Ohler, Norman
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Ohler's central historical claim, developed in Blitzed, is that drug use — systematically hidden from the historical record because archives were never indexed under "drugs" — was integral to the Third Reich's military effectiveness and its unraveling, even though the Nazi movement officially framed itself as an anti-drug, "purity"-obsessed regime (tying anti-drug policy directly to antisemitism, since Nazi ideology claimed Jews were disproportionately drug users and that the "Volk body" needed purification). Methamphetamine (branded Pervitin, invented at Berlin's Temmler company partly out of jealousy after Jesse Owens beat German athletes at the 1936 Olympics) was sold over-the-counter and widely used recreationally before Army physiologist Otto Ranke — whose personal war diaries and correspondence Ohler found in Freiburg's military archive — proved through unauthorized troop trials during the Poland campaign that it let soldiers fight for days without sleep. This became decisive during the 1940 invasion of France: the plan to punch through the "impassable" Ardennes forest devised by tank generals (Guderian, Rommel, von Manstein) only worked if the army could reach Sedan within three sleepless days and nights, which Ranke's stimulant decree (35 million methamphetamine doses distributed) made physically possible — Ohler is careful to say the Ardennes plan itself, not the drug, was the "genius" idea, with methamphetamine merely the enabling condition, pushing back on critics like Richard Evans who accused him of monocausal, morally exculpatory argument. He also documents darker consequences: Rommel's division (dubbed "the Crystal Fox") driving over sleeping French civilians and soldiers at night while on meth — which Ohler calls the moment the Wehrmacht "lost its innocence" — while insisting, against Evans's charge, that drug use never diminishes legal or moral responsibility for war crimes or genocide, which he attributes entirely to ideology, not intoxication.
A parallel and more startling thread concerns Hitler's own physician, Theodor Morell, a "Dr. Feelgood" society doctor who became Hitler's personal physician in 1936 via probiotic treatments for his bloating, then over the following years built an entire dependency relationship: daily vitamin/glucose injections (1936–41, relatively harmless), followed by increasingly experimental hormone concoctions (including a monopolized supply of slaughtered-animal organs from occupied Ukraine, diverting military trains meant for wounded soldiers) once Hitler discovered opioids in August 1941 — first through an intravenous Dolantin injection administered for the flu at the exact moment he decided to split German forces toward Leningrad and the southern oil fields instead of driving on Moscow, a decision Ohler considers one of the war's great blunders. Hitler subsequently developed a physical addiction to Eukodal (oxycodone), taking it roughly every second day by 1944 in a "junkie rhythm," most consequentially before his July 1943 meeting with Mussolini (where the drug's confidence-inducing effect let him monologue Mussolini into silence and staying in the war) and, after the July 20, 1944 Stauffenberg bomb plot, combining cocaine (administered for burst eardrums by physician Karl Brandt's rival, Erwin Giesing) with Eukodal in "speedball" doses — precipitating a bitter turf war between Giesing and Morell for control over Hitler that Ohler considers ripe for a film treatment. Notably, Ohler stresses Hitler almost never used methamphetamine himself (only twice, by his research) — that drug stayed a foot-soldier's tool — while Hitler's supply crisis arrived when Allied bombing destroyed the Merck factory in December 1944, forcing him into opioid withdrawal that Goebbels eventually made him recognize, leading to Morell's dismissal from the Führerbunker in the war's final days.
Ohler extends the same drugs-and-history lens across two other projects: The Bohemians, documenting Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen's underground Berlin resistance network (over 100 members recruited through vetting parties, eventually passing military intelligence to the Soviets before being betrayed and executed in 1942) as a model of principled resistance under totalitarianism; and Tripped, his history of LSD, which traces the drug from Sandoz chemist Albert Hofmann's 1943 discovery through a documented — and previously unknown — transfer of ergotamine to Nazi biochemist Richard Kuhn (used in Dachau "truth drug" experiments alongside mescaline) and then to the U.S. military and CIA's MKUltra program, which Ohler frames as a direct continuation of Nazi human experimentation, and which ultimately drove LSD's criminalization when CIA officer Sidney Gottlieb pressured Sandoz to keep it off the commercial market. He is candid that his own drug experiences (LSD since 1993, occasional methamphetamine, and giving microdosed psilocybin/LSD to his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, whose reading comprehension measurably improved) are inseparable from his research and writing method, while insisting — pointedly agreeing with Lex's own caution — that psychedelics should never be casually recommended to people whose psychological stability is unknown. The episode closes with a preview of Stoned Sapiens, his in-progress speculative history connecting psychoactive plants (khat, iboga, psilocybin, opium) to major inflection points in human cognitive and social evolution — from Homo erectus's dispersal, to the "stoned ape" theory of consciousness emerging relative to drug-free Neanderthals, to Moses's likely DMT-induced revelation via acacia at Sinai, to the claim that beer-brewing (not currency or agriculture per se) catalyzed the first hierarchical kingships in Sumer, replacing millennia of apparently kingless human self-organization exemplified by Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük.
Excerpts
On the decisive role of methamphetamine in enabling the Ardennes breakthrough, while distinguishing the drug from the strategic idea itself:
“Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan... to go through the Ardennes Mountains... it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights... Suddenly Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe for how people could stay awake for three days and three nights... he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug... Temmler had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines.”
On Hitler's first intravenous opioid injection coinciding with the decision to divert forces from Moscow toward Leningrad and the southern oil fields:
“Hitler becomes ill for the first time on the day this decision was made... he says to Morell... Morell then decided to inject an opioid into Hitler's veins intravenously... Hitler gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, in front of everybody, no one is able to overpower him in that meeting... the troops are split up... This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.”
On why he refuses to let drug use excuse Nazi war crimes, despite building his career on documenting the regime's drug dependence:
“I certainly would not excuse people... high-ranking politicians that make policies because the genocidal policies that the Nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs. And I never write that... The Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs. Maybe with alcohol, but... [under German law] if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility.”