Norman Ohler: evaluation

Transcript context

…As far as you understand, that’s true? The beginning? Yeah, I’m pretty sure. I’m pretty sure that this is true. Also, vegetarianism was a right-wing thing in Germany. It was an elitist thing. If you were a vegetarian, you had a higher frequency, which kind of gave you superiority over, let’s say, these workers who need to eat the sausage so you can, you know, do the work. Like Wagner, the composer, he was vegetarian. Hitler was impressed by Wagner. So vegetarianism, all… I think that’s all true. I think Hitler was like that. And it’s hard to be like that actually, and I think that gave him an attraction inside the movement to all the drunkards, like Goering using morphine all the time because of his pain. He got used to morphine, so they were… The movement wasn’t like this, but he was like this. So he symbolized that whole approach of cleanliness, like purity. So then how does methamphetamine come into the picture? It’s totally absurd. That’s why I thought it was fun researching this, because it doesn’t make sense, you know? And, you know, they use this simple trick by defining what is an illegal drug and what is not. Because drugs don’t have it written on them, “This is an illegal, dangerous drug.” You know, drugs are basically neutral. These are molecules, you know? So the methamphetamine molecule was found in a Berlin-based company called the Temmler Company. And the head of Temmler, he was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an Afro-American athlete, Jesse Owens, was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes, you know? How could this be? So they thought that he was on something, because he won, I think, five gold medals. It was ridiculous. You know, these were supposed to be Germany’s games, and then the Afro-American runs better than the Aryan ubermensch. So the only explanation is he took a drug. He took probably Benzedrine, which was an illegal amphetamine, and also there were no doping checks at the Olympics. And if you’re taking amphetamine, of course you can run a bit faster maybe, when it kicks in. That this has to do with the immense release of dopamine in the brain. But it was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs, but the head of the Temmler Company, he said, “We have to prevent this. We have to invent a better amphetamine. We have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine.” So his main chemist, Fritz Hauschild, he did research and he found that in 1917, in Tokyo, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine, and he remade that methamphetamine and they tested it among themselves, the chemists in the Berlin pharmaceutical lab, and they loved it. Like, they made pure methamphetamine, and, you know, they had a really good time, and they were more active, they were talkative. ves, the chemists in the Berlin pharmaceutical lab, and they loved it. Like, they made pure methamphetamine, and, you know, they had a really good time, and they were more active, they were talkative. Because that’s what happens with methamphetamine. So the company really thought this is a great product, and they turned it into a product, they went to the patent bureaucracy and got the patent for methamphetamine, and then it quite quickly came onto the market. It was labeled as Pervitin, which is kind of a great name, because it has the perverse already in it. And this Pervitin was available in any pharmacy, so you didn’t need a prescription. A child could go and buy 10 packs of pure methamphetamine. So methamphetamine was also very cheap, so it became quite popular because people, you know, talked about it.…

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