Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

by Norman Ohler

On August 10, 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a chemist with the Bayer Company, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid from willow bark; it went on sale as Aspirin and conquered the globe. Eleven days later the same man invented another substance that was also to become world famous: diacetyl morphine, a derivative of morphine—the first designer drug.

The Germans were world leaders in another class of substances as well: the companies Merck, Boehringer, and Knoll controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine market. Merck’s cocaine, from the city of Darmstadt, was seen as the best product in the world, and commercial pirates in China printed fake Merck labels by the million.

The young Weimar Republic, swimming in consciousness-altering and intoxicating substances, delivered heroin and cocaine to the four corners of the world and rose to become a global dealer.

If the Weimar Republic can be seen in psychohistorical terms as a repressed society, its supposed antagonists, the National Socialists, were at the head of that trend. They hated drugs because they wanted to be like a drug themselves.

The myth of Hitler as an anti-drug teetotaler who made his own needs secondary was an essential part of Nazi ideology and was presented again and again by the mass media.

The anti-drug policy served as a vehicle for the exclusion and suppression, even the destruction, of marginal groups and minorities.

The war on drugs

The Wehrmacht was thus the first army in the world to rely on a chemical drug. And Ranke, the Pervitin-addicted army physiologist, was responsible for its regulated use. A new kind of war was on the way.

Blitzkrieg was guided by methamphetamine. If not to say that Blitzkrieg was founded on methamphetamine. —Dr. Peter Steinkamp, medical historian72

At the midday briefing, in spite of the looming military disaster, to everyone’s astonishment he revealed a beaming face, and at the lunch that followed—semolina dumpling soup, mushrooms in a ring of rice, apfelstrudel—he fell into one of his endless, distracted monologues. This time it was about elephants, which were the strongest animals in existence, and which, like him, abhorred meat. Next Hitler described in detail the horrors of a slaughterhouse he had visited in occupied Poland. Girls in rubber boots had waded in blood up to their ankles. Meanwhile, Morell was preparing his next injection, made from the glands of slaughtered animals.

Vegan athletes use the same analagy