Norman Ohler on Drugs in Nazi Germany, Blitzkrieg, and the History of Psychedelics

Norman Ohler, the German novelist turned archival historian behind Blitzed, Tripped, and The Bohemians, lays out the drug history of the Third Reich for Lex Fridman — the methamphetamine that fuelled the 1940 Blitzkrieg, the escalating opioid regime administered to Hitler by his personal physician, the Berlin couple who built Germany’s largest resistance network — and follows the thread onward into LSD’s forgotten Nazi-to-CIA lineage and his in-progress attempt to write all of human history through the lens of intoxication.

Key ideas

1. Pervitin, the German brand name for methamphetamine, was issued to the whole invading army ahead of the 1940 assault on France. Army physiologist Otto Ranke’s own trials showed soldiers on the drug still alert and energetic after fourteen sleepless hours, against caffeine- and placebo-dosed comparison groups who had already collapsed. That result won over Wehrmacht high command, which issued a stimulant decree and 35 million doses before the tank divisions made their three-day, sleepless dash to Sedan through the supposedly impassable Ardennes.

2. Hitler’s own drug regime escalated from harmless vitamins to daily opioids as the war turned against Germany. His physician, Theodor Morell, moved from vitamin and glucose injections (1936–41) to an intravenous opioid, Dolantin, given for the first time in August 1941 to steady Hitler before a crucial military briefing, and then to Eukodal (oxycodone) on a near-daily ‘junkie rhythm’ from 1943. After the Merck factory producing Eukodal was bombed in December 1944, Hitler went into withdrawal — and, Ohler argues, this decline in Hitler’s own capacities coincides closely with Germany’s collapsing fortunes on the Eastern Front.

3. Historian Richard Evans has accused Ohler of monocausal history that risks excusing Nazi atrocities — a criticism Ohler partly accepts and partly rejects. He agrees a drugs-only explanation of Blitzkrieg would be wrong, citing his own mentor Hans Mommsen’s direct warning never to argue monocausally; but he rejects outright that drug use diminishes anyone’s responsibility for war crimes, and points to German law itself, which does not reduce culpability for a crime planned before intoxication.

4. LSD has a forgotten Nazi-to-CIA lineage. The Swiss pharmaceutical CEO who developed LSD, Arthur Stoll, and the Nazi biochemist Richard Kuhn, who searched for a chemical ‘truth drug’ and tested hallucinogens on prisoners at Dachau, trained under the same mentor and stayed in professional contact through the war. After 1945, American intelligence inherited the truth-drug programme from the SS, running it as the CIA’s MKUltra — LSD never worked as an interrogation tool, but shaped a generation of researchers and writers regardless, including Ken Kesey, who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest after taking CIA-supplied LSD as a paid research subject.

5. Ohler’s next book, Stoned Sapiens, reframes deep human history around psychoactive plants. He speculates that a khat-like stimulant shaped early Homo erectus migration out of Africa, that the iboga root shaped consciousness in ancestral rainforest populations, that beer-brewing at Neolithic sites such as Göbekli Tepe helped produce the first social hierarchies, and that Moses’s revelation at the burning bush may describe a DMT-induced experience — claims he is candid are speculative reconstruction rather than documented history.

Content

Weimar Berlin, Nazi purity, and the invention of Pervitin

Ohler opens with the context he insists the drug history cannot be understood without: 1920s Munich, where the Nazi movement grew out of beer-hall culture and alcohol-fuelled group aggression, against 1920s Berlin, where the collapse of the German economy under the Versailles Treaty produced a chaotic, cheap-drug scene of morphine, cocaine, mescaline, and ether. When the Nazis took power in 1933 they moved immediately against the Berlin drug culture, conflating anti-drug policy with antisemitism — claiming German Jews used drugs disproportionately, and treating the whole Volk as a body to be purified of poisons, drugs included. Hitler personified the purity ideal: teetotal, non-smoking, vegetarian, with no private life to speak of.

Methamphetamine entered this supposedly clean society through a commercial accident. Stung by Jesse Owens’s performance at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, the Temmler pharmaceutical company’s head chemist synthesised a German equivalent to the American stimulant Benzedrine, rediscovering a compound first made in 1893 by a Japanese chemist. Marketed from 1938 as Pervitin — sold over the counter, no prescription needed — it was treated as a performance enhancer rather than a drug, akin to a strong coffee: clinical trials at the time reported reduced fear and reduced need for sleep, exactly the properties useful to a totalitarian society mobilising for war. The first public warning about addiction risk did not appear until 1940, by which point army physiologist Otto Ranke had already built a case for issuing it to soldiers.

The stimulant decree and the three days to Sedan

Ranke’s own overnight trials at the military academy — Pervitin against caffeine, Benzedrine, and placebo — convinced him methamphetamine was the answer to what he considered a soldier’s real enemy: not the opposing army, but fatigue. His superior, the army’s surgeon general, ignored his recommendations before the 1939 Poland campaign, which Germany won regardless; but before the far riskier 1940 invasion of France, high command took Ranke’s case seriously. Three young tank generals — Guderian, Rommel, and Manstein — had convinced Hitler that a full armoured thrust through the Ardennes could reach Sedan in three days and nights if the advance never stopped; the only way to keep tank crews awake and functioning for that long was Ranke’s drug. The Wehrmacht issued a stimulant decree and roughly 35 million doses, and on 10 May 1940 the invasion began on methamphetamine.

Ohler is careful to separate the tactical genius of the Ardennes plan — which he calls genuinely brilliant, independent of any drug — from the physical endurance the drug supplied to execute it. He also does not shy from its darker edge: he cites an archival report describing Rommel’s division, high on methamphetamine, driving tanks through a sleeping French village at night rather than halting as convention dictated, an episode Ohler treats as the moment ‘the Wehrmacht lost its innocence’. The campaign’s momentum broke at Dunkirk, where Hitler — not on any drug himself, and, Ohler argues, simply out of his depth in a new, faster style of war he had not grasped — issued the Halte Befehl that let the British evacuate rather than be annihilated, a decision one of the three tank generals, Manstein, later called ‘a lost victory’.

Morell, Eukodal, and the doctor’s war

Hitler’s own drug history runs on a separate, slower track from the army’s. His physician from 1936, Theodor Morell, began with vitamin and hormone injections — plausibly beneficial, certainly not narcotic — that cured Hitler’s chronic digestive complaints and won his total trust; Hitler, obsessively private and hostile to any doctor who might see him as vulnerable, found in the socially awkward, unthreatening Morell someone he could depend on absolutely. The turn came in August 1941, six weeks into the invasion of the Soviet Union, when Hitler fell seriously ill on the day a fateful strategic choice had to be made — whether to press on toward Moscow or split forces toward Leningrad and the southern oil fields. Morell administered an intravenous opioid, Dolantin, for the first time; Hitler recovered enough to dominate the meeting and ordered the split that many historians, including Ohler, consider one of the war’s decisive strategic errors.

From 1943, Hitler moved to Eukodal (oxycodone), reportedly the most euphoric opioid available, taken on a near-daily ‘junkie rhythm’ by September 1944. A parallel crisis arrived after the July 1944 Stauffenberg bomb plot, when a new doctor, called in to treat Hitler’s blast-damaged eardrums, began supplying him with cocaine — producing a rivalry between doctors that Ohler calls ‘the doctor’s war’, complete with each physician trying to discredit the other to the SS leadership. The regime collapsed on its own terms in December 1944, when Allied bombing destroyed the Merck factory producing Eukodal; Hitler went into withdrawal, eventually recognised — with Goebbels’s prompting — that Morell had made him a drug addict, and dismissed him days before the fall of Berlin. Morell escaped the city, was later captured and interrogated by American forces, and died in 1948.

The monocausal-history debate

Ohler’s account has drawn genuine scholarly praise — Ian Kershaw called it ‘a serious piece of scholarship’, Antony Beevor ‘a remarkable work of research’ — alongside a sharp rebuke from historian Richard Evans, who called Blitzed ‘crass and dangerously inaccurate’ and morally hazardous, on the theory that crediting drugs for Blitzkrieg’s success both overstates a single cause among many (doctrine, tactics, troop dispositions) and edges toward excusing German soldiers’ conduct as chemically diminished responsibility. Ohler accepts the first point in principle — he credits his mentor Hans Mommsen with drilling into him never to argue monocausally, and maintains he never claimed drugs alone explain the campaign’s success — while rejecting the second outright: he cites German law’s own position that intoxication does not reduce culpability for a crime planned in advance, and insists Nazi ideology and genocide have nothing to do with pharmacology in his account. [?] Whether the book’s popular reception — and its ‘the Blitzkrieg on meth’ framing in marketing and adaptation — has in practice drifted toward the monocausal reading Ohler disclaims is a separate, harder question the conversation does not fully resolve.

The Bohemians: love, resistance, and the limits of dissent

Ohler’s second book grew from a chance find in the German military archive: the last letter of Harro Schulze-Boysen, a Luftwaffe intelligence officer executed in 1942, written to his father with no trace of regret. Schulze-Boysen and his wife, Libertas, built the largest resistance network in Nazi Berlin — over a hundred people, recruited through parties where a critical remark about the regime was floated to see who responded, since the Gestapo’s usual infiltration tactics (posing as sympathisers) did not work against a network built on personal trust rather than ideology. The group passed militarily significant information to the Western Allies and, more perilously, to the Soviet Union — a choice some members opposed, on the grounds that Stalin’s regime was itself totalitarian, but which Schulze-Boysen defended on the narrower ground that Soviet victory over Hitler was the immediate priority.

The group was betrayed after Soviet intelligence, communicating by radio, sent a message the Gestapo intercepted and decoded — naming Schulze-Boysen directly, an intelligence failure or, Ohler speculates, possibly deliberate Soviet betrayal. [?] Libertas was separately compromised after confiding in a Gestapo agent posing as a friend. Both were executed in 1942, among dozens of others. Ohler draws a modest lesson from the story: resistance under totalitarianism succeeds rarely and at enormous personal risk, and even actions that seem to fail in the moment — a thousand stickers reading ‘The Nazi Paradise’ pasted across Berlin overnight in 1942 — can matter simply by proving to a frightened population that dissent exists at all.

Stoned Sapiens: drugs across deep human history

Ohler’s next project, provisionally titled Stoned Sapiens, extends his method to the whole of human history, and he is candid that its evidentiary standard loosens the further back it reaches. [?] He speculates that early Homo erectus migration out of the Great Rift Valley may connect to khat, a stimulant plant still chewed across the Horn of Africa; that iboga, a Central African rainforest alkaloid now central to the psychedelic-therapy revival, may have shaped the cognitive leap historians (including Yuval Noah Harari, whom Ohler cites for leaving the question open) cannot otherwise explain; and that Göbekli Tepe, the 11,600-year-old Anatolian monument built by hunter-gatherers with no apparent hierarchy, marks the point where beer-brewing — evidenced archaeologically at the site — began generating the surplus and status differentiation that produced the first kings in Sumeria.

Ohler extends the same lens to religion: citing Israeli biblical scholarship, he suggests Moses’s burning-bush revelation in the Sinai desert may describe a DMT experience, since the Egyptian acacia mentioned in the relevant biblical passage grows in that region and contains the compound. [?source] He also traces intoxication’s contested relationship with organised religion more broadly — Sufi ecstatic practice within Islam against the Reinheitsgebot, Germany’s sixteenth-century beer purity law, which he reads as a Church-driven prohibition against psychoactive brewing ingredients such as nightshade rather than a neutral quality standard.

LSD’s Nazi-to-CIA lineage and MKUltra

Ohler’s third book, Tripped, traces a genealogy few readers expect: LSD, synthesised in 1943 by the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, was developed under CEO Arthur Stoll, who had trained under the same mentor, Richard Willstätter, as Richard Kuhn — the Nazi biochemist searching for a chemical ‘truth drug’ who also developed nerve gas for the Third Reich. Archival correspondence Ohler found in the Novartis archive shows Kuhn acknowledging receipt of LSD’s precursor compound from Stoll in October 1943, strong circumstantial evidence that the SS used LSD or mescaline in human experiments at Dachau — one surviving account describes a prisoner experiencing a full psychedelic trip from a dose slipped into his coffee.

After the war, American intelligence inherited the truth-drug programme directly: a US general obtained LSD from Stoll’s son within weeks of interrogating Kuhn in 1945, and by 1947 the newly formed CIA had folded the research into MKUltra, an illegal, congressionally unapproved mind-control programme whose head, Sidney Gottlieb, eventually bought the Swiss company’s entire LSD stockpile to keep it out of open circulation. The programme never produced a working truth drug — Ohler argues LSD does not make anyone more truthful, only more exposed to their own mental patterns — but the CIA’s supply reached researchers and unwitting subjects regardless, among them novelist Ken Kesey, who took LSD as a paid research subject in a Menlo Park psychiatric ward and drew directly on the experience to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

See also

• Norman Ohler — speaker
• Lex Fridman — host
• Pharmacology of War — concept this conversation is central to
• Theodor Morell — subject; Hitler’s physician and the architect of his opioid regime
• Blitzed — Ohler’s book on drug use in the Third Reich
• Totalitarianism — related concept; this conversation’s account of the Bohemians’ resistance network is a case study in dissent under the same kind of regime
• James Holland on World War II, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and the Biggest Battles — a doctrine-and-propaganda account of the same 1940 campaign and Hitler’s wartime decline
• Vejas Liulevicius on Communism, Fascism, and the Machinery of Totalitarianism — a comparative-ideology account of the same regime this conversation approaches through pharmacology