Norman Ohler - Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany

London: Allen Lane, 2016

Why is this book on the bedroom floor? - It was a birthday present from my wife.

About the Author - Norman Ohler is a well-known German writer and screenwriter, partly responsible for the 2008 Wim Wenders film Palermo Shooting. His literary fame is based around his City Trilogy, but Blitzed is his first work of nonfiction.

Plot - Nazis on drugs! Not just a dodgy plot in a straight-to-Netflix, but apparently true. Ohler blows the lid off the National Socialist pill-pot, exposing just how off their mash the silver medal winners of the Second World War actually were.

Review - It’s been estimated that the only person with more words spent on him than Adolf Hitler is Jesus Christ. In the seventy-four years since Time’s ‘Man of the Year’ for 1938 bit the big cyanide capsule in the sky, it’s almost improbable that a year will go by without a startling new biography or study of Hitler and the National Socialist regime being published. At this remove we know an insane amount about Adolf, yet there are myriad reasons why books, both good and bad, keep being released: put simply, he’s fascinating.

In the fictional world gods and monsters exist, satisfying the part of the human condition which needs good and evil to keep to the right path. Yet it seems only the base part of our nature endures, and they don’t come much baser than the Nazis. Adolf Hitler is not the only tyrant to ever unleash his madness on the world, and the Final Solution is depressingly not the only example of a genocide for humankind to grapple with. But perhaps Hitler’s historical span is the first to intersect with a modern world; one of mechanised transportation, mechanised media and mechanised murder. It’s often pointed out that it took humankind just over sixty years from flying at Kittyhawk to touching down in the Sea of Tranquility, and slap-bang in the middle of that tumultuous timespan stands a man labelled as evil incarnate, a failed art student from Braunau-am-Inn who created a conflict which caused the deaths of between 70-85 million people across the planet.

So, it’s no wonder that in the twenty or so years that Hitler went from a corporal half-blinded with mustard gas to his death somewhere beneath modern Potsdamer Platz, historians have been trying to work out how it all happened. What was it about this man which gave him such influence? Was it an irresistible magnetism, a silver tongue, a collective madness over a defeated nation which proved impossible to stop? Well, this is a book review, so there’s precious little chance you’ll find the ultimate answer here (and before I continue, I’m duty-bound to say it’s 42).

In Hitler’s case, every small diversion or neglected academic cul-de-sac will eventually be explored, in the hope that the findings will contribute to the whole. We know, for example, that he liked dumb blondes, fancied himself an expert on car engines and found in his personal effects was a record called ‘I’m The Captain In My Bathtub’. But these kinds of things are trivia when weighed against the totality of his actions. His rejection by Viennese art schools might have been a contributing factor to his rise to power, but isn’t the direct cause of genocide.

How much easier it would be if there was a key to the horror of the Nazi regime. Such an explanation is perhaps the selling point of Blitzed. Hailed on publication, Norman Ohler’s exploration of drugs in pre- and wartime Germany caused a sensation and not a little opprobrium. Ohler notes that this is his first academic study and is based on close research of wartime files gathered by the Americans, seemingly lost since that time.

The book starts in a derelict building outside Berlin, where Ohler finds himself in the shell of what used to house the heart of Germany’s methamphetamine industry. Lest we forget, many of the prohibited drugs we know and fear today were once legal to varying degrees, and speed was no different. Indeed, it took until 1971 for amphetamine to become a Class II prohibited substance, and it fuelled many a trip to Brighton or brightened up a stifling day of chores, at least if you believe your rock iconography.

But Blitzed informs the reader that methamphetamine, in a form marketed as Pervitin, became the official drug of choice of the National Socialists, particularly after the official illegalisation of harder drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Never mind that in the 1920s and 30s, Germany was the leader in production of opiates and cocaine derivatives; those drugs were symbolic of the decadent Weimar Republic and needed to be eradicated. Ohler includes a chart, hung at police stations, of how dealers and users alike should be processed: woe betide you if you were an artist.

Not so Pervitin. Not only was it still okay, Ohler demonstrates how aggressively it was marketed in its blue and orange tubes. It seems like a very Nazi drug, encapsulating the miraculous recovery of the Reich and its people. Never mind the crippling depressions after short-term use or the foaming at the mouth, Germany needed its people to go above and beyond, and boy howdy, did they.

Pervitin was the drug which fuelled the Blitzkrieg in Western Europe, we learn. Common wisdom has it that the actions in Belgium and France, where the Nazi tanks rolled through the impenetrable Ardennes ahead of waves of infantry and Stukas, was a well-planned and inevitable eruption of Hitler’s power. But in the Blitzed version, Pervetin was the decisive factor, with an effervescent Wehrmacht ripping through swathes of the Low Countries because they were all overwhelmed by their speeding bodies. Several times the line stretched days ahead of its general support because of whizzing soldiery, and claims are made in the historical sources for fights which lasted an unstoppable seventeen days. The miracle of Dunkirk, so celebrated in Britain, is one of the great unaswerables of the war: why did Hitler pause and let so many Allied troops escape? Ohler offers us an answer to that: Hermann Goring, morphine addict, convinced Hitler that his Luftwaffe would disintegrate the British from the air. That was the drugs talking: his air force were no match for the Allied technology and so Dunkirk stalled, and the evacuation led to a sense of resolve which would fatally undermine the Nazi war effort.

But like the moral panic repeated from generation to generation, Pervitin is merely the gateway drug to something harder, and it’s the aforementioned morphine which envelops the thrust of Blitzed like opium smoke. It’s after the invasion of the Soviet Union - Operation Barbarossa - when Ohler’s protagonist enters the story: Adolf Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. Morell was a doctor of some repute with a clinic on Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm, specialising in vitamin injections at a time when the science was little understood. So celebrated was his reputation that he was frantically called to the Berghof one day to attend to the man himself.

Hitler was in a bad way. Unable to sleep, racked by intestinal pain and worry, Morell was encouraged to do a solid from one guy to another, and with an uncertain prick of a needle, he had Hitler feeling as right as rain in no time. Not morphine this time, but a fairly harmless preparation of vitamins. Nonetheless, Hitler seconded him and this allowed Morell to start flogging his wares across the Reich, to the Wehrmacht and the Sonderkommando. So far, so Last King of Scotland. But Morell wasn’t grateful: he moaned constantly to his wife about the full-time nature of keeping history’s worst dictator on an even keel.

This is the most historically interesting part of the book - its high. In the Blitzed narrative, once Morell had spiked the vein, it didn’t take long for syringes of different hues to be screwed to that needle. The descent began with the retreat to the Wolf’s Lair in eastern Poland when the retreat from Russia began - not only had Hitler’s health worsened with worry and fatigue, but the bunker complex was built in inhospitable swampland, beset with mosquitoes and scorched in summertime. Morell’s “Patient A”, which is the only thing he ever referred to Hitler as, was shored up with extracts of animal entrails and glucose, until the fateful day when Hitler survived an assassination attempt which burst his eardrums, battered his legs and stomach and caused concussion.

Ohler’s reading of the records shows the administration of cocaine drops into the ear canals to dull the pain of the explosion from the July Plotters’ bomb, and shortly after this a mysterious ‘X’ begins to appear on the medical notes. It is the author’s contention that X refers to Eukodal (a drug closely related to heroin), the only thing that could calm the shakes, aches and gripes of Adolf Hitler’s endgame. The reason for the X is both to absolve Hitler of the ignominy of being a drug abuser and to keep the doctor himself from investigation by the Gestapo. The drug was only supposed to help Hitler through a bad time, but the dictator ended up (wouldn't you know) liking the taste. He would constantly badger Morell for more of his wonderful injections, apparently little suspecting what his own Mother’s Little Helper was.

By the end of the war, with Germany collapsing and its pharmaceutical plants utterly destroyed, Morell was a dealer without a supply. The Nazis themselves, crazed and scrabbling for a way to swing the tide back in their favour, started bunging all kinds of substances together in the hope of discovering a Pervetin-like wonderdrug, testing briefly on luckless concentration camp inmates before feeding them to young kids and firing them from their channel ports towards the coast of Essex. Morell was injecting Hitler constantly in the Berlin bunker, until he had to tell him there was nothing left to give him. Hitler blew up at his doctor, dismissing him immediately and leaving him to his fate. We all know how it ended for Adolf, but Morell fared no better: picked up by the Americans, he was so incoherent with madness that they eventually dropped him off outside a Munich railway station and he died in an aid hospital a short time later.

So after that lengthy precis of Blitzed’s key points, was it worth the grubby transaction? Well, firstly the good points. Norman Ohler is a novelist, and Blitzed is an incredibly readable book which snaps along at a fair old pace. It’s pop history, with all extraneous detail about such a battle or that diversion cut out. Enjoy this trip - and it is a trip - because it makes an evening.

But afterwards, you’ll feel the comedown and feel slightly silly and annoyed about it. Because Blitzed’s main problem is that I didn’t believe a word of it. As theories go, the ‘Nazis on drugs’ one is like something from a pulp fiction, and that’s probably why the book feels so slight in your hands - there are so many questions and holes in the story that even if it’s completely accurate, there just isn’t enough detail to convince.

Everybody who is absorbed in the subject of the Nazis knows that Goring was a morphine addict (I didn’t know why, which Ohler explained; an interesting tidbit), but the dangerous area of the story and the part which I imagine caused the most controversy was the unwitting drugging of the dictator. Ohler hints that Hitler could not have been blind to the ‘wonder-drug’ X but somehow only Morell could understand his own fiendish code. I, having read Freaky Dancin’ by Bez, was aware that Shaun Ryder was nicknamed X for similar reasons. Bit of a stretch, but I guarantee that’s the only time you’ll see the Happy Mondays and Hitler mentioned in the same paragraph.

It’s plausible that Hitler was a junkie, but it’s dangerous territory. It’s not too far a leap between that contention and Adolf being under the influence when he made major policy decisions. The timeline suggests the final stand in the capital and the Battle of the Bulge were opiated-affiliated, not to mention things like the evacuation of the camps and the death marches. Ohler deals with this worrying link in a single paragraph, where he argues drugs didn’t influence Hitler, they merely cleared his head enough to allow him to do all of the things he already wanted to do. Oh, that’s okay then. Hooray for dope! Even if you accept that flimsy distancing, Ohler has already signalled that morphine caused a major Nazi battlefield reversal, namely the retreat from Dunkirk. The headquarters of the Luftwaffe are described as a place where Goring wandered round in a stoned haze, wearing whatever took his fancy, causing an atmosphere of chaos and guesswork. But Adolf Hitler? His fix caused nothing more than a sharpening of the will. In Blitzed, Adolf Hitler becomes Alex DeLarge, being injected with moloko plus before a bit of the old ultraviolence, the scamp.

This is before we consider Ohler’s qualifications to analyse medical records, and to question what effects they may or may not have had on the Nazi hierarchy. The infamous X on the records is taken every time as the application of Eukodal by Morell, but there is nothing to suggest that it should be taken as this at all, merely a supposition. Just because it fits a tale, it is not proof. It could just as easily be a substance of his own synthesisation. Several chapters pass whereby Morell orders trains to be urgently rerouted to slaughterhouses and labs so he can boil animal innards to their components; could it just as likely be protein in those syringes?

Even in the early part of the book, you question the application of the medical history by Ohler. He says three million tablets were manufactured for the Wehrmacht in anticipation of the Western assault, but is there evidence they were issued as a matter of course? And if so, were they the reason why the Blitzkrieg was unstoppable or just a way of stretching resources beyond their fatigue point? They may be one and the same thing, but Blitzed suggests strongly that without methamphetamine the Nazis would perhaps have been halted at their starting line, their tanks wondering how to push through the narrow roads of the Belgian woodland.

In the end, it makes a very neat story - sane people go mad, use drugs to keep it all going and eventually collapse when the artificial stimulus runs out. But studies of the Third Reich are tricky things, and stepping from the received lanes of the narrative is always fraught with danger. I don’t think that Ohler is the most qualified to do it, particularly in the field of medicine and its historical effects. There’s too much anecdotal evidence, too many gaps in the notes for it to be definitive. I don't think he’s an apologist, but I think he discovered a little reviewed portion of the record and got excited by it. You can feel the fizz of it in his lines, and while that makes Blitzed an entertaining read, it’s not one to base an argument on.

Blitzed is one of those books which causes a sensation but for all the wrong reasons. Read it, but don’t take it with anything stronger than a good old pinch of salt.

Will I move it from the floor to the bookshelf? - I don’t think so. I might give it to my dad.