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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's taking shitloads of meth? My Hitler. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ******** the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history, or in the case of today's episode, stuff that you think you know but you actually don't know the specifics and the way that you probably think you do. Maybe anyway, terrible top ten interests. On this podcast thank you, Sophie, welcome, Sophie Lichterman, my producer and legally boss and my guest. Today I would like to introduce the wonderful Carolina Barlow Carolina. You are a writer and a Co host of the Ron Burgundy podcast and the True Romance podcast Carolina. Is Will Ferrell nice in person? He is a toxic overlord. Will Ferrell is actually the nicest person I've ever met in my life. He's nicer than, I think, most members of my family and yours. I'm just assuming no, I think you're hearing how kind he is. And yeah, he's he's a Sophie. You can speak French to my dog. How does his hair smell? OK, this is a great question because thank you. Bill is very good at grooming. And he always smells really nice. His skin care is amazing and. I believe he may still be using this product, but once we were on a press tour with Mark Wahlberg, who was using a lot of a brand called Moroccan Oil, Yes, which you can buy. I'm not. This is not an ad, but you can buy it pretty much anywhere will. Decided. Wait, I'm messing up this story. OK, was using a brand, uses a brand called Moroccan Oil, and Mark Wahlberg was obsessed with it. And so we ended up talking about it a lot on a press tour. And Moroccan oil then sent us a bunch of Moroccan oil. So I believe he's still uses that, but it smells incredible. OK, well, this is this is actually a lot more information than I expected. Welcome to the celebrity corner, where we talk about how different celebrities hair smells. Next up on the Baldwin. So funny. We're talking about. We are talking about a celebrity today. Yeah, surrounded by babies. So probably like **** and ****. **** and **** all the time. That's that's gets completely actually. Yeah. You know who else think? A diaper? I totally forgot. You know who else smelled like ****? Ohh, this is so awesome. This is so accurate and is a celebrity. I don't like that. Yeah, I don't like that title for him. He is a celebrity. He's a very famous man. Arguably more famous than any living. Celebrity I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna give Hitler a celebrity title. You can say a lot of bad things about the man, but he has brand recognition. OK, fair enough. So we're, like, going from polar opposites. We're talking about 1 Donna. Yeah. There. You don't even need last names. Exactly. Just Hitler. Right? Going from, like, the nicest person ever of Will Ferrell to the worst person ever to Adolf Hitler so quick. Well, he's also his name's kind of been a verb because you can, like, I don't know about y'all, but like, when my friends are being ****** I'm like, you're kind of Hitler. Right now, you're getting a little Hitler on all of us here. Maybe calm down. So he's like, he's he's like Google friends have been done something so ****** that I would spring that name. Fair enough. Well, this one time, my buddy Mike annexed the Sudetenland and we were we got pretty. We got pretty ****** at him. That's fair. Yeah, that's Carolina. What do you how do you feel about drugs? Drugs? I don't do drugs because when I was young, I did them too much, and then I had to stop. And actually in the same boat I I drink sometimes and and take kratom, but I my, my doing illegal drugs days are long, long behind me because I damaged my brain too much. Right. You, what have you heard about the Nazis and drugs? I know that they did a lot of them. And I think World War Two, much like the Civil War, was a pretty crazy time. And Vietnam wars generally and drugs actually tend to mix well. Together, absolutely. It's a great time to get wasted. Yeah, when you're at a war zone. I can say that from experience. And, you know, it's also there. So there's in 2016, a German novelist and a screenwriter, a guy named Norman Oller, published a book, a work of historic nonfiction in the United States. It was released under the title blitzed drugs in Nazi Germany. A lot of people heard of this book was an international. It was a huge, huge ******* book. I'm going to guess most of the people listening to the episode right now either heard of it or you read some article that was based on kind of the media campaign around this because literally every major news. Website and magazine on the ******* planet published interviews with this guy, or at least kind of like write ups that were summarizing the book the Guardians article during this. Is kind of emblematic of the whole. It was titled high Hitler, which is a a fun, a fun title. Nice little play on **** ******. And it's also really appropriate because the reason Hitler was getting high was for his health and and hail Hitler literally means health to Hitler. But anyway, that's a that's a point older makes. I'm going to read this. It is a nice little. I'm gonna read a sample paragraph from that article talking about Ollers book work. The book in question is the total rush, or to use it, superior English title blitzed, which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich's relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and above all, methamphetamines, and of their effect not only on Hitler's final days. The fear, by Ollers account, was an absolute junkie, with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers. But on the Vermont successful invasion of France in 1940, published in Germany last year, where it became a best seller, it has since been. Translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights olar but also amazes him. And this is interesting. I'm starting not kind of the way we normally do, but just sort of giving the history. But by talking about this book because it is so prominent. In the years that I've been doing behind the ******** I probably had a couple of 100 different people e-mail me or ask me sometimes in person if I've read blitzed and tell me that I had to do a hit an episode on Hitler's drug addiction. And this is that episode. But I have to tell you, a decent chunk of this is actually going to be kind of critiquing. Blitzed and more broadly critiquing kind of how the media presented it, and I want to clarify up top, I don't think blitz is a bad book or that Oler is a a bad guy. I think his work is in some ways a victim of its own, of his own success. If you start Googling around permutations of phrases like Hitler's drug addiction or drugs and Nazis, German and Nazi Germany or the Nazis and meth, about 70% of the search results you see are going to be articles based on Norman's book. Kind of rewriting the same thing over and over again. And this makes his book fairly unique in the field of Nazi. Studies the Third Reich is the single most widely studied and written about regime in political history. There are governments on the planet right now who produce less, who have produced to date less documentation for their government bureaucracy than there is historic works written about the Third Reich. No other government has had more scholars devote their lives to examining it, and no state has had so many pages of quality historical writing dedicated to its history. And when we include the great minds have written about the Third Reich throughout history, we quickly become. Bogged with genius, there's William Shirer, Erin Ian Kershaw, John Toland, Volker Ulrich, Richard Evans and Hannah Arendt, just to name a few. And the fact that in five years Norman Ohler has become one of the most recognized writers in Nazi history is due to the subject matter of his book. Namely, people like drugs. And people are fascinated by the Nazis. And if you combine those two things, you're going to sell a lot of ******* books. And one of the reasons this frustrates some historians is that some of the stuff that older wrote about had been well documented before he came into the picture. For example, pervitin, which is the methamphetamine that the Nazis primarily took. A lot of scholars wrote about the use of pervitin by Nazis during the Blitz. Creek, where older broke new ground, was in making a detailed study about the personal notes and professional journals of a guy named Doctor Theodore Morell, who was one of Hitler's personal physicians. And his primary dope dealer, Morrell was not an unknown. Quantity to historians previously but older spends a lot of time digging into precisely what he gave Hitler and how it may have impacted history. Half of the controversy among historians about blitzed revolves around the language used in this book. Older is not a historian. He's not a scholar. He's writing in a pop nonfiction cadence and vocabulary. So this is closer to a guy like, who's that ******* guy everybody hates now, but everybody loves four at the tipping point. Malcolm Gladwell, his his. I'm not, and I'm not saying he's like, because I think he's much more. Responsible to not be Gladwell, but he he's he's closer to the Gladwell, into the spectrum, that kind of pop nonfiction, than he is to a scholar like Ian Kershaw. You know, and that frustrates scholars because his work has been so influential, right? You get kind of ****** *** when, like you, you do detailed, painstaking analysis of these guys, and then some dude kind of throws out a book that maybe, maybe exaggerates some things and uses some, like, flagrant language and and is much more popular than any work by a scholar. Ever be that frustrated people? And, you know, I I don't think that that means it's not there is good scholarship in this, and there's, in fact, groundbreaking scholarship in this. Ian Kershaw, who's probably the single most prominent biographer of Hitler alive today, called this a serious work of scholarship and praised it. Richard Evans, on the other hand, who's also very well respected, hated this book. So it's not like there. There's no I don't want to come across as saying there's an agreement among scholars that this book is bad or that there's an agreement that it's good. I tend to think it did more good than harm. But it was written to appeal to the masses and be a popular book, and it absolutely is now. The other half of the controversy around Blitz revolves around some of the more serious issues with the way older presents his research. Namely, he suffers from the same problem most people do when they zero in on a very specific aspect of the Nazi regime. He's gotten so into the weeds on this topic that he lends it weight that's sometimes disproportionate to its actual the same thing happens to people studying like the occult and Nazis, right? Because there is like a. Really fascinating history of like esoteric Hitlerism of like of a cult Nazism. But it also wasn't nearly as influential as the people who write books about it put it on as an in fact, by like 1941, it was pretty much out of of of any kind of influence in the party. But you know, if that's your thing, you're going to seek to kind of Hellboy things up a little, you know? So this is like a long winded way of saying it's debatable. No, it's it's a long way of of trying to like, give caveats about like what are not saying it's a bad book. Saying it's a good book that I think because he's so focused on the drugs tends to ignore other reasons for some of the behavior that he's outlining that are not drugs. Yeah, I wonder if. It's dangerous. This is me speaking without reading the book. I think it may be dangerous to blame anything on drug use. I don't think that's a that is a the chief criticism the historians that dislike him make. And he's actually pretty careful. He's careful in his book to say, like, I am not saying Hitler's horrible crimes are the result of this drug because one of the things he does, he points out, is we'll go into most of the ******** drug abuse from Hitler started in the 40s, you know, when he had already set everything in motion that he was going to set in. Ideals were already pretty. Yeah. The right **** was going down. Yeah, but he's saying, like, it's it's worth noting if a guy is ****** ** on meth and cocaine and opium all of the time and he's a warlord, it's worth wondering, like, how does that impact his decision making process? Which I think is a fair question. Right. Like, obviously there is a danger when you do that, but it's also, I don't think that means you shouldn't look at like, well, what was this doctor shooting into the veins of this man making these? Incredibly influential decisions is the same way that like, it's worth looking at how the methamphetamine JFK took impacted his decision making during the Cuban Missile crisis and **** right like it is, it's it's Adderall problem or Trump and Adderall it's it's certainly not like I I don't wanna I agree that's a worry. But I also don't think we should be like, well let's not talk about this just because some people **** it up. You know, I guess I I'm implying more that leaning into it too hard. Yes, much weight. I can see it distracting from a serious threat that was definitely worsened by drugs. I mean, it's interesting. Vietnam. Towards the end of Vietnam, all the soldiers, American soldiers were getting really messed up on all the kinds of pills that were just very prevalent in the 60s and 70s, like Quaaludes, black beauties, speed, anything to keep them up. And it increased a lot of paranoia, especially when there's an enemy that, you know, quote UN quote, enemy Vietcong who aren't in uniforms. You're paranoid, can increase it could make you more violent. With or without these drugs, the Vietnam War is still. Inherently a crime against humanity. But drugs don't help. Yeah, it doesn't help. Yeah. And and and that's. There's a question too, with the Nazis, right, where you don't wanna like a lot of these these, these vermox soldiers were going days without sleeping and taking shifts and methamphetamine, and some of them committed horrible atrocities you don't want to like. The atrocities, number one, were often ordered by people who were certainly not drugged out of their minds and were planned pretty extensively ahead of time. That said, the fact that a lot of these guys are on meth. Like flipping out and burning down villages. Some of that's probably due to the fact that they're they're ****** ** on methamphetamine, right. Like the fact, not necessarily like the the concerted genocide actions where they're shooting 40,000 people in a day, but like, Oh yeah, they get shot at by a partisan and they burn down a village. Yeah, maybe that's some guys who were tweaked out on speed over react, like flipping out in the same way that, like, yeah, maybe it had an impact. I think you can say that. I think you can want to know. OK, well, you have millions of men going days without sleeping. Heavily armed and taking methamphetamine. I bet that has an influence on their behavior. Without saying the Nazis killed millions of Russian civilians because they were on meth, which is not the case. They killed millions of Russian civilians because the war from the beginning was a genocidal crusade. I don't know. I I I don't want to like. I don't want to like veer away from what is an interesting question just because people can people can simplify it to the extent that it gets ****** ** you know, because I I do think this is a fascinating. Question. We're going to be talking a lot about Older's findings here, because I do agree with Ian Kershaw, who described it as a serious piece of scholarship he goes into. He's not just really like cutting up other bits of reporting, he looks at a lot of original primary sources. He's coming through in a way I don't think anyone else ever did. Doctor Theodore Morrells Hitler's primary physicians notes in an exhaustive detail, researching the medicines he's going. There's a lot of very important scholarship, I think, in his findings, but I also will be laying out some areas where. Others conclusions do not gel with the actual evidence, and there are some points there. So let's start by talking about drug culture and vimar Germany. As a refresher. The Weimar government was a progressive democracy that followed after the Kaiser's monarchy went away and was eventually eaten up by Hitler. For like the 15 or so years it existed, Vimar was a dizzyingly progressive government. For its time, Berlin became a magnet for the LGBT community and the site of the first, very first serious research on healthcare for trans people. Art and music flourished and as you'd expect from a city full of bohemian artists and musician, people were getting ****** ** all the time. Like, I mean, just just real expert Brooklyn. Yeah, exactly. Like real creative drug use because, like, Berlin is, Berlin is, you know what? What, what places like new, you know, chunks of New York and chunks of California became in the 60s and 70s. Berlin is that in the ******* 20s, you know, and this put Berlin great photographs you can find of Berlin in the 20s. People are in drag. It's very casual. It's actually. Completely. There's a flamboyant like fun, roaring 20s quality. Yeah it's it's it's it's a fascinating time to study and and this put you know one of the things that I think is is critique about older is he when he's talking about drug use in Germany he focuses heavily on Berlin and the Berlin Hella drug use. But also Berlin's drug use is in direct contrast to what's going on in the rest of Germany. Not only was most of Germany much more socially conservative, think about. Like Portland, OR versus its surrounding areas, right. But the use of recreational drugs like cocaine was markedly uncommon in Germany and not even particularly common in Berlin, as we'll talk about. It's worth noting that at this time, most Germans across the country would not have considered tobacco or alcohol drugs. So when we're talking about drug use, those are not drugs to Germans in the 20s, that's like milk to them. Both were so ubiquitous that they were considered to be a part of a person's diet and interestingly enough, both Communist and Nazi leaders in Europe at this time. Aided tobacco. Linen was famously anti cigarette right? So was Hitler. Obviously linens, anti cigarette **** didn't last one stock cause Stalin loved him some some smoking and Hitler hated cigarettes but there was never really any sort of they both like he had to kind of accept like well I'm not going to get Germans to stop smoking like that's not going to happen. Never seen. Yeah, they were. They were. They were. He was. He was definitely kind of straight edge. Yeah. And, you know, we'll talk about this more later. But for the most part, throughout the 20s, Nazis and Communists smoke and smoked and drank about as much as everybody else. So again, while there's Nazi and Communist leaders who are being like, no, you need to struggle towards revolution and be sober for that most Communists, most Nazis are getting drunk and and and chain smoking like anybody else. And so when we talk about drugs in Germany. What I mean by drugs is hard stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine as well as opiates. Germany was actually the world leader in drug manufacturing at this time. Morphine. Bayer. Exactly. Morphine had first been isolated by a German chemist in the early 1800s. It was rediscovered, patented and mass produced by Bayer in 1898. By the end of World War One, Morphine was the number one product of the entire German Pharmaceutical industry. They were shipping this stuff out everywhere because it's the most. Effective thing in the world, the company that owns that first manufacturing plant in Germany was the Sacklers later responsible for the opioid epidemic. Yeah, we're currently facing. Yep. And the states good people. Yeah, we've talked about them a lot. Yeah, there's some other Bayer products made during the Nazi regime that we could talk about too. Yeah, like heroin. Yeah, it's true of heroin. They advertised as lighter than morphine. Yeah. I mean, and a lot of this **** is OTC in Germany at the time, right? And Bayer is the first to produce and sell heroin. And actually heroin stays over the counter in Germany until like the 1950s. Wow. I'm glad to live in those times, to just be able to walk down to the corner store and get a big fat bag of horse, smoke it and I don't know, it doesn't really matter. What you do is, yeah, it doesn't really matter what you're doing. You're smoking heroin. Yeah. So now by a lot of like this point, heroin has become like a legal in the US and a lot of Asia at least if you're taking it like, you can't just go and get it over the counter, right, maybe it's more prescribed than it is. Than it was now. But it was not like you couldn't just walk in and buy it as a person, but you can in Germany. And so Germany, since everything's kind of legal there, becomes the Nexus for an international Gray and black market drug trade and heroin. And these German Swiss companies will kind of use Germany as a base and will. They're not directly selling it illegally underground in countries, but they're putting it in position to be sold that way and they're profiting from it. I'm going to quote from a write up by a scholar named Jonathan Levy here. Both morphine and heroin were consumed in Germany during the vimar years in the Third Reich. The morphine was far more popular than its more potent cousin, perhaps explaining Merc's decision to cease its diacetylmorphine program. The number of addicts in Germany is difficult to ascertain. Like many drug statistics, the reported numbers of addicts are mere guesstimates rather than reliable figures, mainly because it is next to impossible to differentiate between addicts and users. Now, the best evidence seems to suggest that the rate of opiate addiction in Germany increased from the start of the war. Years. And by that I mean World War One until about 1922, which is probably caused by us. The same thing that drives a lot of opiate use in the US today, which is wounded soldiers getting hooked on it, right, getting prescribed as much of it as they want and having, you know, developing a problem by problem in the civil war too. Yeah. Yeah. Every time, every time a lot of men get wounded, soldiers got hooked on. I mean, it's funny you say guesstimates. I'm just ringing that sacred book everyone's waiting and they said. They said the estimate was 1/4 of a million soldiers in the United States hooked on morphine, and that even Theodore Roosevelt basically created a position for someone to fight this quote UN quote epidemic. Yeah, I mean that that that completely, completely makes sense, especially when it is like as available as it was when you just bump down to the street and buy it. Why wouldn't you take a bunch of heroin? Now, by 1931, though, the rate of addiction seems to have like fallen in Germany. Obviously, none of our data is perfect, but it may have just been a matter of like enough time had passed since the war, people had recovered enough. Some of them had probably died. One leader in the Reich Health office at that point estimated that just point. There were just .3 male addicts per 10,000 people in Germany, which is probably nonsense. But he also noted that one in 100 doctors were addicts. And this is probably a much more accurate number included in part because, like, a lot of these guys have been prosecuted for this and in part because today we know that doctors are at a heavily, a massively elevated risk of particularly opiate addiction. Right. Same thing with nurses, right? Yeah, yeah. Doctors, pharmacists and nurses. You know, I've talked to, I've talked to a nurse with a drug addiction who was like, pinching, you know, opiates and **** for for quite a long while. And it's some. Like, it's it's it's hard to avoid, especially given like the trauma that you encounter as a healthcare worker. Why wouldn't you want to be high on ******* oxy all the time, right? I get it. No, it's not good behavior if people's lives are in your hand. But it's I I can empathize with the need to dole that. Yeah, especially since I don't know. None of us are we. We've all decided not to, not to do the pandemic mitigation thing anymore, so I don't know. Is that Jeff Bezos as an Arizona? Yeah. So yeah, take some oxy. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna yell at you, right. Now, yeah, cocaine was also a drug with a German origin. It was synthesized first from coca leaves by German chemists and popularized by a Viennese psychiatrist named Doctor Sigmund Freud and everyone's eye doctor named Karl Koehler. Freud prescribed cocaine as part of his talk therapy sessions, and Doctor Kohler just poured it right into people's eyes as a local anesthetic. Which is man, imagine going to the eye, doctor. I'm going to pour some cocaine in your eyes. Keep them open this ****. Drawing his ***. My therapist, Kathy, shout out if before I was about to talk to her about stalking people on social media and how it was affecting my mental health, she poured some cocaine into my eyes. I can't say how that would affect our sessions. I think they'd be rather I think they'd be. They'd go by really quickly. They would go by very quickly. Yeah, and I would need a gallon of water to help my dry mouth. Look, as far as I am aware, cocaine is a drug without downsides, so I don't see why people shouldn't shouldn't take a **** load of it. It's good for your heart. Second, I thought you were good for it. I've heard it has the ability to reduce. Nasal problems cleans you out real good, and not after the next two days. Yeah, yeah, for illegal, not for legal reasons. Now continue. You know what it is time for an ad break. And behind the ******** is sponsored by the global cocaine industry. Behind the ********. If you like podcasts, you'll love cocaine. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. 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So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you. For the first time ever in a book format, you can preorder stuff they don't want you to know. Now it's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. We're back and we're celebrating the cocaine industry. An industry with no problems. So more PR. Yeah. Only hearing one side of the story. Exactly. People talk a lot about all the deaths, all the murders, all the violent violence, all the death squads funded by cocaine exports. People never talk about the humble movie producers railing cocaine off of the back of each other's iPhones. In the bathroom of a club? Yeah. Martin Scorsese. Ever heard of movies, right. Another person who never did anything problematic. Cocaine. Thank you, Robert. So. Now, we were just talking about how doctor Sigmund Freud and Doctor Kohler, Karl Kohler were heavily responsible with popularizing cocaine in Germany, and both guys are Jewish. This is relevant because cocaine takes off as the Nazis are rising to and then getting into power. And so the Nazis condemn cocaine as a Jewish drug corrupting pure Aryan bodies, right? They are not fans of cocaine and and This is why they can't really come after opiates, right? And they don't. They have these kind of. They they they kind of approach it as a public health problem, but they can't condemn opiate users because most of a lot of opiate users are soldiers. And there's a you have to, like, worship veterans in this period of time, especially if you're the Nazis. But cocaine, that's the drug that you know, the artists and and and the queer people and the and the the ******* psychiatrists are doing. You can you can demonize cocaine, you know, and they do. So Berlin Decadence was a major topic of complaint for the Nazis, and the city was a hive of all things rad. There were illegal, illegal dance parties, not dissimilar to raves. There were infamous clubs like the Bauhaus. Resi, which was kind of like the studio 54 of its time, was a place people would meet and **** and do lots of cocaine. Since prostitution and drug use was more or less legal in Berlin, tourists from the United States would often travel there to **** and snort themselves silly in blitzed olar sites the lyrics of a contemporary song to set the mood of the time. And I don't know what the tune of this song was, but it's a good song once, not so very long ago. Sweet alcohol, that. East brought warmth and sweetness to our lives. But then the price increased, and so cocaine and morphine Berliners now select. Let lightning flashes rage outside. We snort and we inject. At dinner in the restaurant, the waiter brings the tin of coke for us to feast upon. Forget whiskey and gin. Let drowsy morphine take its subcutaneous effect upon our nervous system. We snort and we inject. These medications aren't allowed, of course, they're quite forbidden, but even such illicit treats are very seldom hidden. Euphoria awaits us, and though, as we suspect. Rfos can't wait to shoot us down. We snort and we inject. And if we snort ourselves to death or into the asylum, our days are going downhill fast. How better to beguile them? Europe's a madhouse anyway. No need for ginia flexing. The only way to paradise is snorting and injecting. That's very fun. And the way you read it made it sound like you were reading a children's book. Yeah, it would be a good children's book. And it makes sense this is happening as the first kind of anti drug laws are being pushed through. And again, they're not. They're not nearly as strict as anything we we live with today in the United States. That they're the 1st and the Nazis are, you know, they're complaining about drug use, but they're also complaining about degeneracy, about artists, about about people who are, are, are queer and they're those people. The the, like, kind of artistic, intellectual can see what's coming and they also can't stop it because they didn't. And that's what the song is about, is like, well, we're about to get all murdered by the Nazis. Might as well take some heroin. Yeah, it's getting a little. Yeah. The price is increasing. Alcohol is not cutting it anymore. Yeah. Time to get yeah. ****** ** until the Nazis take total power. Yeah. Hard to blot out what's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Now I will say is somewhat ironically, olders follis of focus on Berlin drug culture. The fact that he's zero was in on that so much, kind of focusing less on the rest of Germany, seems to have been heavily influenced by Nazi propaganda in a way that I think does make his overall work a little less accurate, he writes. Quote anyone who could afford it to cocaine, the ultimate weapon for intensifying the moment coke spread like wildfire and symbolized the extravagance of the age. On the other hand, it was viewed as a degenerate poison and disapproved of by both communists. Nazis who are fighting for power in the streets. There was violent opposition to the free and easy zeitgeist. German nationalists railed against moral decay, and similar attacks were heard from the Conservatives. Though Berlin's new status as a cultural metropolis was accepted with pride. The bourgeoisie, which was losing status in the 1920s, showed its insecurity through its radical condemnation of mass pleasure. Culture decry it as Decadently Western now. His job does a fine. His work here does a fine job of getting across the way. Popular German opinion, kind of, or at least right wing opinion, saw Berlin. In the decadence of its artistic set. But it's also not historically accurate in absolute terms. And to make that point I want to quote from a paper called the Drug policy of the Third Reich from the journal Social History of Alcohol and Drugs. Criminal Commissar Ernst Engelbrecht of Berlin claimed in 1924 that cocaine became most popular amongst female and male homosexuals. To him, cocaine was not a problem. It had turned into an epidemic. Yet, according to contemporary estimates, the city of Karlsruhe rained reigned supreme as the centre for cocaine consumption. With 1.44 grams per thousand people, while Berlin remains second with a consumption rate of 1 gram per thousand people, which is not particularly high. 1924 marked the first German antique, so yeah, he he's is. Again, there is cocaine, there is this kind of very popular party sect, and the Nazis make a lot of hay of it. But in absolute terms, Berlin isn't consuming a particularly large amount of cocaine. And again, I think this is an area where the fact that the Nazis harped on it so much has older focusing on kind of the decadence of Berlin. In a way that that is kind of falling for their trap because it was not Berlin itself was not nearly as decadent or drug addled as the propaganda made it seem, based on the numbers that we actually have. But not be a problem was it sounds like, well, yeah, it peaked around, I think 2223. It it starts to decline to this. Like that's kind of the whole point is that Germany, especially compared to the United States, does not have a particularly big drug problem or drug culture. It's again very prominent because a lot of famous people are involved in like the set in Berlin that is doing a lot of this. But that is that's kind of like a subculture in Berlin. It's not the city and it's not mainstream in Germany. And the fact that the Nazis kind of blow it up into being Berlin is the sin, the hum of it. It's kind of like what happens with, like, Portland, where like the city of Portland's being burnt down every week because the right wing sees a kid break a Starbucks window. That's kind of, that's kind of, well, no, I was. I didn't break. I didn't see ****. But that that's kind of how, that's kind of how drug use in Berlin gets painted. And and a lot of people still see it in history just because the Nazis made so much hay over the decadence of the city when the reality is that the vast majority of people in Berlin, if they ever did indulge, weren't doing it all that much. It's buzzwords like fried. Yeah. Now, 1924 marked the first major German anti drug law, which banned the sale of powder cocaine from pharmacies. So didn't make it illegal. You could still get cocaine pretty much legally, you just couldn't buy powdered coke from the pharmacy. And cocaine consumption is estimated to have peaked in 1927 and fallen afterwards. So this is definitely an area where Oler engages in some counterfactual pros for the sake of making his book more interesting. But that said, his writing does give a decent idea of how the Nazis expressed their rhetoric around drugs, quote Jews and drugs merged into a single toxic or epidemiological unit that ministered Germany. For decades our people have been told by Marxists and Jews your body belongs to you. That was taken to mean that it's social occasions between men or between men and women. Any quantities of alcohol could be enjoyed, even at the cost of the body's health. Irreconcilable with this Jewish Marxist view is that Teutonic German idea that we are the bearers of the eternal legacy of our ancestors, and that accordingly, our body belongs to the clan and the people S helps to inferior criminal Commissar Erwin Kosmal, who was from 1941, director of the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions. Asserted that Jews play a supreme part in the international drug trade. His work was concerned with eliminating international criminals who often have roots and jewelry. The Nazi Party's office of Racial Policy claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug dependent. The intellectual urban Jew preferred cocaine or morphine to calm his constantly excited nerves and give himself a feeling of peace and inner security. Jewish doctors were rumoured to be often extraordinarily addicted to morphine. But he rather older, rather conveniently ignores the fact that, you know, again, in focusing on this and those are all things the Nazis said. They definitely again harped on Jewish drug use and like this the, the scourge of drug addiction and how it's Jewish, you know, has Jewish origins. But immediately before the Nazi seizure of power, the Reich Health Minister what wrote quote, to the knowledge of the Reich Health Office, there is no illicit drug trade in Berlin in a considerable amount as to pose a danger to the public. The circumstances in this respect have changed completely in recent years, and this is 1931, so after 27. Drug use of kind of, of all kinds declines rapidly. And so by the point the Nazis are in power, there's really not much of a drug problem. And as a result, there's really not much of a drug crackdown. And this is older's main sin in his book, as I see it, he wants to draw a Direct Line between the modern war on drugs and the Nazi War on drugs. And so he notes that when the central, while the central drug law in the Third Reich was a holdover from Vimar Germany, there were new drug regulations put in place when the Nazis took power to further Nazi ideas of racial hygiene. He claims that drug consumption was heavily penalized starting in 1933 with prison time and appears to be making the claim that drug users and Nazi Germany were penalized and thrown into concentration camps like other political prisoners and racial minorities. This is something actual scholars who study drug policy in the 3rd right disagree with that point. While you can find. Yeah, most of it was not. And Even so, we'll talk about it like consumption wasn't really criminalized and there was no point where drug users gone after and. And put in concentration camps in an organized way. And I want to quote from that that paper by Jonathan Levy again quote drug use was never a crime in Germany. Thus habitual drug users or drug addicts were not criminals. Therefore they were not considered habitual criminals and could not be sent to a concentration camp. So this is again, if we're if when in terms of critiquing older and this is a big chunk of the early part of his book, and it is, you know there's two parts of this book. There's the part of it where he's doing original research into Hitler's drug use and Hitler's doctor, and there's a part of it where he's kind of synthesizing a bunch of other historic reports on the Nazis and drugs. And it's that part that in my opinion, he screws up the most. So, yeah, it's it's it's anyway that's a little bit of a rant on. On this. But I think it's important to kind of get this, this sort of stuff right and when you actually more important to get this stuff right. Yeah. Yeah. And and Levy is is clear that he cannot find, and levy is a guy who studies specifically Third Reich policies on like drug policies. His conclusion is that there's no evidence that again, and the Nazis talked a lot about, about racial hygiene, about how drug use, you know, was a was a racial problem. But there's no evidence, according to Levy, that that that Nazi drug policy was impacted by their ideas on racial. Imagine. So politicians and, like, people were saying one thing, but in terms of, like, what the actual legal changes were, there's just not evidence of that. And I have to think Leavy knows his **** on this better than older does. So making drug consumption a crime was really our thing. Oh yeah, we we do the hell out of that. I mean, the Germans do now, but yeah. And part again, part of why the Nazis really didn't want to go after drug users is because a lot of them were veterans, right? Herman Gehring was a drug addicted veteran. The and the trench generation were idolized. They were nearly worshipped by the Nazis. If you'd focused on junkies and demonizing them like that would have been bad politics. It's also worth noting that the German Penal Code established during the Kaisers Reich was actually, we would consider it wildly progressive on issues of drug addiction compared to the United States and I'm going to quote from Levi. Here, addicts were not responsible for their actions while under the influence of drugs and should receive treatment instead of a jail sentence. Judges often agreed with this position, but were unable to force treatment and were known to set free criminals unfit to stand trial. The protection of drunken and intoxicated criminals existed in the German pedal code since its inception, and obviously that's not a perfect way to do things either, being like, well, you. You raped somebody, you beat the **** out of somebody, but you were drunk, so get out of here. They found a bag of, you know. High sativa, yeah. But it is, there is, there is also an element of that that's good which is that like well yeah it it drug addiction should be treated as a health problem rather than a criminal problem. Yeah. So Hunter Biden for. Yeah for progressing understanding of that. Smoked enough crack to move the US forward on drug policy. Really doing the country of service and I mean that actually. Sincerely you know who else is doing our country service Carolina brand brand, the Sinaloa. Cartel, producers of the finest cocaine available. Thought I would until this exact episode. No, no, we're we are peers seeing allowa these days. So curl up with a big fat bag, a cocaine, and listen to a podcast while sweating heavily. Make a pipe out of your mother's vase. Make a pipe out of anything. ABP baby, always be piping. It's my motto. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and. That meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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With you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. We're back. Oh boy, so. Drugs. Yeah, so far I've mostly criticized blitz and it does deserve some criticism. But now we're about to get into what I think the book does very well, which is provide the first really thorough history of a fascinating figure, one of the few high up Nazis to be mostly ignored by historians. Dr Theodore Morell in 1999, psychiatrist Fritz Redlich published a book titled Hitler's Diagnosis of a destructive prophet. It was an attempt to actually answer the to actually answer the question, what the **** was going on with that dude? With this in, like, a medical way, with as much scientific rigor. Yeah. What was going on with that guy? Yeah. And as much of, like, a scientific way as you could for a patient who's, you know, been dead for decades. He used written and oral statements by Hitler and his close associates to try and put together a picture of the Fewer's health. Red looks book relied heavily upon Doctor Theodore Morrell Morrell's records. And I'm going to quote from the psychiatric times here. Before the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler's complaints included insomnia, eczema and GI discomfort. His health. Known to have declined considerably starting in 1941, Redlich cited a host of ailments, including tonight as severe headaches, dizziness, impaired vision, abdominal spasms, impairments and motility, and during the final year of the war, jaundice, laryngitis, runny nose, more bouts of GI spasms, tremor of his hands, and conspicuous difficulties in locomotion. Evidence of Parkinson's disease. In 1945, his GI symptoms and tremors worsened, eventually leaving him unable to move around completely on his own. In treating these symptoms over the years, Morell prescribed for Hitler a cocktail of medications that included opiates. Morphine, oxycodone, barbiturates, cocaine, cocaine, amphetamines and bromides. In the end Redlich drew a conclusion that has been repeatedly repeated frequently ever since Hitler abused amphetamines, particularly between 1939 and 1943, and was temporarily impaired by such abuse. And this was probably the most Hitler a diagnosis, probably the most popular and thorough look at morale and Hitler's drug use prior to Older's work. And like Older's work, Redlick's book was heavily criticized. Experts noted that many of his sources were unreliable because, again, a lot of this is based on personal recollections of Nazis who survived the war who are fundamentally untrustworthy people. And yeah, and even more than that, they criticize Redlich for the fact that his emphasis on the fears drug abuse came close to excusing Hitler's crimes, which you obviously never want to do. And the same criticism is made of blitzed. We'll see how we feel about that at the end of this. But right now, I think it's time to get into the meat of Older's work, which is his portrait of Doctor Morrell and the relationship Hitler had with his primary physician. Here's how older introduces Morell. Quote, The word Jew was smeared on the plaque of a doctor's surgery on Bayreuther Strasse in Berlin. Charlottenburg. District one night in 1933, the name of the Doctor, a specialist in dermatological and sexually transmitted diseases, was illegible. Only the opening hours could still be seen clearly. Weekdays 11 to one and five to 7 apart. From Saturday afternoon, the overweight bald doctor, Theodore Morell, reacted to the attack in a way that was typical. That was as typical as it was wretched. He quickly joined the Nazi Party to diffuse further hostilities of that kind. Morrell was not a Jew. The NSA had wrongly suspected him of being one because of his dark complexion. After he had registered as a party member, Morelli's practice became even more successful. It expanded and moved into the lavish rooms of a 19th century building on the corner of Kurfurstendamm and Fasano and Strasa, now Murrell was not at all unique in in joining the Nazi Party to avoid, you know, getting, getting accused of being Jewish. Yeah, very common. He was one of. And again, not just for that reason, he was one of hundreds of thousands of German professionals who are what you would call apolitical Nazis if the Nazi Party had never come around. They probably never would have done anything bad. They would have done whatever their ******* job is, right. But because being the best way to further their career or just make life easier was to join the Nazi Party, they joined the Nazi Party and thus played some role in the Holocaust. And yeah, so as you might expect, Morel was not a great doctor. Again, STD's were kind of his primary area of expertise, but the thing that he really loved to focus on was the very new field of vitamins. Now, in the early 1900s, we'd figured out that vitamins were things and that you would die without them, but we did not know a whole lot more than that, right? Vitamins, still a pretty new concept that there's like, there's these things that if you don't get enough of them, you your body stops working. Yeah so there was an idea among and we start to realize like oh **** vitamin C or like you know potassium you can have you can feel immediate effects when you take some of this stuff like B12 right and you can if you've ever if you especially if you're dealing with it efficiency like it's it's ******* quick and so that that convinces a lot of people that like you can you know if some of these can have such an immediate effect on people who are vitamin deficient maybe taking **** loads of vitamins will like make you superhuman right like just inject. Huge doses of them. And you'll be, you know, it's, it's, it's Joe Rogan esque stuff, right? Like, it's the. Yeah, this reminds me of being 13 and having to eat a bunch of guys. It's yeah, let's see what happens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And like, eating a bunch of nutmeg, taking shitloads of vitamins is a mixed bag and can make you poop a tremendous amount. The shout of vitamin C hmm. Shout out to vitamin C so obviously vitamin injections can be powerful. Medicine can save people's lives in certain circumstances, right? Incredible potential for malnourished people and people with certain disorders. And also, like, there are certain vitamin shots, like if you're hungover and **** you'll be like, oh **** I feel like, I feel like a king right now. You know, now the early 1900s was a time. Oh, sorry. So there is like, vitamin injections? That's not like snake. Well, necessarily, that's not something that's even necessarily bad for you. But Morrell marketed his vitamin injections in a way that again wouldn't have seemed out of place on, like a a podcast ad today. He was, in short, a snake oil salesman, and he relied on the fact that vitamins were new and sexy to help him market them as performance enhancers. He had these, this thing called Vita Molten, which was he sold it in both like bar form and in a shot that was basically like this powerful vitamin injection that he eventually added like a whole bunch of other stuff to. We'll talk about it. And again, you know, because vitamins don't have a huge impact on people who are already well nourished. Morell, it points, would make the decision to mix real drugs and hormones into his vitamin shots because like, yeah, **** you want him to like, feel something immediately, right? Put a little amphetamine in there, you know, put a little bit of ******* put some ******* testosterone in there, you know, like, so he was he was doping people. It wasn't just vitamins. It was often like steroids. It was or or you know, amphetamines and. Eventually, like, just a **** loaded, like everything. He could get a caffeine. A lot of the time he would shoot caffeine. And, you know, it's kind of because, again, if you're this guy, if someone's well nourished, just most vitamin shots, they're kind of feel anything. So shoot a bunch of caffeine in there too. They'll feel that. They'll feel like something's going on, you know? Like, oh **** like, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm. I'm powerful. Now. It's a smart con move. It's a smart thing, telling someone that you are giving them vitamins, but really you're giving them a cup of coffee. It probably does feel like something's working. Yeah. So for male patients, he often shot added in testosterone to act as an anabolic steroid. For female patients, he would include Nightshade to help with energy and because he thought it made their eyes prettier. If that wasn't enough of a boost, he was not above using more powerful stimulants like methamphetamine. We'll talk about methane more detail later, but the point is Morrell's only true talent is a physician was marketing and the fact that he seems to have been really good at injecting people. There were folks who said you couldn't even feel him prick you with the needle. He was so good at what he did now. Today's fascists are so obsessed with traditionalism that it's often forgotten that the OG's were futurists. Fascism was obsessed with machinery, with cutting edge science. Ultra modern medical science. Fascism was a modern thing. They loved cars. They loved machine guns, they loved planes. Eugenics at the time was considered hip and exciting science. Morrell deducted from the states. Am I right? Yeah yeah, the the eugenics and stuff, sure. I mean, a decent amount of this was and Morrell's vitamin shots fit in well with the vibe of the early Nazi. Years by 1936 he was one of the most prominent doctors in the Reich. And that's the year he got a phone call from Hitler's adjutant asking him to make a house call for Heinrich Hoffman, the Fewer's official photographer. Hoffman had contracted gonorrhea, and not from his wife. Since he was a prominent Nazi, the regime wanted to treat him in a hush hush manner. Morrell knew a lot about STD's and was able to treat the photographer easily. The Nazis were so grateful that they gave him and his wife a fancy trip to Venice as a thank you for his discretion. Afterwards, he was invited to dine. With the Hoffmans in Munich, Hitler showed up in the group, ate all the Nazi leaders, and the group all ate the Nazi leaders. Favorite meal? Spaghetti with nutmeg, tomato sauce on the side and green salad from blitzed quote. Yeah, Hitler's. Weird, weird eater. Hitler, who had heard a great many good things about the jovial Morrell, thanked him before dinner for treating his old comrade and regretted not having met the doctor before. Perhaps than his chauffeur, who had died of meningitis a few months earlier, would have still been alive. Morrell reacted nervously for the compliment and barely spoke during the spaghetti dinner. They constantly sweating Dr with the full face and the thick round glasses on his potato nose, knew that in higher circles he was not considered socially acceptable. His only chance of acceptance lay in his injections, so he perked up his ears when Hitler. In the course of the evening talked almost in passing about severe stomach and intestinal pains that had been tormenting him for years. Morrell hastily mentioned an unusual treatment that might prove successful. Hitler looked at him quizzically and invited Morel and his wife to further consultations at the Burghoff his mountain retreat in the Obersalzberg near Berchtesgaden. There. A few days later, during a private conversation, the dictator frankly admitted to Morell that his health was now so poor that he could barely perform any action. That was, he claimed, due to the bad treatment given to him by his previous doctors. Who couldn't come up with anything but starving him, then? If there happened to be an abundant dinner on the program, which was often the case, he immediately suffered from unspeakable bloating and itchy eczema on both legs, so that he had to walk around with bandages around his feet and couldn't wear boots. Morell immediately thought he recognized the cause of Hitler's complaints and diagnosed abnormal bacterial flora, causing poor digestion. Now, we don't know exactly what was wrong with Hitler at this point, like, medically. In the mid aughts, historian Hendrick Eberle and physician Hans Joachim Neumann attempted to diagnose the fears. Physical maladies, and I'm gonna quote from the site psychiatric times here. While the German Chancellor appears to have not suffered from any major acute illnesses, he was a victim of chronic diseases. Neumann and Eberl confirmed that Hitler's longstanding ailments were GI in nature. There were also signs and medical records of of progressive coronary sclerosis and high blood pressure. Most prominently, however, Newman and a barrel confirmed the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, which really started in the early 1940s. So he's got eczema, and he's got something on his GI that gives him this and his this is his main complaint. He has this horrific, debilitating gas pain. His gas is so bad that, like, he can't, he can't function a lot of the time when he eats. Some of this is probably exacerbated by his vegetarian diet. He probably had IBS as a result of his time in the trenches. You talk about people particularly who were over in like Iraq and Afghanistan earlier in those wars, before there was as much infrastructure in the US side. Nearly all of them have some sort of IBS. It's just something you get when you're in in trenches, the waters dirty and stuff. There's a number of things that are probably going on with Hitler. But it is, it is likely right that he had something going wrong with his bacterial flora. You know, perhaps because of, you know, his injuries during the war or something. But we now know that, like that ****** food he eats. Yeah, all the bad food eats, gut bacteria have a big impact on your health. And that was starting to be understood then. It's still kind of a primitive science now, comparatively. And Morell prescribed his leaders something called Mutaflor. This was a gut bacteria supplement. It actually been. Crafted from the intestinal flora of a German soldier who'd been sent to the Balkans during World War One and have been, like, the only guy in his unit not to get horrible stomach issues. So that, and that's actually a really good medical thing, is like, well, that guy seems like, let's get the **** out of his guts and, like, give it to other people, you know? And Mutaflor was live bacteria in capsules, taken with the hope that they'd set up permanent shop in the patient's bowels. This was real medicine, and its impact on Hitler's GI Tract was apparently powerful and quick. Hitler experienced immediate relief, although not permanent. Relief. So I don't know exactly what was going on here, but he was so overjoyed to be cured, as he felt at the time, that he gave Morella house and made him his personal physician. But Morrell wasn't a gut bacteria specialist. He was a vitamin man. Hitler still had health complaints, and a lot of them were probably due to permanent injuries caused by his service and the fact that he was just an aging man, you know, in a time when medicine wasn't very good. So Morrell was able to convince his new boss that vitamins were the answer. You're not tired because you're pushing 50, and you have been. You know, going without sleep and working like a crazy person and like you were injured and suffered permanent damage and or you're tired because you need these vitamin injections that are also full of caffeine or sometimes amphetamines, you know? So he was basically like, I, you, you. You can't like, you need vitamins. And because vitamin pills take too long and your schedule is so demanding, I've just got to start shooting you up every time before a speech in order to, like, get you, get you hyped up, get you going. Yeah. Yeah. And Murrell starts giving Hitler's shots, and he never stops until the very end of the war. And he would put a wide variety of substances into the Nazi leaders, veins, iodine, vitamins, chalk and when Hitler had a big speech, a power injection, which often contained. Glucose to give him a boost of sugar. Sugar fueled energy, probably caffeine also, a lot of the time, Morelli's immediate goal was an instant cessation of symptoms. So if you're tired, he wants you to feel wired right away, you know? And to that end, he continually experimented and tweaked the injections he was giving Hitler. We don't always know what they included because sometimes I gave him, you know, shot number, whatever. And it's like, OK, well, what the **** was in that? And older does a lot of good work to try to diagnose it, you know? A lot of times that aren't recorded, there's probably some if not amphetamine, then at least caffeine in these things we don't always know. We do know that in 1937, the Nazi leader lost his voice before a big speech and Moreau gave him an injection of something that is said to have cured him immediately. Like, who knows what the **** he was shooting into the guy. Lip sync. Tell Hitler to lip sync. Yeah, soon. Morrell was so indispensable to the fewer that he was forced to let his medical practice shrivel up from lack of attention. Hitler couldn't let him be away from him, right? He needed him kind of available on call at all time. Hitler was an all consuming patient, but he rewarded Dr Morell well, making him a wealthy man. In 1938, he gave his doctor an honored professorship for his part. Morell kept looking for new substances to shoot into Hitler's body. The 1936 Olympics. We've seen the advent of the use of Benzedrine, which is classic speed. When your parents talk about doing speed in the 70s, that's Bennies, baby. Yeah. You can still get it today if you get a benzedrex inhaler. You make the little allergy inhalers. You just make sure that they say Benzedrine on them. You pop them open. You take the little cotton cloth out, throw it in a water bottle. You're good to go. Allegedly. Allegedly. Yeah. Umm, so, yeah, Benzedrine gets bigger after the 36 Olympics and a German pharmaceutical company makes a note of this. They're like, well, seems like people love speed. We should develop a better speed. And the chemical they picked to make an even better speed was a little substance you might have heard about. It was first synthesized in 1919 by Japanese chemists and its name was in Methylamphetamine. Ohhh, that's the good ****. That's a good ship. The good ****. Yeah, baby. Ah, meth. Speaking of drugs with no downsides. So in short order Timler was producing methamphetamine, methamphetamine pills as an over the counter medication under the brand named Pervitin. And sales started in the weekend of night in the winter of 1937 and the drug use was in and the drug was immediately popular among the young Third Reich users or, and the drug was immediately popular in the young Third Reich. Soon Templer was even selling boxes of meth, spiked chocolate. They bragged that their wonder drug was good for quote. Be awakening joy in the despondent and that fragility, fragility in women can be easily influenced with pervitin tablets. Give a girl some meth and she'll want to get down. You know, you could just put that on a box and sell it. Missing is meth, is meth. And it's all legal. I I hope to be an ad man for the methamphetamine industry. It's so easy to self with chemistry. Yeah, yeah. If you guys like it can help as well. If you and your wife been fighting fight faster on meth, you know? Exactly. Exactly. So I'm going to continue to read from timler's ads. For pervitin, the treatment technique is as simple as can be imagined, 4 half tablets every day long before bedtime, 10 days a month for three months. This will achieve excellent results by increasing women's libido and sexual power. Take meth every day to **** better. Meth, I'm almost positive, would not help me *** ****. I mean not. When I smoked pot in college, I would perpetually ruin dates by avoiding the person I was sitting next to. I literally in college smoked weed once with this guy who I was, like getting set up with, didn't speak to him at all. He was like, I need to go home. Apologized to him the next time I saw him. I was like, hey John, I'm so sorry about. That was so weird. I would love to just like see if we could do this again. And he said thank you so much for apologizing. What did we do on our next date? Smoke weed together? I was like, I've got to leave again, so sorry. And that was the end of our short lived relationship. So I feel like. The meth was added, it wouldn't help the situation, is what I'm saying. I mean, you know, there's only one way to find out which is track that guy down and take a just rail, a ******** of crystal, just just if they put it in chocolate and and I want them in those little Roche. Chocolates. Yeah, I would like one. You know, there's like this this chocolate cherries. Little cherry in the middle of the chocolate thing. Yeah, like just a texture with a Little Rock of crystal meth right in the middle. Right in the middle. Nice. Yeah. Yeah, the surprise. Or maybe like those little eggs, they make those. Yeah. Cadbury OHS. Thinking Cadbury egg. Instead of like, building a toy inside you, you smoke meth. Just a ******** of meth filled Cadbury eggs. God, that would be rad. Allegedly. So methamphetamine was even useful in treating drug addicts. Accord. Again, this is according to the company selling meth. They advise they advised people withdrawing from alcohol, cocaine or heroin to take a little meth to help them get over the shakes. Meth was so like, I'm trying to get off heroin. You know, it'll clean you up a little bit of methamphetamine. Can you pronounce this? Yeah. And you're ready to take it. Oh yeah. Cocaine. Bad stuff. Take this meth. Clean your ride out. So again, the reason I bring all this up is to point out that like meth was not a drug in the third it wasn't seen as a drug in the Third Reich. It was just seen as like a medicine and particularly like a treatment for anything. It was, it was, it was a it was a helper. It was not a recreational substance. It was advised it was advertised as capable of bringing quote sugars, malingerers, defeatists and whiners into the Nazi fold and turning them into productive obedience. Distance, they were saying, like, meth will help turn you into a good Nazi. You'll be able to work if you're lazy because you'll be on meth. One farmer. And again, that's also you could draw a line to, like, why they were advertising that it makes women want to **** is like, well, it's all about breeding, right? Like, meth is the drug that makes you, helps you work in a factory or *** **** and make babies, you know, like, that's why they're selling it the way they're selling it. Or a big part of it. 1 pharmacologist Felix Hoffner called Prescribing Pervitin the new supreme commandment of his discipline. In Germany he was saying, like, if you're a pharmacist, it's your duty to give Germans meth. He called it a chemical. He said that it could bring chemical order to disordered people. Now, we don't know when precisely Morell first gave Hitler methamphetamine. The the bad doctor had often gave given, like, he gave again. He had like, different brand names for his various injections. And while some of his notes were detailed, this wasn't always the case. It's likely that Hitler started taking meth in a couple of different forms, potentially in the late 1930s, as he often complained of a lack of energy. And by 19381939, pervitin was incredibly popular among German civilians. So the fact that Hitler's. Taking amphetamines during this period of time was not allowed it it it wasn't something unique to him. It was something that made him very much normal among like the German working class in this. That said, it was not something that was widely publicized. Hitler's reputation was a he was a sober man and he didn't drink, which was weird. Like he was not a guy who drank a lot. He didn't really smoke. He had this reputation of being indefatigable, almost superhuman, and this was a big part of his appeal. So they didn't want to, like, talk about the fact that he was as drugged up as everybody else. Historian Stephen Snelders and Twain Peters called Nazi Germany after 1938 a methamphetamine dictatorship, and when they say that, they don't mean that Hitler was a meth dictator, although he was a dictator on meth. I'm going to quote from psychiatric times to get to what they're saying here. Rather than emphasizing the role of the suppliers, however, they argue that the evidence shows strong demand pressures for the drug from consumers. In clinical practice. The drug was first used to treat psychological inhibition, inhibition, and endogenous depression. And to augment was what was referred to as the will to get healthy. Pervitin quickly moved from clinical to general practice and was prescribed fairly commonly for employees, workers and health housewives. In fact, a praline chocolate with 14 milligrams of Pervitin was marketed to the general public. So it's a meth dictatorship because everyone is on meth. They're on meth to deal with their depression, their anxiety, like the fact that it's a bummer living in Nazi Germany, they're on meth to deal with the fact that, like they have to like the the the work schedules, like the production they're trying to do. To go in Leeds meth is in a way the dictator. You know, to go on dates to make enough babies cry guys. And this is one of those things where I don't think older is really guilty of this. But I think that people kind of interpreting his work have made way too much of Hitler's amphetamine use. And and rather than put in the context of like, no, no, no, all of the Nazis were on a ******** of speed. And that is relevant and it impacted their behavior. It impacted history in a significant way. But it's not that like Hitler was on meth and and. Made crazy decisions. It was that the the whole Third Reich was in the late 30s and early 40s. Very methamphetamine dependent, and that that's kind of important to note. Now. It's tempting to speculate as to which of Hitler's temper tantrums and rages were influenced by Matthews. I'm going to avoid that temptation. It is impossible to know. And while meth certainly had an impact on his behavior, that impact was more to exacerbate the kind of rages he'd always engaged in. Hitler even used Morell to dose another head of state. Czech President Emil Hacha during a crucial moment in March of 1939, Hitler was trying to negotiate over the annexation of Czechoslovakia. It was crucial that the smaller country just sort of hand themselves over without fighting, because Germany actually couldn't have sex successfully invaded Czechoslovakia. They were kind of bluffing here. Hasha was ill when he attended a state visit to the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler demanded he ordered the surrender of Czech troops. Hatcha suffered a heart attack which rendered him unable to function. And I'm going to quote from blitzed here next. Hitler urgently summoned Morell, who hurried along with his case in his syringes, and injected the unconscious foreign guest with such a stimulating medication that Hasha rose again. Within seconds, as if from the dead, he signed the piece of paper that sealed the temporary end of his state. The very next morning, Hitler invaded Prague without a fight. During the following years, hatches sat the powerless head of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to which parts of his country had been reduced, remaining Morrell's loyal patient. In that respect, pharmacology worked as a way of continuing politics by other means. And this reminds me a lot of a girl in New York who once went down OK Hall and everyone was worried that she was going unconscious until Carly Rae Jepsen song Call Me Maybe came on, and then she shot up back from the dead. Hey, that song is morally identical to dosing someone with methamphetamine. I've always said, I've always said that now the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia was pretty much went off. Perfectly for Hitler. But his next goal, the conquest of Poland, was going to require actual, you know, war stuff. The fewer and his general staff all had clear, terrible memories of the First World War, and they wanted more than anything to avoid a repeat of the bloody stalemates of the Western Front. The German war machine developed several solutions to this problem. One of the major reasons that allowed them to kind of that that was crucial behind Blitzkrieg was small unit Stormtrooper tactics that had started being developed near the end of the First World War. The term the Germans used for this was. Of drugs tactic, and it was it was heavily. We'll talk about this a bit more later, but it was heavily based around allowing a lot of unit autonomy. There's this like myth that the the Nazi soldiers were these like automatons who followed orders unquestioningly. The reason why the Blitz Creed worked is that individual small unit leaders were given a degree of personal discretion and and choice and power to make decisions in the field that no other military in the world gave them at this point. And that's a big part of why they were successful. They were also the blitz. Creed was also crucially relied on the fact that the Germans had built up a significant amount of armored cars. Thanks and close air support craft to enable a speedier sort of mechanized warfare. And as all of this developed an idea developed championed by men like General Heinz Guderian, that this new German army might be able to move quickly enough to avoid the static fortifications that had bogged them down in 1914. But technology and tactics only went so far. Poland was huge, and war with Poland meant war with France. In order to have a hope of sweeping through either country, German soldiers were going to need chemical assistance. And Pervitin was just what the Doctor General ordered from a write up and Time magazine quote. Doctor Otto F Ronk, director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, had high hopes that Pervitin would prove advantageous on the battlefield. His goal was to defeat the enemy with chemically enhanced soldiers, soldiers who could give Germany a military edge by fighting harder and longer than their opponents. After testing the drug on a group of medical officers, rock believed that Pervitin would be an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad. We may grasp what far reaching military significance that would have. We managed to remove the natural tiredness using medical methods. Rank himself was a daily user, as detailed in his wartime medical diary and letters quote. With Pervitin, you can go on working for 36 to 50 hours without feeling any noticeable fatigue. This allowed rock to work days at a time with no sleep. And his correspondence indicated. Yeah. Is this an ad? It is. It is an ad for for again primary sponsor of the show. Methamphetamine under a bridge near you and pervitin. Hmm. You can cook in your bathtub if you really want or you know, wherever. So sad it's safe. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. So we're going to talk more about all of this in Part 2, but that's going to do it for us in part one. Carolina. How are you? How are you feeling? Has this changed your mind on methadol? OK, I'm really starting to look at my dating history and I'm realizing a missing puzzle piece. Methamphetamine. Methamphetamine. And maybe just like the Super vitamin shot of chalk. Chalk law. You can't get enough chalk. Glucose and whatever human growth hormone, whatever else he was throwing in there, I think it's fair to say a lot of us have been looking for love in all the wrong places. And maybe the right place is crystal meth. Exactly. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. When you're on meth, every day is Valentine's Day. That's the beauty of meth. True. That's so true. So true. Carolina, do you have anything other than methamphetamine you wanna plug? I would love to plug my show. True romance, where we discuss dating horrors and recovering from anything from an episode of The Bachelorette to a terrible first date to a truly devastating breakup. We're here for you. Every Thursday there's a new episode on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts, and on our next episode, I will be trying that and going on a blind date. Yeah, literally. Yeah will be blacked out and on all our next episodes. I think we'll be on meth, too. Sophie. Can we get a line item in the budget for just, like a **** load of mass? Come on. So, so come on. So come on this question. Well, but off the record, off the record, we're absolutely gonna do some math. Excellent. Alright, good news everybody. Well, this has been behind the ********. Methamphetamine is actually based addition. Listen, it could happen here. It's now daily and and it's on the same podcast. Happy listening to maybe if I was raped. Stop lobbying for this. Stop it. The episode bye bye. Alright, that's the episode. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. 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