Hitler Was on Drugs

Adolf Hitler the leader of the Nazi Party from 1933 to 1945, is known for bringing about WW11 and for his genocide of the Jewish people. Hitler, however, in the beginning at least, had a desire to become an artist; his paintings are rather good, and he was a practising vegetarian.

Mother Mary with the Holy Child Jesus Christ, 1913, Adolf Hitler

There are reports that Hitler became a vegetarian because of concerns for animal cruelty. Although he may have been inspired by other reasons too, it is hard to square the idea of Hitler as caring about the abuse of animals, with the murderous dictator that he became. A 1937 article in The New York Times, also noted that Hitler didn't drink or smoke and that he avoided any kind of meat.

Things changed. Hitler went from a person who would try to dissuade others from eating meat by telling them graphic accounts about how animals are killed, to a person who was addicted to drugs, such as amphetamine, barbiturates, opiates, and cocaine and injected animal hormones.

The German writer Norman Ohler reveals the astonishing tale of drug use by Hitler and the Third Reich and how the Nazi armies carried out the "Blitzkrieg" invasions of Poland and France while high on, Pervitin, which was basically crystal meth.

It was Hitler's personal physician, Dr Morell, who would inject Hitler with an opiate drug, which is very close to heroin (now called oxycodone), three times a day and prescribed him high-grade cocaine to be taken twice a day. But the drug producing factories were bombed and the drug supplies began to run out. Whether the drooling, stumbling and crazy acting Hitler was suffering from Parkinson’s disease or in withdrawal, or both, at the war's end, before his suicide, we cannot be certain.

And all this when we thought that the Nazi's couldn't get any more sinister and despicable.

Books To Read

Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, by Norman Ohler