‘Blitzed’: Mein Kampfetamine
A review of ‘Blitzed’, by Norman Ohler; Allen Lane, 2016.
Adolf Hitler—you will have heard of him—was, among his more widely known eccentricities, a teetotaller and vegetarian who, in a fit of theatrics, once declared at dinner that a meat dish was ‘corpse food’, which has a certain ghoulish flair to it. He did not like tobacco at a time when most people did; and championed a lifestyle of extreme cleanliness and asceticism. He was also, if Norman Ohler is to be believed, a junkie. In his book Blitzed, he sketches a picture of the Third Reich as a place were drugs were used and promoted promiscuously, by everyone from women hoping to charm a first date to sleep-deprived soldiers, the High Command and, of course, the Führer himself.
This queasy contradiction—Hitler as both wellness zealot and drug-addled lunatic — is the heart of Blitzed, which is occasionally unsettling but mainly hilarious, as well as grimly illuminating in its study of the pharmacological underside of Nazi Germany. Far from the mythic empire of discipline and order that it presented to the world and to itself, the Third Reich, our Norman says, was in fact a sprawling chemical experiment gone berserk, held together not solely by ideology or iron will, but by amphetamines, morphine, cocaine, and other goodies.
Far from the mythic empire of discipline and order that it presented to the world and to itself, the Third Reich, our Norman says, was in fact a sprawling chemical experiment gone berserk.
The Reich, in other words, was high; and everyone, it seems, was high. Wehrmacht tank commanders blitzed their way round the Maginot line with teeth clenched and pupils the size of dinner plates; women of the home front dosed themselves before a night out; and Hitler—gosh, Hitler—was apparently falling apart at the seams, sustained only by a cocktail of increasingly potent stimulants and vitamins and whatever fresh poison his personal Dr. Feelgood, a chap named Theodor Morell, could whip up that day.
The question this raises, of course, is: if drugs were fuelling the Nazi war machine, then to what extent were these drugs to thank for the overall success of the German war effort, at least in the early stages of that sanguinary conflict? Surely, if meth had a starring role to play then the entire narrative of the Second World War requires reappraisal. Consider the German invasion of France. Conventional wisdom at the time dictated that the German tanks would proceed slowly and cautiously behind the safety of the infantry. With this in mind, the French build the Maginot line, a system of concrete fortifications, obstacles, and weapon installation designed to stop the Germans invading through Belgium, as they had during World War I. The Nazi tanks, their drivers jacked to the gills on Pervitin, over-the-counter meth handed out like sweets, roared through the Ardennes and around the line, overwhelming the French forces. The commanders drove day and night.
If drugs were fuelling the Nazi war machine, then to what extent were these drugs to thank for the overall success of the German war effort, at least in the early stages of that sanguinary conflict?
It has previously been note that the Allies had larger militaries, more money, and the backing of vast colonial empires. How, then, did the Germans get the better of them? Well, says Norman, the Nazis had pills. And these pills allowed soldiers to fight longer, fear less and sleep never—until they crashed. But by then, perhaps they would have France, and could crash in a lovely manoir, or perhaps a longère if they were based further north.
Ohler gives over much of his book to the figure of Theodor Morell, Hitler’s scene-stealing personal doctor. He was a self-styled ‘master of injections’, whose dubious talents included jabbing people with such finesse that they did not feel a thing, despite the fact that needles back then were quite a lot bigger than those we see now, and required manual sharpening for repeated use. Theo was vain, fat, opportunistic and entrepreneurial, and forced his way into Hitler’s inner circle by providing immediate relief for any and all ailments, real and imagined. He reached such a point of intimacy with the Führer that he reportedly saw him every other day from 1939 to 1945, which was a good deal more often than anyone else. He used his position to buy pharmaceutical companies across the expanding Third Reich and build a drug reich of his own.
Theo was vain, fat and opportunistic, and forced his way into Hitler’s inner circle by providing immediate relief for any and all ailments real and imagined.
Morell’s concoctions, which brimmed with methamphetamine, cocaine, opiates, barbiturates, hormones, and god-knows-what, turned Hitler into a jabbering, shambling pharmacological curiosity, a man barely held together. Ohler recounts how Morell’s services were required with such maddening regularity that he couldn’t even attend his brother’s funeral. By the time the curtain came down on the war, he was less a doctor and more an a kind of life-support machine, chained to a patient who was nearing collapse. Hitler developed a quite serious addiction. If you have seen that clip of Hitler praising boys from the Hitler Youth, one hand behind his back so that no one sees it shaking, you will find this believable.
One finds oneself mulling over the implications of this. If Hitler’s judgement, already questionable, was chemically impaired during the crucial latter stages of the war, then perhaps it was not simply strategic miscalculation or Allied pressure that led to his ruin, but the contents of his own bloodstream. He was, after all, making decisions that baffled his generals: refusing to retreat from Stalingrad, urging a counter-offensive through the Ardennes, attempting to micromanage the war effort from the bunker. If Ohler is to be believed, these were not merely the actions of a lunatic dictator, but of an addict in full spiral.
He was making decisions that baffled his generals: refusing to retreat from Stalingrad, urging a counter-offensive through the Ardennes, attempting to micromanage the war effort from the bunker.
And herein lies the problem: if Hitler was, as it were, chemically compromised, does that in any way diminish his responsibility? It is along the same lines as the question that arises whenever Hitler’s psychology is looked at seriously. Ohler’s answer is an emphatic no. The Führer, he says, was always the Führer — sober or otherwise. The drugs did not make him evil; they merely amplified and warmed his monstrous personality and gave him, almost literally, there energy to pursue them relentlessly. Addiction does not excuse atrocity, for Ohler. It merely explains some of the pacing.
Still, one senses that this subject has been relegated to the margins of serious historical study for a reason. Perhaps there is a fear that by probing too deeply into the chaos of Hitler’s life, one might stumble into inadvertent sympathy. Or perhaps to allow for the possibility that drugs might have played an outsize role in the success of Hitler’s scheme is, for some, to trivialise the war, or to cast a shadow over all of what is perceived to be more serious scholarship. One sympathises. There is something ridiculous about the notion that the bloodiest and most infamous war in history was prosecuted, at least on one side, by a babbling, drug-addled maniac. In any event Ohler presents his findings not as exoneration but condemnation, for it reveals the hypocrisy and degeneracy of the clean-living Führer and explodes the ridiculous idea of the pure, clean-living Aryan übermensch. Turns out he needed a spot of chemical courage to press forward in his attempts to bring about the stupid vision of Blut und Boden.
