Norman Ohler is the bestselling author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich , which is yet another addition to the large pile of works on life in Nazi Germany but with a sensational theme. Contrary to the popular belief that the Third Reich was orderly and preached moral purity, Ohler shows that Germany at the time was permeated with drugs.
Cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth, he says, were used by the citizens, troops, and Adolf Hitler himself. Ohler, who is also the author of three other works of fiction and two novellas, speaks of the controversial work and the mixed reactions to it in this email interview.
How or why do you think the drugs angle of Nazi Germany was overlooked by historians all these years?
I really don’t know why historians have overlooked this angle. It is crucial to understand this period because the German Army was the first army in the world to use a powerful stimulant for their surprising victories in 1939 and 1940.
How did you stumble upon this idea and how long did the research for it take?
I was told by a DJ friend in Berlin that he found old Pervitin pills from the 1940s containing methamphetamine in an old East Berlin pharmacy. The pills still worked, and had a strong psychoactive effect on my DJ friend. Then I started research in several archives in Germany, and the U.S. The overall process took me five years.
You sought out to understand National Socialism through this book. What have you learnt, and how far do you think the drugs played a role in explaining Hitler’s propaganda?
I have learnt that Nazi Germany was a modern performance-driven society that was in need of modern pharmaceutical stimulants, and used them to a great extent. However, this was contradictory to Nazi propaganda, which tried to portray the Nazi society as a clean society where drugs have no place. It was interesting to examine this contradiction.
What’s your most interesting takeaway from the research?
My study of the notes of Dr. Theo Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, enabled me to get a much clearer picture of Hitler, and the ongoings in the innermost circle of the Nazi regime.
How do you respond to the criticism that there are generalisations in the book — for instance, that most Germans were addicted to drugs? Do you think saying Germans were drug addicts explains, or perhaps even justifies, the lack of resistance to Nazism?
The drug Pervitin (methamphetamine) helped people cope with the stress of modern life in the late 1930s, especially with the challenges of the Second World War. However, this does not explain why there were so few people who resisted. In fact, one of the major resistance groups, The White Rose, was using quite a lot of Pervitin.
I don’t think there are generalisations in my book. I think it is a much more accurate description of what was going on at the time. It is a fact that Pervitin was a mass phenomena with billions of dosages used by millions of people over a long period of time.
Why do you think the book is so popular in Germany?
It is popular all over the world. I think this is because people are still very interested in the Second World War, and because my book gives a more accurate account. Without reading Blitzed one cannot understand what was going on at the time.
You have written three fiction books and then a non-fiction. Which was harder to do?
Each book is a challenge, and takes a lot of time and in the best case, inspiration. It is always hard to write literature, no matter if it’s fiction or non-fiction. Writing about the Third Reich is always somewhat easy because it is clear how the story ends (Germany loses the war), and who the bad guys are.
