Robert Evans and Carolina Barlow dissect Norman Ohler's Blitz, critiquing its pop-nonfiction style while exploring Dr. Theodore Morell's administration of methamphetamines, cocaine, and morphine to Hitler. They detail how Morell marketed Purviton to create a "methamphetamine dictatorship" for worker stamina, noting that despite Nazi racial hygiene rhetoric, actual policies treated addiction as a health issue rather than a crime. Ultimately, the discussion suggests that while drugs fueled the regime's productivity and potentially exacerbated Hitler's rages, genocidal ideology remained the primary driver of history, challenging simplistic narratives about drug-induced tyranny. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Financial Literacy Month Kickoff00:02:47
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they've failed.
Listen to Eating Wall Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Bajanista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
I'm talking to people like Julie K. Brown, who broke the explosive story on Jeffrey Epstein in 2018.
The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
Listen to Bleep with Ana Navarro on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Will Farrell's big money players and iHeart podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
Why did you get hard seltzer instead of beer?
Oh, they hit a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
Listen to soccer moms on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's taking shitloads of meth, my Hitler?
I'm Robert Evans.
This is Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we tell you everything you don't know about the worst people in all of history.
We're in today's episode.
Soccer Moms and Real Talk00:14:54
Stuff that you think you know, but you actually don't know the specifics in the way that you probably think you do.
Maybe.
Anyway.
That was definitely top 10 intros to this podcast.
Thank you, Sophie.
You're welcome.
Sophie Lichterman, my producer and legally boss.
And my guest today, I would like to introduce the wonderful Carolina Barlow.
Carolina, you are a writer and a co-host of the Ron Burgundy podcast and the True Romance podcast.
Carolina?
Yes.
Is Will Farrell nice in person?
He is a toxic overlord.
Will Farrell's actually the nicest person I've ever met in my life.
He's nicer than, I think, most members of my family and yours.
I'm just assuming.
No, I think you're right.
Knowing how kind he is.
And yeah, Sophie, you can speak this.
He frenched my dog.
How does his hair smell?
Okay, this is a great question because Will is very good at grooming and he always smells really nice.
His skincare is amazing.
And I believe he may still be using this product, but once we were on a press tour with Mark Wahlberg, who was using a lot of a brand called Moroccan Oil, which you can buy.
I'm not, this is not an ad, but you can buy it pretty much anywhere.
Will decided.
Wait, I'm messing up the story.
Will was using a brand, uses a brand called Moroccan Oil.
And Mark Wahlberg was obsessed with it.
And so we ended up talking about it a lot on a press tour.
And Moroccan Oil then sent us a bunch of Moroccan oil.
So I believe he still uses that, but it smells incredible.
Okay.
Well, this is actually a lot more information than I expected.
Welcome to the Celebrity Corner, where we talk about how different celebrities' hair smells.
Next up, we're talking about, we are talking about a celebrity today.
Yes.
Surrounded by babies, because this is probably like piss and shit.
Piss and shit all the time.
That scans completely, actually.
You know who else?
I totally forgot.
You know who else smelled like shit?
Oh, this is so accurate.
And is a celebrity.
I don't like that.
Yeah, I don't like that title for him.
He is a celebrity.
He's a very famous man, arguably more famous than any living celebrity.
I'm not going to give Hitler a celebrity title.
You can say a lot of bad things about the man, but he has brand recognition.
Okay.
Fair enough.
So we're like going from polar opposites.
We're talking about one Madonna.
Yeah.
Share.
You don't even mean last names.
Exactly.
Just Hitler.
You're just going from like the nicest person ever of Will Farrell to the worst person ever to Adolf Hitler so quick.
Well, he's also, his name's kind of been a verb because you can like, I don't know about y'all, but like when my friends are being shitty, I'm like, you're kind of Hitlering right now.
You're getting a little Hitler on all of us here.
Maybe calm down.
So he's like, he's like Google.
My friends have been done something so shitty that I would spring that name.
Fair enough.
Well, this one time, my buddy Mike annexed the Sudetenland and we got pretty pissed at him.
That's fair.
Yeah.
That's apt.
Carolina, what do you, how do you feel about drugs?
Drugs, I don't do drugs because when I was young, I did them too much and then I had to stop.
I'm actually in the same boat.
I drink sometimes and take kratom, but my doing illegal drugs days are long, long behind me because I damaged my brain too much.
Right.
What have you heard about the Nazis and drugs?
I know that they did a lot of them.
And I think World War II, much like the Civil War, was a pretty crazy time.
And Vietnam.
Wars generally and drugs actually tend to mix well together.
Absolutely.
It's a great time to get wasted when you're at a war zone.
I can say that from experience.
And, you know, it's also...
So there's in 2016, a German novelist and a screenwriter, a guy named Norman Ohler, published a book, a work of historic nonfiction.
In the United States, it was released under the title Blitz, Drugs in Nazi Germany.
A lot of people have heard of this book.
It was an international, it was a huge, huge fucking book.
I mean, I guess most of the people listening to the episode right now either heard of it or you read some article that was based on kind of the media campaign around this because literally every major news website and magazine on the fucking planet published interviews with this guy or at least kind of like write-ups that were summarizing the book.
The Guardian's article during this period is kind of emblematic of the whole.
It was titled High Hitler, which is a fun title, nice little play on Heil Hitler.
And it's also really appropriate because the reason Hitler was getting high was for his health and Heil Hitler literally means health to Hitler.
But anyway, that's a point Oler makes.
It's a nice little pun.
It is a nice little pun.
I'm going to read a sample paragraph from that article talking about Ohler's work.
The book in question is The Total Rush, or to use its superior English title, Blitz, which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich's relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine, and above all, methamphetamines, and of their effect not only on Hitler's final days, the Führer, by Ohler's account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers, but on the Wehrmacht's successful invasion of France in 1940.
Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.
And this is interesting.
I'm starting not kind of the way we normally do by just sort of giving the history, but by talking about this book because it is so prominent.
And in the years that I've been doing Behind the Bastards, I've probably had a couple of hundred different people email me or ask me, sometimes in person, if I've read Blitz and tell me that I ought to do an episode on Hitler's drug addiction.
And this is that episode, but I have to tell you, a decent chunk of this is actually going to be kind of critiquing Blitz and more broadly critiquing kind of how the media presented it.
And I want to clarify up top: I don't think Blitz is a bad book or that Oler is a bad guy.
I think his work is in some ways a victim of his own success.
If you start Googling around permutations of phrases like Hitler's drug addiction or drugs in Nazis Germany in Nazi Germany or the Nazis in meth, about 70% of the search results you see are going to be articles based on Norman's book, kind of rewriting the same thing over and over again.
And this makes his book fairly unique in the field of Nazi studies.
The Third Reich is the single most widely studied and written about regime in political history.
There are governments on the planet right now who produce less, who have produced to date less documentation for their government bureaucracy than there is historic works written about the Third Reich.
No other government has had more scholars devote their lives to examining it, and no state has had so many pages of quality historical writing dedicated to its history.
And when we include the great minds who've written about the Third Reich throughout history, we quickly become clogged with genius.
There's William Shire, Ian Kershaw, John Toland, Volkler Uhlrich, Richard Evans, and Hannah Arendt, just to name a few.
And the fact that in five years, Norman Ohler has become one of the most recognized writers in Nazi history is due to the subject matter of his book, namely, people like drugs and people are fascinated by the Nazis.
And if you combine those two things, you're going to sell a lot of fucking books.
And one of the reasons this frustrates some historians is that some of the stuff that Ohler wrote about had been well documented before he came into the picture.
For example, Purviton, which is the methamphetamine that the Nazis primarily took.
A lot of scholars wrote about the use of Purviton by Nazis during the Blitzkrieg.
Where Ohler broke new ground was in making a detailed study about the personal notes and professional journals of a guy named Dr. Theodore Morel, who was one of Hitler's personal physicians and his primary dope dealer.
Morel was not an unknown quantity to historians previously, but Ohler spends a lot of time digging into precisely what he gave Hitler and how it may have impacted history.
Half of the controversy among historians about Blitz revolves around the language used in this book.
Ohler is not a historian.
He's not a scholar.
He's writing in a pop non-fiction cadence and vocabulary.
So this is closer to a guy like, who's that fucking guy everybody hates now, but everybody loves while I wrote the tipping point, Malcolm Gladwell.
And I'm not saying he's like, because I think he's much more responsible than Malcolm Gladwell.
But he's closer to the Gladwell end of the spectrum, that kind of pop nonfiction, than he is to a scholar like Ian Kershaw, you know?
And that frustrates scholars because his work has been so influential, right?
You get kind of pissed off when like you do detailed, painstaking analyses of these guys, and then some dude kind of throws out a book that maybe Exaggerates some things and uses some like flagrant language and is much more popular than any work by a scholar will ever be.
That frustrated people.
And, you know, I don't think that that means it's not, there is good scholarship in this.
And there's, in fact, groundbreaking scholarship in this.
Ian Kershaw, who's probably the single most prominent biographer of Hitler alive today, called this a serious work of scholarship and praised it.
Richard Evans, on the other hand, who's also very well respected, hated this book.
So it's not like I don't want to come across as saying there's an agreement among scholars that this book is bad or that there's an agreement that it's good.
I tend to think it did more good than harm.
But it was written to appeal to the masses and be a popular book, and it absolutely is.
Now, the other half of the controversy around Blitz revolves around some of the more serious issues with the way Ohler presents his research.
Namely, he suffers from the same problem most people do when they zero in on a very specific aspect of the Nazi regime.
He's gotten so into the weeds on this topic that he lends it weight that's sometimes disproportionate to its actual.
The same thing happens to people studying like the occult and Nazis, right?
Because there is like a really fascinating history of like esoteric Hitlerism of like occult Nazism, but it also wasn't nearly as influential as the people who write books about it put it on as.
And in fact, by like 1941, it was pretty much out of any kind of influence in the party.
But, you know, if that's your thing, you're going to seek to kind of hellboy things up a little, you know?
So this is like a long-winded way of saying it's debatable.
No, it's a long way of trying to like give caveats about like what are not saying it's a bad book, but saying it's a good book that I think, because he's so focused on the drugs, tends to ignore other reasons for some of the behavior that he's outlining that are not drugs.
I wonder if it's dangerous.
This is me speaking without reading the book.
I think it may be dangerous to blame anything on drug use.
I don't think that's a.
That is a the chief criticism the historians that dislike him make, and he's actually pretty careful.
He's careful in his book to say like I am not saying Hitler's horrible crimes are the result of these drug use.
Because one of the things he does he points out, as we'll go into, most of the hardcore drug addicts from Hitler started in the 40s, you know, when he had already set everything in motion that he was going to set in.
His ideals were already pretty yeah, the Reichstag was going down yeah, but he's saying like it's, it's worth noting.
If a guy is fucked up on meth and cocaine and opium all of the time, and he's a warlord, it's worth wondering like, how does that impact his decision-making process, which I think is a fair question.
Right like, obviously there is a danger when you do that, but it's also I don't think that means you shouldn't look at like well, what was this doctor shooting into the veins of this man making these incredibly influential decisions?
Is the same way that like, it's worth looking at how the methamphetamine JFK took impacted his decision making during the Cuban Missile Crisis and shit.
Right, like it isn't a hot oral problem, or Trump and Adderall it's.
It's certainly not like I don't want to, I agree that's a worry, but I also don't think we should be like, well, let's not talk about this just because some people fuck it up, you know?
I guess I'm implying more that leaning into it too hard, giving it too much weight.
I can see it distracting from a serious threat that was definitely worsened by drugs.
I mean, it's interesting.
Vietnam, towards the end of Vietnam, all the soldiers, American soldiers, were getting really messed up on all of the kinds of pills that were just very prevalent in the 60s and 70s, like KwaLudes, Black Beauties, Speed, anything to keep them up.
And it increased a lot of paranoia, especially when there's an enemy that, you know, quote-unquote enemy, Viet Cong, who aren't in uniforms, your paranoia can increase.
It could make you more violent.
Without these drugs, the Vietnam War is still inherently a crime against humanity.
But drugs don't help.
Yeah.
It doesn't help.
And there's a question too with the Nazis, right?
Where you don't want to like, a lot of these, these, these Wehrmacht soldiers were going days without sleeping and taking shitloads of methamphetamine, and some of them committed horrible atrocities.
You don't want to, like, the atrocities, number one, were often ordered by people who were certainly not drugged out of their minds and were planned pretty extensively ahead of time.
That said, the fact that a lot of these guys are on meth and like flipping out and burning down villages, some of that's probably due to the fact that they're fucked up on methamphetamine, right?
Like not necessarily like the concerted genocide actions where they're shooting 40,000 people in a day, but like, oh, yeah, they get shot at by a partisan and they burn down a village.
Yeah, maybe that's some guys who are tweaked out on speed over react, like flipping out in the same way that like, yeah, maybe it had an impact.
I think you can say that.
I think you can want to know, okay, well, you have millions of men going days without sleeping, heavily armed and taking methamphetamine.
I bet that has an influence on their behavior without saying the Nazis killed millions of Russian civilians because they were on meth, which is not the case.
They killed millions of Russian civilians because the war from the beginning was a genocidal crusade.
I don't know.
I don't want to veer away from what is an interesting question just because people can simplify it to the extent that it gets fucked up, you know, because I do think this is a fascinating question.
We're going to be talking a lot about Oler's findings here because I do agree with Ian Kershaw, who described it as a serious piece of scholarship.
Drug Use in Nazi Germany00:09:25
He goes into, he's not just re like cutting up other bits of reporting.
He looks at a lot of original primary sources.
He's combing through in a way I don't think anyone else ever did Dr. Theodore Morels, Hitler's primary physician's notes in exhaustive detail, researching the medicines he's given.
There's a lot of very important scholarship, I think, in his findings.
But I also will be laying out some areas where Ohler's conclusions do not gel with the actual evidence.
And there are some points there.
So let's start by talking about drug culture in Weimar, Germany.
As a refresher, the Weimar government was a progressive democracy that followed after the Kaiser's monarchy went away and was eventually eaten up by Hitler.
For like the 15 or so years it existed, Weimar was a dizzyingly progressive government for its time.
Berlin became a magnet for the LGBT community and the site of the first, very first serious research on healthcare for trans people.
Art and music flourished.
And as you'd expect from a city full of bohemian artists and musicians, people were getting fucked up all the time.
Like, I mean, just real.
Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Yeah, exactly.
Like real creative drug use.
Because like Berlin is, Berlin is, you know, what places like New Chunks of New York and chunks of California became in the 60s and 70s.
Berlin is that in the fucking 20s, you know?
And this put Berlin.
There's great photographs you can find of Berlin in the 20s, where people are in drag.
It's very casual.
It's actually completely, there's a flamboyant, like fun, roaring 20s quality.
Yeah, it's a fascinating time to study.
And this put, you know, one of the things that I think is critiquable at Ohler is he, when he's talking about drug use in Germany, he focuses heavily on Berlin and Berlin, hella drug use, but also Berlin's drug use is in direct contrast to what's going on in the rest of Germany.
Not only was most of Germany much more socially conservative, think about like Portland, Oregon versus its surrounding areas, right?
But the use of recreational drugs like cocaine was markedly uncommon in Germany and not even particularly common in Berlin, as we'll talk about.
It's worth noting that at this time, most Germans across the country would not have considered tobacco or alcohol drugs.
So when we're talking about drug use, those are not drugs to Germans in the 20s.
That's like milk to them.
Both were so ubiquitous that they were considered to be a part of a person's diet.
And interestingly enough, both communist and Nazi leaders in Europe at this time hated tobacco.
Lenin was famously anti-cigarette.
So was Hitler.
Obviously, Lenin's anti-cigarette shit didn't last once because Stalin loved him some smoking.
And Hitler hated cigarettes, but there was never really any sort of, they both, like, he had to kind of accept, like, well, I'm not going to get Germans to stop smoking.
Like, that's not going to happen.
They were in the hardcore scene.
Yeah, they were.
He was definitely kind of straight edge.
Yeah.
And, you know, we'll talk about this more later, but for the most part, throughout the 20s, Nazis and communists smoked and drank about as much as everybody else.
So again, while there's Nazi and communist leaders who are being like, no, you need to struggle towards revolution and be sober for that, most communists, most Nazis are getting drunk and chain smoking like anybody else.
And so when we talk about drugs in Germany, what I mean by drugs is hard stimulants like cocaine and methamphetamine, as well as opiates.
Germany was actually the world leader in drug manufacturing at this time.
Yes.
Morphine.
Bayer, exactly.
Morphine had first been isolated by a German chemist in the early 1800s.
It was rediscovered, patented, and mass-produced by Bayer in 1898.
By the end of World War I, morphine was the number one product of the entire German pharmaceutical industry.
They were shipping this stuff out everywhere because it's the most addictive thing in the world.
The company that owns that first manufacturing plant in Germany was the Sacklers, later responsible for the opioid epidemic we're currently facing in the United States.
Good people.
Yeah, we've talked about it.
Yeah, there's some other Bayer products made during the Nazi regime that we could talk about too.
Like heroin?
Yeah.
Straight up heroin they advertise as lighter than morphine.
Yeah, I mean, and a lot of this shit is OTC in Germany at the time, right?
And Bayer is the first to produce and sell heroin.
And actually, heroin stays over the counter in Germany until like the 1950s.
Which I'm, God, to live in those times, to just be able to walk down to the corner store and get a big fat bag of horse, smoke it, and I don't know.
It doesn't really matter what you're doing.
Go to the movies.
Yeah, it doesn't really matter what you're doing when you're smoking heroin.
Yeah.
So now, by a lot of, like this point, heroin has become like illegal in the U.S. and a lot of Asia, at least if you're taking it.
Like you can't just go and get it over the counter, right?
Maybe it's more prescribed than it was now, but it was not like you couldn't just walk in and buy it as a person.
But you can in Germany.
And so Germany, since everything's kind of legal there, becomes the nexus for an international gray and black market drug trade and heroin.
And these German Swiss companies will kind of use Germany as a base and will, they're not directly selling it illegally underground in countries, but they're putting it in position to be sold that way and they're profiting from it.
I'm going to quote from a write-up by a scholar named Jonathan Levy here.
Both morphine and heroin were consumed in Germany during the Weimar years in the Third Reich, though morphine was far more popular than its more potent cousin, perhaps explaining Merck's decision to cease its diacetyl morphine program.
The number of addicts in Germany is difficult to ascertain.
Like many drug statistics, the reported numbers of addicts are mere guesstimates rather than reliable figures, mainly because it is next to impossible to differentiate between addicts and users.
Now, the best evidence seems to suggest that the rate of opiate addiction in Germany increased from the start of the war years, and by that I mean World War I, until about 1922, which is probably caused by the same thing that drives a lot of opiate use in the U.S. today, which is wounded soldiers getting hooked on it, right?
Getting prescribed as much of it as they want and having, you know, developing a problem.
That's a problem in the Civil War, too.
Yeah, yeah.
Every time a lot of men get wounded.
Yeah.
Soldiers got hooked on.
I mean, it's funny you say guesstimate because I'm just reading that Sakra book everyone is waiting and they said they said the estimate was a quarter of a million soldiers in the United States hooked on morphine and that even Theodore Roosevelt basically created a position for someone to fight this quote-unquote epidemic.
Yeah, I mean that that completely makes sense, especially when it is like as available as it was, when you can just bump down to the street and buy it.
Why wouldn't you take a bunch of heroin?
Now, by 1931, though, the rate of addiction seems to have like fallen in Germany.
Obviously, none of our data is perfect, but it may have just been a matter of like enough time had passed since the war.
People had recovered enough.
Some of them had probably died.
One leader in the Reich Health Office at that point estimated that just point, there were just 0.3 male addicts per 10,000 people in Germany, which is probably nonsense.
But he also noted that one in 100 doctors were addicts.
And this is probably a much more accurate number, in part because like a lot of these guys have been prosecuted for this, and in part because today we know that doctors are at a heavily, a massively elevated risk of particularly opiate addiction, right?
Same thing with nurses.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Doctors, pharmacists, and nurses.
You know, I've talked to a nurse with a drug addiction who was like pinching opiates and shit for quite a long while.
And it's like it's it's it's hard to avoid, especially given like the trauma that you encounter as a healthcare worker.
Why wouldn't you want to be high on fucking Oxy all the time?
Right.
I get it.
Like it's not good behavior if people's lives are in your hand, but it's I can empathize with the need to dole that.
Yeah.
Especially since, I don't know, none of us are, we've all decided not to do the pandemic mitigation thing anymore.
So I don't know.
We are paying more taxes than Jeff Bezos as a nurse in Arizona.
Yeah.
So yeah, take some Oxy.
I'm not going to yell at you.
Right.
Now, yeah, cocaine was also a drug with a German origin.
It was synthesized first from coca leaves by German chemists and popularized by a Viennese psychiatrist named Dr. Sigmund Freud and a Viennese eye doctor named Carl Kohler.
Freud prescribed cocaine as part of his talk therapy sessions, and Dr. Kohler just poured it right into people's eyes as a local anesthetic, which is man, imagine going to the eye doctor and all right, I'm going to pour some cocaine in your eyes.
Keep them open.
This shit's strong as ass.
My therapist, Kathy, shout out.
If before I was about to talk to her about stalking people on social media and how it was affecting my mental health, she poured some cocaine into my eyes.
I can't say how that would affect our sessions.
I think they'd be ratter.
Cocaine Industry Side Stories00:04:45
I think they'd go by really quickly.
They would go by very quickly.
Yeah.
And I would need a gallon of water to help my dry mouth.
Yes.
Look, as far as I am aware, cocaine is a drug without downsides.
So I don't see why people shouldn't take a shitload of it.
It's good for your second.
I thought you were.
I've heard it has the ability to reduce nasal problems, cleans you out real business.
This is not for the next two days.
Yeah.
Yeah.
For legal, for legal reasons.
No.
Continue.
You know what?
It is time for an ad break.
And Behind the Bastards is sponsored by the global cocaine industry.
Behind the Bastards.
If you like podcasts, you'll love cocaine.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really start making money.
It's Financial Literacy Month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum-Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they're seeing all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100%.
They believe everything, but at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating While Broke from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pittman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic, Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
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Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
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Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgetista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never, ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iTeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the markets, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
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Racial Policy and Decadence00:13:03
We're back and we're celebrating the cocaine industry.
We're not.
An industry with no problems.
Not true.
So PR.
Yeah.
You only hear one side of the story.
Exactly.
People talk a lot about all the deaths, all the murders, all the violence, all the death squads funded by cocaine exports.
People never talk about the humble movie producers railing cocaine off of the back of each other's iPhones in the bathroom of a club.
Yeah, Martin Scorsese.
Ever heard of it?
Right?
Another person who never did anything problematic.
Cocaine.
Thank you.
Robert.
So now we were just talking about how Dr. Sigmund Freud and Dr. Carl Kohler were heavily responsible with popularizing cocaine in Germany.
And both guys are Jewish.
This is relevant because cocaine takes off as the Nazis are rising to and then getting into power.
And so the Nazis condemn cocaine as a Jewish drug corrupting pure Aryan bodies, right?
They are not fans of cocaine.
And this is what they can't really come after opiates, right?
And they don't.
They have these kind of, they kind of approach it as a public health problem, but they can't condemn opiate users because most a lot of opiate users are soldiers.
And there's this, you have to like worship veterans in this period of time, especially if you're the Nazis.
But cocaine, that's the drug that, you know, the artists and the queer people and the fucking psychiatrists are doing.
You can demonize cocaine, you know?
And they do.
So Berlin decadence was a major topic of complaint for the Nazis.
And the city was a hive of all things rad.
There were illegal dance parties, not dissimilar to raves.
There were infamous clubs like the Bauhaus Ressi, which was kind of like the Studio 54 of its time.
It was a place people would meet and fuck and do lots of cocaine.
Since prostitution and drug use was more or less legal in Berlin, tourists from the United States would often travel there to fuck and snort themselves silly.
In Blitz, Ohler cites the lyrics of a contemporary song to set the mood of the time.
And I don't know what the tune of this song was, but it's a good song.
Once not so very long ago, sweet alcohol, that beast, brought warmth and sweetness to our lives, but then the price increased.
And so cocaine and morphine, Berliners now select.
Let lightning flashes rage outside.
We snort and we inject.
At dinner in the restaurant, the waiter brings the tin of Coke for us to feast upon.
Forget whiskey and gin.
Let drowsy morphine take its subcutaneous effect upon our nervous system.
We snort and we inject.
These medications aren't allowed, of course.
They're quite forbidden.
But even such illicit treats are very seldom hidden.
Euphoria awaits us, and though, as we suspect, our foes can't wait to shoot us down.
We snort and we inject.
And if we snort ourselves to death or into the asylum, our days are going downhill fast.
How better to beguile them?
Europe's a madhouse anyway.
No need for Jinnya flecking.
The only way to paradise is snorting and injecting.
That's very fun.
And the way you read it made it sound like you were reading a children's book.
Yeah, it would be a good children's book.
And it makes sense.
This is happening as the first kind of anti-drug laws are being pushed through.
And again, they're not nearly as strict as anything we live with today in the United States, but they're the first.
And the Nazis are, you know, they're complaining about drug use, but they're also complaining about degeneracy, about artists, about people who are queer.
And those people, the like kind of artistic intellectual, can see what's coming, and they also can't stop it because they didn't.
And that's what the song is about.
It's like, well, we're about to get all murdered by the Nazis.
Might as well take some heroin.
Right.
Yeah.
It's getting a little, yeah, the price is increasing.
Alcohol is not cutting it anymore.
Yeah.
Time to get fucked up until the Nazis take total power.
Hard to blot out what's happening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Now, I will say, somewhat ironically, Ohler's focus on Berlin drug culture, the fact that he zero was in on that so much, kind of focusing less on the rest of Germany, seems to have been heavily influenced by Nazi propaganda in a way that I think does make his overall work a little less accurate.
He writes, quote, anyone who could afford it took cocaine, the ultimate weapon for intensifying the moment.
Coke spread like wildfire and symbolized the extravagance of the age.
On the other hand, it was viewed as a degenerate poison and disapproved of by both communists and Nazis who were fighting for power in the streets.
There was violent opposition to the free and easy zeitgeist.
German nationalists railed against moral decay and similar attacks were heard from the conservatives.
Though Berlin's new status as a cultural metropolis was accepted with pride, the bourgeoisie, which was losing status in the 1920s, showed its insecurity through its radical condemnation of mass pleasure culture, decry it as decadently Western.
Now, his job does a fine, his work here does a fine job of getting across the way popular German opinion kind of, or at least right-wing opinion saw Berlin and the decadence of its artistic set, but it's also not historically accurate in absolute terms.
And to make that point, I want to quote from a paper called The Drug Policy of the Third Reich from the journal Social History of Alcoholic Drugs.
Criminal commissar Ernst Engelbrecht of Berlin claimed in 1924 that cocaine became most popular amongst female and male homosexuals.
To him, cocaine was not a problem.
It had turned into an epidemic.
Yet, according to contemporary estimates, the city of Karlsruhe reigned supreme as the center for cocaine consumption with 1.44 grams per thousand people, while Berlin remains second with a consumption rate of one gram per thousand people, which is not particularly high.
1924 marked the first German anti-so yeah, he's again, there is cocaine, there is this kind of very popular party sect, and the Nazis make a lot of hay of it.
But in absolute terms, Berlin isn't consuming a particularly large amount of cocaine.
And again, I think this is an area where the fact that the Nazis harped on it so much has Ohler focusing on kind of the decadence of Berlin in a way that is kind of falling for their trap because it was not, Berlin itself was not nearly as decadent or drug-addled as the propaganda made it seem, based on the numbers that we actually have.
But the opiate problem was, it sounds like.
Well, it peaked around, I think, 22, 23.
It starts to decline in this.
Like, that's kind of the whole point, is that Germany, especially compared to the United States, does not have a particularly big drug problem or drug culture.
It's, again, very prominent because a lot of famous people are involved in like the set in Berlin that is doing a lot of this.
But that is, that's kind of like a subculture in Berlin.
It's not the city and it's not mainstream in Germany.
And the fact that the Nazis kind of blow it up into being Berlin is the sin, the hum of, it's kind of like what happens with like Portland, where like the city of Portland's being burnt down every week because the right wing sees a kid break a Starbucks window.
That's kind of well, no, I was, I, I, I didn't break shit.
I don't see shit.
But that's kind of how that's kind of how drug use in Berlin gets painted.
And a lot of people still see it in history just because the Nazis made so much hay over the decadence of the city.
When the reality is that the vast majority of people in Berlin, if they ever did indulge, weren't doing it all that much.
It's buzzwords.
It's like Freud.
Yeah.
Now, 1924 marked the first major German anti-drug law, which banned the sale of powder cocaine from pharmacies.
So didn't make it illegal.
You could still get cocaine pretty much legally.
You just couldn't buy powdered coke from the pharmacy.
And cocaine consumption is estimated to have peaked in 1927 and fallen afterwards.
So this is definitely an area where Oller engages in some counterfactual prose for the sake of making his book more interesting.
But that said, his writing does give a decent idea of how the Nazis expressed their rhetoric around drugs.
Quote, Jews and drugs merged into a single toxic or epidemiological unit that menaced Germany.
For decades, our people have been told by Marxists and Jews, your body belongs to you.
That was taken to mean that at social occasions between men or between men and women, any quantities of alcohol could be enjoyed, even at the cost of the body's health.
Irreconcilable with this Jewish Marxist view is the Teutonic German idea that we are the bearers of the eternal legacy of our ancestors, and that accordingly, our body belongs to the Klan and the people.
SS Hauptstumführer, criminal commissar Erwin Kosmel, who was from 1941 director of the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions, asserted that Jews play a supreme part in the international drug trade.
His work was concerned with eliminating international criminals who often have roots in jewelry.
The Nazi Party's Office of Racial Policy claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug-dependent.
The intellectual urban Jew preferred cocaine or morphine to calm his constantly excited nerves and give himself a feeling of peace and inner security.
Jewish doctors were rumored to be often extraordinarily addicted to morphine.
But he rather, Oler rather conveniently ignores the fact that, you know, again, in focusing on this, and those are all things the Nazis said, they definitely, again, harped on Jewish drug use and like the scourge of drug addiction and how it's Jewish, you know, has Jewish origins.
But immediately before the Nazi seizure of power, the Reich Health Minister wrote, quote, to the knowledge of the Reich Health Office, there is no illicit drug trade in Berlin in a considerable amount as to pose a danger to the public.
The circumstances in this respect have changed completely in recent years.
And this is 1931.
So after 27, drug use kind of of all kinds declines rapidly.
And so by the point the Nazis are in power, there's really not much of a drug problem.
And as a result, there's really not much of a drug crackdown.
And this is Ohler's main sin in his book, as I see it.
He wants to draw a direct line between the modern war on drugs and the Nazi war on drugs.
And so he notes that when the central, while the central drug law in the Third Reich was a holdover from Weimar Germany, there were new drug regulations put in place when the Nazis took power to further Nazi ideas of racial hygiene.
He claims that drug consumption was heavily penalized, starting in 1933 with prison time, and appears to be making the claim that drug users in Nazi Germany were penalized and thrown into concentration camps like other political prisoners and racial minorities.
This is something actual scholars who study drug policy in the Third Reich disagree with.
While you can find most of it was not, and even so, we'll talk about it like consumption wasn't really criminalized.
And there was at no point were drug users gone after and put in concentration camps in an organized way.
And I want to quote from that paper by Jonathan Levy again.
Quote, drug use was never a crime in Germany.
Thus, habitual drug users or drug addicts were not criminals.
Therefore, they were not considered habitual criminals and could not be sent to a concentration camp.
So this is, again, in terms of critiquing Ohler, and this is a big chunk of the early part of his book.
And it is, you know, there's two parts of this book.
There's the part of it where he's doing original research into Hitler's drug use and Hitler's doctor.
And there's a part of it where he's kind of synthesizing a bunch of other historic reports on the Nazis and drugs.
And it's that part that, in my opinion, he screws up the most.
So, yeah.
It's anyway, that's a little bit of a rant on this book, but I think it's important to kind of get this sort of stuff right.
And when you actually...
It's even more important to get this stuff right.
Yeah, yeah.
And Levy is clear that he cannot find, and Levy is a guy who studies specifically Third Reich policies on like drug policies.
His conclusion is that there's no evidence that, again, and the Nazis talked a lot about racial hygiene, about how drug use was a racial problem.
But there's no evidence, according to Levy, that Nazi drug policy was impacted by their ideas on racial hygiene.
So politicians and people were saying one thing, but in terms of what the actual legal changes were, there's just not evidence of that.
And I have to think Levy knows his shit on this better than Ohler does.
So making drug consumption a crime was really our thing?
Oh, yeah, we do the hell out of that.
I mean, the Germans do now, but yeah.
And part, again, part of why the Nazis really didn't want to go after drug users is because a lot of them were veterans.
Herman Gehrig was a drug-addicted veteran.
And the trench generation were idolized.
They were nearly worshipped by the Nazis.
If you'd focused on junkies and demonizing them, that would have been bad politics.
It's also worth noting that the German penal code established during the Kaiser's Reich was actually, we would consider it wildly progressive on issues of drug addiction compared to the United States.
And I'm going to quote from Levy here: Addicts were not responsible for their actions while under the influence of drugs and should receive treatment instead of a jail sentence.
Judges often agreed with this position, but were unable to force treatment and were known to set free criminals unfit to stand trial.
The protection of drunken and intoxicated criminals existed in the German penal code since its inception.
And obviously, that's not a perfect way to do things either.
Being like, well, you raped somebody, you beat the shit out of somebody, but you were drunk.
Serving the Country with Drugs00:05:00
So get out of here.
They found a dime bag of, you know, high sativa.
Yeah.
But it is, there is, there is also an element of that that's good, which is that, like, well, yeah, drug addiction should be treated as a health problem rather than a criminal problem.
Yeah.
Thank you, Hunter Biden, for progressing our understanding of that.
Smoked enough crack to move the U.S. forward on drug policy.
Really doing your country a service.
And I mean that actually sincerely.
You know who else is doing our country a service, Carolina?
Brand, brand?
The Sinaloa cartel, producers of the finest derivative.
I never thought I would worry all about it until this exact episode.
No, no, we are pure Sinaloa these days.
So curl up with a big fat bag of cocaine and listen to a podcast while sweating heavily.
Make a pipe out of your mother's vase.
Make a pipe out of anything.
ABP, baby, always be piping.
It's my motto.
I feel like it was a little bit unbelievable until I really started making money.
It's financial literacy month, and the podcast Eating Wall Broke is bringing real conversations about money, growth, and building your future.
This month, hear from top streamer Zoe Spencer and venture capitalist Lakeisha Landrum Pierre as they share their journeys from starting out to leveling up.
If I'm outside with my parents and they see all these people come up to me for pictures, it's like, what?
Today now, obviously, it's like 100% they believe everything.
But at first, it was just like, you got to go get a real job.
There's an economic component to communities thriving.
If there's not enough money and entrepreneurship happening in communities, they fail.
And what I mean by fail is they don't have money to pay for food.
They cannot feed their kids.
They do not have homes.
Communities don't work unless there's money flowing through them.
Listen to Eating Wild Brook from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hi, I'm Bob Pippman, chairman and CEO of iHeartMedia, and I'm kicking off a brand new season of my podcast, Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.
Math and Magic takes you behind the scenes of the biggest businesses and industries while sharing insights from the smartest minds in marketing.
I'm talking to leaders from the entertainment industry to finance and everywhere in between.
This season on Math and Magic, I'm talking to CEO of Liquid Death, Mike Cesario, financier and public health advocate Mike Milken, take-to interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick.
If you're unable to take meaningful creative risk and therefore run the risk of making horrible creative mistakes, then you can't play in this business.
Sesame Street CEO Sherry Weston and our own chief business officer, Lisa Coffey.
Making consumers see the value of the human voice and to have that guaranteed human promise behind it really makes it rise to the top.
Listen to Math and Magic, stories from the frontiers of marketing on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budgianista Alicia to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
That's great.
It's about creating an atmosphere for you to be able to take care of yourself and leave a strong financial legacy for your family.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
Hey, Ernest, what's up?
Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
On each episode of the podcast, Earn Your Leisure, we break down the conversations you need to understand money, investing, and entrepreneurship.
From stocks and real estate to credit, business, and generational wealth, we translate complex financial topics into real conversations everyone can understand.
Because the truth is, most people were never taught how money really works.
But once you understand the system, you can start to build within it.
That means ownership, smarter investing, and creating opportunities not just for yourself, but for the next generation.
If you want to learn how to build wealth, understand the market, and think like an owner, Earn Your Leisure is the podcast for you.
Listen to Earn Your Leisure on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
We're back.
Hitler's Vitamin Injections00:15:32
Ah, boy.
So, drugs.
Yeah.
So far, I've mostly criticized Blitz, and it does deserve some criticism.
But now we're about to get into what I think the book does very well, which is provide the first really thorough history of a fascinating figure, one of the few high-up Nazis to be mostly ignored by historians, Dr. Theodore Morell.
In 1999, psychiatrist Fritz Redlick published a book titled Hitler, Diagnosis of a Destructive Profit.
It was an attempt to actually answer the, to actually answer the question, what the fuck was going on with that dude in like a medical way, with as much scientific rigor.
Yeah, what was going on with that guy?
Yeah.
In as much of like a scientific way as you could for a patient who's, you know, been dead for decades.
He used written and oral statements by Hitler and his close associates to try and put together a picture of the Führer's health.
Redlich's book relied heavily upon Dr. Theodore Morel's records.
And I'm going to quote from the Psychiatric Times here.
Before the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler's complaints included insomnia, eczema, and GI discomfort.
His health is known to have declined considerably starting in 1941.
Redlich cited a host of ailments, including tinnitus, severe headaches, dizziness, impaired vision, abdominal spasms, impairments in motility, and during the final year of the war, jaundice, laryngitis, runny nose, more bouts of GI spasms, tremor of his hands, and conspicuous difficulties in locomotion, evidence of Parkinson's disease.
In 1945, his GI symptoms and tremors worsened, eventually leaving him unable to move around completely on his own.
In treating these symptoms over the years, Morel prescribed for Hitler a cocktail of medications that included opiates, morphine, oxycodone, barbituates, cocaine, amphetamines, and bromides.
In the end, Redlich drew a conclusion that has been repeated frequently ever since.
Hitler abused amphetamines, particularly between 1939 and 1943, and was temporarily impaired by such abuse.
And this was probably the most Hitler diagnosis, probably the most popular and thorough look at Morel and Hitler's drug use prior to Ohler's work.
And like Ohler's work, Redlich's book was heavily criticized.
Experts noted that many of his sources were unreliable because, again, a lot of this is based on personal recollections of Nazis who survived the war, who are fundamentally untrustworthy people.
And yeah, and even more than that, they criticized Redlich for the fact that his emphasis on the Führer's drug abuse came close to excusing Hitler's crimes, which you obviously never want to do.
And the same criticism is made of Blitz.
We'll see how we feel about that at the end of this.
But right now, I think it's time to get into the meat of Ohler's work, which is his portrait of Dr. Morel and the relationship Hitler had with his primary physician.
Here's how Ohler introduces Morel: quote: The word Jew was smeared on the plaque of a doctor's surgery on Beirutherstrasse in Berlin's Charlottenburg district one night in 1933.
The name of the doctor, a specialist in dermatological and sexually transmitted diseases, was illegible.
Only the opening hours could still be seen clearly.
Weekdays 11 to 1 and 5 to 7, apart from Saturday afternoon.
The overweight bald Dr. Theodore Morel reacted to the attack in a way that was typical that was as typical as it was wretched.
He quickly joined the Nazi party to defuse further hostilities of that kind.
Morel was not a Jew.
The SA had wrongly suspected him of being one because of his dark complexion.
After he had registered as a party member, Morel's practice became even more successful.
It expanded and moved into the lavish rooms of a 19th-century building on the corner of Kerfürstendam and Fassanenstrasse.
Now, Morel was not at all unique in joining the Nazi party to avoid, you know, getting accused of being Jewish.
Yeah, very common.
He was one of, and again, not just for that reason.
He was one of hundreds of thousands of German professionals who were what you would call apolitical Nazis.
If the Nazi party had never come around, they probably never would have done anything bad.
They would have done whatever their fucking job is, right?
But because being the best way to further their career or just make life easier was to join the Nazi Party, they joined the Nazi Party and thus played some role in the Holocaust.
And yeah, so as you might expect, Morel was not a great doctor.
Again, STDs were kind of his primary area of expertise, but the thing that he really loved to focus on was the very new field of vitamins.
Now, in the early 1900s, we'd figured out that vitamins were things and that you would die without them, but we did not know a whole lot more than that, right?
Vitamins is still a pretty new concept, that there's like, there's these things that if you don't get enough of them, your body stops working.
Yeah.
So, there was an idea among, and we start to realize, like, oh shit, vitamin C or like, you know, potassium, you can have, you can feel immediate effects when you take some of this stuff, like B12, right?
And you can.
If you've ever, if you, especially if you're dealing with like a deficiency, like it's, it's fucking quick.
Um, and so that that convinces a lot of people that, like, you can, you know, if some of these can have such an immediate effect on people who are vitamin deficient, maybe taking shitloads of vitamins will like make you superhuman, right?
Like, just inject huge doses of them, and you'll be, you know, it's, it's, it's Joe Rogan-esque stuff, right?
Like, it's the, yeah, it also reminds me of being 13 and having to eat a bunch of nuts.
It's the let's see what happens.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And like eating a bunch of nutmeg, taking shitloads of vitamins is a mixed bag and can make you poop a tremendous amount.
Um, shout out to vitamin C. Shout out to vitamin C.
So, obviously, vitamin injections can be powerful medicine, can save people's lives in certain circumstances, right?
Incredible potential for malnourished people and in people with certain disorders.
And also, like, there are certain vitamin shots, like if you're hungover and shit, you'll be like, oh, fuck, I feel like, I feel like a king right now, you know.
Now, the early 1900s was a time.
Oh, sorry.
So, there is like vitamin injections.
That's not like snake oil necessarily.
That's not something that's even necessarily bad for you.
But Morel marketed his vitamin injections in a way that, again, wouldn't have seemed out of place on like a podcast ad today.
He was, in short, a snake oil salesman, and he relied on the fact that vitamins were new and sexy to help him market them as performance enhancers.
He had this thing called Vitamoltin, which was he sold it in both like bar form and in a shot that was basically like this powerful vitamin injection that he eventually added like a whole bunch of other stuff to.
We'll talk about it.
And again, you know, because vitamins don't have a huge impact on people who are already well-nourished, Morel at points would make the decision to mix real drugs and hormones into his vitamin shots.
Because like, yeah, fuck, you want him to like feel something immediately, right?
Put a little amphetamine in there, you know, put a little bit of fucking, put some fucking testosterone in there, you know?
Like, so he was, he was doping people.
It wasn't just vitamins, it was often like steroids, it was, or, or, you know, amphetamines, or and eventually, like, just a shitload, like everything he could get, caffeine a lot of the time, he would shoot caffeine in.
You know, it's kind of, because, again, if you're this guy, if someone's well-nourished, just most vitamin shots, they're not going to feel anything.
So, shoot a bunch of caffeine in there, too.
They'll feel that.
They'll feel like something's going on, you know, like, oh, shit, like, I'm, powerful now.
Um, it's a smart con move.
It's a smart con.
Telling someone that you are giving them vitamins, but really are giving them a cup of coffee.
It probably does feel like something's working.
Yeah.
So, for male patients, he often shot added in testosterone to act as an anabolic steroid.
For female patients, he would include nightshade to help with energy and because he thought it made their eyes prettier.
If that wasn't enough of a boost, he was not above using more powerful stimulants like methamphetamine.
We'll talk about meth in more detail later.
But the point is, Morel's only true talent as a physician was marketing and the fact that he seems to have been really good at injecting people.
There were folks who said you couldn't even feel him prick you with the needle.
He was so good at what he did.
Now, today's fascists are so obsessed with traditionalism that it's often forgotten that the OGs were futurists.
Fascism was obsessed with machinery, with cutting-edge science, ultra-modern medical science.
Fascism was a modern thing.
They loved cars.
They loved machine guns.
They loved planes.
Eugenics at the time was considered hip and exciting science.
He was adopted from the States, am I right?
Yeah, yeah, the eugenics and stuff.
Sure.
I mean, a decent amount of this was.
And Morel's vitamin shots fit in well with the vibe of the early Nazi years.
By 1936, he was one of the most prominent doctors in the Reich.
And that's the year he got a phone call from Hitler's adjutant, asking him to make a house call for Heinrich Hoffmann, the Führer's official photographer.
Hoffman had contracted gonorrhea, and not from his wife.
Since he was a prominent Nazi, the regime wanted to treat him in a hush-hush manner.
Morel knew a lot about STDs and was able to treat the photographer easily.
The Nazis were so grateful that they gave him and his wife a fancy trip to Vinnis as a thank you for his discretion.
Afterwards, he was invited to dine with the Hoffmans in Munich.
Hitler showed up, and the group ate all the Nazi leaders, and the group all ate the Nazi leader's favorite meal: spaghetti with nutmeg, tomato sauce on the side, and green salad.
From Witz, quote, yeah, Hitler's weird eater.
Hitler, who had heard a great many good things about the jovial Morel, thanked him before dinner for treating his old comrade and regretted not having met the doctor before.
Perhaps then his chauffeur, who had died of meningitis a few months earlier, would have still been alive.
Morel reacted nervously for the compliment and barely spoke during the spaghetti dinner.
The constantly sweating doctor with the full face and the thick round glasses on his potato nose knew that in higher circles he was not considered socially acceptable.
His only chance of acceptance lay in his injections.
So he pricked up his ears when Hitler, in the course of the evening, talked almost in passing about severe stomach and intestinal pains that had been tormenting him for years.
Morel hastily mentioned an unusual treatment that might prove successful.
Hitler looked at him quizzically and invited Morel and his wife to further consultations at the Berghof, his mountain retreat in the Ober Salzburg near Berchtesgaden.
There, a few days later, during a private conversation, the dictator frankly admitted to Morel that his health was now so poor that he could barely perform any action.
That was, he claimed, due to the bad treatment given to him by his previous doctors, who couldn't come up with anything but starving him.
Then, if there happened to be an abundant dinner on the program, which was often the case, he immediately suffered from unspeakable bloating and itchy eczema on both legs, so that he had to walk around with bandages around his feet and couldn't wear boots.
Morel immediately thought he recognized the cause of Hitler's complaints and diagnosed abnormal bacterial flora, causing poor digestion.
Now, we don't know exactly what was wrong with Hitler at this point, like medically.
In the mid-aughts, historian Hendrik Eberl and physician Hans Joachim Neumann attempted to diagnose the Führer's physical maladies.
And I'm going to quote from the Psychiatric Times here: While the German Chancellor appears to have not suffered from any major acute illnesses, he was a victim of chronic diseases.
Neumann and Eberl confirmed that Hitler's long-standing ailments were GI in nature.
There were also signs in medical records of progressive coronary sclerosis and high blood pressure.
Most prominently, however, Neumann and Eberl confirmed the diagnosis of Parkinson's disease, which really started in the early 1940s.
So he's got eczema and he's got something on his GI that gives him this.
And this is his main complaint.
He has this horrific, debilitating gas pain.
His gas is so bad that he can't function a lot of the time when he eats.
Some of this is probably exacerbated by his vegetarian diet.
He probably had IBS as a result of his time in the trenches.
You talk about people particularly who were over in like Iraq and Afghanistan earlier in those wars before there was as much infrastructure on the US side.
Nearly all of them have some sort of IBS.
It's just something you get when you're in trenches, the water's dirty and stuff.
There's a number of things that are probably going on with Hitler.
But it is likely right that he had something going wrong with his bacterial flora, you know, perhaps because of his injuries during the war or something.
But we now know that like Morel prescribed his leaders something called mutafloor.
This was a gut bacteria supplement.
It had actually been crafted from the intestinal flora of a German soldier who'd been sent to the Balkans during World War I and had been like the only guy in his unit not to get horrible stomach issues.
So they, and that's actually a really good medical thing.
He's like, well, that guy seems like, let's get the shit out of his guts and like give it to other people, you know?
And mutafloor was live bacteria in capsules taken with the hope that they'd set up permanent shop in the patient's bowels.
This was real medicine, and its impact on Hitler's GI tract was apparently powerful and quick.
Hitler experienced immediate relief, although not permanent relief.
So I don't know exactly what was going on here.
But he was so overjoyed to be cured, as he felt at the time, that he gave Morel a house and made him his personal physician.
But Morel wasn't a gut bacteria specialist.
He was a vitamin man.
Hitler still had health complaints, and a lot of them were probably due to permanent injuries caused by his service and the fact that he was just an aging man, you know, in a time when medicine wasn't very good.
So Morel was able to convince his new boss that vitamins were the answer.
You're not tired because you're pushing 50 and you have been, you know, going without sleep and working like a crazy person and like you were injured and suffered permanent damage in a war.
You're tired because you need these vitamin injections that are also full of caffeine or sometimes amphetamines, you know.
So he was basically like, I, you're, you're, you can't, like, like you need vitamins, and because vitamin pills take too long and your schedule is so demanding, I've just got to start shooting you up every time before a speech in order to like get you get you hyped up.
Get you going, yeah.
Yeah.
And Morel starts giving Hitler shots and he never stops until the very end of the war.
And he would put a wide variety of substances into the Nazi leader's veins.
Iodine, vitamins, chalk.
And when Hitler had a big speech, a power injection, which often contained glucose to give him a boost of sugar-fueled energy, probably caffeine, also a lot of the time.
Morel's immediate goal was an instant cessation of symptoms.
So if you're tired, he wants you to feel wired right away, you know?
And to that end, he continually experimented and tweaked the injections he was giving Hitler.
We don't always know what they included because sometimes Morel just, I gave him, you know, shot number, whatever, and it's like, okay, well, what the fuck was in that?
And Oler does a lot of good work to try to diagnose it.
You know, a lot of times that aren't recorded, there's probably some, if not amphetamine, then at least caffeine in these things.
We don't always know.
We do know that in 1937, the Nazi leader lost his voice before a big speech, and Morel gave him an injection of something that is said to have cured him immediately.
And like, who knows what the fuck he was shooting into the guy?
Lip sync.
Yeah, just tell Hitler to lip sync.
Yeah.
Soon Morel was so indispensable to the Führer that he was forced to let his medical practice shrivel up from lack of attention.
Hitler couldn't let him be away from him, right?
He needed him kind of available on call at all times.
Hitler was an all-consuming patient, but he rewarded Dr. Morel well, making him a wealthy man.
In 1938, he gave his doctor an honored professorship.
For his part, Morel kept looking for new substances to shoot into Hitler's body.
Meth as a Nazi Medicine00:11:54
The 1936 Olympics had seen the advent of the use of Benzedrine, which is classic speed.
When your parents talk about doing speed in the 70s, that's Benny's, baby.
Yeah.
You can still get it today if you get a Benzedrex inhaler.
You make the little allergy inhalers.
You just make sure that they say Benzedrine on them.
You pop them open.
You take the little cotton cloth out, throw it in a water bottle.
You're good to go.
You'll killed the sky dance.
Allegedly.
Yeah.
So yeah, Benzedrine gets big after the 36 Olympics, and a German pharmaceutical company makes a note of this.
They're like, well, seems like people love speed.
We should develop a better speed.
And the chemical they picked to make an even better speed was a little substance you might have heard about.
It was first synthesized in 1919 by Japanese chemists, and its name was in methylamphetamine.
It's the good shit.
That's the good shit.
Protect your teeth.
Yeah, baby.
Ah, meth.
Speaking of drugs with no downsides.
So, in short order, Timmler was producing methamphetamine pills as an over-the-counter medication under the brand named Purviton.
And sales started in the winter of 1937, and the drug was immediately popular among the young Third Reich users, and the drug was immediately popular in the young Third Reich.
Soon, Timmler was even selling boxes of meth spiked chocolate.
They bragged that their wonder drug was good for, quote, reawakening joy in the despondent, and that frigidity in women can be easily influenced with Purvitan tablets.
Give a girl some meth and she'll want to get down, you know?
You can just put that on a box and sell it.
What's probably missing is meth.
Is meth.
When it's all legal, I hope to be an ad man for the methamphetamine industry.
It's so easy to solve.
With chemistry, yeah.
Yeah.
So like if you've, you and your wife have been fighting, fight faster on meth, you know?
Exactly.
Exactly.
So I'm going to continue to read from Timmler's ads for Purviton.
The treatment technique is as simple as can be imagined.
Four half tablets every day, long before bedtime, 10 days a month for three months.
This will achieve excellent results by increasing women's libido and sexual power.
Take meth every day to fuck better.
Meth, I'm almost positive would not help me get laid.
I mean, when I smoked pot in college, I would perpetually ruin dates by avoiding the person I was sitting next to.
I literally in college smoked weed once with this guy who I was like getting set up with.
Didn't speak to him at all.
I was like, I need to go home.
Apologized to him.
The next time I saw him, I was like, hey, John, I'm so sorry about that.
That was so weird.
I would love to just like see if we could do this again.
And he said, thank you so much for apologizing.
What did we do on our next date?
Smoke weed together.
I was like, I've got to leave again.
So sorry.
And that was the end of our short-lived relationship.
So I feel like if meth was added, it wouldn't help the situation is what I'm saying.
I mean, you know, there's only one way to find out, which is track that guy down and take a just rail a fuckload of crystal.
Only if they put it in chocolate and I want them in those little roache.
Little roast chocolates.
Yeah.
I would like one, you know, those chocolate cherries, the little cherry in the middle of the chocolate thing.
Yeah, that's with a little rock of crystal meth right in the middle.
Right in the middle.
Yeah, the surprise.
Or maybe like those little eggs they make.
Oh, yeah.
Cadbury.
Oh, I was thinking Cadbury eggs.
Instead of like building a toy inside, you smoke meth.
Just a fuckload of meth-filled Cadbury eggs.
God, that would be rad.
Allegedly.
So methamphetamine was even useful in treating drug addicts.
Again, this is according to the company selling meth.
They advised.
They advised people withdrawing from alcohol, cocaine, or heroin to take a little meth to help them get over the shakes.
Meth was like, oh, trying to get off of heroin.
You know, it'll clean you up.
A little bit of methamphetamine.
Can you pronounce this?
Yeah.
Then you're ready to take it.
Oh, yeah, cocaine's bad stuff.
Take this meth.
Clean you right out.
So again, the reason I bring all this up is to point out that like meth was not a drug in the third.
It wasn't seen as a drug in the Third Reich.
It was just seen as like a medicine, particularly like a treatment for anything.
It was a helper.
It was not a recreational substance.
It was advertised as capable of bringing, quote, shirkers, malingerers, defeatists, and whiners into the Nazi fold and turning them into productive, obedient citizens.
They were saying like, meth will help turn you into a good Nazi.
You'll be able to work if you're lazy because you'll be on meth.
One pharma, and again, that's also, you could draw a line to like why they were advertising that it makes women want to fuck is like, well, it's all about breeding, right?
Like, meth is the drug that makes you, helps you work in a factory or get laid and make babies, you know?
Like, that's why they're selling it the way they're selling it, or a big part of it.
One pharmacologist, Felix Hoffner, called prescribing Purvitin the new supreme commandment of his discipline in Germany.
He was saying, like, if you're a pharmacist, it's your duty to give Germans meth.
He called it a chemical, he said that it could bring chemical order to disordered people.
Now, we don't know when precisely Morel first gave Hitler methamphetamine.
The bad doctor had often gave given like, he gave, again, he had like different brand names for his various injections.
And while some of his notes were detailed, this wasn't always the case.
It's likely that Hitler started taking meth in a couple of different forms, potentially in the late 1930s, as he'd often complained of a lack of energy.
And by 1938, 1939, Purvetin was incredibly popular among German civilians.
So the fact that Hitler's taking amphetamines during this period of time was not odd.
It wasn't something unique to him.
It was something that made him very much normal among like the German working class in this period.
That said, it was not something that was widely publicized.
Hitler's reputation was a, he was a sober man and he didn't drink, which was weird.
Like he was not a guy who drank a lot.
He didn't really smoke.
He had this reputation for being indefatigable, almost superhuman, and this was a big part of his appeal.
So they didn't want to like talk about the fact that he was as drugged up as everybody else.
Historians Steven Snelders and Toyne Peters called Nazi Germany after 1938 a methamphetamine dictatorship.
And when they say that, they don't mean that Hitler was a meth dictator, although he was a dictator on meth.
I'm going to quote from Psychiatric Times to get to what they're saying here.
Rather than emphasizing the role of the suppliers, however, they argue that the evidence shows strong demand pressures for the drug from consumers.
In clinical practice, the drug was first used to treat psychological inhibition and endogenous depression, and to augment what was referred to as the will to get healthy.
Purvetin quickly moved from clinical to general practice and was prescribed fairly commonly for employees, workers, and housewives.
In fact, a praline chocolate with 14 milligrams of Purvitin was marketed to the general public.
So it's a meth dictatorship because everyone is on meth.
They're on meth to deal with their depression, their anxiety, like the fact that it's a bummer living in Nazi Germany.
They're on meth to deal with the fact that like they have to, like the work schedules, like the production they're trying to do.
To go on dates.
Meth is in a way the dictator, you know, to go on dates to make enough babies.
And this is one of those things where I don't think Oler is really guilty of this, but I think that people kind of interpreting his work have made way too much of Hitler's amphetamine use.
And rather than put it in the context of like, no, no, no, all of the Nazis were on a fuckload of speed.
And that is relevant.
And it impacted their behavior.
It impacted history in a significant way.
But it's not that like Hitler was on meth and made crazy decisions.
It was that the whole Third Reich was in the late 30s and early 40s very methamphetamine dependent.
And that's kind of important to note.
Now, it's tempting to speculate as to which of Hitler's temper tantrums and rages were influenced by meth use.
I'm going to avoid that temptation.
It is impossible to know.
And while meth certainly had an impact on his behavior, that impact was more to exacerbate the kind of rages he'd always engaged in.
Hitler even used Morel to dose another head of state, Czech President Emil Hacha, during a crucial moment.
In March of 1939, Hitler was trying to negotiate over the annexation of Czechoslovakia.
It was crucial that the smaller country just sort of hand themselves over without fighting, because Germany actually couldn't have successfully invaded Czechoslovakia.
They were kind of bluffing here.
Hasha was ill when he attended a state visit to the Reichschancellery, where Hitler demanded he order the surrender of Czech troops.
Hacha suffered a heart attack, which rendered him unable to function.
And I'm going to quote from Blitz here next.
Hitler urgently summoned Morel, who hurried along with his case and his syringes and injected the unconscious foreign guest with such a stimulating medication that Hacha rose again within seconds, as if from the dead.
He signed the piece of paper that sealed the temporary end of his state.
The very next morning, Hitler invaded Prague without a fight.
During the following years, Hacha sat the powerless head of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, to which parts of his country had been reduced, remaining Morel's loyal patient.
In that respect, pharmacology worked as a way of continuing politics by other means.
This reminds me a lot of a girl in New York who once went down a K-hole and everyone was worried that she was going unconscious until Carly Ray Jemsen's song, Call Me Maybe, came on, and then she shot up back from the dead.
Hey, that song is morally identical to dosing someone with methamphetamine.
I've always said that.
I've always said that.
Now, the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia pretty much went off perfectly for Hitler, but his next goal, the conquest of Poland, was going to require actual, you know, war stuff.
The Führer and his general staff all had clear, terrible memories of the First World War, and they wanted more than anything to avoid a repeat of the bloody stalemates of the Western Front.
The German war machine developed several solutions to this problem.
One of the major reasons that allowed them to kind of, that was crucial behind Blitzkrieg, was small unit stormtrooper tactics that had started being developed near the end of the First World War.
The term the Germans used for this was Auftragstaktik.
And it was, it was heavily, we'll talk about this a bit more later, but it was heavily based around allowing a lot of unit autonomy.
There's this like myth that the Nazi soldiers were these like automatons who followed orders unquestioningly.
The reason why the Blitzkrieg worked is that individual small unit leaders were given a degree of personal discretion and choice and power to make decisions in the field that no other military in the world gave them at this point.
And that's a big part of why they were successful.
They were also, the Blitzkrieg was also crucially relied on the fact that the Germans had built up a significant amount of armored cars, tanks, and close air support craft to enable a speedier sort of mechanized warfare.
And as all of this developed, an idea developed, championed by men like General Heinz Guderian, that this new German army might be able to move quickly enough to avoid the static fortifications that had bogged them down in 1914.
But technology and tactics only went so far.
Poland was huge, and war with Poland meant war with France.
In order to have a hope of sweeping through either country, German soldiers were going to need chemical assistance, and Purviton was just what the doctor general ordered.
From a write-up in Time magazine, quote, Dr. Otto F. Ronk, director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, had high hopes that Purviton would prove advantageous on the battlefield.
His goal was to defeat the enemy with chemically enhanced soldiers, soldiers who could give Germany a military edge by fighting harder and longer than their opponents.
War Tactics and Chemical Aid00:05:28
After testing the drug on a group of medical officers, Ronk believed that Purvitan would be an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad.
We may grasp what far-reaching military significance it would have if we managed to remove the natural tiredness using medical methods.
Ronk himself was a daily user, as detailed in his wartime medical diary and letters.
Quote, with Purviton, you can go on working for 36 to 50 hours without feeling any noticeable fatigue.
This allowed Ronk to work days at a time with no sleep.
And his correspondence indicated, yeah.
Is this an ad?
It is.
It is an ad.
For, again, primary sponsor of the show, methamphetamine, under a bridge near you.
And Purvitan.
You can cook it in your bathtub if you really want, or you're, you know, wherever.
So sad.
It's safe.
Yeah.
It's good stuff.
Yeah.
So we're going to talk more about all of this in part two, but that's going to do it for us in Partlon.
Carolina, how are you?
How are you feeling?
Has this changed your mind on methadol?
Okay, I'm really starting to look at my dating history and I'm realizing a missing puzzle piece.
Methamphetamine.
Methamphetamine.
And maybe just like the super vitamin shot of chalk.
Chalk.
Oh, you can't get enough chalk.
It could be glucose and whatever, human growth hormone, whatever else he was throwing in there.
I think it's fair to say a lot of us have been looking for love in all the wrong places.
And maybe the right place is crystal meth.
Exactly.
Happy Valentine's Day.
Happy Valentine's Day.
When you're on meth, every day is Valentine's Day.
That's the beauty of meth.
That's so true.
Caroline, do you have anything other than methamphetamine you want to plug?
I would love to plug my show True Romance, where we discuss dating horrors and recovering from anything from an episode of The Bachelorette to a terrible first date to a truly devastating breakup.
We're here for you.
Every Thursday, there's a new episode on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And on our next episode, I will be finding going on a blind date.
Yeah.
Literally.
I'll be back out.
And on all our next episodes, I think we'll be on meth too.
Sophie, can we get a line item in the budget for just like a shitload of meth?
Come on, Sophie.
Come on, Sophie.
Come on.
This question.
Well, but off the record.
Off the record, we're absolutely going to do some meth.
Excellent.
All right.
Good news, everybody.
Well, this has been Behind the Bastards.
Methamphetamine is actually based edition.
Listen to it could happen here.
It's now daily and it's on the same podcast app you're listening to.
Maybe if I was.
You know what?
Stop lobbying for this.
Stop it.
That's the episode.
Bye-bye.
All right.
That's the episode.
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