Part One: Hitler's Drug Problem

Robert is joined by Carolina Barlow to discuss Hitler, the Nazis and drugs

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
What's taking shiploads of meth? My hit. I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards. The podcast re tell you
everything you don't know about the worst people in all
of history. We're in today's episode, stuff that you think
you know, but you actually don't know the specifics in
the way that you probably think you do. Maybe anyway.

(00:23):
Top ten intros to this podcast. Thank you, Sophie. Sophie Lichterman,
my producer and legally boss and my guest today, I
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

(00:45):
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.

(01:06):
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,

(01:26):
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

(01:49):
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

(02:09):
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,

(02:32):
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

(02:54):
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

(03:16):
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

(03:37):
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

(03:58):
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

(04:22):
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

(04:42):
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,

(05:03):
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.

(05:24):
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

(05:44):
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

(06:05):
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

(06:26):
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

(06:47):
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

(07:09):
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

(07:31):
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

(07:51):
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

(08:12):
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,

(08:35):
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

(08:58):
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

(09:19):
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,

(09:41):
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

(10:03):
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

(10:26):
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.

(10:47):
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

(11:13):
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

(11:36):
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

(11:59):
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

(12:20):
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,

(12:41):
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

(13:03):
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.

(13:24):
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

(13:45):
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

(14:06):
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,

(14:28):
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

(14:50):
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

(15:10):
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

(15:31):
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

(15:55):
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,

(16:17):
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,

(16:45):
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

(17:07):
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

(17:27):
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,

(17:48):
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,

(18:10):
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

(18:31):
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,

(18:52):
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

(19:13):
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,

(19:34):
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,

(19:58):
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

(20:19):
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

(20:41):
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,

(21:02):
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

(21:22):
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,

(21:45):
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

(22:05):
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

(22:28):
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,

(22:50):
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

(23:11):
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

(23:32):
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

(23:53):
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.

(24:14):
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

(24:34):
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.

(24:56):
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

(25:19):
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,

(25:41):
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,

(26:03):
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

(26:26):
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,

(26:49):
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

(27:10):
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,

(27:32):
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

(27:55):
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.

(28:17):
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

(28:38):
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

(29:00):
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

(29:23):
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

(29:44):
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

(30:05):
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

(30:25):
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

(30:46):
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,

(31:07):
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

(31:31):
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

(31:53):
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

(32:15):
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

(32:36):
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

(32:57):
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

(33:20):
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

(33:43):
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

(34:03):
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,

(34:25):
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

(34:45):
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

(35:06):
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

(35:28):
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

(35:50):
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

(36:11):
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,

(36:35):
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

(36:55):
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

(37:16):
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,

(37:37):
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

(37:59):
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

(38:22):
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,

(38:42):
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?

(39:03):
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.

(39:24):
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.

(39:48):
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.

(40:10):
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

(40:32):
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

(40:55):
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

(41:15):
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

(41:38):
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,

(42:01):
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

(42:25):
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

(42:48):
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,

(43:12):
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

(43:33):
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

(43:55):
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

(44:17):
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,

(44:39):
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,

(45:04):
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.

(45:27):
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

(45:50):
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.

(46:12):
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,

(46:37):
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

(46:58):
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

(47:20):
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.

(47:42):
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

(48:02):
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

(48:23):
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

(48:46):
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

(49:06):
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

(49:27):
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.

(49:48):
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

(50:09):
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.

(50:32):
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,

(50:55):
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

(51:17):
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,

(51:40):
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

(52:03):
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

(52:24):
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

(52:46):
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

(53:08):
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

(53:28):
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

(53:50):
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

(54:11):
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

(54:32):
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.

(54:52):
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

(55:14):
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.

(55:36):
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

(56:00):
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

(56:23):
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

(56:44):
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,

(57:05):
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

(57:29):
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

(57:50):
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.

(58:15):
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

(58:35):
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,

(58:59):
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,

(59:24):
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,

(59:44):
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

(01:00:06):
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.

(01:00:28):
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

(01:00:49):
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

(01:01:11):
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

(01:01:32):
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

(01:01:52):
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

(01:02:15):
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

(01:02:36):
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

(01:02:57):
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

(01:03:19):
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

(01:03:41):
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

(01:04:03):
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

(01:04:23):
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

(01:04:47):
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,

(01:05:07):
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

(01:05:29):
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

(01:05:50):
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

(01:06:10):
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

(01:06:31):
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

(01:06:53):
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

(01:07:16):
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

(01:07:37):
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

(01:07:59):
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,

(01:08:22):
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

(01:08:44):
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

(01:09:06):
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

(01:09:26):
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,

(01:09:48):
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.