Norman Ohler

Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it’s not the drugs, actually that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountain. If you, if you think monocausal, you would say that’s the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. You, it, it becomes a stalemate and they fight for months, and no one really moves, and it’s bloody, and it’s nothing’s happening. It’s bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That’s why the high command said, “No, we’re not gonna do it.

It’s stupid. But these three tank generals said, “Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains,” and Hitler was like, “Eh, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle,” basically. And they said, “No, we can do it because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that wait for the action to happen, and then support this somehow. We’re going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We’re going to overpower the enemy. We’re going to be in France before they know it.

We are already behind them, but it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights, and that was only possible if you don’t stop.” Suddenly, Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe for how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. Before that, he was kind of an outsider, like the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly, he became like…

…”Okay, tell us, how does it work?” And he gave lectures in front of the officers and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case, methamphetamine. How much should be taken, at what intervals. This became a very big thing. And then Temmler had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines. And then on May 10th, they took their methamphetamine and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains.

The following is a conversation with Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, a book that investigates what role psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, played in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians, Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor, give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as, “Very well-researched, serious piece of scholarship.” And Antony Beevor describes it as, “Remarkable work of research.” And it is, indeed, a remarkable work of research. Norman went deep into the archives using primary sources to uncover a perspective on Hitler and the Third Reich that has before this been mostly ignored by historians. He also wrote Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age.

And he’s now working on a new book with the possible title of Stoned Sapiens, a great title, looking at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Norman Ohler. Drugs in post-WWI Germany

Tell me the origin story of meth, methamphetamine, and Pervitin, its brand-name drug version, in the context of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Let’s start there.

I think you’re right to ask about the context because without the context, it’s not really understandable. So what was the situation? In the ’20s, the Nazi movement basically started, and it started in Bavarian beer halls. So alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy that didn’t drink was Hitler. He was a teetotaler, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich. So alcohol and national socialism are very closely connected. At the same time, in the ’20s, in Berlin, there was a completely different thing going on. People were taking all kinds of drugs. This had to do, actually, with the defeat of Germany in the First World War. I mean, the context is a big context.

The Versailles Treaty had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty was written basically by the Western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. And I’m certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Versailles Treaty treated Germany somewhat unfairly. I mean, it laid all the blame on Germany. And, I mean, a war is a very complex thing, and the First World War, to examine how it actually started, is a very complex story, and there are many factors to it. But the Versailles Treaty just said it was Germany’s fault, and then Germany had to make all these payments to the allies. It couldn’t create a new economy. It couldn’t have a new army.

So the economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap, and the people were also using substances that were very cheap in huge quantities. So while in Bavaria, they were drinking alcohol, and alcohol in the brain stimulates behavior, group behavior, us against them. You can actually examine this. A neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. While in Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphine, there was cocaine, there was mescaline, there was ether. So people were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset. It was all… You know, you didn’t behave in a way that some kind of authority would like you to behave in, because the authority had just lost the First World War, and there was no real authority in Berlin.

People were doing whatever they wanted to do, and they were intoxicating themselves in the way they wanted to. So the population, in a way, if you just look at Munich and Berlin, was growing apart. Like, there were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, and then there were these weird, diverse, LGBTQ, whatever kind of scene in Berlin, like actresses sniffing ether in the morning and then making crazy moves.

Could you speak to the nature of the motivation for the drug use in Berlin at the time? Was it rebellion? Was it a way to deal with the difficult economic depression? Was it just the natural thing that young people do to explore themselves, to understand the world, to develop their culture? What do we understand about drug use there?

All of these factors come together. But it was the first time in modern history, in Germany at least, that there was no emperor. Before that, Kaiser Wilhelm, everything was very strict, you know? You had to… You couldn’t go crazy, you know, as a young person. You couldn’t be a young person. But now in the Weimar Republic in the ’20s, you could. No one stopped you, so people went crazy. That’s what made Berlin into the city that it still somehow is. And maybe later we’ll talk about contemporary Berlin. It kind of… It still has that vibe, you know? That’s why people still come to Berlin. Drugs are cheap, you can move however you want, there’s no authority.

So that created a rift between the Nazis in Munich, and they always hated Berlin and what was going on in Berlin. So, for example, Goebbels, the later propaganda minister, he called the situation in Berlin the “hated asphalt reality of Berlin.” He hated that. And when the Nazis then were able to take power in 1933, one of the first things they did was to really prosecute people who were taking drugs, because they wanted to, you know, bring everyone back into the fold. And I think that’s… You asked what was the reason for people taking so many drugs. They were accessible, they were cheap, but I think the most important thing is that they let you find yourself, maybe, or lose yourself, you know? Also possible, you know?

Can we also focus attention there, because you have a connection to this place, Berlin, and this part of the world. Can you just briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even deeper the personal aspect of this? Because you understand the music of the people, the land, its history. There’s something you can only really understand if you’ve been there and you’ve taken it in. And we’ll return to this topic in multiple contexts, but in this particular way, as one human being who writes about this place, what’s your own story?

I grew up in West Germany, and this was during the Cold War. And Berlin, the walled-in city, was always like a big fascination because there was a wall, there was actually a wall in the city preventing people from moving into another part. And I was from the west, fortunate enough to be from the free west, so I could travel to Berlin, and I could leave. I could look at it, and I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very vibey place. And then when the wall came down, I was still in school, but I immediately got into the car of my parents and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. And then Berlin really, in the ’90s, became a place that was very attractive to me, and I moved there then in the ’90s.

I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York, and I loved New York before Giuliani became mayor. It was… He ruined the city. Before that, it was not gentrified. Or let’s say he introduced gentrification, and gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in the ungentrified New York City for like 300 bucks a month rent, and everyone I knew was an artist.

You loved the diversity of it?

Yeah, I loved it. I wrote my first novel there. I took LSD for the first time in Downtown Manhattan on a Saturday night.

So you’re kind of like a German Kerouac-type character, but moved a few decades forward.

I wouldn’t compare myself to another writer, but I think Kerouac is pretty cool. But he’s an amphetamine writer. On The Road was apparently written in two weeks on amphetamines. And it’s good. You know, amphetamines are not bad per se. We can also talk about these so-called bad drugs, you know, because basically they’re neutral. But let’s not lose the thread.

Yes, yes. New York, Berlin…

Even though New York was… Oh, yeah. And then I was in New York. I was in a health food store, one of the first. There weren’t health food stores back then a lot, but there was one on First Avenue. And suddenly there was an announcement, which was unusual in the health food store. I think it was called Prana, Prana Foods. And the announcement was that Kurt Cobain had just shot himself. It was like… And I had been, actually, and still am, a Nirvana fan. I’ve seen one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York City, and it was amazing. But he killed himself, and the next day, I received a music cassette from a friend of mine from Berlin with electronic music, and I realized that there had been a paradigm shift, obviously. Rock music with the hero on stage was dead.

Now it was, you know, dance, electronic music, which a lot of people today think it’s a kind of simplistic music form, but it’s actually a very highly intelligent music form. At least it was in the ’90s. People were really experimenting with that music. That was the new music. That was actually the reason I moved to Berlin. I really… I decided I’d leave New York City and move to Berlin. And then in Berlin, to answer your question, I fell in love with something that probably reminded me of the ’20s, even though I wasn’t there in the ’20s. But that really… The city was very open. The wall had just… Was still, you know… I mean, it’s a few years later, but still, the wall, it felt like it just came down. There was… Germany was… Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany.

That was still in Bonn. So Berlin was a very cheap, and cultural, and crazy city, probably a bit like in the ’20s, actually. And that’s how I fell in love with it, and that’s how I became interested in this electronic scene. I mean, I visited many dance venues then, so-called clubs.

It’s one of the hubs in the world of electronic music.

They claim that techno was kind of invented in Berlin, but it also comes from Detroit. So Detroit and Berlin are like the techno hubs, I would say.

Electronic music is a soundtrack for some of the most interesting experiences this earth has ever created, right? It just gets people together in some interesting ways. So it’s not just the music itself, it’s the experiences that the music enables.

Well, in Germany, we had a situation that the wall actually kept people apart. People didn’t know each other. But because the wall came down, people suddenly met in abandoned buildings in the center of Berlin, which had been owned by the socialist state of East Germany. The most famous club, Tresor… Tresor means, like, vault. It was the big vault with the big doors, so that’s where Tresor was, the club. Nazi rise to power

It’s so funny that the echo 100 years later, Berlin had all these young partygoers using drugs, and then Munich with the beer, and that’s where Hitler came out. So is that what we’re supposed to imagine in the early days of the Nazi party when Hitler’s giving the speeches to just a handful of folks, they’re all drunk?