Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

by Norman Ohler

The dictator sat down in the wicker chair until dawn, and only the constant motion of his jaws revealed his inner agitation and paradoxically bad mood. The Führer wasn’t leading this campaign. Instead he was panting along behind his headstrong, independent tank generals. Even though they were successful, the dictator could not cope with the fact that he had effectively handed over control.

Hitler’s avoidance of the political and social realities was perfectly in line with this new central command post, this non-place in nowhere, this high-tech location in the sticks where he could more easily dope himself up and remove himself from reality.

Mar-a-Lago?

Just like the potent substances in Hitler’s blood supply, his existence itself, which had seemed solid for so long, dissolved gradually into Nirvana. This is a development worth following if we are both to understand how the formerly energetic Führer was transformed into a human ruin, and to gauge how this process interacted with historical events.

The fact was that between the autumn of 1941, when he started being given hormone and steroid injections, and the second half of 1944, when first the cocaine and then above all the Eukodal kicked in, Hitler hardly enjoyed a sober day. This helped him to never break out of his own closed system, never to awaken from the nightmare, until the very end. The chasm was definitive and irreparable: as soon as any psychological bridge to reality was tentatively rebuilt, it was immediately blown up by a further pharmacological explosion.

Within his system, based from the beginning on intoxication and a flight from reality, he acted systematically and with terrible consistency to the end. He was anything but insane. A classic case of actio libera in causa: he could go on taking as many drugs as he liked to keep himself in a state in which he could commit his crimes. It does not diminish his monstrous guilt.

Reminds me a lot of Trump

Germany, land of drugs, of escapism and world-weariness, had been looking for a super-junkie. And it had found him, in its darkest hour, in Adolf Hitler.