Norman Ohler > Quotes

“What is past is prologue’.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany

“The fact was that between the autumn of 1941, when he started being given hormone and steroid injections, and the second half of 1944, when first the cocaine and then above all the Eukodal kicked in, Hitler hardly enjoyed a sober day.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Heroin is a fine business,” the directors of Bayer announced proudly and advertised the substance as a remedy for headaches, for general indisposition, and also as a cough syrup for children. It was even recommended to babies for colic or sleeping problems.4”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Pervitin became a symptom of the developing performance society. Boxed chocolates spiked with methamphetamine were even put on the market. A good 14 milligrams of methamphetamine was included in each individual portion—almost five times the amount in a Pervitin pill. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight” was the slogan of this potent confectionery. The recommendation was to eat between three and nine of these, with the indication that they were, unlike caffeine, perfectly safe.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Heroin is a fine business,” the directors of Bayer announced proudly and advertised the substance as a remedy for headaches, for general indisposition, and also as a cough syrup for children. It was even recommended to babies for colic or sleeping problems.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“While we have driven out other Nazi verbal monstrosities, the terminology of the war on drugs has lingered. It's no longer a matter of Jews - the dangerous dealers are now said to be part of different cultural circles.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany

“Just as the victorious United States appropriated the Third Reich’s discoveries in rocket science and the exploration of outer space, the Nazi drug experiments were imported to explore inner worlds.41”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Its extremely potent active ingredient is an opioid called oxycodone, synthesized from the raw material of opium. The substance was a hot topic among doctors in the Weimar Republic because many physicians quietly took the narcotic themselves. In specialist circles Eukodal was the queen of remedies: a wonder drug. Almost twice as pain-relieving as morphine, which it replaced in popularity, this archetypal designer opioid was characterized by its potential to create very swiftly a euphoric state significantly higher than that of heroin, its pharmacological cousin. Used properly, Eukodal did not make the patient tired or knock him out—quite the contrary.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Hitler had sometimes canceled medical investigations to conceal wounds on his body from Eva Braun’s aggressive sexual behavior.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“The path taken by the authorities in their so-called Rauschgiftbekämpfung, or “war on drugs,” lay less in an intensification of the opium law, which was simply adopted from the Weimar Republic,21 than in several new regulations that served the central National Socialist idea of “racial hygiene.” The term Droge—drug—which at one point meant nothing more than “dried plant parts,”* was given negative connotations. Drug consumption was stigmatized and—with the help of quickly established new divisions of the criminal police—severely penalized. This new emphasis came into force as early as November 1933, when the Reichstag passed a law that allowed the imprisonment of addicts in a closed institution for up to two years, although that period of confinement could be extended indefinitely by legal decree.22”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“America. In drugstores across the United States, two active ingredients were available without prescription: fluids containing morphine calmed people down, while drinks containing cocaine, such as in the early days Vin Mariani, a Bordeaux containing coca extract, and even Coca-Cola,3 were used to counter low moods, as a hedonistic source of euphoria, and also as a local anesthetic. This was only the start. The industry soon needed to diversify; it craved new products.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Usually ingested nasally in high doses, the crystalline form of this so-called horror drug has gained unimaginable popularity all over Europe, with an exponential number of first-time users.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“National Socialism was toxic, in the truest sense of the word. It gave the world a chemical legacy that still affects us today: a poison that refuses to disappear. On one hand, the Nazis presented themselves as clean-cut and enforced a strict, ideologically underpinned anti-drug policy with propagandistic pomp and draconian punishments. On the other hand, a particularly potent and perfidious substance became a popular product under Hitler. This drug carved out a great career for itself all over the German Reich, and later in the occupied countries of Europe. Under the trademark Pervitin, this little pill became the accepted Volksdroge, or “people’s drug,” and was on sale in every pharmacy. It wasn’t until 1939 that its use was restricted by making Pervitin prescription-only, and the pill was not subjected to regulation until the Reich Opium Law in 1941.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“But anyone who passed through the big cast-iron gate and crossed the broad forecourt stepped into a realm of chaos, of unbridled alcohol and drug abuse, of intrigues and general mismanagement. The conditions in Göring’s three-thousand-room fortress (which today houses the Federal Ministry of Finance) were symptomatic of the regime’s loss of political reality and the wrong track that Germany had set off on.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Making housework more fun—methamphetamine chocolates: “Hildebrand chocolates always delight.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“In autumn 1935 a new Marital Health Law was passed that forbade marriage if one of the parties suffered from a “mental disturbance.” Narcotics addicts were marginalized into this category and were branded as “psychopathic personalities”—without the prospect of a cure. This marriage prohibition was supposed to prevent “infection of the partner, as well as hereditarily conditioned potential for addiction” in children, because among “the descendants of drug addicts an increased rate of mental deviations” had been observed.28 The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring took compulsory sterilization to its brutal conclusion: “For reasons of racial hygiene we must therefore see to it that severe addicts are prevented from reproducing.”29”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“A medical officer from the IX Army Corps raved: “I’m convinced that in big pushes, where the last drop has to be squeezed from the team, a unit supplied with Pervitin is superior. This doctor has therefore made sure that there is a supply of Pervitin in the Unit Medical Equipment.”23”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“The scientist, considered unimpeachable at his institute at the Military Medical Academy, whitewashed the inquiries into the stimulant prepared for Berlin. At the same time he revealed his own, very personal inadequacy: he knew the drug better than anybody, and he was aware of its dangers, but he had become dependent upon it and played down the negative effects both to himself and to others. A classic case of an addicted dealer.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Trademarked as Heroin, it entered the market and began its own campaign. “Heroin is a fine business,” the directors of Bayer announced proudly and advertised the substance as a remedy for headaches, for general indisposition, and also as a cough syrup for children. It was even recommended to babies for colic or sleeping problems.4 Business wasn’t just booming for Bayer. In the last third of the nineteenth century several new pharmaceutical hotspots developed along the Rhine. Unlike other, more traditional industries, the chemical industry didn’t require as much in terms of overhead to get business going, only needing relatively little equipment and raw material. Even small operations promised high profit margins.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Hitler had maneuvered the Reich into an impossible situation, and his back was against the wall.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Göring, too, in a ridiculous camouflage uniform bursting at the seams, had fled to southern Germany. If he had to fall into anyone’s hands he wanted it to be the Americans, not the Soviets.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Boxed chocolates spiked with methamphetamine were even put on the market. A good 14 milligrams of methamphetamine was included in each individual portion—”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“Among the drivers many accidents, mostly attributable to excessive fatigue, could have been avoided if an analeptic such as Pervitin had been administered.”26 Crystal meth to avoid road accidents? Really?”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“In 1805 Goethe wrote Faust in classicist Weimar, and by poetic means perfected one of his theses, that the genesis of man is itself drug-induced: I change my brain, therefore I am.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“After landing, reality was a strange world for the zonked pilot: I kept my course precisely, in spite of my euphoric indifference and my seemingly weightless state. Upon landing, I find the place in a state of complete stasis. Nothing moves, there’s no one to be seen, rubble of the hangars forlornly looms . . . between the bomb craters. As I roll on to the squadron’s stand my right tire bursts. I’ve probably driven over a bomb splinter. Later I meet Dr. Sperrling and ask him in passing what kind of “crap” this Pervitin really is, and whether it mightn’t be better to warn pilots in advance? When he learns that I’ve taken three tablets, he nearly faints, and forbids me to touch a plane, even from outside, for the rest of the day.121”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“The Celebrity Doctor of Kurfürstendamm”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“good 14 milligrams of methamphetamine was included in each individual portion—almost five times the amount in a Pervitin pill. “Hildebrand chocolates are always a delight”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“No wonder they already practiced extensively with meth.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“He is all genius and body. And he mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.”18 Hitler allegedly didn’t even allow himself coffee and legend had it that after the First World War he threw his last pack of cigarettes into the Danube near Linz; from then onward, supposedly, no poisons would enter his body.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

“and suddenly, unprepared, Germany had to fight a war against the whole of Western Europe.”
― Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich