Blitzed Drugs in the Third Reich

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES, by Dan Egan. (Norton, $17.95.) Climate change, invasive species and growing human populations are all imperiling the largest freshwater system in the world, which is also the source of drinking water for millions. Despite a looming ecological and public health crisis, Egan, a reporter at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who has covered the Great Lakes for years, offers measured hope - and a set of solutions. MARLENA, by Julie Buntin. (Picador, $16.) After spending her teenage years in rural northern Michigan, Cat reflects some time later on a luminous young friendship cut short. Marlena ushers Cat into a thrilling adolescent world, and the two forge an easy, intimate bond; a year later, Marlena is dead, and Cat's grief prompts her to re-examine the relationship's lasting consequences. WHAT THE F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, by Benjamin K. Bergen. (Basic, $16.99.) A delightful investigation of profanity dabbles in language theory and neuroscience. As our reviewer, Josh Lambert, put it: "What seems like a book about language taboos turns out to be a cognitive scientist's sneaky - charming, consistently engrossing - introduction to linguistics." DEFECTORS, by Joseph Kanon. (Washington Square Press, $17.) It's 1961, and Frank, a former C.I.A. operative, has been living in Moscow with his wife for years after defecting from the United States. He's been at work on a memoir, hoping that his brother, Simon, a New York publisher, will print the manuscript. His brother's defection upended Simon's life, and Simon is skeptical of Frank's motives. But the opportunity to understand Frank's reasons for leaving - and learn about life under Soviet rule - proves irresistible. BLITZED: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler. (Mariner, $15.99.) Despite the Nazis' all-out war on drug use, virtually everyone, from housewives to the Führer, was drugged up. A low-dose methamphetamine comparable to crystal meth, Pervitin, became a go-to cure for everything from a flagging sex drive to depression, and fueled many Nazi battlefield campaigns. Ohler's account is full of rich character studies. WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. (Riverhead, $16.) Nigeria's past, present and future converge in these stories, where the relationships between mothers and daughters often play a central role; many stories linger under the specter of war. Our reviewer, Marina Warner, praised the collection, calling Arimah "a witty, oblique and mischievous storyteller."

There is no shortage of books explaining the rise and reign of the Third Reich in mid-20th-century Germany. Economic devastation, revitalized xenophobia, and cult-like nationalism are most often cited as the primary contributing factors. Do these tell the whole story? Journalist Ohler suggests an additional element that aided German troops, government officials, and even Adolf Hitler himself-drugs. The author tells the story of Nazi-era drug use from both the perspective of members of the military and Hitler himself. Government sanctioned and distributed medication, primarily a German-developed drug called Pervitin (a form of methamphetamine), sustained the German war machine. Hitler's personal physician during the war years, Theodor Morell, is given extensive coverage. Although Morell is not unknown to Nazi history, descriptions of his medicating the Führer here are new and fascinating. Stories of drug use among German soldiers are culled from old letters, anecdotes, and interviews with veterans. This book is well translated from the original German. VERDICT Ohler paints a picture of the Nazi era that will enthrall World War II history buffs and all nonfiction readers alike.-Brett Rohlwing, Milwaukee P.L. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An intense chronicle of "systematic drug abuse" in Nazi Germany.Although the use of opiates and other drugs was pervasive in the Weimar Republic of the 1920s, the Nazis ostensibly opposed them, offering "ideological salvation" instead, writes German journalist Ohler in this nonfiction debut. In fact, the Third Reich depended heavily on drugs, notably cocaine, heroin, morphine, and methamphetamines, to sustain the fearless blitzkrieg attacks of its advancing armies and to keep Adolf Hitler in a euphoric, delusional state. Drawing on archival research in Germany and the United States, the author crafts a vivid, highly readable account of drug use run amok. He describes systematized drug tests conducted by Dr. Otto F. Ranke, a defense physiologist, who waged war on exhaustion with Pervitin, an early version of crystal meth. The fierce Nazi invasion of France, lasting three days and nights without sleep, was made possible by use of Pervitin: "It kept you awake, mercilessly," recalls a former Nazi medical officer. Relying heavily on the diaries of Dr. Theodor Morell, Hitler's personal physician (Hermann Gring called him the "Reich Injection Master"), Ohler writes at length about Hitler's drug use throughout the war, which began with a "power injection" of glucose and vitamins before big speeches, then escalated to cocktails of hormones, steroids, and vitamins, and finally, in his last year, to the use of both cocaine and Eukodal, a designer opioid that even infamous heroin addict William Burroughs called "some truly awful shit." With Morell treating him daily, Hitler spent his last weeks in a fog of artificial euphoria and "stable in his delusion," and his veins had a junkie's track marks. Because of Allied bombing of manufacturing plants, supplies of the drugs favored by Hitler dried up, his health deteriorated, and he entered withdrawal. He would fire his doctor before committing suicide in 1945. Written with dramatic flair (Ohler has published several novels in Germany), this book adds significantly to our understanding of the Third Reich. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

1 Methamphetamine, the Volksdroge (1933-1938)     National Socialism was toxic, in the truest sense of the word. It gave the world a chemical legacy that still affects us today: a poison that refuses to disappear. On one hand, the Nazis presented themselves as clean-cut and enforced a strict, ideologically underpinned anti-drug policy with propagandistic pomp and draconian punishments. On the other hand, a particularly potent and perfidious substance became a popular product under Hitler. This drug carved out a great career for itself all over the German Reich, and later in the occupied countries of Europe. Under the trademark Pervitin, this little pill became the accepted Volksdroge, or "people's drug," and was on sale in every pharmacy. It wasn't until 1939 that its use was restricted by making Pervitin prescription-only, and the pill was not subjected to regulation until the Reich Opium Law in 1941.      Its active ingredient, methamphetamine, is now either illegal or strictly regulated, but with the number of consumers currently at over 100 million and rising, it counts today as our most popular poison. Produced in hidden labs by chemical amateurs, usually in adulterated form, this substance has come to be known as "crystal meth." Usually ingested nasally in high doses, the crystalline form of this so-called horror drug has gained unimaginable popularity all over Europe, with an exponential number of first-time users. This upper, with its dangerously powerful kick, is used as a party drug, for boosting performance in the workplace, in offices, even in parliaments and at universities. It banishes both sleep and hunger while promising euphoria, but in the form of crystal meth it is a potentially destructive and highly addictive substance. Hardly anyone knows about its original rise in Nazi Germany. Breaking Bad: The Drug Lab of the Reich Under a clean-swept summer sky stretching over both industrial zones and uniform housing, I take the suburban train southeast, to the edge of Berlin. In order to find the remnants of the Temmler Factory I have to get out at Adlershof, which nowadays calls itself "Germany's most modern technology park." Avoiding the campus, I strike off across an urban no man's land, skirting dilapidated factory buildings and passing through a wilderness of crumbling brick and rusty steel.     The Temmler Factory moved here in 1933. It was only one year later that Albert Mendel (the Jewish co-owner of the Tempelhof Chemicals Factory) was expropriated by the racist laws of the regime and Temmler took over his share, quickly expanding the business. These were good times for the German chemicals industry (or at least for its Aryan members), and pharmaceutical development boomed. Research was tirelessly conducted on new, pioneering substances that would ease the pain of modern humanity or sedate its troubles. Many of the resulting pharmacological innovations shape the way we consume medicine today.     By now the former Temmler Factory in Berlin-Johannisthal has fallen into ruin. There is no sign of its prosperous past, of a time when millions of Pervitin pills a week were being pressed. The grounds lie unused, a dead property. Crossing a deserted parking lot, I make my way through a wildly overgrown patch of forest and over a wall stuck with broken bits of glass designed to deter intruders. Between ferns and saplings stands the old wooden "witch's house" of the founder, Theodor Temmler, once the nucleus of the company. Behind dense alder bushes looms a forsaken brick building. A window is broken enough for me to be able to climb through, stumbling into a long dark corridor. Mildew and mold grow from the walls and ceilings. At the end of the hallway a door stands beckoning, half open, encrusted with flaking green paint. Beyond the door, daylight peers through two shattered, lead-framed industrial windows. An abandoned bird's nest hides in the corner. Chipped white tiles reach all the way to the high ceiling, which is furnished with circular air vents.     This is the former laboratory of Dr. Fritz Hauschild, head of pharmacology at Temmler from 1937 until 1941, who was in search of a new type of medicine, a "performance-enhancing drug." This is the former drug lab of the Third Reich. Here, in porcelain crucibles attached to pipes and glass coolers, the chemists boiled up their flawless matter. Lids rattled on pot-bellied flasks, orange steam released with a sharp hissing noise while emulsions crackled and white-gloved fingers made adjustments. Here methamphetamine was produced of a quality that even Walter White, the drug cook in the TV series Breaking Bad, which depicts meth as a symbol of our times, could only have dreamed of. Prologue in the Nineteenth Century: The Father of All Drugs Voluntary dependence is the finest state.  ​-- ​Johann Wolfgang von Goethe To understand the historical relevance of methamphetamine and other substances to the Nazi state, we must go back before the beginning of the Third Reich. The development of modern societies is bound as tightly with the creation and distribution of drugs as the economy is with advances in technology. In 1805 Goethe wrote Faust in classicist Weimar, and by poetic means perfected one of his theses, that the genesis of man is itself drug-induced: I change my brain, therefore I am. At the same time, in the rather less glamorous town of Paderborn in Westphalia, the pharmaceutical assistant Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner performed experiments with opium poppies, whose thickened sap anesthetized pain more effectively than anything else. Goethe wanted to explore through artistic and dramatic channels what it is that holds the core of the world together ​-- ​Sertürner, on the other hand, wanted to solve a major, millennium-old problem that has plagued our species to a parallel degree.   It was a concrete challenge for the brilliant twenty-one-year-old chemist: depending on the conditions they are grown in, the active ingredient in opium poppies is present in varying concentrations. Sometimes the bitter sap does not ease the pain quite strongly enough, and other times it can lead to an unintended overdose and fatal poisoning. Thrown back entirely on his own devices, just as the opiate laudanum consumed Goethe in his study, Sertürner made an astonishing discovery: he succeeded in isolating morphine, the crucial alkaloid in opium, a kind of pharmacological Mephistopheles that instantly magics pain away. Not only a turning point in the history of pharmacology, this was also one of the most important events of the early nineteenth century, not to mention human history as a whole. Pain, that irritable companion, could now be assuaged, indeed removed, in precise doses. All over Europe, apothecaries had to the best of their ability (and their consciences) pressed pills from the ingredients of their own herb gardens or from the deliveries of women who foraged in hedgerows. These homegrown chemists now developed within only a few years into veritable factories, with established pharmacological standards. Morphine was not only a method of easing life's woes; it was also big business.     In Darmstadt the owner of the Engel-Apotheke, Emanuel Merck, stood out as a pioneer of this development. In 1827 he set out his business model of supplying alkaloids and other medications in unvarying quality. This was the birth not only of the Merck Company, which still thrives today, but of the modern pharmaceutical industry as a whole. When injections were invented in 1850, there was no stopping the victory parade of morphine. The painkiller was used in the American Civil War of 1861-65 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Soon morphine fixes were doing the rounds as normal procedure. The change was crucial; the pain of even seriously injured soldiers could now be kept within bounds. This made a different scale of war possible: fighters who before would have been ruled out for a long time by an injury were soon coddled back to health and thrust onto the frontline once again. Excerpted from Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.