Dan Snow's History Hit - Nazis, the CIA & Psychedelics

Episode Date: April 6, 2024

This is the untold story of how Nazi experiments with psychedelics influenced CIA research and the War on Drugs. From covert mind control programs to experiments with 'truth serums', we trace the connection between the Third Reich's sinister scientific experiments and later US drug policy.To explain this wild post-war history, Dan is joined by the bestselling historian Norman Ohler, author of 'Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age'.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Berlin, the capital of the Reich, was pulverised.

capital of the Reich, was pulverized. Months and months of Allied bombing had turned much of its finest buildings into rubble, and intense street fighting there in the closing days of the war had completed the task. Tens of thousands of its citizens had been killed, and the survivors now lived among the ruins trying to eke out their lives. They were occupied. Many of the women had been subjected to grotesque levels of sexual assault by the Soviet army as it entered the city. And perhaps not surprisingly in that circumstance, drug use had become completely rampant. The use of cocaine, opiates, amphetamines had been very, very common in Nazi Germany, both among the apparitionals of the Nazi party, but also used by soldiers to give themselves more energy to keep going, and it had filtered down to the civilian population in general.

Now, the American occupiers of Berlin seem to have got two slightly contrasting attitudes to this. First of all, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics tried to clean up the city. They did not want Germans using these drugs, and indeed it became a kind of testbed for the war on drugs as it was rolled out. But the Americans also had an interest in the Nazi drug programs, just as the British took submarine scientists back to Britain to try and harvest their research and ensure that Britain remained at the cutting edge of submarine warfare. And Americans famously recruited wholesale German rocket scientists for their ballistics and space programs. So also was German drugs research taken back to the States. And that's not all that was taken back. The entire global supply of LSD

at one stage was taken back to the States as well, as you will hear. Here on the podcast talking to me about this is the very brilliant Norman Oller. He was the author of the New York Times bestseller Blitz about those German troops using amphetamines during World War II and about Hitler's own drugs use. He has written another book called Tripped Nazi Germany, the CIA in the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. It draws a link between the emergence of LSD, psychedelic drugs, in Switzerland and Germany just before and during the Second World War, and how the Americans decided to continue in many ways the Nazi German research into LSD, seeing if it could have a useful military role.

This is a bizarre story, as you might expect, with anything involving LSD. So with that, let's get into it. Enjoy. go to war with one another again. And liftoff, and the shuttle has cleared the tower. Norman, good to have you back on the podcast, buddy. I'm very happy to be back, Dan. Tell me about Berlin at the end of World War II. I mean, it's actually impossible to imagine, I think, a worse situation with the people living there. Just give me a sense of what it was like. Well, I mean, Berlin is famous for being a city of chaos and the city of experiments and the city where nothing is ever certain and you don't know what adventure you're going to run into when you

leave the house. And after the destruction, the utter destruction of World War II, this was Berlin at its most extreme. So this was a Berlin where people had no security, many, not even a roof over their heads. There was no government. Crime was everywhere. Normal people, so-called normal people, started to become criminals just to survive. were actually everywhere because, as we know, the Wehrmacht, the German army, had had a lot of drugs and suddenly the army was gone, but the drugs were still there. So these drugs appeared at the black markets. And the black markets were actually the place where people got everything they needed. So shopping was done in dingy places, these black markets that popped up everywhere in the city. And this led to a situation that especially the American occupying forces did not like at all. And presumably people took drugs because of the trauma they'd suffered. There'd been thousands killed in bombing. There'd been sexual assault, returning veterans. I mean,

it's just impossible to even enumerate the various causes of the kind of mental health crisis that must have been going on. It was probably the biggest mental health crisis that the planet so far has experienced. People probably unconsciously were looking for remedies in order to deal with all of this. And also in order to gain some kind of energy to rebuild everything. Because when Berlin was bombed, there was this American agent. He said that this would take decades to rebuild, but actually it was rebuilt quite quickly because people had no other choice than to rebuild and form a new society. And for that, they swallowed everything that they could get their hands on.

It was described as a tempest in a teapot by these Americans that you identified. Tell me about them. Well, there was one officer in particular that I found interesting. His name is Arthur Giuliani, and he was the narcotics officer of the United States in Berlin. And he had a very specific job, and his job was to bring order into the chaotic drug scene. And the drug scene was not really of concern to the other occupying forces, the French, the British, and the Russians. But the Americans were really keen on getting this drug situation in Berlin in order because the boss of this Giuliani, his name was Harry J. Anslinger, he was the head of the Federal Bureau

of Narcotics in Washington, D.C. He wanted to use Berlin as an example how drug policies should be organized globally, how prohibition of drugs, which was a new thing at the time, should be installed everywhere in the world. And Berlin was his experimentation ground, so to say. Interesting. So there would be a proving ground here for the war on drugs. Exactly. The war on drugs was not started by Nixon in the 70s, but it was actually started by this Harry J. Anslinger in the 30s. It was a strictly American phenomenon in the 30s, but he wanted to export this globally through the United Nations. And he wanted to show to the newly formed United Nations how it was done in Berlin and how this prohibition of all drugs then should be implemented

worldwide, which was a completely radical idea that many people found completely incredible or not necessary or never really concerned themselves with it. So in a way, Anslinger kind of invented the whole craze against drugs. And Berlin was the grounds where he would prove how it was supposed to be done. Did they enjoy any success there? What was the effect of this decision? Well, the other Allied powers were not so interested in it. For example, Giuliani continued to complain about the French who just didn't care about drugs, this thing that was so important to the Americans, the French really were totally different too. The Russians basically always said no to everything the Americans suggested.

So there was already a conflict going on that would very soon actually lead into the Cold War. So we can actually see also how differences in drug policy also feed into this Cold War discourse that would emerge from Berlin and would capture the world until the Berlin Wall fell many decades later. But the Americans were very, like that was for them a priority. Did they achieve any success in their own terms? in their own terms? Well, they did in a way because the other allied forces, since they didn't care so much, allowed the American prohibitionist approach to gain more and more grounds. Only the Russians, as I said, resisted. And then Anslinger brought this to the UN and said, look, here we have a chaotic situation, and only by implementing a strong anti-drug policy can we actually handle the issue and the topic of drugs,

because these are very potent substances and they can be abused with it. It's very hard as a government to kind of speak against this. The Russians did this out of ideological reasons, but most governments then in the UN, they kind of agreed with the Americans. They kind of agreed, oh yeah, drugs must be bad because people get addicted and people can die from drugs.

What they tried in Berlin in 1945 and 46 then definitely had effects within the UN and then more and more global drug policies were being formed. So you could say, yes, that the global ban on drugs that the United States was then able to impose through the United Nations started in Berlin. And therefore, Giuliani's work as the narcotics officer was in some way quite successful. But did he stop anyone taking drugs? Well, we also know that the war on drugs doesn't stop basically anybody from taking drugs. That's the problem with the war on drugs, that it actually is very ineffective.

But this was unclear at the time. I mean, Anstinger's dream was that at one point there would be no illegal drugs anywhere on the planet. If we look around us today, we see that this is not the case. That's why more and more governments are now looking at legalization of those substances. For example, Germany legalized cannabis on April 1st this year, the first big country in Europe to do so. And in America, there's also legalization of certain substances, cannabis or psilocybin in certain states. So the war on drugs is basically lost. So legalization of certain substances, cannabis, psilocybin in certain states. So the war on drugs is basically lost. It created full prisons, full pockets of illegal drug producers, and empty pockets of the states

because they cannot tax these substances. So the money goes all to criminals. And the drugs on the market that people take are not regulated. So no one really knows what is inside, for example, an MDMA tablet. While if MDMA was a legal substance, like it will be probably in the United States, the FDA is looking at approving MDMA this year. Then you would know exactly what you're taking and doctors could advise people how to take it.

And that would certainly decrease the dangers of these drugs. So the Wuhan drugs actually increased the danger for consumers. What's interesting from your work is that whilst the Americans were trying to follow a kind of policy of prohibition, there was also quite an active academic or government interest in the effects of drugs on humans, right? They realized the Nazis had developed drugs programs. They were quite interested in that research. A new type of drugs came into existence in the mid and late 40s. And those were the psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, late 40s, and those were the psychedelic drugs, especially LSD, which was invented by a Swiss pharmaceutical company, Sandoz.

And they also saw this mental health crisis that we talked about before as being a crisis that would need to be addressed with new medicines. By chance, they had found this molecule, LSD, lysergic acid, diethylamide, that was acting very strong on the mind. And it gave the company a lot of hope that this might be like a wonder medicine. So they tried to develop this into a pharmaceutical product that might potentially be beneficial to people around the world. But then their Swiss CEO, Arthur Stoll, who was friends with Richard Kuhl, who was the leading Nazi biochemist, made the mistake to also inform this Richard Kuhl,

this Nazi biochemist of LSD. And then the Nazis became interested in LSD and made experiments with it. And the Dachau concentration camp together with mescaline, another hallucinogenic or psychedelic drug. And later when the Americans liberated Dachau concentration camp together with mescaline, another hallucinogenic or psychedelic drug. And later when the Americans liberated Dachau concentration camp and liberated Germany from the Nazis, they also found these records and suddenly became very interested. So the American military became very interested in the psychedelics because the Nazis were interested in psychedelics. And the Americans thought that everything the Nazis were interested in might be of potential interest to them. So LSD suddenly became a potential weapon in the eyes of the American military and then American intelligence. And that prevented LSD from going its planned by Sandoz, the company planned way to become a product that anyone could buy in the pharmacy. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We're talking about LSD. More coming up. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering

surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. So why were the Nazis and then the Americans, what did they want?

Were they interested in where the science led or was there a particular job that they thought that LSD and some hallucinogens might do? Well, the National Socialism was a paranoid ideology, so it was always about who belongs to us and who is the enemy. The Nazis were always trying to improve their interrogation techniques, for example, especially after the attack on Hitler's knife on July 20th, 1944, Operation Valkyrie. They were trying to figure out who was a traitor within the army and who was on the Nazi side.

And it's quite difficult, actually, to find that out. And it's quite difficult, actually, to find that out. Even torture didn't give the Nazis what they desired, which was an already looking for the so-called truth drug. I mean, after July 20th, that intensified, but the Nazis also before were already looking for this thing called truth drug. He thought that maybe LSD is that truth drug. Maybe you can give someone LSD in an interrogation without telling that person. And then you could, through asking the right questions,

kind of unlock all the secrets in a prisoner or in a person that you interrogate. So this kind of secret service fantasy to extract all secrets from another person was fascinating to the Nazis and then became very fascinating to the American intelligence, to the newly formed CIA, because when the CIA was formed in 47, that was really the beginning of the Cold War. The Cold War had already begun and they were looking for ways to manipulate, for example, Russian prisoners they had caught. So LSD, in their eyes, was not a drug to heal people, but was a drug to manipulate people, potentially. people, but was a drug to manipulate people, potentially.

And then tell me about this wild CIA program that kind of grows out of this, in which they buy the entire world supply of LSD at one point. This is growing out, I suppose, of the Nazi LSD program, as surely as the American space program grew out of the Nazi V-weapons project. out of the Nazi V-weapons project? Well, within the CIA, which was secret in itself, a secret program was created. MK-Ultra was its name.

Even the people who worked at the CIA didn't know about MK-Ultra. Its head was a guy called Sidney Gottlieb. And Gottlieb became extremely interested in LSD. He thought that this could be the wonder weapon that would win the Cold War against the Soviet Union. And he was quite nervous that a Swiss company, like a company from a neutral country like Switzerland, was producing this potentially powerful medicine slash weapon.

So he flew to Basel, where the headquarters of Sandoz is, and he met with the CEO. I was actually in the headquarters of Sandoz is and he met with the CEO. I was actually in the archives at Sandoz, which today is Novartis, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, because I wanted to see the record of that meeting. But that record wasn't shown to me, but there is records that had been seen by other historians. then Gottlieb basically bought all the supplies that Sandoz had ever produced of LSD because he wanted to make sure that no LSD would travel into the Soviet Union. He had a suitcase with him filled with 200,000 US dollars in cash so he could pay immediately. And then with the world supply of LSD, probably in that same suitcase when he traveled back, he set up this MKUltra program, which was at the time the most extensive program to examine and manipulate the human mind through the means of this psychedelic drug, LSD.

Gottlieb also took it himself in the beginning just to see what LSD is all about. And he gave it to colleagues. Some of them knew what they were getting, others, he just slipped LSD into the coffee and in the office in the morning, and then CIA officers suddenly were high on LSD. And he observed how they would react, would they talk more, maybe reveal secrets. So LSD was really, you could say, abused by MKUltra, by Sidney Gottlieb, by the CIA. And that prevented the drug for a long time to be examined for its benefits because it was only examined for how it could derange a person or how it could be used against people, not for people. And it was tested not just on CIA people,

but on criminals, inmates of prisons, people in hospitals, often without them having any idea that they were being used as guinea pigs. Well, Gottlieb set up a program in which he involved dozens of American universities. And in order that these universities didn't subject to being kind of tools of the American secret intelligence service. He set up foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation or used existing foundations, gave money to the foundations, and then the foundations would sponsor tests and experiments in American universities. And all these results from all these universities that didn't really actually know that they were working for the CIA landed on his desk.

And he designed the questions or the tasks for all these studies and collected all the information. There were questions like, could you make someone insecure in an interrogation by unwittingly administering LSD. Could you lower someone's self-esteem? Could you destroy the psyche of a person? Could you install fear in someone? So all these questions were being examined by American universities in the early 50s in the name of MP Ultra.

Wow. And this eventually came to an end how was this eventually shut down well godly at one point realized that lsd is not a tool that you can use to manipulate people because lsd has quite a different effect on the brain and it took scientists quite a long time until they found out what actually happens in the brain when a person takes LSD. This was at first discovered in the early 90s in Zurich at the University in Zurich, what actually happens in the brain. But Gottlieb already saw that you can't really control someone with LSD. But when you give someone LSD, that actually might set that person free and that person might have creative ideas

and creative thoughts. That's why John Lennon at one point said that we have to thank the CIA for giving us LSD because they helped us develop our creativity. One of the guinea pigs of the MP Altra program, for example, was the writer Ken Kesey, who on LSD then developed his novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, became a world bestseller and then enabled him to buy a farm south of San Francisco where he had huge LSD gatherings.

And then he drove around in a bus and handed out LSD. So Gottlieb, in a way, achieved the opposite of what he wanted to achieve. what he wanted to achieve. And at one point in the early 60s, LSD was the big rave in the United States and it fueled the anti-Vietnam War movement, the peace movement, and it played a significant role in the counterculture revolution of the 60s,

in the Summer of Love in San Francisco, etc. It's wild, the through line that runs from the Nazis experimenting with LSD through to the CIA, through to this. It's embraced by counterculture. It's just an extraordinary story. I mean, this is actually what no one has ever uncovered, that LSD has a Nazi history, because that sounds so incredible in a way, because we all think of LSD as like this hippie drug that was actually tainted by the Nazi sinister research in Dachau, that that had effects on the later career of this little molecule.

So yeah, let's come back to that. The chemists inventing it didn't see it as having this nefarious purpose at all. They'd have been surprised by the direction in which the Nazis and the CIA, I guess, took it in, right? At the very dawn of the era of this hallucinogen, what did they think it might be able to deliver? Well, the guy who actually discovered it, his name is Albert Hoffmann. He was like a normal square Swiss chemist who also served in the Swiss army, of course, and probably never had an unusual thought in his head except, you know, very efficient thoughts about how to develop new medicines for his company. And these medicines that Sandoz was developing, they all came from this fungus called ergot, which is a fungus that grows on rye and is actually

highly poisonous. But Sandoz was able to extract the alkaloids from this fungus. The alkaloid is called ergotermin. And with this ergotermin, they made very potent medicines like against migraine. They made a medicine that was good for women when they were in labor. So very practical things that actually made the company a lot of money. And then suddenly one of these ergot compounds, lysergic acid, the aplomide, had these completely different effects. And Hofmann had no idea. He ingested some of it involuntarily by chance because LSD is potent in such small quantities.

So somehow some LSD got into his bloodstream while he was handling the substance. And he started to see different colors in his lab. And then his assistant came and he thought this assistant looked like an ancient person. He was tripping basically without knowing that tripping existed. So he became frightened in the beginning, but then he became also very interested and he started something that today is known as microdosing. He ingested very, very small quantities of LSD and just tried to feel like what is happening with him. And his brain was suddenly stimulated and he had these different thoughts. And he saw like personal problems that he had that he never thought about that they

were bothering him. Suddenly he could look at them. And so he thought maybe this is really a totally new type of medicine that could actually heal people from diseases of the mind, from psychosis, from trauma, from fear. So he became very, very interested in LSD and actually stayed interested until the end of his life. He died with 102 years, not recently, but only a few years ago, actually. He died and he was still taking LSD in high age. And he fought his whole life against the prohibition of LSD

because he was totally convinced that it is a medicine that could help people. And only recently, research has been allowed again in the United States, in the UK, in Europe. Universities have found out. Also, startups that try to develop new medicines out of these psychedelics, especially out of LSD and psilocybin from magic mushrooms, have found out that it is helpful against dementia, against depression, and against traumatic diseases and trauma therapy. So fields where conventional medicines have problems delivering can be now tackled with these psychedelics exactly like Albert Hoffman already envisioned in the early 50s.

Wow, that's quite the journey that that little drug has been on. That's crazy. Norman Ola, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Tell me what the book is called. The title of the book is Tripped, because LSD also kind of tripped over itself, or tripped over the American government. And only now we can somehow get a more scientific look at the drug by understanding its history. And maybe, you know, its story is not over yet, but there will be the next chapter soon. Sounds like the story is only at the beginning.

Well, thank you very much indeed for coming back on the podcast. Always a pleasure. Thank you, Dan. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.