Tracey answers “How can we take this book seriously...”

Niklas Pivic asked this question about Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany:

How can we take this book seriously following this scathing critique? https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/16/blitzed-drugs-in-nazi-germany-by-norman-ohler-review

Tracey "His numbness, his rigid view of the world, his tendency toward the fantastical, and the unscrupulous transgression of all boundaries - all of this wa…more"His numbness, his rigid view of the world, his tendency toward the fantastical, and the unscrupulous transgression of all boundaries - all of this was ominously supported by the opiod that he used so frequently in the last quarter of 1944. During this time, when the Allies were entering the Reich from both east and west, the powerful narcotic erased any doubts about victory, any empathy for civilian victims, and made Hitler even more unfeeling about both himself and the outside world. On this tranquilizing painkiller, the Fuehrer was fully in command of himself. This was the true Hitler, and that was how he had always been. The overestimation of his own significance and misjudgment of his opponents were both captured in his blueprint Mein Kampf, published in 1925. His opiod addiction only cemented an already existing rigidification, a tendency to delegate violence, and contributed to the fact that in the last phase of the war and in the genocide of the Jews, he never once thought of relenting. So the goals and motives, the ideological fantasy world, were not the result of drugs, but established much earlier. Hitler did not murder because he was living in a haze - quite the contrary: he remained sane until the end. His drug use did not impinge on his freedom to make decisions. Hitler was always the master of his senses, and he knew exactly what he was doing. He acted always in an alert and cold-blooded way. Within his system, based from the beginning on intoxication and the 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. "(less)

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