What I Just Finished ReadingNorman Ohler,
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich: The Nazis sure did a lot of drugs. I am pretty sure I had more to say here but I had a migraine while attempting to write this up.
Okay, with slightly more brain, trying this again: if you have heard things like "wow, the Nazis did a lot of drugs," this book will definitely contextualize that for you. I picked it up because I had heard that and wanted to know if it was true. It is apparently true!
This book was originally written in German, for a German audience, so it's kind of slightly above my head as a layperson who is generally familiar with WW2 from a more US-based perspective, and this meant that there were several parts where I could have used a broader historical context (like, there's a lot about Nazi military operations that off the top of my head I am completely unfamiliar with, like basically everything involving submarines), and the sections that I thought were the most interesting tended to be the ones that were the highest-level. There were also a lot of descriptions that clearly would have made more sense to this book's original audience, because buildings would be described by saying what street corners in Berlin they were on, and I assume that the reader is supposed to know, say, whether that is a nice neighborhood.
The book has two basic focuses, which is (1) the Nazi military development and consumption of drugs generally for the purpose of warfare, and (2) the absolute fuckton of drugs that Hitler personally was on for a lot of this time period, including what the author asserts is an addiction to oxycodone. I am not especially familiar with biographical information about Hitler so I wasn't clear on whether this was a previously-known fact or a new assertion from the author but, regardless, the book did seem to get a lot of mileage of pointing out all the hypocrisy involved here.
As I understand it, the main high-level takeaway is this: the Nazis criminalized drug addiction (and barred marriage for drug addicts because of eugenics etc etc) and specifically were against drugs like morphine, because that's the kind of shit that those degenerates (yes, I am using the term deliberately) in the Weimar Republic were doing. But then they basically invented meth, and meth was great, and there wasn't an existing stigma against meth for them to worry about, and in fact it made them more productive and they could hand it out to troops like candy and who cares about finding out what the side effects or recommended doses are, there's a war on! So there's definitely a whole... cultural framework about the specific drug choice here that I was unaware of, and it matters very much to them that it was specifically meth.
(You may at this point wonder how the hell Hitler was on oxycodone, and the answer appears to be that his personal physician didn't tell him that that's what he was getting. But he sure got a lot of "vitamin" injections. I personally would have rather read more about the drug use at the institutional level; I think those sections worked better.)
In addition to the Nazis generally doing a lot of meth, they were also into experimenting to find out if they could come up with drug combinations to make better, stronger soldiers who could stay awake and on mission for four days straight. Because if you can't make your own ubermensch at home, store-bought is fine, I guess. The meth turned out to be a bad idea for this. Apparently if you give soldiers a combination of meth, oxy, and coke, they will definitely do something, but it's not gonna be accomplishing a four-day solo submarine mission.
Apparently the CIA then got their hands on the Nazi drug research (?) and this later led into MKUltra, which is what the author's other book is about.
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