High Hitler
A stunning new book in Germany details how a ‘Breaking-Bad’ Adolf Hitler was zonked out of his head on heroin-type drug while his Blitzkrieg troops fought the war on a narcotic called Pervitin that was the forerunner of crystal meth.
‘The Total Rush; Drugs in the Third Reich’ by Norman Ohler exposes a regime which projected healthy living and clean-minded supremacy to the world while its masters and servants were high on stimulants.
While it has long been known that the German high command greenlighted Pertivin for the the armed forces, the extent to which it was consumed – together with the revelations of the near-junkie status of the Fuehrer towards the end of the war – caused prominent historian Hans Mommsen to declare: ‘This book will change the accepted face of the history of the war.’
Ohler accessed the records of the Nazi high command, drug firms commissioned to produce the stimulants for troops and the private records of Dr. Theodor Morrell – the quack doctor of Hitler who was known to all within his inner circle as ‘Herr Reich Injection Master.’
Ohler’s book shines the spotlight on a regime which preached health and fitness….but in reality churned out legions of addicts who would fight for longer, with less food and sleep and creature comforts, than the enemy.
Hitler’s propaganda stressed the importance of keeping fit and abstaining from drink and tobacco to keep the Aryan race strong and pure. It was all a lie.
By the time the Third Reich conquered France in May 1940, says Ohler, there were 35 million soldiers and bureaucrats popping pills as a matter of course to get through the day.
Over 364 pages the author, who accessed both the archives of the Nazi state in Germany and those of the Americans in Washington where many secret files were spirited away to at war’s end, proves the link between a doped population and an even more doped leader.
By the time the invasion of the Soviet Union was launched in 1941, hundreds of thousands of soldiers were fighting under the influence of drugs. Records of the Wehrmacht, the German army, show that some 200 million Pervitin pills were isued to the troops between 1939 and 1945.
Research by the German Doctors’ Association also showed the Nazis developed a cocaine-based stimulant for its front-line fighters that was tested on concentration camp inmates.
The drug, codenamed D-IX, was tested at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, where prisoners loaded with 45lb packs were reported to have marched 70 miles without rest.