#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA

The following is a conversation with Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, a deep dive into how stimulants like methamphetamine shaped World War Two. Ian Kershaw called it a serious piece of scholarship; Antony Beevor said remarkable research. Norman also wrote Tripped and is working on Stone Sapiens, a history of humanity through drugs. And now, dear friends, here’s Norman Ohler. Tell me the origin story of meth—Pervitin—in late 1930s Nazi Germany.

Context matters. In the 1920s, the Nazi movement grew out of Munich beer halls—alcohol as the group drug—while Berlin went the other way: morphine, cocaine, mescaline, ether. Versailles crushed the economy, everything got cheap, and people self-medicated or explored. Nazis hated that Berlin freedom. When they took power in 1933, they cracked down hard on drugs. Hitler, the teetotal vegetarian, symbolized ideological purity—at least at first.

You know Berlin—its music, its chaos. What’s your connection?

I grew up in West Germany. Berlin, walled and surreal, fascinated me. After the Wall fell, I moved there in the 1990s, drawn from pre-Giuliani New York by Berlin’s cheap, creative, electronic scene—like a modern echo of the 1920s: open, experimental, no authority breathing down your neck.

So in the early Nazi days, in those beer halls, were people basically drunk when Hitler spoke?

Yes. The movement centered on the Bürgerbräukeller—beer plus right-wing politics. Alcohol primes group aggression. The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch was literally a drunk idea. Göring was shot there, which started his morphine addiction. They failed, did prison time, and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf.

Historians often skip Hitler’s drug use. Why did you go there?

He was a person with a body. Drugs change bodies and minds. Kershaw’s great biography mentions a quack doctor and moves on. I dug in. My mentor, Hans Mommsen, said historians missed drugs. The Navy even ran human trials at Sachsenhausen—meth plus cocaine in gum—for week-long alertness. It’s a missing link in understanding Hitler’s later cognitive decline, without making drugs the only cause.

What was it like in the archives?

Kafkaesque. But a medical historian gave me file signatures for Professor Ranke, head of Army Physiology. I read his handwritten war diary and letters to Temmler about production timelines. He used meth himself and missed his own burnout. Finding anything is hard—the find-books aren’t indexed by “drugs.” The spark for me was a DJ friend who found vintage Pervitin in an old medicine chest—still potent—then a professor who claimed Blitzkrieg needed meth. I followed the paper trail. There’s more out there—some archives stay closed. Good revisionism is about evidence that forces a rethink.

Back to Pervitin: how did meth even enter a regime obsessed with purity?

They outlawed ‘degenerate’ drugs while normalizing stimulants as performance enhancers. Temmler’s chemist, Fritz Hauschild, revived a Japanese 1917 synthesis of meth. After Jesse Owens humiliated Aryan myths in 1936, Temmler wanted a better amphetamine than American Benzedrine. They patented meth as Pervitin. No prescription. Kids could buy it. It was as normal as coffee. Only in 1940 did a dissenting physician—related to Speer—warn about addiction and ideological hypocrisy.

How did the Wehrmacht adopt it at scale?

Ranke ran trials: Pervitin crushed caffeine, placebo, even Benzedrine. Poland saw ad hoc use; field reports raved. Then came the Ardennes plan: reach Sedan in three days and three nights without stopping. Sleep was the enemy. Ranke issued a stimulant decree—dosage, timing, side effects—and Temmler delivered approximately thirty five million doses. On May ten, they attacked.

What did meth actually do in Blitzkrieg—and how does Dunkirk fit?

Meth flips you into fight-or-flight—alert, fearless, euphoric. In tanks, it felt like a fast, joyful push—until it turned brutal. Rommel’s division used the most Pervitin; his night drive ran over sleeping enemies—helped by the French ration of red wine versus German meth. That’s a war crime. And no, drugs don’t excuse crimes. Law says planning a crime makes later intoxication irrelevant. I never argued otherwise. Funny enough, a Bundeswehr officer scolded me for downplaying Wehrmacht skill by mentioning meth. The Red Army’s sacrifice still beat them on the ground.

Why did Hitler halt the tanks at Dunkirk?

He was fighting the last war—obsessed with unsecured flanks—while the armored spearheads were inventing a new one. Göring, high on morphine, promised the Luftwaffe would finish the job from the air. Hitler ordered a stop; the British escaped. Manstein called it a lost victory. From there, Hitler’s strategic choices worsened—collecting enemies, misreading Britain, and later bungling the East.

Morphine and opioids—what are we talking about physiologically, and what did Hitler actually use?

Morphine, isolated in the nineteenth century, plus the hypodermic needle changed battlefield medicine. Heroin and oxycodone are its potent cousins. Hitler loved Eukodal—Merck’s oxycodone—intravenously every other day, escalating from ten to twenty milligrams. It gives a crystalline, kingly high and brutal dependence. I did not shoot it to try; the addiction risk is real. Meth also punishes you on off-days.

Walk me into Patient A: Dr. Theodor Morell and the early cocktail.

Morell was a celebrity doctor—hormones, vitamins, probiotics—no scruples if you paid. Hitler met him in 1936 via photographer Heinrich Hoffmann. At dinner, Hitler complained about gut pain. Morell prescribed Mutaflor—live bacteria from a soldier who resisted dysentery in Serbia—and cured the bloating. Hitler made him personal physician. Daily injections—vitamins at first—became ritual. Morell’s painless technique, Hitler’s obsession with image and stamina—the arm-up salute, the choreographed rallies—the cocktail builds from there.

That Olympic clip of Hitler allegedly tweaking—are we sure he was on drugs there?

I doubt it. In those years he was on vitamins and glucose, not hard drugs, and meth was not even available in 1936. That clip looks sped up. The addiction at first was to injections and to Morell, not to narcotics.

So when did the drug use actually get serious?

August 1941. During Barbarossa he caught a severe flu, and Morell injected Dolantin, an opioid. He walked into a crucial briefing high, dominated the room, and pushed splitting the forces toward Leningrad and the oil fields instead of driving on Moscow. It was a turning point—blitzkrieg thrives on speed, but you cannot run on stimulants forever; the edge fades.

Was that his first opiate hit, and what followed?

That was the first big one. From 1941 to 1943 I see him getting experimental: beyond vitamins into opioids and odd hormonal extracts. Morell even built a pharma company, seized animal organs from occupied territories, and used Hitler as his personal test subject—Hitler would bless a concoction, then decree it legal. He trusted Morell because he felt harmless, apolitical, and useful.

How did he rationalize this level of drug use?

He framed it as medicine for performance. Intravenous opioids hit instantly and let him feel crystal clear for hours. He loved that controlled, confident high before briefings.

Psychologically, what did the drugs do? And was meth really part of his stack?

Opioids gave him calm, energy, and supreme confidence without the twitchiness of cocaine or meth. In Morell’s notes I only see meth twice for Hitler. Vitamultin had no meth. The army used Pervitin at scale; Hitler gravitated to opioids and weird hormone mixes. Göring functioned on morphine for decades. After the July twenty bomb, an ENT named Giesing introduced cocaine; Hitler liked the superiority rush. Then came a doctors’ war—Giesing versus Morell—sometimes giving him cocaine plus Eukodal, a speedball.

Films like Downfall miss this, right?

Yes. They skip the drug engine behind his physical collapse. In the Berlin bunker there were two bedrooms: one for Hitler, one for Morell. That says it all.

How did drugs shape key decisions between 1941 and 1945?

A vivid case is July 1943 with Mussolini. He was in a foul mood, got Eukodal on the way, asked for another, then steamrolled Mussolini for hours; Italy stayed in, despite Rome being bombed mid-meeting. After that, Eukodal became a regular. It was prized for its feel—hence oxycodone’s later appeal.

If we remove the drugs, does the war end differently?

Speculative, but I think Germany still loses once it invades the Soviet Union. You would need an impossible version of Hitler—fanatical yet perfectly rational. He was inseparable from his drugged, self-destructive decision making. British planners even paused assassination ideas because a malfunctioning, drugged Hitler was strategically preferable.

Walk me through the end in the bunker.

The Merck plant was bombed in December 1944; Eukodal vanished. Morell scoured pharmacies on a motorcycle, failed, and Hitler went into withdrawal. Goebbels weaponized that to oust Morell; Hitler finally realized he was dependent and fired him in late April. Morell fled, did his taxes in Bavaria—surreal—and died in 1947 after U.S. custody. Eva Braun had real influence—nightly calls, home base at the Berghof. Early on she even asked for the same medications to stay in sync with him, but they were not a drug couple.

Switching gears—tell me about The Bohemians.

Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas ran the largest German resistance network in Berlin, discovered through a final letter I found. He infiltrated the Luftwaffe ministry, passed intel to Allies and Soviets, and they recruited through brilliant salons—music, dancing, testing trust in conversation. They pulled off a major sticker action in 1942—“Nazi paradise: torture, hunger, war”—all over Berlin at dawn. Later the Soviets sent a radio reply; the Nazis intercepted and decoded names and addresses. The Gestapo rolled up the network; Harro and Libertas were executed. Tragic, brave, and utterly human.

What do you take from their resistance?

It was deadly risky; most stayed silent. But whispers matter—one sticker can ignite a city. In my own life, I chose writing as resistance—changing brains through language. Courage begins with conscience.

Give me the Stone Sapiens lens on human history.

I trace our story through psychoactives. Early humans in the Rift Valley likely chewed khat; sweating plus steady jogs changed hunting. I explore whether iboga in the Central African rainforest helped catalyze consciousness—backed by a Columbia researcher who sees iboga acting across the brain like a neural spa. In Vietnam—called the American War there—I found surprises even in terminology. On Crete, Minoan high culture rode on olive oil and opium trade. Compared to Neanderthals’ simpler cave art, our ancestors show shamanic mushrooms; the stone ape idea makes sense to me. We are, in many ways, stone sapiens.

Do you see a link between psychedelics and religion across cultures?

I do. I read the Moses story as a classic desert retreat: fasting, heat, no alcohol, acacia everywhere, and acacia in that region contains D M T. Moses climbs alone, has a powerful vision, returns with a monotheistic revelation and a law that mirrors his trauma. Across traditions, intoxication and ecstasy often serve devotion, while institutions later swing prohibitionist. The Church’s purity law in Germany standardized beer to water, hops, and barley, pushing out visionary botanicals. So drugs can seed religion and later get policed by it.

As societies develop, why do they seem to resist psychedelics and drugs?

I think hierarchy rides in on beer-as-economy. Pre-kings, people organized well without rulers. Then you get breweries tied to temples, labels, surplus, status, and a ruling class. Gobekli Tepe started as a meeting and mating place; when beer arrives, dynamics shift. In Sumer, priests brewing beer accelerate hierarchy. Today, I want us to outgrow kings and borders and build an egalitarian, probably A I assisted planetary society: shared rights, minimum income, no starvation. It is organization and will, not scarcity.

What is LSD actually like?

My first time, 1993 in the East Village, hit me like a freight train. Walls breathing, scale bending, street scenes that felt real and probably were not. I thought I had broken my brain, then after about ten hours it cleared and I felt freed. Subsequent trips were gentler: colors deepen, patterns emerge, insights click. Microdosing, ten micrograms or so, feels like a long, clean espresso. Around one hundred micrograms, a real journey begins; two hundred on a Thai island turned into a three-hour ocean swim and life clarity.

I find ayahuasca and psilocybin intensify beauty and gratitude—dragons, atoms, the whole world alive. Is that resonance common?

Sandoz saw that in 1943. They set up an intoxication room; employees reported joy, clarity, heightened sensitivity. They thought it might transform mental health. Decades later, microdosing caught my eye when I read about Alzheimer’s. My mother has it. LSD engages the five H T two A receptors that Alzheimer’s erodes. We tried gentle doses—on mushrooms she picked up a newspaper and read headlines for the first time in a year. Then the dark arc: I traced a line from Sandoz C E O Stoll to Nazi biochemist Richard Kuhn, found a 1943 document sending the LSD precursor to Germany. In Dachau, inmates were dosed; one described an astonishingly beautiful trip amid horror, then crushing return. After the war, a U.S. general quietly collected LSD in Basel; the military and then the C I A ran with it. M K Ultra tried mind control—illegal and unethical. Sidney Gottlieb even pressured Sandoz to keep LSD off the market to control supply. It still leaked out; Ken Kesey was a paid subject, then wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. LSD does not yield a truth serum, but it often expands empathy and reframes perception.

Ethically, that is one of the darker chapters. And on recommending psychedelics, I generally say no to the public, then discuss privately case by case. The mind is powerful; outcomes are unpredictable.

I agree. LSD is extraordinarily potent at microgram levels. For a stable mind, it can open doors; for an unstable one, it can overwhelm. Caution is responsibility.

How does LSD compare to psilocybin and D M T?

LSD and psilocybin are close cousins; a Zurich neuroscientist showed LSD docks to more receptor types, which helps explain the depth at tiny doses. Mushrooms are often softer and shorter, about five hours; LSD runs longer, often eight. LSD is an ergot-derived, refined molecule—scalable, which is why it fueled a mass movement. Mushrooms need to grow.

Tell me about Berlin’s party culture—were you in the middle of it?

In the nineties, yes. Legendary clubs, M D M A, eight-hour dance floors. I lived it for a while; you cannot really work like that for long. Later I saw it as research. When I wrote about Pervitin, I even tried crystal meth once. It is toxic—heart hammering, blood pressure up—not visionary like psychedelics, but it helped me grasp the soldier’s sharpened wakefulness in a tank.

Do writers really use drugs to write? Any favorites?

Many do. Kerouac wrote On the Road in a speed blur; Philip K. Dick lived on amphetamines; Hemingway drank. Amphetamines can blast pages out of you, but self-criticism drops—always edit sober. For me, writing has two halves: the painful discipline and the inspiration. I go to the Nietzsche House to focus, phone off, hours at the desk. LSD deepened my sense of the world’s layers and helped me see structure in the mountains, in caves as living canvases—but I do not write on it.

Which books shaped you, fiction and non-fiction?

James Joyce’s Ulysses opened form for me when I was young. Camus’ The Stranger taught me ruthless economy of language. Nietzsche’s chiselled lines, Kafka’s clarity, Thomas Mann’s wit—all lodestars. And Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is a towering masterpiece; Slothrop stumbling through bombed-out Europe is hilarious and profound. Pynchon’s privacy only adds to the mystique.

Big question—what is the meaning of life?

I think the universe is telling a vast story and our consciousness is part of it. In the high mountains, I sometimes feel that larger narrative, especially when I loosen the default mode network and let the world speak. I would not pin it down in words; it is an experience. My aim as an artist is to free brainwaves, to help us perceive more and in different ways. That process of understanding—that is my meaning.

Thank you for the work and for this conversation. And I will close with words from Terence McKenna: Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature responds by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream, and the world will not grind you under; it will lift you up. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done—by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it is, in fact,