High on Hitler and Meth: Book Says Nazis Were Fueled by Drugs

Through interviews and documents that hadn’t been carefully studied before, he unearthed new details about how soldiers of the Wehrmacht were regularly supplied with methamphetamine of a quality that would give Walter White, of “Breaking Bad,” pangs of envy. Millions of doses, packaged as pills, were gobbled up in battles throughout the war, part of an officially sanctioned factory-to-front campaign against fatigue.

.. But the most vivid portrait of abuse and withdrawal in “Blitzed” is that of Hitler, who for years was regularly injected by his personal physician with powerful opiates, like Eukodal, a brand of oxycodone once praised by William S. Burroughs as “truly awful.” For a few undoubtedly euphoric months, Hitler was also getting swabs of high-grade cocaine, a sedation and stimulation combo that Mr. Ohler likens to a “classic speedball.”

.. “There are all these stories of party leaders coming to complain about their bombed-out cities,” Mr. Ohler said, “and Hitler just says: ‘We’re going to win. These losses make us stronger.’ And the leaders would say: ‘He knows something we don’t know. He probably has a miracle weapon.’ He didn’t have a miracle weapon. He had a miracle drug, to make everyone think he had a miracle weapon.”

.. Hopped-up soldiers would sprint tirelessly through the Ardennes at the onset of war, an adrenalized performance that left Winston Churchill “dumbfounded,” as he wrote in his memoirs. A German general would later gloat that his men had stayed awake for 17 straight days.

.. “I think that’s an exaggeration,” Mr. Ohler said, “but meth was crucial to that campaign.”

.. By 1944, the doctor had trouble finding veins to shoot. Then, as the Allies bombed the factories that produced Germany’s drugs, he had trouble finding opiates.

“Historians have tried to explain Hitler’s tremors that started in 1945 by saying that he suffered from Parkinson’s,” Mr. Ohler said. “I wouldn’t rule it out, but there’s no proof of it. I think Hitler was suffering from cold turkey.”

.. Mr. Ohler believes that Hitler’s drug consumption prolonged the war, by enabling his delusions.

Bolshiness is back

The similarities to the world that produced the Russian revolution are too close for comfort, argues Adrian Wooldridge

Western policy was dedicated to making sure that the problems that had produced authoritarianism, both left and right, could not occur again.

.. The Allies created a triad of global institutions—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations—that were supposed to stabilise the global economy and prevent conflict.

.. Mr Putin is much more the embodiment of the spirit of his age than is the outgoing American president, Barack Obama.

.. The Democrats might not have lost the election if they hadn’t nominated Hillary Clinton, the embodiment of a decaying establishment

.. the proportion of after-tax income going to the top 1% doubled from 8% in 1979 to 17% in 2007.

.. Part of the solution lies in exposing liberalism’s enemies as the paper tigers that they are: Mr Putin, in particular, presides, by fear and fraud, over a country whose economic power is stalling and whose people are plagued by poverty and illness. Other strongmen around the world are far less tough than they claim.

.. They need to take worries about immigration more seriously and check their instinct to ride roughshod over minorities such as evangelical Christians. They also need to redouble their efforts to fix capitalism’s most obvious problems. High levels of inequality are threatening stability. Economic concentration is allowing companies to extract record profits. Overregulation is driving businesspeople to distraction.