Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

Norman Ohler

Mar 2017 · Sold by HarperCollins

About this ebook

A New York Times bestseller, Norman Ohler's Blitzed is a "fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich” (Washington Post).

The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. Yet as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping 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.

“Delightfully nuts.”—The New Yorker

Ratings and reviews

Awful sensationalist garbage. Grade school level of research. Terrible analysis of the German military and Nazism as a whole. The Germans were successful because they were well-trained and executed a well-coordinated plan against an unprepared and poorly-led Allied army, not because they were tripping on Pervitin. This idiotic rambling by Ohler (a fictional novelist, not an accredited historian) gives the impression that Hitler and the Nazis were fueled by Methamphetamine, and not a dangerous ideology which persists to this day. Anyone who researches the Second World War with a shred of dignity should pitch this garbage in the fire and warn anyone else to do the same. For those actually interested in the topic there are more credible works available if one would take the time to search. Spend your money somewhere else. I could go on but there is a character limit to these reviews

This book shows a dynamic of the war most hardly knew about.i learned details that intriged me.great research work well done...

Ohler does an excellent job exploring the drug world of Germany during WWII.

About the author

Norman Ohler is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed, the non-fiction books Tripped about Nazi research into LSD during World War II and The Bohemians about resistance against Hitler in Berlin, as well as the novels Die Quotenmaschine (the world’s first hypertext novel), Mitte, Stadt des Goldes (translated into English as Ponte City), as well as the historical crime novel Die Gleichung des Lebens. He was cowriter of the script for Wim Wenders’s film Palermo Shooting. He lives in Berlin.