Episode highlight

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, a 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.

It's so funny that the echo 100 years later, Berlin had all these young partygoers using drugs, and then Munich with the beer, and 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?

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.

Maybe this is a good moment to also, since we're talking about historians, to address some of the criticism. So Richard Evans has been also a great historian, has been one of the bigger critics. He said that your work is crass and dangerously inaccurate account, 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. Accountability can be removed because they were using drugs." Right.

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 allowed from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication, it's the ideological intoxication. So they quickly installed concentration camps, which were at the time run by the SA, not the SS, which 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 which were very important from day one for the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is the defining pillar of national socialism.

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 it.

Alright, we're back. So can you say a bit more about the French campaigns? It was over in six weeks. It took six weeks to complete a 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 kind of a way in.

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 that they, they kind of cut as a, 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 even flee. But Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open. And the German army was, you know, 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, you know, they didn't want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. Hitler was, he basically, it was a little bit similar to the Berlin-Munich thing. Hitler didn't really understand that campaign, it was too fast for him. He...

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. He wanted to know what the potent alkaloid in opium was. Because opium is a natural drug, but there's something in the opium that's 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 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 and send them back into battle. And that also corresponded with the development of the hypodermic needle, the injection needle that was around in the mid-19th century.

Okay, so let's go into the cocktail. It started with the vitamins in '36. Right. I think it was pretty harmless in the beginning. But the addiction to the injection was the main thing that I think happened—that Hitler needed his doctor. But from '36 to '41, only vitamins and glucose were being injected, so I don't think it really harms you. It might benefit you. He never got sick; he was fit.

Okay, there you go. So when did it start getting more serious? The injections and the kind of drugs he was taking? This was a day in August of 1941. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd. So this is about six weeks into the campaign, which was called Operation Barbarossa. And Germany was doing pretty well, and it came to a crucial moment where high command said, "Now we're going to take Moscow." And Hitler said, "No, we're going to split up the troops and take Leningrad," which is now Saint Petersburg in the north, and in the south, we're going to go for the oil fields, basically. That was his plan. He said, "Let's not do Moscow." And high command was like, "This is the biggest mistake. We must take Moscow. If we take Moscow, we're going to win." And Hitler became ill for the first time on the day this decision was made. I mean, this is a dynamic thing that's going on, you know?

He did try cocaine. Why didn't he get into cocaine? He started cocaine after the bomb attack by Stauffenberg on July 20th, 1944. When this bomb went off, which actually killed a few people in the room, this was during a military briefing. Stauffenberg put a bag with explosives under the table, and the table actually saved Hitler's life because it was a good German quality oak table. So the table was so stable that the bomb explosion kind of just, it kind of blew up the table, but Hitler behind the table was protected by this table.

That would be incredible. Can you just speak high level from, from... What is it? You said '41 to '45. What were some behavioral changes or changes in decision-making that we can trace in Hitler that could be attributed to drugs? How did they change him? Well, an interesting event is July 1943 in a villa in Northern Italy where Hitler meets Mussolini. Mussolini is basically fed up with the war and he wants Italy to leave the Axis of Evil. Hitler is really pissed when he hears that. He knows that's what the meeting is all about. Mussolini, I mean, the Italians invented that modern type of fascism, and Italy was the role model for Nazi Germany, but by now, Nazi Germany, of course, has been much more powerful. Italy is the most important ally, and now Mussolini is quitting in the middle of the war. What is going on here? So Hitler becomes... Morell writes about this quite a lot. He's in a terrible mood. He really doesn't want to go.

Let's talk about another perspective on this whole story that you document in your book, "The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis." So this is the story of the people who resisted from within Germany. Right.

What lessons can we learn from that about how to resist totalitarian regimes? Is there some deeper wisdom? I just think it's admirable to be brave and not do things that you cannot really justify in front of your own conscience. I don't know if I would have been so brave. I don't even know, obviously, how my conscience would have been, but I'm probably more the fleeing type. Like, a lot of writers would just leave Germany. Like Thomas Mann just left Germany and lived in Pacific Palisades.

Right. That is the aim of my next book. So is it still called Stone Sapiens?

What about one of the great, if you can think of it that way, technologies that humans have developed is religion. Religion evolved different kinds. Do you think there's a connection between psychedelics and religion, the development of religion throughout different parts of the world? Well, I think Moses is quite interesting. Moses was a traumatized man that had fled Egypt, where he had killed a man who had been beating up a Hebrew. So Moses kind of took revenge and killed him. So he was running from the law and he was, together with, in the Bible it says, I think 66 people. They were in the desert, in the Sinai, and they had been fasting for days and no alcohol. So it was kind of a psychedelic retreat, basically. I mean, this is being examined by Israeli scholars and I think it's very interesting work. They examine in detail what the Bible says, and the Bible mentions in that passage where Moses sees the burning bush and then gets the Ten Commandments.

Speaking of which, I have to ask you... I've done psilocybin a bunch, and I've done ayahuasca, but I've never done LSD, acid, and you have quite a bit. So, maybe the big general question is what's LSD like? In the space of psychedelics, which funny enough, we haven't really spoken a lot about psychedelics— Right

So, because you mentioned the effect of LSD on you as a writer, that it at least changed the way you write. Well, I mean, the book Tripped is a book where I come back with that story to my father, and then my father decides to give LSD to my mother. And we did do the LSD, the three of us, on Christmas. And we did mushrooms on Mother's Day. And whenever my mother takes LSD, and Alzheimer's is a horrible disease, obviously. For example, on Mother's Day, there was the newspaper lying on the balcony. We were sitting in the sun, and she was on mushrooms. It's just a microdose, you know? It's not that you have a trip, but you have that stimulation of your brain. That's what you have. Even her brain, attacked by Alzheimer's, reacted stronger than my father's.

Can we go back to something we talked about in the beginning about Berlin? It'd be fascinating to learn more about this culture. Are you still connected? I'm sure you've been to some wild parties. I've been told that Berlin has some wild parties. Well, it had them in the '90s. I mean, it had the best clubs that I... It was just a dream. You go into this club. But I was also in my mid-20s, so I would go into this club, I'd take MDMA, and the DJ is amazing and the sound system is crazy and there's like 500 people on MDMA just dancing for like eight hours.

Yes. It's Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is good, but only when you're like in your early 20s, living in New York, and you're writing your first book, and you just have taken LSD. Oh, nice.