No, it’s not an obscure punk band.
I’ve just read a singular book, originally published in 2015 under the title Der Totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich, the English translation “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich” released in the US this year. The work, by Norman Ohler, is an entirely new view of the Nazi Party and the Wermacht in World War II, seen from a pharmacological perspective.
From the close of the 19th Century, when chemist Felix Hoffman synthesized acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) and developed diamorphine (heroin) for Beyer, the Rhine Valley was the world’s chemical and pharmaceutical powerhouse, supplying the lion’s share of the planet’s chemical-based drugs, at one point using nearly the entire supply of coca produced by South America. The despair and decadence of Weimar Berlin floated on an ocean of smack and cocaine produced in the laboratories of Beyer and Merck.
As the National Socialists came to power, they condemned these “foreign” and “Jewish” influences and instituted a “war on drugs,” closely linked to the Party’s antisemitism and xenophobia. Whereas Marxists and dangerous “others” claimed one’s body was one’s own to pleasure at will, “true” Germans recognized the Teutonic duty to preserve one’s body to serve the “race.” Draconian penalties were established for addicts and dealers, with two years’ imprisonment standard for users.
Around the same time, Dr. Fritz Hauschild, of the small pharmaceutical house Temmler, synthesized a new form of methamphetamine, a drug first developed in late 19th Century Japan, and patented it under the brand name Pervitin.
This new drug fit the “new Aryan” ideal like a glove, enabling Germans to work harder, produce more, study longer and live the Aryan ideal of the “superior race.” Soon available without prescription, even in massive doses in chocolate candy, Pervitin was the engine that pulled Germany from the depths of the Weimar dumps to robust productivity, even while the rest of the world suffered in Depression.
When the Reich’s massive new war-making machine was unleashed on Poland in September of 1939, Pervitin was the Wermacht’s principal fuel, enabling soldiers and airmen to advance and fight for days at a time. When the Nazis invaded France the following year, the drug’s effect was even more profound, 35 million tablets of meth enabling the army to take the country in little more than two weeks, literally without sleeping the entire time.
After the conquest of France, Hitler’s circle painted the campaign as a purposefully-designed affair, based in the natural rigor of the German war-fighter, but it was, in truth, an unintended triumph, a literal speed trip. The strategy that came to be known as Blitzkrieg had been invented, entirely by pharmacological accident.
Meth seemed tailor-made for the Nazi self-identity, engendering feelings of superiority, invulnerability and aggressiveness. It was like National Socialism in pill form. Under the influence of Pervitin, it seemed there was nothing a noble German could not accomplish, and no one who could stand as his equal.
With “Blitzed,” Ohler has brought a new and surprisingly intimate portrait of the Nazis, not only of their psychology but of a key reason for their initial success, and one of the reasons for the fragility of that success. The work also provides constant, haunting echoes of fascism’s contemporary manifestations, both in attitude and in the dangers that inhere within it.
I would recommend the book to anyone interested in the era.
Or ours.