Is this true? Nazis used meth extensively for energy--soldiers, workers, Hitler

THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER 'The most brilliant and fascinating book I have read in my entire life' Dan Snow 'A huge contribution... remarkable' Antony Beevor, BBC RADIO 4 'Extremely interesting ... a serious piece of scholarship, very well researched' Ian Kershaw The Nazis presented themselves as warriors against moral degeneracy. Yet, as Norman Ohler's gripping bestseller reveals, the entire Third Reich was permeated with drugs: cocaine, heroin, morphine and, most of all, methamphetamines, or crystal meth, used by everyone from factory workers to housewives, and crucial to troops' resilience - even partly explaining German victory in 1940. The promiscuous use of drugs at the very highest levels also impaired and confused decision-making, with Hitler and his entourage taking refuge in potentially lethal cocktails of stimulants administered by the physician Dr Morell as the war turned against Germany. While drugs cannot on their own explain the events of the Second World War or its outcome, Ohler shows, they change our understanding of it. Blitzed forms a crucial missing piece of the story.

The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs: cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, which were consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to German soldiers. In fact, troops were encouraged, and in some cases ordered, to take rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to account for the breakneck invasion that sealed the fall of France in 1940, as well as other German military victories. Hitler himself became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—ultimately including Eukodal, a cousin of heroin—administered by his personal doctor.

Thoroughly researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.

Winston Churchill developed an interest in speed when he learned that the Germans were using it and British troops were supplied with hundreds of thousands of pills as well. And U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, who would later become president, ordered at least half a million tablets for Americans fighting in North Africa.

Arguably, one of the most important takeaways from the episode isn’t just that troops were given speed to keep them awake, as we might assume. Researchers of the time discovered that it helped make their troops more confident and even more aggressive. That’s obviously useful in war, but it also has its downsides. As the episode explains, one useful thing about fear is that it keeps you from putting your body in harm’s way. Fear is a natural self-defense mechanism and people who are overly confident might achieve great things, but they also run the risk of making really dumb mistakes.

The episode also gets into the dosages that troops were using, which could run as high as 100 milligrams on some occasions. And that was before the invention of “extended release” technology that we have today that slowly introduces a drug into your bloodstream. When you took a pill in the 1940s, you were getting a swift kick of the entire dose at once.