Hitler's personal dealer

Writer and historian Norman Ohler focused on what is much talked about, but little is actually known: drug use in the Nazi Third Reich, with a special focus on the Emperor himself, Hitler. We know from great books and movies that the Weimar Republic was flooded with drugs, we also know that the Nazis, declared purists and fanatics about healthy bodies, passed laws against drug use after taking power, but they did not pay attention to the laws. There are a lot of testimonies about the fact that German soldiers and SS men of all kinds were systematically drugged - after all, the second man of Hitler's empire, Hermann Goering, was caught by the Americans with an impressive amount of drugs in his suitcase, so they weaned him for months before the Nuremberg trials - while they are excellent historians found indisputable evidence that Vođa was also under the influence of opiates and psychoactive substances, but no one dealt with that problem systematically. It was precisely this hole in historiographical endeavors that Norman Oller noticed and instead of writing a novel, he decided to take on serious historical work. The result was impressive. Not only are they Aloof a book that does not let go of your hands and which has been translated into more than thirty languages, but it sheds a different light on some events of the Second World War, or at least Oller offered a different perspective.

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Oller's two main theses boil down to the following: 1. Hitler is Blitzkrieg - the conquest of Belgium and France above all - was achieved in only twenty days thanks to the fact that German soldiers and officers were systematically drugged with pervetin and methamphetamines. Although Hitler had done everything he could Blitzkrieg failed because he could not bear not to be the main and brilliant military leader and constantly interfered in the plans of the headquarters and issued crazy orders, the generals in the field (Guderian, Rommel, Meinstein) did not obey Hitler's orders (probably because they were drugged themselves). 2. The Second World War would have lasted longer if Hitler, apart from being a complete lunatic and a banal megalomaniac, had not been spoiled by all kinds of substances that he regularly consumed for almost a whole decade. However, in this Oller book, Hitler is not the main character, as one might expect, or he is not the only main character. The man around whom the story revolves is Hitler's personal physician and one of his closest friends - until the Leader's drugs completely drained his brain (as Oller thinks) - Dr. Theodor Morel, an impressive and unscrupulous slob. Ohler often calls him Hitler's personal dealer.

The Weimar Republic, an unfortunate consequence of the First World War, poor, indebted and humiliated, was the largest producer of chemical drugs in the world. It's not too much of a surprise: Germans have always been good at chemistry. After all, they came up with the ingenious idea of ​​using battle poisons in the First War. So, in a country of weak industry and weak republican institutions, drug production flourished to such an extent that the Germans simply ignored the recommendations and laws of the most important European powers on the prohibition of drug use. But besides being a producer of drugs, Germany was also a big consumer: people (understandably) didn't like the reality at all - just look at how many addicts there are in the great series Babylon Berlin Hank Handloegten (and others) - so they resorted to artificial paradises. The same could be said, however, about Hitler and the Nazis: to the distressed Germans, further depressed by the Great Depression of the 1930s, they offered hallucinogenic stories to escape reality. How the golden age of Germany ended is well known. (Under a collapsed concrete canopy, if anyone missed it.) The data that Oller brings is profoundly incredible. Here we should immediately draw attention to Oler's skillful combination of data and storytelling - which, after all, has always been a characteristic of great historians - and a scientist who digs through archives, works on facts, numbers and dry information, never crosses over to the terrain controlled by the storyteller and interpreter: you can't do without numbers, but numbers are not everything. The places where Oller introduces his own are characteristic ja into the book, and talks about the problems he encountered in the archives, tells the story of endless shelves full of documents or people who help him navigate the chaos of papers. It is precisely these excursions that breathe literary life into this, otherwise, undoubtedly historiographical work. In the manner of a conscientious and careful historian, Oller relies only on data obtained from documents of undoubted authenticity, while very rarely using testimonies. His main source of information is Dr. Morel's diary about the "treatment" of patient A, but also Hitler's notes related to Dr. Morel. Patient A is, of course, Hitler (patients B and C from the Nazi peak will appear later, as well as Mussolini or Eva Braun), and Morel's records about the patient's condition and the ways in which he "treats" him are very thorough. In November 1944, Morel wrote in Dnevnik: "I canceled today's injections in order to give the holes from previous punctures time to heal." The fold of the left hand is good, the fold of the right is still full of red dots (but no purulent ulcers) at the injection sites. F. says that this did not happen" (p. 228). Then Oler comments: "Each stab created a new wound that built on the previous one and made an elongated, matured scab, the characteristic 'zipper' of railway station junkies, when one stab with the next forms a disgusting line" (p. 229). In addition to neat reports about the administration of injections, there are remarks about Hitler's general condition - often this is the self-delusion of a doctor who has given up on the Hippocratic Oath, and the Führer's condition is brilliant, brilliant, miraculous, he is in good spirits and full of strength (as he would not be when on psychoactive substances), to drop dramatically when the effect wears off, and then, in a withdrawal crisis, he calls his perfect dealer in the middle of the night to inject him with a new dose - about Hitler's diet, or detailed descriptions of Hitler's bowel movements (for drug addicts, Oller teaches us, constipation is one of the side effects): "From 16 to 18 p.m., four bowel movements, two of which are small, and two very copious. In the second case, after removing the suppository, an explosive liquid discharge. The third and fourth discharges are accompanied by an extraordinary stench, especially the fourth (probably due to the decomposition of residual agglomeration that caused gases and toxic substances). Relatively improved condition and change in facial expression. (Of course the Führer changed his expression, who wouldn't. – prime. aut.) He sent for me only to give me good news about the performance” (pp. 232-233).

However, how was it even possible for a fanatic of healthy living and careful nutrition to become addicted to drugs? It all begins in 1936 when Hitler, due to exhaustion, calls Dr. Morel, who is known for experimenting with vitamins and supplements that quickly restore energy. And indeed, vitamin injections easily recover the body, so the Leader, full of energy, appears in public in winter in just a shirt. Hitler liked it, and soon appointed Morel as his personal physician. This unnatural relationship would last for the next nine years, with the fact that, as things got worse for Hitler, Morel would resort to increasingly stronger energy supplements, only to slowly switch to drugs ("I don't want to become an addict," Hitler told him when Morel suggested more drastic measures. "Don't worry," the doctor replied and made Hitler a drug addict.) Of course there were people in Hitler's circle, especially doctors, who understood what Morel was doing - from his patient. he makes an addict whom he will, to some extent, manipulate for personal gain - but even powerful types like Hitler's vicious personal secretary Martin Bormann or Hitler's personal surgeon were unable to harm Dr. Morel who enjoyed the Leader's unending trust (until he ran out of suitable substances) .

At the same time, the drugging of German troops on all fronts did not stop. Blitzkrieg was, therefore, according to Oller's thesis, obtained with the generous use of pervetine and methamphetamines, thanks to which the soldiers and officers did not sleep for four nights in a row, stopping only to fill up with fuel, and it is no wonder that the French did not manage to meet them in the places where should, according to logic and normal mode of movement, be. Rommel's and Guderian's tanks destroyed everything in front of them - without infantry support, it must be said - a pace that neither Churchill, nor the French, nor even Hitler himself, believed in at first. It often happened that German tanks simply ran over entire French units unarmed and unconcerned because it was impossible for the Germans to reach them in such a short time. But they still came. Thanks to drugs, Oler proves. The bewildered army, in the meantime, rejected all the warnings of conscientious doctors that these are substances whose effects have not been tested, and that the few experiments show that euphoria and insomnia are followed by heavy falls, sometimes accompanied by health damage. It was also clear to the doctors that long-term drug use was unsustainable. The top of the army, however, remained deaf to it, because Poland was also conquered on a methamphetamine raid, just as the initial successes in Russia could be attributed to pervetin and methamphetamines. The same logic, only with the opposite sign, can explain the later catastrophe, although Oller does not go that far in the interpretation.

Everything Oler talks about is supported by figures, documents, reports - the writer regularly reports when there is no reliable data - and the reliability of the data cannot be doubted. What could be questioned are Oler's conclusions in some sections. Let's say that Hitler, thanks to drugs, remained what he always was: a brutal maniac insensitive to people's suffering. Not, therefore, that he transformed into something else, but that he remained the same, which is quite a bold conclusion. Just as, probably, one should keep a reserve towards reducing a complex event, such as a world war, to a single motive. However, in spite of that, there is nothing much to complain about in Oler's book, in the methodological sense, while its passability, undoubtedly, should be strongly applauded.