Blitzkreig "Blitzed"
"I call it the Fuehrer-high. It makes you feel on top of the world even if the world is collapsing around you."
"There's not one sober day after the fall of 1941 [within the ranks of the Nazi government and military, and a large segment of the civilian population]."
"Every animal that was slaughtered in the Ukraine, all the organs would go to Morell [Dr. Theodor Morell, Adolph Hitler's personal physician]; he would send them to his factory ... and concoct hormonal doping agents to introduce into the bloodstream of Hitler."
"He [Hitler] was going cold turkey as he lost the Second World War. He was basically a wreck."
"I have no idea how it [Nazi assaults] would have worked without Pervitin [closely related to present-day crystal meth]."
"Nazism was toxic, in the truest sense of the word. It has given the world a chemical legacy still with us today, a poison that won't soon disappear."
German writer Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed
"In the proper dosage, one's self-confidence is significantly elevated, and one's fear of undertaking even difficult work is lowered."
Wehrmacht order, April 17, 1940, pre-invasion of France
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| Adolf Hitler awards the Merit Knight Cross to his private doctor, Theodor Morell, in February 1944. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images |
Hitler favoured a healthy society; he frowned upon consumption of alcohol, of tobacco, and was a proponent of whole foods in the German diet. Aryans, like the German ideal of the tall, blond, muscular German, should be beautiful to look upon, healthy and vibrant, the very picture of youth and vigour. That was the message he promoted among the civilian and military when he came to power. He was himself the antithesis in presentation of the perfect Aryan without the athletic appearance he favoured.
And just as he was personally the very opposite of what he promoted as the perfect human body and healthy mind to do credit to the Germany whose future he planned, his coda of healthy living was in competition with his penchant for drug-taking. His personal physician saw to it that Hitler was well supplied with regular injections of steroids, opioids and an assortment of new drug formulations that the physician produced with the Fuehrer in mind.
When the author of the newly published book on Hitler's passion for the values he saw in the strategic use of recreational drug products for the military, let alone for himself, began his research he uncovered a plethora of data that glued together his narrative of a demented dictator whom drugs helped to assure he would one day control the world and in so doing making it a superior place.
That this charismatic madman was documented to have been peculiar in his erratic behaviour, particularly as the war came to a close, the theories of the strain brought about by stress, by early senility, by the mind corruption that absolute power invariably brings to its possessor, were all contemplated. But it was, in reality, his indiscriminate and passionate use of drugs that drove him to the excesses of mannerisms that intrigued those who documented his trajectory and compulsions.
Not much the man did made intelligent sense, since he represented a total and complete moral vacuum while espousing a high degree of moral values all his very own, which possessed a veneer of potential, but rotten to the core. From his viral hatred of Jews and plan to formulate a Final Solution in lock-step with his determination to rule the world and transform it into a stalwart and glorious Aryan satrapy, to his self-assurance that anything he undertook would succeed, irrespective of the lives taken in the process, he was certifiably mad.
What the book that Mr. Ohler produced does point out was that the Nazi military, all three million under arms and more marched imperiously in the company of millions of tablets of Pervitin. This combination brought the fantasy of the Aryan Superman to life and the German Blitzkreig to fruition when soldiers fed the equivalent of a diet enriched with crystal meth needed less sleep than those they attacked; marching and doing battle when their enemies were long since exhausted.
Fascism and paranoia seemed to have been perfect bedmates, aided by the presence of mind-altering drugs to produce a semi-permanent high, from the civilian German population, to the German troops, to their government leaders. Until commanders of the troops realized their men needed a longer recuperation time than their enemies who were not dependent on drugs. The Pervitin-addicted soldiers were soon acquainted with psychotic episodes and breakdowns.
And, said, author Ohler, "You can't take Russia with crystal meth".
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| Workers at the Temmler factory in Berlin produced 35m tablets of Pervitin for the German army and Luftwaffe in 1940. Photograph: Temmler Pharma GmbH & Co KG, Marburg |
Labels: Drugs, Germany, Holocaust, Nazis, World War Two
posted by Pieface @ Monday, October 03, 2016
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