Important book excerpts from Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler.
The Germans were world leaders in another class of substances as well: the companies of 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. 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 and 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,” the so-called cocaine convention and opiates convention. Merck was the business leader in both cases. 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 market dealer.
A drug manufactured by Merck in Darmstadt, it came on to the market as a painkiller and cough medicine in 1917, and was so popular in the 1920s that the word “Eukodalism” was coined. 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….Morell debated with himself whether to use this hard drug. The moment of departure for the important meeting with Mussolini was edging closer. Patient A seemed apathetic, was hunched over, and talking to no one. Morell knew that Eukodal would pep the Fuhrer up straight away and remove the violent spastic constipation that probably had a psychological cause. But he saw the possibility that after trying it just once, the addiction-prone dictator would be very unwilling to give up this supposed nectar of the gods. (“Gods” referring to the directors of IG Farben who called themselves “The Council of the Gods.”)
After only two or three weeks of regular use, Eukodal can make a person physically dependent on it. On the other hand, world history seemed at stake. The chance that Hitler might not be up to a state meeting of the Axis powers, or that he might even cancel it, was quite unthinkable. Morell decided to take the risk. He injected the new drug subcutaneously—under the skin. It was a momentous decision.
The immediate transformation of Patient A in the minutes and hours after application was so striking that no one in this entourage could fail to spot it—even if, of course, no one learned the cause for his abrupt change of mood….
A U.S. Secret Service report written after the war and all eyewitness accounts confirm that Hitler was hyped up at his meeting with Mussolini in the Villa Gaggia near Feltre in the Veneto.
Taking Eukodal
“Eukodal is like a combination of junk and C [cocaine]*. Trust the Germans to concoct some truly awful shit.” – William Burroughs.
* Heroin is the pharmacological cousin of oxycodone.“The path taken by the authorities in their so-called Rauschgiftbekampfung, or “war on drugs,” lay less in an intensification of the opium law, which was simply adopted from the Weimar Republic, 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 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…. the anti-drug policy served as a vehicle for the exclusion and suppression, even the destruction, of marginal groups and minorities….
Anti-Drug Policy as Anti-Semitic Policy
The Jew has used the most refined means to poison the mind and soul of German people, and to guide thought along an un-German path which inevitably led to doom… Removing this Jewish infection, which could lead to a national disease and to the death of the people, is also a duty of our health leadership. – Medical Journal for Lower Saxony, 1939
From the onset, the racist terminology of National Socialism was informed by linguistic images of infection and poison, by the typos of toxicity. Jews were equated with bacilli or pathogens. They were described as foreign bodies and said to be poisoning the Reich, making the healthy social organism ill, so they had to be eradicated or exterminated. Hitler said: “There is no longer any compromise, because such a thing would be poison to us.”
In fact the poison lay in the language itself, which dehumanized the Jews as a preliminary state to their subsequent murder…
Every German was also ordered to “convey observations about drug-addicted acquaintances and family members, so that corrective action can be taken immediately. Filing systems were put in place in order to establish a thorough record, enabling 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….
The Law for Prevention of Hereditary 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.”
Worse to follow. Under the guise of “euthanasia,” those considered “criminally insane,” a category including drug users, would be murdered in the first years of the war. The precise number of those affected is impossible to reconstruct. Of crucial importance to their fate was the assessment on their file card: a plus (+) meant a lethal injection or the gas chamber, a minus (-) meant a deferral. If an overdose of morphine was used for killing it came from the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions, which had emerged from the Berlin Drug Squad in 1936 as the first Reich-wide drug police authority….
The First World War had made it clear that Germany had too few natural raw materials for armed conflict with its neighbors and so artificial ones had to be created: synthetic gasoline produced from coal as well as “Buna” (synthetic rubber that evolved into plastics) were at the center of the development of IG Farben, which had gone on growing in power within the Nazi state and had consolidated its position as a global player in the chemical industry. Its board described itself as the “Council of the Gods.” …. While the Nazis’ war on drugs brought down the consumption of heroin and cocaine, the development of synthetic stimulants was accelerated and led to a new blossoming within the pharmaceutical companies. The workforces of Merck in Darmstadt, Bayer in the Rhineland, and Boehringer in Ingelheim grew and wages rose.
(a more accurate characterization of Nazism is described by an American correspondent who was stationed in Nazi Germany until December 7, 1941. “In actual fact, Nazism is the most reactionary and vicious form of capitalism that has ever existed, and Hitler has destroyed systematically every element in his state which was, in any degree, revolutionary.” – The Last Train From Berlin by Howard K Smith, 1942)
Expansion was also on the cards at Temmler. The head pharmacist, Dr. Fritz Hauschild, had heard how the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 had been influenced by a substance called Benzedrine, a successful amphetamine from the United States—and still a legal doping product at the time. At Temmler all development resources were now pooled in that direction, since the company was convinced that a performance-enhancing substance was a perfect fit for an age in which everyone was talking about new beginnings. Hauschild turned to the work of Japanese researchers who had synthesized an extremely stimulating molecule called N-methylamphetamine as early as 1887, and crystallized it in its pure form in 1919. The drug was developed out of ephedrine, a natural substance that clears the bronchia, stimulates the heart, and inhibits the appetite. In the folk medicine of Europe, America, and Asia, ephedrine had been known for a long time as a component of the ephedra plant and was also used in so-called Mormon tea.
Hauschild perfected the product and in autumn 1937 he found a new method of synthesizing methamphetamine. A short time later, on October 31, 1937, the Temper factory patented the first German methylamphetamine, which put American Benzedrine very much in its shadow. Its trademark: Pervitin.
The molecular structure of this pioneering material is similar to adrenalin, and so it passes easily through the blood and into the brain. Unlike adrenalin, however, methamphetamine does not cause sudden rises in blood pressure but works more gently and lasts longer. The effect occurs because the drug tickles out the messenger substances dopamine and noradrenaline from the nerve cells of the brain and pours them into synaptic gaps. This puts the brain cells in excited communication with each other and a kind of chain reaction takes place. A neuronal firework explodes and a biochemical machine gun starts firing an uninterrupted sequences of thoughts. All of a sudden the consumer feels wide awake and experiences an increase in energy; the senses are intensified to the extreme. One feels livelier, energized to the tips of one’s hair and fingers. Self-confidence rises, there is a subjectively perceived acceleration of thought processes, a sense of euphoria, and a feeling of lightness and freshness. A state of emergency is experienced, as when one faces a sudden danger, a time when an organism mobilizes all its forces—even though there is no danger. An artificial kick.
Methamphetamine does not only pour neurotransmitters into the gaps but also blocks their reabsorption. For this reason the effects are long-lasting, often more than twelve hours, a length of time that damage the nerve cells at higher doses as the intercellular energy supply is drawn into sympathy. The neurons run hot and brain chatter can’t be turned off. Nerve cells give up and die off irrevocably. This can lead to a deterioration in the ability to find words, in attention and concentration, and a general depletion in the brain where memory, emotions, and the reward system are concerned. The lack of stimulation once the effect fades away is a sign of empty hormone stores, which have to fill back up again over the course of several weeks. In the meantime fewer neurotransmitters are available: the consequences can include a lack of drive, depression, joylessness, and cognitive disturbances.
Although such possible side-effects have been investigated by now, further in-depth research was put on the back burner at the time because Temmler was overeager, bursting with pride over their new product. The company smelled a roaring trade and contacted one of the most successful PR agencies in Berlin to commission an advertising campaign the likes of which Germany had never seen. Their publicity model was the marketing strategy for another rather stimulating product, produced by none other than the Coca-Cola Company, which—with the catchy slogan “ice-cold”—had enjoyed enormous success with their brown brew.
In the first weeks and months of 1938, when Pervitin was beginning to go from strength to strength, posters appeared on advertising pillars, the outsides of trams, and on the buses and local and underground trains of Berlin….
Pervatin spread among all social circles. Furniture packers packed more furniture, firemen put out fires faster, barbers cut hair more quickly, night watchmen stopped sleeping on the job, train drivers drove trains without a word of complaint, and long distance truck-drivers bombed down freshly constructed autobahns completing their trips in record time. Post-lunchtime taps became a thing of the past. Doctors treated themselves with it, businessmen who had to rush from meeting to meeting pepped themselves up. Party members did the same, and so did the SS. Stress declined, sexual appetite increased, and motivation was artificially enhanced….
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 confectionary. The recommendation was to eat between three and nine of these, with the indication that they were, unlike caffeine, perfectly safe. The housework would be done in a trice, and this unusual tidbit would even melt the pounds away, since Pervitin, a slimming agent, also curbed appetite…
Another part of the highly effective campaign was an essay by Dr. Fritz Hauschild in the respected Klinische Wochenschrift. In this, and again in the same journal three weeks later, under the headline “New Specialties,” he reported on the extremely stimulating effect of Pervitin, its ability to increase energy and boost both self-confidence and decisiveness. Associative thought became much faster and physical work easier. Its multiple applications in internal and general medicine, surgery, and psychiatry seemed to give it a wide field of indication, and at the same time to stimulate scientific research.
Universities all over the Reich pounced on these investigations….
Pervitin was a perfect match for the spirit of the age. When the medication conquered the market, there actually seemed to be a reason for thinking that all forms of depression had come to an end. At least those Germans who profited from the Nazis’ tyranny thought so, and that was most of them… Two miracles had occurred, one economic and one military, covering the two most urgent problems for Germany in the 1930s. When the Nazis took power there were 6 million unemployed and only 100,000 poorly armed soldiers; by 1936, in spite of a continuing global crisis, almost full employment had been achieved, and the Wehrmacht was one of the most powerful military forces in Europe….
Hitler was never content. Boundries had to be crossed in every respect and at all times, and state borders in particular….
Dr. Morell, the personal physician, was even directly involved with the defeat of Czechoslovakia. On the night of March 15, 1939, the Czech president, Emil Hacha, in poor health, attended a more or less compulsory state visit to the new Reich Chancellery. When he refused to sign a paper that the Germans laid in front of him, a de facto capitulation of his troops to the Wehrmacht, he suffered a heart attack and could no longer be spoken to. Hitler urgently summoned Morell, who hurried along with his case and his syringes and injected the unconscious foreign guest with such a stimulating medication that Hacha rose again within seconds, as if from the dead. He signed the piece of paper that sealed the temporary end of his state. The very next morning Hitler invaded Prague without a fight. During the following years, Hacha sat at the powerless head of the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia,” to which parts of his country had been reduced, remaining Morell’s loyal patient. In that respect, pharmacology worked as a way of continuing politics by other means….
Pervitin made it easier for the individual to have access to the great excitement and “self-treatment” that had supposedly gripped the German people. The powerful stuff became a sort of grocery item, which even its manufacturer didn’t want to keep stuck just in the medical section. “Germany, awake!” the Nazis had ordered. Methamphetamine made sure that the country stayed awake. Spurred on by a disastrous cocktail of propaganda and pharmaceutical substances, people became more and more dependent. – Excerpt from Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler. Portions taken from Chapter 1 (Methamphetamine, the Volksdroge (1933 – 1938)
Performance pharmaceuticals like Ritalin and other amphetamine derivatives are in widespread use today here in the States…
A little justice did come to Hitler for his deal with the “Council of the Gods” and his cruelty towards his fellow human beings. Getting pumped daily with synthetic vitamins called “Vitamultin,” synthetic hormones, meth, cocaine, oxycodone (Germans called it Eukodal, the pharmacological cousin of heroin), and other IG Farben products destroyed his health. Hitler was their guinea pig as well and look at the results.
“The generals walked between between rows of black-clad SS men toward a “bent figure with a pale, sunken face, collapsed on his chair, with trembling hands, hiding his left, violently twitching arm to the best of his ability,” as General Hasso von Manteuffel described him. The frightening, drooling wreck’s name was Adolf Hitler…
The sight of Hitler now only caused revulsion or at best pity. Everyone circled him, trying in vein to make him feel good. Still his condition kept deteriorating. In the past all his loyal followers had been nervous at the first cough or sniffle; now his tooth enamel was decaying, his gums were drying up, and his ruinous teeth were falling out. His brain, irreversibly damaged by neurotoxins, was no longer receiving stimulation: all the receptors that the transmitters could have filled were switched off… Morell wanted to try bloodletting to bring patient some kind of relief, but because of the… hormone injections his blood had become as thick as jelly and clotted immediately… Patient A wheezed pitifully as he endured his withdrawal. He trembled with anxiety from head to toe, he chewed the air, he lost weight, his kidneys were failing, and so too was his circulation.” – Chapter 4: The Wonder Drug (1944 – 1945)
“When Hasselbach protested that any medical or even civil court could at least accuse Morell of negligent bodily harm, Himmler turned abrasive: “Professor, you are forgetting that as interior minister I am also head of the supreme health authority. And I don’t want Morell to be brought to trial. The head of the SS dismissed Giesing’s objection that Hitler was only the head of the state in the world who took between 120 and 150 tablets and received between 8 and 10 injections every week.” page 172….
“If he folded his arms in front of his chest, his whole torso was set in motion. Morell recommended baths and rest. Hitler asked “if he couldn’t be given injections for it.” But injections wouldn’t alleviate the problem. Quite the contrary. In search of the cause for his trembling limbs and stooped posture, medical historians have diagnosed the dictator as suffering from arteriosclerotic Parkinson’s disease, a shaking palsy probably provoked by an autoimmune disorder. With Parkinson’s, the body’s neurons are mistaken for foreign bodies by the immune system and attacked–the possible result of his having consumed outrageous preparations made of animal hormones. The consequences are that dopamine-producing nerve cells wither and there is a lack of nourishment to the essential nuclei of the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for learning and control processes. In his notes Morell also expressed a suspicion of Parkinson’s, although not until April 1945. There is no way of telling whether the diagnosis is accurate. Another, perhaps supplementary explanation is that Hitler’s notorious shaking was the direct effect of his unchecked drug consumption.” – page 178
“For years Morell painstakingly recorded medications he used to keep his patient constantly on the go. Meticulous records were required in case anything happened to Hitler, in which case Morell would have had to hand over his detailed reports to the Gestapo. This gave rise to an immense bundle of papers unique in medical history., and overflowing with details. Anyone with the desire to decipher the collection has to visit several sites to put together the various fragments of the doctor’s estate. A chunk is in the Federal Archive in Koblenz, another part in the Institute of Contemporary History in Munich–and a third, significant, portion in Washington, DC. (National Archives) Page 105
Merck continued controlling their cocaine trade as well
“This was pure, first-class stuff, the famous Merck cocaine, delivered from Berlin by courier train as an extremely psychoactive 10 percent “cocaine solution” in a sealed bottle, responsibly signed for by the SS pharmacist in line with the regulations of the Reich Security Main Office. In the Wolf’s Lair Hitler’s valet kept it locked up under his personal care.” – Blitzed page 159
The Council of The Gods have never had any problem utilizing children in their wars to secure their resources for production or to destroy nations preventing their complete control of their domestic and foreign policies. Nations who refuse the Council of The Gods’ military industrial/agricultural/healthcare/banking/media model are systematically destroyed and they have perfected their strategies.
“On December 7, 1944, Donitz stood in Dresden in front of five thousand members of Hitler Youth. Most in the crowd were only teenagers, fifteen or sixteen, and there were even ten-to twelve-year-olds. … Countless members of the Hitler Youth signed up and over the next few days were driven in trucks with blacked-out license plates to the ports where they were to be deployed…
Obviously these young men didn’t know what awaited them when they pulled on their caps, each with a little gold sawfish stitched on to it, and clambered aboard the hastily riveted-together torpedo vehicles and received their just-as-hastily-pressed pills or cocaine-spiked chewing gum. Soon most of them would drown wretchedly, like kittens in a sack.”
The Origins of CIA’s MK Ultra Program
Brainwashing
… Dr. Kurt Plotner of Leipzig University… In Dachau concentration camp, as department head of the Institute of Practical Military Research, he had tested “chemical methods for the aborgation of the will. They were based on experiments undertaken in the Auschwitz extermination camp by Dr. Bruno Weber, the director of the Hygienic Bacteriological Research Center in Auschwitz, with barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and mescaline. These experiments were inspired by the Gestapo, where there was frustration at their limited success in gaining information from imprisoned Polish resistance fighters. Unlike Sachsenhausen, which was chiefly concerned with endurance tests, Auschwitz was focused on brainwashing and consciousness control.
Plotner continued this barbaric series of tests in Dachau, and gave unwitting prisoners mescaline….
Like his predecessor, Dr. Weber in Auschwitz, he wanted to find out whether better results could be achieved through brainwashing in interrogations… For a test group of thirty people the perverted SS shaman secretly dissolved mescaline in coffee or alcohol and began an innocuous conversation with the unsuspecting test subjects. The alkaloid had passed into the bloodstream via the mucous membrane of the stomach. The experimental subjects who were “opened up” by the drug were now informed that in this special zone where the interrogation was taking place Plotner had direct access to their soul… Emotions of hatred and revenge could always be brought to light….
Plotner could not finish his series of tests. The Americans liberated the camp and confiscated his documents. It was a treasure trove for the U.S. Secret Service. Under the leadership of Charles Savage and Harvard medic Henry Beecher, the experiments were continued under the code name Project Chatter and other rubies at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Washington, D.C. These were used as a matrix for extensive series of investigations that spanned the whole of the 1950s, involved thousands of human guinea pigs, and whose results would be used by the Americans to try to unmask Soviet spies in the Korean War. Like the Germans, they were concerned with “becoming precisely acquainted with the way in which these drugs took effect, as a practical instrument for their possible use on (civilian and military) prisoners. 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. The secret U.S. program MK Ultra, based on Plotner’s initial work, took “Mind Kontrol” as its goal—the spelling with a “K” could be read as a nod to its German origins.
Plotner himself was never punished for his crimes but lived in hiding in north Germany as “Herr Schmitt” until 1952. In the soccer World Cup year of 1954 the medical faculty of Freiburg University appointed him as an extraordinary professor.” – Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler
Chapter 4: The Wonder Drug (1944 – 1945) Pages 210 – 211
“They planned to take the Russian capital in a decisive battle and win the war by that means. But the freshly cured Hitler had a different strategy. He divided the troops up to conquer Leningrad in the North, cutting the Soviet Union off from the Baltic, while at the same time Army Group was to advance via the Ukraine into the Caucasus to take the oil resources that were of crucial importance to the war economy.” – Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich (Chapter 3 – High Hitler: Patient A and His Personal Physician (1941 – 1944) page 113
“Since its occupation by the Wehrmacht had imposed death and destruction on the city: two thirds of the buildings had been destroyed and the number of inhabitants reduced from 1.5 million to 190,000. Soviet citizens had been thrown from their balconies and hanged in hallways and the doorways of banks and hotels… Many inhabitants of Kharkov were transported to Germany as forced laborers, and when an attempt was made by the Red Army to liberate the city in May 1942, some 240,000 Soviet soldiers were imprisoned. None of that mattered to Morell in the slightest. On the contrary, the desperate situation in Kharkov seemed to inspire him: “It’s an unusually interesting task, in a city that has changed possession several times, to take anything that can possibly be taken from it for the war economy,” he wrote to Koch. When he learned that there was an institute of endrocrinology in Kharkov that specialized in the treatment of internal secretory glands, Morell turned to Koch again: “As the institute which belonged to the Russian state is pointless without a supply of glands, and you have been so kind as to allow these bodily organs to me when slaughter takes place, I should like to ask permission to buy this institute and to start the processing of the glands and the manufacture of the materials that are so urgently needed in Germany….
The answer came the same day by telephone: Morell could have his institute; it was “transferred” to him. The instruction was now issued to all eighteen abattoirs in the Ukraine: “According to the decree of the Reich Commissar of the Ukraine organs accruing in the abbatoirs… are to be delivered exclusively and continuously to the Ukraine. Pharma-Works. They should be freed of fat, frozen two hours after slaughter to -15 degrees or brought to the lowest possible temperature…. nothing now stood in the way of development and mass production of hormone preparations… If his opposite number complied, he was rewarded with the prospect of being presented to Hitler–or at least given a box of silver-wrapped high-class Vitamultin bars. Morell always had his way…” Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler (Portions from Chapter 3 – High Hitler: Patient A And His Personal Physician)
Sachenhausen concentration camp, twenty-one miles north of Berlin on the edge of the small town of Oranienburg, was opened in 1936, the year of the Olympic Games…
A single machine gun could keep all the prisoners covered. Altogether over 200,000 people from around forty nations would be confined here until just before the end of the war: political opponents, Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the citizens of occupied European countries, “anti-social elements,” alcoholics, drug addicts. Tens of thousands of detainees perished from hunger, illness, forced labor, mistreatment, and medical experiments. In the autumn of 1941 an estimated thirteen to eighteen thousand Soviet prisoners of war were executed with a shot to the back of the neck in a special facility that was designed to standardize the killing process.
One other perfidious specialty of the camp was the so-called shoe-walking unit. Prisoners had to test the resilience of the soles for the German shoe industry on uninterrupted forced marches…
The German economics ministry paid for the maintenance costs of the shoe-walking track. The Reich economics office controlled the material tests centrally, and only allowed leather substitute materials to of into production once they had been successfully tested in Sachenhausen. It paid the camp six reichmarks per day, per prisoner. In the case of rubber soles, after several improvements they could withstand 1,800 miles, or a seventy-five-day march. Still most materials were unusable long before that. Leather fabrics barely survived 600 miles, but a sole made of Igelit, a form of soft PVC, survived for over 1,200 miles. All of this was painstakingly noted down. According to estimates, up to twenty people dies on the track every day. The SS called this “extermination through labor.” – Blitzed: Drugs during the Third Reich by Norman Ohler (Portions from pages 199 – 201)
Our Capitalist Council of Gods continue their reign and destruction….
The Silent War 