Part One: Hitler's Drug Problem

would like to introduce the wonderful Carolina Barlow. Carolina, you are a writer and a co host of the Ron Burgundy podcast and the True Romance Podcast. Carolina. Yes, is Will Ferrell nice in person? He is a toxic overlord. Will Farrell is actually the nicest person and I've never met my life. Um, he's nicer than I think most members of my family and yours. I'm just assuming, um, no knowing how kind he is. And yeah, he's a Sophia.

You can he frenched my dog. How does his hair smell? Okay, this is a great question because is very good at grooming and he always smells really nice. His skincare is amazing and I believe he may still be using this product. But once we were on a press tour with Mark Wahlberg, who was using a lot of brand called Moroccan oil, which you can buy. I'm not this is not an ad, but you can buy it pretty much anywhere. Will decided, Wait,

I'm messing up this story. Will was using a brand uses a brand called Moroccan oil, and Mark Wahlberg was obsessed with it, and so we ended up talking about it a lot on a press tour, and Moroccan Oil then send us a bunch of Moroccan oil. So I believe he still uses that. But it smells incredible. Okay, well this is this is actually a lot more information than I expected. Welcome to the celebrity corner. When we

talk about how different celebrities hair smells. Next up, so we're talking about we are talking about a celebrity today surrounded by babies because probably like pissing ship, pist and ship all the time. That's that scans completely. Actually, you know who else a diaper? I totally forgot you know who else smelled like ship? Oh? This is this is so accurate and is a celebrity. I don't like that? Yeah, I don't like that title for him. He is a celebrity.

He's a very famous man, arguably more famous than any living celebrity. I'm not gonna I'm not going to give Hitler a celebrity title. You can say a lot of bad things about the man, but he has brand recognition. Okay, fair enough. So we're like going from polar opposites. We're talking about one of the Donna Share. You don't even need the last names exactly, just Hitlers going from like the nicest person ever of Will Ferrell to the worst

person ever to aid off Hitler so quick. Well, he's also his name has kind of been a verb because you can like, I don't know about y'all, but like when my friends are being shitty and like you're kind of hitler ing right now. You're you're getting a little Hitler on all of us here, Maybe calm down. So he's like, he's like, Google, my friends have been done

something so shitty that I would spring that name. Fair enough. Well, this one time my buddy Mike annexed the Sudette land and we were got pretty we got pretty pissed at him. That's fair. Yeah, that's um, Carolina, what do you, how do you feel about drugs? Drugs? I don't do drugs because when I was young, I did them too much and then I had to stop. And actually in the same boat, um, I drink sometimes and uh and take creatum.

But I my my doing illegal drugs days or long long behind me because I damaged my brain too much. You've what have you heard about the Nazis and drugs. I know that they did a lot of them. And I think World War two, much like the Civil War, was a pretty crazy time and Vietnam wars generally and drugs actually tend to mix well together. Absolutely, it's a great time to get wasted when you're at a war zone.

I can say that from experience. Um. And you know it's also so there's In two thousand sixteen, a German novelist and a screenwriter, a guy named Norman Oehler, published a book, a work of historic nonfiction. In the United States, it was released under the title Blitzed, Drugs and Nazi Germany. A lot of people have heard of this book. It was an international but it was a huge, huge book. I mean, I guess most of the people listening to

the episode right now either heard of it. Or you read some article that was based on kind of the media campaign around this, because literally every major news website in magazine on the fucking planet published interviews with this guy or at least kind of like write ups that were summarizing the book. The Guardians article during this period it is kind of emblematic of the whole. It was titled Hi Hitler, which is a fun a fun title,

nice little play on Heil Hitler um. And it's also really appropriate because the reason Hitler was getting high it was for his health, and Hil Hitler literally means health to Hitler. But anyway, that's a that's a point Owlder makes. Umm, it is a nice little pun. I'm going to read a sample paragraph from that article talking about Owler's wook work.

The book in question is The Total Rush, or to use its superior English title, Blitzed, which reveals the astonishing and hitherto un largely untold story of the Third Reich's relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine, and above all, methamphetamines, and of their effect not only on Hitler's final days. The fear by Owler's account was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last

of his bunkers. But on the Wehrmacht's successful invasion of France in nineteen forty published in Germany last year, where it became a best seller. It has since been translated into eighteen languages. A fact that the lights owler but

also amazes him. And this isn't I'm starting, not kind of the way we normally do by just sort of giving the history, but by talking about this book because it is so prominent, and in the years that I've been doing Behind the Bastards, I've probably had a couple of hundred different people email me or ask me sometimes in person if I've read Blitzed and tell me that I had to do hit an episode on Hitler's drug addiction,

and this is that episode. But I have to tell you a decent chunk of this is actually going to be kind of critiquing blitzed um and more broadly critiquing kind of how the media presented it. And I want to clarify up top. I don't think blitz is a bad book where that older is a bad guy. I think his work is in some ways a victim of

its own, of his own success. If you start googling around permutations of phrases like Hitler's drug addiction, or drugs and Nazis German and Nazi Germany, or the Nazis and meth, about seventy of the search results you see are going to be articles based on Norman's book, kind of rewriting the same thing over and over again, and this makes his book fairly unique in the field of Nazi studies. The Third Reich is the single most widely studied and

written about regime in political history. There are governments on the planet right now who produce less, who have produced to date less documentation for their government bureaucracy than there is historic works written about the Third Reich. Um no other government has had more scholars devote their lives to examining it, and no state has had so many pages of quality historical writing dedicated to its history. And when we include the great minds have written about the Third

Reich throughout history, we quickly become clogged with genius. There's William Schier, Iran Ian Kershaw, John Toland, Vocaler, ul Ric Richard Evans, and Hannah Rent, just to name a few. And the fact that in five years, Norman Ohler has become one of the most recognized writers in Nazi history. UM is due to the subject matter of his book, namely, people like drugs and people are fascinated by the Nazis, and if you combine those two things, you're going to

sell a lot of fucking books. Um. And one of the reasons this frustrates some historians is that some of the stuff that Older wrote about had been well documented before he came into the picture. For exam ample, pervitin, which is the methamphetamine that the Nazis primarily took UM. A lot of scholars wrote about the use of pervitin

by Nazis during the Blitz Creek. Where Older broke new ground was in making a detailed study about the personal notes and professional journals of a guy named Dr Theodore Morrell, who was one of Hitler's personal physicians and his primary dope dealer. Morrell was not an unknown quantity to historians previously, but Ohler spends a lot of time digging into precisely what he gave Hitler and how it may have impacted history. Half of the controversy among historians about Blitz revolves around

the language used in this book. Older is not a historian, he's not a scholar. He's writing in a pop nonfiction cadence and vocabulary. So this is closer to a guy like, um, who's that fucking guy everybody hates now that everybody loved for I wrote The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell. I'm not and I'm not saying he's like because I think he's

much more responsible than not. But he's closer to the Gladwell into the spectrum that kind of pop nonfiction than he is to a scholar like Ian Kershaw, you know, Um, And that frustrates scholars because his work has been so influential, Right, you get kind of piste off when, like you, you do detailed, painstaking analyzes of these guys and then, um, some dude kind of throws out a book that maybe maybe exaggerates some things and uses some like flagrant language

and and is much more popular than any work by a scholar will ever be that frustrated people? Um, And you know, I I don't think that that means it's not There is good scholarship of this, and there's in fact, groundbreaking scholarship in this. Ian Kershaw, who's probably the single most prominent biographer of Hitler alive today. UM called this a serious work of scholarship and praised it. UM. Richard Evans, on the other hand, who's also variable respected, hated this book.

So it's not like there's not I don't want to come across as saying there's an agreement among scholars that this book is bad, or that there's an agreement that it's good. UM. I tend to think it did more good than harm Um. But it was written to appeal to the masses and be a popular book, and it absolutely is now. The other half of the controversy around Blitz revolves around some of the more serious issues with

the way Older presents his research. Namely, he suffers from the same problem most people do when they zero in

on a very specific aspect of the Nazi regime. He's gotten so into the weeds on this topic that he lends it weight that's sometimes disproportionate to its actual and the same thing happens to people studying like the occult and nazis right because there is like a really fascinating history of like esoteric Hitlerism, of like of occult Nazism, but it also wasn't nearly as influential as the people who write books about it put it on as an in fact, by one it was pretty much out of

of of any kind of influence in the party. But you know, if that's your thing, you're going to seek to kind of hell boy things up a little, you know. So this is like a long winded way of saying it's debatable. No, it's it's a long way of trying to like give caveats about like what are not saying it's a bad book, but saying it's a good book that I think, because he's so fo focused on the drugs, tends to ignore other reasons for some of the behavior

that are not drugs. I wonder if it's dangerous. This is me speaking without reading the book. I think it may be dangerous to blame anything on drug use. I don't think that's That is the chief criticism the historians

that dislike him make, And he's actually pretty careful. He's careful in his book to say, like I am not saying Hitler's horrible crimes are the result because one of the things he does, he points out, as we'll go into most of the hardcore drugging use from Hitler started in the forties, you know, when he had already set everything in motion that he was going to set in

were already pretty yeah, was going down. Yeah. But he's saying like, it's it's worth noting if a guy is funked up on myth and cocaine and opium all of the time, and he's a warlord, it's worth wondering, like, how does that impact his decision making process? Which I think is a fair question, right, Like, obviously there is a danger when you do that, but it's also I don't think that means you shouldn't look at like, well, what was this doctor shooting into the veins of this

man making these incredibly influential decisions. Is the same way that like, it's worth looking at how the methamphetamine JFK took impacted his decision making during the Cuban missile crisis and ship right, like it is a problem or Trump and aneral It's it's certainly not like I don't wanna. I agree that's a worry, But I also don't think we should be like, well, let's not talk about this just because some people talking all you know, I guess I I am implying more that leaning into it too hard,

giving it too much weight. I can see it um distracting from a serious threat that was definitely worsened by drugs. I mean, it's interesting, um, Vietnam. Towards the end of Vietnam, all the soldiers, American soldiers were getting really messed up on all the kinds of pills that were just very prevalent in the sixties and seventies, like coaludes, black beauties, speed,

anything to keep them up. And it increased a lot of paranoia, especially when there's an enemy that you know, quote unquote enemy Via Kong who um aren't in uniforms. Your paranoia can increase, it can make you more violent. Um. With or without these drugs. The Vietnam War is still inherently a crime against humanity. But drugs don't help, Yeah,

and help. And that's there's a question too with the Nazis right where you don't want to like a lot of these these these r mock soldiers were going days without sleeping and taking ship into that amphetamine, and some of them committed horrible atrocities. You don't want to like the atrocities. Number One, we're often ordered by people who were certainly not drugged out of their minds, and we're

planned pretty extensively ahead of time. That said, the fact that a lot of these guys are meth and like flipping out and burning down villages, Um, some of that's probably due to the fact that they're they're fucked up on meth amphetamine, right, Like not necessarily like the the concerted genocide actions where they're shooting forty people in a day, but like, oh yeah, they get shot at by a partisan and they burned down a village, And maybe that's

some guys who are tweaked out on speed over react like flipping out in the same way that like, yeah, maybe it had an impact. Um, I think you can say that. I think you can want to know. Okay, well, you have millions of men going days without sleeping, heavily armed and taking math amphetamine. I bet that has an influence on their behavior. Without saying the Nazis killed millions of Russian civilians because they were on meth which is

not the case. They killed millions of Russian civilians because the war from the beginning was a genocidal crusade. UM. I don't know. I don't want to like I don't want to like veer away from what is an interesting question just because people can, Um, people can simplify it to the extent that it gets sucked up, you know, because I I do think this is a fascinating question. Um, We're gonna be talking a lot about Ohler's findings here because I do agree with Ian Kershaw who described it

as a serious piece of scholarship. He goes into he's not just real like cutting up other bits of reporting. He looks at a lot of original primary sources. He's combing through in a way I don't think anyone else ever did. Dr Theodore Morrell's Hitler's primary Physicians notes in in exhaustive detail researching the medicines He's getting. There's a lot of very important scholarship, I think in his findings.

But I also will be laying out some areas where Owler's conclusions do not jell with the actual evidence, and there are some points there. So let's start by talking about drug culture in Weimar, Germany as a refresher. The Vimar government was a progressive democracy that followed after the Kaiser's monarchy went away and was eventually eaten up by Hitler. For like the fifteen or so years it existed, Weimar

was a dizzying lye progressive government for its time. Berlin became a magnet for the LGBT community, and the side of the first very first series is research on healthcare for trans people. Art and music flourished, and as you'd expect from a city full of bohemian artists and musician, people were getting fucked up all the time, like I

mean just just really yeah, exactly, like real creative drug use. Um, because like Berlin is Berlin is you know what what what places like New you know, chunks of New York and chunks of California became in the sixties and seventies. Berlin is that in the fucking twenties, you know. UM and this put photographs you can find of Berlin in the twenties where people are in drag. It's very casual. It's actually completely there's a flamboyant, like fun Roaring twenties quality. Yeah,

it's um, it's it's it's a fascinating time to study. Um. And and this put you know. One of the things that I think is critique about older is he when he's talking about drug use in Germany, he focuses heavily on Berlin and the Berlin Hella drug use, but also Berlin's drug uses in direct contrast to what's going on

in the rest of Germany. Not only was most of Germany much more socially conservative think about like Portland, Oregon versus as surrounding areas right, but the use of recreational drugs like cocaine was markedly uncommon in Germany and not

even particularly common in Berlin. As we'll talk about, it's worth noting that at this time most Germans across the country would not have considered tobacco or alcohol drugs, So when we're talking about drug use, those are not drugs to Germans in the twenties, that's like milk to them. Both were so ubiquitous that they were considered to be a part of a person's diet, and interestingly enough, both Communists and Nazi leaders in Europe at this time hated tobacco.

Lenin was famously anti cigarette, um so was Hitler. Obviously, Lennon's anti cigarettes ship didn't last once stock Castalla loved him some some smoking, and Hitler hated cigarettes, but there was never really any sort of They both like he had to kind of accept like, well, I'm not going to get Germans to stop smoking, Like that's not gonna happen. Yeah, they were, they were, they were, he was he definitely kind of straight edge. Yeah. Um. And you know, uh,

we'll talk about this more later. But for the most part throughout the twenties, Nazis and Communists smoke and smoked and drank about as much as everybody else. So again, while there's Nazi and Communist leaders who are being like, no, you need to struggle towards revolution and be sober for that, most Communists, most Nazis are getting drunk and chain smoking like anybody else. Um. And so when we talk about drugs in Germany, what I mean by drugs is hard

stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, as well as opiates. Germany was actually the world leader in drug manufacturing at this Morphine beer exactly. Morphine had first been isolated by a German chemist in the early eighteen hundreds. It was rediscovered, patented, and mass produced by Bayer in eight By the end of World War One, morphine was the number one product

of the entire German pharmaceutical industry. They were shipping this stuff out everywhere because it's the most addictive thing in the world. The company that owned that first manufacturing plant in Germany was the Sacklers, later responsible for the opioid epidemic we're currently facing the States. Good people, Yeah, we've talked about. Yeah, there's some other Bear products made during the Nazi regime that we could talk about too, like heroin. Yeah,

heroin they advertise as lighter than morphine. Yeah, I mean, and a lot of this ship is OTC in Germany at the time, right, Um, and Bear is the first to produce and sell heroin, And actually heroin stays over the counter in Germany until like the nineteen fifties. Um, I'm god to live in those times, to just be able to walk down to the corner store and get a big fat baggele horse smoke it. And I don't know, it doesn't really matter what the movies. Yeah, it doesn't

really matter what you're doing when you're smoking heroin. So now by a lot of like this point, heroin has become like illegal in the US and a lot of Asia, at least if you're taking it, like you can't just go and get it over the counter, right, Maybe it's more prescribed than it is than it was now that it was not like you couldn't just walk in and buy it as a person, but you can in Germany, and so Germany, since everything is kind of legal, there

becomes the nexus for an international gray and black market drug trade in heroin, and these German Swiss companies will kind of use Germany as a base and will They're not directly selling it illegally underground in countries, but they're putting it in position to be sold that way and they're profiting from it. I'm gonna quote from a write up by a scholar named Jonathan Levy here. Both morphine and heroin were consumed in Germany during the Weimar years

and the Third Reich. The morphine was far more popular than it's more potent cousin, perhaps explaining Merk's decision to cease its uh diacetyl morphine program. The number of addicts in Germany is difficult to ascertain. Like many drug statistics, the reported numbers of addicts are mere gu estimates rather than reliable figures, mainly because it is next to impossible

to differentiate between addicts and users. Now, the best evidence seems to suggest that The rate of opiate addiction in Germany increased from the start of the war years, and by that I mean World War One until about nineteen twenty two, which is probably caused by the same thing that drives a lot of opiate use in the US today, which is wounded soldiers getting hooked on it, right, getting prescribed as much of it as they want having, you know, developing a problem, but by much of them in the

Civil War too, Yeah, yeah, every time, every time a lot of men get wounded. Yeah, soldiers got hooked on. I mean, it's funny you say guestimate because I'm just reading that sock rebook. Everyone is waiting, and they said, they said the estimate was a quarter of a million soldiers in the United States hooked on morphine, and that even Theodore Roosevelt basically created a position for someone to

fight this quote unquote epidemic. Yeah, I mean that that that completely completely makes sense, especially and it is like as available as it was when you just bumped down to the street and buy it. Why wouldn't you take up on Jay irwin Um. Now by nineteen thirty one, though, the rate of addictions seems to have like fallen in Germany. Obviously, none of our data is perfect, but it may have just been a matter of like enough time had passed since the war, people had recovered enough, some of them

had probably died. UM. One leader in the Reich Health Office at that point estimated that just point there were just point three male addicts per ten thousand people in Germany, which is probably nonsense. But he also noted that one in a hundred doctors were addicts UM and this is

probably a much more accurate number. Include in part because like a lot of these guys have been prosecuted for this, and in part because today we know that doctors are at a heavily, massively elevated risk of particularly opiate addiction, right something with nurses? Yeah, yeah, doctors, pharmacists and nurses. You know, I've talked to I've talked to a nurse with a drug addiction who was like pinching you know,

opiates and ship for for quite a long while. And it's some like it's it's it's hard to avoid, especially given like the trauma that you encounter as a healthcare worker. Why wouldn't you want to be high on fucking oxy all the time? I get it, it's not good behavior if people's lives are in your hand. But it's I I can empathize with the need to dull that. Yeah, especially since I don't know none of us are. We've all decided not to not to do the pandemic mitigation

thing anymore. So I don't know. We got more taxes than Jeff Bezos Arizona. Yeah, so yeah, take some oxy. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna yell at your um now do Yeah. Cocaine was also a drug with a German origin. It was synthesized first from coca leaves by German chemists and popularized by a Veny psychiatrist named Dr Sigmund Freud and a Vienny's eye doctor named Carl Kohler.

Freud prescribed cocaine as part of his talk therapy sessions, and Dr Cohler just poured it right into people's eyes as a local anesthetic, which is man, imagine going to the eye doctor and I'm gonna pour some cocaine in your eyes. Came them open. This ship is strong as ass. My therapist Kathy shout out if before I was about to talk to her about um stalking people on social media and how it's affecting my mental health. She poured some cocaine into my eyes. I can't say how that

would affect our sessions. I think they'd be rather. I think they'd be they'd go by really quickly. They would go by very quickly. Yeah, and I would need a gallon of water to help my dry mouth. Look, as far as I am aware, cocaine is a drug without downsides, So I don't see why people shouldn't shouldn't take a shipload of it. It's good for your part, good for you. I've heard it has the ability to reduce u nasal problems, cleans you out real for the next two days. Yeah,

for legal res no continue. You know what it is. Time for an ad break and Behind the Bastards is sponsored by the global cocaine industry. Behind the Bastards if you like podcasts, you'll love cocaine. We're back and we're celebrating the cocaine industry, an industry with no problems, sore pr Yeah, carry one side of the story exactly. People talk a lot about all the deaths, all the murders, all the violence, violence, all the death squads funded by

cocaine exports. People never talk about the humble movie producers railing cocaine off of the back of each other's iPhones in the bathroom of a club. Yeah, Martin ever heard of write another for and he never did anything problematic cocaine, thank you. So now we were just talking about how Dr Sigmund Freud and Dr Cohler Carl Koehler Um were heavily responsible with popularizing cocaine in Germany. And both guys are Jewish. This is relevant because cocaine takes off as

the Nazis are rising to and then getting into power. Um. And so the Nazis condemn cocaine as a Jewish drug corrupting pure Arean bodies, right um. They are not fans of cocaine. And and this is why they can't really come after opiates, right um. And they don't they have these kind of they they kind of approached as a public health problem. But they can't condemn opiate users because most of a lot of opiate users are soldiers. And there's this you have to like worship veterans in this

period of time, especially if you're the Nazis. But cocaine, that's the drug that you know, the artists and and and the queer people and the and the fucking psychiatrists are doing you can you can demonize cocaine, you know um, and they do so. Berlin decadence was a major topic of complaint for the Nazis, and the city was a hive of all things rad There were illegal, illegal dance

parties not similar to raves. There were infamous clubs like the Bowhouse Ressi, which was kind of like the Studio fifty four of its time is a place people would meet and fucking do lots of cocaine. Since prostitution and drug use was more or less legal in Berlin, tourists from the United States would often travel there to fucking snort themselves silly in blitzed older sites. The lyrics of a contemporary song to set the mood of the time. And I don't know what the tune of this song was,

but it's a good song. Once, not so very long ago, sweet alcohol, that beast brought warmth and sweetness to our lives. But then the price increased, and so cocaine and morphine. Berliners now select. Let lightning flashes rage outside, we snort and we inject. At dinner in the restaurant, the waiter brings the tin of coke for us to feast upon. Forget whiskey and gin let drowsy morphine take its subcutaneous effect upon our nervous system. We snort and we inject.

These medications aren't allowed, of course, they're quite forbidden, but even such a listid treats are very seldom hidden. Euphoria awaits us, and though as we suspect our foes can't wait to shoot us down, we snort and we inject. And if we snort ourselves to death or into the asylum, our days are going downhill fast. How better to beguile them. Europe's a madhouse anyway, No need for ginia flecting. The only way to paradise is snorting and injecting very fun.

And the way you read it and made it sound like you're reading a children's book, Yeah, it would be a good children's book. And it makes sense. This is happening as the first kind of anti drug laws are being pushed through and again they're not they're not nearly as strict as anything we we live with today in the United States, but they're the first, and the Nazis

are you know, they're complaining about drug use. But they're also complaining about degeneracy, about artists, about about people who are are queer, and there those people the like kind of artistic intellectually can see what's coming, and they also can't stop it because they didn't um. And that's what the song is about, is like, well, we're about to it all murdered by the Nazis. Might as well take some heroin, right, Yeah, it's sending a little Yeah, the

prices increasing, it's not cutting it anymore. Yeah, time to get yeah fucked up until the Nazis take total power. Yeah. Hard to blot out what's happening. Yeah, yeah. Now, I will say, somewhat ironically, Ohler's fullness of focus on Berlin drug culture, the fact that he zero was in on that so much, kind of focusing less on the rest of Germany, seems to have been heavily influenced by Nazi propaganda in a way that I think does make his

overall work a little less accurate. He writes, quote anyone who could afford it to cocaine the ultimate weapon for intensifying the moment. Coke spread like wildfire and symbolize the extravagance of the age on the other hand, it was viewed as a degenerate poison and disapproved of by both communists and Nazis were fighting for power. In the streets, there was violent opposition to the free and easy Zitgeist. German nationalists railed against moral decay, and similar attacks were

heard from the conservatives. Though Berlin's new status as a cultural metropolis was accepted with pride, the bourgeoisie, which was losing status in the nineteen twenties, showed its in security through its radical condemnation of mass pleasure culture, to cry it as decadently western. Now, his job does a fine His work here is a fine job of getting across the way popular a German opinion, kind of at least right wing opinions saw Berlin and the decadence of its

artistic set. But it's also not historically accurate in absolute terms. And to make that point, I want to quote from a paper called the Drug Policy of the Third Reich from the journal Social History of Alcohol. A drugs criminal Commissar Ernst Angelbrecht of Berlin claimed in nineteen twenty four that cocaine became most popular amongst female and male homosexuals. To him, cocaine was not a problem. It had turned

to do an epidemic. Yet, according to contemporary estimates, the city of Karl's rue Ragn reign supreme as the center for cocaine consumption, with one point four or four grams per thousand people, while Berlin remained second with a consumption rate of one gram per thousand people, which is not particularly high. Nineteen two marked the first German Anti So yeah, he's is again there is cocaine. There is this kind of very popular party sect and the Nazis make a lot,

a lot of haye of it. But in absolute terms, Berlin isn't consuming a particularly large amount of cocaine. And again, I think this is an area where the fact that the Nazis harped on it so much has older focusing on kind of the decadence of Berlin in a way that that is kind of falling for their trap, because it was not. Berlin itself was not nearly as decadent or drug adduled as the propagandamate it seen. Based on the numbers that we actually have, um but don't be

a problem. Was it sounds like, well, it peaked around I think um three um it starts to decline to this like, that's kind of the whole point is that Germany, especially compared to the United States, does not have a particularly big drug problem or drug culture. It's again very prominent because a lot of famous people are involved in like the set in Berlin that is doing a lot of this, but that is that's kind of like a subculture in Berlin. It's not the city and it's not

my mainstream in Germany. Um. And the fact that the Nazis kind of blow it up into being Berlin is the sin the hum of It's kind of like what happens with like Portland, where like the city of Portland's being burnt down every week because the right wing sees a kid break a Starbucks window. Um, that's kind of that's well, no, I was, I didn't break I didn't

see ship. But that that's kind of how That's kind of how drug use in Berlin gets painted and and a lot of people still see it in history just because the Nazis made so much hay over the decadence of the city, when the reality is the vast majority of people in Berlin, Um, if they ever did indulge, weren't doing it all that much. Um. It's buzzwords like yeah now. Nineteen twenty four marked the first major German anti drug law, which banned the sale of powder cocaine

from pharmacies. So didn't make it. You could still get cocaine pretty much legally, you just couldn't buy powdered coke from the pharmacy. Um and cocaine consumption is estimated to have peaked in nineteen seven and fallen afterwards, So this is definitely an area where Older engages in some counterfactual prose to the sake of making his book more interesting. Um. But that said, his writing does give a decent idea of how the Nazis expressed their rhetoric around drugs. Quote.

Jews and drugs merged into a single toxic or epidemiological unit that menaced Germany for decades. Are people have been told by Marxists and Jews, your body belongs to you. That was taken to mean that at social occasions between men or between men and women, any quantities of alcohol could be enjoyed, even at the cost of the body's health.

Irreconcilable with this Jewish Marxist view is the Teutonic German idea that we are the bearers of the eternal legacy of our ancestors, and that accordingly our body belongs to the clan and the people as as helpstone Fear Criminal Commissar Orwen Cosmel, who was from ninety one director of the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transit Aggressions, asserted that Jews play a supreme part in the international drug trade.

His work was concerned with eliminating international criminal who often have roots and jewelry. The Nazi Party's Office of Racial Policy claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug dependent. The intellectual urban Jew preferred cocaine or morphine to call him his constantly excited nerves and give himself a feeling of peace and inner security. Jewish doctors were rumored to

be often extraordinarily addicted to morphine. But he rather cooler, rather conveniently ignores the fact that you know, again, in focusing on this and those are all things the Nazis said, they definitely again harped on Jewish drug use and like this, the scourge of drug addiction and how it's Jewish, you know,

has Jewish origins. But immediately before the Nazi seizure of power, the Reich Health Minister what wrote quote, to the knowledge of the Reich Health Office, there is no illicit drug trade in Berlin in a considerable amount, as opposed a danger to the public. The circumstances in this respect have changed completely in recent years. And this is nineteen thirty one.

So after seven drug use kind of all kinds declines rapidly, and so by the point the Nazis are in power, um there's really not much of a drug problem and as a result, there's really not much of a drug crackdown.

And this is Ohler's main sin. In his book, as I see it, he wants to draw a direct line between the modern war on drugs and the Nazi war on drugs, and so he notes that when the Central while the Central Drug Law and the Third Reich was a holdover from Fimar Germany, there were new drug regulations put in place when the Nazis took power to further

Nazi ideas of racial hygiene. He claims that drug consulsumption was heavily penalized starting in nineteen thirty three with prison time, and appears to be making the claim the drug users and Nazi Germany were penalized and thrown into concentration camps like other political prisoners and racial minorities. This is something

actual scholars who studied drug policy, and they disagree. While you can find most of it was not and even so we'll talk about it like consumption wasn't really criminalized, and there was at no point where drug users gone after and put in concentration camps in an organized way. And I want to quote from that that paper by Jonathan Levy again, quote drug use was never a cry I'm in Germany. Thus habitual drug users or drug addicts

were not criminals. Therefore they were not considered habitual criminals and could not be sent to a concentration camp. So this is again if we're if when in terms of critiquing Older, and this is a big chunk of the early part of his book, and it is, you know, there's two parts of this book. There's the part of it where he's doing original research into Hitler's drug use and Hitler's doctor, and there's a part of it where he's kind of synthesizing a bunch of other historic reports

on the Nazis and drugs. And it's that part that, in my opinion, he screws up the most. Um, So yeah, Um, it's it's it's anyway. That's a little bit of a rant on on this book, but I think it's important to kind of get this this sort of stuff right. Um and when you are important to get this stuff right? Yeah. Um. And and Levy is is clear that he cannot find And Levy's a guy who studies specifically Third Reich policies

on like drug policies. His conclusion is that there's no evidence that again, in the Nazis talked a lot about about racial hygiene, about how drug use, you know, was it was a racial problem, But there's no evidence, according to Levy, that that the Nazi drug policy was impacted by their ideas on racial hygiene. So politicians and like people were saying one thing, but in terms of like what the actual legal changes worth, there's just not evidence of that. Um. And I have to thank Levy knows

who shipped on this better than Owler does. So making drug consumption of crime was really our thing. Oh yeah, we we do the hell out of that. I mean the Germans do now. But um yeah, and part again, part of why the Nazis really didn't want to go after drug users is because a lot of them were veterans. Herman Garring was a drug addicted veteran in the Trench generation were idolized, They were nearly worshiped by the Nazis. If you've focused on junkies and demonizing them like that

would have been bad politics. It's also worth noting that the German penal code, established during the Kaiser's Reich was actually we would consider it wildly progressive on issues of drug addiction compared to the United States. And I'm gonna quote from Levy here. Addicts were not responsible for their actions while under the influence of drugs and should receive treatment instead of a jail sentence. Judges often agreed with this position, but we're unable to force treatment, and we're

known to set free criminals unfit to stand trial. The protection of drunken and intoxicated criminals existed in the German Peedle code since its inception, And obviously that's not a perfect way to do things either, being like, well, you you raped it somebody, you beat the ship out of somebody, but you were drugs. Get out of here. They found

a bag of uh, you know, high sativa. Yeah, but it is there is There is also an element of that that's good, which is that like, well yeah it, drug addictions should be treated as a health problem rather than criminal problem. Um yeah yeah, progressing stating of that smoked enough crack to move the US forward on drug policy. Really doing your country service, and I mean that actually sincerely you know who else is doing our country service?

Carolina Brand Brand, the sin Aaloa cartel producers until this exact episode. No, No, we're we are peers seeing ala these days. So curl up with a big fat bag a cocaine and listen to a podcast while sweating heavily. Make up pipe out of your mother's base, make a pipe out of anything. A BP baby, always be piping. It's my motto. We're back, Uh boy, so drugs? Um yeah. So far I've mostly criticized Blitzed, and it doesn't deserve

some criticism. But now we're about to get into what I think the book does very well, which is provide the first really thorough history of a fascinating figure, one of the few high up Nazis to be most lely ignored by historians, Dr Theodore Morrell. In nine, psychiatrist Fritz Redlick published a book titled Hitler diagnosis of a destructive profit. It was an attempt to actually answer the to actually answer the question, what the funk was going on with

that dude? With this in like a medical way, with as much scientific rigor, Yeah, what was going on with that guy? In as much of like a scientific way as you could for a patient who's been dead for decades. He used written in oral statements by Hitler and his close associates to try and put together a picture of the fewer's health. Red Look's book relied heavily upon Dr Theodore Morrell Morrell's records, and I'm gonna quote from the

Psychiatric Times here. Before the outbreak of war in nineteen thirty nine, Hitler's complaints included insomnia, eczema, and g I discomfort. His health is known to have declined considerably starting in nineteen forty one. Red Li excited a host of ailments, including tonitis, severe headaches, dizziness, impaired vision, abdominal spasms, impairments and motility, and during the final year of the war, jaundice, laryngitis, running knows more abouts, g I spasms, trimmor of his hands,

and conspicuous difficulties in locomotion evidence of Parkinson's disease. In ninety five, his GI symptoms and Trimmer's worsen't, eventually leaving him unable to move around completely on his own. In treating these symptoms over the years, Morrell prescribed for Hitler a cocktail of medications that included opiates, morphine, oxycodone, barbiturous cocaine, amphetamines, and bromides. In the end, red Lick drew a conclusion

that has been repeatedly repeated frequently ever since. Hitler abused amphetamines, particularly between nineteen thirty nine and nineteen forty three, and was temporarily impaired by such abuse, and this was probably the most hitler A diagnosis, probably the most popular and thorough look at Morele and Hitler's drug use prior to Owler's work, and like Owler's work, red Lick's book was

heavily criticized. Experts noted that many of his sources were unreliable because again, a lot of this is based on personal recollections of Nazis who survived the war, who are fundamentally untrustworthy people, um and yeah. And even more than that, they criticized red Lick for the fact that his emphasis on the fears drug abuse came close to excusing Hitler's crimes um, which you obviously never want to do. And

the same criticism is made of Blitz. We'll see how we feel about that at the end of this but right now I think it's time to get into the meat of Hler's work, which is his portrait of Dr Morrell and the relationship Hitler had with his primary physician. Here's how Older introduces morrel quote. The word Jew was smeared on the plaque of a doctor's surgery on bay Ruther Strasse in Berlin's Charlottenburg district one night in nineteen thirty three. The name of the doctor, a specialist in

dermatological and sexually transmitted diseases, was illegible. Only the opening hours could still be seen clearly weekdays eleven to one and five to seven apart from Saturday afternoon. The overweight, baldtor Theodore Morrell reacted to the attack in a way that was typical, That was as typical as it was wretched. He quickly joined the Nazi Party to diffuse further hostilities of that kind. Morel was not a Jew. The essay had wrongly suspected him of being one because of his

dark complexion. After he had registered as a party member, Morrell's practice became even more successful. It expanded and moved into the lavish rooms of a nineteenth century building on the corner of First and dom and fasanen Strassa. Now, Morrel was not at all unique in joining the Nazi Party to avoid, you know, getting getting accused of being Jewish. Yeah, very common. He was one of and again not just

for that reason. He was one of what hundreds of thousands of German professionals who are what you would call a political Nazis. If the Nazi Party had never come around, they probably never would have done anything bad. They would have done whatever their fucking job is, right, Um. But because being the best way to further their career or just make life easier was to join the Nazi Party, they joined the Nazi Party and thus played some role in the Holocaust. Um. And Yeah, so, as you might expect,

Morrell was not a great doctor. Again, std s were kind of his primary area of expertise. But the thing that he really loved to focus us on was the very new field of vitamins. Now, in the early nineteen hundreds, we'd figured out that vitamins were things and that you would die without them, but we did not know a whole lot more than that. Right, vitamin is still a pretty new concept that there's like there's these things that if you don't get enough of them, you your body

stops breaking. Yeah. Um, so there was an idea. And when we start to realize, like, oh shit, vitamin C or like you know, potassium, you can have you can feel immediate effects when you take some of this stuff like B twelve, right, and you can if you ever, if you especially if you're dealing with it, get efficiency,

like it's it's fucking quick. Um. And so that that convinces a lot of people that, like, you can, you know, if some of these can have such an immediate effect on people who are vitamin efficient, maybe taking shiploads of vitamins will like make you superhuman, right, like just inject huge doses of them and you'll be you know, it's it's it's Joe roganesque stuff, right, like it's the it also reminds me of being and having to eat a bunch of this. Yeah, let's see what happened. Yeah, yeah exactly,

And like eating a bunch of nutmeg. Taking shiploads of vitamins is a mixed bag and can make you poop a tremendous amount. Um, shout out to vitamin C. Shout out to vitamin C. So obviously, vitamin injections can be powerful menas and save people's lives in certain circumstances, right, incredible potential for malnourished people and people with certain disorders. And also like, there are certain vitamin shots like if you're hungover and ship you'll be like, oh fuck, I

feel like I feel like a king right now, you know. Um, Now, the early nineteen hundreds was a time oh sorry, so um, there is like vitamin injections that's not like snake oil necessarily, that's not something that's even necessarily bad for you. But Morrell marketed his vitamin injections in a way that again wouldn't have seemed out of place on like a podcast

add today. Um. He was, in short, a snake oil salesman, and he relied on the fact that vitamins were new and sexy to help him market the a performance enhancers. He had this thing called Vita Molton, which was he sold it in both like bar form and in a shot that was basically like this powerful vitamin injection that he eventually added like a whole bunch of other stuff too.

We'll talk about it, um and again. You know, because vitamins don't have a huge impact on people who are already well nourished, Morrell it points would make the decision to mix real drugs and hormones into his vitamin shots because like, yeah, you want them to like feel something immediately, right, Put a little amphetamine in there, you know, a little bit of fucking put some fucking testosterone in there, you know. Um, Like, so he was he was doping people. It wasn't just vitamins.

It was often like steroids. It was or or you know, amphetamines, and eventually like a shiploaded like everything. He could get a caffeine A lot of the time he would shoot caffeine in you know. It's kind of because again, if you're this guy, if someone's well nourished, just most vitamin shots, they're not kind of feel anything. So shoot a bunch of caffeine in there too. They'll feel that. They'll feel like something's going on, you know, like ship like i'm

i'm i'm, I'm, I'm I'm powerful now. Um, it's a smart con move. It's a smart telling someone that you are giving them vitamins but really are giving them a cup of coffee. It probably does feel like something's working. Yeah, So for male patients, he often shot added in testosterone to act as an anabolic steroid. For female patients, he would include nightshade to help with energy and because he

thought it made their eyes prettier. If that wasn't enough of a boost, he was not above using more powerful stimulants like methamphetamine. We'll talk about method more detail later, but the point is Morrel's only true talent as a position was marketing and the fact that he seems to have been really good at injecting people. There were folks who said you couldn't even feel him pricky with the needle.

He was so good at what he did. Now today's fascists are so obsessed with traditionalism that it's often forgotten that the o g s were futurists. Fascism was obsessed with machinery, with cutting edge science, ultra modern medical science. Fascism was a modern thing. They loved cars, they loved machine gun, they loved planes. Eugenics at the time was considered hip and exciting science. Morrell adopted from the States. Yeah, yeah,

the eugenics and stuff. Sure, I mean a decent amount of this was um and Morrell's vitamin shots fit in well with the vibe of the early Nazi years. By nineteen thirty six, he was one of the most prominent doctors in the Reich, and that's the year he got a phone call from Hitler's adjutant asking him to make a house call for Heinrich Hoffman, the Fewer's official photographer. Hoffman had contracted gonorrhea and not from his wife. Since he was a prominent Nazi, the regime wanted to treat

him in a hush hush manner. Morrell knew a lot about STDs and was able to treat the photographer easily. The Nazis were so grateful that they gave him and his wife a fancy trip to Venice as a thank you for his discretion. Afterwards, he was invited to dine with the Hoffman's in Munich. Hitler showed up and the group ate all the Nazi leaders in the group all eight. The Nazi leader's favorite meal spaghetti with nutmeg tomato sauce, on the side and green salad from whitst quote, Yeah,

Hitler's weird, weird eater. Hitler, who had heard a great many good things about the jovial Morrell, thanked him before dinner for treating his old comrade and regretted not having met the doctor before. Perhaps then his chauffeur, who had died of meningitis a few months earlier, would have still been alive. Morrell reacted nervously for the compliment and barely

spoke during the spaghetti dinner. The constantly sweating doctor, with the full face and the thick round glasses on his potato nose, knew that in higher circles he was not considered socially acceptable. His only chance of acceptance lay in his injections, so he pricked up his ears. When Hitler, in the course of the evening, talked almost in passing about severe stomach and intestinal pains that had been tormenting him for years, Morrell hastily mentioned an unusual treatment that

might prove successful. Hitler looked at him quizzically and invited Morrell and his wife to further consultations at the Berghoff, his mountain retreat in the Ober Saltzburg near Berkdscaden. There. A few days later, during a private conversation, the dictator frankly admitted to Morrell that his health was now so poor that he could barely perform any action. That was he claimed due to the bad treatment given to him by his previous doctors, who couldn't come up with anything

but starving him. Then, if there happened to be an abundant dinner on the program, which was often the case, he immediately suffered from unspeakable bloating and itchy exima on both legs, so that he had to walk around with bandages around his feet and couldn't wear boots. Morrell immediately thought he recognized the cause of Hitler's complaints and diagnosed abnormal bacterial flora causing poor digestion. Now we don't know

exactly what was wrong with Hitler at this point. Like medically in the mid odds, historian Hendrik A. Berl and physician Hans Joachim Neuman attempted to diagnose the fear's physical maladies. And I'm gonna quote from the Psychiatric Times here. While the German Chancellor appears to have not suffered from any major acute illnesses. He was a victim of chronic diseases. Neuman and Eberil confirmed that Hitler's longstanding ailments were g I and nature. There are also signs and medical records

of progressive coronary sclerosis and high blood pressure. Most prominently, however, Neuiman and A. Burrow confirmed the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, which really started in the early So he's got eximant, he's got something on his GI gives him this, and this is his main complaint. He has this horrific, debilitating gas pain. His gas is so bad that like he can't he can't function a lot of the time when he eats. Some of this is probably exacerbated by his

vegetarian diet. He probably had IBS as a result of his time in the trenches. You talk about people particularly who were over in like Iraq and Afghanistan earlier in those wars, before there was as much infrastructure on the U. S side, nearly all of them have some sort of ib S. It's just something you get when you're in in trenches. The water's dirty and stuff. Um. There's a number of things that are probably going on with Hitler. Um,

but it is. It is likely right that he had something going wrong with his bacterial flora, you know, Um, perhaps because of you know, his injuries during the war or something. Um. But we now know that like, yeah, all the bad food eats, gut bacteria have a big impact on your health. Um. And that was starting to be understood then. It's still kind of a primitive science now comparatively, um. And Morrell prescribed his leaders something called

Utah floor. This was a gut bacterious supplement. It had actually been crafted from the intestinal flora of a German soldier who had been sent to the Balkans during World War One and had been like the only guy in his unit not to get horrible stomach issues. So that's actually a really good medical thing. He's like, well, that guy seems like, let's get the ship out of his guts and like give it to other people, you know.

And Muda floor was live bacteria in capsules, taken with the hope that they'd set up permanent shop in the patient's bowels. This was real medicine, and its impact on hitler g I track was apparently powerful and quick. Hitler experienced immediate relief, although not permanent relief. So I don't know exactly what was going on here, but he was so overjoyed to be cured, as he felt at the time, that he gave Morella house and made him his personal physician.

But Morrell wasn't a gut bacteria specialist. He was a vitamin man. Hitler still had health complaints, and a lot of them were probably due to permanent injuries caused by his service and the fact that he was just an aging man, you know, in a time when medicine wasn't

very good. So Morrell was able to convince his new boss that vitamins were the Antswer, You're not tired because you're pushing fifty and you have been, you know, going without sleep and working like a crazy person, and like you were injured and suffered permanent damage in the war. You're tired because you need these vitamin injections that are

also full of caffeine or sometimes amphetamines, you know. Um. So he was basically like, I you're you're you can't like you need vitamins, And because vitamin pills take too long and your schedule is so demanding, I've just got to start shooting you up every time before a speech in order to like get you get you hyped up. Yeah, and Morrel starts getting Hitler's shots and he never stops

until the very end of the war. And he would put a wide variety of substances into the Nazi leader's veins, iodine, vitamin's, chalk, and when Hitler had a big speech, a power injection which often contained glucoset to give him a boost of sugar sugar fueled energy, probably caffeine. Also. A lot of the time, Morrel's immediate goal was an instant cessation of symptoms. So if you're tired, he wants you to wired right away, you know. Um. And to that end, he continually experimented

and tweaked the injections he was giving Hitler. We don't always know what they included, um, because sometimes just I gave him, you know, shot number whatever, and it's like, okay, well, what the funk was in that? And older does a lot of good work to try to diagnose it. You know, a lot of times that aren't recorded, there's probably some if not amphetamine, then at least caffeine, and these things

we don't always know. Um. We do know that in seven UM, the Nazi leader lost his voice before a big speech, and Moreau gave him an injection of something that is said to have cured him immediately, Like, who knows what the funk he was shooting into the guy? Just tell Hitler to lip sync? Yeah, um soon. Morrel was so indispensable to the few that he was forced to let his medical practice shrivel up from lack of attention.

Hitler couldn't let him be away from him right, um, he needed him kind of available on call at all time. Hitler was an all concer booming patient, but he rewarded Dr Morrell wealth, making him a wealthy man. In nineteen thirty eight, he gave his doctor an honored professorship. For his part, Morrell kept looking for new substances to shoot

into Hitler's body. The nineteen thirty six Olympics had seen the advent of the use of benz adrine, which is classic speed when your parents talking about you and speed in the seventies. That's Benny's baby. Yeah, you can still get it today. If you get a benza, drecs and hailer, you make it. They're little allergy and hailers. You just make sure that they say benz adrine. On him. You pop them open, you take the little cotton cloth out throat in a water bottle, you're good to go. Allegedly.

Allegedly yeah, um so yeah. Benz Adrine gets big after the thirty six Olympics and a German pharmaceutical company makes a note of this. They're like, well, it seems like people love speed, we should develop a better speed. And the chemical they picked to make an even better speed was a little substance you might have heard about. It was first synthesized in nineteen nineteen by Japanese chemists and

name was in methyl mphetamine. That's the good ship, good good ship, yeah baby, uh meth speaking of drugs with dolen sides. So in short order, Timmler was producing meth methemphetamine pills as an over the counter medication under the brand named pervitin Um, and sales started in the weekend of night in the winter of nineteen seven, and the drug use was and the drug was immediately popular among the Young Third Reich users or in The drug was

immediately popular in the Young Third Reich. Soon Timmler was even selling boxes of meth spiked chocolate. They bragged that their wonder drug was good for quote reawakening joy and the despondent, and that fragility, frigidity, and women can be easily influenced with pervitin tablets giving her all some methods she'll want to get down. You know, you can just put that on a box and sell missing is meth is meth when it's all legal. I hope to be an admin for the meth m that I mean industry.

It's with chemistry. Yeah, yeah, like it can help it. Well, have you you and your wife been fighting? Fight faster on meth? You know, exactly exactly. So I'm going to continue to read from Timmler's ads for purvidin. The treatment technique is as simple as can be imagined. Four half tablets every day, long before bedtime, ten days a month for three months. This will achieve excellent results by increasing women's libido and sexual power. Take meth every day to

funk better. Meth I'm almost positive would not help me get laid. I mean when I smoked pot in college, I would perpetually ruined dates by avoiding the person I was sitting next to. I literally in college smoked weed once with this guy who I was like getting set up with, didn't speak to him at all, like I need to go home, apologized to him. The next time I saw him, I was like, hey, John, I'm so sorry about it. That was so weird. I would love to just like see if we could do this again.

And he said, thank you so much for apologizing. What did we do on our next date? Smoke weed together? I was like, I've got to leave again, so sorry, and um, that was the end of our short lived relationship. So I feel like if meth was at it, it it wouldn't help the situation, is what I'm saying. I mean, you know, there's only one way to find out, which is track that guy down and take a just rail a funckload of crystal. Only if they put it in chocolate,

and I want them in those little roche little roast chocolates. Yeah, I would like when you know there like this this chocolate cherries, little cherry in the middle of the chocolate. Things like texture with a little rock of crystal meth right in the middle, right in the middle. Yeah, the surprise or maybe those little eggs they make. Yeah, Cadburry. I was thinking Cadbury instead of like building a toy inside you you smoke meth, just a funkload of meth

field cadburry eggs. God, that would be rad um. Allegedly, so, metho fetamine was even useful in treating drug addicts. According Again, this is according to the company selling meth. They advised they advised people withdrawing from alcohol, cocaine or heroin to take a little meth to help them get over the sheiks. Meth was so trying to get off a heroine. You know what, I'll clean you up famine. Can you pronounce this? Yeah, then you're ready to take it. Oh yeah, Cocaine's bad stuff.

Take this meth, clean your right out. Um. So again, the reason I bring all this up is to point out that like meth was not a drug in the Third it wasn't seen as a drug in the Third Reich. It was just seen as like a medicine, particularly like a treatment for anything. It was. It was. It was, It was a helper. It was not a recreational substance. Um. It was advised. It was advertised as capable of bringing quote sugars, malingerers, defeatists and whiners into the Nazi fold

and turning them into too productive obedient citizens. They were saying, like, meth will help turn you into a good Nazi. You'll be able to work if you're lazy, because you'll be on meth one pharmer. And again that's also you could draw a line to like why they were advertising that it makes women want to funk is, Like, well, it's all about breeding, right, Like meth is the drug that makes you helps you work in a factory or get laid and make babies. You know, Like that's why they're

selling it. The way they're selling it are a big part of it. One pharmacologist, Felix Hoffner called prescribing purvit in the new Supreme Commandment of his discipline in Germany. He was saying, like, if you're a pharmacist, it's your duty to give Germans meth um. He called it a chemical. He said that it could bring chemical order to disordered people. Now we don't know when precisely Morrel first gave Hitler and meth amphetamine. The bad Doctor had often gave given

like that he gave again. He had like different brand names for his various injections, and well, some of his notes were detailed. This wasn't always the case It's likely that Hitler started taking meth in a couple of different forms, potentially in the late nineteen thirty as he had often complained of a lack of energy, and by nineteen nineteen thirty nine pervitin was incredibly popular among German civilians. So the fact that Hitler's taking amphetamines during this period of

time was not odd. It wasn't something unique to him. It was something that made him very much normal among like the German working class in this period. That said, it was not something that was widely publicized. Hitler's reputation was he was a sober Man and he didn't drink, which was weird, Like he was not a guy who drank a lot um. He didn't really smoke. Uh. He had this reputation being indefatigable, almost superhuman, and this was

a big part of his appeal. So they didn't want to like talk about the fact that he was as drugged up as everybody else. Historians Steven Snelder's and Twin Peter's called Nazi Germany after nineteen thirty eight a meth amphetamine dictatorship, And when they say that, they don't mean that Hitler was a meth dictator, although he was a dictator on meth. I'm gonna quote from Psychiatric Times to get to what they're saying here. Rather than emphasizing the

role of the suppliers. However, they argue that the evidence shows strong demand pressures for the drug from consumers. In clinical practice, the drug was first used to treat psychological inhibition, inhibition and endogenous depression and augment was what was referred to as the will to Get Healthy Purvet and quickly moved from clinical to general practice and was prescribed fairly

commonly for employees, workers and housewives. In fact, a pre Leane chocolate with fourteen milligrams of purviton was marketed to the general public. So it's a meth dictatorship because everyone is on meth. There on meth to deal with their depression, their anxiety, like the fact that it's a bummer living in Nazi Germany. They're on meth to deal with the fact that like they have to like the work schedules,

like the production they're trying to do. Like meth is in a way the dictator, you know, to go on dates to make enough baby. And this is one of those things where I don't think Older is really guilty this, but I think that people kind of interpreting his work have made way too much of Hitler's amphetamine use, and rather than put in the context of like, no, no, no, all of the Nazis were on a funkload of speed, and that is relevant, and it impacted their behavior and

impacted history in a significant way. But it's not that like Hitler was on meth and and made crazy decisions. It was that the whole Third Reich was in the late thirties and early forties very methamphetamine dependent, and that's kind of important to note. Um. Now it's tempting to speculate as to which of Hitler's temper, tantrums and rages were influenced by Matthews. I'm going to avoid that temptation.

It is impossible to know. And while meths certainly had an impact on his behavior, that impact was more to exacerbate the kind of rages he'd always engaged in. Hitler even used morrel to dose another head of state, check President Emil Hasha, during a crucial moment in March of nine. Hitler was trying to negotiate over the annexation of Czechoslovakia. It was crucial that the smaller country just sort of hand themselves over without fighting, because Germany actually couldn't have

sex successfully invaded Czechoslovakia. They were kind of bluffing here. Um Hasha was ill when he attended a state visit to the Reich Chancellory, where Hitler demanded he ordered the surrender of Czech troops. Hatcha suffered a heart attack which rendered him unable to function, and I'm gonna quote from Blitz here. Next Hitler urgently summoned Morrell, who hurried along with his case in his syringes, and injected the unconscious foreign guest with such a stimulating medication that Hasha rose

again within seconds, as if from the dead. He signed the piece of paper that sealed the temporary end of his state. The very next morning, Hitler invaded Prague without a fight. During the following years, Hatches sat the powerless head of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to which parts of his country had been reduced, remaining Morrell's loyal patient.

In that respect, pharmacology worked as a way of continuing politics by other means, And this reminds me a lot of a girl in uh New York who once went down a k hole and everyone was worried that she was going unconscious until Carle ray Jemsen's song call Me Maybe came on and then she shot up back from the dead. Hey, that song is morally identical to dosing

someone with methamphetamin. And I've always said I've always said that. Now, the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia was pretty much went off perfectly for Hitler, but his next goal, the conquest of Poland, was going to require actual, you know, war stuff. The Fewer and his general staff all had clear terrible memories of the First World War and they wanted more than anything to avoid a repeat of the bloody stalemates of the Western Front. The German war machine developed several

solutions to this problem. One of the major reasons that allowed them to kind of that that was crucial behind blitz Creek was small unit stormtrooper tactics that had started being developed near the end of the First World War. The term the Germans used for this was Austrug's tactic um and it was it was heavily We'll talk about this a bit more later, but it was heavily based around allowing a lot of unit autonomy. There's this like myth that the Nazi soldiers were these like automatons who

followed orders unquestioning lee. The reason why the blitz cree worked is that individual small unit leaders were given a degree of personal discretion and choice and power to make decisions in the field that no other military in the world gave them at this point um and that's a big part of why they were successful. They were also the blitz creed was also crucially relied on the fact that the Germans had built up a significant amount of armored cars, tanks, and close air support craft to enable

a speedier sort of mechanized warfare. And as all of this developed, an idea developed, championed by men like General Heinz Guderian, that this new German army might be able to move quickly enough to avoid the static fortifications that had bogged them down in nineteen fourteen. But technology and tactics only went so far. Poland was huge, and war

with Poland meant war with France. In order to have a hope of sweeping through either country, German soldiers were going to need chemical assistance and pervitin was just what the doctor general ordered. From a write up and Time magazine quote, doctor Otto F. Rank, director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, had high hopes that pervitin would

prove advantageous on the battlefield. His goal was to defeat the enemy with chemically enhanced soldiers, soldiers who could give Germany a military edge by fighting harder and longer than their opponents. After testing the drug on a group of medical officers, Rock believed that pervitin would be an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad. We may grasp what far reaching military significance it would have if we managed

to remove the natural tiredness using medical methods. Rock himself was a daily user, as detailed in his wartime medical diary in letters, quote, with purviton, you can go on working for thirty six to fifty hours without feeling any noticeable fatigue. This allowed Ron to work days at a time with no sleep, and his correspondence indicated, yeah, is this an ad? It is? It is an ad for for again, primary sponsor of the show meth amphetamine under a bridge near you. You can cook in your bathtub

if you really want or you're you know, wherever it's safe. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. So we're going to talk more about all this in part two. But but that's going to do it for us in part law and Carolina, how are you? How are you feeling? Has this changed

your mind on method? Al? Okay, I'm really starting to look at my dating history and I'm realizing a missing puzzle piece meth amphetamine, methymphetamine and maybe just like the super vitamin shot of chalk oh you can't get enough job, the glucose and whatever human growth hormone, whatever else he was throwing in there. I think it's fair to say a lot of us have been looking for love in all the wrong places, and maybe the right place is

crystal meth exactly. Happy Valentine's Day, Happy Valentine's Day. When you're on meth, every day's Valentine's Day, that's the beauty of meth. That's so true, So true, Carolina, Do you have anything other than methamphetamine? You want to plug? I would love to plug my show True Romance, where we discuss um dating horrors and we're covering from anything from an episode of the Bachelorette to a terrible first date

to a truly devastating breakup. We're here for you. Every Thursday, there's a new episode on I Heart Radio, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts and um. On our next episode, I will be going on a blind date. Yeah. Literally, we'll be blocked out and on all our next episodes, I think we'll be on meth too, Sophie, can we get a line item in the budget for just like a shipload of math? Come on, so come on this question. Well, but off the record, off the record, We're absolutely gonna

do some math. Excellent. Alright, good news everybody. Well, this has been behind the bastards. Methamphetamine is actually based edition. Listen, it could happen here. It's now daily and and it's on the same Podka stapp you're listening to. Maybe if I was stop lobbying for this, stop it. That's the episode, Bye bye, alright, that's the episode.