The Total Rush

[Allan Balliett]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/books/high-on-hitler-and-meth-book-says-nazis-were-fueled-by-drugs.html?emc=eta1&_r=0

On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 5:10 AM, Alexei du Périer <alexei.duperier at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Fascinating! Thanks
>
> 2016-09-26 13:10 GMT+02:00 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>:
>
>>
>> I read Ohler's *Der totale Rausch* when it came out in original. The
>> book is as informative as it is entertaining and belongs, in my opinion, to
>> the list of secondary literature for *Gravity's Rainbow*.
>>
>> > ... The story Ohler tells begins in the days of the Weimar Republic,
>> when Germany’s pharmaceutical industry was thriving – the country was a
>> leading exporter both of opiates, such as morphine, and of cocaine – and
>> drugs were available on every street corner. It was during this period that
>> Hitler’s inner circle established an image of him as an unassailable figure
>> who was willing to work tirelessly on behalf of his country, and who would
>> permit no toxins – not even coffee – to enter his body.
>>
>> “He is all genius and body,” reported one of his allies in 1930. “And he
>> mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t
>> drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.” No
>> wonder that when the Nazis seized power in 1933, “seductive poisons” were
>> immediately outlawed. In the years that followed, drug users would be
>> deemed “criminally insane”; some would be killed by the state using a
>> lethal injection; others would be sent to concentration camps. Drug use
>> also began to be associated with Jews. The Nazi party’s office of racial
>> purity claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug-dependent.
>> Both needed to be eradicated from Germany.
>>
>> Some drugs, however, had their uses, particularly in a society hell bent
>> on keeping up with the energetic Hitler (“Germany awake!” the Nazis
>> ordered, and the nation had no choice but to snap to attention). A
>> substance that could “integrate shirkers, malingerers, defeatists and
>> whiners” into the labour market might even be sanctioned. At a company
>> called Temmler in Berlin, Dr Fritz Hauschild, its head chemist, inspired by
>> the successful use of the American amphetamine Benzedrine at the 1936
>> Olympic Games, began trying to develop his own wonder drug – and a year
>> later, he patented the first German methyl-amphetamine. Pervitin, as it was
>> known, quickly became a sensation, used as a confidence booster and
>> performance enhancer by everyone from secretaries to actors to train
>> drivers (initially, it could be bought without prescription). It even made
>> its way into confectionery. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight,”
>> went the slogan. Women were recommended to eat two or three, after which
>> they would be able to get through their housework in no time at all – with
>> the added bonus that they would also lose weight, given the deleterious
>> effect Pervitin had on the appetite. Ohler describes it as National
>> Socialism in pill form.
>>
>> Naturally, it wasn’t long before soldiers were relying on it too. In
>> *Blitzed*, Ohler reproduces a letter sent in 1939 by Heinrich Böll, the
>> future Nobel laureate, from the frontline to his parents back at home, in
>> which he begs them for Pervitin, the only way he knew to fight the great
>> enemy – sleep. In Berlin, it was the job of Dr Otto Ranke, the director of
>> the Institute for General and Defence Physiology, to protect the
>> Wehrmacht’s “animated machines” – ie its soldiers – from wear, and after
>> conducting some tests he concluded that Pervitin was indeed excellent
>> medicine for exhausted soldiers. Not only did it make sleep unnecessary
>> (Ranke, who would himself become addicted to the drug, observed that he
>> could work for 50 hours on Pervitin without feeling fatigued), it also
>> switched off inhibitions, making fighting easier, or at any rate less
>> terrifying.
>>
>> In 1940, as plans were made to invade France through the Ardennes
>> mountains, a “stimulant decree” was sent out to army doctors, recommending
>> that soldiers take one tablet per day, two at night in short sequence, and
>> another one or two tablets after two or three hours if necessary. The
>> Wehrmacht ordered 35m tablets for the army and Luftwaffe, and the Temmler
>> factory increased production. The likes of Böll, it’s fair to say, wouldn’t
>> need to ask their parents for Pervitin again.
>>
>> Was Blitzkrieg, then, largely the result of the Wehrmacht’s reliance on
>> crystal meth? How far is Ohler willing to go with this? He smiles. “Well,
>> Mommsen always told me not to be mono-causal. But the invasion of France
>> was made possible by the drugs. No drugs, no invasion. When Hitler heard
>> about the plan to invade through Ardennes, he loved it [the allies were
>> massed in northern Belgium]. But the high command said: it’s not possible,
>> at night we have to rest, and they [the allies] will retreat and we will be
>> stuck in the mountains. But then the stimulant decree was released, and
>> that enabled them to stay awake for three days and three nights. Rommel
>> [who then led one of the panzer divisions] and all those tank commanders
>> were high – and without the tanks, they certainly wouldn’t have won.”
>>
>> Thereafter, drugs were regarded as an effective weapon by high command,
>> one that could be deployed against the greatest odds. In 1944-45, for
>> instance, when it was increasingly clear that victory against the allies
>> was all but impossible, the German navy developed a range of one-man
>> U-boats; the fantastical idea was that these pint-sized submarines would
>> make their way up the Thames estuary. But since they could only be used if
>> the lone marines piloting them could stay awake for days at a time, Dr
>> Gerhard Orzechowski, the head pharmacologist of the naval supreme command
>> on the Baltic, had no choice but to begin working on the development of a
>> new super-medication – a cocaine chewing gum that would be the hardest drug
>> German soldiers had ever taken. It was tested at the Sachsenhausen
>> concentration camp, on a track used to trial new shoe soles for German
>> factories; prisoners were required to walk – and walk – until they dropped.
>>
>> “It was crazy, horrifying,” says Ohler, quietly. “Even Mommsen was
>> shocked by this. He had never heard about it before.” The young marines,
>> strapped in their metal boxes, unable to move at all and cut off from the
>> outside world, suffered psychotic episodes as the drugs took hold, and
>> frequently got lost, at which point the fact that they could stay awake for
>> up to seven days became irrelevant. “It was unreal,” says Ohler. “This
>> wasn’t reality. But if you’re fighting an enemy bigger than yourself, you
>> have no choice. You must, somehow, exceed your own strength. That’s why
>> terrorists use suicide bombers. It’s an unfair weapon. If you’re going to
>> send a bomb into a crowd of civilians, of course you’re going to have a
>> success.”
>>
>> Meanwhile, in Berlin, Hitler was experiencing his own unreality, with his
>> only ally in the world his podgy, insecure personal physician, Dr Morell.
>> In the late 20s, Morell had grown a thriving private practice in Berlin,
>> his reputation built on the modish vitamin injections he liked to give his
>> patients. He met Hitler after he treated Heinrich Hoffman, the official
>> Reich photographer, and sensing an opportunity quickly ingratiated himself
>> with the Führer, who had long suffered from severe intestinal pains. Morell
>> prescribed Mutaflor, a preparation based on bacteria, and when his
>> patient’s condition – Patient A, as Hitler was thereafter known – began to
>> improve, their codependent relationship began. Both were isolated. Hitler
>> increasingly trusted no one but his doctor, while Morell relied solely on
>> the Führer for his position.
>>
>> When Hitler fell seriously ill in 1941, however, the vitamin injections
>> that Morell had counted on no longer had any effect – and so he began to
>> ramp things up. First, there were injections of animal hormones for this
>> most notorious of vegetarians, and then a whole series of ever stronger
>> medications until, at last, he began giving him a “wonder drug” called
>> Eukodal, a designer opiate and close cousin of heroin whose chief
>> characteristic was its potential to induce a euphoric state in the patient
>> (today it is known as oxycodone). It wasn’t long before Hitler was
>> receiving injections of Eukodal several times a day. Eventually he would
>> combine it with twice daily doses of the high grade cocaine he had
>> originally been prescribed for a problem with his ears, following an
>> explosion in the Wolf’s Lair, his bunker on the eastern front.
>>
>> Did Morell deliberately turn Hitler into an addict? Or was he simply
>> powerless to resist the Führer’s addictive personality? “I don’t think it
>> was deliberate,” says Ohler. “But Hitler trusted him. When those around him
>> tried to remove Morell in the fall of 1944, Hitler stood up for him –
>> though by then, he knew that if he was to go, he [Hitler] would be
>> finished. They got along very well. Morell loved to give injections, and
>> Hitler liked to have them. He didn’t like pills because of his weak stomach
>> and he wanted a quick effect. He was time-pressed; he thought he was going
>> to die young.” When did Hitler realise he was an addict? “Quite late.
>> Someone quotes him as saying to Morell: you’ve been giving me opiates all
>> the time. But mostly, they talked about it in oblique terms. Hitler didn’t
>> like to refer to the Eukodal. Maybe he was trying to block it off from his
>> mind. And like any dealer, Morell was never going to say: yeah, you’re
>> addicted, and I have something to feed that for you.” So he talked in terms
>> of health rather than addiction? “Yes, exactly.”
>> The effect of the drugs could appear to onlookers to be little short of
>> miraculous. One minute the Führer was so frail he could barely stand up.
>> The next, he would be ranting unstoppably at Mussolini ... <
>>
>> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/25/blitzed-norman
>> -ohler-adolf-hitler-nazi-drug-abuse-interview
>>
>>
>
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