Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich

First Mariner Books edition 2018

Copyright © 2015 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne Germany

Copyright © 2015 by Norman Ohler

Translation copyright © 2016 by Shaun Whiteside

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to trade.permissions@hmhco.com or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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First published in the German language as Der Totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich by Norman Ohler with an afterword by Hans Mommsen. Published by arrangement with Penguin Books Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ohler, Norman, author. | Whiteside, Shaun, translator.

Title: Drugs in the Third Reich / Norman Ohler ; translated by Shaun Whiteside.

Other titles: Totale Rausch. English

Description: First U.S. edition. | Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, [2017] | Translated from the German. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016056346 | ISBN 9781328663795 (hardcover)

ISBN 9781328915344 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Nazis—Drug use. | Drugs—Germany—History—20th century. | Pharmaceutical industry—Germany—History—20th century. | Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945—Drug use. | Soldiers—Drug use—Germany—History—20th century. | World War, 1939–1945—Germany.

Classification: LCC HV5840.G3 O3513 2017 | DDC 362.29/95094309044—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016056346

Photo credits appear on page 272.

Cover design by Albert Tang

Cover photograph © Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images

eISBN 978-1-328-66409-9

Version: 09042024ER

A political system devoted to decline instinctively does much to speed up that process.

—Jean-Paul Sartre

1

Methamphetamine, the Volksdroge

(1933–1938)

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.

Its active ingredient, methamphetamine, is now either illegal or strictly regulated,¹ but with the number of consumers currently at over 100 million and rising, it counts today as our most popular poison. Produced in hidden labs by chemical amateurs, usually in adulterated form, this substance has come to be known as crystal meth. 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. This upper, with its dangerously powerful kick, is used as a party drug, for boosting performance in the workplace, in offices, even in parliaments and at universities. It banishes both sleep and hunger while promising euphoria, but in the form of crystal meth* it is a potentially destructive and highly addictive substance. Hardly anyone knows about its original rise in Nazi Germany.

Breaking Bad: The Drug Lab of the Reich

Under a clean-swept summer sky stretching over both industrial zones and uniform housing, I take the suburban train southeast, to the edge of Berlin. In order to find the remnants of the Temmler factory I have to get out at Adlershof, which nowadays calls itself Germany’s most modern technology park. Avoiding the campus, I strike off across an urban no-man’s-land, skirting dilapidated factory buildings and passing through a wilderness of crumbling brick and rusty steel.

The Temmler factory moved here in 1933. It was only one year later that Albert Mendel (the Jewish co-owner of the Tempelhof Chemical Factory) was expropriated by the racist laws of the regime and Temmler took over his share, quickly expanding the business. These were good times for the German chemical industry (or at least for its Aryan members), and pharmaceutical development boomed. Research was tirelessly conducted on new, pioneering substances that would ease the pain of modern humanity or sedate its troubles. Many of the resulting pharmacological innovations shape the way we consume medicine today.

The Temmler factory in Berlin-Johannisthal, then . . . and now (following images).

By now the former Temmler factory in Berlin-Johannisthal has fallen into ruin. There is no sign of its prosperous past, of a time when millions of Pervitin pills a week were being pressed. The grounds lie unused, a dead property. Crossing a deserted parking lot, I make my way through a wildly overgrown patch of forest and over a wall stuck with broken bits of glass designed to deter intruders. Between ferns and saplings stands the old wooden witch’s house of the founder, Theodor Temmler, once the nucleus of the company. Behind dense alder bushes looms a forsaken brick building. A window is broken enough for me to be able to climb through, stumbling into a long dark corridor. Mildew and mold grow from the walls and ceilings. At the end of the hallway a door stands beckoning, half open, encrusted with flaking green paint. Beyond the door, daylight peers through two shattered, lead-framed industrial windows. An abandoned bird’s nest hides in the corner. Chipped white tiles reach all the way to the high ceiling, which is furnished with circular air vents.

This is the former laboratory of Dr. Fritz Hauschild, head of pharmacology at Temmler from 1937 until 1941, who was in search of a new type of medicine, a performance-enhancing drug. This is the former drug lab of the Third Reich. Here, in porcelain crucibles attached to pipes and glass coolers, the chemists boiled up their flawless matter. Lids rattled on potbellied flasks, orange steam released with a sharp hiss while emulsions crackled and white-gloved fingers made adjustments. Here the methamphetamine produced was of a quality that even Walter White, the drug cook in the TV series Breaking Bad, which depicts meth as a symbol of our times, could only have dreamed of.

Prologue in the Nineteenth Century: The Father of All Drugs

Voluntary dependence is the finest state.

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

To understand the historical relevance of methamphetamine and other substances to the Nazi state, we must go back before the beginning of the Third Reich. The development of modern societies is bound as tightly with the creation and distribution of drugs as the economy is with advances in technology. 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. At the same time, in the rather less glamorous town of Paderborn in Westphalia, the pharmaceutical assistant Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner performed experiments with opium poppies, whose thickened sap anesthetized pain more effectively than anything else. Goethe wanted to explore through artistic and dramatic channels what it is that holds the core of the world together—Sertürner, on the other hand, wanted to solve a major, millennium-old problem that has plagued our species to a parallel degree.

It was a concrete challenge for the brilliant twenty-one-year-old chemist: depending on the conditions they are grown in, the active ingredient in opium poppies is present in varying concentrations. Sometimes the bitter sap does not ease the pain quite strongly enough, and other times it can lead to an unintended overdose and fatal poisoning. Thrown back entirely on his own devices, just as the opiate laudanum consumed Goethe in his study, Sertürner made an astonishing discovery: he succeeded in isolating morphine, the crucial alkaloid in opium, a kind of pharmacological Mephistopheles that instantly magics pain away. Not only a turning point in the history of pharmacology, this was also one of the most important events of the early nineteenth century, not to mention human history as a whole. Pain, that irritable companion, could now be assuaged, indeed removed, in precise doses. All over Europe, apothecaries had to the best of their ability (and their consciences) pressed pills from the ingredients of their own herb gardens or from the deliveries of women who foraged in hedgerows. These homegrown chemists now developed within only a few years into veritable factories, with established pharmacological standards.* Morphine was not only a method of easing life’s woes; it was also big business.

In Darmstadt the owner of the Engel-Apotheke, Emanuel Merck, stood out as a pioneer of this development. In 1827 he set out his business model of supplying alkaloids and other medications in unvarying quality. This was the birth not only of the Merck Company, which still thrives today, but of the modern pharmaceutical industry as a whole. When injections were invented in 1850, there was no stopping the victory parade of morphine. The painkiller was used in the American Civil War of 1861–65 and in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Soon morphine fixes were doing the rounds as normal procedure.² The change was crucial; the pain of even seriously injured soldiers could now be kept within bounds. This made a different scale of war possible: fighters who before would have been ruled out for a long time by an injury were soon coddled back to health and thrust onto the front line once again.

With morphine, also known as morphium, the development of pain relief and anesthesia reached a crucial climax, both in the army and in civil society. From the worker to the nobleman, the supposed panacea took the whole world by storm, from Europe via Asia and all the way to 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. On August 10, 1897, Felix Hoffmann, a chemist with the Bayer Company, synthesized acetylsalicylic acid from willow bark; it went on sale as Aspirin and conquered the globe. Eleven days later the same man invented another substance that was also to become world famous: diacetyl morphine, a derivative of morphine—the first designer drug. 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. What was most important was intuition and specialist knowledge on the part of the developers, and Germany, rich in human capital, was able to fall back on an inexhaustible stock of excellent chemists and engineers, trained in what was at the time the best education system in the world. The network of universities and technical colleges was recognized as exemplary: science and business worked hand in hand. Research was being carried out at top speed, and a multitude of patents were being developed. Where the chemical industry was concerned, Germany was the workshop of the world. Made in Germany became a guarantee of quality, especially for drugs.

Germany, the Global Dealer

This didn’t change after the First World War. While France and Great Britain were able to acquire natural stimulants such as coffee, tea, vanilla, pepper, and other natural medicines from colonies overseas, Germany, which lost its (comparatively sparse) colonial possessions under the terms of the Versailles Treaty, had to find other ways—stimulants had to be produced synthetically. In fact, Germany was in dire need of artificial assistance: the war had inflicted deep wounds and caused the nation both physical and psychic pain. In the 1920s drugs became more and more important for the despondent population between the Baltic Sea and the Alps. The desire for sedation led to self-education and there soon emerged no shortage of know-how for the production of a remedy.

The course was set for a thriving pharmaceutical industry. Many of the chemical substances that we know today were developed and patented within a very short period of time. German companies became leaders in the global market. Not only did they produce the most medicines, but they also provided the lion’s share of chemical raw materials for their manufacture throughout the world. A new economy came into being, and the picturesque Rhine Valley became a Chemical Valley of sorts. Previously unknown little outfits prospered overnight and grew into influential players. In 1925 the bigger chemical factories joined together to form IG Farben, one of the most powerful companies in the world, with headquarters in Frankfurt. Opiates above all were still a German specialty. In 1926 the country was top of the morphine-producing states and world champion when it came to exporting heroin: 98 percent of the production went abroad.⁵ Between 1925 and 1930, 91 tons of morphine were produced, 40 percent of global production.⁶ Under the obligations of the Versailles Treaty, Germany reluctantly signed the League of Nations International Opium Convention in 1925, which regulated the trade. It was not ratified in Berlin until 1929. The local alkaloid industry still processed just over 200 tons of opium in 1928.⁷

The Germans were world leaders in another class of substances as well: the companies Merck, Boehringer, and Knoll controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine market. Merck’s cocaine, from the city of Darmstadt, was seen as the best product in the world, and commercial pirates in China printed fake Merck labels by the million.⁸ Hamburg was the major European marketplace for raw cocaine: every year thousands of pounds were imported legally through its port. Peru sold its entire annual production of raw cocaine, over five tons, almost exclusively to Germany for further processing. The influential Fachgruppe Opium und Kokain (Expert Group on Opium and Cocaine), put together by the German drug manufacturers, worked tirelessly on a close integration of the government and the pharmaceuticals industry. Two cartels, each consisting of a handful of companies, divided up between them the lucrative market of the entire world,⁹ the so-called cocaine convention and opiates convention. Merck was the business leader in both cases.¹⁰ The young Weimar Republic, swimming in consciousness-altering and intoxicating substances, delivered heroin and cocaine to the four corners of the world and rose to become a global dealer.

The Chemical Twenties

This scientific and economic development also resonated with the spirit of the age. Artificial paradises were in vogue in the Weimar Republic. People chose to flee into worlds of make-believe rather than engage with the often less rosy reality—a phenomenon that more or less defined this very first democracy on German soil, both politically and culturally. Many were reluctant to admit the true reasons for the military defeat and repressed the shared responsibility of the imperial German establishment for the fiasco of the First World War. The malicious legend of the stab in the back gained currency, claiming the German Army had only lost the war because of internal sabotage from the left.¹¹

These escapist tendencies often found expression either in sheer hatred or in cultural excess, most of all in Berlin. Alfred Döblin’s novel Berlin Alexanderplatz identified the city as the Whore of Babylon, with an incomparably grubby underworld, a place seeking salvation in the most appalling, barely imaginable, excesses, particularly drugs. Berlin nightlife, oh boy, oh boy, the world has never seen the like! We used to have a great army, now we’ve got great perversities! wrote the author Klaus Mann.¹² The city on the Spree became synonymous with moral reprehensibility. When Germany’s currency collapsed—in autumn of 1923 one U.S. dollar was worth 4.2 billion marks—all moral values seemed to plummet with it as well.

Everything whirled apart in a toxicological frenzy. The icon of the age, the actress and dancer Anita Berber, dipped white rose petals in a cocktail of chloroform and ether at breakfast, before sucking them clean. Films about cocaine or morphine were showing in the cinemas, and all drugs were available on street corners without prescription. Forty percent of Berlin doctors were said to be addicted to morphine.¹³ In Friedrichstrasse Chinese traders from the former German-leased territory of Tsingtao ran opium dens. Illegal nightclubs opened in the back rooms of the Mitte district. Smugglers distributed flyers at Anhalter Station, advertising illegal dance parties and beauty evenings. Big clubs like the famous Haus Vaterland, on Potsdamer Platz, and Ballhaus Resi, notorious for its extravagant promiscuity, on Blumenstrasse, attracted potential fun-lovers in droves, as did smaller establishments like the Kakadu Bar or the Weisse Maus, where masks were distributed on the way in to guarantee the anonymity of the guests. An early form of sex-and-drugs tourism from Western neighbors and the United States began, because everything in Berlin was as cheap as it was exciting.

The world war was lost, and everything seemed permitted: the metropolis mutated into the experimental capital of Europe. Posters on house walls warned in shrill Expressionist script: Berlin, take a breath / bear in mind your dance partner is death! The police couldn’t keep up: order collapsed first sporadically, then chronically, and the culture of pleasure filled the vacuum as best it could, as illustrated in a song of the times:

Once not so very long ago

Sweet alcohol, that beast,

Brought warmth and sweetness to our lives,

But then the price increased.

And so cocaine and morphine

Berliners now select.

Let lightning flashes rage outside

We snort and we inject! . . .

At dinner in the restaurant

The waiter brings the tin

Of coke for us to feast upon—

Forget whisky and gin!

Let drowsy morphine take its

Subcutaneous effect

Upon our nervous system—

We snort and we inject!

These medications aren’t allowed,

Of course, they’re quite forbidden.

But even such illicit treats

Are very seldom hidden.

Euphoria awaits us

And though, as we suspect,

Our foes can’t wait to shoot us down,

We snort and we inject!

And if we snort ourselves to death

Or into the asylum,

Our days are going downhill fast—

How better to beguile ’em?

Europe’s a madhouse anyway,

No need for genuflecting;

The only way to Paradise

Is snorting and injecting!¹⁴

In 1928 in Berlin alone 160 pounds of morphine and heroin were sold quite legally by prescription over the pharmacist’s counter.¹⁵ Anyone who could afford it took cocaine, the ultimate weapon for intensifying the moment. Coke spread like wildfire and symbolized the extravagance of the age. On the other hand, it was viewed as a degenerate poison, and disapproved of by both Communists and Nazis, who were fighting for power in the streets. There was violent opposition to the free-and-easy zeitgeist: German nationalists railed against moral decay and similar attacks were heard from the conservatives. Though Berlin’s new status as a cultural metropolis was accepted with pride, the bourgeoisie, which was losing status in the 1920s, showed its insecurity through its radical condemnation of mass pleasure culture, decried as decadently Western.

Worst of all, the National Socialists agitated against the pharmacological quest for salvation of the Weimar period. Their brazen rejection of the parliamentary system, of democracy, as well as of the urban culture of a society that was opening up to the world, was expressed through tub-thumping slogans directed against the degenerate state of the hated Jewish Republic.

The Nazis had their own recipe for healing the people: they promised ideological salvation. For them there could be only one legitimate form of inebriation: the swastika. National Socialism strove for a transcendental state of being as well; the Nazi world of illusions into which the Germans were to be enticed often used techniques of intoxication. World-historical decisions, according to Hitler’s inflammatory text Mein Kampf, had to be brought about in states of euphoric enthusiasm or hysteria. So the Nazi Party (NSDAP) distinguished itself on one hand with populist arguments and on the other with torch parades, flag consecrations, rapturous announcements, and public speeches aimed at achieving a state of collective ecstasy. These were supplemented with the violent frenzies of the Brownshirts (SA) during the early Kampfzeit, or period of struggle, often fueled by the abuse of alcohol.* Realpolitik tended to be dismissed as unheroic cattle trading: the idea was to replace politics with a state of social intoxication.¹⁶ If the Weimar Republic can be seen in psychohistorical terms as a repressed society, its supposed antagonists, the National Socialists, were at the head of that trend. They hated drugs because they wanted to be like a drug themselves.

Switching Power Means Switching Substances

. . . while the abstinent Führer was silent.

—Günter Grass¹⁷

During the Weimar period Hitler’s inner circle had already managed to establish an image of him as a man working tirelessly, putting his life completely at the service of his people. A picture was created of an unassailable leader-figure, entirely devoted to the Herculean task of gaining control of Germany’s social contradictions and problems, and to ironing out the negative consequences of the lost world war. One of Hitler’s allies reported in 1930: 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.

We teetotalers have—let it be mentioned in passing—a particular reason to be grateful to our Führer, if we bear in mind what a model his personal lifestyle and his position on intoxicants can be for everyone, reads an announcement from an abstinence association.¹⁹ The Reich Chancellor: ostensibly a pure person, remote from all worldly pleasures, entirely without a private life. An existence apparently informed by self-denial and long-lasting self-sacrifice, a model for an entirely healthy existence. The myth of Hitler as an anti-drug teetotaler who made his own needs secondary was an essential part of Nazi ideology and was presented again and again by the mass media. A myth was created that established itself in the public imagination but also among critical minds of the period, and still resonates today. This is a myth that demands to be deconstructed.

Following their seizure of power on January 30, 1933, the National Socialists suffocated the eccentric pleasure-seeking culture of the Weimar Republic. Drugs were made taboo, as they made it possible to experience unrealities other than the ones promulgated by the National Socialists. Seductive poisons²⁰ had no place in a system in which only the Führer was supposed to do the seducing. 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 Further measures ensured that doctors who consumed drugs would be forbidden to work for up to five years. Medical confidentiality was considered breakable when it came to detecting consumers of illegal substances. The chairman of the Berlin Medical Council decreed that every doctor had to file a drug report when a patient was prescribed narcotics for longer than three weeks, because public security is endangered by chronic alkaloid abuse in almost every case.²³ If a report to that effect came in, two experts examined the patient in question. If they found that hereditary factors were satisfactory, immediate compulsory withdrawal was imposed. Although in the Weimar Republic slow or gradual withdrawal had been used, now addicts were to be subjected to the horrors of going cold turkey.²⁴ If assessment of the hereditary factors yielded a negative result, the judge could order confinement for an unspecified duration. Drug users soon ended up in concentration camps.²⁵

Your identity card at the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions could be a matter of life and death. You were defined by a number (as a dealer, prescription forger, Eukodal addict, artist, etc.) and a color (purple: Jew; red: held for drying out, etc.).

Every German was also ordered to convey observations about drug-addicted acquaintances and family members, so that corrective action can be taken immediately.²⁶ Filing systems were put in place in order to establish a thorough record, enabling the Nazis to use their war against drugs to feed into a surveillance state quite soon after they came to power. The dictatorship extended its so-called health leadership into every corner of the Reich: in every administrative district there was an anti-drug consortium. Doctors, pharmacists, social security authorities, and representatives of the law such as the army and the police were all involved, as well as members of the National Socialist People’s Welfare, establishing a full-blown anti-drug web. Its threads converged in the Reich Health Office in Berlin, in Principal Department II of the Reich Committee for the People’s Health. A duty of health was postulated, which would go hand in hand with the total containment of all demonstrable physical, social and mental damage that could be inflicted by alcohol and tobacco. Cigarette advertising was severely restricted, and drug prohibitions were put in place to block any remaining breaches of moral codes in our people.²⁷

In autumn 1935 a new Marital