Evans wrote that Ohler severely overstates the role of drugs in both civil society and the military effort. Does the evidence he presented, in fact, allow Ohler to say that many or most German citizens and soldiers were taking methylamphetamines? In a scathing review, historian Richard J. The Wehrmacht ordered 35 million tablets for the campaign.Ĭritics have pointed out that Ohler tends to make sweeping generalizations.
Learning from the use of Pervitin during the Polish campaign, army officials realized that overcoming fatigue was just as crucial as tactic and equipment.
The German surprise-strategy to drive tanks through the Ardennes – later coined the “sickle cut” by Winston Churchill – was a near-impossible operation, argues Ohler, that only stood a chance if the Germans could drive day and night without stopping. Ohler even goes so far as to say that the use of Pervitin was crucial to Germany victory in France in 1940. The “people’s drug:” Pervitin (Karl-Ludwig Poggemann via Flickr) By 1939, the drug was also distributed among German army battalions as they swept through Poland and France without sleep and without halt. Pervitin was marketed to Germans as a panacea cure for anything from depression to “frigidity” in women. The first German methylamphetamine, Pervitin was a performance-enhancing drug that gave the consumer an “artificial kick” of heightened energy, alertness, euphoria, and intensified senses, often lasting more than 12 hours. Fritz Hauschild found a drug to match the social intoxication of the time: Pervitin. In 1937, in a pharmaceutical factory not far from Berlin, the pharmacist Dr. In the 1920s, many Germans turned to artificial stimulants to cope with the trauma of WWI, Ohler argues, and eventually Nazi promises of collective ecstasy and euphoria became like a drug itself. From its rise through to its collapse, German citizens were high, German soldiers were high, and Hitler was high.
In sum, Ohler aims to show that drug use was rife in Nazi Germany. The result is the highly readable, bitingly ironic Blitzed, that, although not without problems, lends a fresh perspective on Hitler and the Second World War.
What he found in military records and the personal papers of Hitler’s physician was so astounding that Ohler left the world of fiction to write a work of history. Intending to write a novel on the subject, Ohler went into the archives in search of historical detail for his book. A German novelist and screenwriter, Norman Ohler first happened upon the topic of drug use in the Third Reich through a Berlin-based DJ, who told him that drugs were widespread at the time.
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