High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history - by Rachel Cooke
When Hitler fell seriously ill in 1941,
however, the vitamin injections that Morell had counted on no longer had any
effect – and so he began to ramp things up. First, there were injections of
animal hormones for this most notorious of vegetarians, and then a whole series
of ever stronger medications until, at last, he began giving him a “wonder
drug” called Eukodal, a designer opiate and close cousin of heroin whose chief
characteristic was its potential to induce a euphoric state in the patient
(today it is known as oxycodone). It wasn’t long before Hitler was receiving
injections of Eukodal several times a day. Eventually he would combine it with
twice daily doses of the high grade cocaine he had originally been prescribed
for a problem with his ears, following an explosion in the Wolf’s Lair, his
bunker on the eastern front...
The effect of the drugs could appear to
onlookers to be little short of miraculous. One minute the Führer was so frail
he could barely stand up. The next, he would be ranting unstoppably at
Mussolini. Ah, yes: Mussolini. In Italy, Blitzed will come
with an extra chapter. “I found out that Mussolini – patient D, for Il Duce –
was another of Morell’s patients. After the Germans installed him as the puppet
leader of the Republic of Italy in 1943, they ordered him to be put under the
eyes of the doctor.”
Drugs in Nazi Germany by Norman Ohler: a crass & dangerously inaccurate account
The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’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 1940. Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.
It’s not only that he
is – as Der Spiegel helpfully pointed out – a non-historian
(the author of three novels and the co-writer of the Wim Wenders film Palermo
Shooting, this is his first work of nonfiction). It’s that there was
anything new to be said at all. Arrange all the books that have been written
about the Nazis end to end and they’d be longer than the Spree.
“I guess drugs weren’t
a priority for the historians,” he says. “A crazy guy like me had to come
along.” Still, crazy or not, he has done a remarkable job. If Blitzed is
gripping, it is also convincing. Ian Kershaw, the British historian who is
probably the world’s leading authority on Hitler and Nazi Germany, has
described it as “a serious piece of scholarship”.
Unlikely as it sounds,
it was Ohler’s friend, the Berlin DJ Alexander Kramer, who first put him on to
the idea. “He’s like a medium for that time,” says Ohler. “He has this huge
library, and he knows all the music from the 20s. One night he said to me: ‘Do
you know the massive role drugs played in National Socialism?’ I told him that
I didn’t, but that it sounded true – and I knew immediately it would be the
subject of my next book.”
His plan was to write
a novel, but with his first visit to the archives that changed completely.
There he found the papers of Dr Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician,
previously only a minor character in most studies of the Führer. “I knew then
that this was already better than fiction.” In the months that followed,
supported by the late, great German historian of the Third Reich Hans Mommsen,
Ohler travelled from archive to archive, carefully gathering his material – and
how much of it there was! He didn’t use half of what he found. “Look at this,”
he says, jumping up. When he returns, in his hand is a copy of a letter from
Martin Bormann, Hitler’s private secretary, in which he suggests that the
“medication” Morell is giving the Führer needs to be regulated for the sake of
his increasingly wobbly health.
The story Ohler tells
begins in the days of the Weimar Republic, when Germany’s pharmaceutical
industry was thriving – the country was a leading exporter both of opiates,
such as morphine, and of cocaine – and drugs were available on every street
corner. It was during this period that Hitler’s inner circle established an
image of him as an unassailable figure who was willing to work tirelessly on
behalf of his country, and who would permit no toxins – not even coffee – to
enter his body.
“He is all genius and
body,” reported one of his allies in 1930. “And he mortifies that body in a way
that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats
vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.” No wonder that when the Nazis seized
power in 1933, “seductive poisons” were immediately outlawed. In the years that
followed, drug users would be deemed “criminally insane”; some would be killed
by the state using a lethal injection; others would be sent to concentration
camps. Drug use also began to be associated with Jews. The Nazi party’s office
of racial purity claimed that the Jewish character was essentially
drug-dependent. Both needed to be eradicated from Germany.
Some drugs, however,
had their uses, particularly in a society hell bent on keeping up with the
energetic Hitler (“Germany awake!” the Nazis ordered, and the nation had no
choice but to snap to attention). A substance that could “integrate shirkers,
malingerers, defeatists and whiners” into the labour market might even be
sanctioned. At a company called Temmler in Berlin, Dr Fritz Hauschild, its head
chemist, inspired by the successful use of the American amphetamine Benzedrine at the
1936 Olympic Games, began trying to develop his own wonder drug – and a
year later, he patented the first German methyl-amphetamine. Pervitin, as it
was known, quickly became a sensation, used as a confidence booster and
performance enhancer by everyone from secretaries to actors to train drivers
(initially, it could be bought without prescription).
It even made its way into
confectionery. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight,” went the slogan.
Women were recommended to eat two or three, after which they would be able to
get through their housework in no time at all – with the added bonus that they
would also lose weight, given the deleterious effect Pervitin had on the
appetite. Ohler describes it as National Socialism in pill form… read more:
