Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich
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So, apparently, most of Germany was hopped up on drugs during World War II. Despite the fact that the Nazis originally ran on an anti-drug platform and the first form of concentration camps were designed for addicts under the guise of sobering them up, most of the population got hooked on Pervitin, aka methamphetamine, which German pharmaceutical companies churned out like candy. Literally– because it took a bunch of forms, including gum.
Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich argues that Pervitin and similar intense stimulants are partially to blame for escalating WWII by enabling the German army to get really irrationally fired up behind their cause, stay awake for multiple days without food, and have the energy for military tactics like blitzkrieg. Other nations, weary of the fact that WWI had just ended, wanted everyone to chill, and the Nazi’s were high on meth, wanting to stir everything up.
Ohler’s research is very comprehensive and he gives an insight into history that I’d never explored. He paints a particularly damning picture of Hitler himself (not that he needed any more damning…). Hitler was doing all of the drugs all of the time and he looked like shit at the end of his life.
All of this sounds scandalous and therefore riveting. And it is… to an extent. I don’t think it’s worthy of an entire book, because after a while, I get the gist. I don’t need hundreds of pages of every single drug that Hitler took every single day (also, allegedly…because these conclusions are mostly drawn from a singular source: Hitler’s doctor’s medical records, which I think we can all intuit might not be the most reliable). There were occasional pivotal moments where drugs played an interesting historical role, but there was a lot of filler in between.
Also, it was very dramatized in a way that felt tacky– like a re-enactment in a low-budget crime show. Ohler was also overly quippy, saying things like, “Drug use wasn’t the only thing about to explode in the summer of 1941.” I know that he was trying to write a book that would capture people’s attention, but drugs usually do the trick itself. In my opinion, his try-hard dramatizations undermined the authority of his argument, because I questioned what was historically accurate and what was creative license on his part. His attempt to jazz up his work blurs the lines of fact and fiction in a way that makes me distrustful.
Overall, the facts are compelling and his theories surrounding those facts paint a historical lense that is for sure overlooked in history classes. Still, I’m reluctant to recommend it as a book. I give it 2 out of 5 flames. I think it’s more suitable to documentary form, where more historians could weigh in and it wouldn’t feel so repetitive for the sake of filling pages.
