why I wrote the book, The Bohemians, because there were a few people in Berlin that didn't react this way, but they reacted in a different way. They said, "We cannot be part of this." - But it's hard to be the person— - It's very hard, yeah. And most people are part of it because it's much more safe, or at least it seems more safe. I mean, it has its own perils, you know. Because you might become a genocidal murderer, you know. That might happen. Like, are you responsible? I would say you are responsible, but that's just my personal gut feeling. Like, I always thought my grandfather was responsible for the genocide because he was working for the German railway system, and he once saw a train car full of Jews in a cattle wagon, and he only said to me, "Yeah, this was against German railway regulations." And I said, "So what did you do?" And he said, "Well, there were SS at the station when I was working, and I was too scared. I didn't do anything." So I thought that he was... he made himself guilty, I thought. That's... and my father, for example, reacted very strongly because of that. He never called him by his first name, the father of his wife, because he still had that, you know, he was a Nazi because he was working for the railway. So I wouldn't excuse... I wouldn't excuse people actually, and I certainly would not excuse high-ranking politicians that make policies because the genocidal policies that the Nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs. And I never write that in any, you know, because there's no documents. If I would find documents that say, "Yeah, when we..." you know, but this the Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs. Maybe with alcohol, you know, but it's... and I spoke with my father, who had been a high judge in Germany. What does actually the law say, and the law says if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility. Your responsibility is only diminished... Let's say you're a totally normal person, never done any harm to anybody, and suddenly you take a drug that... or you're totally drunk, and you don't know what you're doing and you kill someone. Then a judge could say maybe you have a lesser responsibility. But this is not the case with the crimes of National Socialism, and I never even hint at that in my book. So I think that criticism by Evans was short-sighted. I wouldn't... I think he's not right about that. - Yeah, I think I agree with you totally. I didn't get that sense. - He thought the book was very successful because a lot of right-wing people bought it, but that's not... it's simply not true. - I think your book did a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative. - To the contrary, I got an angry letter by a German army employee, quite a high officer and a military historian, and he said that I... he also thought I overemphasized the drug use of the methamphetamine in the western campaign because he said the German army was just so good, and you kind of diminish their capability by saying they were only so good because they took methamphetamine. I thought that was kind of funny because the Wehrmacht doesn't exist anymore, and the current German army is called the Bundeswehr, and they're not... historically, they're not supposed to be connected. Like, there was a clear-cut, but he still felt that I was kind of hurting the pride of the Wehrmacht, so. - I generally sort of agree with him. In general, it seems like great historians often... I'm just a human, so I'm not a historian, but they undermine the importance of the heroes that make up an army. The Soviet Army, the British Army, the French Army, the German Army. These are humans, and some of the great military campaigns involve people really stepping up. Now, the effectiveness of the military tactics with blitzkrieg, the effectiveness of meth, the strategic decisions around where to invade, the timing, the speed, all those are important, but there's humans there. There's real heroes. And sometimes historians kind of diminish that. I don't know what to make sense of it. I might be just an idiot, but I've had a great conversation with James Holland. I've gotten to know him well. He kind of analyzed the mistakes made by Hitler and by Stalin in the Operation Barbarossa. But I just, through generations, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, you hear these stories of these heroes, you know. My grandfather was a machine gunner and miraculously survived. And, like, and just knowing those stories, Stalingrad would not have happened without the heroes on the Soviet side. It's easy to say there's a lot of blunders, a lot of bad tactics, all this kind of stuff, but to me, from the human side, I just know through my bloodline, the people that have fearlessly given their life to defend their homeland, and that sometimes can be a little bit easily dismissed. So, I don't know what to make sense of it. Maybe I'm romanticizing or maybe I'm speaking to the suffering that the people have felt, and they just propagate themselves through my life story, and then maybe the gratitude I have for the people who have stopped the Nazi forces. - I think it's amazing what the Russian soldiers actually did because they beat the Wehrmacht. It was really the Red Army on the ground that did the job, you know. And did they love communism and the system? I don't think so, and I think they were... I mean, of course, some people, but basically, they were defending their country, and... I'm also very grateful to them. - Yeah, they're defending their families. Quick pause. Bathroom break? - Okay. - All right, we're back. So can you say a bit more about the French campaigns in, um... It was over in six weeks. It took six weeks to defeat and occupy most of France. And the initial operation, three days, was, from a military perspective, successful. What else can we say about the role of drugs, the effectiveness, what was learned from that experience by the Wehrmacht? - I mean, for me to research the Western campaign was very interesting because I didn't really know anything about it except that Germany won very quickly. So to actually look at the details is very interesting, and the drugs give you a way in. - What are some things you found in the archives that were interesting, like, about maybe letters, reports, diaries, that gave you some insight about the human story of it all? - Well, there are letters, for example, by Heinrich Böll, who won the Nobel Prize later in literature. He writes to his parents describing in detail what Pervitin did to him, how it kept his mood up, and that without Pervitin, he wouldn't have been able to do the job. But also military documents I found very interesting. For example, I could see exactly how the methamphetamine was distributed because it was not distributed equally. It was done in a way that the tank troops who were leading the advance received the most meth, and they also needed it. I could see how many pills on which date were delivered to Rommel's troops. And Rommel became, I call him the Crystal Fox in my book for obvious reasons. His division was using a lot of meth. - And he was using meth as well? - I just have descriptions how he, like, totally crazy stands in the open lid of the tank and all his people, well, they had the meth, but there's no- - So you can infer from that. - There's no, maybe they didn't use it. Maybe he didn't use it. But it looks like he used it. There were also never any reports that all the meth was given back. I mean, a lot of soldiers write that they take it, but Rommel specifically, I wouldn't write in my book, Blitz, that Rommel would take methamphetamine. on such a day or something if there was no record for it. But Rommel, there is a record for it that Rommel's division used the most meth of any tank division. So, I write about that. And that's, that already makes him the Crystal Fox because, you know, in his division, crystal meth is, you know, rampant. - You know, it's like in Animal Farm when the pigs discover alcohol. Animal Farm by George Orwell. There's no evidence that they drank. It's just the next day that they're all hungover. - I mean, Rommel is a very interesting character in general because later he turned, apparently, turned against Hitler. He was part of the conspiracy of Operation Valkyrie. He received, you know, the offer to shoot himself in the forest, which he did instead of being tried and executed. - Is he just part of this general tension that the generals, the military had with Hitler? Would that be fair to say? - I would say so, yes. I'm not an expert on the Wehrmacht. This is a very complex, large organization. But I see most of the officers of the Wehrmacht as not necessarily Nazis in the way that they would, you know, shout, "Heil Hitler," all the time. They were highly intelligent, highly trained, super professionals that ran a very effective war machine. And at one point, more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler was giving were not really helping, you know, and they have their men dying because of it. So that creates a lot of tension. And that led to the mistake that Hitler did in Dunkirk, basically. What Churchill called the sickle cut, which was the idea to storm through the Ardennes Mountains and kind of cut off the British and French troops who were still, you know, in the north of Belgium trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly, the Germans are behind them, so they kind of cut like a sickle into enemy territory, the sickle cut. That was so successful that, basically, the campaign was won already. So then the Germans invaded, like occupied all the cities on the canal back to England to kind of cut off the British completely, so they couldn't, you know, even flee. But Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open. And the German army was like, you know, they were already on the outskirts of Dunkirk. They could have just taken it and closed that, you know, that hole for the British military to get out. But Hitler then did his famous... And this is all the dynamic of the Western campaign, you know. A lot of things happen every day. And then they're saying like, "We're going to have Dunkirk tomorrow and then it's over." And then Hitler stops the tanks. It's his famous Halte Befehl, the order to stop. And you know, they were all on meth. They didn't want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. Hitler was, he was, he- he basically, it was a little bit similar than Berlin, Munich thing. Hitler didn't really understand that campaign. It was too fast for him. He... Because they didn't say like, "Oh, they're all on meth. They're not going to sleep. They're going to behave erratically." They didn't discuss this. They discussed this in the old-fashioned terms. And Hitler was seeing like, "They do not protect their flanks. What if the British come from the north?" This is terrible. Militarily, it was, they were already fighting World War II, while Hitler was still fighting World War I. And especially the Allies, they were still fighting World War I. But the tank generals on meth, or the tank generals without meth, the tank generals per se, they were fighting a new type of war. And Hitler then got a visit from Goering, the head of the air force, the Luftwaffe. And Goering was a morphinist. That is very well documented. He was on morphine. He was high as a kite most of the time. And that comes with losing touch with reality, I would say, or at least it changes your grip on reality, you know. Maybe you're still a good decision-maker, but it could lead to... You know, if you're intoxicated, let's say you're writing, and you're intoxicated, you think it's great, but the next day you read it, and it's shit, you know? Goering was using morphine in the morning, then met Hitler at the Felsennest, which was Hitler's headquarters to command the Western campaign, the Felsennest. And Goering said to him, "If the army generals are now gonna take Dunkirk, then basically the army has won this campaign, and that will give army high command, which is already against you," because they were, you know, for them, Hitler was always like, "der kleine Gefreite," like this small, kind of regular army guy because that's what Hitler had been in the First World War, and now suddenly, he was the big decision-maker. So they never, they thought they make much better decisions than him. So Goering says, "Their power will be so overwhelming that they will, from now on, call the shots how this war will continue and what will be done next. You should let me with the Luftwaffe do the job from the air. The National Socialist Luftwaffe is gonna end the Western campaign." So he thought that he could destroy... It doesn't make sense, you know. Even to destroy the British military from with planes, maybe you can do it. But certainly, he couldn't do it. So the tank generals received the Haltebefehl, the stopping order. They didn't believe it when they received it, because the victory, this would've been complete victory over Great Britain. This would've been the end of Great Britain. The whole British military was encircled, but they did get out through Dunkirk. That's why the movie Dunkirk with Christopher Nolan is not good because he doesn't describe what happened on the German side. It's just this heroic British thing, "Yeah, we just got out and we reformed, and then we beat..." You know. This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command, and convinced by Goering's morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't, which he couldn't. I mean, he bombed, and then the British, you know, they were on ships, and a few ships were sunk, but basically, they got, they got out. You need to do this on the ground. At least back then, you would've needed to do it on the ground. So that was a big mistake by Hitler. That's why von Manstein, one of the three tank generals from February 17th, it was Rommel, von Manstein, and Guderian, and von Manstein, he later said, he spoke of a "lost victory." He said the Western campaign was a lost victory because we really could have achieved the victory. We could've dominated, you know, Britain. They could've invaded Britain. There was no more military. - Well, okay. On land, yes. - There was still the Royal Air Force. - And the Navy. - And the Navy, yeah. - So, invading Britain, I think any invasion of actual Britain is a gigantic mistake on the Nazi part, but- - But if Britain doesn't have a standing army anymore, it's much easier- - Well, I- - ...than still have one. - I think it's still extremely difficult to invade, but it's much easier to sort of neutralize, make sure that Britain is not a player in the war. I mean, the co- mean, the co- - For sure. Maybe Hitler wouldn't have invaded at all, anyhow. - Also, because of his sort of, not respect, but non-hatred- - Right - ...of the British Empire. - Because they're also white supremacists, so ...Why would we fight them? You know, it doesn't make sense. While the French, they were already like half black, basically, in Hitler's eyes. - If we're to talk about counterfactual history of the possible trajectories of the war that would lead to Nazi victory, one of the big mistakes is the invasion of Britain. So you already mentioned the stake with Dunkirk, but beyond that, if they even captured mainland Europe, they could've just neutralized the British threat and not invaded Britain, and then go after the oil, which is much needed maybe in the Middle East. So focus on that campaign before invading the Soviet Union. And then maybe wait for the Soviet Union to invade them through Poland, which would be likely coming, or wait until 1943, something like this, to invade east without the Western front having to be, been there. And the other really big mistake is declaring war against the United States. Having complete disrespect for the United States and declaring war on the United States. Which didn't have to be done at all. So it's collecting enemies when those didn't have to be. So there is, to me actually, there's a lot of paths there, as dark as it is to imagine for Nazi Germany to be successful in the invasion of the Soviet Union, even. - Well, I think that's why the Wehrmacht officers were pissed at Hitler, because they knew that they could actually win if it was done in a certain way. But Hitler's ideology and his stupidity... and later also, his degeneration of his cognitive abilities did not allow the Wehrmacht to fight in a most effective way. Hitler was a very bad leader after Dunkirk. - So can you speak to the morphine? What kind of drug is morphine? - Morphine was developed in the 19th century by a German, a young chemist called Sertürner. A German, a young chemist called Sertürner. He wanted to know what the potent alkaloid is in opium. Because opium is a natural drug, but there's something in the opium that is actually decisive, and that's morphine. So he was able to extract that from the opium. So he basically, this young guy, invented morphine, which then became this young guy, he invented morphine, which then became, you know, very important in wars. Very important in wars, especially like the American Civil War is unthinkable without morphine. Or at least it would have been very different, because with morphine, you can treat people, you can amputate people, you can fix people up, you can fix people up, and send them back into battle. And that also corresponded with the development of the hypodermic needle, the injection needle. Needle, the injection needle. That was around in the mid-19th century. So the injection needle and morphine together became a very efficient way to treat soldiers. And that prolonged, for example, the Civil War in America. - So Göring was taking morphine. - Yeah. Morphine is like the classic. You don't eat opium, you know? You take what is active in opium, and you inject it, and that's a much... That's a very potent... You know, potent... You know, that numbs all your pain. You don't have pain anymore if you're on morphine. Morphine. - It also affects judgment. - I've never taken morphine, so I cannot really say. There are a few junkies that are highly creative on it. A lot of musicians in the '60s were using heroin, which is a more potent form, or it's a half-synthetic. It's an opioid. form, or it's a half-synthetic. It's an opioid. Morphine is an opiate, and heroin's an opioid. I guess you could be quite sharp on it also. That's why Hitler liked Eukodal, which is OxyContin, oxycodone. OxyContin, oxycodone. And he injected that. - Which is another opiate, heroin-like. - It was a product by the Merck company from Darmstadt, Germany. They made Eukodal, which when Germany lost the war, the patent was basically taken by America and then ended up in oxycodone. So if you inject Eukodal, that was a very popular drug in the '20s. Because apparently, it gives you the most beautiful high on Earth. You're like super high. You feel extremely well, and you can think very clearly. And you feel like this is how life should feel. High on Eukodal, this is like Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. He used Eukodal. Quite a few doctors actually used it also, and probably quite a few Jewish doctors also used it, because this was like a doctor's drug. Doctors knew how to, you know, set the injection. And it was a great experience. And Hitler, he really loved to be on Eukodal. He would use Eukodal every second day. In the beginning, 10 milligrams intravenously, then he raised to 20 milligrams. And I spoke to someone who's actually done exactly that drug application, because I wanted to know how Hitler felt, and I didn't feel like doing it myself for some reason. I don't like needles, so I didn't want to put a needle in my vein to have the Hitler drug experience. I should have done it. Like a historian, a proper historian never does that, okay? But I thought I should take quite a few drugs that I write about to understand it better. But this drug I didn't take. I never shot oxycodone intravenously into my veins. But I met someone who did, and he said it's like the, it's like the king's high. You know, if you do that properly, obviously you get addicted to it, you know? - I'd be scared to try. - Very intense experience. - I think it's a very badass thing to do for a historian, by the way. But I think it's a big risk. I think, I mean, there is a risk that comes along with it, right? - Well, but not for Hitler, because he got the Eukodal from the pharmacy. He knew exactly, like his doctor knew exactly what was inside. It was made by a pharmaceutical company. - No, I mean, the risk of addiction. - Yeah, that is a big risk. But there's also the risk of getting impure stuff and- - Yes, yes - like heroin on the street and die from an overdose or... But the addiction thing is very... I think it happens quite quickly with Eukodal, because it's such a great feeling. So why wouldn't you do it over and over again? Because... And then the opioid receptors in the brain want you to take it. And if you don't take it, you get withdrawal symptoms and you feel like shit. And you have to... So that's the problem with opioids, with morphine. That's what happens. And that's what happened to Hitler. - I generally say yes to most things, but those drugs, like cocaine doesn't scare me. Heroin scares me. The opioids scare me. Oxycodone scares me. - Because they really make you physically dependent. I don't even know if cocaine makes you physically dependent. It makes you psychologically addicted. But you actually have to get it, otherwise you feel bad. That's a physical, terrible addiction. - And also for life to feel like less when you're not on it. That scares me. - That's the problem also with methamphetamine. People who use a lot of methamphetamine, on days they don't use it, they don't feel great at all, especially not compared to the methamphetamine days. So that became a problem in Germany when people were really using more and more of the Pervitin. - All right, you got to take me through the full drug cocktail that Hitler was on. Patient A of Morell's. Let's start at the beginning. We're big on setting context here. So tell the story of Dr. Theodor Morell. How did he meet Hitler? - Well, Morell was ... He had his practice on Kurfürstendamm, which is like the main boulevard of Berlin, in the west of…

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