The Wehrmacht's Secret Ingredient Was Methamphetamine

On the morning of February 17, 1940, Hitler called three young tank generals — Heinz Guderian, Erich von Manstein, and Erwin Rommel — into his office. High Command had rejected an attack on the west as suicide: Britain and the French army together looked unbeatable, and the only plan on the table was a northern thrust through Belgium, a replay of 1914 that would stall into months of blood. The tank officers offered another route. Send the whole army through the Ardennes, a mountain range the French had barely fortified because nobody believed a modern force could squeeze through that eye of a needle.

Hitler balked, then understood. Tanks, they told him, were not slow machines waiting in the rear. Used as race cars at the front, they could be in France before the Allies knew it — but only if the spearhead reached Sedan in three days and three nights without stopping. Sleep suddenly became the operational problem. Professor Otto Ranke, head of the Institute for Army Physiology and until then a fringe figure with a drug idea, had the recipe: methamphetamine, marketed as Pervitin. He wrote a stimulant decree for an entire army, lectured officers on dose and interval, and Temmler delivered 35 million dosages to the staging areas. On May 10 the men took their meth and the surprise attack began.

That story is the core of Norman Ohler's *Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich*, a book Ian Kershaw called a well-researched piece of scholarship and Antony Beevor called a remarkable work of research. Richard Evans, another major historian of the period, called it crass, dangerously inaccurate, and morally and politically dangerous — the fear being that a drug lens would excuse Nazi crimes or over-explain Blitzkrieg. Ohler's mentor Hans Mommsen had already warned him not to argue in a monocausal way, especially about war. Ohler says he never left the facts: the victorious idea was the Ardennes, and meth was the condition that made three sleepless days physiologically possible.

Ohler starts the meth story in the 1920s, because without that split Germany the later absurdity does not make sense. The Nazi movement came out of Bavarian beer halls. Alcohol was the drug of choice; the only man who did not drink was Hitler. Drunk people, he argues, are more open to right-wing populism and more aggressive toward outsiders, and a shared blood-alcohol level also constitutes the group. The Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 was, in his telling, a stupid drunk idea: they left the Bürgerbräukeller and tried to seize Munich. Bavarian police, sober that day, shot them down. Hitler jumped behind a bodyguard. Hermann Göring took a stomach wound and became a morphine addict for the rest of his life. Hitler wrote *Mein Kampf* in prison.

Berlin was another country. The Versailles Treaty, Ohler says, treated Germany unfairly enough that even he — no nationalist — can see the economic wreckage: all the blame, the payments, no new army. Everything in the city was cheap, including morphine, cocaine, mescaline, and ether. After Kaiser Wilhelm there was no emperor to stop young people from going crazy, and Weimar Berlin became the city it still partly is: no authority, cheap drugs, a diverse scene that Joseph Goebbels later called the hated asphalt reality. When the Nazis took power on January 30, 1933, one of their first moves was to prosecute drug users. Anti-drug policy was quickly tied to antisemitic policy. They claimed German Jews used more drugs than non-Jewish Germans. The goal was to purify the German body; Jews were poison, and so were communists and anyone who thought differently.

Hitler was staged as the shining counter-example: he had quit cigarettes in the 1920s, never touched alcohol, ate no meat, and avoided even caffeine. Vegetarianism in that German right-wing milieu was elitist, associated with Wagner and a claim of higher frequency. The movement around him was full of drunkards and a morphine-using Göring; he symbolized cleanliness. Methamphetamine, Ohler says, then entered the picture in a way that is totally absurd — by the simple trick of defining what counted as an illegal drug and what did not.

The Temmler company in Berlin produced the molecule. Its head, Ohler says, was furious after the 1936 Olympics, when Jesse Owens outran the Aryan *Übermensch* on Germany's own stage. There were no doping controls. The only explanation the industrialist would accept was that Owens had taken American Benzedrine. He told his chief chemist, Fritz Hauschild, to make a stronger German amphetamine. Hauschild found that a Japanese chemist had synthesized methamphetamine in Tokyo in 1917, remade it, and tested it in the lab. The chemists were more active and talkative. They liked it.

The company patented the drug and put it on the market as Pervitin — a name Ohler enjoys because it already contains *perverse*. It was sold in any pharmacy without a prescription. A child could buy ten packs of pure methamphetamine. It was cheap, and it was not stigmatized. People called it a performance enhancer. Is morning coffee a drug? In that Germany, taking a Pervitin before an important meeting was in the same category. Billy Wilder's postwar film *One, Two, Three* has an American executive asking his secretary for morning coffee with half a Pervitin. University clinical tests, which Ranke later read in the military archive, were mostly glowing: less fear, no need to sleep, lower appetite. For an army moving toward war, each of those looked like a feature.

Negative reports became public only in 1940. The first prominent opponent was a psychologist related to Albert Speer, who made two points that still define the argument: methamphetamine contradicted Nazi ideology, because Aryans were supposed to be high performers by will alone; and the drug would create addiction and tolerance. Until then, Temmler and the universities had treated it as a quality German product. Ranke, whose job was to improve the soldier, read those same reports and saw an answer to the opponent that ranked above the British, the French, and the Russians: fatigue.

Ohler imagines Ranke as a James Bond Q: an academic soldier running an institute that also built gadgets. He tested young medical officers at the military academy from 8:00 p.m. onward on methamphetamine, caffeine, placebo, or Benzedrine. By 10:00 a.m. the Pervitin group still wanted to go out and party; the caffeine group was asleep on the bench. He wrote to the Surgeon General that the coming campaign against Poland needed a controlled synthetic stimulant, because civilians already used Pervitin and many soldiers would bring it anyway. The old-school Surgeon General did not reply. Germany attacked Poland without a regulatory system. Ranke then collected field reports from medical officers and concluded that it was a really good fighting drug.

Poland was not the west. High Command in November 1939 even planned a coup to stop Hitler ordering an attack they expected to lose. Hitler's hatred of France, Ohler says, was deeper than strategy: France was the hereditary enemy, Versailles had to be torn up, and the decision was irrational. His position was not yet absolute; the Wehrmacht still had its own tradition. That deadlock broke on February 17, 1940, when the tank generals sold the Ardennes. The catch — Sedan in 72 hours — made Ranke's outsider idea suddenly official. Temmler produced 35 million doses. On May 10 the attack started.

Ohler is careful about what the archives do and do not show. The meth was not issued equally: tank troops leading the advance received the most, and he could see how many pills went to Rommel's division on which date. He nicknames Rommel the Crystal Fox for that reason, while refusing to write that Rommel personally swallowed a pill on a given day without a record. Heinrich Böll, later a Nobel laureate, wrote to his parents that without Pervitin he could not have done the job. The campaign that followed was, until Dunkirk, the most successful German operation of the war. It was also, Ohler insists, untested: nobody knew whether men in tanks, in mountains, in enemy country, on meth, would fight better or collapse.

Reports from just before the attack, Ohler says, describe a depressed camp. Most of the men were not hardcore Nazis; they were afraid and did not want the war. Meth changed the mood into something like a party. It throws the brain into fight-or-flight, dumping the transmitters that fire under mortal threat. On meth, people usually do not run. They think what is happening is cool; they like to move with their pals; a tank is a great place to be. Spring successes came fast. The fighting was real, and so were the crimes.

Armies stop at night. The French, issued three-quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day, camped in a village. Rommel, in Ohler's reading of the reports, did not stop. He stood in the open hatch and took his division through, a berserk figure in a machine whose tracks, some descriptions say, came away bloody. Ohler calls that a war crime and the moment the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in the French countryside: the enemy was sleeping, and you do not do that. Evans heard in this story an excuse — they were intoxicated, so they were not evil. Ohler says he never wrote that, and German law as his father, a senior judge, explained it does not help: if you plan a crime and commit it under the influence, responsibility is not diminished. Lesser responsibility is for the ordinary person who has never harmed anyone and then, drunk or drugged, kills by accident. Nazi policy was not that case.

His own family sits inside the argument. His grandfather, who worked for the German railways, once saw a cattle wagon full of Jews and said only that it violated railway regulations; asked what he did, he said SS men were on the platform and he was too scared to act. Ohler thinks he made himself guilty. The other angry letter came from a Bundeswehr officer and military historian who felt Ohler had insulted the Wehrmacht's skill by saying meth made it good. Ohler finds that almost funny: the Wehrmacht no longer exists, and the Bundeswehr is not supposed to inherit it, yet the pride still flinched. Fridman pushes back from another direction, recalling Soviet family stories of Stalingrad. Ohler agrees the Red Army on the ground beat the Wehrmacht, and that he is grateful to those soldiers whether or not they loved the system.

The sickle cut — Churchill's name for the Ardennes thrust that sliced behind Allied forces still stuck in northern Belgium — had already won the campaign in military terms. German units were on the outskirts of Dunkirk, the last open port. Guderian, Rommel, and Manstein expected to close it the next day. Hitler issued the *Haltebefehl*, the stop order. The tank men, many of them still on meth, did not want to stop. Hitler, Ohler says, was not on meth and did not understand a war that fast. Staff talk stayed in old language: unprotected flanks, what if the British came from the north. The tank generals were already fighting a new war. Hitler was still fighting World War I.

Then Göring arrived at the Felsennest, Hitler's western headquarters, high on morphine, a habit documented from the 1923 wound until American captivity in 1945. If the army took Dunkirk, Göring told him, army high command — already hostile to *der kleine Gefreite*, the little corporal — would own the victory and the next decisions. Let the National Socialist Luftwaffe finish the campaign from the air. The stop order went out. A few ships were sunk; the bulk of the British army got away. You needed ground troops to seal a beach. Manstein later called it a lost victory. Ohler thinks Christopher Nolan's *Dunkirk* fails because it never shows the German side of that political fear and that morphine-colored advice.

Fridman and Ohler then walk the counterfactuals: neutralizing Britain without a cross-Channel invasion, grabbing oil before Barbarossa, not declaring war on the United States. Ohler doubts a German win once the Soviet Union was attacked; Fridman puts a speculative 10 percent on a narrower, faster, less multi-front war. What they share is the sense that after Dunkirk, Hitler became a very bad leader, and that Wehrmacht officers were furious because they thought a more rational commander could still have won. Drugs, in this telling, are one more way the decision-making degenerated — not a magic key that unlocks every fork in the road.

Theodor Morell kept a celebrity practice on Berlin's Kurfürstendamm: a Dr. Feelgood for opera stars who wanted a shot before opening night, not a diagnosis. He was knowledgeable about hormones, vitamins, and probiotics and had no boundaries. If you paid, you got testosterone, vitamins, or an opioid. Physically unappealing, with famously bad table manners, he lived for the moment a patient looked up after an injection and thanked him. In 1936 Hitler's photographer came in with gonorrhea; Morell cured him. A plane then fetched the doctor to Munich for a dinner of spaghetti with tomato sauce and nutmeg, attended by Hitler, Eva Braun, and the photographer. Morell could barely eat the pasta. His opening came when Hitler complained of bloating from a cake-and-white-bread vegetarian diet that his SS doctor, Brandt, could not fix.

Morell offered Mutaflor, live bacteria cultured from a World War I soldier in Serbia who had not gotten sick when others drank the local water. It was a real product, and it worked. Hitler asked him to become personal physician. Morell's wife objected that he would have no time for her; he said a chance like that comes once. Hitler would not swallow pills, which had to pass through the gut he already distrusted. Morell was a master injector with needles thicker than today's, and he could do it without pain. From 1936 to 1941 the daily shot was mostly vitamins and glucose. Hitler did not get sick. He even trained with an expander so he could hold the salute for hours at parades. Ohler found a document for that grim little gym routine.

The viral clip of Hitler twitching at the 1936 Olympics, often read as meth, is in Ohler's view almost certainly fake or over-cut. There is no record of a drug that day, methamphetamine was not yet on the market, and Morell's notes show meth only twice in the entire later cocktail — not a meth user's pattern. Vitamultin, the sweet bar beside the plate, did not contain meth either, despite later SS gossip. Army meth and Hitler's drugs were different systems. Hitler signed the stimulant decree, but Pervitin was for foot soldiers. He was becoming, Ohler says, an injection addict first: once the needle went in, the day was good. The substances inside the syringe would darken later.

Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. About six weeks in, High Command wanted Moscow. Hitler wanted to split the armies toward Leningrad and the southern oil. On the day of that decision he fell ill for the first time, with a high-fever flu. Morell's notes, which Ohler says no other historian had read at the Federal Archives, record Hitler telling him vitamins were no longer enough. After a struggle with himself, Morell injected Dolantin, a legal German opioid, into a vein. Ohler compares it to a 1988 flu shot he received as an exchange-student tennis player in Flint, Michigan, after which he beat a feared opponent 6-0, 6-0 by looping high balls. Hitler got up, dominated the briefing, and nobody in the room could overpower him. The troops were split. The one-time chance at Moscow, Ohler thinks, was spent. The German machine could win only in speed wars, and speed on meth has a clock: two months, maybe, then a nervous wreck.

After that needle, Hitler became experimental. Morell founded Hammer Pharmaceuticals in occupied Czechoslovakia and, once Ukraine was taken, demanded a monopoly on organs from every slaughtered animal in every slaughterhouse, shipped by military train while wounded men waited. He threatened officers who blocked the cars: he would tell the Führer. Wartime drug approval was slow, so Hitler offered himself as guinea pig: make it in the factory, if I like it I will decree it legal across Germany. The loner doctor was no threat, never asked Hitler to undress, and kept the secret. Hitler, who expected to die young, framed every shot as performance medicine, not a habit.

Eukodal, Merck's oxycodone, entered in July 1943, before a villa meeting in northern Italy where Mussolini wanted out of the war. Hitler was in a foul mood, ready to cancel while the plane waited. Morell injected Eukodal; on the way to the aircraft Hitler asked for a second shot. Fifteen or twenty people were in the room. Memoirs agree Mussolini barely spoke. Hitler, highly charged, talked for two hours about why Italy could not leave, even after a messenger reported that Rome had been bombed. Success made Eukodal his favorite. Regular use began that month; by September 1944 he was on an every-other-day junkie rhythm. A man Ohler interviewed who had taken the same intravenous dose called it the king's high: mind clear, body superb, the others in the room merely mortal. Hitler had meth only twice. The army was meth-ed up. The dictator was an opioid guy.

Stauffenberg's bomb on July 20, 1944, killed men in the briefing room and should have killed Hitler. A heavy oak table took the blast; Stauffenberg had also removed some of the explosive, a mystery Ohler cannot solve. Propaganda said the Führer was unharmed. He had more than a hundred wood splinters, blown eardrums, internal bleeding, and shock. An army ENT specialist, Dr. Keesing, was ordered in to treat the ears and applied cocaine, then a ordinary local anesthetic. Hitler had never had it, liked it immediately, and began asking for more in the nose as a liquid on a swab. In a fifteen-page interrogation for the Americans after the war, Keesing described an old man in a blue pajama coming forward to shake his hand — the fate of Germany hanging on a wreck — and then a patient who said, after cocaine, that he could finally think clearly again.

Cocaine, Ohler says, is not a humble drug; it inflates the ego. After the bombing Hitler already saw traitors everywhere, and the stimulant fitted the paranoia. What followed was a doctors' war. Keesing, later presenting himself as conscientious, tried to limit the cocaine and to oust Morell, even lining up Heinrich Himmler, who wanted control over whatever the Führer was being given. When Keesing left the room, Morell came in with intravenous Eukodal: cocaine plus opioid, a speedball, the unstable high at the end of a drug career. Hollywood, Ohler complains, has never bought this plot. *Downfall* missed the drug angle because *Blitzed* did not yet exist, and so it cannot explain why Hitler became a physical wreck. Two bedrooms in the Berlin bunker: one for Hitler, one for Morell.

British bombers destroyed Merck's plant in December 1944. Eukodal vanished. There is a report of overweight Morell on a motorcycle, riding from pharmacy to pharmacy in ruined Berlin, scoring nothing. Morphine was available to the end; Hitler never switched. Only in the last weeks, when Goebbels wanted the second bedroom and told him Morell had turned him into an addict, did the shaking of withdrawal make the diagnosis real. In late April he fired Morell; some accounts have a gun to the kneeling doctor's head. Morell left in tears on one of the last planes, reached a Bavarian lab on May 2, and — wife still in Berlin — started doing his taxes. Americans later interrogated him for two years, then dumped him in a too-small uniform jacket on the pavement in front of Munich station. A half-Jewish nurse got him to a hospital at Tegernsee, where his wife saw him once more before he died. Eva Braun, Ohler adds, was not the dumb blonde of older histories: she phoned Hitler at 10:00 p.m. whenever he was at headquarters, ran the Berghof, shot the color film of the kindly private Führer, and once asked Morell for the same medications so she could stay on his wavelength. Scratch marks on her one morning, noted in a Morell file in Washington, suggest a violent sex life that Ohler refuses to treat as militarily important.

While hunting Luftwaffe drug files in a Munich archive, Ohler stumbled on the last letter Harro Schulze-Boysen wrote to his father: he was at peace with what he had done, sorry mainly for his family, and had a clean conscience because he had tried to stop the madness. Googling a then-obscure name, Ohler found that Harro and his wife Libertas — the name means freedom — had built the largest resistance network inside Nazi Germany, more than a hundred people in Berlin: artists, workers, leftists, patriots. Harro had learned in April 1933 that you cannot argue with Nazis. SS men smashed the presses of his debate paper *Gegner* (Opponent), dragged him and his half-Jewish friend Henry Erlanger to an early camp, killed Erlanger, and cut swastikas into Harro's thighs. He chose what 1960s Germans later called the march through the institutions: he entered the Air Ministry, rose far enough to see secrets, and tried to warn the BBC about Germany's clandestine role in the Spanish Civil War. The journalist was too afraid to publish.

They recruited at Thursday-night parties in a loft off the Kurfürstendamm. Someone would drop a remark against the regime and watch: if the guest leaned in, contact continued; if they went to the bar, it stopped. The Gestapo could mimic communist jargon and infiltrate cells; it could not easily fake the sniff-test of a bohemian room. In May 1942 the group over-pasted the hugely popular exhibition *Soviet Paradise* — two million visitors — with stickers reading *Nazi Paradise*: torture, SS torture, hunger, war, how long will it last? Couples pretended to kiss against walls while one glued a sticker. Nobody was caught that night. Tens of thousands of Berliners saw, in the morning, that resistance existed.

The Soviets wanted them as proper spies. Harro would pass information to hurt Hitler and refused to become one of them. They accepted a radio with instructions only in Russian, bungled the tech, and were finished when Moscow answered with a message the Germans intercepted and decoded — complete with Harro's name and address. Ohler calls it an intelligence blunder, or possibly a Stalinist abandonment. Months of surveillance, military trials, and death sentences followed. A Gestapo secretary, Gertrude Breiter, posed as Libertas's friend in custody and extracted secrets that broke the rest of the network. Harro's last act was the letter Ohler found by accident. Asked what to learn, Ohler does not offer a manual. He admires people who will not do what they cannot justify to their own conscience, suspects he himself would have been the fleeing type, and treats writing — changing a reader's brain waves — as his own form of resistance.

Ohler's next book, *Stoned Sapiens*, began on a family vacation in Crete, when he could not explain why Europe's first high culture, the Minoans, exploded there. An old excavation note, a swim to a submerged breakwater, and a climb over a fence showed him Bronze Age walls of a serious harbor. Crete made olive oil and opium. High culture from Knossos to Athens, he suggests, starts with traders in the one medicine that reliably kills pain. He told Antony Beevor he wanted to write a world history; Beevor said it was possible if you accept that history is always a selection. Ohler goes further: historical science is a fiction based on facts. Nobody was there. The early chapters will be more speculative than a later one on Vietnam — which Vietnamese officers told him is called the American War, and in which they denied both the name Viet Cong and a plot to heroin-dose GIs.

He reaches back 1.5 million years to Homo erectus in the Great Rift Valley, where khat, a plant amphetamine still chewed in Ethiopia and Yemen, grew. There is no proof they used it; they lived where it lived. They shed fur, gained sweat glands, and invented endurance hunting: antelopes sprint and then pant, humans jog until the animal drops. Homo sapiens later bottlenecked at perhaps 1,500 people, close to extinction by inbreeding. Consciousness, Ohler says, is what saved the species. One unprovable hypothesis is iboga in the Central African rainforest, a plant elephants eat before walking oddly backward, used in human ritual for perhaps a hundred thousand years. Yuval Noah Harari's *Sapiens*, which Ohler respects, says we do not know how the cognitive revolutions happened. Ohler wants to inspect everything Harari leaves out.

A Columbia iboga researcher who has never taken the drug himself told Ohler it is not like LSD or psilocybin docking at known receptors. It seems to be everywhere in the brain at once, a spa for neurons, as if it had known the human nervous system a long time — lifting the literal depression in a network of I-am-not-worthy loops. The scientist calls it 22nd-century neurotechnology, not a plant. Other chapters sketch Moses' burning bush beside Sinai acacia that contains DMT; Germany's 1516 beer purity law as church prohibition against nightshade vision-brews; Göbekli Tepe as a 1,600-year party against inbreeding that changes once beer appears; and Sumerian temples labeling beer, taking money, and inventing kings. Ohler's political landing is explicit and distant: we once organized without kings, and in maybe fifty years he wants nation-states replaced by an open-source-AI-assisted planetary society with equal political rights and a minimum income. We do not need kings.

Ohler's first LSD trip was in ungentrified Lower Manhattan in 1993, a Saturday night with a girlfriend, and it was the worst of his life: vibrating bathroom tiles, a friend who seemed a foot tall, a possible street killing and riot he still cannot fully separate from hallucination. He thought a chemical switch had locked him insane until, after about ten hours, it wore off. In hindsight it was freeing — atoms not rigid, the world not identical with his conditioned picture — and stronger than later high doses. Albert Hofmann had reported intense brain effects to Sandoz in 1943. The company set up an intoxication room in Basel, a stone's throw from the German border, where employees volunteered while a world war was audible outside. They laughed, felt that this was how life should feel, and CEO Arthur Stoll wondered whether LSD might be a mental-health game changer after antibiotics and before antidepressants, with millions already traumatized by the war.

Stoll and Richard Kuhn had both trained under the Jewish Nobel chemist Richard Willstätter. Stoll went to Sandoz; Kuhn became Hitler's leading biochemist, hunting a truth drug and working on nerve gas. They stayed in touch. In Dachau the SS tried mescaline and an unnamed hallucinogen; mescaline tasted bitter, LSD did not. Ohler bribed a Novartis archivist with a blotter printed in the old Sandoz logo and got Stoll's files: in October 1943 Kuhn acknowledged half a gram of ergotamine, LSD's precursor. An inmate given it in coffee had a full-blown trip of fractals and colors, and said the horror was sobriety — becoming a prisoner again. Alsos, the American team that scooped German scientists, heard about LSD from Kuhn the opportunist. A general flew to Frankfurt, changed into civilian clothes, and collected the first LSD from Stoll's son in Basel in the summer of 1945. It failed as a truth drug. The CIA's MKUltra, never approved by Congress, then continued those human experiments. Sidney Gottlieb flew to Basel with $240,000, thinking Sandoz had 400 kilograms; Stoll said 400 grams, sold it anyway under FDA pressure, and confined LSD to research channels that mostly fed the Agency. One paid subject, Ken Kesey, took $75 and saw the patients in a Menlo Park ward as people who simply saw differently — the seed of *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*.

Ohler wrote *Tripped* because a study suggested microdoses of LSD might help Alzheimer's, which his mother has, by acting on the same 5-HT2A receptors the disease destroys. His father, a former judge who had sent people to prison for drugs, asked why, if it was so good, it was not in pharmacies, and told him to bring the story. They took LSD together at Christmas and mushrooms on Mother's Day, a microdose in the sun. She picked up a newspaper she had not touched in a year and read a headline about the Ukraine war, stumbling on a word that had left her world. Ohler will not write on LSD; he writes in Nietzsche's house in Sils Maria with the phone off, and he would not take drugs in that room. Amphetamines can dump twenty pages and kill self-criticism; Kerouac's *On the Road* is a speed book, and the rule is write drunk, edit sober. Asked for a recommendation, he and Fridman agree: to strangers, no. LSD works in micrograms, stronger than cobra toxin at that scale, and an unstable psyche can be overwhelmed. The meaning of life, as he felt it walking high mountains on LSD, is not a sentence. The universe is telling a large story; consciousness is a way to perceive more of it. Fridman closes with Terence McKenna: nature loves courage, and the abyss is a featherbed.