Norman Ohler details how the Third Reich weaponized drugs, contrasting Hitler's oxycodone reliance with the military's mass use of Temmler's Pervitin to fuel Blitzkrieg tank advances through the Ardennes. While Nazi ideology officially opposed narcotics, they conducted horrific LSD experiments in camps that later informed CIA MKUltra programs. Ohler explores the historical link between ancient rituals and modern psychedelics, questioning if JFK's peace shift resulted from Leary-supplied LSD before concluding that while substances altered behavior, Hitler's crimes stemmed from ideology, not chemical influence. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Punk Roots and Stimulants00:13:44
Do you listen to punk rock?
I listen to the Sex Pistols.
Yeah.
When I saw you, my initial reaction was like, this is like a kind of a grungy German punk rock dude.
Well, but I mean.
Literary punk rock kind of dude.
If you say grunge, I saw actually one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York.
And then I was in the grocery store, like an organic store, and they announced that Kurt Cobain had shot himself.
And that day I received a music tape from Berlin with electronic music.
And I kind of concluded all this punk rock grunge stuff that's dead.
And the new music is electronic music.
So that's actually why I moved back from New York, where I was living in 95, to Berlin.
Really?
Yeah.
And then you started listening to dubstep in Europe.
I don't know.
I just went to.
Clubs in Berlin, which were playing techno music, which was new at the time.
It exploded right around then.
Yeah.
I thought it was.
They call it house music, though, right?
That's what it was called.
Well, no, there's different kinds of electronic music.
House is one, techno is another.
Then drum and bass came.
So it was a big, kind of flourishing culture, which at one point stagnated.
I think it just stagnated, but I think it's still fascinating.
But at the time, it was like new.
So I don't know where we're trying to go, but this is.
We're not trying.
We're not trying.
We're just going.
I'm happy.
Good, me too.
Your shirt is amazing.
That's the meth that the Nazis were taking on your shirt, right?
The Pervitan?
Yeah, I mean, I like the branding, the design.
Also, the name is very good.
It's a good brand name for methamphetamine, Pavitin, because it's the word Pavas, perverse, kind of in it.
Yeah.
Which it is a perverse toxin, I would say, methamphetamine.
Yeah.
The famous saying that everything goes back to the Nazis couldn't be more true.
Even the fucking drugs go back to the Nazis.
Well, I mean, somehow it's not surprising because they were really interested in performance enhancement.
You know, they were the Nazi movement was a very modern movement.
They were applying the news technology, the news forms of propaganda, the news medicines.
So they were.
They were on the cutting edge of everything.
That's correct.
But they didn't have empathy and they didn't have the right morals.
So that can always be a problem.
A very efficient system can also go off the rails.
You need some kind of morals.
I guess you would call it morals.
It's a term that Nietzsche hated, but what do you do without morals?
And you just become kind of a soulless machine that can go anywhere and in a big way too.
Yeah.
So.
You've written two books on the history of drug use in the Third Reich, right?
You've written the first one, which was Blitzed, which was all about the amphetamines and the uppers and all the kind of shit that Hitler's doctor was giving him.
And the second one was Tripped, which was more about the psychedelics and the LSD research they were doing trying to find truth serums, which is eventually what the CIA got its hands on in the Cold War.
First of all, how did you get into writing and what made you want to write a book about Hitler doing myth?
Actually, we have to be very precise.
What we say, and Hitler was actually not into meth.
The German army was into meth.
They were really meth'd up.
But he didn't do it?
No, because he thought this is for the foot soldier, just the robot that has to function, because that's what meth does.
It just releases neurotransmitters and you just follow orders, good.
You're kind of, but it's not the drug to use the highest, the most complex questions that you don't do that on math.
So Hitler wasn't using math.
He was using a certain opioid, which is actually the same one that is now being used in America excessively, which is oxycodone, it's called, right?
Or Oxycontin.
I always confuse the two.
Yeah, Oxycontin.
What's the difference between oxycodone and Oxycontin?
That's a good question.
I'm not sure.
I think codone, I'm not sure.
Okay.
I think codone comes from codeine, which is like a syrup.
And the content is just I think that has a time release in it somehow.
Yes, I think so.
So that was Hitler's favorite drug, actually, the opioid, which at the time was a German product called Oikodal.
So it was a German product.
It wasn't a crazy, you know, illegal drug that he was taking.
Yeah.
Wasn't he mixing it with no, maybe he was speedballing it with Coke, right?
Yeah, he was doing that.
Oh, okay.
But only for like two months, then he stopped the Coke.
He wasn't a coke guy.
No.
He was an opioid guy.
Okay.
Usually they go hand in hand with those kind of dudes.
I don't know.
I mean, I think.
But yeah, maybe.
But his doctor, like his personal physician, Morel, he was the opioid guy.
He always gave him the oxycodone.
And a new doctor came in after the bomb attack on July 20th, Operation Valkyrie.
A new doctor, an ear specialist, because Hitler's eardrums were blown in the explosion.
done by the bomb of Stauffenberg.
Oh, yeah.
And this ear doctor brought the cocaine because cocaine was like also an anesthetic against, you know, it was against pain and he had pain.
So he received the cocaine, but the doctor realized immediately that Hitler loved also the high of the cocaine.
Like this guy wrote a report that I found in the National Archives in Washington.
It's quite funny.
Like he realized immediately that Hitler's like a totally drug.
Like some people really like drugs, take a lot, experiment with it.
And Hitler was one of these guys.
I mean, and the doctor realized that immediately when Hitler was demanding more and more coke.
And then Hitler was happy when the guy left and Morell came and gave him the opioid.
So he was kind of speedballing for a while.
But then this other doctor fell out of favor because he was actually trying to get into Morell's role, but he didn't succeed.
So he had to leave.
So also the cocaine left.
So Hitler remained with opioids.
And didn't they get the coke from one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies that's still around today?
Wasn't it Merck?
Well, that's Merck.
Merck.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Merck's cocaine was.
Apparently, the best in the world.
It was very famous.
Peru's annual production of coca leaf was shipped to the Hamburg harbor and then processed by Merck into the finest cocaine in the world.
Wow.
Do they still make it?
Not anymore.
I know they use cocaine for certain surgeries.
Yeah, right.
Actually, every pharmacy has cocaine.
There are eye drops containing cocaine.
No way.
Yeah.
But it's in a very small quantity.
So back then, cocaine was.
Was actually a big hit.
You know, it was a very successful product because it was so famous, the Mac cocaine.
There were product pirates in China that faked the label of the Mac cocaine and put it on different cocaine bottles, but none was as good as the one they were trying to make knockoff coke with the Merck label.
Kind of, yeah.
Kind of like they make like fake Nike Jordans today.
Yeah, right.
Yeah.
Wow.
Probably get it in Bangkok at the market or something.
Huh.
So, um, How did you first become interested in all this stuff and start writing about it?
Well, I grew up in West Germany, and we were.
West Germany was considered the world championship in dealing with its shitty past.
Like, we were always getting educated about it, which I actually thought was good because it would be weird to grow up in Germany and not know about the Holocaust.
Right.
That would be a weird way of dealing with it.
But it's also a possible way.
Like, Japan is not looking at its past like Germany does.
Like, Germany has an obsession with looking at it.
Right.
So, I grew up kind of knowing a lot about fascism and the Third Reich.
And it was always.
There was always like this image created of like a law and order system where like everything was disciplined.
And so, like, it has nothing to do with drugs, you know.
The Nazis are too square to take drugs, basically.
It's not.
And no one ever combined this.
So.
A friend of mine then in 2010 found old Pervitin packages in an old East Berlin apartment, which were still there from the 40s.
And he took them and he still could feel the methamphetamine effect.
And he told me this story.
That's kind of how it started.
Whoa.
How many years?
This was like 70 something years ago.
Yeah, that's what they used to mean with quality coming from Germany.
Pharmaceutical company Temla makes Pervitin in the 40s.
And some guy finds it in 2010, uses it, and tells me that it was really quite strong, actually.
And he's a DJ, so he knows his drugs.
He could really evaluate it.
Oh, yeah.
He took three in a row because he liked them so much.
And he said after the third meth pill from Nazi Germany, he really felt like a strong drug effect.
That's what got me researching, you know, because that's pretty interesting.
You know, no historian had ever evaluated that.
He's DJing at nightclubs all night long, and you've got to stay awake.
So why not take some Nazi meth?
Well, I mean, he would take probably meth anyhow, you know.
Right.
But so he was interested because.
If people take meth today, they usually snort lines, right?
That's the crystal meth that comes from black eyes.
They just take, I mean, the most sophisticated version of meth now, which everyone takes, is Adderall, pretty much.
Every kid in college.
Is it meth or is it amphetamine?
Isn't it pretty simple?
Is it similar or no?
Well, methamphetamine is like a stronger sort of amphetamine.
And I've heard that Adderall is methamphetamine, but I'm actually not quite sure.
What is the difference between Adderall and meth?
Adderall and methamphetamine are both stimulant drugs that belong to the amphetamine class.
But they have distinct differences in their chemical structures.
Methamphetamine has an additional methyl group, which makes it more potent and able to cross the blood brain barrier more quickly.
Okay.
Meth is like a Porsche, and amphetamines is like a Volkswagen or something.
That's how you can compare it.
Right, right, right.
And the Pervitin was like a golden Lamborghini.
Well, not.
I mean, actually, it was like a Volks pill because it was like a pill for everybody.
It wasn't like you take one pill and you go like insane.
It was like you go one pill and you have like, you know, you can just drive a bit.
Your engine is a bit stronger.
Let's put it that way.
But it's still the same kind of.
So it enhances your performance.
And that's why it became very popular.
You know, it wasn't like now we're drinking a.
We're drinking Kratom.
I got this whole entire table is loaded with drugs.
Yeah, right.
Legal drugs mostly.
So it was not so unusual actually to take a pill of meth.
Because also at the time they didn't have so many substances at the availability as we have now.
It was the late 30s.
So when Pavitin came onto the market, people liked it.
They talked about it.
Everyone would use it.
And not just soldiers and people in the military.
Everyday people, business people were using it.
It was kind of like a common thing for folks.
Yeah, also, it wasn't so available, popular to go into a coffee shop.
As many as today, and I think especially women would often not go into coffee shops because the cafehäuser they were male dominated, which they still are in some parts of the world.
So it's not so what do you take?
You know, you take methamphetamine.
I can understand it, I probably would have taken it back then, yeah, because also it's beneficial in a dictatorship that's all about functionality to function, you know, you don't, and methamphetamine is a good.
It's a stimulant that makes you, you know.
It doesn't make you think, right?
It makes you just kind of like a machine.
Like you get to the point.
I mean, a machine is a bit exaggerated.
Well, I mean, I've done Adderall before and I know the feeling.
I hate it.
You kind of can't stop, right?
Right.
It kind of kills creativity and it makes you just want to get more things done and get more shit checked off the checklist.
Yeah, I don't think, for example, amphetamine is a good drug for writing because you do write a lot, but.
It lowers your ability to self criticize yourself because you just feel too good and you just do it too fast.
And that's not what literature is actually about.
Battlefield Drugs Compared00:13:42
You have to be very subtle in each step you take forward.
So, amphetamine.
I'm surprised some writers can write stuff on amphetamines, like Philip K. Dick was writing on amphetamines.
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Oh, yeah, that's crazy.
Especially, but also, on the road was written on amphetamines by Kerouac, supposedly in two weeks without sleep, which is possible because you can actually write a lot of pages quite quickly.
Wasn't uh Stephen King also doing loads of coke when he was writing some of his books like Cujo?
I'm not familiar with that, I could imagine it.
I'm pretty sure he was.
I'm pretty sure he was like drinking like crazy and doing Freud was developing um.
A lot of his theories on Koch.
Yes.
Freud, my favorite philosopher.
Sherlock Holmes was created probably on Coke by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
I think Holmes himself used Coke to solve his cases.
Really?
Yeah.
But I'm also not a Sherlock Holmes specialist.
Yeah, I mean, I'm just a Hitler specialist.
Some of the most prolific, most famous works in history were done by authors who were bombed on drugs.
Like, just from just the last couple people we mentioned, right?
Like, that's.
Did you, when you were writing this, did you.
Try any of these drugs and try to dive deeper into the literature and understand them better?
Actually, I did because I thought I have to make this experience to write about it.
Yeah.
I would do the same thing, I would think.
So I was a bit, to be honest, a bit afraid to use crystal meth because I had heard, like, I was also, you know, introduced to this by mostly American anti drug propaganda, which says if you take crystal meth, like, I I was a US high school student in the late 80s.
So this was, I think Reagan was still president.
So it was like, just say no.
And if you take crystal meth once, you will automatically be addicted, like forever.
Right.
That was kind of what I had in mind, which is total bullshit.
I mean, yeah.
But so I asked my grass dealer, at the time marijuana was still illegal in Germany, can you help me find, like, I just want to have like one sample of crystal meth.
I was kind of, and still am a fan of Taxi Driver.
It's one of my favorite movies.
And Schrader, when he wrote it, he had a gun in his writing desk in the drawer to be kind of closer to the vibration of his story.
So I thought it's good to have like a gram of crystal meth like with me.
Yeah.
But she said, no, I don't want to bring it because she was a weed dealer and weed and crystal meth, they don't go together.
Like they're totally different animals, basically.
But she said, I know a guy, he has crystal meth.
And then she asked him and he actually brought me one gram.
And he brought a Xerox copy of the old Pavitine patent that they made on methamphetamine.
He Xeroxed that and gave it with the gram without knowing that I was researching this book.
Oh, shit.
So he was like some kind of crystal meth dealer that was like a history buff or freak or whatever and wanted to educate where it comes from.
It's kind of funny.
I don't and I took it also to try it.
What was it like?
Versus, like, what did you expect it to be like?
Because usually those two are vastly different.
Well, I know the effects of amphetamines, just like legal amphetamines, but also illegal amphetamines.
So I was expecting it to have this effect but stronger, and that's exactly what it is.
So the effect in itself can be quite interesting and pleasurable.
You're not going to feel bad on crystal meth while the high lasts.
But the problem for me was once the high receded, I actually felt worse than I had felt before I took it.
And that's something I don't like.
So I, it didn't really become my drug, basically.
I thought, I thought this coming down effect is a very bad structure for like a drug, a drug, like a drug effect, basically, which is different with a psychedelic drug.
You have the problematic experience in the beginning when the psychedelic drug starts to kick in.
But then once you're stable, it's going to be great and there's no like hang up afterwards.
Yeah.
I think that's much, that feels much healthier.
It does.
It does.
Yeah, it feels almost psychedelics and mushrooms and LSD.
Almost feel like godly, like you're getting closer to God in some way.
And cocaine and crystal meth and stimulants almost feel like the devil.
It's like you're going to hell because it borrows your dopamine.
So you feel like dog shit when you're done.
And you either need more to keep that thing going, stay on the wagon.
It's quite horrible, actually.
Or you're going to dive off head first.
So, what else did you actually get a hold of any of the pervitin?
Or how do you say it?
No, I've never talked.
Taken it myself because my friend, he took everything he found.
It was actually a couple, they were and still are antique dealers, and they found it and they took it amongst themselves.
Like I spoke to the guy, he said, For one month, we were taking methamphetamine every day.
It was great.
So that pill, actually, from the company Temla, which is Pavitine, it was probably a good product, you know.
It did lead obviously to addiction and problems, but it's in terms of performance enhancement, it's a very good product.
Yeah.
Seems like it worked.
I mean, well, no, I mean, in the end, it didn't really work, but it works for a specific task while it happens, but it doesn't work in the long run.
It works in the short run, but not in the long run.
And a war was, in this case, a long war.
The only chance for the Nazis to win this war was if.
Everything becomes a blitzkrieg if every campaign is a quick campaign like the one against the West.
Yeah.
Because that's how long the Pavitin works.
It works like for one, two months, and you can stay awake the whole time.
The whole army is like fighting like mad, you know, but then they come down.
So if this victory has been achieved after like two months, they cannot sustain it.
So they're like sprinting instead of running a marathon.
Right.
They're trying to run as fast as they can.
That was the new idea.
You sprint, you don't go slow.
Right, right.
Which is kind of shock and awe.
It's a very modern approach.
I mean, it's very.
It's a progressive military approach, I would say.
But it only works in certain situations.
I just read a report on, I forget who sent it to me.
I think Travis Kitchen sent me this report.
And it was about how the Russians in the Ukraine war are using a certain kind of methamphetamine.
Russia is giving their soldiers, like they're all jacked on meth.
Yeah.
I forget the name of it.
It's like a newer version.
There was a brand name for it.
Right now in the war?
Yes, right now in the war, the Russians are freaking jacked on meth.
What was the name of that drug?
Captagon?
Oh.
Have you heard of that?
Yeah.
Captagon is interesting because Captagon was made by the Assad regime in Syria.
That's how they kept themselves in power.
And they had obviously strong ties with Russia.
Assad is now in Moscow.
Yes, right.
So it kind of makes sense that this Captagon was made probably even in Syria and then brought to the Russian troops.
Because it is a good fighting drug.
It's not good for the, you know, it's not healthy and not good for the soldier, but it might be beneficial if used, you know, intelligently.
Can you Google Captagon ingredients or like what is in Captagon?
It's just a different form of amphetamine.
Right, but is it actually methamphetamine or is it just amphetamine?
Uh, phenethyline, okay, it's just an amphetamine.
They can't contain, oh, amphetamines and caffeine, but it's a very strong amphetamine, very strong amphetamine.
So it's not much crystal meth is stronger.
Well, yeah, I'm sure.
So this is actually, I think a pill of Pervitin would have been stronger than a pill of Captagon.
Yeah, I'm sure, I'm sure it would have been.
Yeah, because the Nazis always wanted the strongest, you know, even though it wasn't a Nazi invention, it was just a German invention of its pharmaceutical company.
It has nothing to do with the Nazi party.
Just a German company.
Yeah, just a product.
Drugs are neutral.
Also, there's in that same report that I read, they're saying that they're giving Ibogaine to the soldiers on the Ukrainian side.
And I don't think it's just there.
The report was saying that it was for brain injuries and for PTSD, but I think they're also using it for on the battlefield, for things like edge detection and stress.
And combat fatigue.
So, like, that's an interesting thing.
And I know DARPA, I've read some stories that DARPA has been funding psychedelic research for soldiers, not just for after the war, but for when they're in war.
Like, how can psychedelics enhance a soldier moving through the battlefield and shooting and being more accurate with his shots or things like that?
You know?
I spoke with the doctor of the Orlando Magic team.
After the NBA game, about psychedelics, whether it's good also for a basketball player.
And the problem is that basketball, just as I think fighting in a war, is a lot about motor precision.
And that could be not enhanced through psychedelics, which maybe make you think too long or, you know, on the battlefield, I think you have to react.
You don't need complex thought processes.
I think you need it maybe.
Yeah.
Maybe for strategy, you know, for generals, it might be good to see it in a different way.
And well, I think actually, now that you mentioned that, I think what I heard about DARPA studying this stuff was they're trying to take the trip out of it.
So you get the benefits of visual acuity and edge detection and other things without having the trip.
Right.
So maybe that would have some benefits to it if they were able to alter it somehow.
Yeah.
And this story only says that they're using it for PTSD and anxiety.
But what I read and what I heard from Dana was they're using it.
He's trying to fly it into Ukraine.
And with other stuff that David Nichols is working on with DARPA, trying to take the trip out of this stuff for enhancing soldiers on the battlefield, like while they're in.
That's very interesting, especially with Ibogaine, because Ibogaine is so unexamined yet.
But I would imagine that it's probably quite healthy for the brain to use Ibogaine.
An army on the one side using amphetamines, if it's true, then this would be the Russian army, and another army using ibogaine is, of course, looks much better for the Ukrainian side because it's a much smarter, more sustainable way of being.
Yeah.
Because ibogaine is good for your brain while amphetamines is not good for your brain.
Ridge Wallets and Nonfiction00:03:06
In the long term, right?
Yeah.
So, when you wrote your first book, you didn't do it the way typical authors do.
Like, I've had a lot of people that in this podcast that talk about JFK and they write books about JFK.
And the vast majority of them, in fact, all of them except for one of them, when they write their books, they read other people's books to come up with their ideas and to write about, you know, to come up with their material and they rework it or whatever.
Very rarely, when somebody writes a story or a book, do they actually go to the sources.
Of things.
And if I'm not mistaken, when you were writing your first book, you weren't basing this off any other writer's book or any sort of previous research.
You were doing it sort of like going to the grassroots of this stuff.
Well, I mean, once my friend told me about having all these parotene pills and being like stoned on methamphetamine.
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I became interested and then I started researching it for actually, I wanted to write a novel, but then my publisher said, just.
Topic is too interesting to turn it into a novel.
It should be a nonfiction book.
So I had never written a nonfiction book before, but I had written three novels.
So I thought, okay, now I can't invent anything anymore.
It's kind of that kind of sucks because I was I like to invent things for novels.
Obviously, it's why you write a novel.
So my first idea was to write a novel, but then the publisher said, no, it must be a nonfiction book.
Finding Original Documents00:05:18
And he was right with his decision it must be a nonfiction book because if it's a novel about Nazis and drugs, You, as the reader, you don't know if it's true or whether I imagined it.
Yeah.
So, in a nonfiction book, this is not the case.
So, for me, it was I don't know what was your question.
I'm sorry.
I was just asking you about like how, like the research process, like you didn't go and read other books to come up with your.
So, I was trying to figure out what is a nonfiction book.
How do you write a nonfiction book?
Yeah.
Which is obviously, you know.
If you find out something, it must be the original materials.
So, for me, it actually, my girlfriend at the time said, You should go to the archives.
And it immediately clicked and it made sense to me, you know, that I really want to find out the actual truth.
And from that, in the beginning, I wanted to construct a novel, but later on, I made it into a nonfiction book.
But I wanted to actually know the truth.
And I mean, there was one book out at the time by actually a friend of mine, but it was more like a random collection of, you know, articles he found on drugs in the Third Reich, but it wasn't really structured.
It was like a Treasure trove.
So I kind of expand, I started expanding on this.
And especially everything changed when I met a historian who had researched this for a paper and he told me where in the archives to actually find it.
Because it's very difficult to find stuff in the archives.
Because at the time, like this archive about the military, about World War II, these documents were filed probably sometime in the 50s.
They were all collected and then filed.
But they didn't file them for drugs.
Like, they didn't read through where was methamphetamine used.
And then we make a note that if anyone ever in the future searches for this keyword drugs, he will find these papers because the archivist didn't think of drugs as a relevant category.
So you have a big archive and probably you have a lot of documents relating to drugs, but how do you find them?
So I was lucky enough that a scientist who had researched this before told me exactly.
So he shared his knowledge.
It's actually quite important.
People share their knowledge.
Yeah.
Which is kind of a spirit, probably, amongst researchers because most people don't research.
It's kind of a secret cult if you actually go to the archive.
It's very fun, you know, and everyone is kind of friendly because you're like such on the fringe.
But at the same time, you're like at the center of it all because only at the archive are the documents, you know, in their original form.
You know, they're not being processed by, let's say, books.
Yeah.
So being a historian, just copying, Passages in books of others or ideas in other books.
I mean, you can write a compelling book, but it's more interesting to try to find these documents.
I guess I was also lucky to find them.
It's not so easy.
I bet it's way more exciting to do it that way because you feel like you're probably getting something out that hasn't been out before, right?
Yeah, right.
The world hasn't seen this shit yet.
That's a lot of work to do to actually go somewhere, physically dig through paperwork, like ancient paperwork.
versus just like looking up some shit online on a directory.
Well, and also you find different things in the archive.
Yeah.
Because what's in the archive is not online.
Like it's really, you have to find stuff.
And sometimes you don't find stuff.
There's actually people whose job this is, the historical detectives.
You can hire them.
You can like say, like I met one guy in the National Archives in DC and he said his client wants him to find out why a relative of his, a U.S. soldier, Died falling out of a window in Heidelberg in summer of 1945.
There's like all the information.
Then he goes to the archive to actually find that story.
Wow.
If he's good, he'll find it.
It seems highly improbable, actually.
Very, oh, yeah, I bet.
But who knows how good a detective you are.
So I have like this side hobby, which is like a hobby detective, also, but basically I'm a writer.
Yeah.
Sometimes it has the shape of nonfiction books and sometimes the shape of novels.
Both are great.
I mean, both forms are interesting.
Yeah, I bet you like what, like the difference between writing about stuff that you're finding in archives, like, how does that process different versus like just writing?
Well, when you find something in an archive, there's no one that helps you at first to evaluate what you've seen.
Like, the problem with Hitler's drugs was the writing of Morell, who Shot him these drugs, his personal physician was a bit hard to read.
Like most doctors' handwriting is hard to read for some reason.
They want to hide stuff all the time.
Like he was, his hand is hard to read.
And the Americans who investigated his papers misread oikodal.
Hitler's Hidden Health Status00:10:00
They thought it's encadol, which doesn't exist.
So it was just, that's how it was filed, but it was never examined.
So when I found this, I also didn't know what is oikodal.
I just found it and I also showed it.
To Alex, my friend, the DJ who told me first about Nazis and drugs, because he became like an advisor because he's such a knowledgeable guy on history and on drugs.
He's like the perfect, actually, like a Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson situation.
And he's like, Oikodal, are you insane?
Hitler took Oikodal.
This is like the heaviest, most euphoric making opioid.
He shot like 20 milligrams intravenously.
Are you crazy?
You don't realize what this means?
So that's, yeah.
Thanks to Alex at this point.
And what exactly was Oikodal?
Well, that's the oxycodone.
That's the drug that defined Hitler, basically.
Oh.
That was his favorite drug.
Yeah.
So, is that the drug that he first took before that famous meeting with Mussolini?
Yeah.
He wanted to pull out of the.
Yeah, that was like in July 1943 or something.
Right, right.
Mussolini wanted to kind of leave the war because it was not looking so good for the axis of evil.
So, he wanted to become like neutral, and Hitler hated that idea.
And so he was very nervous before the meeting.
And also, he was, Morel describes him as depressed.
So he was like depressed and he was like, not, it was not really happening.
He didn't.
And as the Führer, you always, you can't be depressed.
I mean, that was also John F. Kennedy's problem.
He was suffering from depression.
And as the US president, you can't be depressed, you know?
I mean, can you say, maybe you can say, sorry, American people, I'm depressed today.
I don't want to take any big decisions.
Right.
I hope everything's going to be cool.
But these, like Kennedy, didn't do that.
So he was taking medicine, same obviously for Hitler.
So before that meeting with Mussolini he was taking Eukaryot for the first time, and intravenously, because I think Morel tried to keep that a bit away from Hitler, because he was realizing, once Hitler tastes those opioids yes, it's not going to stop, which is then exactly what happened.
So Morel was in the difficult position of having to administer these opioids like on a regular basis, kind of making his patient, who's also the leader of Germany, into an addict which he must have known, Or, you know, because Hitler wanted these opioids.
And when he wanted them, he just wanted them.
He didn't want to like argue, you know.
Can't argue with Hitler about anything, especially not about when he wants his opioids.
So Morel just gave him the opioids.
So it's an interesting Hitler biography that's kind of enclosed in this blitzed book.
So Morel, what was his first name?
Theo.
Theo Morel?
Theo Morel.
How much would you say that How much literature was there on him that you had to read?
I mean, first of all, when I researched where that stuff was, and that's in one archive in Koblenz in Germany, the Federal Archive.
And then I went there and I could see the history of recent checkouts of this material of Theo Morel, the personal physician of Hitler.
And it had only been checked out like three times since the end of the war or something.
Wow, really?
So no one actually thought of doing what I did.
Which is wild.
I thought that that would be like standard for a historian, you know?
Right.
Because Morel played a very important role.
He was like with Hitler like all the time.
They were close, very close buddies.
You wouldn't leave home without him.
Not really because he's your, I mean, eventually he's basically, he's your dealer, you know, because he shoots, he injects you with a very strong opioid into your vein, you know, every other day.
So that becomes a very important person to you, you know?
So that, without this morale story that you can't really understand the Hitler story.
I would say that's fascinating.
Actually, there's some stuff I left out which concerned Hitler's.
Like Hitler's is like examined by this doctor and like there's like tons of writings about it and the con, what's in there and is it bad for him.
Was it good for him and his?
Yeah, it was always like sent to a certain lab in Bavaria, even during the war.
It was like a special career.
Why would they do that?
Because the Führer had to be healthy.
So it was all about the health.
You know, Heil Hitler also means health to Hitler.
So it was like the health, the status of this person's health was kind of the status of the whole, you know, so called Third Reich.
Interesting.
He was a vegetarian, wasn't he?
Well, I mean, I discovered that he had basically three drug phases, which was 36 to 41, mostly like vitamins and harmless stuff.
And 41 to 43, he used a lot of animal concoctions, like.
Pig's liver extract injected and thyroid glands extract that he used.
Like he became a bit crazy because Morel was like inventing new medicines.
Morel had his own pharmaceutical company.
So he was like inventing stimulants.
Like you take the most something from the animal, it could be stimulant, you know.
So he was using a lot of animal products, basically.
I don't know if you could technically call that a vegetarian.
He didn't eat animal products.
It wasn't in his diet, but he was.
Blasting it into his veins, yeah.
So he's like, even more of a, I don't know if he realized this.
That technically speaking, I think he's not a vegetarian.
So that I also uncovered this, by the way, that he's not a vegetarian, but only through your help because I didn't even think about it anymore.
That's so weird that they were studying his and sending off his to labs to see if I would shoot a movie on the third Reich or on Blitz.
Blitz, uh, that Blitz is not a movie yet, it's very strange to me.
That's because that's like it's.
It has a lot of good scenes.
And one of them would be, you know, the shit moving through the front lines and moving all across Germany and then being examined by the, you know, German scientists.
And reports are written, which are now in the archive.
On Hitler's poop.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah.
Shit was a big part of the movement.
I mean, it's a brown movement.
Yeah.
Yeah, no.
You must have a fascination with shit.
That famous video of him at the Olympics, I think in like 36, I think it was, where he's like, Back and forth.
What was he on in that video?
Do you know?
Well, I mean, I studied Morel's writings, and Morel's writings are very extensive.
Like almost every day, he writes how Hitler looked and not only how the shit was, what he said, how his skin, the color of his skin.
He writes a lot, but he never, yeah, he never, he never, he doesn't mention this thing.
So I kind of think it looks a bit unnatural.
It looks sped up, doesn't it?
Yeah.
It's definitely sped up.
I think it's not natural.
My research actually.
Would say that this is not a fake video because at the time Hitler had no problems.
He was very healthy.
He was also younger looking.
How old was he here?
Do you know?
Not off the top of my head.
But he was pretty young.
In his 30s?
He looks older in this way.
Something's off with this, but that's just my gut feeling.
What do you mean is off?
How do you think it's fake?
Just the movement doesn't seem natural.
I think.
It's, it's, I think it was done by a director.
Oh, really?
Interesting.
So, someone staged this and recreated it.
I think it's digitally manipulated to look this way.
Maybe he was moving a bit, and maybe there's a way to kind of speed that up.
They definitely sped it up.
You can tell by the guys in the background how they're moving their arms.
Maybe he was nervous and doing like this, but if you speed that up, it looks already weird.
So, for me, this video is nothing, basically.
Maybe he's just got to pee really bad.
Maybe, yeah.
That's kind of what I do when I have to peek.
I have some insight on the sped up.
Hang on, Steve.
Can you see when this video was uploaded, by the way?
Oh, this one.
This one is.
Three years ago.
Okay, yeah, it could have easily been faked.
What do you think?
What's your video analysis on this one, Steve O?
So, film cameras back in the day, if they were cheap or small or portable, they were hand crank, which means that the speed of the film going through it is dictated by your hand movement.
And so, when you play that back on a machine that plays it back at 24 frames a second, it's typically sped up.
You're gonna, you're not gonna speed you you're.
Your speed is never gonna be as consistent or as fast as you know a machine and you'll see that a lot with like the Charlie Chapman videos and stuff oh okay, interesting.
That's why the black and the old black and white stuff looks sped up.
So 36 was before he was really experimenting hardcore with drugs.
Yeah, that's when he met Morrell.
That's when he met him in 36.
Yeah, so he was.
He was basically on nothing huh yeah, but he could still, you know, behave oddly.
Who knows he's an odd guy, But he was on nothing in 36.
At least Morell doesn't write about it.
Maybe he gave him something, but it's a slow increase of maybe methamphetamine wasn't invented yet, so also he wasn't on the math.
It wasn't invented yet?
No.
The Stimulant Decree Explained00:06:46
Was Coke invented yet?
Yeah.
When was Coke invented?
I don't know.
We would have to look at when, like, for example, Mark patented Coke, but that was older.
Methamphetamine was patented in October 37.
1856, by a German chemist, Frederick Geitsche.
The Germans invented all the drugs, of course.
The Germans invented everything just drugs and cars, and time machines and spaceships.
Flying saucers apparently came from them too.
Rockets, yes.
Yeah, rockets.
Isolated active ingredient from the coca leaf.
How crazy is it?
The coca leaf is illegal.
It's illegal to own a coca leaf in the United States of America.
Yeah, I landed once in an airport in Cusco, Peru, and I was given a coca tea as a welcome present so I could deal with the elevation.
Yeah, they use it for it's pretty cool.
At the airport, you drink it.
How crazy is that, right?
For altitude sickness.
I think it's actually quite healthy, the coca leaf.
It's just like a stimulant.
It's like a normal stimulant.
But we're not allowed to have it here because we might mix it with gasoline and other chemicals and try to produce fucking cocaine.
Yeah.
But the so the soldiers in war, they weren't necessarily giving the soldiers cocaine because cocaine, I'm sure would be too hard to manage.
You have to constantly be taking it and ripping lines all day long.
And it's not like with the Pervitan is the methamphetamine.
You can take it one pill and I'm sure it lasts for hours.
Well, I mean, they did, you know, they wrote a so-called stimulant decree, which kind of says, you know, when you should, you know, you should take the first dose before it starts.
Oh, really?
So they had like a guidebook for it.
Yeah.
They had a, it's the stimulant decree.
It's also in the archives.
It's like, I think it's.
Okay, the stimulant decree was a significant order issued by the German Army High Command on April 1940, which mandated the production and distribution of stimulants to the military personnel.
The decree was crucial in enabling soldiers to stay awake for extended periods of time, which was seen as essential for the success of military operations.
For instance, during the invasion of France in 1940, soldiers were instructed to take parvatin, a form of methadone.
Yeah, right.
In an interval.
I'll read my book.
Maintain alertness.
Did they source your book here?
And strategic positioning.
Wow.
Yeah, they cite Blitzed.
Oh, look at that.
At least one of them.
Look at that.
Yeah, Blitz is the first one.
Good shit.
Yeah, I kind of uncovered it, I guess.
But basically, Alex uncovered it.
Oh, look at that photo.
Can you pull up that photo of the little bottle of it?
No way.
Look at that, dude.
Yeah.
It was a successful product.
Yeah.
I mean, it's normal for a soldier to take drugs in battle.
This has happened since it's happening today since there's war.
And because you always want to, because it's such a weird situation, you have to deal with anxiety, you want to improve your performance.
Like it's a very complex situation to be in a combat situation.
Yeah.
Also, it's risky to take a drug, you know, you might go wrong, you know.
But drugs are a big topic for the soldier.
And The in the first in World War One, cocaine played like a small role for pilots, like because they're the coolest, anyhow.
So they take cocaine and they fly better.
And yeah, but it wasn't it makes perfect sense.
It's a pilot's drug, maybe, but it's not a mass drug, really, because it's too expensive.
So that you cannot really give it to like three million men, like, it doesn't make sense.
But methamphetamine was quite cheap to manufacture, and um.
That's why it became meth and not cocaine, while the French, for example, still banked on their red wine.
So every French soldier, when Germany attacked them, drank three quarters of a liter of red wine, while each German soldier was using up to like 20 milligrams of methamphetamine.
So they're running circles around these French guys.
I mean, the French guys didn't really stand a chance.
Right.
They're running around drunk.
These Germans are in their tanks.
I mean, yeah, I mean, just imagine the situation in the tank, you know.
Oh my God.
Because the tanks received the most uh pravitine, because they were used um differently than before.
Four, three of I don't know how many, are in the tank, three guys, I don't know.
So let's say four guys.
I always, I always think of four guys.
So they're in the tank.
Oh yeah, and the tanks were used as the avant-garde of the of the military movement, usually before that tanks in the old thinking tanks are like the backup, so you, you run, you know, and then you have the tanks and the big machinery from the behind you.
Yeah, so Three tank generals had the idea to kind of reverse it and put the tanks in the front and race with the tanks through the Ardennes Mountains.
And that kind of paved the way for the others to kind of run after them.
And these tank divisions also received most of the methamphetamine because they had to reach the French border city of Sedan within three days and three nights.
Being that fast, they would cut off the British and French who were north of them in Belgium because they thought the Germans would attack up there.
So, the Germans kind of ran through the mountains on tanks, and that was only possible because of the methamphetamine that was used, especially by people in the tanks.
So, that's why I always think of the tank with the four guys high on crystal meth, like racing into France.
They were young guys, they were just in the tank on meth.
I think it must have been a very intense experience.
And then it just kept going, and that's what led to this.
victory against France which no one thought would have been possible because it was Britain and France together, stronger army.
The defenders always are, you know, to invade successfully you have to be like, you have to be, you know, overpowering.
You have to have much more strength than the defenders, usually three to one.
But in this case the Germans were weaker but still won because they had the better strategy to go through the Ardennes Mountains on crystal meth basically.
Tanks Racing on Meth00:15:05
Right.
Wow.
Crazy.
That's what happened.
And the French, they still like.
I received a lot of feedback from France when my book came out there.
They said finally, because for them it had been the unanswerable question why did we lose?
What happened?
Why did these fucking Germans overrun us and we didn't know what was going on?
And because they were still fighting an old, they had a different mindset.
They were not there yet.
So that has been a problem for the French psyche for decades.
Which now is finally being solved.
Yeah.
Yeah.
The Germans were ahead of their time.
I know, like, some of the guys that were close to Hitler were really upset.
I think maybe it was Himmler who was obsessed with like ancient civilizations and like what the Egyptians were doing and the pyramids.
He had a Tibet expedition, for example, where he sent scientists to Tibet.
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To find like the origins of mankind.
And so the Nazis were about creating like a big story.
Like they were, it's not just limited to Germany.
It's a global kind of narrative that they spin of the superhumans who then conquer everything and where they come from.
So they had like historians look at history in a totally different way than we do today because they were supposed to interpret it.
Certain way, do you know if they were into like the Greeks and what the Greeks were doing?
Well, that's classical, um, because the Greeks were big into drugs, yeah.
But I don't think the Nazis looked up to the classical Greek period because of drugs, because drugs also was not something that was officially enhanced.
Officially, the Nazi government was an anti drug government, and when they took power.
Some of the first people they threw into concentration camps in already 1933 were like drug users.
So they were.
That's why I, growing up, always thought, you know, Nazis, they're all about purity and cleanliness.
So that was also the image to the.
That was a big part of their image.
So.
What did I want to say?
I was asking you about how they looked at the classical Greek civilization and how much.
How much attention did they pay to the stuff that was going on then?
Or did they read any of that stuff?
Did they translate any of it?
Or were they taking any ideas from classical civilizations or any other ancient civilizations that you know about that you discovered?
I mean, the swastika does exist in India.
It's just remote.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, and Himmler apparently did three hours of yoga each morning in his office because he was connecting with the you know, ancient Aryan roots that come, you know, out of India or out of the Himalayas, or like I think he was, he was like believing in magic and that there was something higher going on, you know, more than the eye can see.
Well, Hitler was much more like on the ground, you know, but Himmler was this kind of evil dreamer.
Yeah.
So he's a very interesting character, actually, quite scary.
How was, um, So you said you went to high school here in the US and then went to Germany?
I grew up in a German town which was 30,000 Germans and 10,000 American soldiers.
So you could say there was like a bigger military presence.
So I kind of grew up with the American culture.
And then when I was 16, there was the offer to go to the United States as an exchange student.
This was financed by the US Congress and the German parliament to like make people get to know each other better.
Like Americans would go to Germany for a year, Germans would go to America.
Sure.
Which I think makes a lot of sense actually because if you live in another country for a year, you learn the language, you understand the culture.
So I actually became a state sponsored something that probably, I don't even know if it still exists, exchange student.
Yeah.
And at the end we were all invited to Washington and I was chosen to give a speech at the Senate of the United States, but not in the big hall, but like in a smaller room, but it was still big.
About the different perceptions of the term freedom in Germany and in America, and I delivered that speech interesting and that night I got late for the first time.
Oh really, who was in the audience?
So the speech was good, no way, what a great story, unforgettable.
At Georgetown University, Washington.
I've never told that story.
Very cool, very exciting stuff.
That sort of changed the trajectory of your life, didn't it?
It did.
We're still good friends, Really.
Yeah, she's my oldest friend now.
Wow, amazing.
Does she live here or Germany now?
She lives in Berlin.
Berlin, okay.
Yeah, that's something I was curious about too.
Like, when you go to school in Germany, like, what do they teach you about the Nazis?
Like, what is the view on.
And I know they put a lot of emphasis on how we don't want to go, like, the Germans obviously don't want to go down that path anymore.
And there's like an inherent guilt that they have.
Like, what is that like?
Oh my god, now it's getting deep.
I have to talk about the German psyche.
I think it's interesting, man.
I because I know Annie talked about this a little bit when she came on here.
She was talking about the research she was doing for Operation Paperclip, but she's not German exactly.
But she was explaining to me sort of like the people she was dealing with.
She was dealing with some of these German scientists' children and talking to them like this was the German psyche was really becoming aware to her on how they felt about all this stuff, and she had to explain to I forget this guy's name, which is terrible, but one of the most prominent Russian scientists that was brought here, or not Russian, German scientists, that was brought here during Paperclip.
Maybe Werner von Braun.
It wasn't von Braun, it was someone else, a guy who did a lot of evil shit.
But he eventually had to leave his wife and his kid behind in Germany.
And he, like, she met with his son, and he absolutely resented his father for all of this horrific shit, being a part of the Nazis and doing all these experiments.
And, like, basically, she sat there and had like a three hour conversation with this guy.
And this guy was like every day writing love letters to his wife and his son about how much he missed them and how much he wanted to reunite with them and how he was back in America doing this stuff.
And, like, this guy had like a deep love for his family and he thought his dad just abandoned him.
And, like, it was a really complex, like, deep story.
But, like, this guy ended up giving Annie all of the material, all the books, all the letters that he's been writing his son his whole life.
And she went back to America and she had to hide all this stuff because some of these letters had swastikas on them and stuff.
And she had to hide all this in the bottom of her bag because I think you can go to prison for trying to take this stuff out of Germany.
Like they're very, very strict about any kind of anything to do with studying Nazi history or Nazi propaganda or anything like this.
Well, I mean, yeah, we are taught a lot.
But it's always, we see like secondary, you know, how other people evaluate it.
So it's kind of, in a way, you could say it's force-fed to you.
You learn that the Nazis are bad and that everything's horrible.
And that's probably the right way to go about it, because the general consensus is that it was bad, that it shouldn't happen again, that we don't want to engage in such behavior anymore.
So I think that's good.
At the same time, I think certain things might be weird.
Like, I'm not sure, for example, if Mein Kampf is prohibited or not.
So maybe, you know, usually it's maybe some sources are not I don't know.
I think generally we're dealing with it quite okay, actually.
I mean, there's no, yeah, there's no, there's no the call from the new right in Germany to pay less attention because they said that it has been over.
emphasized, you know, the negative side of the German history.
German history is so much more.
Which of course it is, you know, but it's just kind of a choice you make, you know, how you present yourself.
But it's interesting how a society deals with its past.
I think Germany is doing a pretty good job actually compared to some other countries.
Like Great Britain, I think there's very little critical examination.
Generally about its role as colonizing the whole world, and you know what it, what it actually did to the world, right.
So I think we're doing a fairly good job, but it's actually getting less and less.
Yeah, the teachings yeah it's, it's so.
It's so different for different countries right because, like I don't think there's really much because, like in Germany with the Nazis, like it was all happening there right, like all the death and the concentration camps and all the fucking war was there In Europe, but, like for Americans, we never saw anything, everything was away from us.
Like, we dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, right?
And you know, killed millions of civilians and children and innocent people.
And like, we don't sort of have it, doesn't feel like to me, at least, that there's any sort of like guilt for lack of a better term in all our culture for doing that, right?
In American culture, there's more guilt over like Jim Crow.
Era, you know, when like women and blacks didn't have the right to vote or were, you know, slavery, which is, you know, it's humanity evolves, right?
Right.
But like, and I don't want to compare evil, but dropping nuclear bombs and killing people is like crazy, crazy, crazy.
And yeah, like I said, there's no real, like, I mean, it's fascinating stuff.
Like people, like, the, there's still development of the, of the bomb too, which was a huge, You know, in part, hugely to people that we brought over here from Germany, right?
Like that, that Cold War history is just so, so fascinating and complex.
And how, like, that put America at least into the trajectory that started the trajectory of where America has ended up now with like this bolstering of this military that spends more money on weapons than anywhere, any other country, all other countries combined, I think, and like, you know, getting its foot.
In controlling governments of all these other countries.
It's interesting how that moment in history after World War II was such a pivoting point.
And it's, I think, very directly dictated where we've ended up now.
I mean, basically, this is what I examined for my second book, Tripped.
Yeah.
Let me think how I want to put it.
Want some more?
All right.
So, what do you do?
You always cut it out or you just leave it?
No, we just put it in there.
We didn't do drugs on camera.
Huh?
No, we just do it on camera.
No, I mean, in general, do you leave it running or do you cut the.
The talk.
We don't cut anything.
We leave it all in here.
I think it's better.
It's more raw.
It's quite good.
I love it.
When it's brand new, when it's fresh, when you first get it out of the package and you take a whiff out of it, it'll literally ruin your day because it's so strong.
So, yeah, I just kind of like did that.
I really was long winded on that elaboration on how the Cold War.
And bringing the Nazis over here to develop the bombs and the creation of the CIA and all that shit kind of spiraled out of World War II.
And you were, so your book Tripped essentially is about LSD and how we got LSD from the Nazis and tried to use it as a truth serum to try to do different things.
LSD Origins from Nazis00:15:54
And, you know, people are familiar with shit like MKUltra and Operation Chaos and all the stuff that was going on.
I mean, I wanted to write about.
The early history of LSD, not about what went wrong in the 60s when all the hippies were taking it.
So I was actually curious about why Sandos, the Swiss company that made it, was not able to turn it into a product.
Because I had found reports like when they found LSD in 1943, they didn't really know what it was.
So they created an intoxication room within the company and employees could just.
go there and then they would receive LSD, maybe 20 milligrams or micrograms, 100 micrograms.
And people then just took LSD and looked out the window and.
They'd be in there all day?
Yeah, I mean, there was a secretary typing and people really liked it.
They loved it.
They were like, finally, I feel like I always want to feel like I can think much better.
So Sanders thought that they had a potential big hit on their hands because this was in 1943.
World War II raging.
Yeah.
So a lot of people have and will have mental problems.
Right.
Like depression and trauma.
Also, I didn't bring this up earlier, but I meant to.
Weren't the Nazis spending a lot of time in the Amazon jungle studying this stuff and trying to find different plants and herbal stuff?
I'm not familiar with the Nazi expedition to the Amazon.
No.
But I heard rumors about it, but also this would have to be carefully checked, you know, because this could also be.
Fake news that I heard.
Fake news, yeah.
But it's, I mean, I would imagine it possible.
Like, I wouldn't be surprised.
So, when the Nazis were looking for the truth drug in 1943, there was one guy that played a crucial role in this search, and his name is Richard Kuhn.
And he was the leading German biochemist.
He received the Nobel Prize for chemistry, and he was best friends with a Swiss CEO who had discovered LSD.
And they had been friends since the 20s.
So they had been friends for a long time.
And they'd always shared their knowledge.
And I found the document, like the letters between them.
I read the letters between them.
And so this Nazi chemist who's supposed to find the truth drug for Hitler receives the knowledge in 43 from his best friend, Stoll.
We found this compound that works so potently in the mind.
You only need like a few micrograms and someone has completely different perceptions and everything.
So the Nazi scientist, and you can call Kuhn a Nazi scientist.
I mean, he was basically a German scientist.
He started his lectures with Heil Hitler and stuff like that.
He makes it clear that he's part of the system.
He finds this very interesting and he asks Stoll to send him half a gram and he receives half a gram.
Then the Nazis, the SS, which is a Nazi organization, started tests with psychedelic substances in the concentration camp of Dachau at that time.
They were testing the prisoners with LSD?
Yeah, and mescaline.
They were trying to, and then they would talk to them like it was one-on-one, you know and um, sometimes the person was told that in the coffee there's a drop of something, sometimes not, but it was like checking out whether you can use that situation to your advantage in an interrogation, which I guess would be true, you know, because the other person would be confused and that gives you an edge over that other person.
I would, I would imagine, and if the, if the trip's very strong, if you're able to exploit that somehow with your power position, It's, like scary mind control experiments done in the concentration camp of Dachau.
And I read some reports, like one guy who has the most amazing trip on Meskaline.
And he really loves it.
And during the trip, he realizes that the trip will be over and he'll come back to his life as an inmate in the concentration camp.
And he said that was pretty hard.
Wow.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
But he survived it and later wrote about this.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
So.
That basically put LSD in a position where when the US military, when they invaded the concentration camp of Dachau, became aware of it because they confiscated the SS papers.
They had them reviewed by their drug expert, which was Professor Beecher from Harvard University.
So suddenly the knowledge of LSD was in American hands.
And then Americans, I mean, they thought if the Nazis were so interested in it, maybe there's something, you know, we should also look at this, you know.
And the US started.
Their own search for truth back then, because right after World War II ended, the Cold War started the confrontation that's going on until today.
I'm sure they knew Russia had it, so we had to figure out everything we knew about it, too.
And Sidney Gottlieb was a huge part of this.
Well, Gottlieb was like a weirdo who was chosen because he was not like usually the CIA directors and higher officials, they were all wasps.
And Gottlieb was Jewish.
So he was like an odd one.
Was he Jewish?
Yeah.
Really?
I didn't know.
I mean, Gottlieb, I would imagine.
That is, I guess, a Jewish.
He was from the Bronx.
Yeah.
And his parents came from Hungary.
They were Jews from Hungary that came to the United States.
Okay.
So he was like an odd choice, but the kind of department that he was leading or the program, MKUltra, was so secretive that he was kind of the right choice.
So he kind of merged with that.
And that program, I guess, was understanding the human mind in order to possibly through like certain means.
Like, for example, LSD was a big topic for Godley, but not only LSD, but LSD for him was very interesting.
Can we, as the CIA, investigate properly how to develop LSD into a pharmacological weapon?
Yep.
Which is very difficult, you know, because LSD is so weird.
You know, what does LSD do?
They didn't know at the time, really.
We're only starting to understand it more now, and I'm very happy to talk about what we understand now, what actually happens in the brain, because it is quite interesting.
I don't think we know, do we?
We know certain things.
Really?
Yeah.
What do we actually know?
And how do you prove anything?
Like, it's all like so much of it is subjective and anecdotal.
There's brain scans being done with brains on substances so you can see the difference in the energy flows in the brain.
And one of the leading experts in the field is Professor Vollenweider.
I write about him in Tript.
He's a professor at Zurich University.
And he's been putting people on psychedelics in the 90s and put them in brain scanners and then examines exactly what changes in the brain and what changes in the brain.
You said in their 90s?
Yeah, early 90s.
He's added for a long time.
That's why he's the word's leading.
How old are the patients that he's doing this stuff to?
I don't know.
I think it's countless.
Because you also say that this stuff was used for your mother because she had Alzheimer's.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I actually asked Vollenweider while doing research for the book.
I got to know him because I knew he's the world's leading expert.
He can actually tell me what happens in the brain.
And I had read a white paper that low dosages of LSD are good against Alzheimer's.
And therefore, we decided to, you know, research this properly and then maybe administer it in the family.
So it was kind of my family job to research the true story of LSD.
That's basically the story of Tripped of this book, which I therefore wanted to call LSD for Mom because it was basically about LSD for my mom.
And, um, So the story of TRIP, the story of LSD is what I came back with at the end to my father, who had been a judge before, not a drug person, but a man of the law.
And he read my report on LSD and he said, look, he also thought it was a good idea.
So we all in the family decided to use it.
It's been very helpful for my mom.
And for example, in Australia, it is now patients, dementia patients are receiving LSD legally.
Australia is the first country that has made this kind of treatment legal and possible.
And from my experience, I think psychedelics are very interesting in treating dementia.
I think this is something that has to be looked at.
It's very important because dementia is the pandemic of the future.
It's what a lot of people will be getting more.
It's an increasing disease.
And we have no medication right now.
Do we know why it's increasing?
More people, more old people.
But I'm not a dementia expert, but I know it works.
LSD works against dementia for my mother.
And that was quite amazing to see whenever she does that.
And what is the law in Germany in regard to using psychedelics to treat different ailments like this?
Is it the same in the US?
Yeah, it's illegal.
And my father was visited by four young policemen.
And since he was like one of the highest judges in the state, and everyone knows that, they were very timid.
And approached him in a shy and respectful manner, but asked to have a glance into the fridge.
And because I write about it in Tripped.
So apparently they had read the book, and I write about that he takes it out of the fridge.
But that day there was nothing in the fridge.
So they were like, okay, we see there's nothing in the fridge.
And they left and they stopped the investigation.
So it was officially dropped.
It's officially been dropped.
He was already kind of looking forward to it.
That's the benefit of being a judge.
I'm just kidding.
No, he was actually, he thought it would be fun to be in court.
Oh, yeah.
He was confused.
Yeah.
Did you guys ever, did you ever convince your dad to try it?
Yeah, he's tried it a few times in microdoses and usually it doesn't feel anything.
You can't feel like the hallucinogenic effect.
No, microdose.
But you could feel a little like drinking an espresso maybe.
It does something to the brain, right?
Like it does like, the first time I microdosed mushrooms, like I didn't feel, I didn't feel high at all, but I felt just like smiley and happy and like was just, I thought everything was funny.
I mean.
So what what Follenweider found out is that certain areas of the brain receive less energy when you are on a psychedelic and the area that receives less is the is kind of a command center.
Some neuroscientists call it the default mode network.
Oh, yes.
And that is what kind of tells you right now that you're doing a podcast with me and that it's like associated with like the ego, right?
Like me, I'm here doing this now.
Yeah.
And if this receives less energy, then you're more open to.
To perceiving something not being separate because you don't, the ego like immediately judges this as it can, you know.
But if that judgment wouldn't be there, you look at it and you kind of maybe see like it's how beautiful it is, maybe as an object, I don't know, you would see something else.
So that is what he could see actually in energy flows.
Also, he could detect that.
On psilocybin, unpleasant memories are less often recalled than not on psilocybin.
And that makes the anti-depressant effect.
Really?
Yeah.
Because we all have negative things inside of us, obviously.
Some more severe than others, but we all have them.
Yes.
It's just a question, do you access them the whole time?
Do you get into loops and repeat them the whole time?
And psychedelics disrupt that.
Interesting.
Yeah.
So, you think about something else, and then it immediately becomes a little less relevant to you if you can get out.
Isn't that so, so wild about psychedelics?
Because with marijuana, for me, when I smoke a lot of marijuana, or if I do like a marijuana gummy, which can be like 10 times more potent, psychoactive, all of the dark shit creeps in.
Like, for me, like, if I take too much, if I get too stoned, I will be like in the fetal position in the corner with my world caving in on me.
But at the end of it, usually it's positive, right?
At the end of it, I kind of like.
I have an epiphany about something, you know what I mean?
But it's not the same with like DMT, for example.
Like, first time I tried DMT, I thought it was going to be like that times a million, right?
And it was completely on not even in the same universe.
Yeah.
Have you ever done DMT?
Yeah, I've done it, I don't know, a few times.
I had once a DMT vape, which was kind of nice because you could just vape DMT.
But it's also a bit crazy because it's a very strong drug.
So, just to use it so casually is a bit weird.
It's interesting because it's the one drug, one of the few drugs that's illegal that is in every living thing on this world.
It's in every plant.
It's in every biological creature.
DMT is a bit under examined, I think.
It's a very important substance, but we don't really know that much about it.
It's a different thing than the other drugs, right?
It's almost impossible to become addicted to it.
To DMT.
To DMT.
Or to like maybe it's like an ayahuasca because for most people, when you talk, people like psychonauts, people that are very into this kind of stuff, they when you ask them about like their experiences, they'll explain to you like in vivid detail everything they've learned from it, you know, how they do it and what they see and what it's like and how it changes their brains.
It's like, when's the last time you did it?
He'll be like, oh, it was uh October of 2022.
But I can describe it like they did it yesterday, it never leaves you, it's not something that you constantly are chasing and want to do it again, right.
Like heroin or cocaine or meth or some of these things.
Yeah, it's hard to become addicted to psychedelics.
I tried it once with lsd and I took like every other day lsd for like half a year and I wouldn't leave the house without lsd and then I just stopped.
I never became addicted.
You did it every day, every other day, every other day.
Yeah, there was in micro doses or like big doses, hero doses, hero doses.
With my girlfriend we were both experimenting.
Psychedelics as Medicine00:15:05
This was in Berlin in the mid 90s, so you didn't have to work, Because everything's so cheap.
Right.
You just party.
Wow.
Yeah.
How did that affect you?
I think I couldn't have written a Nazi drug book without drug experiences because I was able to understand much more because of the drug experiences I have had.
And I worked on the book closely with an elderly German historian, Hans Mommsen.
Who was like the leading German historian on National Socialism?
And he kind of said that we historians, we don't know anything about drugs.
That's why we have overlooked it the whole time.
Like for him, he immediately understood it when he saw all the Xerox copies I had made from the archives.
He said, This is it.
This is the missing piece.
We just never thought about it because we don't use drugs.
So in a way, I'm kind of thankful for using these drugs.
First of all, it was a lot of fun while I was using them.
I thought for a while I would become like just like a Going to parties and nothing ever comes out of it.
This is what usually happens if you become a Berlin kind of party person.
You just kind of have fun, but you kind of waste your years.
Maybe, you know?
So I could use it all for this book.
So that was actually, I think it really helped me to grow up in Berlin to understand that much about drugs and about German history because Berlin, you know, this is where it all happened.
You know, this is where the Bunker was and whatever, you know.
Have you heard of.
A guy by the name of Carl Ruck.
Yeah, he wrote that book with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman.
I spoke with him.
Oh, did you really?
Yeah, I wanted to know when you were researching your book.
Yeah, I wanted to know if he still thinks that it's a valid case and he was totally convinced.
In the book The Road To Helusis they try to prove that a hallucinogenic potion was used at the ritual there for the kukion uh mix that they would take right, which is um Ergot.
That's what they think, yeah.
So they went there, and Hoffman, being the chemist who had found LSD, like his drive was to show to the world that this freak that he found, LSD, was actually a compound that has helped us evolve as a culture, especially as, you know, the Western culture, Western civilization.
The most important ritual, Eleusis for Athens, a secret ritual, had.
Psychoactive drink called kükeon.
That was the thesis, but the problem is it was so far it has not been proven right.
And it has not been proven because technology only recently is able to examine, like residue yes, in like pots, yes.
So when they were trying, when they were writing the book, the Rotoeulosis, this was like I would say in the 80s.
No, it was in the 60s, I think.
Yeah.
I think it might have been.
No, I think it was later.
Ruck was at, I think he was at Harvard in the 60s, as early as the 60s.
And maybe it was the 70s.
Find out when The Road to Elusis first came out.
But he was blacklisted from academia when he came out with that.
That's crazy.
Yeah, now you're like the hottest shit.
If you're doing psychedelic research, back then you were blacklisted.
Yeah.
Steve, I'm sorry, but you're going to have to go back to Chrome, man.
There's just some stuff.
Okay, 78, published in 78.
Interesting.
So they didn't know, and the problem in the book is that it all makes sense and it's very probable, but it still just remains a speculation because they don't find a proof.
Like Hoffman really goes all the way, you know, he like examines like plants and like tries to find Ergot there, and I think he finds something, and then they brew it there, and then they take it, but it's not strong enough.
So it's like they really try to figure out what was taken back then, but the only way to figure it out would be to examine.
Like cups where the Kukeon was in, and then we would know, yeah, so this was probably going to happen.
Yeah, I think one of the reasons that Ruck was um sort of blacklisted.
And then there was a famous guy from Boston University named John Silber I think he was that one of the I think he was the head of Boston University who basically came out and said that Ruck's work was vanity press.
And uh he, I think the academic institutions didn't want, they didn't like the idea that Ruck was Basically, vindicating the psychedelic renaissance, which was happening with the Vietnam War and the psychedelic movement in the United States, connecting that with the people that founded Western civilization, the people that came up with democracy and the scientific method.
These people were doing the same thing that these crazy psychedelic anti war people are doing, right?
So it kind of like validated that.
The problem is not that there's no proof, but still, it's an interesting work that they did in this book.
Yeah.
And, um, I mean, today I visited the Tampa Art Museum and there's a famous, now famous, like cup of Bess, the god Bess.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Pull up that article, Steve.
That's fascinating.
They found like breast milk and vaginal fluids in this thing.
It's weird.
So you went and saw this?
Yeah.
And I had a conversation with the curator.
Yeah.
One of the things that Galen, Marcus Aurelius' physician, writes about is the use of bodily fluids as antidotes for viper venom.
Because a lot of people were getting bit by snakes around that area, right?
They were everywhere.
So what they were doing was one of these classical philologists that I had in here, Amon Hillman, wrote about this stuff, how they were taking bandages and Impregnating them, the bandages with these venoms, these viper venoms.
And they were making cuts on people and wrapping the bandage around the cut so it would slowly induce the venom into their body.
And they're young people, young kids who had robust immune systems.
So they would develop the antibodies to this stuff.
So they could use the bodily fluids of children as antidotes to snake bites and viper venoms and stuff like this.
The curator basically said that.
There's so many artifacts that could have contained at one point, like psychoactive stuff.
But since it's not evaluated, we basically look at these artifacts in museums and we have no idea really what was in all these vases, especially in Greece.
The problem is that it's expensive to examine it, there's no funding for it.
Right.
So we don't pay enough.
Because he said, actually, he said it's important to imagine.
The people back then, because there were also drugs, psychoactive drugs found in this mug.
Yeah.
He said it brings us, these people, closer.
If we imagine that they were, you know, maybe using the same drugs as we are today, because the trip is a trip, you know.
If it's a certain strength on a mushroom trip, I think today your trip would be very similar to someone tripping thousands of years ago.
So it does kind of create an empathetic notion.
It's very interesting that.
Some of the most brilliant and bright minds of antiquity were engaging in these rites and these rituals, and they were so into if the Eleusinian mysteries and the Kycheon were, they were, you know, partaking in some sort of psychedelic trip.
You know, people like Aristotle and doing all this stuff and coming up with all these crazy ideas like democracy and the scientific method.
It's crazy to think that, you know, that stuff kind of got buried.
I think it was in the third century or something like that.
You know, the church kind of burned it down, they burned down Eleusis and made all this stuff the devil.
I have to actually examine how it degenerated.
It's interesting.
I think it was going on for like a thousand years.
Yeah.
I've been there, I looked at the ruins because as a historian, you have to look at.
Archives and documents, but if you look at a time that's older than documents, then you have to actually look at like ruins.
You have to basically become an archaeologist, which is also an interesting profession because it's just like a story, you know, you just see like something carvings and.
So you're working on a new book right now, which is about what's it about?
It's basically about all kinds of historical.
Epochs and how drugs played roles in them.
That's why I was interested in this Bess head because that's, you know, sheds some light on a certain period in time that psychoactive drugs for sure were used because it's hard to find proof, you know.
If you examine the residue in an old cup, that's a proof, you know.
If you see, like, for example, there's ruins in South America where you can see San Pedro cactus, that's also a proof that this cactus was known there, you know.
So.
I don't know.
Where was I going?
Your new book.
Oh.
You want more Kratom?
No.
Because you said the second one makes you tired, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, the second one's a downer.
I would drink another green tea, actually.
Sure.
Steve, would you mind cooking him up another green tea, man?
Absolutely.
Sweet.
We can take a little break.
I got to take a leak, anyways.
Yeah.
We'll be right back.
Yeah, I think it's important.
To try to figure out why we think this is interesting.
Because I think that it does actually connect us with the people back then when they were using the same alkaloids that we're using.
Even though here it's not so clear because so many different things have been found, it was like a magic concoction.
But it had psychoactive stuff in there too the blue water lily.
Oh, yeah, the blue water lily.
That was a huge thing with the Egyptians, I think.
It was growing all over Egypt.
Right.
I think so, yeah.
And it had, but it had more like a calming effect.
It was like lotus eating lotus.
But also, Harmonine was found in there, which is basically an MAO inhibitor.
So I think it's still not pharmacologically clear what was in this basmug.
Yeah.
But it was something very intense, obviously.
And uh um, Branko Van Oppen, who's the curator of the museum, he thinks maybe it would.
It has something to do with giving birth, because giving birth was very difficult back then.
Yeah, a lot of women actually died and a lot of infants died, so they had mortality was like 50.
I think it was like a big challenge to actually kept keep the humanity going.
Basically yeah um, and apparently, because this was also because vaginal fluids are found in there and mother's milk and blood, it seemed to have some kind of connection to something very female going on here.
Very.
Yeah.
The ergot thing's interesting, though.
There was one, there was a guy that you mentioned, I think, in your book who was like the, like he was the guy who did the most research on ergot.
Oh, well, I know the guy who produced the most LSD, which is Leonard Picard.
Oh, okay.
I don't know if you mean him.
Maybe.
But there's also a scientist in Switzerland I met on the mountains who did.
A lot of ergot research.
It's a very nerdy topic to become an ergot expert, but it's quite interesting.
Well, it's an alkaloid that comes from a fungus, right?
It grows on it.
People were getting stoned off it by accident because, you know, wheat and barley was just infected with it.
I think in the Middle Ages it was a problem, ergot poisoning.
Yes.
That could lead to like mass psychosis and people freaking out.
But Paracelsus said this, it's always the dosage that makes the poison.
So that was the idea of Sandos, who created later LSD to.
Extract the potent alkaloids from ergot and turn that into medicines.
Their first medicine in the 20s was a migraine, anti migraine medicine, headache, anti headache medicine.
because ergot basically makes you contract your vessels, like your blood vessels.
Oh, really?
So they also made a successful medication that is, I think, still given during birth, that after the birth, it contracts the blood vessels, so bleeding, the bleeding stops.
That's how a lot of women died in antiquity, from bleeding out after birth.
So Sandos developed a medicine against that.
That was one of the big early hits.
So, LSD for them was just a freak medicine.
They didn't want to develop LSD.
It just happened.
They just didn't know really what it is.
Right.
They weren't very good in bringing it to the market because they basically sold it to Richard Kuhn, a Nazi scientist who was looking for a truth drug.
So, that was the big mistake the CEO did.
And that's why LSD is not legal at this moment.
Right.
I wonder, I always wonder, like, what kind of version of LSD?
MKUltra, are they working on right now that we'll find out about in 10 years?
You know, who knows?
Who knows if they're even still interested in drugs that much, you know, other than like that guy who I mentioned earlier who's doing the DARPA funded research on soldiers, trying to make better soldiers with psychedelics.
Government Control of Brains00:02:54
I think it can improve soldiers with psychedelics, not for the actual battle situation.
Yeah, because if you're giving them psychedelics, be like, why are we here?
Like, we shouldn't be here.
We all need to give each other hugs.
But I mean, if you try to create a powerful army, you need a powerful narrative.
Yeah.
And so a truthful narrative would be better than like a fictional ideology.
So it would make sense actually to make your people aware of who they are and their surroundings.
Maybe then they wouldn't want to be soldiers anymore.
Right, that's what I'm saying.
But maybe, you know, maybe you can create a narrative of an army that makes sense to serve in.
Yeah, if you could take this, if you could take this, the hallucination or the psychoactive element out of it and just induce the other benefits that you get from it, where the, you know, like brain enhancement or focus, vision.
Yeah, I mean, what also happens is apart from the default mode network receiving less energy, is that for a window of two weeks after the psychedelic experience, so-called neuroplasticity is enhanced.
Oh yeah.
Your brain is more kind of flexible and moving.
It's not like rigid, like it always the same thoughts.
It's more like, let's reinvent ourselves and look at everything.
But when you're a kid, you're going away.
Yeah, so it seems, it makes sense to me that this is a healthy process.
But maybe if your brain is very unstable, that additional instability could cause you problems.
So I think everyone has to decide for him or herself.
It's just very weird that the US government or any government in the world would kind of put up a chemical wall on our brains and kind of dictate what we can do and what we cannot do.
And I mean, Kennedy claimed that he would reevaluate this and legalize psychedelics, but I'm somehow very skeptical.
But that's at least it would be a very libertarian thing to do, also to remove these kind of regulations, because I think that's what the New administration is all about kind of removing regulations and kind of disrupting what was here before.
And anti drug laws, like really old school stuff, you know, they come from the Cold War, like they have no correlation to reality.
They're not working.
They're not contemporary anymore.
So that should be one of the first things that need to be re evaluated.
Yeah.
The drug cartels would lose a lot of business.
They would, yeah.
They would not be happy.
Peaceful Intentions and LSD00:05:36
I think it's interesting also.
I mean, I would.
Like to, like, it's said that big corporations will benefit from a change like this, but I actually don't think so.
If they could patent it, if they could get control of the patents.
I don't, I think psychedelics is more, it's not a big company thing.
I think it's, I have a feeling it would be interesting for a lot of startups to come up with stuff and develop things and get into the market.
And I think it would be a shift.
You know, big companies would lose money.
Obviously there was.
They would not sell their products as well anymore.
So Kennedy um, Kennedy said you, you have a theory that Kennedy did Lsd.
Well, I mean, there's a one source only for this and it's uh, Timothy Leary's autobiography.
So if you believe the source, then he received a visitor in april 1963, Mary Pinchot, who was kind of Kennedy's like lover.
She was always in the White House with him when they also they were alone a lot and she said to Leary that she uh wants Lsd for a very important person and Leary kind of suggested that he would do the ritual with them.
But she never said he, she never said it was Jfk, she was like a, what year was this?
Uh 63 63 okay, she was like an influencer, kind of like it.
How do you spell her name, Steve?
Can you look her up?
What's her name?
P-i-n-c, H-O-T, Mary.
Pinchot, Mary Pinchot.
Yeah, she was married to a CIA guy, but divorced him and then became kind of a peace advocate in D.C.
He was trying to interesting.
So she went to Leary.
She's quite hot, actually.
Is she hot?
Oh, there she is.
Look at this.
Oh, yeah, she's not bad.
She's great fun in the White House.
So they were smoking weed.
That's proven that they were smoking weed together in the White House.
And she had been married to the CIA operative before and divorced him and then kind of changed.
And she was murdered.
This, uh, what yeah, she was shot in the head a few months after Kennedy was assassinated.
And I read, but I don't know if that's true.
I just read that her diary also was confiscated and was never seen.
Pinshot was murdered on the Chesapeake Ohio Canal towpath in Washington, D.C. on October 12th, 1960.
October 12th, so a year after Kennedy was killed.
Well, they had to wait a bit.
A suspect, uh, Ray Camp Jr., was arrested and charged with her murder, but he was ultimately acquitted.
Wow.
Beginning in 1976, Pinchot Meyer's life, her relationship with Kennedy, and her murder became a subject of numerous articles and books, including a full length biography by Nina Burley.
Yeah, I think it's a good book.
So, in any case.
So she went to.
She went to Timothy Leary.
Timothy Leary was like known that he's the LSD guy.
I mean, he made that pretty clear.
Oh, yeah.
So she wanted to turn on JFK.
And she received LSD from Lyri.
And then she gave, well, it's not.
He wanted to go, but she was like, he wanted to go and participate, but she was like, no, no, you can't go.
You just got to teach me how to do it.
Right.
Because this guy's a big shot.
Yeah, he's too big.
Find some more photos of her.
Is there any other photos?
And also, you should look up Kennedy's peace speech at the American University.
Oh, yeah, I'm familiar with that one.
Which he held after she returned from Harvard with the LSD.
So that's the theory that she gave.
They tripped on the phone.
No, they tripped together, and then he realized.
And this was in what month?
This was late, right?
Like close to his death.
Well, like half a year before.
Half a year before.
Because he changed his policies.
He was like a hawk before, like really into the arms race.
And with the peace speech, he kind of said the arms race is bullshit.
And let's just, he basically is kind of hippie esque, you know.
And he wasn't like that before.
In June 10, 1963, rather than a speech at Harvard, however, Kennedy gave a speech at Harvard University on 14th, 1956, where he expressed his views on the importance of peace and its role in the United States.
If more politicians knew poetry and more poets knew politics, I'm convinced the world would be a better place in which to live.
That was a way of saying a lot of things like, oh, the Russians also have children, like just like us, and some we just want to take care of our children, friends, and peaceful.
Yeah, and um, I think that's uh, I think that's the reason why he got assassinated because he wanted to end the arms race and really make peace on the earth, of course.
Yeah, no, they was not really wanted.
The joint chiefs of staff were planning a global nuclear war, they wanted a new.
China and Russia, and they wanted to do that before Russia got intercontinental ballistic missiles because they knew that they wouldn't be able to retaliate before the beginning of 1964 when they did get ICBMs.
Only in 64.
Yeah, they got ICBMs in the beginning of 64.
So America had an advantage.
We had an advantage, right?
They didn't cheap air until later.
Technology.
Right, right.
Modern Enhancements for Soldiers00:15:05
Well, hey man, thanks for coming and doing this.
This was fun.
Thanks for having me.
Of course.
I love learning about all this crazy history, the Nazis and drugs, and throughout history has also been super fascinating to me.
So thanks again.
I really enjoyed it.
Tell people where they can find your books and find more about you on the internet.
Well, I want to do a Substack, but so far I haven't done it yet.
But I think it's a really good medium because it's kind of, you kind of own the content, I think.
Well, let's say on Instagram, you don't really own anything you put out there.
Right now, I'm just posting shit on Instagram, but I think it's unworthy somehow.
I think reading books is quite good.
I find it hard to focus and actually read, but I would encourage everyone to actually try to read maybe Tripped and Blitzed.
Yeah.
And my third book, The Bohemians, which is also out in English.
Okay.
They're on audio too, right?
You can listen to them.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
Well, thanks for having me.
Beautiful.
I'll link it all below as well as your Instagram.
Cool.
We also have our secret, our super secret community.
Of Patreon subscribers who have very detailed questions for you that I'm going to have you answer as soon as we wrap up this podcast.
So that's the end of the podcast, folks.
Thanks again, Norman.
It's been amazing.
I really enjoyed this.
And if you're not on Patreon, sorry about your luck.
All right, this guy said, What surprised you most about the role in drugs shaping the Third Reich's military strategy?
How long should I answer?
A minute, maybe 30 seconds to a minute.
You don't have to elaborate too much.
You can keep it pretty short.
Well, I think understanding that methamphetamine will be enhancing the fighting capabilities, I think it's quite something to discover that and then to actually turn that into a program that millions of soldiers are using and that it actually works, at least in the beginning against France.
That was kind of surprising.
Okay.
Tristan says How much of an effect did Hitler's drug use have on his motivation to?
Target the Jews besides the master race claim?
How far did the Nazi super soldier program?
Okay, these are like three questions.
How much of an effect did Hitler's drug use have on his motivation to target Jews?
I think none.
I didn't read any description of Morrell where he says it's like Hitler's taking this and this and then he realized that Jews are bad or something.
So I also think this answers the question of accountability.
I think the responsibility is not lessened because he took drugs once in a while because I think.
The crimes were really have nothing to do with drugs, but with his kind of evil ideology.
Right.
Okay, Sharma, this is a long one.
What's the biggest difference between amphetamines of today and the stimulants the Nazis were using?
Kind of explained that on the podcast.
Yeah, we did.
What's the long term result of the drug used amongst the average soldier?
Any evidence of typical substance use disorders associated with symptoms or behaviors that we see now?
Or did they just return to whatever the new normal looked like?
Was there a long term side effect of all this stuff with those guys?
It was never examined.
I mean, the army had a program, like a rehab program, but they didn't put it into place because the war was, you know, it became so chaotic and they didn't have any resources anymore.
So the people just came back.
Like I spoke to one guy, his father was a writer, and he said he just took it then in the evening when we all went to bed.
Then at 10, he took a Pavitine in the 50s and wrote his books.
To like two at night.
So people knew about it.
Also, Pavitine is not like heroin.
It's not the withdrawal.
It probably just stops.
You take methamphetamine for two years in the war and then you come out of the war.
I think many people just didn't take it anymore.
Right.
Are you still microdosing with your mom?
Any positive long-time changes?
Got any updates?
Well, it was really good for quite a while, like over two years.
And then my father, now my mother is in an old people's home.
Because my father couldn't take care of her anymore by himself.
And he stopped giving the microdosis since she's in the home because it's still illegal.
And he doesn't want to give it secretly.
And he doesn't feel like talking to the nurses there that he wants to do this.
Which I think he should try harder because it's always been good for her.
Because it seems to be good for her brain.
I think he's giving up too quickly.
But I respect his decision.
She cannot make the decision anymore.
Because I'd say my.
I think he said so before she went into the home that Alzheimer's gets slowed down through the LSD, but it doesn't get stopped.
So the Alzheimer's basically wins even over the LSD.
It's just more and more Alzheimer's in the brain.
Okay.
Thank you for the work you've done.
What is he saying?
Questions.
I know, right?
How did the Nazis source the ingredients?
Well, Temla, the company that made Pavitine, made it very clear from the beginning when they advertised the medicine to doctors and then later to the military that the ingredients for methamphetamine are very easy to come by.
It's nothing that's like scarce or couldn't be found anymore during the war.
And so it was just like basic chemicals that a company just has, you know.
So they were able to make still millions of dosages of methamphetamine in 1945 when you know, there was not much being produced anymore in Germany because of the bombing campaigns.
But Temla kept producing.
They relocated their production facilities to a brewery in West Germany.
So, in this brewery, they made beer and methamphetamine at the same time.
Oh, wow.
I think in 1945.
Was there any connection to.
I can't see it, Steve.
Was there any indications of hallucinogenic drugs used by the Nazis in regards to their occult worship?
I didn't find anything.
No.
Also, the whole occult thing, I think it played a role, and I think Himmler was really into it, but I don't think Hitler was really into it.
And so it's not so, I mean, people might disagree, but I don't think it's so important this occult part of the Nazi movement.
Were the allies on drugs?
They noticed in the fall of 1941 that the German pilots had been using methamphetamine and then.
Uh, Churchill ordered a drug program also for the Royal Air Force and they examined different types of amphetamines and methamphetamine.
They decided then to use amphetamines and they started an amphetamine program, but they thought methamphetamine is too strong for them.
Oh, okay.
But amphetamine is actually a better choice, yeah.
I mean, the Nazis would say so, right?
Right.
Uh, do you see any correlation with the current day big pharma medical industrial complex and the massive amounts of vaccines and drugs given to people?
Is there a way to control, dumb down, or make people sick?
Wow.
This guy thinks you got all the answers.
Yeah, I think the pharmaceutical industry is not really helping people to get more healthy.
And I think it really needs the legalization of psychedelics.
I think that will be a game changer because then it's like the truth is there, you know?
Sure.
Then they have to compete with that.
Right now they have like a protected playing field because, you know, the right stuff that can really help is not allowed.
Right.
That really needs to change.
Were mushrooms used in any ways?
Uh, or no, were mushrooms used in the same way as Nordic cultures, or was it mainly narcotics?
Um, I think there have been, I haven't examined it properly enough, but there have been like uh mushroom depictions on like boats and stuff.
So I think they used mushrooms, uh, but I haven't researched this properly yet.
Okay, thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon.
It's actually my favorite novel, and I read it in the mid 90s in Berlin when I was like coming home from Kit Kat Club and other underground venues in Berlin.
So, still high on acid.
And I think it's one of the greatest novels ever written.
It's very complex, very hard to understand.
What's it about?
It's basically set in Germany during the war and right after the war.
And it's about an American special agent, Tyrone Slothrop.
And they find out, first, he's in London.
And he always likes to have sex in places where then the next day the German V2 rockets land.
So he's kind of psychically connected to this.
And so they kind of follow him, and wherever he kind of fucks at night, they're going to evacuate the area the next day because the V 2 rocket is going to hit there.
And then he later goes into Berlin and he has all kinds of crazy adventures.
I think it's an amazing novel, and I'm wondering really how Thomas Pynchon wrote it because he has so much esoteric information about drugs and rocket science in Germany.
And it's a very knowledgeable book.
It's a bit hard to read.
When was he around?
He's still around.
Oh, is he really?
He's the most famous, completely unknown American author.
No one knows where he lives and how he looks.
I gotta write his name.
I gotta get him on here.
He won't.
I'll have him in here tomorrow.
He's very hard to trace down.
He lives here, though?
I know the city where he lives, but I wouldn't disclose it.
Oh.
Because he just doesn't want to be known.
Right.
It's hard.
Yeah, I'm sure.
He's not.
Gonna do Instagram stories, you know, right?
But he doesn't need to, you know, he's a great, he should receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
I would be interested in whether he would come out for that, yeah.
Yeah, interesting.
What year did he write that uh novel about the Gravity Rainbow 70s solar panel death sentence?
I don't even know what that means.
Do you know what that means?
No, I don't know what that means.
Let's skip that.
All right, sounds scary.
It sounds like a van, like a metal van.
It does hand me that that lid.
Um, do you think the Nazis' history of drug use?
And experimentation influenced the knowledge or practices transferred to Operation Paperclip.
Yeah.
I think we talked about that, right?
We did, yeah.
What's the best drug for inducing lucid dreaming or enhancing a creative flow state?
AI says that maybe galantamine and modafinil.
Well, AI is pretty bad, actually.
Everyone praises it, how intelligent it is.
I think it's pretty stupid still, and it makes a lot of mistakes.
Yeah.
Which drug did it recommend?
Oh, modafinil.
Modafinil is okay.
What the hell is modafinil?
It works a little bit like an amphetamine, but it's not an amphetamine.
It's like a brain enhancer or a performance enhancer.
Like the German army, when they were deployed in Afghanistan, they would use modafinil in certain combat situations because it makes you more awake and more alert.
But it doesn't really have a great trip.
It's kind of like what you said it doesn't have an intoxication effect, but it does have a stimulating effect.
Okay.
And galantamine, I don't know, but I think the AI didn't give a very good answer.
This guy's talking about lucid dreaming and flow state.
Yeah, you need something else.
Yeah, I wouldn't imagine that to get into a flow state, you would be wanting to go towards stimulants like that.
I don't know.
That's just me.
Mr. Oler, are you suggesting that your work shifts the blame from Hitler to drugs?
Yes, Farouk, that's exactly what he's saying.
Are drugs?
No, you're not saying drugs are responsible.
No.
I don't know what.
I don't know.
He clearly did not write well.
I mean, it's a legit question, so I'm not, but I'm not suggesting that it could be.
It could be my angle if I was like a right wing kind of guy, but it's not really my angle at all.
Yeah, what historical connections are there between the pharmaceutical giants of today and the Nazi regime?
Well, Merck is still around, right.
I mean, IG Farben was like a conglomerate of the biggest German pharmaceutical companies and they were like, weren't they also making rubber?
Yeah, they were making rubber, but they also made like Cyclone B, which was a business chambers.
So, they were like a big influence from a business side into the government, kind of.
Mussolini said democracy dies when money has too much influence on the political process.
And this was certainly what the Nazis did.
They allowed CEOs to talk into their politics.
Wow.
Crazy quote coming from Mussolini.
Yeah.
I mean, it's a very interesting quote what fascism actually is.
It makes sense to me.
He thought that was good, you know, and a lot of people think it is good, but it's.
What?
Think what's good?
If money kind of decides politics.
Politics has a big, you know.
Mussolini thought it was good?
Well, he was a fascist.
He invented fascism.
Right, right.
So.
What's the most surprising discovery in your research for Blitz?
I mean, I actually didn't think Hitler was on drugs, you know, before I started this research.
And then when I read all the notes by his doctor, which are very detailed.
Detailed and very vivid, also kind of well written sometimes, like how he washes the syringe.
He actually used the same syringe over and over again, yeah, because it didn't have like all, you know, it was a different time.
Also, the syringe was much thicker, so it was actually, oh God, must have been quite painful.
But I think Hitler was a bit of a masochist, he kind of liked that, yeah, that pain going into, yeah, so he really liked to get injections.
Um, okay, was the question was that in relation to the question?
Yeah, that was one of the questions, okay.
Hitler's Painful Injections00:00:23
The other ones we talked about.
Thanks again.
This person just said thanks.
Good.
This person is saying, Danny, get up with me on Instagram.