Behind the Bastards - Part One: Hitler's Drug Problem

Episode Date: August 24, 2021

Robert is joined by Carolina Barlow to discuss Hitler, the Nazis and drugs Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's taking shitloads of meth, my Hitler? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast to retell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history. I love that. Or in the case of today's episode, stuff that you think you know, but you actually don't know the specifics in the way that you probably think you do.

Maybe. Anyway, terrible introduction. That was definitely top ten intros to this podcast. Thank you, Sophie. You're 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. Yes. 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 accurate.

Knowing how kind he is. Yep. Yeah. He's a, Sophie, you can speak to this. He Frenched my dog. How does his hair smell? Okay. This is a great question because Will is very good at grooming and he always smells really nice.

His skincare is amazing. And I believe he may still be using this product. But once we were on a press tour with Mark Wahlberg, who is 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 the story. Okay.

Will 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 still uses that, but it smells incredible. Okay. 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. They used to bathe.

Yeah. So funny. No, we're talking about, we are talking about a celebrity today. He's just surrounded by babies because they're probably like piss and shit. Piss and shit all the time. That scares completely actually. Yeah. You know who else?

He's changing a diaper. I totally forgot. You know who else smelled like shit? Oh, 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 going to. I'm not going to give Hitler a celebrity title. You can say a lot of bad things about the man, but he has brand recognition. Okay. Fair enough. So we're like going from polar opposites.

We're talking about one of Donna. Yeah. You don't even need the last names. Exactly. Just Hitler. Right? You're just 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 shitty, I'm like, you're kind of hitlering right now. You're getting a little hitler on all of us here. Maybe calm down. So he's like, he's like Google. I don't know if any of my friends have been done something so shitty that I would spring that name off. Fair enough.

Well, this one time my buddy Mike annexed the Sudetenland and we were, we got pretty, pretty pissed at him. That's fair. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That's apt. 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. I'm actually in the same boat. I drink sometimes and take credum, but my doing illegal drugs days are long, long behind me because I damaged my brain too much. Right. So have you heard about the Nazis and drugs? I know that they did a lot of them and I think World War II 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 when you're at a war zone. I can say that from experience. You know, it's also, so there's, in 2016, a German novelist and a screenwriter, a guy named Norman Oler published a book, a work of historic nonfiction. In the United States, it was released under the title Blitz, Drugs in Nazi Germany. A lot of people have heard of this book. It was an international, but it was a huge, huge fucking 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 fucking planet published interviews with this guy or at least kind of like write-ups that were summarizing the book. The Guardian's article during this period is kind of emblematic of the whole. It was titled High Hitler, which is a fun tile, nice little play on Heil Hitler. And it's also really appropriate because the reason Hitler was getting high was for his health and Heil Hitler literally means health to Hitler.

But anyway, that's a point Oler makes. So it's a nice little pun. It is a nice little pun. I'm going to read a sample paragraph from that article talking about Oler's work. The book in question is The Total Rush, or to use its 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 Oler's account was an absolute junkie

who was ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers, but on the Wehrmacht successful invasion of France in 1940, published in Germany last year where it became a bestseller. It has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Oler, but also amazes him. And this is interesting. I'm starting not kind of the way we normally do by just sort of giving the history, but by talking about this book because it is so prominent. And in the years that I've been doing behind the bastards,

I probably had a couple of hundred different people email me or ask me sometimes in person. If I've read Blitz and tell me that I ought to do 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 Blitz and more broadly critiquing kind of how the media presented it. And I want to clarify up top, I don't think Blitz does a bad book or that Oler is a bad guy. I think his work is in some ways a victim of his own success. If you start googling around permutations of phrases like Hitler's drug addiction or drugs in Nazi Germany in Nazi Germany or the Nazis in 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 and no state has had so many pages of quality historical writing dedicated to its history.

And when we include the great minds who've written about the third Reich throughout history, we quickly become clogged with genius. There's William Shire, Ian Kershaw, John Toland, Volker, Ulrich, Richard Evans, and Hannah Arendt just to name a few. And the fact that in five years Norman Oler 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 fucking books. And one of the reasons this frustrates some historians is that some of the stuff that Oler wrote about had been well documented before he came into the picture.

For example, Purvitan, which is the methamphetamine that the Nazis primarily took. A lot of scholars wrote about the use of Purvitan by Nazis during the Blitzkrieg, where Oler broke new ground was in making a detailed study about the personal notes in professional journals of a guy named Dr. Theodore Morel, who was one of Hitler's personal physicians and his primary dope dealer. Morel was not an unknown quantity to historians previously, but Oler 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 Blitzkrieg revolves around the language used in this book. Oler 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 fucking guy everybody hates now, but everybody loved him. We're at the tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell. And I'm not saying he's like, because I think he's much more responsible than Malcolm Gladwell. But he's closer to the Gladwell into the spectrum, that kind of pop nonfiction than he is to a scholar like Ian Kershaw. And that frustrates scholars because his work has been so influential. You get kind of pissed off when you do detailed, painstaking analyses of these guys, and then some dude kind of throws out a book that maybe exaggerates some things and uses some flagrant language and is much more popular than any work by a scholar will ever be, that frustrated people.

And, you know, 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. 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 sometimes disproportionate to its actual end. 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, occult Nazism. But it also wasn't nearly as influential as the people who write books about it put it on as. And in fact, by, like, 1941, it was pretty much out 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 a long way of trying to, like, give caveats about, like, what are... Not saying it's a bad book, but 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... That is 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 these drugs. Of course, of course. Because one of the things he does, he points out, as we'll go into, most of the hardcore 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 motion.

His ideals were already pretty clear. The Reichstag was going down. But he's saying, like, it's worth noting if a guy is fucked up 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?

It's 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 shit, right? Like, it is... Or Trump and his lateral problem. Or Trump and Adderall. It's certainly not like, I don't want to, 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 will fuck it up, you know? I guess I'm implying more that leaning into it too hard, giving it too much weight.

I can see it distracting from a serious threat that was definitely worsened by drugs. 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 Quayludes, 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-unquote enemy, Viet Cong, who aren't in uniforms. Your paranoia can increase. It could make you more violent. Without these drugs, the Vietnam War is still inherently a crime against humanity, but drugs don't help.

Yeah, it doesn't help. And there's a question too with the Nazis, right? A lot of these Wehrmacht soldiers were going days without sleeping and taking shit with the methamphetamine, and some of them committed horrible atrocities. 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 and flipping out and burning down villages, some of that's probably due to the fact that they're fucked up on methamphetamine, right?

Not necessarily like 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 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, okay, 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 don't want to like veer away from what is an interesting question just because people can simplify it to the extent that it gets fucked up, you know? Because I do think this is a fascinating question. We're going to be talking a lot about Oler'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 cutting up other bits of reporting. He looks at a lot of original primary sources. He's combing through and I don't think anyone else ever did. Dr. Theodore Morels, Hitler's primary physician's notes in exhaustive detail, researching the medicines he's given. There's a lot of very important scholarship, I think, in his findings, but I also will be laying out some areas where Oler's conclusions do not gel with the actual evidence, and there are some points there.

So let's start by talking about drug culture in Weimar, 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, Weimar was a dizzyingly progressive government for its time. Berlin became a magnet for the LGBT community and the site of the 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 musicians, people were getting fucked up all the time. Like, I mean, just real...

Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Yeah, exactly, like real creative drug use. Because Berlin is what places like chunks of New York and chunks of California became in the 60s and 70s. Berlin is that in the fucking 20s, you know? And there's 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, fun, roaring 20s quality.

Yeah, it's a fascinating time to study. And this put, you know, one of the things that I think is critique about Euler is he, when he's talking about drug use in Germany, he focuses heavily on Berlin. And Berlin, hell of 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, Oregon 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 hated tobacco. Lenin was famously anti-cigarette. Right.

So was Hitler. Obviously, Lenin's anti-cigarette shit didn't last one stop because Stalin loved him 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. They were in the hardcore scene. Yeah, they were.

They were. He was definitely kind of straight edge. Yeah. And we'll talk about this more later. But for the most part throughout the 20s, Nazis and communists 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 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. Yes, Bayer. 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 addictive thing in the world. The company that owned that first manufacturing plant in Germany was the Sacklers, later responsible for the opioid epidemic we're currently facing in the United 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. Like heroin?

Yeah. Straight up heroin, they advertise as lighter than morphine. Yeah, I mean, a lot of this shit 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. God, to live in those times, to just be able to walk down to the corner store and get a big fat bagel horse, smoke it, and I don't know, doesn't really matter what you do.

Go to the movies. Yeah, it doesn't really matter what you're doing when you're smoking heroin. Yeah. So now buy a lot of, like this point heroin has become like illegal in the U.S. 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 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 in 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 Weimar years in the Third Reich. The morphine was far more popular than its more potent cousin, perhaps explaining Merck'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 I until about 1922, which is probably caused by the same thing that drives a lot of opiate use in the U.S. 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. Huge problem in the Civil War, too. Yeah, yeah, every time a lot of men get wounded. Soldiers got hooked on, I mean, it's funny you say guesstimates, I'm just reading that Sacre Book, Everyone's Waiting, and they said the estimate was a quarter 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-unquote epidemic. Yeah, I mean, that completely makes sense, especially when it is as available as it was. When you just bump down to the street and buy it, why wouldn't you take up on Jay Erwin? 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 hadn't 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 0.3 male addicts per 10,000 people in Germany, which is probably nonsense, but he also noted that 1 in 100 doctors were addicts,

and this is probably a much more accurate number, in part because a lot of these guys have been prosecuted for this, and in part because today we know that doctors are at a massively elevated risk of particularly opiate addiction. Including pharmacists, right? Yeah, doctors, pharmacists, and nurses. I've talked to a nurse with a drug addiction who was, like, pinching, you know, opiates and shit for quite a long while, and it's, like, 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 fucking oxy all the time? Right.

I get it. Like, it's not good behavior if people's lives are in your hand, but I can empathize with the need to dole that. Especially since, I don't know, none of us are, we've all decided not to do the pandemic mitigation thing anymore, so, I don't know. Right. And we're paying more taxes than Jeff Bezos, as in Arizona. Yeah, so yeah, take some oxy, I'm not going to 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 Dr. Sigmund Freud and a Viennese eye doctor named Karl Kohler. Freud prescribed cocaine as part of his talk therapy sessions, and Dr. Kohler just poured it right into people's eyes as a local anesthetic. Love it. Which is, man, imagine going to the eye doctor and, alright, I'm going to pour some cocaine in your eyes. Keep them open. The shit's strong as ass. My therapist, Kathy,

Shout out. If before I was about to talk to her about stocking 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 ratter. 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. Yes. Look, as far as I am aware, cocaine is a drug without downsides. So I don't see why people shouldn't take a shitload of it. It's good for your heart. For a second, I thought you were sincere. I've heard it has the ability to reduce nasal problems. Cleans you out real good.

This is not accurate. And you should for the next two days. Yeah, yeah. For legal reasons. No. Continue. It is time for an ad break and behind the bastards is sponsored by the global cocaine industry. We are not.

Yes. Behind the bastards. If you like podcasts, you'll love cocaine. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way.

And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space. 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back, and we're celebrating the cocaine industry. You're not. An industry with no problems. Not true. More PR. You're only hearing one side of the story. Exactly.

People talk a lot about all the deaths, all the murders, all the 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. Martin Scorsese? Yeah. Martin Scorsese. Ever heard of him?

Right? Another person who never did anything problematic. Cocaine. Thank you. You're welcome. Now, we were just talking about how Dr. Sigmund Freud and Carl 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. They are not fans of cocaine, and in this is why they can't really come after opiates, and they don't. They have these kind of, they kind of approach it as a public health problem, but they can't condemn opiate users because most, a lot of opiate users are soldiers, and there's this, you have to worship veterans in this period of time, especially if you're the Nazis. But cocaine, that's the drug that the artists and the queer people and the fucking psychiatrists are doing.

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 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. It was a place people would meet and fuck 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 fuck and snort themselves, silly. In Blitz, Oler cites 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 beast 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. But 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, our foes 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 genuflecting. 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 nearly as strict as anything we live with today in the United States, but they're the first. And the Nazis are, you know, they're complaining about drug use, but they're also complaining about degeneracy, about artists, about people who are queer in there. Those people, 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.

It's like, well, we're about to get all murdered by the Nazis, might as well take some heroin. Right. Yeah. It's getting a little, yeah, the price is increasing, alcohol is not cutting it anymore. Yeah. Time to get, yeah, fucked up until the Nazis take total power. Yeah. Hard to blot out what's happening.

Yeah. Now, I will say somewhat ironically, Oler's 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 took 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 and Nazis who were 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, decried as decadently Western. Now his job does a fine, his work here does a fine job of getting across the way popular

a German opinion kind of, or at least right-wing opinions saw Berlin and 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, Rhein-Supreme is the center

for cocaine consumption with 1.44 grams per thousand people, while Berlin remains second with a consumption rate of one gram per thousand people, which is not particularly high. 1924 marked the first German antiques. So yeah, again, there is this kind of very popular party sect in the Nazis make a lot of hay of it. 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 is kind of falling

for their trap, because 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 that would be a problem was, it sounds like. Well, yeah, it peaked around, I think, 22, 23. It starts to decline in 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 my mainstream in Germany. And the fact that the Nazis kind of blow it up into being Berlin is the sin, the hum of... 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 was you, huh?

Well, no, I didn't break... I didn't see shit. You're still going over your words. But that's kind of how drug use in Berlin gets painted 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. That's buzz words.

It's like Freud. Yeah. 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 prose 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 at 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 the Teutonic German idea that we are the bearers of the eternal legacy of our ancestors, and that accordingly our body belongs to the Klan and the people. SS Helpsturmführer, criminal commissar Erwin Kosmel, 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 rumored to be often extraordinarily addicted to morphine. But he rather conveniently ignores the fact that, again, in focusing on this, and those are all things the Nazis said.

They definitely, again, harped on Jewish drug use and the scourge of drug addiction and how it has Jewish origins. But immediately before the Nazi seizure of power, the Reich Health Minister 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 1927, drug use, 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 Oler'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 while the central drug law in the Third Reich was a holdover from Weimar 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 in 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 Third Reich disagree with, called, you can find, 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 put in concentration camps in an organized way. And I want to quote from 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, 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 anyway, that's a little bit of a rant on this book, but I think it's important to kind of get this sort of stuff right. And when you actually do. It could be more important to get this stuff right. Yeah, yeah. And Levy is clear that he cannot find, and Levy is a guy who studies specifically third

right policies on like drug policies. His conclusion is that there's no evidence that, again, and the Nazis talked a lot about racial hygiene, about how drug use, you know, was a racial problem. But there's no evidence, according to Levy, that Nazi drug policy was impacted by their ideas on racial hygiene. 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 Levy knows his shit on this better than Oler does.

So making drug consumption a crime was really our thing. Oh yeah, 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. Herman Gehrig was a drug addicted veteran. And the trench generation were idolized, they were nearly worshiped 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 Kaiser's 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 Levy 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 penal code since its inception. And obviously, that's not a perfect way to do things either, being like, well you raped somebody, you beat the shit out of somebody, but you were drunk, so get out of here. They found a dime bag of, you know, high sativa arms. But it is, there is also an element of that that's good, which is that like, well, yeah, drug addiction should be treated as a health problem rather than a criminal problem. Thank you, Hunter Biden, for progressing our president on this issue.

Yeah, for progressing our understanding of that. Smoked enough crack to move the US forward on drug policy. It's really doing your country of service, and I mean that actually sincerely. You know who else is doing our country of service, Carolina? Brand? Brand? The Cina Loa Cartel. Producers are the finest cocaine available in the world for years.

I literally never thought I would miss out on it until this exact episode. No, no, we are peers Cina Loa these days, so curl up with a big fat bag of cocaine and listen to a podcast while sweating heavily. Make a pipe out of your mother's vase. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. Make a pipe out of anything. ABP baby, always be piping.

It's my motto. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back! 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 Morel. In 1999, psychiatrist Fritz Redlich published a book titled, Hitler, Diagnosis of a Destructive Prophet.

It was an attempt to actually answer the question, what the fuck was going on with that dude, with his in like a medical way, with as much scientific rigour, yeah, what was going on with that guy? Yeah, in as much of like a scientific way as you could for a patient who's 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 Fuhrer's health. Redlich's book relied heavily upon Dr. Theodore Morel'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 is known to have declined considerably starting in 1941. Redlich cited a host of ailments, including tinnitus, severe headaches, dizziness, impaired vision, abdominal spasms, impairments in 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, Morel prescribed for Hitler a cocktail of medications that included opiates, morphine, oxycodone, barbiturates, cocaine, amphetamines, and bromides. In the end, Redlich drew a conclusion that has been 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 diagnosis, probably the most popular and thorough look at Morel and Hitler's drug use prior to Oler's work. And like Oler's work, Redlich'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 criticized Redlich for the fact that his emphasis on the fear of drug abuse came close to excusing Hitler's crimes, which you obviously never

want to do. And the same criticism is made of Blitz, 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 Oler's work, which is his portrait of Dr. Morel and the relationship Hitler had with his primary physician. Here's how Oler introduces Morel. Quote, The word Jew was smeared on the plaque of a doctor's surgery on Beiruthrsdrasse in Berlin's 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 11-1 and 5-7, apart from Saturday afternoon. The overweight bald Dr. Theodore Morel reacted to the attack in a way that was as typical as it was wretched. He quickly joined the Nazi party to defuse further hostilities of that kind. Morel was not a Jew. The essay had wrongly suspected him of being one because of his dark complexion.

After he had registered as a party member, Morel's practice became even more successful. It expanded and moved into the lavish rooms of a 19th century building on the corner of Kirfürstendam and Fasanenstrasse. Now Morel was not at all unique in joining the Nazi party to avoid getting accused of being Jewish. Very common. He was one of, and again, not just for that reason, he was one of hundreds of thousands of German professionals who were 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 fucking 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, STDs 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? Vitamin's still a pretty new concept that there's like, there's these things that if you don't get enough of them, your body stops working. Yeah. So there was an idea among and we start to realize like, oh shit, 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 a good efficiency, like it's fucking 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 shitloads 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. It also reminds me of being 13 and having to eat a bunch of nuts. Yes. Yeah. Let's see what happens. Exactly. 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. Shout out to vitamin C. Shout out to vitamin C. So obviously vitamin injections can be powerful medicine and save people's lives in certain circumstances. Right?

Incredible potential for malnourished people and in people with certain disorders. And also like there are certain vitamin shots, like if you're hungover and shit, you'll be like, oh fuck, 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 oil 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 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 this thing called Vitamolton, which was sold 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 too. We'll talk about it. And again, because vitamins don't have a huge impact on people who are already well nourished,

Morrell, it points would make the decision to mix real drugs and hormones into his vitamin shots. Why not? Because like, yeah, fuck, you want him to like feel something immediately, right? Put a little amphetamine in there, you know? That's what this says. Put a little bit of fucking, put some fucking testosterone in there, you know? So he was doping people, it wasn't just vitamins, it was often like steroids or amphetamines.

And eventually like a shitloaded, like everything he could get at caffeine a lot of the time, he would shoot caffeine in, you know, it's kind of, because again, if you're this guy, if someone's well nourished, just most vitamin shots, they're not going to 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 shit, like I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm powerful now. It's a smart con move. It's a smart telling someone that you are giving them vitamins, but really are 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 meth and more detail later, but the point is Morel's only true talent as 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 OGs 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. Morel. I adopted from the States. Am I right?

Oh yeah, the eugenics and stuff. Sure. I mean, a decent amount of this was. And Morel'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 Fuhrer'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. Morel knew a lot about STDs 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 and 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 Blitzt, quote, yeah, Hitler's weird eater, Hitler, who had heard a great many

good things about the jovial Morel, thanked him before dinner for treating his old comrade and regretted not having met the doctor before, perhaps then his chauffeur, who had died of meningitis a few months earlier, would have still been alive. Morel reacted nervously for the compliment, and barely spoke during the spaghetti dinner. The constantly sweating doctor 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 pricked 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. Morel 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 Berghof, his mountain retreat in the Ober Salzburg near Berchtesgaden. There a few days later, during a private conversation, the dictator frankly admitted to Morel 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. Morel 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 Hendrik Eberl and physician Hans Joachim Neumann attempted to diagnose the fear's physical maladies, and I'm going to quote from the 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 in medical records of progressive coronary sclerosis and high blood pressure. Most prominently, however, Neumann and Eberl 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 this is his main complaint. He has this horrific debilitating gas pain. His gas is so bad that 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 Iraq and Afghanistan earlier in those wars, before there was as much infrastructure on the US side, nearly all of them have some

sort of IBS. There's something you get when you're in trenches, the water's dirty and stuff. There's a number of things that are probably going on with Hitler. But it is likely right that he had something going wrong with his bacterial flora, perhaps because of his injuries during the war or something. But we now know that like 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 Morel prescribed his leader something called mutaflora. This was a gut bacteria supplement. It had actually been crafted from the intestinal flora of a German soldier who'd been sent to the Balkans during World War I, and had been the only guy in his unit not to get horrible stomach issues. And that's actually a really good medical thing, is like, well, that guy seems like, let's get the shit out of his guts and give it to other people. And mutaflora 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 Morel a house and made him his personal physician. But Morel wasn't a gut bacteria specialist.

He was a vitamin man. He 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 in a time when medicine wasn't very good. So Morel 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 going without sleep and working like a crazy person, and you were injured and suffered permanent damage in a war.

You're tired because you need these vitamin injections that are also full of caffeine, or sometimes amphetamines. So he was basically 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 get you hyped up. Get you going, yeah. Yeah. And Morel starts giving Hitler shots, and he never stops until the very end of the war.

And he would put a wide variety of substances into the Nazi leader's 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-fueled energy, probably caffeine also a lot of the time. Morel'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 shot number, whatever.

And it's like, okay, well, what the fuck 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 Morel gave him an injection of something that is said to have cured him immediately. Like, who knows what the fuck he was shooting into the guy.

Are you sure he had a lip sync? Yeah. They could tell Hitler to lip sync. Yeah. Soon, Morel 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. Morel well, making him a wealthy man. In 1938, he gave his doctor an honored professorship. For his part, Morel kept looking for new substances to shoot into Hitler's body. The 1936 Olympics had seen the advent of the use of benzadrine, which is classic speed. When your parents talk about doing speed in the 70s, that's binnies, baby. Yeah. Oh, you can still get it today.

If you get a benzadrex inhaler, you make it a little allergy inhaler, you just make sure that they say benzadrine on them. You pop them open, you take the little cotton cloth out, throw it in a water bottle, you're good to go. You'll kill it. Allegedly. Top dance. Allegedly.

Yeah. So yeah, benzadrine gets big after the 36 Olympics, and a German pharmaceutical company makes a note of this. They're like, well, it 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 methyl amphetamine.

Oh. That's the good shit. The good shit. Protect your teeth from it. That's the good shit. Yeah, baby. Ah, meth, speaking of drugs with no downsides. So in short order, Timler was producing methamphetamine pills as an over-the-counter medication

under the brand named Purvitin. And sales started in the winter of 1937, and the drug use was, and the drug was immediately popular among the young Third Reich users, and the drug was immediately popular in the young Third Reich. Soon, Timler was even selling boxes of meth spiked chocolate. They bragged that their wonder drug was good for, quote, reawakening joy in the despondent, and that fragility in women can be easily influenced with Purvitin 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. What you're dating is probably missing is meth. Is meth. Oh, when it's all legal, I hope to be an ad man for the methamphetamine industry. It's so easy to sell. It can help. It can help with chemistry. Yeah.

Yeah. It can help. It can help. It can help. Fight faster on meth. You know? Exactly. Exactly.

So I'm going to continue to read from Timler's ads for Purvitin. The treatment technique is as simple as can be imagined. Four half tablets every day, long before bedtime, ten days a month for three months. This will achieve excellent results by increasing women's libido and sexual power. Take meth every day to fuck better. Meth. I'm almost positive would not help me get laid. I mean, 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. I was like, I need to go home and apologize to him. The next time I saw him, I was like, hey, John, I'm so sorry about that. 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? Smoked weed together. I was like, I've got to leave again. So sorry. And that was the end of our short loved relationship. So I feel like if 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 fuckload of crystal.

Okay. Only if they put it in chocolate and I want them in those little Roche ones. Roche chocolates. I would like one. There's like this, this chocolate cherries, little cherry in the middle of the chocolate thing. Yeah, that kind of texture with a little rock of crystal meth right in the middle. Right in the middle.

That's nice. Yeah. Yeah. The surprise or maybe like those little eggs they make. Oh yeah. Cadbury. Oh, I was thinking Cadbury eggs. Instead of like building a toy inside, you, you smoke meth, just a fuckload of meth filled

Cadbury eggs. God, that would be rad allegedly. So methamphetamine was even useful in treating drug addicts. But again, this is according to the company selling meth. They advised. That's a really good tote bag. They advised people withdrawing from alcohol, cocaine or heroin to take a little meth to help them get over the shakes.

Meth was like, oh, I'm trying to get off of heroin. You know, it'll clean you up. A little bit of methamphetamine. Can you pronounce this? Yeah. Yeah. Then you're ready to take it. Oh yeah.

Cocaine's bad stuff. Take this meth. Clean you right 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, 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 shirkers, malingerers, defeatists and winers into the Nazi fold and turning them into productive, obedient citizens. They were saying like meth will help turn you into a good Nazi. You'll be able to work if you're lazy cause you'll be on meth. One pharmacologist, and again, that's also, you could draw a line to like why they were advertising that it makes women want to fuck is like, well, it's all about breeding, right?

Like meth is the drug that makes you, helps you work in a factory or get laid 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. One pharmacologist, Felix Hofner called prescribing perviton 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 Morrell first gave Hitler methamphetamine. The bad doctor had often gave given like, 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, but potentially in the late 1930s, as he'd often complained of a lack of energy. And by 1938, 1939, perviton was incredibly popular among German civilians.

So the fact that Hitler's taking amphetamines during this period of time was not odd. It wasn't something unique to him. It was something that made him very much normal among like the German working class in this period. That said, it was not something that was widely publicized. Hitler's reputation was 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 Steven Snelters and Toin 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 argued that the evidence shows strong demand pressures for the drug from consumers. In clinical practice, the drug was first used to treat psychological inhibition and endogenous depression and to augment what was referred to as the will to get healthy. Perviton quickly moved from clinical to general practice and was prescribed fairly commonly for employees, workers, and housewives. In fact, a praline chocolate with 14 milligrams of perviton 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 work schedules, like the production they're trying to do. To go on dates. Meth is in a way the dictator, you know, to go on dates to make enough babies. And cry guys.

And this is one of those things where I don't think Euler 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 rather than put it in the context of like, no, no, no, all of the Nazis were on a fuckload of speed and that is relevant and it impacted their behavior and impacted history in a significant way. But it's not that like Hitler was on meth and made crazy decisions. It was that the whole Third Reich was in the late thirties and early forties very methamphetamine dependent and 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 Morel to dose another head of state, Czech President Emil Haša, 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 successfully invaded Czechoslovakia. They were kind of bluffing here. Haša was ill when he attended a state visit to the Reich Chancellery where Hitler demanded he order the surrender of Czech troops. Haša suffered a heart attack which rendered him unable to function. And I'm going to quote from Blitz here next.

Hitler urgently summoned Morel, who hurried along with his case in his syringes and injected the unconscious foreign guest with such a stimulating medication that Haša 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, Haša sat the powerless head of the protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to which parts of his country had been reduced, remaining Morel's loyal patient.

In that respect, pharmacology worked as a way of continuing politics by other means. This reminds me a lot of a girl in New York who once went down a k-hole and everyone was worried that she was going unconscious until Carly Rae Jemson's 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 that. Now the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia pretty much went off perfectly for Hitler, but his next goal, the conquest of Poland, was going to require actual war stuff.

The Fuhrer 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 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 Aufdrugstaktik, and it was heavily, we'll talk about this

a bit more later, but it was heavily based upon allowing a lot of unit autonomy. There's this like myth that the Nazi soldiers were these like automatons who followed orders unquestioningly. The reason why the Blitzkrieg worked is that individual small unit leaders were given a degree of personal discretion 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 Blitzkrieg was also crucially relied on the fact that the Germans had built

up a significant amount of armored cars, tanks, 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 Purvetin was just what the doctor general ordered. From a write up in Time magazine, quote, Dr. Otto F. Ronck, director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, had high hopes that Purvetin 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, Ronck believed that Purvetin would be an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad.

We may grasp what far-reaching military significance it would have if we managed to remove the natural tiredness using medical methods. Ronck himself was a daily user, as detailed in his wartime medical diary and letters. Quote, with Purvetin, you can go on working for 36 to 50 hours without feeling any noticeable fatigue. This allowed Ronck 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 again, primary sponsor of the show, Methamphetamine, under a bridge near you. In Purvetin. You can cook it in your bathtub if you really want, or wherever. That's so sad. It's safe. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah, so we're going to talk more about all of this in part two, but that's going to do

it for us in part one. Carolina, how are you feeling? Has this changed your mind on Methadol? Okay, 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 choc vitamin C, coffee, 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.

That's so true. That's so true. That's so true. Carolina, do you have anything other than Methamphetamine you want to 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 meth and going on a blind date. Literally, life 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 shitload of meth? Yeah, come on, Sophie. Come on, Sophie. I'm not going to answer this question, but off the record, we're absolutely going to

do some meth. Excellent. All right. Good news, everybody. Well, this has been behind the bastards, Methamphetamine is actually based edition. Listen, it could happen here. It's now daily and it's on the same podcast app you're listening to. Maybe if I was right.

Stop lobbying for this. Stop it. That's the episode. Bye-bye. All right. That's the episode. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. According to Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.