Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
March 2017
On Sale: March 7, 2017
304 pages ISBN: 1328663795 EAN: 9781328663795 Kindle: B01IAS9G94 Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
A fast-paced narrative that discovers a surprising perspective on World War II: Nazi Germanyβs all-consuming reliance on drugs
The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, meth amphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact, troops regularly took rations of a form of crystal methβthe elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to explain certain German military victories.
Drugs seeped all the way up to the Nazi high command and, especially, to Hitler himself. Over the course of the war, Hitler became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugsβincluding a form of heroinβadministered by his personal doctor. While drugs alone cannot explain the Nazisβ toxic racial theories or the events of World War II, Ohlerβs investigation makes an overwhelming case that, if drugs are not taken into account, our understanding of the Third Reich is fundamentally incomplete.
Carefully researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws surprising light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.
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