Norman Ohler: belief

Transcript context

…The following is a conversation with Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, a book that investigates what role psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, played in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians, Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor, give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as, “Very well-researched, serious piece of scholarship.” And Antony Beevor describes it as, “Remarkable work of research.” And it is, indeed, a remarkable work of research. Norman went deep into the archives using primary sources to uncover a perspective on Hitler and the Third Reich that has before this been mostly ignored by historians. He also wrote Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. And he’s now working on a new book with the possible title of Stoned Sapiens, a great title, looking at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here’s Norman Ohler. Tell me the origin story of meth, methamphetamine, and Pervitin, its brand-name drug version, in the context of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Let’s start there. I think you’re right to ask about the context because without the context, it’s not really understandable. So what was the situation? In the ’20s, the Nazi movement basically started, and it started in Bavarian beer halls. So alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy that didn’t drink was Hitler. He was a teetotaler, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich. So alcohol and national socialism are very closely connected. At the same time, in the ’20s, in Berlin, there was a completely different thing going on. People were taking all kinds of drugs. This had to do, actually, with the defeat of Germany in the First World War. I mean, the context is a big context. The Versailles Treaty had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty was written basically by the Western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. And I’m certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Versailles Treaty treated Germany somewhat unfairly. I mean, it laid all the blame on Germany. And, I mean, a war is a very complex thing, and the First World War, to examine how it actually started, is a very complex story, and there are many factors to it. But the Versailles Treaty just said it was Germany’s fault, and then Germany had to make all these payments to the allies. It couldn’t create a new economy. It couldn’t have a new army. So the economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap, and the people were also using substances that were very cheap in huge quantities. So while in Bavaria, they were drinking alcohol, and alcohol in the brain stimulates behavior, group behavior, us against them. You can actually examine this. A neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. While in Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphine, there was cocaine, there was mescaline, there was ether. So people were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset. It was all… You know, you didn’t behave in a way that some kind of authority would like you to behave in, because the authority had just lost the First World War, and there was no real authority in Berlin. People were doing whatever they wanted to do, and they were intoxicating themselves in the way they wanted to. So the population, in a way, if you just look at Munich and Berlin, was growing apart. Like, there were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, and then there were these weird, diverse, LGBTQ, whatever kind of scene in Berlin, like actresses sniffing ether in the morning and then making crazy moves. Could you speak to the nature of the motivation for the drug use in Berlin at the time? Was it rebellion? Was it a way to deal with the difficult economic depression? Was it just the natural thing that young people do to explore themselves, to understand the world, to develop their culture? What do we understand about drug use there?…

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