Summary: Blitzed

The GIST

Blitzed by Norman Ohler is a gripping and deeply contested history of drugs in the Third Reich. It was published in 2015 and appeared in English as Drugs in Nazi Germany in the UK and Drugs in the Third Reich in the US. Ohler is a German novelist and screenwriter, and he came to the subject almost by accident. A Berlin DJ told him that drugs had been everywhere in Nazi Germany. Ohler planned a novel on the subject and went into the archives to find period detail. What he found in military records and in the personal papers of Theodor Morell, Hitler's personal physician, struck him so hard that he set fiction aside and wrote a work of history instead.

The result is a short, fast, bitingly ironic book with a provocative thesis: from the Reich's rise to its collapse, its citizens were high, its soldiers were high, and Hitler was high. Ohler sets the regime's public cult of purity against what he says was a hidden reality of stimulants and opiates. He links a pill called Pervitin to the stunning speed of the 1940 invasion of France. He also traces how injections from a society doctor helped keep a crumbling Führer locked in a fantasy of victory. Prominent historians Antony Beevor and Ian Kershaw welcomed it as a valuable addition to the scholarship. The historian Richard J. Evans called it crass and dangerously inaccurate. That argument is part of what makes the book worth knowing about.

The Big Ideas

From Weimar's Intoxication to the Nazi "Health Saint"

Ohler opens with the Germany that came before Hitler. In the 1920s, he argues, many Germans turned to artificial stimulants to cope with the trauma of the First World War. Germany had a reputation for both its nightlife and its pharmaceutical quality. Doctors prescribed morphine, aspirin and even heroin freely, sometimes to babies with coughs. Some party drugs were technically illegal, but the laws were rarely enforced.

The Nazis promised to sweep all this away. They cast themselves as clean-living and enforced the existing prohibition laws with new ferocity. Drug users were sent to concentration camps as early as 1933. Addicts faced up to two years' imprisonment or indefinite detention, and doctors could be barred from practice for up to five years. Drug use was treated as a public threat, so a patient's health information on the subject was no longer confidential. Officials kept records of users, and citizens were encouraged to report relatives who might be taking drugs. Ohler shows how this campaign fused with antisemitic propaganda, which portrayed Jews as drug users poisoning the German people.

At the top stood Hitler as a "health saint": a vegetarian teetotaller who supposedly would not even drink coffee for fear of letting poisons into his body. Ohler treats this myth of self-denial as central to Hitler's power. He also argues that Nazism itself worked like a drug. The regime promised collective ecstasy and euphoria to a wounded nation, and the rest of the book suggests that pharmaceuticals soon followed.

Pervitin, the "People's Drug"

The chemical turning point came in 1937. At a pharmaceutical factory near Berlin, the pharmacist Dr. Fritz Hauschild developed Pervitin, the first German methamphetamine. Each tablet held a small dose, about 3 mg. It gave users an artificial kick of energy, alertness, euphoria and heightened senses that could last more than twelve hours. Crucially, it was not seen as a dangerous narcotic. It reached the market around 1938 as a legal stimulant, closer to coffee than to cocaine.

Ohler describes how Pervitin was sold as a cure-all for everything from depression to "frigidity" in women. He argues that it became an ordinary household item, a kind of grocery-shelf staple, well before the war. His sharpest line ties the drug to the regime's own slogan: "'Germany, awake!' the Nazis had ordered. Methamphetamine made sure that the country stayed awake." In his telling, a "doping mentality" spread through the Reich, and "Pervitin allowed the individual to function in the dictatorship."

The irony runs through the book. A state that jailed addicts and called drugs a racial plague was quietly embracing one of the most powerful stimulants ever made, because it was useful.

Blitzkrieg on Speed

The heart of the military argument is the 1940 campaign in the West. By 1939 Pervitin was being handed out to army units as they swept through Poland. Ohler argues that commanders learned a lesson there: beating fatigue mattered as much as tactics and equipment.

The plan for France depended on that lesson. Germany's surprise strategy was to drive armoured columns through the dense Ardennes, a manoeuvre Winston Churchill later called the "sickle cut." Ohler argues that it was nearly impossible and only stood a chance if tank crews could keep driving day and night. The Wehrmacht ordered 35 million Pervitin tablets for the campaign. In Ohler's account, soldiers pushed through without sleep or rest, and their fear was dulled while their aggression and confidence rose. He goes so far as to call the drug crucial to Germany's victory.

Ohler also follows the drug's darker side inside the military establishment. He shows how a respected scientist at the Military Medical Academy downplayed concerns about the stimulant while secretly depending on it himself. The man knew its dangers better than anyone and still minimised them to himself and to others. Ohler sums him up with a characteristically dry verdict: "A classic case of an addicted dealer." Soldiers, meanwhile, became guinea pigs for compounds that had never been properly studied.

The Desperate Pharmacology of Defeat

As the war turned against Germany, the experiments grew more extreme and more criminal. Ohler describes D-IX, a late-war tablet combining oxycodone, cocaine and methamphetamine. It was tested on prisoners at a concentration camp who had been forced into a "shoe-walking unit." Their original job was to test the durability of shoe materials by marching all day under heavy packs, about 25 miles a day with a roughly 25-pound load, until the shoes fell apart. Dosed with stimulants, most prisoners collapsed. One record describes a man on 75 mg of cocaine covering about 60 miles "without fatigue," and his performance became the standard others were forced to meet. From this, Nazi planners concluded that soldiers might fight through the war's final battles on cocaine, including cocaine chewing gum.

The last chapter of this story involves Germany's mini-submarines, one- or two-man craft sent out on multi-day missions. Their crews were supplied with gum laced with cocaine and methamphetamine. These scenes show a regime that once preached bodily purity reduced to chemically propping up exhausted men in a hopeless cause.

Patient A: Hitler and Dr. Morell

The most sensational part of Blitzed is its portrait of Hitler's own drug use and the strange partnership behind it. Theodor Morell was a fashionable "injection doctor" to Berlin's wealthy, famous for vitamin and glucose cocktails that seemed to work wonders. He was introduced to Hitler when the dictator was suffering from severe digestive trouble. Hitler distrusted doctors, but Morell's injection of vitamins and probiotics brought fast relief, and he was made personal physician. From then on Hitler appeared in Morell's meticulous notebooks as "Patient A." Morell treated him more or less daily from 1936 until the end of the war.

Ohler shows how this relationship deepened into mutual dependence. Hitler feared illness and feared being unable to perform, and Morell's injections grew more frequent, more varied and at times experimental. By the last years of the war he was giving several injections a day to keep the declining leader looking capable. By 1944, Ohler argues, Hitler was hooked on a mix of cocaine and Eukodal, a powerful opiate. Ohler believes these drugs often hid behind entries Morell marked simply "X."

In Ohler's reading, this chemically induced confidence helped hold Hitler in a world of delusion while the war was being lost. It hardened his refusal to compromise, fed his contempt for generals who urged tactical withdrawals, and sustained his conviction that victory was still possible. Then Allied bombing destroyed pharmaceutical plants. By February 1945, Eukodal supplies were running out, and Ohler argues that Hitler went into withdrawal during his final months in the bunker.

Ohler is careful on one key point. Hitler's drug use began long after his racist worldview had formed, so the drugs did not create his ideology. In a brief passage Ohler states that the drug use did not impinge on his freedom to make decisions and that Hitler "was anything but insane." His claim is narrower. He argues that drugs helped keep Hitler functioning and deluded, and so helped prolong the war.

The Controversy

Any honest account of Blitzed has to include the fight it started. Richard J. Evans, a leading historian of the Third Reich, attacked the book in the Guardian on several fronts:

• The numbers. He argued that 35 million tablets spread across more than two million troops works out to only about fifteen per soldier for the whole campaign. Since supplies went mainly to tank crews, most soldiers probably took none.
• The generalisations. He called the idea that ordinary Germans, a nation of tens of millions, depended on drugs to function "wildly implausible."
• The "X" entries. Evans said Morell carefully recorded the opiates he gave Hitler, and that those occasions were few. He noted that Hitler openly scorned Hermann Göring's morphine addiction. He also pointed to earlier medical studies attributing Hitler's late tremors to Parkinsonism, not withdrawal. These include Henrik Eberle and Hans-Joachim Neumann's Was Hitler Ill? and work by Fritz Redlich, and Evans said Ohler doesn't engage with them.
• The moral risk. Evans warned that, despite Ohler's disclaimer, the book could be read as excusing both Hitler and the German people.

Evans also highlighted Ohler's remark, in the German edition, that "writing history is never just science, it's also always fiction."

Defenders answer that Blitzed is not an apology for anyone. They see it as an outsider's fresh angle on a heavily studied period. Even sympathetic readers grant that Ohler's claims about civilian use are hard to prove. Many still find his case for Pervitin's methodical military use, especially in 1940, convincing.

Putting It to Work

• Read propaganda against reality. The book's central irony is a regime that jailed addicts and posed as pure while running on pills. Public images, especially of leaders, can be the exact reverse of private practice.
• Notice how "performance" becomes a justification. Pervitin was welcomed because it was useful. Once a substance is framed as a tool for efficiency, its dangers get waved away, even by experts who know better, as the "addicted dealer" scientist shows.
• Watch the slide from treatment to dependence. The Hitler and Morell story shows how vitamin shots and quick fixes can escalate into multiple daily injections and mutual reliance between patient and provider.
• Remember who pays for experiments. The shoe-walking prisoners are a reminder that the costs of chasing chemical advantage fell first on the powerless.
• Read history critically. Use Blitzed as an exercise in weighing evidence. Ask what the documents actually show, how figures like 35 million tablets compare with the size of an army, and where vivid storytelling outruns the sources. Reading Evans's review alongside the book is a good start.

Who Should Read It

Blitzed suits readers of World War II history who want a startling, less familiar angle. It also suits anyone curious about the history of drugs and addiction, and readers who enjoy narrative nonfiction with a novelist's pace and dark irony. It is short, vivid and hard to put down. It works best if you read it as a bold, debated argument rather than the final word, ideally alongside its critics.

This has been a summary of Blitzed by Norman Ohler, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.