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Lex Fridman Podcast
#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA
04:31:21
Norman Ohler is a historian and author of "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich," a book that investigates the role of psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, in the military history of World War II.
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- [00:00]
A
The following is a conversation with Norman Oehler, author of Drugs in the Third Reich, a book that investigates what role psychoactive drugs, particularly stimulants such as methamphetamine, played in the military history of World War II. It is a book that two legendary historians, Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beaver, give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as as very well researched, serious piece of scholarship, and Antony Beaver describes it as remarkable work of research. And it is indeed a remarkable work of research. Norman went deep into the archives, using primary sources to uncover a perspective on Hitler and the Third Reich that has before this been mostly ignored by historians. He also wrote Tripped Nazi Germany, the CIA and and the dawn of the Psychedelic Age. And he's now working on a new book with the possible title of Stoned Sapiens. Great title. Looking at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description or@lexfreedman.com Sponsors it is in fact the best way to support this podcast. We got Uplift Desktop for beautiful standing desks, Fin for AI agents, Shopify for selling stuff online, Element for electrolytes, and Hampton for connecting with CEOs. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. I try to make them interesting, but if you skip, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. To get in touch with me for whatever reason, go to lexfreedman.com contact all right, let's go. This episode is brought to you by Uplift Desk, my go to for all office and podcast studio furniture. This very podcast, ladies and gentlemen, had three desks, uplift desks involved, and a fourth desk in the same room. So that desk you see, sort of me place my hands on that wooden color desk. That's Uplift desks. And I've had those for many years and I've enjoyed them for many years, long, long, long before they became a sponsor. I'm a huge supporter of what they do. I'm a huge supporter of the product they create. I spend so much time behind a desk that really, it might be silly to say, but things like a desk or a Kinesis keyboard are sources of little and big moments of happiness throughout the day. And the days add up to weeks and the weeks add up to years until a lifetime. And so the amount of happiness that Uplift Desk has brought me is a lot immeasurable, really. I'm sitting behind an uplift desk now as I'm recording this. Anyway they have a huge number of combinations and sizes and colors and all that kind of stuff that you can pick. If you go to upliftdesk.com lex and use code Lex to get four free accessories, free same day shipping, free returns, a 15 year warranty and an extra discount off your entire order. That's U P L I F t d e s-k.com lex this episode is also brought to you by Fin, an amazing world class AI agent for customer service. It's trusted by over 5,000 customer service leaders including Anthropic and Synthesia. You know when an AI company trusts another AI company, they're good. Fin is powered by their Fin AI engine which continuously improves based on the interactions during the Analyze train, test, deploy loop and so your customer service keeps getting smarter and smarter and smarter. It's built to handle complex multi step queries like returns, exchanges, disputes, all that kind of stuff. If you haven't tried it, you absolutely must go to Fin AI Lex to learn more about transforming your customer service and scaling your support team. That's Fin AI Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Shopify, a company that brings a smile to my face every time I bring it up. In part because of the incredible conversation I had with the legendary dhh. He is a person, he is a programmer, he's an entrepreneur. As a philosopher, as a human inspires me and he and Shopify work closely together. Obviously we talked a lot about Toby, the CEO of Shopify. It's an incredible company. The engineering behind the company is incredible. And if you haven't listened to that episode and you're at all interested in programming, you should. Because if you're not interested in Ruby on Rails, first of all, it's very likely that you will be by the end of the episode, but you at least will get a chance to listen to a human being that sees the beauty in the programs he creates. So to know that a little bit of that love went behind the engineering of Shopify is really great to know. Anyway, it is also a company and it is also a company that helps companies sell stuff online. So you should sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com lux that's all lowercase. Go to shopify.com lex to take your business to the next level today. This episode is also brought to you by Element, my daily zero sugar and delicious electrolyte mix that I'm currently drinking as I dredge the prospects. After I'm done speaking these words, I'll be doing a very long run in the Texas heat. And that's why I'm drinking electrolytes, because I'm not bringing any water or electrolytes with me on the run. And it's very possibly going to be 8, 10, 12 plus miles if I have the guts. It will be over 12 miles. Let us see. But one thing is for certain, if I don't get electrolytes into my system beforehand and afterwards, I'm just not going to feel good. Cold water with some watermelon salt flavor. It is a big component of happiness for me on a daily basis. Get a free 8 count sample pack for free with any purchase. Try it@drinkelement.com Luxe this episode is also brought to you by Hampton A private community for High growth founders and CEOs. You can talk to LLMs all day. You can read clickbait articles about what it's like to start a business, to grow a business. But so much of that information, quite honestly from the bottom of my heart, is bullshit. You have to talk to other leaders. You have to talk to other CEOs that have done it, that are doing it. They're in the middle of the battle. Anytime I talk to somebody like Jason Calacanis, who I'm a big fan of, and he's here in Austin now, aside of course from the all in podcast that I'm also a fan of, he's the host of this Week in Startups that I recommend you listen to. The reason I bring that up is because he has seen and he has helped so many people in that battle of creating a business, of growing a business. And it's so fun to talk to him because he has a lot of wisdom about the different ways to do it. And that's what I'm trying to get at is you need to talk to the people that have done it, that are not 5, 10, 20 years ago, but are doing it now. And that's what Hampton is good at. It connects you with other people that are in the midst of that battle and you could have candid conversations with them. They have groups forming in New York City, Austin, San Francisco, L.A. miami, Denver and other top cities nationwide. Quit reading the bullshit online and go talk to actual founders, actual people that are building high growth companies. Find your group@joinhampton.com Lex that's joinhampton.com Lex. This is the Lex Friedman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description or@lexfreedman.com sponsors and consider subscribing, commenting and sharing the podcast with folks who might find it interesting. And now, dear friends, here's Norman Older. Tell me the origin story of meth, Methamphetamine and pervitin is brand name drug version in the context of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Let's start there.
- [09:12]
B
I think you're right to ask about the context, because without the context, it's not really understandable. So what was the situation in the twenties? The Nazi movement basically started, and it started in Bavarian beer halls. So alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy that didn't drink was Hitler. He was a teetotaler, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich. So alcohol and National Socialism are very closely connected. At the same time in the twenties in Berlin, there was a completely different thing going on. People were taking all kinds of drugs. This had to do actually with the defeat of Germany in the First World War. I mean, the context is a big context. The Versailles Treaty had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I. The Versailles Treaty was written basically by the western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. And I'm certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Versailles Treaty treated Germany somewhat unfair. I mean, it laid all the blame on. On Germany. And I mean, a war is a very complex thing. And the First World War, to examine how it actually started is a very complex story and there's many factors to it. But the Versailles said it was Germany's fault. And then Germany had to do all these payments to the Allies. It couldn't create a new economy, it couldn't have a new army. So it was. The economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap and the people were using also substances that were very cheap in huge quantities. So while in Bavaria, they were drinking alcohol. And alcohol in the brain stimulates behavior, group behavior, us against them. You can actually examine this as a neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. While in Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphium. There was cocaine, there was mescaline, there was ether. So people were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset. It was all, you know, you didn't behave in a way that some kind of authority would like you to behave in, because the authority had just lost the First World War and there was no real authority In Berlin, people were doing whatever they wanted to do and they were intoxicating themselves and in the way they wanted to do it. So the population, in a way if you just look at Munich and Berlin was growing apart. Like, there were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, then there were these weird, diverse LGBTQ whatever scene in Berlin, like actresses sniffing Ethan in the morning and then making crazy moves.
- [12:20]
A
Could you speak to the nature, the motivation of the drug use? And in Berlin at the time, was it a rebellion? Was it a way to deal with the difficult economic depression? Was it just the natural thing that young people do to explore themselves, to understand the world, to develop their culture? Like, what do we understand about drug use there?
- [12:43]
B
All of these factors come together, but it was the first time in modern history, in Germany, at least, that there was no emperor. Like before that, Kaiser Wilhelm. Everything was very strict, you know, you couldn't go crazy, you know, as a young person, you couldn't be a young person. But now in the Weimar Republic, in the twenties, you could. No one stopped you. So people went crazy. Like, that's what made Berlin into the city that it still somehow is. And maybe later we talk about contemporary Berlin, it kind of. It still has that vibe, you know, that's why people still come to Berlin. Drugs are cheap. You can move however you want. There's no authority. So that created a rift between the Nazis in Munich, and they always hated Berlin and what was going on in Berlin. So, for example, Goebbels, the later propaganda minister, he called the situation in Berlin die Verhaster as faltrealite, the hated asphalt reality of Berlin. He hated that. And when the Nazis then were able to take power in 1933, one of the first things they did was to really prosecute people who are taking drugs because they wanted to, you know, bring everyone back into the fold. And I think that's. You asked what was the reason for people taking so many drugs. They were accessible, they were cheap. But I think the most important thing is that they. They let you find yourself, maybe, or lose yourself, you know, also possible.
- [14:11]
A
You know, can we also take a tangent there? Because you have a connection to this place, Berlin and this part of the world. Can you just briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even deeper the personal aspect of this? Because you understand the music of the people, the land, its history. There's something you can only really understand if you've been there and you have taken it in. And we'll return to this topic in multiple contexts, but in this particular way. As one human being who writes about this place, what's your own story?
- [14:48]
B
I grew up in West Germany, and this was during the Cold War, and Berlin, the walled in city was always like a big fascination because there was a wall. There was actually a wall in the city preventing people to move into another part. And I was from the west, fortunate enough to be from the free West. So I could travel to Berlin and I could leave. I could look at it. And I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very vibey place. And then when the wall came down, I was still in school, but I like immediately got into the car of my parents and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. And then Berlin really in the 90s, became a place that was very attractive to me. And I moved there then in the 90s, I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York. And I loved New York. Before Giuliani became mayor, it was. He ruined the city. Before that, it was not gentrified. Let's say he introduced gentrification. And gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in the un gentrified New York city for like 300 bucks a month rent. And everyone I knew was an artist.
- [15:56]
A
You love the diversity of it.
- [15:57]
B
Yeah, I loved it. I wrote my first novel there. I took LSD for the first time in downtown Manhattan on a Saturday night.
- [16:04]
A
So you're kind of like a. Like a German Kerouac type character, but moved a few decades forward.
- [16:09]
B
I wouldn't compare myself to another writer, but I think Carrick is pretty cool. But he's an amphetamine writer. On the Road was apparently written in two weeks on amphetamines. But it's good. You know, amphetamines are not bad per se. We can also talk about this so called bad drugs, you know, because basically they're neutral. But let's not lose the thread.
- [16:29]
A
Yes, yes.
- [16:30]
B
Even though New York. Oh yeah. And then I was in New York. I was in health food store. One of the first. Like there weren't health food stores back then a lot, but there was one on First Avenue. And suddenly there was an announcement, which was unusual in the health food store. I think it was called Prana Prana Foods. And the announcement was that Kurt Cobain had just shot himself.
- [16:51]
A
It was like.
- [16:53]
B
And I had been actually and still am a Nirvana fan. I've seen one of the last concerts of Nirvana in New York City and it was amazing. But he killed himself. And like the next day I received a music cassette from a friend of mine from Berlin with electronic music. And I realized that there had been a paradigm shift. Obviously rock music with the hero on stage was dead now. It was you know, dance electronic music, which a lot of people today think it's kind of simplistic music form, but it's actually a very highly intelligent music form. At least it was in the 90s. People were really experimenting with that music. That was the new music. That was actually the reason I moved to Berlin. I decided I leave New York City, I'm going to move to Berlin. And then in Berlin, to answer your question, I fell in love with something that probably reminded me of the 20s. Even though I wasn't there in the 20s. But the city was very open. The wall had just was still, you know, I mean it's a few years later, but still the wall, it felt like it just came down. There was Germany was. Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany. That was still in Bonn. So Berlin was a very cheap and cultural and crazy city, probably a bit like in the 20s, actually. And that's how I fell in love with it. And that's how I became interested in this electronic scene. I mean I visited many dance venues then, so called clubs.
- [18:25]
A
Yeah, it's one of the hubs in the world of electronic music.
- [18:28]
B
They claim that techno was kind of invented in Berlin, but it also comes from Detroit. So Detroit and Berlin are like the techno hubs, I would say.
- [18:38]
A
Yeah. Electronic music is a soundtrack for some of the most interesting experience this earth has ever created. Right. Just it gets people together in some interesting ways. So it's not just the music itself, it's the experiences that the music enables.
- [18:52]
B
Well, in Germany we had a situation that the wall actually kept people apart. People didn't know each other. But because the wall came down, people suddenly met in abandoned buildings in the center of Berlin, which had been owned by the socialist state of East Germany. The most famous club, Tresor. Tresor means like vault. It was the big wall with the big doors. So that's where Tresor was, the club.
- [19:19]
A
It's so funny that the echo, 100 years later, Berlin had all these left partiers, young people using drugs in the Munich with a beer. And then that's where Hitler came out. So is that what we're supposed to imagine in the early days of the Nazi party, when Hitler's giving the speeches to just a handful of folks, they're all drunk.
- [19:41]
B
Well, it is a fact that the movement came out of the Burgerbroikeller, It's a certain restaurant pub in Munich. And that was not only a beer hall, that was also a political venue. And it was a right wing venue. It was for right wing populist people. Like communists wouldn't use it, even though communists are in many ways quite similar to the right wing, especially back then. But it was used by right wingers and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right wing populism, I would claim now here. And Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk or maybe even very drunk. Because if you're drunk, you also get aggressive against others. He could play with that.
- [20:28]
A
So drunk, aggressive towards others, but drunk.
- [20:31]
B
In a group, it constitutes the group. Also if everyone is on the same alcohol level, you just go to Oktoberfest in Munich, which is not a political thing, but everyone, you can kind of sense how it originated. And actually the first time the Nazis tried to grab power was the so called Beer Hall Putsch. I mean that's a historical event, took place in 1923 and it was after a drunk night where they suddenly decided, no, we're going to do it. So they came out of the Burger Broike and they were all drunk except of Hitler. And they just tried to overtake the Munich government and they miserably failed because it was just a stupid drunk idea. They were like, yeah, let's just do it. And the Bavaria police, quite sober that day, they just shot him to the ground. Hitler was almost killed. He just jumped behind. His bodyguard. Goering, during the Beer Hall Putsch was wounded in his stomach with I think a gunshot. That's why he became a morphine addict. So this Beer hall putsch in 23 had and severe effects also. They were sentenced to prison and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison.
- [21:40]
A
All of these little events come together. It's so interesting that for them it was just life. But now we look back these critical moments in history that turned the tides of human civilization, right? So Hitler could have died there. And these characters occurring that became larger than life, that influenced the lives and the deaths and the suffering of millions, all first of all could have been stopped then and whatever that means when you look back at history. But all of those are just human beings developing their ideas, growing, developing groups, developing ideologies and using drugs or drinking.
- [22:22]
B
I mean, that's why I thought it's interesting, for example, to examine Hitler's drug use. When I announced that to a historian while I was doing research, he helped me a lot with methamphetamine and the army proper medicine historian from the University of Ulm. And then I said, no, I'm interested in Hitler. He said, no, don't. This is not interesting. This is not serious. This is not serious history. But it's, you know, even Hitler was a person, you know, and if you understand, for example, the substance abuse of a person, of course you understand more about that person. And historians never had had that idea before. Kershaw, for example, who's really a great. He's very knowledgeable about National Socialism, like many British historians, they always know more about German history than the German historians. But Kershaw really does. I think he's really good. But in his biography of Hitler, he just writes one sentence like. And then he had a crazy doctor called Morel who gave him dubious medications and drugs, and he stops there, and then he goes on to describe whatever.
- [23:30]
A
Yeah, we should say that Ian Kershaw is widely considered to be probably one of the greatest biographers of Hitler.
- [23:36]
B
I think he wrote the best biography.
- [23:38]
A
Of Hitler, which is so important. Your work is really important because it opens a whole new perspective on the lives of the individuals and the machinery of the Nazi military that historians haven't looked at. It's so interesting that you can unlock those perspectives. And that's the underlying, really the foundation of our conversation today, any of your work is there's layers to this thing. You can look at the tactics of war, this strategic level of war, the operational level of war. You can look at the human suffering of war, the love stories. You could look at the hate, the psychology of propaganda, or you could look at the individual things, substances consumed by the individuals that make up the Nazi party leadership and the soldiers. And all of those are critically important to understand the war. Right. And this piece of drug use and supplement use have been ignored by historians.
- [24:40]
B
That was very surprising to me. You know, I didn't know this myself. I never planned to write this book. It kind of happened to me. And I decided to team up with the leading German historian on National Socialism, Hans Mommsen, who has passed away. By now, he was quite old, but quite ready to be my mentor for this book. Blitzed. And he was maybe even shocked when I came back from the military archive of Germany with a lot of copies, all relating to the systematical drug use of the German army, including an experiment done by the navy, who had always pretended to be the clean. In German, we say Waffen Gatung weapon. Like, you have the army, you have the air force, you have the navy. And in Germany, they had the ss, and the navy always pretended to be like, we weren't really Nazis, we were like the German navy. We had our ethics code. But I found in the Archive that the navy did human experiments in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, trying to find a new wonder drug, because they had new, what they called wonder weapons or what Hitler called wonder weapons. He always talked about these wonder weapons. Wonder weapons were basically mini submarines, one or two people going in, staying underwater for up to a week and torpedoing Allied ships. So the navy was trying to develop a drug that would keep you awake and combat ready for seven days and seven nights without sleep and without burning out. Very difficult to find. So they hired a penalty unit in the concentration camp. The SS had the so called shoe walking unit. It was a penalty unit in the concentration camp testing shoe soles for the German shoe industry, walking for like days. And then they would measure how the soles kept up in the stress. And they had different layers in the concentration camp, like all the surfaces that German soldiers would touch when they conquer Europe. So this is a very elaborate thing. And if you go to the concentration camp today, it's a museum, you can still see that running track of the shoe runners unit. So the navy hired the shoe runners unit from the ss, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations. Methamphetamine combined with cocaine and in a chewing gum and like all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know, and there's documents to it. And Mommsen, who knew everything about National Socialism, the old authority, I'm like the young. Like, I didn't study history. I just, you know, I just try to make sense, you know. But I present him all these documents he's reading, like from this pill patrol. And he said, wow, like he said, we historians, we never do drugs. We don't understand drugs. We missed this, you know, so he was very clear that we missed this. And he said, this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs. You can explain a lot of Hitler through the drugs. But you can also look at this point that historians so far had not been able to, to figure out basically what happened to Hitler? Why did he get crazy? And I mean, he was crazy or he was, but why did he get so bad as a leader? Because he was very effective for a long time. And then there's this moment where it turns.
- [28:46]
A
Yeah, the generation of decision making, psychology, behavior, all of that. You cannot understand that fully without understanding his drug use. And we should also say that some of the historians you mentioned, Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beaver, these legends of history, they all gave you compliments. So Kershaw said that your work is very good, extremely interesting, and a serious piece of well researched history. Anthony Beaver said that it's a remarkable work of research. So props to them. You have received a bunch of criticism from historians, but you've also received obviously a lot of props. I mean, Kershaw's the legendary historian of Hitler. Complimenting how deep your work is. That must feel good. Maybe this is a good moment to also, just since we're talking about historians, to address some of the criticism. So Richard Evans has been also a great historian, has been one of the bigger critics. He said that your work is crass and dangerously inaccurate account and is morally and politically dangerous. I think that's grounded in the idea that if you say that, well, all the Nazi forces and Hitler was on drugs, so therefore their evil can be. They're not really evil. It's just accountability can be removed because they were using drugs.
- [30:17]
B
Right.
- [30:18]
A
And also another criticism of his, which I also understand and probably can steal, man, is if you look too much through this singular lens of drugs, you can overemphasize it. You know, you can overemphasize how important it was as an explainer of the effectiveness of blitzkrieg, for example, because there is some. I mean, I should say there is something really compelling about a singular theory that explains everything. And you can fall in love with it too much as an explainer. So can you steel man, his criticism or criticism you received and also argue against it?
- [31:01]
B
I think he's absolutely right that you shouldn't argue in a monocausal way. And this is actually what Mommsen also said to me because of course, I was enthusiastic about all my drug findings. And he said, don't argue in a monocausal way, especially the war.
- [31:19]
A
There's a lot of variables, a lot of factors, a lot of things going on. Yes.
- [31:22]
B
So that sentence of his, don't argue in a monocausal way, that always stayed with me. And I think that I didn't deviate from that path, actually. But it was still interesting that Evans thought that I put too much emphasis on the drugs. I think it's. It's a totally fine opinion. I would disagree. Otherwise I wouldn't have written the book. What I can state here is that I invented nothing. In all of my three nonfiction books, nothing is invented. If you are a good writer. And I trained as a novelist, for me, it was also very unusual to write a nonfiction book. I wanted to write a novel about Nazis and drugs. My publisher said no. He looked at the facts. He said, someone has to write the facts. So I said, but nonfiction books are boring. He said, not necessarily. Maybe you can find a way to write it with your novelistic style, but based 100% on the facts. And that is like in German we say spaghett. How do you say that? Split, like when you do with your legs, like it's hard, you know, because with a very fluent, sophisticated language, you can easily overpower the reader. If I describe how the German guys, 19 year old guys, took the math and went into the tank and the math started kicking in. Five guys on math after like one hour of ride into France, you can write that in a powerful way. That if you are the reader, you would think, yeah. I mean, the blitzkrieg without math is unthinkable.
- [33:07]
A
There is a bit of a man, I wish I found that kind of feeling for historians, right? Like, how did I miss this piece? So some historians, like, great historians, like Kershaw, obviously, see, they kind of give you a, like a slow clap, applaud. And some historians are a little bit skeptical, like this is a little too good. So totally understandable.
- [33:30]
B
And also they have a different techniques to write text like this. I used a totally different technique and I have an apparatus. So it really feels like it could be an academic work, but still it's written in a way that it kind of overpowers. It kind of colonializes the story in a weird way. I never thought about it about it like that. But while I was writing it, I was just trying to write it as well as I could. I didn't think about these questions we're talking about now. I just, I got carried away, obviously. But I never left the area of facts.
- [34:12]
A
Yes. So we should talk about your process. That's also super fascinating. You went to the archives, you went to the sources. What's that take? What does it feel? What does it smell like? What does it look like? What does it entail? How much text is there? What language is it in? What's the process there?
- [34:30]
B
I never thought of going to the archives. And my girlfriend at the time, she said, you have to go to the archives. And she's an academic. And I was like, yeah, okay, I'll go, I'm fine. I'll check it out. And then when I met a historian, he claims that without methamphetamine There would be no blitzkrieg victory of Germany. Like he's monocausal. But he was also extremely helpful to me. And he's an academic. He gave me the signatures. It's called in German where you find stuff in the archives. Signature is like. Then it's like H2538, something like this. And these were the files of Professor Ranke. And Professor Ranke was. He was the head of the Institute for Army Physiology. His job was to improve the. The performance of the soldier. And all of his stuff was filed in a certain place in the military archives, which in Germany is in Freiburg in the south, in a small town, not in Berlin. Because Germany is a bit of a decentralized country. We don't want to put everything into Berlin again like the Nazis did. We try to avoid our mistakes. So the military archive is in Freiburg. And I went there and because I had this signature, immediately I got original documents that were all relating to my research. Like I could read. I had the original.
- [36:03]
A
What does it look like? Is it sheets of paper?
- [36:05]
B
Yeah.
- [36:07]
A
So it's not scanned well.
- [36:08]
B
It's different things. Like the guy who did the math into the army, the professor Ranke, he was writing a war diary. That's what the name was, War diary. So every day he would write it by hand. So this war diary was given to me.
- [36:25]
A
So you're reading that, so it's like dated, like you have a date.
- [36:28]
B
The diary, it was a bit funny with him because he took a lot of meth himself because he thought it was great. He just thought it increases your performance. By now we know a little bit more that methamphetamine is not so healthy because you get used to it and you burn out, you get depressed and then you have to take more big problem. And he became depressed and burned out. And he didn't realize it's because of the math that he's like describing to the whole German army. He made a convincing case. And I can explain that in detail how that actually happened. But just to have his war diary was great. And then also he would type letters writing to the company of Temla. How fast they could produce stuff, in which time. So you have all these original documents, you have 500 documents. And it goes like he writes like reports what happened in this battle on methamphetamine. Like there's a lot of stuff you can find in the archives, if you find them. But the tricky thing is that you can only look. You kind of look at a so called find book. In the find book, you cannot type in drugs. It wouldn't find anything because at the time when they were taking all the notes from this doctor, his war, everything, they didn't put the label drugs there. They put the label, his name, his position, World War II, French campaign, stuff like that. So. Because at the time they didn't know that I would at one point come and look for drugs in that, you know, but he was the drug guy. But also they didn't realize he was the drug guy. You know, no one realized that he was the drug guy. So it's not easy to find stuff in the archives. So the archives, you go, it's a Kafka experience. You go into this building and you have to understand the rules and you will never fully understand what's going on. Also the archivists, they don't really know what's going on because there's so many documents. No one's read them all, you know, no one knows. Like there's history kind of lying there, somehow organized, somehow stored.
- [38:34]
A
I mean, it does sound like a.
- [38:35]
B
Very Kafkaesque thing, but it's great if you find something. But you can also sit there for a week and not find anything.
- [38:43]
A
So what was the process for you? You're just reading open minded, trying to see is there some truth here to be discovered.
- [38:55]
B
Well, I have a friend, he's a dj and we talked about Berlin, we probably talk about it more. And he takes a lot of drugs and he knows his, let's put it that way, he knows his drugs. And one day he said to me, when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next, he said, the Nazis took a lot of drugs, you should write about that. And I said, the Nazis didn't take drugs. Because when you grow up in Germany, you get educated about the Nazis quite intensely. Especially in West Germany, they teach you everything, but they don't teach you drugs. I mean, now they do maybe, but it was not known. And the Nazi Nazis always had this aura of being law and order. No drugs, of course, no chaos, everything. My grandfather, he was a Nazi, always said, well, at least there was discipline in the country, there was law and order. So this doesn't match with drugs.
- [39:53]
A
I should also say, I think that's the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling that the Nazi ideology was all about like law and order and purity and surely they would not be doing drugs. So this was like this really blew my mind. I think I was, I wasn't quite ready. Similar to, like, Richard Evans. Like, this is a big, like, okay. A narrative transforming into a deeper, more complicated understanding what Nazi forces and the Hitler inner circle actually look like.
- [40:29]
B
That's why I didn't believe Alex.
- [40:32]
A
Always take the dj, the drug expert, with a grain of salt.
- [40:36]
B
I didn't believe him. But I said, it's a great topic. Maybe I could invent. He said, no, we don't invent this. This is real. I said, how do you know? And he said, I have a friend and I know this guy by now. I met him. He's an antique dealer in Berlin. And he had bought an old medicine chest in an old Berlin apartment. This was in 2010. And he found Pavitin tablets inside, which were the methamphetamine product that was marketed in Germany in the late 30s. And this guy, the antique dealer, took some tablets, and they were quite old, you know, 70 years old, but they still had an effect on him. And I later asked him, and he said, well, we took them for about a month. It was the greatest month we ever had. Like, we had so much fun. We were so productive. Because that methamphetamine back then was also, like, a quality product. It was not crystal meth made in a trailer lab.
- [41:32]
A
So this is many decades later.
- [41:34]
B
They were still potent.
- [41:35]
A
They were still potent.
- [41:36]
B
Especially Alex convinced me, because Alex has a high tolerance. And he said, okay, they still had some. So I said to him, can I have some also? And I took one. And he's like, this was. We were standing in my writing tower, which is at the river in Berlin. And he was like, I took one. I could feel something. Then I took another one, and then I could feel more. And then I took a third one. Typical Alex, he would take three instead of just taking one, he took three methamphetamine tablets from the 40s. And he said. And then I felt like. And he looked at the river, and there was a big ship, like a cargo ship going by. And he said, I felt like this ship. Suddenly there was a schoop. He said in German, like a motion that was, like, energy that was grabbing me. And I could. Like, I felt so powerful. And he told me this, and I was like, wow, this is like. And I Googled, like, methamphetamine. Nazi Germany. This was in 2010. And there was this one professor at the university in Ulm who said the Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine. So I called up this guy and he said, sure, I'll meet you. And Then he gave me the signature for the archive. Then I went to the archive, and then I really started to do my own research.
- [42:47]
A
And.
- [42:47]
B
And then I went to different archives and I tried to find everything on Nazis and drugs, and that came. Everything is in the book. So that crazy meeting with Alex in my writing tower, that kind of got me on this research journey.
- [43:03]
A
It makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives. Do you think there's stuff like that in there that we deeply don't understand about? For example, there's a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand. Maybe about the concentration camps, maybe about the Eastern Front, the interplay between Stalin and Hitler, maybe about Britain that could be discovered in the letters, in the data that were completely missing.
- [43:35]
B
I think so. And I think that also there are archives that are not open, let's say the Vatican archive, some secret archives that some very powerful structures have, structures that we might not even know now off the top of our head, which still have a huge influence. So I think that the human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that's. That's just one version. I think there's several versions. And I think that it goes much deeper and is much more interesting. So I guess history is a very active thing, which I also didn't know I was writing historical nonfiction book. And I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool, because the history defines the future or is very connected. Our history teacher always said, if we don't know where we come from, we cannot know where we go. And that is, I think, true. That is what I now really am interested in for my next book. I'm trying to really understand human history. And obviously I'm not the first. There's a few alternative historians that go like. Because you have to go back in time quite a bit. And then it's not easy to write about it, but it's very interesting to think about it. And I would love to find the truth on Atlantis, which I don't believe in, actually. And we can also talk about that. But maybe there's an archive where we can actually see that they had this king ruling. I don't think this could be found, but I think we can still also find a lot of documents, but I think especially in closed archives, so we won't find them.
- [45:20]
A
He said a lot of really interesting things. It's so important to have people like you that do the daring work of going to the archives of the sources, the evidence, and trying to find a thing that completely transforms history. As we thought we understood it. That's revisionist history at its best. There's revisionist history has a sort of negative connotation sometimes because you go to conspiratorial land without much evidence and you're just being a rebel for rebel sake. But when you ground it in data and dare to challenge the historical narrative, that's really powerful. Now I should also mention that we've been just setting the. Laying out the context.
- [46:06]
B
Yeah, we're still in the context phase.
- [46:09]
A
Context phase. And for the next 10 hours and maybe for the rest of our lives, we will be continuing just setting the context. But let us dare return to the original question of Pervitin. How did that come about? Take me to the 1930s Nazi Germany, the Munich and the Berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully. How did Pervitin come into the picture?
- [46:32]
B
Well, the Nazis managed to grab power on January 30, 1933 and they immediately become an anti drug regime. That is important to them because the only intoxication they allow from now on in Germany is the Nazi intoxication. It's the ideological intoxication. So they quickly install concentration camps which were at the time run by the sr, not the ss, takes over later and turns the concentration camps into an industry. The first SR concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside. And some of the first people that landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users. Also anti Semitic policies, which were very important from the day one for the Nazis. Antisemitism is the defining pillar of National Socialism, the core of it really. They quickly connected anti drug policies with anti Semitic policies. They claimed the Jews in Germany, the German Jews were taking more drugs than the non Jewish Germans. And National Socialism's goal was to purify the German body. So they saw the whole folk, the country, the people as one body and that has to be purified. So all Jews are poison, but not only Jews. Everyone who thinks differently. Communists are also poison. Jews are the worst poison. But you know, a lot of, you know. Yeah. And then you create this clean body and obviously drugs play have no position in that. If you are addicted to drugs, that's weak, you know, you're morphinist, you use cocaine, that's all degenerate, that's Jewish, that's Jewish. Doctors are all morphinists, you know. So that Nazi Germany and Hitler was the shining example of the person who doesn't take drugs. He was. He didn't have a private life, he didn't even have a body. He just led the folks body. So Hitler was not putting any poisons into him. He stopped smoking cigarettes in the twenties already. He never touched alcohol. Vegetarian, vegetarian, no caffeine even. So he was, that's what he was in the beginning. Story of course changes at a certain point in time. But he started as this as far as you understand.
- [49:17]
A
That's true.
- [49:18]
B
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that this is true also. Vegetarianism was a right wing thing in Germany. It was an elitist thing. If you were vegetarian, you had a higher frequency, which kind of gave you superiority over, let's say, these workers who need to eat the sausage so he can do the work. Like Wagner, the composer, he was a vegetarian. Hitler was impressed by Wagner. So vegetarianism, I think that's all true. I think Hitler was like that and it's hard to be like that actually. And I think that gave him an attraction inside the movement which were all like drunkards and using morphine all the time because of his pain. And he got used to morphine. So they were. It was not. The movement wasn't like this, but he was like this. So he was, he symbolized, but he symbolized that whole approach of cleanliness, like purity. So then how does methamphetamine come into the picture? It's totally absurd. That's why I thought it was fun researching this, because it doesn't make sense, you know, and you know, they use this simple trick by, you know, defining what is a drug, an illegal drug and what is not, because drugs don't have it written on them. This is an illegal, dangerous drug. You know, drugs are basically neutral. These are molecules, you know, so the methamphetamine molecule was found in a Berlin based company called the Temla company. And the head of Temla, he was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an Afro American athlete, Jesse Owens, was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes. How can this be? So they thought that he was on something because he won, I think five gold medals. It was ridiculous. This was supposed to be Germany's games. And then the Afro American runs better than the Aryan Ubermensch. So the only explanation is he took a drug. He took probably Benzedrine, which was a legal amphetamine. And also there were no doping checks at the Olympics. And if you take an amphetamine, of course you can run a bit faster, maybe when it kicks in. This has to do with the immense release of, of dopamine in the brain. But it was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs. But the head of the Temner company, he said, we have to prevent this. We have to invent a better amphetamine. We have to. We have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine. So his main chemist, Hauschild, Fritz Hauschild, he did research and he found that in 1917 in Tokyo, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine, and he remade that methamphetamine. And they tested it among themselves, the chemists in the Berlin pharmaceutical lab, and they loved it. They made pure methamphetamine. And, you know, they had a really good time and they were like, more active. They would talkative, because that's what happens on methamphetamine. So the company really thought, this is a great product, and they turn it into a product. They went to the patent bureaucracy and got the patent for methamphetamine. And then it quite quickly came onto the market. It was labeled as Pervitin, which is kind of a great name because it has, like, the perverse already in it. And this Pavitin pervertin was available in any pharmacy. So you just. You didn't need a prescription. A child could go and buy 10 packs of Pure methamphetamine. So methamphetamine was also very cheap. So it became quite popular because people talked about it.
- [53:13]
A
Did they understand the side effects and negative effects of methamphetamine? Did they care?
- [53:18]
B
They didn't really know what it was. I mean, I also read. I went to the archive of that company also, of course. So they were like, what is it good for? I just feel great when I take it and I have more energy. And they didn't know if that could be a product. It was 1937, 38, when they were discovering it.
- [53:37]
A
But also, did they. How did they think about the fact that this is a drug?
- [53:43]
B
Well, it. It was. They called it a performance enhancer. Is drinking a coffee in the morning a drug? I mean, it is a drug, but we don't think of it as a drug. You know, it's legal. And this was kind of how meth was treated in Germany. It was normal to use it. Like you had a very important business meeting. Of course you would take a Pavitin. There's a movie by Billy Wilder called 123. Very good movie. And he shows the American executive. The movie said, right after the end of the Second World War. So we see, like, I think it's a Coca Cola executive American. And he says to his secretary, how should I have the morning coffee? I think half of a Pavitine. So Pavitin was also normal. It wasn't stigmatized. It was not the American just say no propaganda where your teeth fall out. I mean, it was a German quality product. People liked it. Of course, they did tests at universities, but most of them were quite positive. Yeah, it reduces your fear. Today we might look for different things, but this was also a performance driven, totalitarian society moving towards war. So if someone takes Pavitin and says in the clinical tests at the university, I'm not afraid of anything anymore. So that's positive. That's actually what got the guy who worked for the German army interested, because he read university reports. I also saw all of these reports. They were also in the military archive. So he's like, okay, you're not afraid anymore if you take methamphetamine. You don't need to sleep anymore, you don't need to eat so much because your appetite is lowered. This is perfect for a soldier. So negative effects only became public in 1940 when the first palatine opponent, he was actually a relative of Albert Speer, Hitler's architect and later arms minister. He was the Speer psychologist. He was the first one who said, wait a minute. First of all, methamphetamine is against the Nazi ideology because now we're all taking a drug to be high performers. We have to be high performance without a drug. And he also said the obvious. This is going to make you addicted, et cetera. This will create a tolerance. So only then the first negative reports came out before that, what Temla did and then what the universities did, they all thought methamphetamine is really good.
- [56:20]
A
So what was the process of convincing the German military, the Wehrmacht army, to use it at scale?
- [56:28]
B
Well, Professor Ranke was employed by the army, so it was his job to find things that would improve the performance of the German soldier. I always imagined him like a James Bond character, like Q, who develops like gadgets and stuff, because he also developed gadgets. So he was quite a, you know, he was an academic, but he was also a soldier. You know, he was employed, but he was basically running this institute, examining it. And he was so convinced that Pavitin is the answer to his question how to beat the main opponent of the German soldier. And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer. So when he read these reports from universities, he did his own tests in the military Academy with young medical officers. They came together at 8pm in the evening. And then they received either methamphetamine, caffeine pill or placebo or Benzedrine. Like he had different experiments and he always concluded at the end. They started 8pm and at 10am in the morning. One time, he notes, the Pavitin people still want to go out and party while the coffee guys are sleeping on the bench. And the, you know, it was clear that Palatine is the strongest. It gives you the most energy, lets you work for the longest time. So he was convinced. But his superior, like the surgeon general of the German army, he was like an old school dude. And he was like, he didn't even react to these. Like Ranke would write letters. We have to use a synthetic drug in the next campaign, which was against Poland, which he knew about. And because Papatin was quite known in the civil society, people were using it already. So he even said, a lot of soldiers will just take it with them and we should control that, we should make it an official drug. But the surgeon general didn't understand. He didn't reply. So Germany attacked Poland without a clear regulatory system on methamphetamine. And indeed a lot of soldiers used it. And what Ranke then did was he requested from all the. The medical officers in the field in Poland. The war was over after a few weeks, but the German army was occupying Poland. He said, send me all back reports and tell me, did your people take Pavitin and what were the effects? And he collected all these reports, which I also studied in the military archive. And he came to the conclusion, this is a really good fighting drug and it probably is, because people are still using it today. Methamphetamine is still being used. And Ranke discovered this. He had everything in front of him and Poland was beaten. And then Hitler wanted to attack the West. And the west was a different story than Poland, because the west was the world empire of Great Britain combined with La Grande, the strongest army in the world, the French army, these two combined. How can you win that? Poland they could overpower. They had better army than Poland. But is the German Wehrmacht really better than both of these armies combined? His officers didn't think so. High command said, no, we're not going to attack the west, we're going to lose. And Hitler was fanatic about it. He really wanted to attack it. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939, just to prevent him ordering the attack on the west, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany, because they really cared. If you're a high command, you don't want to start a war that you're going to lose, you know, very bad.
- [60:15]
A
Can you just briefly give us a sense of. Do you think this is genius or insanity on Hitler's part to think that he can take on probably what's perceived as to be the most powerful military in the world, which is the French military, or at least in Europe?
- [60:34]
B
I think his hatred for the French was very, very deep. He really. He really wanted to go to war with them. It was an ideological irrational decision. That's why he was not. He didn't hate the Empire. He kind of looked down. He admired it and looked down on.
- [60:52]
A
You mean the British Empire?
- [60:53]
B
Yeah, yeah. But the French he really hated. And France had been the ERP Find the genetic enemy of the German people, at least right wingers would say so. There had been two wars. The first one Germany had won. Then First World War Germany had lost. So Hitler wanted to kind of revenge and also stop the Versailles Treaty. So he really needed to attack the west, at least in his mindset. But it was an irrational decision, and that's why High command said, no, we're not going to do it, basically. And Hitler's position at the time was not that he could do anything he wanted. I mean, High command is still a high command of the German Wehrmacht. That's a very old. You know, it's a tradition. They do whatever they want, you know, but also they have to obey Hitler's order. So it's a power struggle, basically. But to invade France was a totally stupid idea. But it changed. On the morning of February 17, 1940, Hitler invited three young tank generals to his office and they had a plan, which was the plan to go through the Aden mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs, actually, that idea to go through the Aden mountain. If you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius. And Hitler immediately understood it because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I. It comes as stalemate and they fight for months and no one really moves. And it's bloody and nothing's happening. It's bad. But that was the only plan that they had. That's why the high command said, no, we're not going to do it. It's stupid. But these three tank generals, they had kind of like somehow they were able to snuck into Hitler's office and they said, look, if we go with the whole army through The Aden Mountains. And like Hitler, this is not possible. This is like a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle, basically? And they said, no, we can do it, because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that kind of wait for the action to happen and then, you know, I don't know, support this somehow. We're going to use tanks in the front as race cars, basically. We're going to overpower the enemy. We're going to be in France before the French, who are stationed all with the British in northern Belgium and also on the Maginot Line, but not really in the Ardennes Mountains. That was hardly fortified because no one could imagine that Germany would go through there. And before they know it, we are already behind them. Basically, we are already in France, and they're still hanging out in northern Belgium because it takes quite a while to travel. This was a different time also. So he was convinced, and he then ordered the attack. The attack would happen and then. But it would only work if you would reach Sedan, the border city of France, within three days and three nights. So the whole army, or at least the avant garde of the machinery, had to be like a big part of the army had to be in Sedan after three days and three nights. And that was only possible if you don't stop. And that was the problem. The sleep was really. Then suddenly became a huge problem. And Hitler said, when I was fighting In World War I, of course I could stay awake for a week. I'm a German. Even though he's not even German, he's Austrian. But that was a problem. But suddenly Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe how people could stay awake for three days and three nights. So Ranke suddenly became. Before that, he was kind of an outsider, like the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly he became like, okay, tell us, how does it work? And he gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case, methamphetamine. How much should be taken, at what intervals? What are the side effects? So this became a very big thing. And then Temla had to deliver 35 million dosages to the front lines, which were. No, not the frontier. I mean, it was. They. They were stationed in the west of Germany. And then on May 10, they took their methamphetamine and they started the surprise attack through the aden Mountains.
- [65:30]
A
So 35 million dosages for the French Campaign. I mean, we could probably talk for many hours about this particular campaign because it is, I think it's fair to say the most successful military campaign from.
- [65:46]
B
The German side ended with a big mistake. Dunkirk.
- [65:50]
A
Dunkirk.
- [65:51]
B
It was brilliant up until that point. That is a turning point. That was the first big mistake Hitler did. And it also had to do with drugs.
- [65:58]
A
We'll talk about it. But that's just the link on this three days. So we should also mention that's where Blitzkrieg really shined. So it wasn't just the tanks, it was the infantry. It was the aircraft moving very fast behind the French lines. I mean, what can you speak to just the execution of that campaign and the role of drugs in it. And it is, we should say, a really bold strategic decision to use meth. I mean it's a big risk. There's a lot of risks taken here which could be seen as military genius or military insanity and are a mixture of both.
- [66:37]
B
Well, they were very lucky that it all worked out. Like also the guys in the tanks could all have freaked out on the meth because then it was never tested before. Can you actually be in a combat situation, in a tank, in enemy territory, on meth? Can people actually cope with that and be better fighters going through the mountains?
- [66:58]
A
It's insane against the biggest military in Europe.
- [67:02]
B
Well, what meth does is because I read reports of depressed atmosphere right before the attack started because they were afraid they thought they would lose. Like they didn't want that. You know, soldiers, maybe some, you know, really hardcore Nazi soldiers, but most people were just normal guys, you know, they didn't want to start that. But once they had the methamphetamine, it kind of, you're like in a party mood. So also when you're in the tank, you know, and everyone likes it, you know, it's rather an uplifting thing. Like they were, they were really getting into it and they were really, you know, they started fighting. Then is also an intoxication, you know, it's a, it's a rush.
- [67:43]
A
Like what is, what is, what does meth feel like?
- [67:48]
B
Well, meth creates the so called fight or flight motors. So either you like, it releases all the neurotransmitters in the brain which are released in situations of high danger, for example. So in a highly dangerous situation you become very alert so you can cope with the situation. If you're under life threat and you don't even react to it, you're probably going to be dead. But the body does that and methamphetamine does that. So you take a pill of methamphetamine or a snorter line of methamphetamine, and you're like this. And then that's the fight or flight mode. Either you run away, like it's too much, you know, but on meth, you usually don't run away. You kind of think it's really cool what's happening. You like to move, you like to be with your pals, you like to be in A tank's great.
- [68:39]
A
So there is a party aspect to it.
- [68:41]
B
I think it was very joyful for the German soldiers because it was springtime, they had immediate successes. And it wasn't heavy fighting, it was just being in the tank. I mean, there was, of course, fighting and there were also war crimes. And I read a report when Rommel, high on math, like, at night, doesn't stop, of course, because they all. You know, they don't stop at night. But every army usually stops at night. So the French army were stopping. They were in a village camping out. And the German, Rommel was going with the tank through that village with his division just running over people. And he was standing, like, in the open lid of the tank and he was, like, going through that thing, you know, and, you know, like a berserk type of warrior. And that was when. That, to me, is a war crime. That is when the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in that push of Rommel through the French countryside. Because you don't do that. Your enemy is sleeping. Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So of course, at night they're going to be sleepy on red wine. And the Germans were on meth and they were just running over them. There's this descriptions of the chains of the tank becoming bloody. I don't think he did it. And he was like, oh, my God, what did I just do? I'm sorry, you know, what. What am I doing here? He was in the. In the movie.
- [70:10]
A
You know, this is the dark thing about human nature that in war, if you dehumanize, if you allow your brain to dehumanize the enemy, the opponent, the humans on the other side, you can actually. I think hate can take over. And in that hate, you can find pleasure when you murder the other. And people have written about this, have talked about this. It's probably a thing that a person like me can't possibly comprehend unless I experienced it. And you have to be in the mania, in the hysteria, in the insanity, intensity of war.
- [70:50]
B
I mean, what Evans, for example, said is that I excuse the Germans of the war crimes because they were just in an intoxication. I understand that argument. But if you look at individual soldiers, it's quite tricky. Like it's a 19 year old guy, he's been drafted and in Nazi Germany, if you don't go, you land in the concentration camp. So you can choose concentration camp or you just join the ranks and then you get Palatine and then you invade France. There was a trial in Germany because someone said all soldiers are murderers. And I think then the German Bundeswehr sued him. No, soldiers are not murderers. And he actually won in court. So it's legal in Germany to call every soldier a murderer. But it's a tricky question.
- [71:41]
A
Yeah, I remember seeing the documentary on the Ordinary People. There's also social pressure. Again, insane it is to say, I think the documentary Ordinary People was looking at the Germans that were part of the shooting squads and they didn't understand what they're signing up for. And they were told that they're free to leave once they understand what they're doing. And many of them didn't. And they didn't have hate for Jews or for the people who they're murdering. You are again a 19, 20 year old young kid. Like it's so hard to comprehend the moral insanity that's happening all around you and you just kind of want to fit in.
- [72:23]
B
I mean, that's why I wrote the book the Bohemians, because there were a few people in Berlin that didn't react this way, but they reacted in a different way. They said, we cannot be part of this.
- [72:35]
A
But it's hard to be the person.
- [72:37]
B
It's very hard. Yeah. And most people are part of it because it's much more safe, or at least it seems more safe. I mean, it has its own perils, you know, because you might become a genocidal murderer, you know, that might happen. Are you responsible? I would say you are responsible, but that's just my personal gut feeling. I always thought my grandfather was responsible for the genocide because he was working for the German railway system and he once saw a train car full of Jews in a cattle wagon. And he only said to me, yeah, this was against German railway regulations. I said, so what did you do? And he said, well, there were SS at the station when I was working and I was too scared, I didn't do anything. So I thought that he made himself guilty, I thought. And my father, for example, reacted very strongly because of that. He never called him by his first Name the father of his wife because he still had that he was a Nazi because he was working for the railway. So I wouldn't excuse people actually and I certainly would not excuse high ranking politicians that make policies because the genocidal policies that the Nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs. And I never write that in any, you know, because there's no documents. If I would find documents that say, yeah, when we, you know, but the Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs, maybe with alcohol, you know, but it's. And I spoke with my father who had been a high judge in Germany. What does actually the law say? And the law says if you plan a crime and then maybe when you committed, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility. Your responsibilities only diminish. Let's say you are totally normal person, never done any harm to anybody, and suddenly you take a drug or you're totally drunk and you don't know what you're doing and you kill someone. Then a judge could say maybe you have a lesser responsibility. But this is not the case with the crimes of National Socialism. And I never even hint at that in my book. So I think that criticism by Evans was short sighted. I think he's not right about that.
- [75:08]
A
Yeah, I think I agree with you totally. I didn't get that sense.
- [75:12]
B
He thought the book was very successful because a lot of right wing people bought it. But that's simply not true.
- [75:19]
A
I think your book did a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative.
- [75:28]
B
To the contrary. I got an angry letter by a German army employee, quite a high officer and a military historian. And he said that he also thought I overemphasized the drug use of the methamphetamine in the Western campaign because he said the German army was just so good. And you kind of diminish their capability by saying they were only so good because they took methamphetamine. I thought that was kind of funny because the Wehrmacht doesn't exist anymore. The current German army is called the Bundeswehr. And they're not historically, they're not supposed to be connected. Like there was a clear cut. But he still felt that I was kind of hurting the pride of the Wehrmacht.
- [76:15]
A
I generally sort of agree with him. In general, it seems like great historians, often I'm just a human, so I'm not a historian. But they undermine the importance of the heroes that make up an army. The Soviet army, the British army, the French army. The German army, like, these are humans. And some of the great military campaigns involve people really stepping up now. Like the effectiveness of the military tactics with blitzkrieg, the effectiveness of meth, the strategic decisions around where to invade, the timing, the speed, all those are important. But there's humans there. There's real heroes. And sometimes historians kind of diminish that. I don't know what to make sense of it. I might be just an idiot, but I've had a great conversation with James Holland. I've gotten to know him well. He kind of analyzed the mistakes made by Hitler and by Stalin and the Operation Barbarossa. But I just. Through generations, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, you hear these stories of these heroes. You know, my grandfather was a machine gunner and miraculously survived. And, like, just knowing those stories, Stalingrad would not have happened without the heroes on the Soviet side. And it's easy to say there's a lot of blunders, a lot of bad tactics, all this kind of stuff. But to me, from the human side, I just know through my bloodline, the people that have fearlessly given their life to defend their homeland, and that sometimes can be a little bit easily dismissed. So I don't know what to make sense of it. Maybe I'm romanticizing or maybe I'm speaking to the suffering that the people have felt, and they just propagate themselves through my life story. And then maybe the gratitude I have for the people who have stopped the Nazi forces.
- [78:19]
B
I think it's amazing what the Russian soldiers actually did, because they beat the Wehrmacht. It was really the Red army on the ground that did the job. And did they love communism and their system? I don't think so. And I think they were. I mean, of course, some people. But basically they were defending their country. And I'm also very grateful to them.
- [78:43]
A
Yeah, they're defending their families. Quick pause. Bathroom break.
- [78:47]
B
Okay.
- [78:49]
A
All right, we're back. So can we say a bit more about the French campaign? So in. It was over in six weeks. It took six weeks to complete a defeat and occupy most of France. And the initial operation, three days, was, from a military perspective, successful. What else can we say about the role of drugs, the effectiveness, what was learned from that experience?
- [79:22]
B
I mean, for me to research, the Western campaign was very interesting because I didn't really know anything about it except that Germany won very quickly. So to actually look at the details is very interesting. And the drugs give you kind of a way in.
- [79:39]
A
What are some things you found in the archives that were interesting? Like about maybe letters, reports, diaries, they gave you some insights about the human story of it all.
- [79:49]
B
Well, there is letters for example, by Heinrich Bull, who won the Nobel Prize later in literature. He writes to his parents describing in detail what, what Palatine did to him, how it kept his mood up and that without Palatine he wouldn't have been able to do the job. But also military documents I found very interesting. For example, I could see exactly how the methamphetamine was distributed because it was not distributed equally. It was done in a way that the tank troops who were leading the advance received the most meth and they also needed it. I could see how many pills on which date were delivered to Rommels troops. And Rommel became. I call him the Crystal Fox in my book for obvious reasons. Like his division was using a lot.
- [80:39]
A
Of meth and he was using meth as well.
- [80:43]
B
I just have descriptions how he like totally crazy, stands in the open lid of the tank and all his people, well, they had the meth, but there's no from that, there's no they. Maybe they didn't use it, maybe he didn't use it, but it looks like he used it. There was also never any reports that all the meth was given back. I mean, a lot of soldiers write that they take it, but Rommel specifically, I wouldn't write in Blitz that Rommel would take methamphetamine on such a day or something if there was no record for it. But Rommel, there is a record for it that Rommel's division used the most meth of any tank division. So I write about that. That already makes him the Crystal Fox because in his division crystal meth is rampant.
- [81:35]
A
You know, it's like an animal farm when the pigs discover alcohol. Animal Farm by George Orwell. There's no evidence that they drank. It's just the next day that they're all hungover.
- [81:47]
B
I mean, Rommel is a very interesting character in general because later he turned, apparently turned against Hitler. He was part of the conspiracy of the operation Valkyrie. He received the offer to shoot himself in the forest, which he did instead of being tried and executed.
- [82:09]
A
Is he just part of this general tension that the generals, the military had with Hitler? Would that be fair to say?
- [82:17]
B
I would say so, yes. I'm not an expert on the Wehrmacht. This is a very complex, large organization. But I see most of the officers of the Wehrmacht as not necessarily Nazis in the way that they would shout Heil Hitler all the time. They were highly intelligent, highly trained, super professionals that ran a very effective War machine. And at one point, more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler were given were not really helping. And they have their men dying because of it. So that creates a lot of tension. And that led to the mistake that Hitler did in Dunkirk. Basically what Churchill called the sickle cut, which was the idea to storm through the Ardennes mountains and kind of cut off the British and French troops who were still in the north of Belgium, trying to figure out what was going on. Suddenly the Germans are behind them so that they kind of cut as a sickle into enemy territory. The sickle cut that was so successful that basically the campaign was won already. So then the Germans invaded, like occupied all the cities on the canal back to England to kind of cut off the British completely, so they couldn't even flee. But there was just. Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open. And the German army was like, you know, they were already on the outskirts of Dunkirk. They could have just taken it and closed that, you know, that hole for the British military to get out. But Hitler then did his famous. And this is all the dynamic of the Western campaign. You know, a lot of things happen every day and then they're saying, like, we're gonna have Dunkirk tomorrow. And then it's over. And then Hitler stops the tanks. It's his famous Haltebefehl, the. The order to stop. And they were all on meth. They didn't want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. Hitler was basically, it was a little bit similar than Berlin, Munich thing. Hitler didn't really understand that campaign. It was too fast for him. Because they didn't say, like, oh, they're all on meth. They're not going to sleep, they're going to behave erratically. They didn't discuss this. They discussed this in the old fashioned terms. And Hitler was seeing. They do not protect their flanks. What if the British come from the north? This is terrible. Militarily. They were already fighting World War II while Hitler was still fighting World War I. And especially the Allies, they were still fighting World War I. But the tank generals on math, or the tank generals without math, the tank generals per se, they were fighting a new type of war. And Hitler then got a visit from Goering, the head of the air force, the Luftwaffe. And Goering was a morphinist. That is very well documented. He was on morphine. He was high as a kite most of the time. And that comes with losing touch with reality, I would say. Or at least it changes your grip on reality. Maybe you're still a good decision maker, but it could lead to, you know, if you're intoxicated, let's say you're writing and you're intoxicated, you think it's great, but the next day you read it, it's shit, you know. So Goering was using morphine in the morning, then met. Met Hitler at the Felsen Nest, which was Hitler's headquarters to to command the Western campaign, the Felsen Nest. And Goering said to him, if the army generals are now going to take Dunkirk, then and basically the army has won this campaign and that will give army high command, which is already against you, because they were for them, Hitler was always like their kleine Gefreit, like the small kind of regular army guy, because that's what Hitler had been in First World War. And now suddenly he was the big decision maker. So they thought they make much better decisions than him. So Goering says their power will be so overwhelming that they will from now on call the shots how this war will continue and what will be done next. You should let me with the Luftwaffe do the job from the air. The National Socialist Luftwaffe is going to end the Western campaign. So he thought that he could destroy. It doesn't make sense, even destroy the British military from planes. Maybe you can do it, but certainly he couldn't do it. So the tank generals received the halte befell the stopping order. They didn't believe it when they received it because the victory, this would have been complete victory over Great Britain. This would have been the end of Great Britain. The whole British military was encircled, but they did get out through Dunkirk. That's why the movie Dunkirk by Christopher Nolan is not good because he doesn't describe what happened on the German side. It's just this heroic British thing. Yeah, we just got out and we reformed and then we beat. This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of Army High Command and convinced by Goering's morphine high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't. I mean, he bombed. And then the British, they were on ships and a few ships were sunk, but basically they got out. You need to do this on the ground. At least back then you would have needed to do it on the ground. So that was a big mistake by Hitler. That's why von Manstein, One of the three tank generals from February 17 was Rommel, von Manstein and Guderian. And von Manstein, he later said he spoke of a velour Nasik, a lost victory. He said The Western campaign was a lost victory because we really could have achieved the victory. We could have dominated. They could have invaded Britain. There was no more military.
- [88:19]
A
Well, okay, on land there was still the Royal Air Force and the, and the Navy.
- [88:25]
B
And the Navy, yeah.
- [88:26]
A
So like so invading, invading Britain. I think any invasion of actual Britain is a gigantic mistake on the Nazi part.
- [88:35]
B
But if Britain doesn't have a standing army anymore, it's much easier than they still have one.
- [88:40]
A
I think it's still extremely difficult to invade, but it's much easier to sort of neutralize, make sure that, that, that Britain is not a player in the war for sure.
- [88:51]
B
Maybe Hitler wouldn't have invaded at all.
- [88:53]
A
Anyhow also because of his sort of not respect but non hatred of the.
- [88:59]
B
British Empire because they're also white supremacists. So why would we fight them? You know, it doesn't make sense. While the French, they were already like half black basically in Hitler's eyes.
- [89:09]
A
If we were to talk about counterfactual history of the possible trajectories of the war that would lead to Nazi victory. One of the big mistakes is the invasion of Britain. So you already mentioned the mistake with Dunkirk. But beyond that, if they even captured mainland Europe, the, they could have just neutralized the British threat and not invaded Britain and then go after the oil which is much needed maybe in the Middle East. So focus on that campaign before invading the Soviet Union and then maybe wait for the Soviet Union to invade them through Poland, which would be likely coming or wait until 1943, something like this to invade east without the Western front having to be been there. And the other really big mistake is, is declaring war against the United States, having complete disrespect for the United States and declaring one in the United States, which didn't have to be done at all. So it's collecting enemies when those didn't have to be done. So there is, to me actually there's a lot of paths there. As dark as it is to imagine for Nazi Germany to be successful in the invasion of the Soviet Union even.
- [90:42]
B
Well, I think that's why the Wehrmacht officers were pissed at Hitler because they knew that they could actually win if it was done in a certain way. But Hitler's ideology and his stupidity and later also his degeneration of his cognitive abilities did not allow the Wehrmacht to fight in the most effective way. So they had a. Hitler was a very bad leader after Dunkirk.
- [91:07]
A
So can you speak to the morphine? What kind of drug is morphine?
- [91:11]
B
Morphine was developed in the 19th century by a German, a young chemist called Saturna. And he wanted to know what is the potent alkaloid in opium, because opium is a natural drug, but there's something in the opium that actually is decisive, and that's morphine. So he was able to extract that from the opium. So he basically, this young guy, he invented morphine, which then became very important in wars, especially like the American Civil War, is unthinkable without morphine, or at least it would have been very different. Because with morphine, you can treat people, you can amputate people, you can fix people up and send them back into battle. And that also corresponded with the development of the hypodermic needle, the injection needle, that was around in the mid 19th century. So the injection needle and morphine together became a very efficient way to treat soldiers. And that prolonged, for example, the civil war in America.
- [92:21]
A
So Guring was taking morphine.
- [92:23]
B
Yeah, morphine is like the classic. It's like you don't eat opium. You know, you take what is active in opium and you inject it. And that's much. That's a very potent, you know, that numbs all your pain. Like you don't have. You don't have pain anymore. If you're on morphine also affects judgment. I've never taken morphine, so I cannot really say. Like, there's a few junkies that are highly creative on it. Like, a lot of musicians in the 60s were using heroin, which is a more potent form, or like, it's a half synthetic. It's an opioid. Morphine is an opiate and heroin is an opioid. I guess you could be quite sharp on it also. That's why Hitler liked Oikodal, which is Oxycontin, Oxycodone.
- [93:20]
A
He injected that, which is another opiate, heroin.
- [93:23]
B
Like, it was a product by the Merck Company from Darmstadt, Germany. They made Oikodal, which, when Germany lost the war, the patent was basically taken by America and then ended up in oxycodone. So if you inject Oikodal, that was a very popular drug in the 20s, because apparently it gives you the most beautiful high on earth. You're like super high. Like, you feel extremely well and you can think very clearly and you feel like this is how life should feel. High on Oiko Dahl, this is like Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. He used Oiko Dahl. Quite a few doctors actually used it also. And probably quite a few Jewish doctors also used it because this was like a doctor's drug. Doctors knew how to set the injection. And it was a great experience. And Hitler, he really loved to be on Oikodal. Like, he would use Oikodal every second day. In the beginning, 10 milligrams intravenously, then he raised to 20 milligrams. And I spoke to someone who's actually done exactly that drug application because I wanted to know how Hitler felt. And I didn't feel like doing it myself for some reason. I don't like needles, so I didn't want to put a needle in my vein to have, like, the Hitler drug experience. I should have done it. Like a historian, a proper historian never does that. Okay. But I thought I should take quite a few drugs that I write about to understand it better. But this drug I didn't take. I never shot oxycodone intravenously into my veins. But I met someone who did, and he said, it's like the king's high. If you do that properly, obviously you get addicted to it.
- [95:03]
A
I'd be scared to try.
- [95:05]
B
Very intense experience.
- [95:06]
A
I think it's a very badass thing to do for a historian, by the way. But I think it's a big risk. I think I. I think. I mean, there is a risk that comes along with it. Right?
- [95:16]
B
Well, but not for Hitler, because he got the Oiko dye from the pharmacy. He knew exactly. Like, his doctor knew exactly what was inside. It was made by a pharmaceutical company.
- [95:26]
A
No, I mean, the risk of addiction.
- [95:28]
B
Yeah, that is a big risk. That is a big risk. But there's also the risk of getting impure stuff and carried on the street and die from an overdose or. But the addiction thing is very. I think it happens quite quickly with Oikodiol because it's such a great feeling. So why wouldn't you do it over and over again? Because. And then the opioid receptors in the brain want you to take it, and if you don't take it, you get withdrawal symptoms and you feel like shit, and you have to. So that's the problem with opioids, with morphine. That's what happens, and that's what happened to Hitler.
- [96:00]
A
I generally say yes to most things, but those drugs, like cocaine doesn't scare me. Heroin scares me. Like, the opioids scare me. Oxycodone scares me.
- [96:15]
B
Because they really make you physically dependent. I don't even know if cocaine makes you physically dependent. It makes you psychologically addicted. But they actually. You have to get it, otherwise you feel bad. That's a physical terrible.
- [96:28]
A
And also addiction for life to feel like Less when you're not on it.
- [96:33]
B
Right.
- [96:34]
A
That scares me.
- [96:35]
B
That's the problem also with methamphetamine. People who use a lot of methamphetamine on days they don't use it, they don't feel great at all, especially not compared to the methamphetamine days. So that became a problem in Germany when people were really using more and more of the Pavitin.
- [96:51]
A
All right, you got to take me through the full drug cocktail that Hitler was on. Patient A of Morels. Let's start at the beginning. We're big on setting context here. So tell the story of Dr. Theodore Morel. How did he meet Hitler?
- [97:08]
B
Well, Morel was. He had his practice on Kuhfirstendam, which is like the main boulevard of Berlin in the west of Berlin. Kind of a fancy street. And he was a celebrity doctor, which was a new type of doctor, in a way. Dr. Feelgood. He kind of was one of the first Dr. Feelgood. So you didn't go to him when you had a disease. You went to him when you were. Let's say you were like an opera star in the Berlin Opera and you had a big premiere. So you would go to Morel in the afternoon, and he would give you a nice shot, and then you would be really good on stage. But he was not a quack. I mean, he just knew his drugs, and he believed in. Why shouldn't you treat someone even if that person doesn't have a disease, if you can make that person feel better, it's good. Especially if that person pays. Like he said. Everyone who pays my. And he wasn't cheap, who comes to me and wants a testosterone hormone injection or a vitamin injection or an opioid injection. You get it from him. He. He didn't have any scruples.
- [98:19]
A
I mean, but we should also say he was pretty innovative and extremely knowledgeable. So you mentioned hormones, but also, you know, like probiotics, like you're talking about.
- [98:29]
B
Just.
- [98:30]
A
He knew his shit.
- [98:31]
B
He was a bit of a nerd.
- [98:33]
A
Yeah. He was like a legit doctor. Just didn't have boundaries about what he used.
- [98:38]
B
He had a very unappealing physical appearance, and I think that was a problem for him. And he was known to have very bad eating habits. Like, sauce was running. And so people were easily disgusted by him. He was like an outsider. He was really like a freak. But when people looked at him after he had given them an injection and they said, thank you, and I feel so great now. That's what kind of made his day. You know. So one day, a man entered his doctor's office on Kofestendam named Hubertus Hoffmann. And Hubertus Hoffmann was a photographer, and he had gonorrhea. And Morel, because he knew about alternative ways to treat, he actually cured him. And Hubertus Hoffman said to Morel, I have a good friend, and I think you should meet him. And I'm going to have a dinner in Munich, and I think it would be really worth your time to come. And Morel came, and the good friend was Hitler, because Hubertus Hoffman was the photographer of Hitler. And they were in German. We have a U, a formal U, which is Sie. If I don't know you so well, I say, sie. If you're my close friend, I say, do you? And Hitler only had, like, four people. He would say, you too. He was always like to see, like, the distance. It was always about distance and respect and borders and boundaries.
- [100:06]
A
What are the two again? See and what do see and do?
- [100:10]
B
Yeah, see is the formal one and do is the. Is the informal one.
- [100:13]
A
Yeah. In Russian, there's the same thing, V and D. And so there's a big.
- [100:18]
B
That's a big thing also in friend. In French, you also have that. You have that in Spanish, only in English, you don't have it.
- [100:24]
A
And there is. It is part of the cultural sort of discourse of, like, when you upgrade from the V to the te, from the C to the do, or from the dew to the sea.
- [100:35]
B
From the sea to the dew. That would be the upgrade because you become more intimate.
- [100:39]
A
Yeah. Like, and you ask, can I go from the sea to do?
- [100:42]
B
Yeah, like, the older person must suggest it, I think.
- [100:45]
A
Yeah. Okay. The beautiful language.
- [100:48]
B
So Hoffman was a du Freund. A dudz Freund, we say, of Hitler. So he was quite close to Hitler, and so that's why he could also make that close connection. So he had a dinner with just him, Hitler, Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend. And Morel came, like, they sent a plane to Berlin to pick him up. So it was like VIP treatment. It was the whole thing.
- [101:09]
A
And this is 36.
- [101:11]
B
Yeah. They had spaghetti with tomato sauce on the side. I read in a description of this event, the tomato sauce was on the side, and there was Muscat. What is muscat? It's a spice. Nutmeg.
- [101:27]
A
Nutmeg, yeah.
- [101:28]
B
It was with nutmeg, which is an unusual recipe, I guess, but that's what they had. And spaghetti wasn't a fancy thing. It came from Italy, from Mussolini, who invented fascism in Italy. And who was like Hitler's role model for a long time, until Hitler surpassed him, obviously. So the spaghetti, the spaghetti, they came from Italy and it was a big thing. And Morel had the big problem that spaghetti is hard to eat, right? And he couldn't even like. It was a catastrophe. But he got out of it because Hitler complained about stomach problems. Because Hitler was a terrible vegetarian. He was a so called cake vegetarian. He would only eat like sweets, like cake, no meat, of course, but like, he wouldn't like eat healthy stuff, you know. So he was bloated the whole time because if you only eat like cake and white bread and it's not good. But so he voiced that. And there was also. Brandt was there like an official doctor from the SS that was like his doctor. And Hitler said, my doctors can't cure me. And Morel was like, this is my chance, thank you, God. And he told Hitler about the probiotics, which Hitler had never heard of. And also Brandt, the doctor, he hadn't heard of because that was a new thing that you give. And Hitler was asking, what is that? And Morel said, these are live bacteria from German soldiers from the war in the first World War that were fighting in Serbia. There was one guy who didn't get the stomach flu. And all the others drank the water in Serbia and all got sick. But this one guy. So his bacteria, and this is a true story, his gut bacteria were cultivated into a medicine called Mutaflor. And Morel told Hitler about this. And this is amazing. I have to try this. And it helped. He got the Muta flor. He did the Muta Fluhr kind of therapy and it cured him. He suddenly had no bloating anymore. And the farting of Hitler was really bad. So bad that it would like. It diminished his ability to work. So suddenly he could work. He felt better. He didn't have the pain. He felt great. So he really thought that Morel is a wonder doctor. And he asked Morel pretty quickly afterwards, do you want to be my personal physician? And Morel was like, his wife was very much against it because she said, if you become the personal physician of Hitler, you won't have any time for me anymore. And he said, like, come on, man, this is like the chance you only get once in your life.
- [104:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, at this point, Hitler's a really big deal.
- [104:07]
B
He's the most powerful man in Europe. And there have not been war crimes because the war hasn't started yet. Obviously there's concentration camps and a lot of crimes have Been committed, but it's also kind of hushed up, you know, it's not such a huge thing as now we know it became. So Morel never really has any conscientious problems. He just think it's great, you know, I'm going to be the doctor. I'm going to be part of history. So he becomes a personal physician. And being this vitamin guy, like, vitamins were really his thing. He believed in the power of vitamins. And today I think we know that he was right. Vitamins are good, but back then, no one knew. And Hitler was like, okay, he told Hitler, and then Hitler said, okay, I want to try this vitamins. And what they did from the beginning was injections because Hitler didn't want to take a pill because a pill takes too long and it goes through the tract that he has the problems with, like the digestion. He didn't want to take a pill. He believed in the injection. And Morel was the masterful injector because the needles were thicker than they are today. But Morel could give you an injection without you feeling any pain. So Hitler was quite impressed. So he got, like, a vitamin C injection. But Hitler loved the daily injection. So he got hooked on the daily injection. Once he got the injection, the day was good. And he never got sick, actually. And he could stand for a long time with the arm raised. He went to the gym, basically. I mean, he had a gym where he was doing exercise so he could have the arm up for hours when a military parade would walk by. So he was quite fit and he was never sick. And Morel was giving him the daily injection, and. And they lived happily ever after, basically, until the Soviet Union attacked.
- [106:03]
A
Wait, he literally lifted so he can do the Heil Hitler salute.
- [106:08]
B
Yeah, I found a document for that.
- [106:13]
A
Oh, God, that's dark.
- [106:14]
B
He had an expander. We say. I don't know. Do you use that word in English? Expander?
- [106:18]
A
Oh, like a band?
- [106:20]
B
Yeah, it's like this. You do like.
- [106:21]
A
Yeah, I have one of those.
- [106:23]
B
Yeah, that's what he did in front of the window.
- [106:29]
A
Well, at least he's not doing in front of a mirror. Okay. Wow, that's dark. Okay, that's. I mean, those little details. Yet another reminder that he's just a human being.
- [106:40]
B
I mean, it's hard to keep your arm up for, like, hours. You can't let it down if you keep it up. That's what it's all about, you know?
- [106:47]
A
I mean, he was very much about the facade. Right. He's very important to present himself In a certain kind of way, when he's giving the speeches.
- [106:55]
B
Yeah. Everything was orchestrated. The Nazis were masters in propaganda. They really knew how to create the perfect image.
- [107:04]
A
Okay, so let's go into the cocktail started with the vitamins. This is in 36, right?
- [107:10]
B
I think it was pretty harmless in the beginning, but the addiction to the injection was the main thing that I think happened, that Hitler needed his doctor. But from 36 to 41, only, like, vitamins are being injected and glucose. So I don't think it really harms you. I mean, it might benefit you. He never got sick. He was fit.
- [107:36]
A
I mean, this is the thing that there was.
- [107:38]
B
Phase one of his drug use were the vitamins until 41.
- [107:41]
A
So you think the tweaking at the Olympics, though, you've talked about before, but it's still. So you're saying this person we're watching a video of here is not on drugs?
- [107:52]
B
I don't know. I don't think so. So the video could be fake.
- [107:57]
A
It could be sped up.
- [107:58]
B
I think it's fake because I think someone read my book that Hitler was on, thought that Hitler was always on meth and created this. But I might be wrong.
- [108:05]
A
And the narrative takes hold. And I think the thing you mentioned, he could be on sugar, so it could be a lot of elements.
- [108:12]
B
He was also a weird guy. Maybe he was really just rocking because he was so happy what he saw. You know, maybe he really got into it. Maybe it was a sexual thing for him, what he saw. I don't know. There's no document showing that he took a drug on that day. Let's put it that way.
- [108:26]
A
I think I've been especially, like, stay up all night. I'll get. I've been fidgety. You can be caught in a certain moment when you're being, like, very, like. Like fidgety.
- [108:37]
B
I think he probably rocked a few times, and then the video was cut in a way that he rocks more or something. Also, methamphetamine wasn't yet available in 1936. That's important to say for sure he was not. So what is said here on Hitler tweaking on meth at the 1936 Olympics is definitely false.
- [108:57]
A
Okay, there you go. So when did it start getting more serious, the injection and the kind of drugs he was taking?
- [109:06]
B
This was a day in August of 1941. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd. So this is about six weeks into the campaign, which was called Unternehmen Barbarossa, and Germany was doing pretty well. And it came to a crucial moment where high command said, no, we're going to take Moscow. And Hitler said, no, we're going to split up the troops and take Leningrad, which is now St. Petersburg in the north and in the south we're going to go for the, for the oil fields. Basically that was his plan. He said, let's not do Moscow. And high command was like, this is the biggest mistake. We must take Moscow. If we take Moscow, we're going to win. And Hitler became ill for the first time on the day. This decision, I mean, this is a dynamic thing that's going on. They're moving and now they have to decide will we split up or we will continue towards Moscow. He had the Russian flu, in German, the Ruhr, which is like a flu type disease with very high fever. It comes like they were in the field, so they were in the east camping out. Maybe he drank water that wasn't good or he had some. They tested everything meticulously. But he got sick, high fever, he felt like shit. And he said to Morel, and you can see that in Morel's notes. Morel describes this very vividly in his notes, which are at the Federal Archives, which no historian ever looked at except me, the non historian, which is kind of funny. So he describes how Hitler then asks of him, basically says, vitamins are not enough anymore. Like he's very weak, he must go to the military briefing. But if you. The flu is quite a severe disease. I think if you have a heavy flu, you really feel like you're going to die. You can't go to a military briefing. But Morez kind of fought with himself and then he decided to inject an opioid into Hitler's veins intravenously, like the strongest application possible. And this was Dolantine, which is a German opioid that was legal. And I was once an exchange student in Flint, Michigan, 1988. And I was number one of the tennis team because I was quite a good tennis player. We were playing our main enemy, I think I was at Flint Powers Catholic High School in Flint, Michigan. And I think it was power Central. And they had a number one, Mark Resteiner, still remember.
- [111:54]
A
Wow.
- [111:55]
B
He was feared and no one could beat him.
- [111:59]
A
Yes.
- [112:00]
B
And on the day of the match I had the Russian flu, basically. And I was the hope. I was the number one, the wonder kid from Germany. And they took me to a doctor and the doctor gave me an injection. And I don't know until this day because I just, I was, you know, kid. I got the injection. I was 17 and I felt great, like the flu was gone like this. It was probably an opioid something, you know, something that just shuts off all the pain and gives you, you know, energy. And I beat this guy in a way. I totally. I thought of a new technique by playing like very high balls. Like in the direct, like fierceful competition. I would have lost. So I played something that in Germany we call fuden, which is something you don't really do. You just play high balls, which is not pretty to look at, but it's very effective. And he just lost. He just lost his nerve. And I beat him like six zero six zero, something like that. Sensational. So Hitler receives this Dolentine injection and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room. He dominates the meeting room. He feels great. He decides in front of everybody, no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow. They probably could have taken it or maybe not. But the decision was made in August to.
- [113:40]
A
I think it's one of the biggest blunders of the.
- [113:43]
B
To not take Moscow.
- [113:44]
A
To not take Moscow. I think they had a straight shot given this organization.
- [113:49]
B
They had the one time thing, the one time moment where they could have done it. And the German war machine could only win in so called speed wars, like lightning war, only if they would do it very fast and surprise. Because they were always weaker. Basically they just had this moment, this dynamic moment. And this was fueled by the methamphetamine. Also in the Soviet Union hundreds of millions of dosages were given. So the Germans were really going. And at one point this ends. You know, you can't take methods for the rest of your life. You're just going to end up being a nervous wreck. But you can do it for like two months. You could do it, but then it stops.
- [114:24]
A
I think if you're really honest about where you have the asymmetry of power, which is in the speed of the blitzkrieg. So that's similar to Genghis Khan who had a very small military. But their advantage was, I mean, I think at the peak it would be probably 100,000 and. But, but every soldier of Genghis Khan's had five horses. So.
- [114:51]
B
Right.
- [114:51]
A
The whole point was they can move really fast. They, they. And they. Not just fast, but they can move on all terrain. So they can go around. You know, if wars were Fought on normal roads, you're supposed to travel a certain kind of way. If you go fast and around, not on paths that are usually taken. Attack from all kinds of sides. That's why you can conquer as much as Genghis Khan was able to conquer. And the same thing with the Nazi forces. This is their biggest advantage. And not using that is essentially the end of its effectiveness.
- [115:28]
B
I think that's also why the tank troops were such a good weapon, because they can go off road while military vehicles, cars cannot do it. Like a tank can even go through a forest and just kill small trees and just run over it. So those are kind of the five horses. That was the idea that they had at this working breakfast. That's what they presented to Hitler. We're going to use the tank force in a very different way and that's going to enable us to win the Lightning war campaigns.
- [115:58]
A
It was that one of the first times he tried an opiate like that, an intense one.
- [116:03]
B
That was the first time.
- [116:05]
A
And then that was it for him.
- [116:07]
B
Well, not immediately. Like you can see when you study his medications that that is a turning point in a way that now he deviates from the vitamins. Like he becomes more interested in what's out there. And like from 41 to 43 he tries out a lot of medications that he didn't try out before. Before that it was quite conventional, mostly vitamins and glucose. But now he becomes experimental and he discusses this with Morel. And Morel is also very experimental. Like they got really, they really nerded themselves into like what can we use? Like bulls testicle extracts. So Morel, in order to present those things to his patient A, he created a pharmaceutical company that he ran. He was a personal physician of Hitler and he was also the CEO of Hama Pharmaceuticals, which had its production site in occupied Czechoslovakia. And for example, at one point when Germany had invaded the Ukraine, Morel asked for a monopoly for all the organs of all the slaughtered animals from all the slaughterhouses in the Ukraine. So this was a huge logistical operation. Like all the slaughtered animals, all the organs were removed for the personal physician of the sent in military trains back to the factory in occupied Czechoslovakia. And the military became really upset with that because they said we need our trains to transport back our wounded soldiers. Now we're like cars are full with awful and pigs hearts and livers. And it was totally bizarre. But Morel then became like he was this good natured Dr. Feelgood in the beginning. And then when Ukraine was occupied, he became this business freak who Made a lot of money with his dubious hormonal concoctions where he would threaten the army, if you don't let the train with my raw materials go to my factory, I will tell Hitler and you will have a problem. He was acting like that. He became quite an asshole, actually, and a war criminal because he also. At his factory where he would make the famous pig liver extract that was then tested by Hitler. And Hitler said it was. That's a. That's a good medication. I feel more. I have more energy. So this can also be sold to the German military. That's how it worked. Because the regulations at the time were that it was very difficult to bring out a new medication onto the market, because medications, to bring them onto the market, you need certain test phases and all of that stuff. So that's hard to do in a war, especially in World War II. So Hitler said to Morel, I'm going to be your guinea pig. You just make it in your factory. I test it, and if I think it's good, then I'm just going to write a. Today you would say a decree, because I'm the president, I can order it, that it's going to be legal all over Germany.
- [119:27]
A
So Hitler was a real drug guy. He liked drugs.
- [119:30]
B
Well, he liked to experiment, I would say, with his. With. With drugs. And with Morel, they never. Like he was against drugs, you know, he was.
- [119:40]
A
But that's a crazy thing for a guy who didn't do anything, right?
- [119:43]
B
It's a big contradiction or it's a big irony, or it's very weird.
- [119:50]
A
But isn't it even a bit of a mystery? Because at that stage, I'm sure he was paranoid about being killed and all that kind of stuff. So he must have really trusted Morel, right?
- [120:00]
B
Yeah, he trusted Morel because Morel was not part of any organization. He was the loner coming from the VIP doctors, his own VIP doctor's office. And now he was basically Hitler's toy. Like, Hitler could get access to all kinds of medications through him. And Morel would never say it to anybody. You know, he would just write it down. But this was kept quite secret. No one knew what was going on between the two men.
- [120:23]
A
It's just so interesting because, like, why would he. There might be. Can you maybe even speak to that? Why did Hitler trust another human being this much? Because you could probably make the case nobody was closer to Hitler than Morel.
- [120:40]
B
That is certainly the story I'm telling.
- [120:42]
A
Isn't that crazy? Like, what is that? What is it about? Morel, this guy who's, I guess he's fat and weird and like nobody really.
- [120:53]
B
Likes him, he was not a threat to Hitler. Like Hitler hated all the super smart medicine people. Like he never undressed before them. He never let himself be seen naked because he didn't want anyone to know anything about him that he couldn't control. So Mouret was harmless. Mouret would, but basically did what Hitler wanted. They wouldn't say, today we're going to take drugs together. It's going to be fun. Hitler was always about optimizing his performance because he knew only I'm doing this. And he always thought he's going to die young. So he always like, I don't have unlimited time. The clock was always ticking, so I have to be always the high performer. So Hitler, when he first experienced the beauty of the opioid high that was given to him in August 1941 intravenously, when he experienced that kind of his eyes opened and he didn't think this was a drug. I mean, this is a medicine. This is a medicine that helps me function. This is a medicine that my doctor gives me in a very controlled manner and that lets me be extremely sharp for like eight hours. I can convince all the generals, I can do my job. I'm happy. Because Hitler was also depressed. I mean, this is he need. He need like he really appreciated what the drug gave him, but he never thought, now I'm becoming like a drug.
- [122:25]
A
Addict or so it begins to. Oxycodone in general begins to work within 30, 60 minutes and lasts for about four to six hours. This is a long lasting thing.
- [122:35]
B
Yeah, but these are. This, this you swallow. If you get an intravenous injection, it works after one second. Get the injections, you're high, but it.
- [122:42]
A
Lasts for many hours.
- [122:44]
B
Yeah, that's why people love heroin who take it because you feel like shit. You take the injection, you feel great. I mean, it's in your system for quite a while. Like you can go into the meeting quite comfortably into the meeting.
- [122:58]
A
Yeah, Okay.
- [122:59]
B
I mean, there's the briefing. It starts at 1. Morel comes and you can see this in the notes. Like I have to be at the, in his bedroom at 12. And then, you know, you chat a bit and then Hitler rolls up his uniform sleeve and then he gets the injection maybe at maybe 12:30, then the high comes on and then it's very stable. Like you feel great. This is a pure product from the Merck company. This is not some heroin from the street. And Morel knows exactly what dosage you want right now. So you feel at the top of your game. You don't feel. You're not intoxicated. I mean, you are, but it makes you clear, you know, so the mind is clear. The mind's totally clear. Your body feels fantastic. You know exactly your points. You know exactly how the others. Because the others are just mortals, you know, because they're sober. They just sit there and they just. They haven't slept very well or they have problems with them, you know, and you're way above them.
- [123:59]
A
What do we know about general psychological effects of it? So does it boost your confidence? Does it boost aggressiveness? What effect did it have on his vision of the world?
- [124:09]
B
It makes you feel extremely confident. You have a lot of energy, but it's not too much. Like, let's say you take cocaine or methamphetamine. You're like, that's why Hitler was never a meth guy. That's also why I think this video is fake. He didn't take math. I mean, I studied Morel's. The things he gave them. He gave a lot of things, and only twice was math. So. So that was. That's not a lot for Hitler, like, twice.
- [124:36]
A
I read that the multivitamin had some amphetamine and maybe meth. A little bit or. No, multi.
- [124:43]
B
I mean. I mean, Vitamultin. I mean, vitamultin is interesting because it was a little bar of a sweet that was lying next to his food. So he would just, you know, eat. And then at the end, he would take this. It was nice tasting. It, had some sugar in it. And I read through all of the, you know, ingredients of the. There were different types and never. There's never methamphetamine in it.
- [125:07]
A
There isn't.
- [125:07]
B
Okay. There was an SS, Dr. Schenck, and he claimed that Morel made special Vitamol in his lab with meth in it, but I think he just made that up. Okay, There's. There's. There was never any proof of that.
- [125:23]
A
I mean, that's a really important, like, line to draw. The army, the Nazi army at scale, not everybody, but some fraction, especially during the French campaign, used meth.
- [125:36]
B
Right?
- [125:36]
A
And then there's Hitler, which used a lot of drugs, but meth was not one of them, really.
- [125:43]
B
No. Meth for him was just for the foot soldiers, you know, I mean, he didn't even talk about meth. This is not nothing that concerned him, you know, this is something that makes you function. Maybe he signed. I mean, it went over his Desk, the stimulant decree. But. But I don't know if he really read it or understood it. I mean, he probably knew pervitine because everyone knew it. And maybe they discussed it, but they would probably also not. I mean, there's a point when there's a conflict about methamphetamine in the army. This is when the Secretary of Health of the German government, the Nazi government, Conti, he starts writing to the army and he says, you must stop this. This is against Nazi ideology. But the army basically doesn't listen to him and keeps on using meth all the way to the end. So maybe that guy Conti, maybe he discussed this with Hitler, but also Hitler never. You know, if Hitler would have said, we stopped the methamphetamine, it probably would have stopped. But Conti saying that wasn't enough. I don't think Hitler was really into meth. It was not his thing. He was more into the opioids, into these weird hormonal things. Like those things were especially. The opioids were interesting to him because you can function on opioids for a long time if you have a proper product and a doctor that gives you the injections. I mean, Goering was addicted to morphine from 1923 until when the Americans captured him in 45. That's 22 years he was functioning on morphine. And when they captured him, he had. I write about it in blitz, like the amount of morphine capsules he had on him. So what the Americans did was first take away all the morphine from him, and then he went through withdrawal in American incarceration and he lost a lot of pounds. And he became more of a haggard Goering, which was then in Nuremberg, this haggard kind of guy defending what he did. And so Hitler was really an opioid guy while the army was really messed up. That's how you could sum it up.
- [127:54]
A
Briefly, he did try cocaine. Why didn't he get into cocaine?
- [127:59]
B
He started cocaine after the bomb attack by Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944, when this bomb went off, which actually killed a few people in the room. This was during a military briefing. Stauffenberg put a. A bag with explosives under the table, and the table actually saved Hitler's life because it was a good German quality oak table. So the table was so stable that the bomb explosion kind of just kind of blew up the table. But Hitler behind the table was protected by this table.
- [128:29]
A
Yeah, this is the closest assassination attempt probably.
- [128:33]
B
I mean, it's very weird that it didn't succeed because he had the bomb. He put it next to Hitler. He took out some of the explosives before he went into the room. This is one of the big mysteries. Why did Stauffenberg take out some of the explosives? There's no explanation for it. But Hitler survived, but he was quite injured, which Nazi propaganda always denied. They always said the was miraculously unharmed, but he was quite harmed. There were like over 100 splinters from the wood everywhere his eardrums were blown, which was, you know, it's quite an injury, I guess. You know, he was bleeding internally and, and he was shell shocked, basically. And then a new doctor comes in. His name is Giesing. Because Morel was not a. In Germany we have. Well, I guess it's worldwide. It's the ear, nose and throat specialist, right? So an ear, nose and throat specialist from the German army called Dr. Giesing. He was ordered to come into headquarters after the bomb attack to treat Hitler's blown earth drums. And Giesing gave Hitler cocaine. Because cocaine at the time was being. It was used, it was not Schedule 1. It had the effect that it would numb the pain. And you could use it. You would put it on a certain place where you had the pain and then it would numb that area. But Hitler was like, he'd never taken cocaine before, but he got very interested in it. And Gieseng writes a meticulous report about his experiences with Hitler alone. That report is really fun to read. It's about a 15 page report that he did for American military after the war when he was being interrogated by American military. He described what happened with Hitler and him. And he realized that Hitler really liked the cocaine. And then he's started saying, now give it in the nose. It was a liquid that he could apply with a dab into the nose. It wasn't cocaine powder, but he could.
- [130:43]
A
Liquefied.
- [130:45]
B
Yeah, liquefied cocaine. And Hitler loved it. And he's saying things like, finally I can think clear again. And he had this cocaine rush, which is a rush of superiority. It's a dangerous drug because you think you know more than the other. It's not very humble drug, you know, it just increases the ego and that. Actually he liked that because that was, you know, after the bomb attack, he thought everyone was a traitor. Like he didn't feel safe anymore in his own bunker, you know. And he was like, Nazis, the right wing is always paranoid, like who's the enemy? Like they're behind us, like they're stabbing us in the back. So Hitler was This type of person. So the cocaine kind of stabilized him, and Gieseng realized that this guy is like a drug guy. He didn't know. He came in, he saw the. For the first time, he was in awe and like a drug wreck was approaching him. And as soon as he had some cocaine in his system, because this was summer 44, he already had taken a lot of opioids and a lot of drugs and a lot of these dubious hormonal concoctions which led to autoimmune diseases in Hitler, maybe even had Parkinson's, morale, basically turned him into a physical wreck. That Gieseng also writes about this. He's trembling before he goes into the room for the first time where the is. And then this old guy in a blue kind of pajama is kind of coming up to him and kind of shaking his hand. That's the. Gieseng is like, totally shocked because he's.
- [132:15]
A
Like.
- [132:17]
B
The destiny of the German nation, the whole Europe, everything hangs on this guy. And then whenever he takes cocaine, he's a little bit better, like. But the cocaine had the problem that Gieseng was more of, at least later in his discussions with the US military, he described himself as a conscientious guy. And he's like, I became like, I had kind of problems giving Hitler more cocaine.
- [132:46]
A
Yeah. And I'm sure Hitler could have sensed that.
- [132:49]
B
And then Morel started disliking geising, because Hitler spent more time now with Giesing than with him. And there was what I call the doctor's war ensued because Giesing then tried to get rid of Morel because Giest could suddenly see that Hitler was receiving a lot of drugs and he was taking cocaine with Giesing. Giesing left the room. Then Morel would come in and give him Oikodal, the opioid, intravenously, which is the speedball effect. Cocaine and an opioid at the same time. That creates a really crazy high. But that's a high that's not stable anymore. That's a high that you. That's like at the end of your drug career, you take the speedball.
- [133:36]
A
So speedball is a combination of a stimulant and a depressant. Cocaine. Yeah. So combining cocaine and heroin, huh?
- [133:48]
B
Wow. I've never had a speedball, but I think it's like the most hardcore drug experience you can have. And Hitler had this in the summer of 1944 for quite some time. And then the doctors really fought for an influence over Hitler. And Giesing teamed up with Himmler, head of the ss, and basically said to Himmler, this Morel guy. And Himmler was already suspicious of Morel, obviously, because Morel is spending so much time with Hitler, there's no control. Like, Himmler was a control freak. What is he actually giving to the Fuhrer? Doesn't look good anymore. So Gieseng was trying to get Morel out, maybe because he wanted Hitler to have a better health. Maybe he wanted to have the job himself. He certainly tried to get rid of Morel. And it came to, like, the High Noon situation, like the duel between the two doctors. It's. By the way, why I think it's completely insane that Hollywood hasn't bought the rights yet alone. This doctor's War.
- [134:48]
A
You mean for the entire Blitz story?
- [134:50]
B
Yeah, of course.
- [134:51]
A
Yeah. Yeah. That's really. I mean, some of the greatest movies. I mean, like Fear Unloading Las Vegas.
- [134:57]
B
You can do a drug movie on the Nazis.
- [135:00]
A
You know, one of my favorite movies, probably Downfall, which is Hitler in the Bunker, which does, I guess. Does Downfall have a drug?
- [135:07]
B
No, they missed. They missed the drug angle because my book hadn't been out yet. They didn't know about it. That's why they have a different story. They can't really explain why Hitler became a physical wreck. There's no explanation for it except the drugs. The opioid addiction, you could explain.
- [135:24]
A
It is a part of it that. It's an extremely stressful position he's in.
- [135:30]
B
Yeah. But don't become a physical wreck.
- [135:33]
A
The physical wreck aspect. Yeah.
- [135:35]
B
And there were two bedrooms in the bunker in Berlin. Two bedrooms. One, of course, for Hitler, the other one for Morel. No one else was sleeping in the bunker. I mean, you can see the importance of. Especially those last months of Morel in the bunker. And they didn't get that when they made the movie the Downfall. But it's still an interesting movie. But I can't take it seriously because they didn't see this as a drug component.
- [136:03]
A
Again, I don't think it has to be the main thing, but it has to be a part of it. A serious movie on Blissed would be really nice. It's not easy to do. No, there's something about drugs. If you do a movie on drugs that involve drugs, that it makes it. You can go too far into, like, Tarantino territory, where it's more like. Which is also incredible and awesome, but it's a different thing.
- [136:31]
B
He invents history and he is, like, very open about it. Like, this is not what actually happened. I think a Blitz movie would have to stick to the facts. And I spoke with some directors, very good German directors, and it's just very hard to do, but.
- [136:46]
A
But if you do it well, that's a legendary movie. Yeah, that would be incredible. What. Can you just speak high level from. From. What is it you said? 41 to 45. What were some behavioral changes or changes in decision making that we can trace in Hitler that could be attributed to drugs? How did it change them?
- [137:13]
B
Well, an interesting event is July 1943, in a villa in northern Italy where Hitler meets Mussolini. And Mussolini is basically fed up with the war and he wants Italy to leave the axis of evil. And Hitler is really pissed when he hears that. He knows that's what the meeting is all about. And Mussolini, I mean, the Italians invented that modern type of fascism. And Italy was the role model for Nazi Germany. But by now Nazi Germany, of course, has been much more powerful, but Italy is the most important ally. And now Mussolini is like quitting in the middle of the war. I mean, what is going on here? So Hitler becomes. And Morel writes about this quite a lot. He's in a terrible mood. He doesn't want to go. Like he might lose his temper or whatever. He's not happy. And actually that's the day when he receives the Oikudal for the first time. Because he says to Morel, I'm under such stress, I'm not gonna go. He threatens. Like, he calls off the whole thing. The plane's already waiting in Obersalzberg. Everything is ready. And he says, I'm not meeting this guy. And then Morel gives him oikudal. And you can see the time when he gets the oikudal. And that's when he has this effect for the first time. Just like, I can do anything. This is great. I'm going to explain to Mussolini that he's not going to leave the war effort. And on the way to the plane, he says to Morel that this oikodal is really helping him and he wants another shot. And he receives another shot. So he has quite a lot of oikudal in him when he speaks to Mussolini. And there's like the people who write the protocol of the meeting and also other people around. It's not like it's not just two people in the room. It's like, I don't know, 15 or 20 people in the room. And a lot of people talk about that meeting in their memoirs. And Mussolini is not able to say one word, basically because Hitler is so high and so Charged. And he's like, just telling the whole time. Time how great this is. You know, what they're doing right now. And of course, there's not even a. It's not possible that you're gonna leave. You know, we are in this together from the. You know, he explains everything, you know, the whole thing for, like, two hours. And Mussolini is just like. It's like. Then a messenger comes in and says, rome has just been bombed. He's like. He knows he can't say anything and he stays. So that was very much influenced, that meeting, by his Oikodal, and that's probably because it was so successful in Hitler's eyes. What happened is why Oikodal became a very attractive drug for him. And this happened. This was the first time in July 1943. So he didn't take Oikodal through the whole time. It only started in 7 43. He started with a regular opioid use. You can see that he takes it more and more regular now. Not every day, but sometimes. Like, there's the. September 1944. He takes Oikoton every second day, which is like junkie rhythm. You take it. Then the next day you don't take it, then you take it again.
- [140:27]
A
Why is that? Junkie rhythm.
- [140:28]
B
You don't take it all the time because you need to, I don't know, relax, or you don't. There's like. You take it. Maybe Saturday night you take it, and the high lasts till Sunday morning and then Sunday when the high slowly wears off. You sleep, and then you wake up and you're hungry, maybe you eat. And then the next day, Monday, you're going to do it again. So that's this rhythm.
- [140:53]
A
And it was more potent than. What is it? Dalentine.
- [140:58]
B
Is said to have the best effect. The best in the sense of. It's not about strength, you know, you just increase the dosage and you have a stronger effect, but you can't increase it too much because then you're going to die. That's also the problem with opioids. If you take too much, you're going to die because you just have a heart attack.
- [141:15]
A
There's nuance differences that it's hard to convert into words, I guess.
- [141:19]
B
Yeah, different molecules have different effects. So Oikodal apparently had the best effect. That's why you had the oxycodone epidemic in America, because people take this pill. I mean, thank God they're not injecting it all like Hitler did. They take a pill. So it's not so dangerous as injecting but apparently the effect is so pleasant of this oikodal, of this particular type of opioid that it just is more attractive maybe than Dolentin.
- [141:48]
A
Is it possible to try to reverse engineer the effect of Hitler's drug use on the outcome of World War II? So if he didn't use any drugs, would the Nazis be more successful or less successful? What do you think?
- [142:07]
B
I think it would be speculative to answer, but I can try. But it's very. The war is so complex. I mean there's many different ways this war could have played out and ended, but I think it would always have ended with a German defeat.
- [142:24]
A
I don't think it would have ended with a German defeat.
- [142:27]
B
Well, if you don't attack the Soviet Union, then of course you can win. But as soon as you attack the Soviet Union, that was as we talked about.
- [142:33]
A
I think the probability of success is low. But I would put it like, I don't know, 10%. Again, extremely speculative. But yeah, if you do blitzkrieg type of attack, very rapid, don't split the forces in Operation Barbarossa, go straight for Moscow, don't invade Britain, don't declare war on the United States and really focus on, on gaining oil from the Middle East. So maybe take making the Africa campaign the central point in the very beginning so that you have the resources that are essential for the industrial capacity of Germany that's required to keep manufacturing and keep fueling the planes, the tanks, the mechanized aspect of the army. So there's a lot of paths to this. I mean, but I don't think, I think it's probably fair to say that reasonable, thoughtful, calculated, disciplined leader would not have done any of the things Hitler did even in the beginning. I mean, it requires insanity, it requires hatred, it requires ideological self capture where you tell yourself narratives that rapidly deviate from like ground truth, from first principles of things. And you just, you're an insane person. You're an insane dictator that's drunk on power and it's impossible for you to make great military decisions at that point.
- [144:07]
B
Yeah, you would need like an impossible Hitler that is as crazy as he was, but still wouldn't make any irrational mistakes. So that doesn't exist. Hitler can only be imagined or understood as this in a way as the drugs. Hitler without drugs is unthinkable for me. And he was the drug guy. You cannot separate this. So Hitler was a self destructive personality and National Socialism is a self destructive movement. That's why I said I think the Germans would have lost in any case, except if there was this, this perfect Hitler, which is theoretically impossible, theoretically impossible.
- [144:52]
A
In the 20th century. I mean, you could think of Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great type characters that would really internalize the sense of, in the case of Hitler, that the German people are without the hatred, without the ideology, but with the murderous, with the ability to dehumanize the rest of the world and see as the German people as superior, the superior. And so it's fair to do the Lebensraum and all of that kind of stuff, right? It's hard to. It's just the reason you want to think about that kind of stuff is Hitler got to me at least close to capturing a very large part of the world. And it's in, it's, it's terrifying and, and sort of unbelievable that somebody could get close to that.
- [145:46]
B
I mean, what you described as this feeling of superiority and conquering countries, that was basically what the Wehrmacht, the high command, that's what they were going for. And they wanted to eliminate Hitler in the Operation Valkyrie, not because they thought he's an evil guy, he's killing the Jews, or they wanted to eliminate him because he was not this effective decision maker anymore that they needed to win the war or to end it in a different way. I spoke with Antony Beaver once about the attempt of British intelligence to assassinate Hitler. And he had seen some evidence that at a point in time they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler or malfunctioning Hitler, which he was after the summer of 1943 is better for Britain than killing Hitler and then having to deal with some kind of. Maybe the army would have taken over the country and that would have been more uncomfortable for Great Britain than having the continuation of the degenerating maniac.
- [147:00]
A
What do we know about the very end Hitler in the bunker, the moments, the days, the weeks, the months leading up to the suicide, all those kinds of things.
- [147:14]
B
It's quite well documented because people at the time were keeping diaries and writing about it, writing about the experiences. Also Morel wrote quite a bit what happened in the bunker. One thing that changed was that Oikodal was not available anymore. So the drug that Hitler actually had become physically addicted to was suddenly not available anymore. This had to do with the bombardment of the Merck Company, the factory in December 1944. British bombers destroyed the production facilities and Morel. There's a report of Morel, the overweight person riding on a motorcycle through bombed out Berlin from pharmacy to pharmacy, basically going into the pharmacies, trying to score Oiko DAHL and he couldn't find it anymore. It was nowhere to be found. And that's when Hitler goes into withdrawal. What I find surprising is that he didn't use another opioid because morphine was available all the way till the end. But he never kind of made that switch then, like, he doesn't. Also, he didn't realize for a long time that he becomes physically dependent on a drug, that he becomes a drug addict. But this realization happens in the last weeks in the bunker because Goebbels, he understood it. And Goebbels wanted that bedroom, the second bedroom. So he said to Hitler, do you understand what's going on that Morel makes turns you into a drug addict? And he does. Like. And at one point, he realized what Goebbels is saying is true because he felt the withdrawal, he was shaking, and he felt like shit. And Morel is, like, giving him weird stuff in the end. Like, one time he gives him Harmine, which is an MAO inhibitor, which is part of Ayahuasca, actually, because he still had that in his doctor's bag. It hadn't been used yet, so it gives him that, which also creates some kind of a weird high. But Hitler at one point realizes really what's going on. This is late April, so very late in the game. And there's a few reports of what actually happens. Like, some say that Morel has to kneel in front of him and that Hitler puts a gun on his head and says, you've been making me addicted to opioids. Get the hell out of the bunker. For sure. He fires him that day. And Morel is described as being in tears, like, leaving the bunker. He gets one of the last planes out of Berlin. He has a research lab in the south of Bavaria, close to the Berghof. And he makes, like, one of the last or the last plane out of Berlin.
- [150:03]
A
He survives.
- [150:04]
B
Yeah. And he goes to this research lab, and this is, like, May 2, 1945. He has, like, a little apartment in his research lab. His wife is still in Berlin. He's, like, all alone, and he starts doing his taxes. And that kind of shows you that he was probably insane at that point.
- [150:20]
A
You know, just totally out of touch.
- [150:22]
B
Why would you do your tax? Maybe he was bored, you know, Maybe it's like he didn't do his taxes for so long because he always had to treat Hitler. And then these things, like, no, what am I gonna do? You know, I'm just gonna do my tag. At least I'm gonna do my taxes now. Very German thing to do.
- [150:34]
A
This is just a strange character. I mean, you tell this.
- [150:38]
B
I would put that in the movie for sure. Him doing his taxes.
- [150:41]
A
That's how the movie ends.
- [150:43]
B
Well, then the Americans move into Bavaria, liberate Bavaria from National Socialism, which was a great job they did there. And so I'm also thankful not only to the Red army, but also to the American forces. Really very thankful that they. Because National Socialism was hard to beat. It was a beast, you know, it was hard to beat. So they capture Morel and they interrogate him. And he actually lives for another two years in American custody in Germany in a military prison. And after these two years, his health's really bad, he has heart problems. And the Americans dump him in front of the Munich train station in a much too small kind of uniform jacket, like probably an American uniform. And he's like lying on the pavement in front of the train station. And a half Jewish nurse walks around there, finds him and he says, I'm Theo Morel. It's really like in a movie. I'm Theo Morel. I was the personal physician of the. She's like, this is 1947, Germany's in ruins. And she brings him to a hospital. His wife comes from Berlin for the last time. They meet in the hospital at Tegansee, beautiful lake in Bavaria. And then he dies. So that was the end of Morel. So we know pretty much what happens in the end.
- [152:02]
A
Did somebody try to talk to Hitler about this? Like, what about Eva Braun? Has anybody close to him tried to talk about.
- [152:09]
B
Well, Goebbels did.
- [152:10]
A
Well, that at the very end. But you would imagine maybe the generals or friends are inner circle. I mean, the reason I mentioned Eva is because, you know, like personal and people close to him.
- [152:23]
B
There is a certain tension between Eva Braun and Morel. And I could very well imagine that she talked with Hitler about it, but there's no record. So I don't know exactly. But they had a very intimate relationship. So Eva Braun was not just the dumb blonde that plays no role. They actually spoke every day. And when Hitler was in the military headquarters, he would phone her every night at 10pm they would have a long phone conversation. So they had a very deep relationship. And I'm pretty sure she didn't really like Morel because, you know, for the obvious reasons, he was closer to Hitler than herself. And, you know, if you count one plus one, it's two.
- [153:03]
A
But she could have maybe not liked him because she might have cared for Hitler. And you can see the effects of drugs on Humans that you care for.
- [153:11]
B
She also had a good relationship with him at times because he was often at the Berghof. The Berghof was like the. What is it called? Mar Delago.
- [153:21]
A
Oh, the Mar A Lago.
- [153:23]
B
Yeah, yeah. That was kind of what it was. And it was actually. It became an official headquarter for Hitler, so he would actually make decisions from there. It was not just a vacation place. And Morel was often there and Eva Braun was always there. That was her place. She was running that place. She was like the woman of that place. And Hitler was often, of course, in the field, in the headquarters, but he came as much as he could to the Berghof because it's quite beautiful. I went up there. It's quite interesting. And she also had a good relationship with Morel. And there's a paper that I found where they were very intimate and very close. There's a paper of Morel where she comes to him in the morning and she has scratch marks. So apparently they had violent sex. So Morel is also kind of witness to that that I found in Washington D.C. in the National Park.
- [154:20]
A
Hitler and Eva had violent sex. What do we know about Hitler's sex life? It's like, not known. Right.
- [154:26]
B
I found it interesting that Morel describes these scratch marks. I mean, it's interesting. So they had some kind of kinky sex. Maybe. Maybe they also had normal sex and sometimes it was kinky or maybe Hitler was aggressive in bed, but it doesn't really matter. It's just what happened between Eva and him.
- [154:45]
A
Yeah, I don't think that affected military operations of the drug use.
- [154:49]
B
Did his sex. If he would have had sex with, like, a lot of people, maybe with his generals, maybe then, you know, it would be worth writing about it because maybe he dominated his generals in bed or something, but he was just having sex with Eva, and I don't think that's historically relevant. It might be interesting for the movie, but also, I don't want to see Hitler having sex.
- [155:10]
A
I don't think anyone wants to see Hitler have sex.
- [155:14]
B
But Eva Braun is an interesting character because she had had more of a say than historians for a long time. Attributed to her. Then a biography was written on her by a female German historian. And that's a very good biography. It really shows that she had quite a lot to say in this relationship. She was not the dumb blonde that just. She was quite opinionated and active and she was filming him a lot. She was always filming in the Berghof. You can go online and look at the Eva Braun clips And you will see Hitler in Kala at the Berghof, how he's like meeting children, patting their head. And she was contributing to the myth of this private. The private man, the good private man. So Eva Braun is an interesting character for sure. But I found one note that she, in the beginning, when Morel started with his drugs, said to Morel that she wants the same drugs, the same medication. Not drugs, the same medications as Hitler. So she would be on the same wavelengths with him. She wanted to be. She didn't want to lose this world. But, I mean, Hitler became such a drug polytoxicomanic user that of course, Eva couldn't keep up with that. They weren't a drug couple. I didn't see any evidence for that, that they would take all the crazy drugs together and then have crazy sex or something like that. That's not how it was. So I think she was sympathetic to Morel in the beginning and then changed her opinion. And I'm pretty sure she talked with Hitler about it, but there's no records about their private conversations.
- [156:50]
A
Let's talk about another perspective on this whole story that you document in your book, the Bohemians. The subtitle is the Lovers who Led Germany's Resistance against the Nazis. So this is the story of the people who resisted from within Germany.
- [157:06]
B
Right.
- [157:08]
A
Can you tell their story? And in particular, it's told to the story of the two key figures in the movement who happen to also be in love.
- [157:18]
B
Well, the main guy is Haro Harro Schulze Boysen. He caught my attention when I was doing research in an archive in Munich, researching drugs in the Luftwaffe, being the morphinist, I mean, the Luftwaffe was a drug, a very promiscuous place. Like, a lot of people in the Luftwaffe were high.
- [157:44]
A
Also more for entertainment versus the practical aspect of. So it's less about, like, the meth optimizing the human performance and more about just exploring.
- [157:55]
B
Like the number three of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet, he committed suicide in the fall of 1941. And he had had seven Pervitin tablets for breakfast. So he was really high on meth. He really enjoyed. But he loved to take meth and then drink. Alcohol was a big thing in the Luftwaffe. You can drink a lot more when you're on methamphetamine. And I found this letter, and that was really a coincidence. While I was looking through the drug stuff, I was searching for, you know, drugs, and I found this letter by Haro Schulze Boysen, who had nothing to do with drugs, but still I Found this letter. I don't know why, I can't remember how exactly it happened that I was suddenly reading this letter. And it was the last letter that he wrote in his life. He wrote it to his father and he said that everything I have done, I'm totally fine with it. And I know it's very hard for you and I really am mostly sad for you and mother and my brother that you have to go through this. And I'm very sorry, but I'm fine with it. And I have a clean conscience. I did what I could to stop this madness. I'm like, what? Who is this guy? You know? And I googled him and there were not so many hits on him, but I read a little bit and he actually had formed, together with his wife Libertas, which means freedom, good name. He had formed the largest resistance network against the Nazis that ever existed. Over a hundred people in Berlin that were all connected and they were from all flights of life. There were some were artists, other were workers, some were leftists, other were patriots. Harold always believed that people could come to an agreement, like it's possible to actually talk about things. And he was a true democrat, maybe you could say, or true, I don't know, libertarian or. He had to learn a hard lesson that with Nazis you cannot argue because they are always right. It doesn't work. At least it didn't work during the Third Reich. He had published a newspaper during the Weimar Republic called Gegner, which means opponent. And in the Gegner, opponents could all write who would be on the streets. Opponents, they could all write in the opponent. And so it was, you read all kinds of texts and opinions. And he thought when Hitler took over power in 33, that he could continue to publish the opponent, because the opponent, he thought, even in a Nazi led Germany, this keeps the discourse. You have to have a discourse, we have to discuss, we have to disagree. And then in April 1933, two months after Hitler took power, they had a meeting with the editorial staff and they discussed the new issue. And then there was a knock on the door and it was the ss and they beat up everybody and they destroyed the typewriters and the printing press that they had in the office in Berlin. And they took Haro and his best friend, who was half Jewish, to one of these early concentration camps and they tortured both of them. And the Jew was killed. He didn't make it. Henry Erlanger and Haro, at that moment he realized who he's against, that he has to. He decided to become to fight this system. And the way he fought the system was later, during the 60s, we also had a 60s kind of cultural and political changes in Germany and our 60s they called it march through the institutions. That is a way to infiltrate the system, like to become part of the system and then change the system from within. So you don't leave the country, you stay, you go into the institutions, you march through the institutions. So Haro decided to go into the Luftwaffe. And he was working in the Air Force, Luftwaffe Ministry. Huge building still intact today in Berlin, Wilhelmstrasse. Quite an interesting building that was like the power center of the Luftwaffe. Like one of the most, most important structures in the whole Nazi regime. He was working there and he worked his way up and he received quite a lot of information. For example, when Germany for the first time became militarily active again. This was in 1936 when the Germans supported the fascists in Spain in the Spanish Civil War. This was a clandestine operation. The Luftwaffe did this and German soldiers went to Spain in plain cloth posing as vacationers. But then they were actually soldiers and supporting Franco's were part of Franco's victory later on. And Haro had this information and he tried to pass this on to the BBC. He failed passing it on. Well, he met a BBC journalist during the Olympic Games in Berlin and told him about this. And the BBC guy was too afraid to make this public and he kind of buried that information. So Haro, it's just a very interesting character. And he was in love with Libertas and Libertas with him. Harro came from like a bourgeois family, very educated. His great grand uncle was von Tirpitz, who built up the marine, the navy for the Kaiser. So he came from this influential German family. But they were all patriots. They were not Nazis, they were democrats, patriots and militarists, I guess you could say, or like even very straight laced also in a way. And Libertas, she came from a castle north of Berlin. She was this bohemian, like aristocratic bohemian type, very good looking, always playing music. And they fell in love. They met on the Wannsee, on boats they were both on. Haro was rowing and she was on a sailboat of a guy that Haro also knew. So he was rowing and he saw his friend on the sailboat and he looked at Libertas, she looked at him and they were in Love in 1934. And the other guy, the friend of Haro, he left his sailboat because he realized I'm like the fifth wheel on the car, not really needed, right? How do you say that in sailboat terms? I don't know. The third sail is not needed know. But what happened at night? Harold didn't sleep with Libertas. For her that was very unusual because everyone wanted to sleep with her. But how? Like he wanted to keep his clothes on. It was a very warm night. And I researched this quite thoroughly. Like I know exactly the temperature. And so also the Bohemians. When you read the Bohemians you really experience the life of these people, what they experience. But everything is. Nothing is invented. Which is very tricky to do you. So what happens that night? Like Libertas wants to take off his clothes. And he doesn't want to take them off because why? From the torture in April 1933. He has quite a lot of scars. They even burned swastikas into his thighs. Not burned, sorry, with knives. The ss. So he doesn't want to show that to her. And he hadn't had a girlfriend for a while. He can't open up emotionally because he's fighting the Nazis. It's very secret. Like no one knows about this. That he's long term planning his life to fight the system that he hates so much because they killed his best friend in front of his eyes. But at one point Libertas does take off his clothes and she sees this and she's like naive. She's even a member of the Nazi party. But she's not a very active party member. She's just. She works for MGM actually in Berlin and marry a Hollywood film studio office in Berlin. Germany was one of the biggest movie markets and she was the press girl. She did the campaigns for the big Hollywood movies in Germany.
- [166:26]
A
So just a regular German girl?
- [166:28]
B
Well, she wasn't regular. She was from a very high family actually her grandfather had been in a relationship with the German Emperor which is a side story that I found out when I researched research, researched the Bohemians. The German Emperor apparently was bisexual and was going to that castle and they had homosexual kind of meetings there with Libertas grandfather. So she came from a very unusual family.
- [166:57]
A
But what I mean actually in the usual German girl. What I mean by that is it's not obvious that a person like that would hold a crucial role in the resistance against the Nazis.
- [167:10]
B
No, not at all. That was always a problem because for her it was weird that someone was against the system. But Haro was totally convinced that fascism is wrong and that he has to fight it. And more and more Libertas was convinced. And then more friends kind of came into the group and the Way Haro organized this resistance group was through parties. Like, they were like a power couple of Berlin. And they had a great loft apartment. They moved together to a loft apartment on also a side street from Kudam, a huge room. And there they had parties every second Thursday night. And they would invite friends. And then once they trusted someone personally, then they would spill the beans and say, this is actually not just a party, but they would test it at the party. They would say something critical of the regime, and you immediately, either the person jumps on it, responds, or goes somewhere else, gets a drink at the bar, not into it. So that was the way of recruiting people. And that was such an efficient way that the Gestapo was not able to understand this group for a long time, not even recognize that there is a group, because Gestapo was very good in infiltrating, for example, communist resistance groups. Because you just had to go in as a Gestapo guy and be a communist, just say the right words. And they would at one point, you know, take you. But with Haro and Libertas, it wasn't so easy. You know, they would. They would sniff you out.
- [168:48]
A
You know, these parties were what, like intellectuals, like artists and that kind of stuff?
- [168:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, they had music, they would dance, they would sleep with each other. They also.
- [169:00]
A
Oh, sex stuff, too.
- [169:02]
B
Well, they had. And this is again, kind of a parallel to the 60s. They had the idea that if you're against fascism, if you're for freedom of.
- [169:14]
A
Everything, the whole thing.
- [169:15]
B
Yeah, they had free love, but it wasn't a dogma. Like, there were also. There was a doctor, a female doctor there. She was quite square, I guess you would say, and she was like, against this. And she said, this is too complicated. We are a resistance group. Like, what if there's jealousy? And what. Like this could compromise operations? And it did sometimes. So that's why the Bohemians are a very interesting subject, because sometimes it just doesn't work. In a way, it works that love really bonds them together, but also, especially Libertas and how they have a terrible marriage sometimes. Like, they really fight because. Because Libertas is not so much intellectually convinced. She's more resistance fighter from the heart. She feels that the Nazis are not good. But Harro is more like the analytical guy. So they have a lot of friction also. And it's a fascinating story. And they came quite far. I mean, there was a point in time when Harro had militarily relevant information through his position at the Luftwaffe ministry. And he passed that on to allies, to Western allies and to the Soviet Union. So he went a step further than just being like a resistance guy. He became, you could say a traitor.
- [170:31]
A
Or he would give information to the Soviets.
- [170:34]
B
Yeah, he would. Because he said, as part of the resistance, yeah, they can beat Germany. But that was also discussed, like in the group. It's very interesting to see, like some say we can't do this because the Soviet Union is also totalitarian regime. But then Harros says, yeah, but they are going to beat Hitler. So the Bohemians is a very interesting topic.
- [170:55]
A
What lessons do you learn from these folks maybe about why so few resisted Hitler found in Germany?
- [171:06]
B
I mean, it was extremely dangerous.
- [171:09]
A
It's purely the danger of. Is it also people believed. It's hard to. It's hard to take yourself, like be an independent thinker and take yourself outside the propaganda because they're also swimming in propaganda.
- [171:24]
B
I mean, the chances of succeeding are quite small because the system was extremely strong. And if you'd made a joke about Hitler and the wrong person heard it, like in a restaurant and would rat on you, you would land in a concentration camp. So people were very, very careful also at parties with like how. And Libertas and she was singing and they were drinking and dancing. And then suddenly the political discussion started. That's, you know, you have to have guts to then actually not leave the party but to stay because they were risking their lives. Basically, as soon as they would be found out, they would be dead. And people don't want to die when they're like in their mid-20s. They were old, they were pretty young. And. And also Libertas, she would often say, like, we can't win. Why are we risking our lives for like, what? So one time they did a Klebe Zettelaktion Klebezettel they produced because one guy had access to a printing press and they produced leaf, like small papers that had glue on one side. And the paper said what the Nazis did. They set up a huge exhibition hall which was called the Soviet Paradise. This exhibition hall was in the center of Berlin. I'd never heard about this before. I found this when I researched the Bohemians and it was the most popular exhibition during the whole of the war. Like 2 million Germans saw this. They went into this exhibition and they saw how horrible the Soviet Union is, how horrible communism is to people. So it was a propaganda show. And the group decided to make these leaflets which didn't say the Soviet paradise, but it said the Nazi Paradise. Torture, ss, torture, hunger, war. How long will it last? And they glued over A thousand of these stickers everywhere in Berlin in May 1942 at night. And they organized it in a way that they always two, a man and a woman would go out and they had the stickers with them, and then they would pretend to kiss and would lean on a wall and then while they were kissing, one would put the sticker on. Then they would move on in the dark. So in the morning of that May 1942, tens of thousands of Berliners saw that the city was like. Like saw these things. So does it make a difference? It made one on that day. You know, it was a very dangerous thing to do and no one got caught. And in the morning, a lot of people saw that there is actually resistance, that there are people who do something against it. So I think they did something. Yeah.
- [174:18]
A
I was reading about protests in recent human history and then most of them, many of them, don't have an effect. Until they do, it's like this threshold effect. It's very hard to know. It's very hard to know because it's a match that lights a fire and sometimes it's a spark that takes a little bit of time to propagate through the whispers. What happens is the people whispering. It's the whisper network of people talking. And sometimes it just takes that one sticker to begin the whispers. And then a few months later, the regime is overthrown. It's funny, but it's hard to sort of trace back what was effective and what was not.
- [175:04]
B
I mean, Haro was convinced that the system would lose, so he thought that maybe we can make a contribution, that it's going faster. No, maybe we will be that spark. So unless when I think that there's this possibility, I must try it. That was his conviction. So he would put his life on the line for that possibility.
- [175:28]
A
How did they get caught?
- [175:30]
B
They were approached by the Soviet Union who wanted to recruit them as spies. And they didn't want to do that. Howell refused the Soviet intelligence. These are documents that were found in the early 90s. One of the sons of one of the members of that group of Haro, a good friend of Haro, one of his sons, went to Moscow to look at the files and he found kind of furious Soviet KGB kind of descriptions of this weird guy Haro, that doesn't want to be a proper Soviet spy and just says, yes, I'm going to give you information so you can hurt Hitler, but I'm not going to play your game. I'm not going to be one of you. So still they did collaborate with the Soviet Union. They accepted a radio transmitter from the Soviet Union with which they were supposed to send military information via radio to Moscow. And they struggle with the technology. The Russians give them an apparatus only with a Russian instruction. And it's very difficult. They make mistakes. But what actually then gets them caught is the Russians at one point answer and send a message to them through the ether. And that message is coded. But the Nazis intercept that message and are able to decode it. And in the message it gives the clear names of Haro and his address, which is a total intelligence blunder. Or maybe they just wanted to give them up and had their revenge because Stalin did crazy stuff like that. So they suddenly know that Gestapo knows Haro. Schulze Boysen, the high ranking officer in the Luftwaffe ministry, is giving military information to the Soviet Union. And apparently he's meeting with all kinds of friends. So they started the Gestapo, started observing the group for months. And the group at one point realizes that they've been basically found out, but then it's already too late. Then they capture quite a few of them, and quite a few get military trial and receive the death penalty and are also being executed. And Haro and Libertas are among them. And also that last chapter of their lives is very well documented. And it actually ends with that letter that I found in the beginning. That's the last thing that Haro does, is write that letter to his father. That's very interesting, what happens with Libertas? Because she gets in custody, the Gestapo asks one of their secretaries, Gertrude Breite, to go in and pose as a friend to Libertas. And Libertas actually falls for it and starts telling that secretary who pretends to be her friend and kind of helps her with certain things, tells her secrets, and that kind of breaks the neck of the group. It's a very tragic ending. So while my books always contain as much humor as possible, that is not a funny story. But it's a very dramatic story. Even though they had a lot of humor, obviously. I mean, they had parties to recruit people.
- [179:00]
A
What lessons can we learn from that about how to resist totalitarian regimes? Is there some deeper wisdom?
- [179:13]
B
I just think it's admirable to be brave and not do things that you cannot really. That you cannot really justify in front of your own conscience. I don't know if I would have been so brave. I don't even know obviously how my conscience would have been, but. But I'm probably more the fleeing type. Like a lot of writers would just leave Germany Like Thomas Mann just left Germany and lived in Pacific Palisades.
- [179:41]
A
And then maybe write, criticize, but leave first.
- [179:45]
B
And he criticized it from the outside, and he was quite influential. Like, he worked for the BBC. They did shows against the Nazis. So maybe you can do more when you leave. It's just. You have. It's like today, let's say we see something, we live in a system that suddenly changes and we're not happy with it anymore. Do we just go along and continue to stare at our smartphone, or do we do something against it? What do we do? I mean, every situation has very different conditions. I think it's probably even harder now to. To be in the Resistance than it was back then.
- [180:27]
A
But I think it does, at the end of the day, boil down to facing yourself, looking yourself in the mirror, that you're facing your conscious, and then doing the courageous thing. And I think that in itself that, like it's the tree falling in the forest, even if there's nobody there to hear it. Just the fact that that exists somehow through the karma channels of the world can materialize into, progress into a revolution against oppression. Something about that, that human spirit still shining through can start a revolution.
- [181:09]
B
I mean, it is that spirit that actually made us human. It is that, that neuroplasticity in our brain that we do not just repeat the conditioned sets that we ought to repeat, but that we actually dim down the command center in the brain and let other parts of the brain react, which is the psychedelic experience, basically, that I think contributes to the evolution of our species. And our species is certainly threatened by extinction. So I think if we somehow care for the human race, then resistance becomes a very immediate and important topic. Because you can resist, obviously, your brain is yours. You can resist in many ways just by thinking. That's actually why I became a writer when I was a teenager. I was very political. I wanted to change the system. I thought, this is not good, what's happening. This was in the Cold War. I don't know if conservative is even the right word, but Ronald Reagan was president. So I thought my writing could change the brain waves of the readers, basically, and therefore have a neuroplastic effect on the reader. Because that is what literature is, literature. And I started off as a novelist. So that's really literature. It's about what do you see right now? How do you describe it? So you do it in ways that when you read it, when you read a good book, you feel good, because suddenly you see different things, your brain changes, you become more free. I Think if you read good literature, that was always my form of resistance. Communist resistance cells would probably say, this is nothing. But I think it is resistance. And that's a little bit. I think it resembles a little bit what this group did. Just living differently, not living. That's why I said in the beginning, Nazis are bad dancers. Because I think they were good dancers at the parties. And they were like, I think dancing can be a form of resistance. Yeah.
- [183:48]
A
But I also like the scale when you resist. And through that resistance, you have impact at scale. And I do think writing is that. So if you can encapsulate you're sort of the spirit of that resistance into writing, that's beautiful. And some of the greatest literature does exactly that.
- [184:08]
B
Right. That is the aim of my next book.
- [184:12]
A
So is this still called Stone Sapiens?
- [184:14]
B
Yeah, it's called Stone Sapiens.
- [184:16]
A
Great title. Great title. So what is this lens that you're looking at at all of human history through?
- [184:23]
B
I discussed this with, already mentioned Anthony Beaver, who is like the master in historical nonfiction books. I said, is it also possible to write a world history about everything, basically? And he said, yes, it is possible. It's not easy because you have to understand a lot. And obviously it will always be a selection. It's clear. That's why I also think that the historical science is basically a fictional science. I have a foreword. The Blitz Forward basically tells that story. Take it with a grain of salt, not only Blitz, but every historical book, because we weren't there. That's what Johnny Depp said when the guy said, so you had a mega pint of red wine. He just said, were you there? The guy wasn't there. Historical Sciences is a fiction, but it's a certain type of fiction, and it's based on facts. So I'm not inventing anything in Stone Sapiens, and I'm highly interested in the very early human history. And there are not a lot of sources. So the beginning of the book is more speculative than, for example, the Vietnam War chapter. In the Vietnam War chapter, I'm in Hanoi speaking to Viet Cong generals, asking them, did they supply heroin to the GIs, which diminished their fighting capability. You can research that. And that's also a chapter, by the way. The Vietnam War is not called the Vietnam War in Vietnam, it's called the American War. And also I was sitting with these Viet Cong generals in Hanoi just a few weeks ago for researching for Stone Sapiens. And I said, so did the Viet Cong bring heroin? Because there's never been evidence that it happened. This way. And they just looked at me and they said, there's no Viet Cong. What are you talking about? You are the Viet Cong. He said, no, this is an American propaganda term. We were the North Vietnamese Army. We never called ourselves the Viet Cong. So the book is full of surprises, obviously. But the very early beginning of Stone Sapiens goes back to about 1.5 million years ago, when Homo erectus, who also has become kind of famous by now, Homo erectus, it's like the first human that really gets shit done.
- [186:54]
A
They get moving.
- [186:55]
B
Yeah, they move.
- [186:56]
A
And why were they moving?
- [186:57]
B
Why were they moving? I mean, then you can examine exactly where they originated, which was. I mean, it's also disputed by now that it's the Great Rift Valley, that only the most fossils have been found there. But that doesn't mean that they originated there. Maybe they originated in the Central African rainforest where fossils disintegrate. And only there in the Rift Valley, we still find it. But we know for sure that in the Great Rift Valley there was a plant called Cut, which is like a plant speed. So they were using that. It's still being used now in these countries, in Ethiopia, Yemen, around the Horn of Africa. Kut is very normal to use. You chew the leaves and it gives you. It's like an amphetamine. It's a plant amphetamine, basically. So Homo erectus, there's no proof that they actually used it, but they were living in that area and the plant was there, so you can write about that. So it's interesting because they were able to do certain things like they shed the fur. They were the first ones to suddenly be naked. And that has the effect that sweat glands are produced. Homo erectus could sweat it out, basically, when they were very hot. What animals couldn't do because they had the fur. So an antelope can run faster as a Homo erectus, but after 10 minutes, the antelope has to stop. That's what dogs do. The tongue goes out. And humans didn't have to do that because they were sweating. So they developed the jogging mode, basically. So they were jogging. They were not sprinting to get the animal, they were jogging it. And when the animal couldn't do it, had to rest, then the humans would come and hunt it down. So Homo erectus was evolutionary very good. And then later, one of the species coming out of Homo erectus is Homo sapiens. And Homo sapiens, at one point, there were only like about 1,500 people left. There were not a lot of Homo sapiens. There was a point in time, when there were quite a few of them and the problem became inbreeding, and there was a real danger of extinction, they were vulnerable. They were not on top of the food chain yet. So they had to develop consciousness. Consciousness is what basically saved us from extinction. Without the human consciousness, we wouldn't be here. That is what made us, in the end, then superior to the other animals. So how did this happen? You can kind of trace how they moved. You can trace that they went through the Central African rainforest. And there's one plant there which elephants like, and that's iboga. And iboga now is like the hot thing of the psychedelic renaissance. Iboga. Iboga. Iboga. But it's also the oldest drug in the book. Basically, they saw that elephants were eating iboga, the root and the leaves, and suddenly we were, like, walking backwards and we're behaving in an unusual way. And then. And people were also using this, and this was going on over, like, a hundred thousand years in the rainforest. So you can write a story about that. You know, was it maybe Boga? Of course, you can't prove it. You know, maybe the frontal cortex grew by itself.
- [190:17]
A
You know, that's a really compelling story. That's one of the great mysteries of how did the light turn on the magic of human cognition and consciousness and.
- [190:27]
B
The like Sapiens by Harari, which is a great book. He also misses that when it comes to those moments. He writes like, we don't understand how the first cognitive revolution and the second cognitive revolution actually happened. So I find it interesting to kind of look, could it have been drugs? Like, I include, like, everything he leaves out, I look at thoroughly.
- [190:54]
A
He does a good explanation of interesting consequences, you know, our ability to imagine ideas and share them and, you know, collaborate on them, and the imagination, all that kind of stuff. But the why the transitions of why did it happen? There's. He doesn't provide.
- [191:11]
B
Right.
- [191:12]
A
I mean, there's some theories, but if iboga is one of them, that's a compelling one. That's a really compelling one.
- [191:20]
B
Yeah. I mean, I'm still researching this book and writing it. I also want to go there because they still take iboga in the. In the. In Gabon, for example. I also interviewed one of the leading iboga experts at Columbia University for Stone Sapiens, and he described how iboga works in the brain, because that's. And he's never taken iboga himself.
- [191:46]
A
Oh, interesting.
- [191:47]
B
He just relies on the data. He doesn't want to be personally influenced, but he. He said he will take it at A certain point in time. But right now he's still just. Just working on data, just with patients and what he found and also examining in the brain through brain scanners what actually happens. And classic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, they dock at certain points, they interact with certain receptors. It's quite well understood how they work. And he said iboga is completely different. It's like. And he also showed this with his hands because he's so mesmerized by his own findings. It kind of everywhere at the same time in the brain. Like, he says, it's like a spa for the neurons. Basically. His findings show, and these are academic findings at Columbia, that it's like as if. He said to me, as if iboga would know our brain from a long time. It knows exactly, like, if you're addicted to something or if you're depressed. Depression. Depression literally is a depression in the neuronal network. Depression is a thought loop, for example, or a system of thought loops that I'm not worthy, whatever. I can't do it. You always go back. It really kind of depresses your brain in a way. And the boga sees this immediately and kind of takes the depression out and makes your brain basically, well again. So this is what his findings are. So he says he's totally convinced this is like a. He doesn't call it a plant. He calls it like a neurotechnology of the 22nd century. So iboga really seems to be in a different kind of category. That's why I really feel that Stone Sapiens must be written, because there's so much that historians just shied away from. And it all started when I was on the island of Crete, the biggest island of Greece. Crete. That's another Harare moment on Crete was the first, what is called high culture of Europe, the Minoan culture. You might have heard of the Minoan culture, and no one can explain so far why there on Crete, suddenly in Europe, they started making amazing structures and amazing art. And how did it happen there? That this totally backwards place, Crete became. I mean, backwards as any other place. Why did it happen there? That such intricate objects were being made and that the culture was. Was developing so intensely? And I was kind of thinking about that. That's how the book started. I was with my kids on vacation in Crete, and if you go to, like, Knossos or Festos, the big archaeological sites, or to the museum in Heraklion, you don't find an answer. Why did it happen there? And then I found like an old book in an old bookshop. And it described an excavation site at the sea and that it was like maybe a maritime place where. Like a harbor, basically. And then while I was swimming there, I found on the sea floor the remnants of a wall that was a harbor wall that was out, that was breaking the waves. And. And then I climbed over the fence because the archaeological site is still fenced off. Like, it's not explained officially what it is. And the walls in there are the biggest walls of the whole Bronze era. And it was actually quite a big harbor. And then the next step is, what did they trade? And they traded olive oil, because Crete was the first place to produce olive oil. And then I also found, and this is historically documented it. Opium was made in Crete, and the poppy flower was growing there, and this was the harbor. Basically, they became incredibly wealthy through olive oil and opium trade through that harbor. So you could say that the whole of the European high culture, which goes from Minoa, it goes to Athens. So it all started, basically, they were drug dealers in a way. I mean, it was the most potent medicine because it was the only medicine that numbs the pain, for sure. You know, opium works, and the Minoans developed that. So, I mean, it's kind of. It's a bit similar to the Blitzed experience. The more I start. I did research, the more I found.
- [196:46]
A
That there's this whole component to human history that could be a really critical component. It. I mean, I am really interested about the. Or there are certain leaps, like the origins of human civilization and then the origins of Homo sapiens. Those are really big leaps.
- [197:01]
B
I mean, there's some evidence, you know, like they came through the area where Iboga was, but there's no academic proof. So I guess an academically trained historian couldn't really write about that. But I can write about it. I can write about possibilities.
- [197:20]
A
Yeah. I mean, that's what. The farther into history you go, the more it's about writing the possibilities.
- [197:29]
B
I mean, it's also interesting. Why did the Neanderthals die out? And what we can compare is the cave art. And the cave art of the Neanderthals is much simpler than ours. Like. Like, if you really get into the cave art, I don't know if you've done that.
- [197:44]
A
I've not. No.
- [197:45]
B
It's quite fascinating. Picasso looked at some of the cave paintings in southern France, and he said, we didn't learn anything new. And if you study them, they're really good. But only the humans are good. The Neanderthals they were like worse artists than us. And you can also see there's a very famous one that comes from Algiers with like a shaman and around his body, like mushrooms grow out of his body. So he was like a mushroom shaman. So mushrooms seem to have been like part, at least in that area. And I mean, that's the stone ape theory that Terence McKenna did. And I think a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the Neanderthals, who did not have a drug culture. They were basically too sober for the future. We assimilated them. They had no chance against our impetus of boldly going where no one has gone before. They were much more happy with what they had. They were not progressing all the time. We have the transcendental kind of moment, which is the psychedelic experience. Psychedelic experience. I guess you could think of it without it. But to imagine sapiens makes more sense. To imagine sapiens as stone sapiens, as a species that was able to incorporate psychoactive components into his development, it makes a lot of sense.
- [199:21]
A
What about one of the great, if you could think of it that way, technologies that humans have developed is religion, religion of all different kinds. Do you think there's a connection between psychedelics and religion, the development of religion throughout different parts of the world?
- [199:36]
B
Well, I think Moses is quite interesting. Moses was a traumatized man that had fled Egypt where he had killed a man who had been beating up a Hebrew. So Moses kind of took revenge and killed him. So he was running from the law and he was together with. In the Bible it says, I think, 66 people. They were in the desert in the Sinai and they had been fasting for days and no alcohol. So it was kind of a psychedelic retreat, basically. I mean, this is being examined by Israeli scholars and I think it's very interesting work. Like, they examine in detail what does the Bible say. And the Bible mentions in that passage where Moses sees the burning bush and then gets the Ten Commandments. In that Bible passage, there's a lot of. Several times the acacia is mentioned. And the acacia, the Egyptian acacia, grows right in that Sinai area and contains dmt. So there's this Israeli research that Moses was actually having a trip. Basically, he was hallucinating. The burning bush was, you know, if you take LSD and you look at a bush in the heat, you know, it will move. You know, it might resemble like a burning and, you know, experience. Then he went up the mountain, which takes three hours, while the others were staying down. And with A DMT type of experience. Not that everyone in the group has the same experience. Similar to Ayahuasca. Sometimes like one guy has like incredible experience while another person might not feel that much at all. And Moses felt a lot. And you do feel a lot when you, you know, when you are, when you have something to work through. And he had certainly something to work through, the trauma of killing a man. So it's also no surprise that he receives one of the commandments, you should not kill, you know, so for him it's like extremely important. And what he receives on the mountain, like God is like there's someone speaking to me. And he understands that God is not that there's not many gods, just one God. Like he has a revelation, you know. And I think when I read, you know, these examinations by these scholars, I think it makes a lot of sense, sense to imagine that the Jewish religion comes from Moses trip. And also if you look at the Jewish religion, they are quite open to drugs. I don't know if that could be an unconscious reaction to that kind of trippy beginning. Like they have Purim where it's like you're supposed to get intoxicated to get closer to God. They're not as straight laced as the Christians. Like they were just, they just allow alcohol. It's like they the blood of Christ. So also Stone Sapiens is a book about religion. Also the Islam and intoxication is also a very interesting topic because you have the Sufis who intoxicate themselves to get into ecstasy to be closer to God. And then you have like the conservative Islamist scholar Ibn Taymiyyah who defended Damascus against the Mongols by combining anti drug rhetoric like they're bringing drugs to us and they are not good Muslims. So drugs and religion, sometimes drugs kind of help religion are used in religious contexts. But then you can also see that religions work as prohibitionist movements against drugs like the Christian church. Also the purity law, for example, it's very famous in Germany. It's called the Reinheitsgebot. Beer can only contain three water, hops and barley or something like. That's the purity law. And that was done by the church in 16th century. And in Germany for a long time this was seen as like, this is like a quality control, like beer has to be pure, only has these ingredients. But it's actually a move by the church to weed out all the other ingredients that had been put in beer before, like nightshade plants. So beer also witches were brewing crazy beer. You drink it and you have like visions and you dance around the fire and the church didn't like this. So the church said this is the beer now. And especially the hops was the new ingredient for the beer. So the purity law is the first prohibitionist law in the Middle Ages in Europe. Another fascinating.
- [204:31]
A
Yeah. I think as society becomes develops more and more it seems to resist, certainly psychedelics seems to resist drugs. I don't know what that's about.
- [204:45]
B
One of the very fascinating turning points that I have been able to kind of pinpoint, or at least I think this is what happened is when do the first kings come up? They weren't kings for a very long time. The first king that I can identify was in the so called Sumerian high culture, was in Uruk, was Gilgamesh and they wrote the Gilgamesh epic about the great king. But that was four or 5,000 years ago, something like that. But what happened in the thousands of years before? There's no, no source that there were rulers. It seems like humans were quite good in organizing themselves without kings. Before these first kings came, and I mean thousands of years from the end of the ice age until the Sumerian high culture, there were no kings. So people were quite able to organize their communities. There was for example Catalhuyuk in eastern Turkey that was working for like 2000 years without any hierarchies. I think that is quite interesting. And then why do suddenly the hierarchy start and what makes the hierarchy stronger? And again, I'm still researching this, but in Sumeria we can see that it's the beer that destroys the hierarchy. Free society because they are able. I mean beer is quite old. The first beer was made in Gobekli Tepe, the famous first kind of structure of mankind. I also write about that because it's very interesting small detail. What is Gobekli Tepe? No one knows. How did they make it? No one knows, but they made it. But why did they make it? I think they made it because they were creating a meeting place. And why was that so important? There were not so many humans at the time. There were like 1 to 4 million. Those are the estimates on the whole planet. And they were usually living in small communities of like 100 people, up to 500, not more. So the problem then is again inbreeding. Inbreeding means it's a degeneration. So it's a problem. We are genetically not so diverse actually as humans. But Gobekli Tepe people were meeting from different areas, having sex with people they usually wouldn't see, creating healthy children. And Gobekli TEPE was working for 1,600 years. And I think it was like an evolutionary kind of machine. Like without that idea, we're going to create like a fucking place or a party place, you know, it was a party. Basically. They were eating very well, they found a lot of bones, but no one lived there. They just came together there for parties. And then after 800 years, they start making beer there. And then the situation slightly changes. They found these beer. These places where they made beer. You can still find the chemicals and kind of. It's sure that they made beer there. And then once they make beer, they create different stone circles. And then somehow it changes. And we can see clearly how it changes in the Sumerian high culture when beer then becomes a business. Beer is being done by the priests, by the ruling class, or ruling class emerges. Like monasteries often brew beer. And that was also the case in the Sumerian high culture. They make beer. They labeled the beer like the temple that would make the beer. The beer would be attributed to that temple. It would be sold. So that temple kind of rises in status, makes money. So that's how hierarchies started up. So the hierarchy, which is the big problem right now, that we have these hierarchies, that we have these kings everywhere that kind of steal our money or at least make it very difficult for us as humans to organize on an egalitarian planetary scale, which is our only chance for survival. If we at one point overcome the hierarchies, overcome the nation states, and create a planetary, probably AI assisted, open source, AI assisted planetary society. And everyone has the same political rights. There's no more borders. There's a planetary minimum income, so no one is starving. Everyone has at least what everyone needs, which is totally possible. It's just a problem of organizing and of breaking the resistance of those who don't like that. And there's a lot of resistance, obviously. I mean, I'm talking about what's happening on the planet in 50 years, not what's going to happen tomorrow. But that is where we slowly are moving towards. And you can see that this actually comes from a time when we were able to organize ourselves without kings. We don't need kings. Kings always say, if you don't have me, then someone else, some other guy will come. But that's why I'm not. If a nation state makes war against another nation state, I'm not taking a position and saying this country like better. Basically, the both nation states are doing war. And who has to suffer is us. You know, is Stone Sapiens is the human, is the human species.
- [210:08]
A
Speaking of which, I have to ask you. So I've done psilocybin a bunch and I've done ayahuasca, but have never done LSD acid and you have quite a bit. So maybe the big general question is what's LSD like in the space of psychedelics, which funny enough, we haven't really spoken a lot about psychedelics except in the context of Stoned Sapiens. What's LSD like?
- [210:38]
B
Well, this is probably the third book that we want to talk about is Tripped because Tript is an examination of the history of lsd. And that sounds maybe less interesting than it actually is. I find it fascinating. I had tried lsd. It was given to me by my girlfriend at the time, Anya, in lower Manhattan on a Saturday night, 1993. So I was 23 and she said, let's take LSD. And I'd never really taken any drug. Like I maybe smoked a bit of weed, but I didn't know what a strong drug is. And she gave me this paper and I took it and we walked around in the East Village. Pre gentrified East Village. It's pretty cool actually. And it didn't work for like one hour. I felt nothing. And then I went into the toilet. I had a falafel or something. I went into the toilet it and there was a mirror, like I was peeing. And then there was this mirror. But the walls had like lines like they were painted in line. Suddenly these lines were started to like vibrate. And that's then the trip started. And it was such an empowerful experience that I thought I would go insane. Like it was the worst trip I've ever had. Like it was because so strong. I was totally scared. I didn't know what it was. I suddenly I walked, I said to my girlfriend, it's working. And she said, yes, it's working, I feel it also. And I went into Notel Motel, which was my favorite bar, just to be in a familiar environment. It's not a good idea on your first very strong LSD trip to be out in lower Manhattan on a Saturday night. But I also didn't know this. So I was in the bar and I saw my friend Dora Espinosa from Peru. She was quite a small woman. She was only like, I don't know the American system, like maybe 1 meter 50. So she was quite short. Short is the right word. But on LSD she was like this. So I saw her down there, like and I said, dora, Do I look normal? Because you look very small.
- [213:04]
A
Yeah.
- [213:04]
B
And Dora's like, no, you look fine. I'm like, okay, I gotta get out of here. And then we walked up to Second Avenue and we saw like a bunch of Puerto Rican kids killing one of their. It was like a gang kind of. It was more of a druggie kind of. I mean, Manhattan back then was kind of dangerous in the East Village. And one of. They killed one of them on the hood of the car in front of our eyes. We saw it. And I said, do you see this?
- [213:32]
A
Like, oh my God.
- [213:34]
B
And then they resurrected him. Like they gave him mouth to mouth and the guy was fine again. And we walked past and we were not sure anymore what we were seeing. And this was a very strong hallucination. And then we saw a full blown racial riot on Second Avenue. Like people were smashing in taxi windows, pulling the drivers out. It was like a gta.
- [214:00]
A
Grand Theft Auto, right?
- [214:01]
B
It was like that, that.
- [214:02]
A
And so most of this is basically hallucination?
- [214:05]
B
I think so, yeah. And I have taken.
- [214:06]
A
But it felt real.
- [214:07]
B
It felt totally real. And so I was happy when this trip was over because I thought I have gone insane. Basically. I thought like there was a switch in my brain that had been like something chemical. Like I have. I have now a chemical imbalance in my brain. I'm going to be crazy for the rest of my life. I thought that. But after like 10 hours, it suddenly got. The effects wore off and I became normal again. And I thought that was quite fascinating. So in hindsight I thought it was a great experience, even though it was quite scary. But it also had moments of incredible perceptions. Like I could see that the atoms are not rigid. Obviously everything's moving in our universe. Everything. There's nothing fixed. So I could see that. I could see that everything was basically alive. And that my previous perceptions, how the world is just my conditioned perception and that the word was very different. And just how you look at it, it looks different.
- [215:13]
A
So it's freeing in a way.
- [215:14]
B
Yeah, totally freeing. Also, it was much stronger than all the LSD I've taken since. And I've taken high dosages, so I'm not even sure if that was lsd. Like there's also other compounds that are quite rare, like DOM or whatever. Maybe it was something else. But then I also spoke to LSD experts by now also for the book Tripped. And it can happen that your first trip is much stronger than all the other trips because your brain kind of reacts very strongly to it. Because what happens in the brain is basically the default mode network, receives less energy and other, other parts of the brain there think more, communicate better. So if this happens for the first time, like your brain maybe is totally surprised by this, like, firework that's going on and then creates like hallucinations to somehow make sense of it. Like, there's a lot of things firing and then so you see things that maybe are not there. But that's not usual on an LSD trip. Like you don't have. I've never had such hallucinations afterwards again.
- [216:15]
A
You know, what's the usual experience on lsd?
- [216:19]
B
It really depends on the dosage. If you microdose, it's just like drinking an espresso that lasts maybe for two, three hours in a very pleasant way. So you just slightly buzzed.
- [216:30]
A
Is it visual artifacts? Like, no color.
- [216:34]
B
Then you would take like, more. Maybe if you take 50 micrograms, you start, the colors become more intense. But if you take a microdose of 10 micrograms, nothing happens. The trip starts with about 100 micrograms. And then you could see. Maybe it would be like, I took a swimming trip in Thailand in January, and I took about 200 micrograms, which is quite a lot because it was so beautiful on this island. And it was kind of. Will it be more beautiful if I'm on LSD now? And of course, every LSD trip also tells you about your life. Like some things you didn't understand, suddenly you see, oh, it's like this. You. It's very good for, you know, reflecting on your life, but it's also a lot of fun. So I swam for like three hours through the ocean, which is something you usually don't do. You know, I like swimming, but after like 10 minutes or 20 minutes, I go out. But I was swimming and swimming. And so, yeah, for me, on the.
- [217:32]
A
Psilocybin and ayahuasca, there's a intensification of beauty of the world around you, whether that's nature, whether that's people, or whether that's your own memories of your past or maybe your imagination manifesting itself in different kinds of visuals. You know, on ayahuasca, I saw dragons of different kinds, and they were just really beautiful. And maybe I've never taken, like a heroic dose of psilocybin, but it was always. Everything was just always so beautiful. And I was just grateful to be alive and grateful to be in this world. World and get to appreciate in. In this most intense way. There's something about like. Like you. You said you. You could see the individual atoms. Like, there are certain ways to deconstruct sort of, or maybe to visualize or reinterpret, revisualize the world. That makes you, like, appreciate holy. This is really. This is really awesome. This is really special. And that can only be done through the process of, like, showing you, like, a different version of it a little bit.
- [218:44]
B
I mean, when the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz developed LSD in 1943, like, they were having the. To solve the big question, what is it good for? Like, Albert Hoffman, the chemist, he found it basically involuntarily. And he reported to the CEO, I had very strong reactions basically in the brain. So they set up an intoxication room. I found the documents about this intoxication room in the Novartis archive when I researched Tripped, because Novartis bought Sandoz in the 90s. So all the LSD stuff is in the Novartis archive. And this intoxication room. I always think it's kind of interesting to imagine this was 1943. There's a world war going on everywhere in Europe, except in Switzerland, which is a neutral country. But Basel, where the LSD was found, is like a stone throw from the German border. So you actually hear the war going on. And so they created a nice room within the company. And then all the employees voluntarily could go and take lsd. So they were the first people to take lsd and they had no idea that there was at one point, MKUltra, and they were just trying out something that one of their guys had developed. And I read through all these reports and they all had a great experience. They were sitting in a nice chair and they looked outside the window and they were reporting stuff like, I just had to laugh the whole time. I felt so good. I realized about my life, or it kind of created in them the feeling, like a heightened sensitivity and a feeling of that this is how life should feel, kind of. So the CEO, Arthur Stoll, he was really trying to figure out what he could market it for because he thought maybe this is a game changer in mental health. Because this was before antidepressants, before antipsychotics. And it was in the middle of World War II, which had created already millions of traumatized people. How do you treat these people? So they thought LSD could be really a big. A big, big, big thing. And I mean, I came up, I just told you when I first took LSD and I somehow was interested in lsd, but I never thought I would write a book about it. I just used it once in a while when I wanted to understand something about my life, I'd just enjoy a day in the ocean. But I read a study that microdoses of LSD at one point help against Alzheimer and my mother has Alzheimer's. So I discussed this with my father, who takes care of my mother. And this was an academic study. I discussed this also with a leading Alzheimer expert that I interviewed for Trip. And he's like, wow, this is amazing. Because LSD interacts with, with the very Same receptors, the five HT2A receptors in the brain that LSD interacts with those receptors and Alzheimer destroys those receptors. So LSD basically does the opposite that Alzheimer does. And I discussed this with my father and he said, so why can't I buy LSD in the pharmacy if it's so good? You know, he was a judge before he actually put people in prison for drugs, books. So he said, you better bring me the story. So I did kind of a research loop. This is the book Tripped. Then I came back to him in the end with the true story of why LSD has been made illegal. And that is quite fascinating because the Swiss CEO Stoll, he had learned biochemistry. This is very nerdy, but I think it's quite interesting. He had learned biochemistry from the Jewish German God of biochemistry, Wiltstetter. Richard Wilstetter was Nobel Prize winner for chemistry. And his work was he would extract the potent alkaloids from so called poisonous plants and make the poison. Paracelsus taught us it's the dosage that makes the poison. If you take too much of a potent alkaloid, maybe it's a poison. But if you, if you extract a potent alkaloid, maybe you can turn it into a medicine. So Stoll learned this from Wiltstetter. And there was another guy that was learning from Wiltstetter, Richard Kuhn. So it was Kuhn and Stoll. Those were the two students of Wiltstetter and Stoll left and became the CEO of Sandoz and developed the pharmaceutical branch of Sandoz. And Kuhn became Hitler's leading biochemist and was responsible in finding a truth drug and also developing nerve gas. But the two guys, Kuhn and Stoll, stayed friends also when the Nazis took power, like I researched the papers of Stoll in the archive and in the 20s he would communicate all the ergot research. LSD is an ergot product. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. He would communicate all this with Kuhn and Kuhn would come to the Sandoz lab And they did experiments together. And then in 43, Kuhn was a hardcore Nazi scientist and especially looking for the truth drug at the time. And I was looking through the archive, I wanted to find the connection that Stohl also sent LSD to Kuhn. Because when I was researching for Blitz in Dachau, I had found that the SS had done in the concentration camp of Dachau experiments with mescaline and another hallucinogenic substance which was not named. And mescaline has the problem. The truth drug idea is I give you something without you noticing it. Like something that doesn't smell or doesn't taste like anything. And then after like half an hour, I know that something's working in your brain and you become insecure because suddenly something's working in your brain. And I can play with that situation and therefore extract all the secrets from you, because it's a power. I'm suddenly above you because I know something about you that you don't know. That was the idea. The problem with mescaline was it has a bitter T and it's kind of hard to make it. And LSD is very easy to make. Not very easy, but it's quite easy. And LSD is odorless and tasteless. So I was trying to. I somehow had the notion that LSD has a Nazi past, you know, which is something that no one ever thinks about. LSD is like the hippie drug, right? It's a drug of the peace people. But I wanted to see all the papers of this, of the CEO of Stohl and the archivist, he already knew, like, he was the Swiss archivist. Archivist. And this is not a public archive. In a public archive, you basically like a national archive of the United States. You see what's there. You have the right to see it. Freedom of information. But a company archive, like Novartis archive, the archivist can just say, no, I can't find this. Right? You basically at his mercy. So I bribed him with LSD because he didn't want to show me. He didn't want to show me the Stoll papers. And I said to him, him, just to distract him, I said, did you ever. Have you ever seen lsd? And he's like, no, how would I see it? And I said, well, I have some here. And I had some. I just had gotten it from a friend.
- [226:14]
A
What does LSD look like? Tabs.
- [226:17]
B
Yeah, tab. I had a paper and the funny thing about. Yeah, these are different, you know, different designs.
- [226:23]
A
And you could put it on your tongue. Is that people usually take it.
- [226:26]
B
Yeah. Then you take it like that. And the one I had was given to me by a Swiss friend. And it had like here, you see certain prints on it. Oh yeah. And he had the. The print was the old logo of sandoz from the 40s. So the guys who make this illegal LSD in Basel in some kind of lab, they know where it comes from. So they made like a joke to make like the old logo of Sandoz. I showed this to the archivist. He said, this is the old logo of our company. I said, well, it was made by your company. He said, I know this, but it was, was. It's not. This is very interesting actually. And I said, I'm going to gift you one of these trips now. And he said, wow, really? You would do this? And I said, you can archive it. And he's like, hahaha. Then he actually took one, then the ice broke.
- [227:11]
A
That's great.
- [227:11]
B
And then he said, okay, I'm going to show you now the correspondence of Stoll, our CEO. It's no problem. And he just went to the next room and he looked for like 10 minutes. And then he brought me these boxes. And then I saw actually the correspondence between Stoll and Kuhn, between the Swiss CEO and the German Nazi scientist, what they were talking about. And then I found a smoking gun. October 1943. Kuhn acknowledges that he receives half a gram of ergotamine, which is the precursor drug to lsd. And so it's highly likely that the Nazis used LSD together with mescaline in Dachau. And when the Americans liberated the Dachau camp, they had a special unit called Alsos with them. And Also's job was to find German scientists and kind of interview them, get their knowledge for the nuclear program mostly, but also for biochemical weapons. And one of the first persons they interrogated was Richard Kuhn. And Richard Kuhn immediately collaborated because he didn't want to go to the Nuremberg trial. He wanted to continue his career. Actually he was an opportunist. So I guess his Nazi convictions were not so strong after all, because he also liked the American Americans. So he told the Americans immediately about lsd. And the next day a very high general flew from the States to Frankfurt, went to Heidelberg, spoke to Kuhn again, went, then took off his uniform and went in civil clothing to Basel because Switzerland is neutral, and received the first LSD from Stolzung. So the American general had LSD. This was in 45, in the summer. And then the American military Started to examine lsd. Could LSD be the true drug? Because if the Nazis think so, maybe it's true, you know, because the Nazis were, you know, cutting edge scientists, as evil as they were in Dachau.
- [229:05]
A
This was presumably used for the different experimentation that was done.
- [229:09]
B
Well, I read one report from a guy who was an inmate and he received it in coffee and he had a full blown psychedelic trip. And he had this guy who was asking him questions and the guy had such a great trip. I would always imagine you have a terrible trip in a concentration camp and he was seeing fractals and colors and he could see that there was something bigger than these Nazis and there was something bigger than the concentration camp. And he only said it was so horrible when the trip ended and he kind of became sober again and we was just an inmate again in the concentration camp.
- [229:45]
A
I mean, one of the things you get from books like Man Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl is that in the concentration camp actually the slightest good things are so rich of feeling. You just get so like. I would actually expect to have incredible trips there because you're just grateful for anything positive. Anything positive.
- [230:09]
B
Yeah, I didn't, I didn't think about that.
- [230:11]
A
Becomes intensified. But from the perspective of the Nazis, they're trying to develop the truth drug.
- [230:16]
B
They miserably failed. Because LSD is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth. Because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy in other parts of the brain, think more, and the brain becomes a neuroplastic. You know, the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and is stimulated. You might understand something about your life, you might not. You know, I mean, LSD doesn't necessarily turn you into a more knowledgeable person. You could also focus that on your orthodox belief system. But many people realize different things have different ideas. So it doesn't work as this conditioning drug. But also the CIA then kind of took over the LSD experiments that the US military took over from the SS. So now it's in CIA hands. In 1947, central intelligence agencies founded it because America didn't have a Central Intelligence Agency before. They had like the military agencies like oss. Now they have the CIA, and the CIA makes it Dulles. The first director, he says the brain warfare is going on now between the Soviet Union and us. This is Cold War. We have to, you know, maybe they are using something against us. We have to be really on our, you know, we have to be prepared, you know, for the brain warfare because Communism is a propagandistic system. So they were always either really afraid or just pretending to be afraid. The Soviet Union would develop the truth drug quicker than them. So the LSD truth drug program, which was labeled MK Ultra, the infamous MK Ultra, is a mind control program. I mean it is. And LSD played a big part in it.
- [232:01]
A
It's a deeply illegal one, certainly.
- [232:04]
B
Yeah, I mean it was never, never approved by the Congress or anything like that.
- [232:09]
A
Probably deeply unethical. Maybe one of the more un American unethical things done in, in recent times.
- [232:17]
B
It's certainly unethical. It continues the Nazi human experiments. That's what the CIA did.
- [232:22]
A
So it's continuing one of the worst aspects of what the Nazis were doing.
- [232:27]
B
Absolutely, yeah.
- [232:28]
A
Defeated the Nazis and carried the flag forward. It's just dark.
- [232:33]
B
And this is basically the reason why LSD at one point became illegal, because it did not get the chance. Stoll still wanted to put it on the market, but Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKUltra, he really didn't want LSD to be on the market. Not because he thought it's not good or dangerous for anybody. He just wanted to control lsd. He wanted to. Wanted LSD to be his so he could use it for MKUltra for experiments. But he couldn't really stop. There was also legit LSD research always going on until it was prohibited in 1966. There was legit LSD research done in universities which came to all kinds of conclusions. But the decisive thing was a visit by Gottlieb in the office of Stoll in Basel, where he basically says he comes with a suitcase with US$240,000 to buy the world supply of LSD because he has the information from the American ambassador. He said, we think by now Sandoz has produced 400 kilograms of LSD. So that was the price for these, 400. And Stohl said, no, actually we have produced only 400 grams, but I'll sell everything to you, of course. Because the pressure that he received from the CIA was because the CIA and the fda, they're like quite friendly organizations. So the CIA has a certain influence on the fda, at least back then. So the pressure was if you want to put your medicines on the market, which is of course the biggest market in the world, and Sandoz, I'm sure you want to thrive and as a pharmaceutical company, then LSD is not going to be one of these products. And Stohl basically betrayed lsd. So he said okay. And LSD was only distributed as A research drug. It was never sold by the company. So researchers could actually write to Sandos and say, I'm doing this and this test and I'm neuroscientist, I need lsd. And then they would receive it. But mostly what happened to the LSD was it went into the CIA's hands and then it was used in MK Ultra. But then it spilled out, obviously, because one of the guinea pigs was Ken kesey. He received US$75 for taking LSD for the CIA. And he was working in Menlo park in a psychiatric ward. And on lsd, he basically had the idea to ride one flu over the cuckoo's nest. He understood that these people maybe are not crazy. It's just a different way of seeing. That's like an LSD revelation. These are not bad crazy people. They just see the world differently. Because that neuroplasticity that kind of leads you away from one way of thinking, you realize that there's different ways. So it does. I would say lsd, the tendency of LSD is more to increase empathy is that kind of empathy, diversity, all these kinds.
- [235:39]
A
Because you mentioned, you mentioned the effect of LSD on you as a writer, that it at least changed the way you write.
- [235:48]
B
Well, I mean, the book Tripped is a book where I come back with that story to my father and then my father decides to give LSD to my mother. And we did do the lsd, the three of us, on Christmas, and we did mushrooms on Mother's Day. And whenever my mother takes lsd. And Alzheimer's is a horrible disease, obviously. For example, on Mother's Day, there was the newspaper lying on the balcony. We were sitting in the sun, and she was on mushrooms. It's just microdose. It's not that you have a trip, but you have that stimulation of your brain. That's what you have even. And her brain, attacked by Alzheimer, reacted stronger than my father. He always says, I never feel anything from a microdose, and you're not supposed to feel anything. But my mother suddenly picked up the newspaper, which she hadn't looked at for a year. So on mushroom microdoses, she picks up the newspaper and starts reading the headline to us, which was about the Ukraine war. She'd never heard about the Ukraine war. So when she had problems pronouncing the word Ukraine, because that was a new word for her, because she hadn't been part of the news cycle in about a year. And this was because of the mushroom microdose. So this book, how did it change my writing this on an emotional level, taking LSD and then writing about LSD changed something in my family. It improved the health of my mother. That made me very happy, of course, very satisfied.
- [237:24]
A
Yeah. There's a deep personal connection. But I even mean on Ken Kesey side, like.
- [237:28]
B
I know what you mean.
- [237:32]
A
I mean, what does it do? Listen, writing. I don't know. Again, me as a fan of writing. It feels like writing is suffering kind of. When I see, like, just these great writers in history talk about writing, it seems like it's really hard. It's a kind of torture. You know, Hemingway and, you know, there you have the Kerouac stories that you just kind of flows out of you. But a lot of times it's like really disciplined. Day after day, you're really digging and digging. And so it's interesting what that looks like under the different supplements. Right. Like Stephen King, famously. I mean, there's a lot of people, you know, they go to the drugs, to the alcohol. You have the Hunter S. Thompson who goes, you know, when given the option, just says yes to all of it. And the mind is a weird thing. And a lot of writers talk about, like, they're not really developing the ideas, they're plugging into some. They're channeling a voice from somewhere else. And with psychedelics that certainly. It feels like you're modifying the channel or you're expanding the channel, or you're directing the channel to a different direction. That's why I ask.
- [238:47]
B
I think for me, writing has two important parts, and one of them is the actual writing part. And that's the painful part that you talk about. It's basically discipline, focus. It becomes harder and harder to focus. Because of the telephone. Yeah.
- [239:11]
A
Distractions.
- [239:12]
B
There's a place in Switzerland, the Nietzsche house. I go there as much as I can to write. It's in Silsmaria. It's quite high up. Nietzsche went there every summer from 1882 to 1888, with the exception of 1887. Didn't go that. That summer. I don't know why. And in those, he stayed there for three months and wrote most of his work in that room. And that room is still there, and his desk is still there. And you can rent rooms in that nature house. And I rent. It's great. And I do this as often as I can. And only there am I able to switch off the phone in the morning. I don't even switch it on. I'm like a soldier. I'm in the nature house. Also, Nietzsche was magical. So it gives you I would never take drugs in the Nietzsche house because it would disturb that clarity that is in that house. When Nietzsche wrote like Zarathustra, you can.
- [240:07]
A
Sense his presence a little bit.
- [240:08]
B
Yeah, I speak to him quite a bit. Like, his door is always open.
- [240:12]
A
Is he an asshole? Is he a nice guy?
- [240:13]
B
No, he's a nice guy.
- [240:14]
A
Nice guy.
- [240:15]
B
His room cannot be rented. It's like a museum type room, room. And I mean, I never thought of him as an. I mean, he's a total weirdo.
- [240:27]
A
Obviously had issues like struggled getting laid.
- [240:30]
B
Yeah, I think he had a lot of problems.
- [240:33]
A
That's one of them. Yeah, but he had a lot of good qualities too.
- [240:36]
B
But he's also part of Stone Sapiens because he did experiment with drugs there and he writes about it. It's very hard to find. But in the Nietzsche house, I found a book on Nietzsche's medicine history. And he takes quite a bit of hashish. He smokes.
- [240:52]
A
Does it help with the stomach issues or whatever?
- [240:54]
B
Oh, he's interested in what happens in the brain. And this comes back to your question. How did the drugs change my writing? Well, first of all, it's this one. It's this discipline. I can do it up in the nature house. I can also do it sometimes in Berlin. It's just sitting there trying to focus and writing. But what you need, of course, is the inspirational part. And LSD helped me, just the first trip, to realize that it's not all black and white. The world's quite colorful and there's like the abyss and there's also the horror. And like, I was a happy go, lucky kid, you know, I never thought the world is so deep as I understand it now. So the LSD makes the world deeper. So I think for me to understand the world better, to understand myself better, it improved my writing. But I would not write on lsd because on LSD you're like, you want to walk in the forest or you want to go up the mountain or that's what I like. I would never sit in front of the ugly computer with a stupid screen and write. Maybe I would lie in the mountains with a notebook and kind of write like poetic lines. And that could be done on LSD because you have. Like when I was researching Stone Sapiens, I did one LSD trip in from the Nietzsche house. I went quite high up in the mountains on LSD and I came and it was not. I just thought about the book and kind of looked at the different chapters. Does it work together, like, kind of like macro, without taking too Many notes, just kind of letting it, it play out in my mind. But then when I walked down, I passed a cave and I realized a lot about people's relationship to caves and the cave paintings. How actually the cave walls, you see all the arteries of the rocks. And I mean, on LSD you see all of that and you see how alive that is and how beautiful it actually was by humans to then use that canvas and work your cave paintings in there. I mean, I never had the appreciation of that before.
- [243:11]
A
Yeah, you're right. You are able to detect on psychedelics the aliveness of the details. If I can put it this way, it's a very.
- [243:20]
B
For me, it's a very creative drug. But for other people it might not be, you know, so I cannot also, I cannot advertise it because also if you have a psychological problem, maybe it's overwhelming.
- [243:32]
A
Yeah, that's actually a good thing to say at this moment, like from my perspective. And maybe you can comment on it in general when people ask me, because I've done psilocybin a few times and I did ayahuasca and I've talked about it. When people ask me if I recommend those things as a general statement, I say no to the general population. And then, then as a second step, if I'm talking to specific people on a case by case basis, I can just discuss my experience and let that be kind of an inspiration.
- [244:02]
B
Is.
- [244:02]
A
I'm very hesitant to recommend a thing that could be so powerful because I don't know, like, I had a tremendously positive experience and I was sure I would be meeting some demons. Like I thought I would have some demons in the basement or something, but I didn't meet them, not yet. And my. But people might have some demons that they meet and it might destroy them or it might change them in the way they don't like. And actually it's a good question for me whether it's good to do psychedelics when you're in a good place in life or in a bad place in life. Because I know that even scientifically there have been studies where psilocybin helps with extreme, with depression and PTSD and all these kinds of things. But I'd be very nervous about that too because, like, the mind is such a powerful thing and it's such a complicated thing that with these really powerful tools, it's unclear where it's going to take you. But I have heard a lot of stories of people have taken incredible journeys, sometimes difficult journeys with psychedelics and have come out much Happier and much freer and have, have healed some of the things that we've been going through. But if, when people ask me to recommend or not, I'm just too afraid to say yes. I think the right thing is always as a general. No, be very careful.
- [245:28]
B
Yeah, I think it would be irresponsible to recommend it to people you don't see. Maybe if you know a friend and a friend asks you, maybe then you can, could maybe I would say to a friend, yeah, I think you would be fine taking it. But even that is a big responsibility, you know, because LSD in German, the book Tripped, is called the strongest substance. And it is actually the strongest substance because it works in microgram dosages. Like even the strongest snake poison, cobra toxin, if you use that in micro zero gram dosages, you don't feel anything. But if you take 250 micrograms of LSD it can totally overpower you. And if you have an unstable psyche, it could, you know, make turn you mad, you know.
- [246:20]
A
Do you understand how it compares to psilocybin and ayahuasca and dmt? How does LSD compare to those? Is it similar land territory, just more intense?
- [246:30]
B
LSD and psilocybin are like cousins, distant cousins? No, quite close cousins. And I spoke to a neuroscientist from university clinic in Zurich who's been researching psilocybin and LSD since the early 90s. And he puts people in brain scanners, for example, so he sees exactly what happens in the brain on LSD or on psilocybin. And he said to me, when I asked him that very same question, he said LSD is the more sophisticated molecule. He meant by that is that LSD docks onto more receptors than psilocybin. Like psilocybin interacts with like five different types of receptors in the brain and lsd like with nine. So that makes LSD more complex molecules. So that's why it already works in very small quantities, because it's like the key is like perfect for our brain. Our brain really reacts strongly to lsd. For mushroom psilocybin you have to take milligrams, not micrograms but milligrams. So mushrooms is also described as the softer, you know, psychedelic experience because it only lasts for like 5 hours while LSD lasts like 8 hours. And LSD can be more. LSD is also a mushroom, but it's ergot, which is a mushroom, but it's turned into a diathylamide. You extract the potent acid from ergot, which is lysergic acid. And you turn that into a diethylamide. So it's a processed drug in a way. It's a potent process drug that works also for mass movements quite well. That's why it was so popular in the 60s, because people could just make it. While mushrooms, they kind of. They have to grow. Like the. The hippie movement, they could never have, you know, sustained on mushrooms because so many mushrooms don't even grow. But a good LSD chemist can make LSD for the whole world, basically.
- [248:41]
A
Can we go back to something we talked about in the. In the beginning, about Berlin is just. It'd be fascinating to learn more about this culture. Do you still. Are you still connected? I'm sure you've been to some wild parties. I've been told that Berlin has some wild parties.
- [248:59]
B
Well, it had them in the 90s. I mean, it had the best clubs that I. I mean, it was just a dream. You know, you go into this club, but I was also in my mid-20s, so I go into this club, I take MDMA and the DJ is amazing and the sound system is crazy, and there's like 500 people on MDMA just dancing for like eight hours.
- [249:17]
A
And that's when electronic music was really.
- [249:19]
B
Yeah, it was really cool.
- [249:20]
A
Good.
- [249:20]
B
Yeah. Like, a friend of mine, he. He runs now Club of Visionaries, which is kind of a famous underground club in Berlin. And he asked me in the early 2000s, when this club was offered to him, should I do this? And I said. I said, gregor, techno is over. You know, electronic music is dead. But obviously it's not dead. It's still going on. But in the 90s, it was new. So it was. You really went into the club and you heard something you'd never heard before. And the first time I came from New York, and New York was a very old school kind of urban place. I mean, rock and roll or grunge music. And I came to Berlin, it was in a club called Aima Bucket in East Berlin. Doesn't exist anymore. Like in a rundown, totally rundown, like squat. And I went to the bar and I had a beer and I looked and there was just a few people on the dance floor and this electronic music, which I'd never heard before. And the guy in front of me, he was like. He looked like an East Berlin skinhead kind of type of guy, but, like, totally smiling. I'm sure he was on ecstasy. And he was disassembling like an imaginary machine. And I just looked at this guy, he was like, for one hour, he was just, like, doing the most complicated things. And I was like, this is a totally different way of moving. And I like that. Actually. I like to dance in clubs. And I did this for like two years, very intensely with my girlfriend at the time. We went out a lot, like from Friday to Monday, basically. But it means. And a lot of people still do that in Berlin, but it means that you cannot really work. I mean, yeah, you escaped that.
- [251:01]
A
It's interesting that you were able to do that for a short time. This is an experience and then. And go on to be extremely productive.
- [251:08]
B
For me, it was also kind of research, even though I didn't know this.
- [251:10]
A
I mean, life is research in a way, if you allow it to be.
- [251:14]
B
I could not have written these books on history and drugs without having had these drug experiences. Because that. I mean, also, like when I wrote about methamphetamine and the Nazis, I asked at the time, weed was illegal in Germany. So I asked the friend of mine, she's a cannabis. This dealer, I guess you would say. I said, can you also get me crystal meth? She was shocked, like, no, because she was a weed dealer. But then she found a Polish guy who actually had crystal meth. I just wanted to have it. It was like the Paul Schrader thing. When he wrote the screenplay to Taxi Driver, he had a gun in his drawer so he would get the vibe of danger. So I wanted to have this crystal meth. So this Polish guy sold it to me and he gave me a zero without me saying anything. Maybe my friend, maybe she said, he's a writer or something, but he gave me a Xerox cop. He gave me the methamphetamine, one gram and the Xerox copy of the patent of Pavitin from 1938. So this was a crystal meth dealer that actually had historical knowledge about it.
- [252:22]
A
Did you ever try.
- [252:23]
B
Yeah. Well, then I tried it because I really wanted. I could not really write about it in the same way without having tried it. I can't recommend it. It feels very toxic. Like when you take a psychedelic. I can say this with a clear conscience. It's not toxic. LSD is not toxic. It doesn't poison you. You might have reactions in your brain that are too much for you. But if you snort crystal meth, it goes on your central nervous system. Your heart starts pounding, your blood pressure rises. So it's stressful on the organism. It's toxic, you know, Know. But still, you know, the effect in the brain is not so interesting as with lsd, like you couldn't go crazy. I would say on crystal meth you just have like, you're just very much awake, but you don't have like crazy thoughts that you can't, you know, evaluate anymore. So it's a very, very, very different drug. But taking that of course made me understand better how a soldier feels in the tank taking it.
- [253:19]
A
Yeah, yeah, I think that's really, really important to do. I have to ask your friend Alex, who's. It sounds like he's taken every single drug there is. Has he spoken about like, what's the most interesting drug? Like what's his favorite drug? He seems like a connoisseur. Right.
- [253:40]
B
But he's not a psychedelic guy, so.
- [253:42]
A
Oh, well then, okay.
- [253:44]
B
More. He's more into the addictive drugs.
- [253:47]
A
It's very difficult, I guess. Yeah, that would be a special person that can be a really sort of.
- [253:56]
B
Yeah.
- [253:56]
A
A full on explorer of the drug space. Because if you get into psychedelics, then you don't really want to do the hard drugs. If you get the hard drugs, you don't want to.
- [254:05]
B
Yeah, right. They contradict each other.
- [254:07]
A
They do contradict each other. Yeah.
- [254:09]
B
That's why we spend less and less time together.
- [254:17]
A
Since you mentioned Kerouac. Listen, I love Kerouac. Do we know any sort of famous writers that have used drugs as part of the writing? So Kerouac is one.
- [254:29]
B
Do we know any famous writers who have not used drugs as part of their writing?
- [254:32]
A
Interesting. So wait, I didn't actually know, to be honest. The story I loved.
- [254:38]
B
That's the good thing about being a writer. You can take drugs on the job and no one will cancel you for it. If you're like a politician, you can't really do it.
- [254:45]
A
That's right. You could be a rock star. You can be a writer, you can.
- [254:48]
B
Be an artist and take drugs. Drugs.
- [254:49]
A
You mentioned that Kerouac did what?
- [254:51]
B
Amphetamine speed, basically. Speed. The legend has it that on the Road was written in two weeks on speed, basically without sleeping and using an endless paper roll in this typewriter. So he was just writing. And I can imagine that you can write a hell of a lot on amphetamines. And I do it sometimes, but I don't do it a lot. So I can take amphetamines and have a really good time and write like 20 pages. But then the next day I wouldn't do it anymore. Any. I wouldn't do it anymore. But he decided, okay, for 14 days I'm going to do it. Philip K. Dick was an amphetamine writer. And also I think if you take a lot of amphetamines, you get into kind of psychedelic spaces at a certain point in time where you start hallucinating. And like, if you write, you know, Blade Runner, maybe it helps you. So amphetamines are also. They can be creative, I guess. It's just not. I don't. It's not my type of drug. And they're certainly not as creative as. But it also depends on the person. Like Malcolm Laurie, under the Volcano. He was drinking a lot. Or Hemingway was drinking a lot. And they could only write when they're drunk. When I'm drunk, I can't write. I just can't do it.
- [256:06]
A
Write drunk, edit sober.
- [256:10]
B
And that's advisable. Like if I would write something on amphetamines, I would certainly edit it sober. Of course, because on amphetamines your self criticism is lowered because you feel so good, like you feel so confident, you just write. But writing is about nuances, especially literary writing. Maybe a nonfiction book would be easier on amphetamines, but a novel, it's all about. You have to be very, very open. Amphetamines close you, you become like a machine. Like, you write. But if you are on the right track, like Kerouac with On the Road, he had the right, you know, he was going, you know. But you could also be on the wrong one and then write 200 pages and you just have to throw it away. And probably he did a lot of that also, you know.
- [256:55]
A
Yeah, yeah. And also on the Road is a particular kind of book.
- [257:00]
B
It's an amphetamine book.
- [257:01]
A
You want the spontaneity, the speed of.
- [257:05]
B
It's about speed. It's about moving fast. It's about not stopping. It is a speed book. Yeah, but it's a great book.
- [257:12]
A
It's such a great book. It's such a great book. But then I recently been rereading all of Dostoevsky. So going to Notes on the Ground to the Idiot to Cry and Punishment to Brothers Karamazov and that, I don't think, who's your favorite Brothers Karamazov? Well, I read it in both Russian and English and for the longest time it was the idiot until it's a complicated philosophical issue. When I was younger, I thought Prince Mishkin, the main character and the idiot, was not as flawed as I believe he is now. I think Dostoevsky tried to create a Jesus like character in Prince Mishkin and I think kind of failed because he was Too giving in a way that it was actually counterproductive and destructive to the world, which is he tried to fix in the Brothers Karamazov with Alyosha Karamazov. But anyway, I don't think that you could do that. I'll be very surprised to learn that Dostoevsky did any drugs also.
- [258:15]
B
There was not so much available.
- [258:17]
A
That's true.
- [258:18]
B
Alcohol, of course, nicotine, coffee. Those are already powerful drugs.
- [258:24]
A
And I'm also doing a podcast with Chuck Paulinate, author of Fight Club and many other amazing books.
- [258:31]
B
Yeah, he's a great writer. Fight Club influenced me quite a bit. I think the novel is even better maybe than the movie, but the movie's great.
- [258:41]
A
I mean, in that case, as he said, the movie is great and that it's almost like a bigger than life thing. And sometimes the book and the movie and those things can influence culture.
- [258:54]
B
That certainly influenced culture to where like.
- [258:56]
A
Okay, this has a life of its own. I'd like to think some of your work might influence the. How we perceive history. That's really important. That's really powerful to not just change, but sort of expand our conception of history, which is important to do. Is there particular books, fiction or non fiction? So you were both a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer writer. Is there books that had an influence on you?
- [259:22]
B
Yeah, it's Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is good, but only when you're like in your early 20s, living in New York and you're writing your first book and you just have taken lsd.
- [259:35]
A
Oh, nice.
- [259:36]
B
Then I read it and then it opened. Well, it just showed. It's just a very experimental novel. So it opens up. You don't have to understand everything, but it shows you that there's many different ways of telling a tale. And that was quite interesting to me. But the most influential book maybe is the Stranger by Camus. Because I like the language so much and I'm really mostly interested in language. I don't really care what it's about. I was lying on the beach in Morocco when I was 20 and reading the Stranger. And then a Moroccan came and he said, why are you reading a racist book? They were like, what are you talking about? This is world literature. He said, yeah, right. He's like killing an Arab without consequence. No, actually, there is consequence, but no reason. Basically just because he's bored. So this is racist. That made no sense to me, that argument, because I was just interested in how Camus constructed. It was just for me a stylistical experience to read that.
- [260:45]
A
I always love books and Stranger is a short book. I love books that are able to accomplish so much in so little, in so little pages, in so few pages, in so few words. The Stranger.
- [260:57]
B
There's nothing unnecessary in the Stranger. And I always try to write a book where every sentence is just. There's nothing unnecessary in the book. But it's very hard to do, actually. Nietzsche could do this. Peterson talked about this, that every sentence in Nietzsche is, like, chiseled, and it's, like, perfect. And I think not every. I mean, but that's his tendency. He tries to write like this, and that's very hard to achieve. That's actually where the writing becomes poetic. So for me, Nietzsche also is like a poet. The aphorisms is poetry. So Nietzsche also, stylistically, since you asked, was very important to me. So Camus, Nietzsche, James Joyce, and then just in Kafka also. I like Kafka always. And I like Thomas Mann. I don't know how well he translates, but in German. It's interesting, his take on how to. It's funny. He's a very funny guy. Even though he's like. He talks too much, but he's good. So I always wanted to have these guys as my colleagues, basically.
- [262:00]
A
Are they there somewhere in your head as you're writing?
- [262:03]
B
Less and less. But it was like an incentive to be part of that club, like, to be able to write a book. And it's out there and it's perfect and it's. And you're on one level with Camus, you know, it's very hard to do. Let's say you become a carpenter, which is also, you know, a very challenging job. But you don't have these kind of great. Well, you have Jesus, I guess, as your potential colleague.
- [262:28]
A
Yeah, sure.
- [262:28]
B
But for the. I just like these writers, these two. So. So the ones I mentioned. And also then Thomas Pynchon, who wrote Gravity's Rainbow, which I think is one of the best novels of the 20th century. And I read that in Berlin in the late 90s, and it really blew my mind. I think it's an absolute masterpiece. The intensity of this novel, Gravity's Rainbow, is unparalleled. And I'm still puzzled by how he did it. It. And it's not known how he did it because he lives a completely obscure life. No one knows basically who he is. So he's also a very interesting colleague.
- [263:10]
A
It's widely regarded as one of the most challenging and significant works of postmodern literature. Set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, the novel centers on the design, production, and deployment of the German V2 rocket. The narrative follows several characters. It lists the characters.
- [263:27]
B
Well, it's. Lothrob is the American agent who is the main character. He works for Allied intelligence, and he's really a funny guy. He smokes a lot of weed, and he's like, in Berlin and bombed out Berlin after the war. And it's just funny to go with him through that. He's a great character. It's a great novel. It really is.
- [263:46]
A
So it does give a window into history also.
- [263:49]
B
It does, yeah. Yeah. But that's not why it's interesting to me. But it. It makes it especially interesting because the way he describes these situations, it's just the way he writes is phenomenal.
- [264:01]
A
It's a Pulitzer Prize, and.
- [264:03]
B
Oh, but I'm sure he didn't take it on lists. Yeah, he declined. Well, no one knows who he is. I know a little bit. I know who his w. His wife is, but I'm not going to talk about it. He really wants to protect his privacy. And I think that's also made amazing.
- [264:17]
A
I think that's a beautiful thing. But for me, from my perspective, he.
- [264:21]
B
Wouldn'T appear in the podcast.
- [264:22]
A
He would not.
- [264:23]
B
It would be great if he would not.
- [264:25]
A
Well, I. I believe it's possible, but with people like that, it has to be a long journey, and it has to. You have to. Like, for me, for example, I just interviewed Terrence Tao, who's one of the greatest mathematicians, one of the greatest living mathematicians, probably one of the greats in history. And there's another I want to speak with, which is Grisha Grigori Perlman, woman, who's a Russian mathematician, who's more akin to Thomas Pynchon. He declined the millennial prize, the $1 million. He declined all the prize of the Fields Medal, the breakthrough prize in mathematics. He declined everything. And he just lives with his mom now, quit mathematics, like Kira.
- [265:04]
B
He also lived with his mom.
- [265:06]
A
There's something really beautiful about a human being like that.
- [265:09]
B
Right.
- [265:10]
A
Especially because in his case, it was done for principles. Like, he has a certain set of principles and no amount of money, nothing can buy him or.
- [265:20]
B
Yeah, that's amazing, actually.
- [265:23]
A
Yeah. I had somebody tell me this. A really interesting guy I met a few days ago said that there's nothing more exhilarating. Perhaps only a rich person can say this, but there's nothing more exhilarating than saying no to a lot of money. But he said it was so much confidence that I somehow believed him. But it is the more. The deeper Truth there is living by principles and having integrity. There is something deeply fulfilling. If that means saying no to money or if that means standing up to Hitler and then risking your life, that's a deeply fulfilling thing. Big ridiculous question. I thought you were a good person to ask. What's the point of this whole thing? What's the meaning of life and our existence here on Earth?
- [266:23]
B
I somehow think that the universe has a big story to tell or it's telling a big story the whole time and our consciousness is part of the, that bigger story. So the consciousness of the whole of the universe, the big, the huge story is something that is probably the meaning of life or the meaning of life, of our individual life, is to understand that story. That is something, for example, that I understood quite well on LSD when I walked in the mountains about a month ago. Because the mountains, they actually, you know, they're quite high up into the atmosphere and they are made of all kinds of minerals and so they are receiving cosmic energy that comes, you know, that hits our planet and walking up there and it doesn't. I guess if you're on lsd, you're more open somehow because you're not closing with your default mode network. That's that this is the tree and this is the path and this is the mountain. And now it's 2 o' clock and I have to go back. And the rain, like you're more open so you're more like perceiving. At least that's the impression I had. And I couldn't put it in words what exactly I was perceiving, but I was perceiving more of the bigger story. And I think that is inspiration. And I think, think those moments bring you quite close to the meaning of life. And I wouldn't put that meaning on life in words. It is an experience. And I think that for me as an artist, it was an important experience to make to get close to that. And that is what you can achieve in each, each of your professions. Like a mathematician, he comes to that point when he hears more, he grasps connections and he might not be able to put it into a formula yet, but if he's an open person, he might be a better mathematician because he can understand a bit more of the.
- [268:43]
A
Meaning of everything of this bigger story that's being written.
- [268:46]
B
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I mentioned to you my substack, which I think is going to be the best substack.
- [268:53]
A
Do you think it's possible it's the greatest substack of all time in history?
- [268:56]
B
That's what it's going to be.
- [268:57]
A
It's going to be, yeah.
- [268:58]
B
Stone Sapien substack, but something else.
- [269:01]
A
I just hope you actually do it well.
- [269:04]
B
You should become a subscriber.
- [269:06]
A
I will definitely subscribe.
- [269:09]
B
I really realized that there is a greater, a bigger story and it's somehow interesting to try to open up. Because if we live, live, that's why I like to be in nature also quite a lot. You have a better access. We live boxed in. Walter Benjamin called us like the boxed human beings. Like, we're living in the cities. We're waking up, we're doing. It's good to be, therefore it's good to be outside the system. And I hope that my art can contribute to freeing the brain waves, to understanding a bit more. What that is, I don't know. But I think the process of understanding more and connecting in different ways, that is what I'm going for because I think that is the meaning of life.
- [269:52]
A
Well, thank you for doing that with all of your work and for inspiring us all to do the same. Thank you so much for talking today.
- [270:00]
B
It was great. Thank you.
- [270:03]
A
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Norman Ohler. To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. Subscribe. And now let me leave you with some words from the great Terrence McKenna. Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under. It will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done, by hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering that it is in fact, a feather bed. Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time. Sa.