The Total Rush

[Alexei du Périer]

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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