Speaker

Norman Ohler

Norman Ohler

German novelist and screenwriter turned archival historian, best known for Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (2016), the first systematic account of psychoactive drug use across the Nazi regime, from the methamphetamine issued to the Wehrmacht to the escalating opioid regime administered to Hitler by his personal physician.

Ohler trained as a novelist, not a historian, and stumbled into the subject in 2010 after a friend — a Berlin antique dealer — found decades-old Pervitin tablets in a medicine chest and reported that they still worked. Following that lead into the German military archive in Freiburg, mentored by the historian Hans Mommsen, Ohler spent years reconstructing a drug history of the Third Reich that established historians had largely ignored. He has since written The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany’s Resistance Against the Nazis (2020), on the Berlin resistance network built by Harro Schulze-Boysen and Libertas Schulze-Boysen, and Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age (2024), tracing LSD’s path from a Swiss pharmaceutical laboratory through Nazi human experiments at Dachau to the CIA’s MKUltra programme. He is currently researching Stoned Sapiens, an attempt to read the whole of human history — from the origins of consciousness to the first kings — through the lens of psychoactive plants.

Core positions

Ohler argues that drugs are a genuine, previously overlooked causal factor in specific historical events — never the sole cause, a distinction he attributes to Mommsen’s direct warning never to argue ‘monocausally’ — but a mechanism serious history should not ignore simply because it is uncomfortable or, in the Nazis’ own self-image, contradicts their professed purity. He is emphatic that this explanatory claim carries no moral one: he holds that drug use does not diminish the culpability of individuals who planned or committed war crimes, and treats Nazi ideology and genocide as entirely separate from the regime’s pharmacology. Historian Richard Evans has criticised Blitzed on both grounds — as monocausal and as risking exculpation — a criticism Ohler accepts in part (on method) while rejecting outright on the moral question.

In the wiki