A book about drug use in the Third Reich set out to offer a new way of seeing Nazi Germany

"In a sense, drugs changed everything and they changed nothing — that's the paradox of history"

Open the personal website of the German writer Norman Ohler and the first thing you see is a black-and-white photograph: a tall, lean Ohler in a suit, standing in an empty derelict building, sunlight through a window printing his shadow on the mottled floor. Across the photo run the capital letters BLITZED, the title of a book Ohler published three years earlier.

Der totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich became a bestseller in Germany soon after it came out. The next year the English edition, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, climbed onto the New York Times bestseller list, and the Guardian named it one of its books of the year for 2016.

The book's success makes sense. Before Ohler, mainstream historians had never taken drugs up as an important subject in the history of Nazi Germany, and the public knew almost nothing about it. And from any angle, "getting high" grabs attention.

Ohler traces the book back to his own childhood. His grandfather worked as a railway engineer at a small but important station in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, where he once watched a train packed with Jews pull out for the nearby Theresienstadt concentration camp.

In the early 1980s, the oil crisis pushed West Germany into a severe economic slump; unemployment kept climbing and social problems piled up. Ohler's grandfather began to miss the social order of Nazi Germany — "None of this would have happened under Hitler; everything was in order." He was not the only one who felt that way.

A tightly ordered society under an authoritarian system was hardly a new subject. But the young Ohler still wanted to hit back at the nostalgia going around, by showing what the Third Reich had really been.

Then he dropped the plan for a while. Nazi Germany had been studied over and over. "Every corner of this subject, every thread of it, has been combed through a thousand times. The Wehrmacht is arguably the most thoroughly studied army in history. We flatter ourselves that we know everything about that period. The Third Reich is like a sealed ruin — any attempt to find something new in it looks delusional, even faintly ridiculous."

What brought the Nazi Germany project back to life was a friend of Ohler's, Alex Kraemer, a Berlin DJ well versed in both drugs and history. One day Kraemer told him a story: an antiques dealer had turned up some methamphetamine pills left over from the 1930s, tried them, and found they had a powerful stimulant effect. Back then these pills were known as "Pervitin." Today methamphetamine goes by a better-known name: crystal meth.

The story caught Ohler's interest. His early experiments with marijuana and with a potent hallucinogen called "angel dust" had taught him how much soft drugs can do to a person's mental state. He began working through the archives on Nazi Germany scattered across Berlin, Koblenz, Munich, Sachsenhausen, Dachau, Washington. The more files he read, the more links he found between drugs and Nazi Germany: ordinary citizens, the army, the top of the government — and even Hitler, long presented as a vegetarian who touched neither tobacco nor alcohol, was "on drugs."

The irony is that Nazi Germany had strict anti-drug laws from the moment Hitler took power.

Behind those laws lay the deflated, decadent mood of Germany after its defeat in the First World War. "People would rather escape into a hallucinatory world than face a reality that fell short." Morphine, heroin and cocaine were available everywhere, and they turned Berlin into an "artificial paradise," a playground for Europe's adventurers.

The Nazi Party had attacked that scene more fiercely than anyone. Once in power, it set about wiping out the openness and pluralism of the Weimar Republic's culture of pleasure, launched a sweeping anti-drug campaign, and went as far as forced sterilization for drug users: "From the standpoint of racial hygiene, we should consider measures to stop severe addicts from having children."

The anti-drug policy also merged with Nazi racial policy, and together they opened a convenient door for purging outsiders. In Nazi propaganda, Jews were like drugs, part of a "toxic and contagious unity that together threatened Germany's safety." Opium, morphine, addicts, dealers and Jews — every outsider the Nazi system would not tolerate was a "drug" to be eliminated.

While it was purging "drugs," Nazi Germany was going through a prewar boom: unemployment falling, wages rising, prosperity everywhere. Economic recovery and restored order rekindled Germans' hopes for their country, and ordinary people enjoyed the security and plenty that came with Nazi rule. It was at this point that Pervitin, the pill that woke you up and cleared your head, arrived.

Temmler, the company that developed methamphetamine, put this "new energy agent" on the market in 1938, and it took off at once — methamphetamine even went into chocolate. People believed it improved grades, made work more efficient, lifted the mood, made you smarter, built stamina, even took off weight. Typists, actors, students, doctors, businessmen, long-haul drivers, firefighters and housewives all took Pervitin. Nobody needed an afternoon nap any more: "Everyone was full of energy and drive."

In an age of fast development, with the great wheel of the times rolling forward, everyone wanted to achieve something and dreaded falling behind, dreaded being left as an obsolete part. Pervitin's popularity was the spirit of that age in miniature: a booster that kept the individual in step with the times, a tonic that helped the German people "heal themselves."

The army was no different. When Hitler launched the war and faced a stronger Anglo-French force, Pervitin was one of the chips that won Germany its early victories. Riding the drug's powerful stimulant effect, German troops pushed forward day and night without rest and caught the French army off guard with blitzkrieg tactics. There is no doubt that Germany's "medals of honor" contained a measure of methamphetamine. "The Wehrmacht was the first army in the world to use a chemical drug as a weapon," Ohler writes in the book.

The Führer himself was also heavily dependent on drugs. He relied on his personal physician, Dr. Theodor Morell, to keep injecting him with hormones, steroids and vitamin cocktails to hold his energy up. In the later stages of the war those drugs no longer sufficed for a body that ached more and more often and was worn out, so Morell began injecting him with Eukodal, an opioid; another doctor, Erwin Giesing, treated him by applying cocaine.

But Ohler never answers one crucial question in the book: how large a dose does it take before something counts as a "drug"?

Nazi Germany was hardly alone. In the United States of the Civil War era, sedatives containing morphine and synthetic drinks containing cocaine were sold openly, and heroin, when it first came to market, went into children's cough syrup. Methamphetamine, or crystal meth, is like every drug in history — opium, cocaine, heroin — in that when it was first discovered or created it was widely used to relieve pain or sharpen the mind. Drugs and medicines are two sides of the same coin, and the main difference is abuse: an abused medicine is a drug.

In the framework Ohler builds, Pervitin, with its methamphetamine, is a drug. He notes how widely it was used, but gives no concrete statistics and no grounded estimate. Of Nazi Germany's 78 million people, how many ever took Pervitin? How many took it continuously? Even if it was in wide use, was the dose ordinary people took enough to produce physical addiction? Ohler never answers these questions.

There is a second problem. Ohler also files the hormones and steroids Hitler took under the word "drugs," and then makes a bold guess: that the sharp contrast between Hitler's character early in the war and late in it, and even some of his more baffling wartime decisions, were connected to the hormones, steroids, Eukodal and cocaine he lumps together as "drugs." Is that an appropriate move in a work of nonfiction history?

The more basic question is whether telling Nazi history in the name of "drugs" holds up as an approach at all.

Ohler admits that "drugs" could not have steered the course of history.

"On one hand, I think if you take all the drugs out, the outcome of the war would have been the same. Germany would have lost regardless of drugs — it makes no difference, because Germany could not have won the war. Germany didn't have the resources to win, didn't have the manpower. For a Central European country, winning a war in the west and in the east at the same time was simply impossible. Even if Hitler hadn't taken drugs the outcome would have been the same, because Hitler was a racial ideologue: he believed Germany was the finest nation and would win the war in the end, even though reality was nothing like that. Drugs only changed the way the outcome came about. So in a sense, drugs changed everything and they changed nothing — that's the paradox of history."

Ohler said this in an interview with QDaily.

Morell's detailed medical records supply plenty of material for the book's most readable stretch — the interweaving of Hitler's growing need for drugs with Nazi Germany's mounting defeats on the battlefield — which lets Ohler give readers a dense, you-are-there account. But that may also have heightened the emotional pull of the "drugs" passages themselves, so that readers overlook the more two-sided facts inside them.

The book has drawn fierce argument since it appeared. Richard John Evans, an expert on German history and a former president of Wolfson College, Cambridge, wrote a piece in the Guardian attacking it. Evans argued that Ohler had greatly overstated how widespread and how influential drugs were among Nazi Germany's soldiers and civilians, and that on Hitler's drug abuse his conclusions did not match what historians had already established. He wrote: "Ohler's skills as a novelist make his book far more readable than an academic study, but that comes at the cost of truth and accuracy, and in a field this historically sensitive the price is too high."

Ohler shrugged the criticism off. He thinks Evans did not read the book carefully and was only "protecting his own turf." As Ohler sees it, Evans could not bear the thought of "a non-historian entering the field he knows best and suddenly finding something he had never seen."

For Ohler, "drugs" are a magnifying glass he holds over the Third Reich; he never set out to give readers a full panorama of Nazi Germany. He writes in the book: "What this book offers is an unconventional, distorted perspective, meant precisely to use that distortion to bring certain parts into sharper view. German history will not be rewritten because of it, still less overturned. It is only that when people tell the story in the future, some parts may become more specific and more precise."

So Ohler writes about how Jews were stigmatized and cleared away in the name of "drugs"; about how Hitler, guarding his image, sank deeper and deeper into drug dependence; about how the Nazi military, chasing victory, looked the other way as Pervitin was abused — even though Leo Conti, the man in charge of German public health, tried several times to regulate its use.

Seen this way, the scientific question of what counts as a "drug" is not what Ohler cares about. What he wants to stress is the political meaning of "drugs": the line between drug and non-drug is drawn not by science but by what serves the ruler.

On the evening of December 16, at the invitation of the Chinese publisher of Blitzed, Ohler came to Beijing for a book salon promoting his first work to appear in Chinese. Talking with Ren Jiantao, a professor in the political science department at Tsinghua University, Ohler said: "The main problem with the Nazis wasn't really drugs; it was the lack of freedom. Under Nazi Germany people were not free. They could not voice their own opinions freely; they had to accept a war that made no sense; they had to face antisemitism, or take part in it. This may be the darkest chapter in German history, so what we need to study now is how to build a free society."

He agrees, though, that understanding drugs scientifically matters. "For any society the drug question is a sensitive one, so we need to treat it with care — we need to look at it from a scientific, rational point of view."

Cover image from Wikipedia; long-format cover image from Norman Ohler's personal website.