Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481

Hitler invited 3 young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan: the plan to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea, so it wasn't actually the drugs that produced the idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains. If you think monocausally, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before that, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which was the same as in World War I.

It becomes a stalemate, and they fight for months, and no one really moves. It's bloody, nothing's happening, and it's bad. But that was the only plan they had. That's why the high command said, "No, we're not going to do it. It's stupid." But these 3 tank generals said, "Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains—" and Hitler was like, "This is not possible. This is a mountain range. How can the whole German army fit through this eye of a needle?"

They said, "No, we can do it, because everyone misunderstands what tanks can do. Tanks are not slow machines in the back that wait for the action to happen and then somehow support this. 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 they know it. We are already behind them. But it would only work if we reached Sedan, the border city of France, within 3 days and 3 nights, and that was only possible if you didn't stop."

Suddenly, Ranke realized that his moment had come, because he had the recipe for how people could stay awake for 3 days and 3 nights. Before that, he was kind of an outsider, the freak with the drug idea. Suddenly, he became, "Okay, tell us, how does it work?" He gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army was prescribed a drug—in this case, methamphetamine—how much should be taken, and at what intervals.

This became a very big thing. Then Temmler had to deliver 35 million doses to the front lines. On May 10, they took their methamphetamine and started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains.

The following is a conversation with Norman Ohler, author of Blitzed: 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 Antony Beevor, give very high praise to. Ian Kershaw describes it as, "Very well researched, serious piece of scholarship." And Antony Beevor 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 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. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description and consider subscribing to this channel. And now, dear friends, here's Norman Ohler.

Tell me the origin story of meth, methamphetamine, and Pervitin, its branded drug version, in the context of Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Let's start there.

I think you're right to ask about the context, because without the context, it's not really understandable. What was the situation? In the 1920s, the Nazi movement basically started in Bavarian beer halls. Alcohol was the drug of choice of the early Nazi movement. The only guy who didn't drink was Hitler. He was a teetotaler, I guess you say. So that was happening in Munich.

At the same time, in the 1920s, 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. The context is a big context. The Treaty of Versailles had the effect that the German economy was not really able to recover after the end of World War I.

The Treaty of Versailles was written basically by the Western victorious powers. Germany had no say in the negotiations. I'm certainly not a German nationalist, not even a German patriot, but even I would say that the Treaty of Versailles treated Germany somewhat unfairly. It laid all the blame on Germany. A war is a very complex thing, and the First World War, to examine how it actually started, is a very complex story with many factors to it.

But the Treaty of Versailles just said it was Germany's fault, and then Germany had to make all these payments to the Allies. It couldn't create a new economy, and it couldn't have a new army. So the economy really went down. Everything in Berlin was cheap, and people were also using 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. A neuroscientist would know exactly how this works. In Berlin, the drugs that were used were morphine, cocaine, mescaline, and ether. People were experimenting. Everyone developed a different mindset.

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 intoxicating themselves in whatever way they wanted. So the population, in a way, if you just look at Munich and Berlin, was growing apart.

There were the alcohol people in Munich, the Nazis, and then there was this weird, diverse, LGBTQ scene in Berlin, with actresses sniffing ether in the morning and then making crazy moves.

Could you speak to the nature of the motivation for drug use in Berlin at the time? Was it 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, understand the world, and develop their culture? What do we understand about drug use there?

All of these factors come together. But it was the first time in modern history, in Germany at least, that there was no emperor. Before that, with Kaiser Wilhelm, everything was very strict. You couldn't go crazy as a young person. You couldn't really be a young person. But now, in the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, you could. No one stopped you, so people went crazy.

That's what made Berlin into the city that it still somehow is. Maybe later we can talk about contemporary Berlin. It still kind of has that vibe. That's why people still come to Berlin. Drugs are cheap, you can move however you want, and there's no authority.

That created a rift between the Nazis in Munich and Berlin, and they always hated Berlin and what was going on there. For example, Goebbels, the later propaganda minister, called the situation in Berlin "the hated asphalt reality of Berlin." He hated that. When the Nazis were then able to take power in 1933, one of the first things they did was prosecute people who were taking drugs, because they wanted to bring everyone back into the fold.

You asked what the reason was for people taking so many drugs. They were accessible and cheap, but I think the most important thing is that they let you find yourself, maybe, or lose yourself. That's also possible.

You have a connection to Berlin and this part of the world. Can you briefly speak to that so we can contextualize even more deeply the personal aspect of this? You understand the music of the people, the land, and its history. There's something you can only really understand if you've been there and taken it in.

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?

I grew up in West Germany, and this was during the Cold War. Berlin, the walled-in city, was always a big fascination. There was a wall—there was actually a wall in the city preventing people from moving into another part. I was from the West, fortunate enough to be from the free West, so I could travel to Berlin and leave. I could look at it, and I always loved Berlin. I thought it was a very vibey place.

When the wall came down, I was still in school, but I immediately got into my parents' car and drove there. I wanted to see how it came down. Berlin, in the 1990s, became a place that was very attractive to me, and I moved there in the 1990s.

I was first living in New York. I wrote my first novel in New York, and I loved New York before Giuliani became mayor. He ruined the city. Before that, it wasn't gentrified. Or, let's say, he introduced gentrification, and gentrification is a big topic. I still lived in ungentrified New York City, paying like 300 bucks a month in rent, and everyone I knew was an artist.

You loved the diversity of it?

Yeah, I loved it. I wrote my first novel there. I took LSD for the first time in Downtown Manhattan on a Saturday night.

So you're kind of like a German Kerouac-type character, but moved a few decades forward.

I wouldn't compare myself to another writer, but I think Kerouac is pretty cool. He's an amphetamine writer. On the Road was apparently written in 2 weeks on amphetamines, and it's good. Amphetamines are not bad per se. We can also talk about these so-called bad drugs, because basically, they're neutral.

But let's not lose the thread.

Yes. Yes. New York, Berlin. Yes. Oh, yeah. And then I was in New York. I was in a health food store, one of the first. There weren't many health food stores back then, but there was one on First Avenue. Suddenly, there was an announcement, which was unusual in a health food store. I think it was called Prana Foods.

The announcement was that Kurt Cobain had just shot himself. I had been, and still am, a Nirvana fan. I saw one of the last Nirvana concerts in New York City, and it was amazing. But he killed himself. 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.

Rock music with the hero onstage was dead. Now it was dance and electronic music, which a lot of people today think is kind of a simplistic music form, but it's actually a 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 really decided I'd leave New York City. I was going to move to Berlin. 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.

The city was very open. The wall had just come down. I mean, it was a few years later, but it still felt like it had just come down. Berlin was not yet the capital of Germany. That was still in Bonn. So Berlin was a very cheap, cultural, and crazy city, probably a bit like in the '20s, actually.

That's how I fell in love with it, and that's how I became interested in this electronic scene. I visited many dance venues then, so-called clubs.

Yeah, it's one of the hubs in the world of electronic music.

They claim that techno was kind of invented in Berlin, but it also comes from Detroit. So Detroit and Berlin are the techno hubs, I would say.

Yeah, electronic music is a soundtrack for some of the most interesting experiences this Earth has ever created. It gets people together in some interesting ways. So it's not just the music itself; it's the experiences that the music enables.

In Germany, we had a situation where 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 “vault”—was in the big vault with the big doors. That's where Tresor was, the club.

It's so funny that the echo, 100 years later, is that Berlin had all these left-wing partiers, young people using drugs, and then Munich with the beer, and that's where Hitler came out. Is that what we're supposed to imagine in the early days of the Nazi Party, when Hitler was giving speeches to just a handful of people? Were they all drunk?

It is a fact that the movement came out of the Bürgerbräukeller. It was a certain restaurant-pub in Munich, and that was not only a beer hall; it was also a political venue. It was a right-wing venue, for right-wing populists. People like communists wouldn't use it, even though communists are in many ways quite similar to the right wing, especially back then.

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 here, and Hitler would agree. 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 toward others. He could play with that.

So, drunk and aggressive toward others, but drunk in a group.

It constitutes the group also if everyone is on the same alcohol level. You can just go to Oktoberfest in Munich, which is not a political thing, but you can kind of sense how it originated.

Actually, the first time the Nazis tried to grab power was the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. It took place in 1923, after a drunken night when they suddenly decided, “Now we're going to do it.” They came out of the Bürgerbräukeller, and they were all drunk except Hitler. They tried to overtake the Munich government, and they miserably failed because it was just a stupid, drunken idea. They were like, “Yeah, let's just do it.”

The Bavarian police, quite sober that day, just shot them to the ground. Hitler was almost killed. He jumped behind his bodyguard. Göring, during the Beer Hall Putsch, was wounded in his stomach with a gunshot, I think. That's why he became a morphine addict.

This Beer Hall Putsch in '23 had severe effects. They were sentenced to prison, and Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in prison.

All these little events come together. It's so interesting that for them it was just life, but now we look back at these critical moments in history that turned the tides of human civilization.

So Hitler could have died there, and these characters—Göring, who became larger than life—went on to influence the lives, deaths, and suffering of millions. First of all, it could have been stopped then, whatever that means when you look back at history.

But all those are just human beings developing their ideas, growing, developing groups, developing ideologies, and using drugs or drinking.

That's why I thought it was 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. He was a proper medical historian from the University of Ulm.

Then I said, “Now I'm interested in Hitler.” He said, “No, don't. This is not interesting. This is not serious history.”

But even Hitler was a person. If you understand, for example, the substance abuse of a person, of course you understand more about that person. Historians never had that idea before.

Kershaw, for example, is really great. He's very knowledgeable about National Socialism. Like many British historians, Kershaw knows more about German history than German historians do. I think he's really good.

But in his biography of Hitler, he just writes one sentence: “And then he had a crazy doctor called Morell who gave him dubious medications and drugs,” and he stops there. Then he goes on to describe whatever.

Yeah, we should say that Ian Kershaw is widely considered to be probably one of the greatest biographers of Hitler.

I think he wrote the best biography of Hitler.

Which is so important. Your work is really important because it opens a whole new perspective on the lives of individuals and the machinery of the Nazi military that historians haven't looked at. It's so interesting that you can unlock those perspectives.

That's really the underlying foundation of our conversation today and of your work: there are layers to this thing. You can look at the tactics of war and the strategic level of war, the operational level of war. You could look at the human suffering of war, the love stories, the hate, the psychology of propaganda, or the individual things—substances consumed by the individuals who made up the Nazi Party leadership and the soldiers.

All those are critically important to understand the war. This piece of drug use and supplement use has been ignored by historians.

That was very surprising to me. I didn't know this myself. I never planned to write this book. It kind of happened to me.

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.

He was maybe even shocked when I came back from the German military archive with a lot of copies, all relating to the systematic drug use of the German army, including an experiment done by the Navy, which had always pretended to be the clean one. In German, we say Waffengattung, meaning a branch of the armed forces. You have the Army, the Air Force, and the Navy, and in Germany they had the SS.

The Navy always pretended to be like, “We weren't really Nazis. We were 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.

They had new things they called “wonder weapons,” or what Hitler called “wonder weapons.” He always talked about these wonder weapons. They were basically mini-submarines. One or two people would go in, staying underwater for up to a week and torpedoing Allied ships.

The Navy was trying to develop a drug that would keep you awake and combat-ready for 7 days and 7 nights without sleep and without burning out. It was very difficult to find. So they hired a penal unit in the concentration camp.

The SS had a so-called “shoe-walking unit.” It was a penal unit within the concentration camp, testing shoe soles for the German shoe industry and walking for days. Then they would measure how the soles held up under stress.

They had different layers in the concentration camp, representing all the surfaces the German soldiers would touch when they conquered Europe. This was a very elaborate thing. If you go to the concentration camp today, it's a museum. You can still see the running track of the shoe-walking unit.

The Navy hired the shoe-walking unit from the SS, paid them money, and gave them different kinds of drug combinations: methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things.

So this is a big thing, and there are documents to support it. Mommsen knew everything about National Socialism; he was the old authority. I'm the young one. I didn't study history. I just try to make sense of things.

But I presented him with all these documents. He was reading from this pile of material, and he said, “Wow.” He said, “We historians, we never do drugs. We don't understand drugs. We missed this.” So he was very clear that we missed this.

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, meaning militarily effective decisions—in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort toward the end. 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 figure out: what happened to Hitler? Why did he get crazy? He was crazy, but why did he get so bad as a leader? He was very effective for a long time, and then there's this moment where it turns.

Yeah, the degeneration of decision-making—psychology, behavior, all of that. You cannot understand that fully without understanding his drug use.

We should also say that some of the historians you mentioned—Ian Kershaw and Anthony Beevor, these legends of history—they all gave you compliments. Kershaw said, “Your work is very good, extremely interesting, and a serious piece of well-researched history.” Anthony Beevor said that it's a remarkable work of research. Props to them.

You have received a bunch of criticism from historians, but you've also received a lot of praise. I mean, Kershaw, the legendary historian of Hitler, complimented how deep your work is. That must feel good. Maybe this is a good moment, since we're talking about historians, to also address some of the criticism.

Richard Evans was also a great historian and has been one of the bigger critics. He said that your work is crass and dangerously inaccurate, and is morally and politically dangerous. I think that's grounded in the idea that if you say, “Well, all the Nazi forces and Hitler were on drugs,” then their evil can be explained away. They're not really evil; accountability can be removed because they were using drugs.

Right.

Another criticism of his, which I also understand and can probably steelman, is that if you look too much through the singular lens of drugs, you can overemphasize it. You can overemphasize how important it was as an explanation for the effectiveness of the Blitzkrieg, for example.

There is something really compelling about a singular theory that explains everything, and you can fall in love with it too much as an explanation. Can you steelman his criticism, or a criticism you received, and also argue against it?

I think he's absolutely right that you shouldn't argue in a monocausal way. This is actually what Mommsen also said to me, because, of course, I was enthusiastic about all my drug findings. He said, “Don't argue in a monocausal way, especially in the war.”

There's a lot of variables, a lot of factors, a lot of things going on.

That sentence of his—“Don't argue in a monocausal way”—always stayed with me. I think I didn't deviate from that path, actually. But it was still interesting that Evans thought I put too much emphasis on the drugs. I think 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 3 nonfiction books, nothing is invented. As a good writer—and because I trained as a novelist—it was very unusual for me to write a nonfiction book. I wanted to write a novel about Nazis and drugs. My publisher said, “No, this is…” He looked at the facts and 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 base it 100% on the facts.” In German, we say “Spagat.” How do you say that? A split, like when you do it with your legs. It's hard.

With a very fluent, sophisticated language, you can easily overpower the reader. If I describe how 19-year-old German guys took methamphetamine and went into the tank, and the meth started kicking in—5 guys on meth after 1 hour of riding into France—you can write that in a powerful way. If you are the reader, you would think, “Yeah, I mean, the Blitzkrieg without meth is unthinkable.”

Man, I wish I found that kind of feeling from historians, right? “How did I miss this piece?” Some historians—great historians like Kershaw—obviously give you a slow clap and applaud. And some historians are a little bit skeptical: “This is a little too good.” That's totally understandable.

They also have different techniques for writing texts like this. I used a totally different technique. I have an apparatus, so it really feels like it could be an academic work. But still, it's written in a way that kind of overpowers. It kind of colonizes the story in a weird way.

I never thought about it like that. 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 got carried away, obviously, but I never left the area of facts.

Yes. We should talk about your process. That's also super fascinating. You went to the archives. You went to the sources. What does that take? What does it feel like? 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?

I never thought of going to the archives. My girlfriend at the time said, “You have to go to the archives.” She's an academic. I said, “Yeah, okay. I'll go. I'm fine. I'll check it out.”

Then I met a historian who claims that without methamphetamine, there would be no Blitzkrieg, no victory for Germany. He's monocausal. But he was also extremely helpful to me, and he's an academic. He gave me the signatures—it's called that in German—where you find things in the archives. A signature is like… Then it says something like H2/538, something like this.

These were the files of Professor Ranke. Professor Ranke was the head of the Institute for Army Physiology. His job was to improve the performance of the soldier. All of his material 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.

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. Because I had this signature, I immediately got original documents that related to my research. I had the originals.

What does it look like? Is it sheets of paper? It's not scanned?

It's different things. The guy who brought methamphetamine into the army, Professor Ranke, was writing a war diary. That's what it was called: a war diary. Every day, he would write it by hand. This war diary was given to me.

So you're reading that? It's dated? You have a date in the diary?

Yes. It was a bit funny with him because he took a lot of meth himself because he thought it was great. He thought it increased his performance. By now, we know a little bit more: methamphetamine is not so healthy. You get used to it and burn out, you get depressed, and then you take more. Big problem.

He became depressed and burnt out, and he didn't realize it was because of the meth that he was prescribing to the whole German army. He made a convincing case. I can explain in detail how that actually happened.

But just having his war diary was great. He would also type letters to the Temmler Company about how quickly they could produce things and in what amount of time. You have all these original documents. You have about 500 documents, and he writes reports about what happened in this battle involving methamphetamine. There's a lot of material you can find in the archives if you can find it.

The tricky thing is that you can only look at a so-called finding aid. In the finding aid, you cannot type in “drugs.” It wouldn't find anything, because when they were cataloging all the notes from this doctor—his war diary, everything—they didn't put the label “drugs” there. They used his name, his position, World War II, the French campaign, and things like that.

At the time, they didn't know that I would one day come and look for drugs in it. He was the drug guy, but they didn't realize he was the drug guy. No one realized he was the drug guy. So it's not easy to find material in the archives.

The archive you go to is a very Kafkaesque experience. You go into this building, and you have to understand the rules, but you will never fully understand what's going on. The archivists don't really know what's going on, either, because there are so many documents. No one's read them all. No one knows. History is just lying there, somehow organized, somehow stored.

I mean, it does sound like a very Kafkaesque thing.

But it's great if you find something, though you can also sit there for a week and not find anything.

So what was the process for you? Were you just reading with an open mind, trying to see if there was some truth there to be discovered?

I have a friend who's a DJ, and we talked about Berlin. We'll probably talk about it more. He takes a lot of drugs, and he knows his drugs, let's put it that way. He knows his drugs.

One day, when I was trying to figure out what I would write about next, he said to me, “The Nazis took a lot of drugs. You should write about that.” 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 about drugs. Now they do, maybe, but it was not known then.

The Nazis always had this aura of being law and order. No drugs, of course. No chaos. My grandfather was a Nazi and always said, “Well, at least there was discipline in the country. There was law and order.” So this doesn’t match with drugs.

You know, I should also say that I think that’s the experience for a lot of people. Before reading your book, I had the same kind of feeling: the Nazi ideology was all about law and order and purity, and surely they would not be doing drugs. So this really blew my mind. I think I wasn’t quite ready, similar to Richard Evans. This is a big narrative transforming into a deeper, more complicated understanding of what the Nazi forces and Hitler’s inner circle actually looked like.

That’s why I didn’t believe Alex.

Always take the DJ, the drug expert, with a grain of salt.

I didn’t believe him, but I said, “It’s a great topic. Maybe I could invent it.” He said, “No, we don’t invent this. This is real.” I said, “How do you know?” He said, “I have a friend.” 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 Pervitin tablets inside, which was the methamphetamine product marketed in Germany in the late 1930s.

This guy, the antique dealer, took some tablets. They were quite old—70 years old—but they still had an effect on him. I later asked him, and he said, “Well, we took them for about a month. It was the greatest month we ever had. We had so much fun. We were so productive.” That methamphetamine back then was also a quality product. It was not crystal meth made in a trailer lab.

So this is many decades later.

They were still potent. Alex especially convinced me because he has a high tolerance, and he said, “Okay, they still had some.” So I said to him, “Can I have some also?” I took one.

We were standing in my writing tower, which is at the river in Berlin, and he said, “I took one, and I could feel something. Then I took another one,” and then, “I could feel more.” Then I took a third one. Typical Alex—he would take three. Instead of just taking one, he took three methamphetamine tablets from the 1940s.

He said, “And then I felt like…” He looked at the river. There was a big cargo ship going by, and he said, “I felt like this ship.” Suddenly, there was this “Schub,” he said in German, like a motion, like energy that was grabbing me, and I felt so powerful.

He told me this, and I was like, “Wow!” I Googled “methamphetamine Nazi Germany.” This was in 2010. There was one professor at the University of Ulm who said, “The Blitzkrieg was only possible because of methamphetamine.” So I called this guy up, and he said, “Sure, I’ll meet you.” Then he gave me the signature for the archive. I went to the archive, and I really started to do my own research.

Then I went to different archives, and I tried to find everything on Nazis and drugs. Everything is in the book. That crazy meeting with Alex in my writing tower got me on this research journey.

It makes me wonder what other mysteries like that are in the archives. Do you think there are things like that in there that we deeply don’t understand? I mean, for example, there are a bunch of mysteries that we think we understand—maybe about the concentration camps, maybe about the Eastern Front, or the interplay between Stalin and Hitler. Maybe about Britain, things that could be discovered in the letters and data that are completely missing.

I think so. I also think there are archives that are not open. Let’s say the Vatican archive. There are secret archives that some very powerful structures have—structures that we might not even know about, which still have a huge influence.

I think that human history is quite different from what most historians write. I think that’s just one version. I think there are several versions, and I think 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 a historical nonfiction book, and I suddenly realized that this is like a shark pool, because history defines the future or is very connected to it. Our history teacher always said, “If we don’t know where we come from, we cannot know where we go.” That is, I think, true.

That is what I’m now really interested in for my next book. I’m trying to really understand human history. Obviously, I’m not the first. There are a few alternative historians who go in that direction, because you have to go back in time quite a bit. Then it’s not easy to write about it, but it’s very interesting to think about.

I would love to find the truth about Atlantis, which I don’t actually believe in. We can also talk about that. 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 find a lot of documents, especially in closed archives. So we won’t find them.

You said a lot of really interesting things. It’s so important to have people like you who do the daring work of going to the archives, the sources, and 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.

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 rebels’ sake. But when you ground it in data and dare to challenge the historical narrative, that’s really powerful.

I should also mention that we’ve just been laying out the context.

Yeah. We’re still in the context phase.

In the context phase. For the next 10 hours, and maybe for the rest of our lives, we’ll continue just setting the context. But let us dare to return to the original question of Pervitin. Take me to 1930s Nazi Germany—the Munich and Berlin tension that we all laid out beautifully. How did Pervitin come into the picture?

The Nazis managed to grab power on January 30, 1933, and they immediately became an anti-drug regime. That was important to them because the only intoxication they allowed from then on in Germany was Nazi intoxication—the ideological intoxication.

They quickly established concentration camps, which at the time were run by the SA, not the SS. The SS took over later and turned the concentration camps into an industry. The first SA concentration camps were in cellars in Berlin or in the countryside. Some of the first people who landed in these cellars and were disciplined were drug users.

Anti-Semitic policies were also very important from day 1 for the Nazis. Anti-Semitism is the defining pillar of National Socialism. They quickly connected anti-drug policies with anti-Semitic policies. They claimed that German Jews were taking more drugs than non-Jewish Germans.

National Socialism’s goal was to purify the German body. They saw the whole Volk, the Volk, the country, the people, as one body, and that body had to be purified. So all Jews were poison. But not only Jews: everyone who thought differently. Communists were also poison. Jews were the worst poison, but a lot of people were included.

Then you create this clean body, and obviously drugs have no place in that. If you’re addicted to drugs, that’s weak; you’re a morphinist. You use cocaine—that’s all degenerate, that’s Jewish. Jewish doctors are all morphinists.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler was the shining example of the person who didn’t take drugs. He didn’t have a private life; he didn’t even have a body. He just led the Volkskörper, you know? Hitler wasn’t putting any poisons into himself. He stopped smoking cigarettes in the 1920s already. He never touched alcohol.

Vegetarian.

Vegetarian, no caffeine even. That’s what he was in the beginning. The story, of course, changes at a certain point in time, but he started as this.

As far as you understand, that’s true? In the beginning?

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 a vegetarian, you had a higher frequency, which kind of gave you superiority over, let’s say, the workers who needed to eat sausage so they could do the work.

Wagner, the composer, was vegetarian. Hitler was impressed by Wagner. I think that’s all true. I think Hitler was like that.

It’s hard to be like that, actually, and I think that made him attractive within the movement to all the drunkards, you know, and Göring, who used morphine all the time because of his pain. He got used to morphine. So the movement wasn’t like this, but he was like this. He symbolized that whole approach of cleanliness and 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. They used this simple trick of defining what is an illegal drug and what is not.

Because drugs don’t have it written on them, “This is an illegal, dangerous drug.” Drugs are basically neutral. They’re molecules. So the methamphetamine molecule was found by a Berlin-based company called the Temmler Company.

The head of Temmler was very upset with the Olympics in 1936 because an African American athlete, Jesse Owens, was running faster than German superheroes with the best genes. How could this be? They thought he was on something because he won, I think, 5 gold medals. It was ridiculous. This was supposed to be Germany’s games, and then the African American ran better than the Aryan Übermensch.

The only explanation was that he took a drug. He probably took Benzedrine, which was illegal amphetamine, and there were also no doping checks at the Olympics. If you’re taking amphetamine, of course, you can run a bit faster when it kicks in. This has to do with the immense release of dopamine in the brain.

It was never proven that Owens used any type of drugs, but the head of the Temmler Company said, “We have to prevent this. We have to invent a better amphetamine. We have to make a German amphetamine that is stronger than the American Benzedrine.” So his main chemist, Fritz Hauschild, did research and found that in 1917, in Tokyo, a Japanese chemist had made methamphetamine.

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, had a really good time, and were more active and talkative. That’s what happens with methamphetamine.

The company thought this was a great product, so they turned 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 Pervitin, which is a great name because it already has “perverse” in it.

Pervitin was available in any pharmacy, so you didn’t need a prescription. A child could go and buy 10 packs of pure methamphetamine. Methamphetamine was also very cheap, so it became quite popular because people talked about it.

Did they understand the side effects and negative effects of methamphetamine? Did they care?

They didn’t really know what it was. I also went to the archive of that company, of course. They were asking, “What is it good for?” They would say, “I just feel great when I take it, and I have more energy.” They didn’t know if that could be a product. It was 1937 and 1938 when they were discovering it.

But also, how did they think about the fact that this is a drug?

They called it a performance enhancer.

Got it.

Is drinking coffee in the morning a drug? It is a drug, but we don’t think of it as a drug. It’s legal. This was how meth was treated in Germany. It was normal to use it. If you had a very important business meeting, of course you would take a Pervitin.

There’s a movie by Billy Wilder called One, Two, Three, a very good movie. It shows an American executive. The movie was set right after the end of the Second World War, so we see, I think, an American Coca-Cola executive, and he says to his secretary, “How should I have the morning coffee? I think half a Pervitin.”

Pervitin was normal. It wasn’t stigmatized. It was not the American “Just Say No” propaganda, where your teeth fall out. It was a German quality product, and people liked it.

Of course, they did tests at universities, but most of them were quite positive. It reduces your fear. Today, we might look for different things, but this was also a performance-driven, totalitarian society moving toward war.

If someone takes Pervitin and says in the clinical tests at university, “I’m not afraid of anything anymore,” that’s positive. That’s actually what got the guy who worked for the German army interested, because he read the university reports. I also saw all of these reports. They were in the military archive.

He thought, “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.”

Negative effects only became public in 1940, when the first opponent of Pervitin spoke up. He was a psychologist related to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later armaments minister. He was the first one to say, “Wait a minute. First of all, methamphetamine is against Nazi ideology, because now we’re all taking a drug to be high performers. We have to be high performers without a drug.”

He also said, “This is going to make you addicted. This will create a tolerance.” Only then did the first negative reports come out. Before that, what Temmler did, and then what the universities did, was all based on the idea that methamphetamine was really good.

So what was the process of convincing the German military, the Wehrmacht, to use it at scale?

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 gadgets and stuff, because he also developed gadgets.

He was an academic, but he was also a soldier. He was employed, but he was basically running this institute and examining things. He was so convinced that Pervitin was the answer to his question: How do you beat the main opponent of the German soldier?

That was not the British soldier, the French soldier, or the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.

When he read these reports from universities, he did his own tests in the military academy with young medical officers. They came together at 8:00 PM, and then they received either methamphetamine, a caffeine pill, a placebo, or Benzedrine. They had different experiments, and he always concluded at the end.

They started at 8:00 PM, and at 10:00 AM, one time he noted, the Pervitin people still wanted to go out and party, while the caffeine guys were sleeping on the bench. It was clear that Pervitin was the strongest. It gave you the most energy and let you work for the longest time.

He was convinced, but his superior, the Surgeon General of the German army, was an old-school dude, and he didn’t even react to these reports. Ranke would write letters saying, “We have to use this synthetic drug in the next campaign,” which was against Poland, and which he knew about.

Because Pervitin was already quite well known in civil society, people were using it. 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.

Germany attacked Poland without a clear regulatory system for methamphetamine, and indeed, a lot of soldiers used it. What Ranke then did was request reports from all 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 your reports, and tell me: Did your people take Pervitin, and what were the effects?” He collected all these reports, which are also studied in the military archive, and came to the conclusion, “This is a really good fighting drug.”

It probably is, because people are still using it today. Methamphetamine is still being used. Ranke discovered this. He had everything in front of him.

Poland was beaten, and then Hitler wanted to attack the West. The West was a different story than Poland because it was the world empire of Great Britain combined with La Grande Armée, the strongest army in the world—the French army. These two combined, how could you win that?

Poland could be overpowered. Germany had a better army than Poland. But was the German Wehrmacht really better than both of these armies combined? Hitler’s officers didn’t think so. The High Command said, “No, we’re not going to attack the West. We’re going to lose.”

Hitler was fanatical about it. He really wanted to attack. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him from ordering the attack on the West, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany.

They really cared. If you’re the High Command, you don’t want to start a war that you’re going to lose. That’s very bad.

Can you briefly give a sense of whether you think this was genius or insanity on Hitler’s part—to think that he could take on what was probably perceived to be the most powerful military in the world, the French military, or at least the most powerful military in Europe?

I think his hatred for the French was very, very deep. He really wanted to go to war with them. It was an ideological, irrational decision.

He didn’t hate the British Empire. He looked down on it, but he also admired it.

You mean the British Empire?

But he really hated the French. France had been the Erbfeind, the hereditary enemy of the German people, at least according to right-wingers. There had been 2 wars. Germany had won the first one, and then, in the First World War, Germany had lost.

Hitler wanted revenge and also wanted to end the Treaty of Versailles. He really needed to attack the West, at least in his mindset. But it was an irrational decision, which is why the High Command said, “No, we’re not going to do it.”

Hitler’s position at the time was not that he could do anything he wanted. The High Command was still the High Command of the German Wehrmacht. That was a very old tradition. They did whatever they wanted, but they also had to obey Hitler’s orders.

So it was a power struggle, basically. To invade France was a totally stupid idea, but that changed in the morning.

On the morning of February 17, 1940, Hitler invited 3 young tank generals to his office, and they had a plan: to go through the Ardennes Mountains. That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, if you think in monocausal terms, you would say that going through the Ardennes Mountains was the reason.

That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before that, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which was the same as World War I. It becomes a stalemate, and they fight for months, and no one really moves. It's bloody, and nothing's happening. It's a bad plan, but that was the only plan they had. That's why the High Command said, "No, we're not going to do it. It's stupid."

But these 3 tank generals somehow managed to sneak into Hitler's office, and they said, "Look, if we go with the whole army through the Ardennes Mountains—" Hitler said, "This is not possible. This is 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 wait for the action to happen and then support it somehow. We're going to use tanks at 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 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. Before they know it, we're already behind them. We're 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, but it would only work if they reached Sedan, the border city of France, within 3 days and 3 nights. The whole army—or at least the vanguard of the machinery, a big part of the army—had to be in Sedan after 3 days and 3 nights. That was only possible if they didn't stop.

That was the problem. Sleep 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. Suddenly, Ranke realized that his moment had come because he had the recipe for how people could stay awake for 3 days and 3 nights.

Before that, he was kind of an outsider, a freak with a drug idea. Suddenly, he became someone they asked, "Okay, tell us, how does it work?" He gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree in which a whole army was prescribed a drug—in this case, methamphetamine. "How much should be taken? At what intervals? What are the side effects?" This became a very big thing.

Then Temmler had to deliver 35 million doses to the troops stationed in the west of Germany. On May 10, they took their methamphetamine, and they started the surprise attack through the Ardennes Mountains.

So, the 35 million doses were for the French campaign. 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 on the German side.

It ended with a big mistake: Dunkirk.

Dunkirk.

It was brilliant up until that point. That is the turning point. That was the first big mistake Hitler made, and it also had to do with drugs.

We'll talk about it, but let's linger on these 3 days.

Right.

We should also mention that's where Blitzkrieg really shone. It wasn't just the tanks; it was the infantry and the aircraft moving very fast behind the French lines. What can you speak to about the execution of that campaign and the role of drugs in it?

And we should say it's a really bold strategic decision to use meth. It's a big risk. There are a lot of risks taken here, which could be seen as military genius or military insanity, or a mixture of both.

Well, they were very lucky that it all worked out. The guys in the tanks could have all freaked out on the meth. It had never been 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—

It's insane, yeah.

—against the biggest military in Europe.

What meth does is—I read reports of a depressed atmosphere right before the attack started because they were afraid. They thought they would lose. They didn't want that. Soldiers—maybe some really hardcore Nazi soldiers, but most people were normal guys. They didn't want to start that.

But once they had the methamphetamine, you're in a party mood. When you're in the tank, everyone likes it. It's rather an uplifting thing. They were really getting into it, and they really started fighting then. It's also intoxication. It's a rush.

What does meth feel like?

Meth creates the so-called fight-or-flight mode. It releases all the neurotransmitters in the brain that are released in situations of high danger, for example. In a highly dangerous situation, you become very alert so you can cope with it. If you're under a life threat and you don't react to it, you're probably going to be dead.

The body does that, and methamphetamine does that. You take a pill of methamphetamine or snort a line of methamphetamine, and you're like this. Then it's the fight-or-flight mode. Either you run away because it's too much, but on meth, you usually don't run away. You think what's happening is really cool. You like to move, you like to be with your pals, and being in a tank is great on meth.

So there is a party aspect to it?

I think it was very joyful for the German soldiers because it was springtime. They had immediate successes. It wasn't heavy fighting; it was just being in the tank. There was, of course, fighting, and there were also war crimes.

I read a report about Rommel, high on meth, who at night didn't stop, of course, because they didn't stop at night. Every army usually stops at night. The French army was stopping. They were in a village camping out, and Rommel was going through that village with his division, just running over people.

He was standing in the open hatch of the tank, going through that thing like a berserk type of warrior. To me, that was a war crime. That was when the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in Rommel's push through the French countryside. Because you don't do that. Your enemy is sleeping.

The French also had a drug regulation. They received 0.75 liters of red wine per man per day. Of course, at night, they were going to be sleepy on red wine, while the Germans were on meth and just running over them. There are descriptions of the tank's tracks becoming bloody.

I don't think he did it, and then he was like, "Oh my God, what did I just do? I'm sorry. What am I doing here?" He was in the mood, you know?

This is the dark thing about human nature: in war, if you dehumanize—if you allow your brain to dehumanize—the enemy, the opponent, the humans on the other side, I think hate can take over. In that hate, you can find pleasure when you murder the other.

People have written about this; they've talked about this. It's probably something a person like me can't possibly comprehend unless they've experienced it. You have to be in the mania, the hysteria, and the insane intensity of war.

What Evans, for example, said is, "I excuse the Germans for the war crimes because they were just intoxicated." I understand that argument, but if you look at individual soldiers, it's quite tricky. It's a 19-year-old guy who's been drafted.

In Nazi Germany, if you don't go, you end up in a concentration camp. So you can choose: concentration camp, or just join the ranks, get Pervitin, and invade France.

There was a trial in Germany because someone said all soldiers are murderers. I think 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.

Yeah, I remember seeing this documentary, Ordinary Men. I think there's also social pressure. As insane as it is to say, I think the documentary Ordinary Men was looking at the Germans who were part of the shooting squads.

They didn't understand what they were signing up for, and they were told that they were free to leave once they understood what they were doing, and many of them didn't. They didn't hate Jews or the people they were murdering.

Again, you're a 19- or 20-year-old kid. It's so hard to comprehend the moral insanity that's happening all around you, and you just want to fit in.

That's why I wrote the book The Bohemians, because there were a few people in Berlin who didn't react this way. They reacted in a different way. They said, "We cannot be part of this."

But it's hard to be that person.

It's very hard, yeah. Most people are part of it because it's much safer, or at least it seems safer. It has its own perils, because you might become a genocidal murderer. 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. 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.

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 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 who 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 because there are no documents. If I found documents that said, “Yeah, when we…” But the Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs. Maybe with alcohol.

I spoke with my father, who had been a high judge in Germany. What does the law actually say? The law says that if you plan a crime and then, when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility. Your responsibility is only diminished if, let’s say, you’re a totally normal person who has 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 don’t think he’s right about that.

Yeah, I think I agree with you totally. I didn’t get that sense.

He thought the book was very successful because a lot of right-wing people bought it, but that’s not true. It’s simply not true.

I think your book did a masterful job of never making itself amenable to that kind of narrative.

To the contrary, I got an angry letter from a German army employee, quite a high officer and a military historian. He also thought I overemphasized the drug use of methamphetamine in the Western campaign because he said the German army was just so good, and I diminished 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, and the current German army is called the Bundeswehr. Historically, they’re not supposed to be connected—there was a clear-cut distinction—but he still felt that I was hurting the pride of the Wehrmacht.

I generally agree with him. In general, it seems like great historians often undermine the importance of the heroes that make up an army: the Soviet Army, the British Army, the French Army, the German Army. These are humans, and some of the great military campaigns involve people really stepping up. 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 are humans there. There are real heroes. Sometimes historians diminish that. I don’t know what to make 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 analyzed the mistakes made by Hitler and Stalin during Operation Barbarossa. But through generations, because I grew up in the Soviet Union, you hear these stories of these heroes. My grandfather was a machine gunner and miraculously survived. Just knowing those stories, Stalingrad would not have happened without the heroes on the Soviet side.

It’s easy to say there are 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 who have fearlessly given their lives to defend their homeland, and that can sometimes be easily dismissed. So I don’t know what to make 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. Then maybe it’s the gratitude I have for the people who have stopped the Nazi forces.

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. Did they love communism and the system? I don’t think so. Of course, some people did, but basically they were defending their country, and I’m also very grateful to them.

Yeah, they’re defending their families.

So can you say a bit more about the French campaigns? It was over in 6 weeks. It took 6 weeks to defeat and occupy most of France. The initial operation, 3 days, was, from a military perspective, successful. What else can we say about the role of drugs, their effectiveness, and what was learned from that experience by the Wehrmacht?

For me, researching the Western campaign was very interesting because I didn’t really know anything about it except that Germany won very quickly. To actually look at the details is very interesting, and the drugs give you a way in.

What are some things you found in the archives that were interesting, maybe letters, reports, or diaries, that gave you some insight into the human story of it all?

There are letters, for example, by Heinrich Böll, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature later. He writes to his parents, describing in detail what Pervitin did to him, how it kept his mood up, and that without Pervitin, he wouldn’t have been able to do the job.

Military documents were also 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 Rommel’s troops. I call Rommel the Crystal Fox in my book for obvious reasons. His division was using a lot of meth.

And he was using meth as well?

I just have descriptions of him standing totally crazily in the open lid of the tank. All his people had the meth.

So you can infer from that.

Maybe they didn’t use it. Maybe he didn’t use it. But it looks like he used it. There were also never any reports that all the meth was given back. A lot of soldiers write that they took it, but, specifically with Rommel, I wouldn’t write in my book, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, that Rommel took methamphetamine on such a day if there was no record for it. But there is a record that Rommel’s division used the most meth of any tank division. So I write about that, and that already makes him the Crystal Fox because, in his division, crystal meth is rampant.

It’s like in Animal Farm when the pigs discover alcohol. In Animal Farm by George Orwell, there’s no evidence that they drank. It’s just that the next day they’re all hungover.

Rommel is a very interesting character in general because later he apparently turned against Hitler. He was part of the conspiracy of Operation Valkyrie. He received the offer to shoot himself in the forest, which he did instead of being tried and executed.

Is he just part of this general tension that the generals and the military had with Hitler? Would that be fair to say?

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 who ran a very effective war machine.

At one point, more and more of these generals realized that the orders that Hitler was giving were not really helping, and they had their men dying because of it. That creates a lot of tension. That led to the mistake Hitler made at Dunkirk, basically.

What Churchill called the “sickle cut” was the idea to storm through the Ardennes Mountains and 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 they cut like a sickle into enemy territory—the sickle cut. That was so successful that basically the campaign was already won.

Then the Germans occupied all the cities on the canal back to England to cut off the British completely, so they couldn’t even flee. But Dunkirk was open, the last port that was open. The German army was already on the outskirts of Dunkirk. They could have just taken it and closed that hole for the British military to get out.

But Hitler then gave his famous Haltebefehl, the order to stop. This is all the dynamic of the Western campaign: a lot of things happen every day. Then they’re saying, “We’re going to have Dunkirk tomorrow, and then it’s over.” Then Hitler stops the tanks. They were all on meth. They didn’t want to stop. But Hitler was not on meth. It was a little bit similar to the Berlin-Munich thing. Hitler didn’t really understand that campaign.

It was too fast for him. They didn't say, “They're all on meth. They're not going to sleep. They're going to behave erratically.” They didn't discuss this; they discussed it in old-fashioned terms. Hitler was thinking, “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. Especially the Allies, they were still fighting World War I. But the tank generals on meth—or the tank generals without meth, the tank generals per se—they were fighting a new type of war.

Then Hitler got a visit from Göring, the head of the air force, the Luftwaffe. Göring was a morphinist. That is very well documented. He was on morphine. He was high as a kite most of the time. 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 if you're intoxicated—let's say you're writing while intoxicated—you think it's great, but the next day you read it and it's shit. Göring was using morphine in the morning, then met Hitler at the Felsennest, Hitler's headquarters for commanding the Western campaign.

And Göring said to him, “If the army generals are now going to take Dunkirk, then basically the army has won this campaign, and that will give army high command, which is already against you”—because for them, Hitler was always “der kleine Gefreite,” this small, kind of regular army guy. That's what Hitler had been in the First World War, and now suddenly he was the big decision-maker. So they thought they could make much better decisions than him.

So Göring says, “Their power will be so overwhelming that from now on they will call the shots about 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 the British military. With planes, maybe you can do it, but certainly he couldn't do it. The tank generals received the Haltebefehl, the stopping order. They didn't believe it when they received it, because 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 with 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 because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command and was convinced by Göring's morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't.

He bombed, and then the British were on ships. 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. That was a big mistake by Hitler.

That's why von Manstein, one of the 3 tank generals from February 17th—it was Rommel, von Manstein, and Guderian—later said he spoke of a “lost victory.” He said the Western campaign was a lost victory because they really could have achieved victory. They could have dominated Britain. They could have invaded Britain. There was no more military.

Well, okay. On land, yes.

There was still the Royal Air Force.

And the Navy.

And the Navy, yeah.

So invading Britain, I think any invasion of actual Britain is a gigantic mistake on the Nazi part, but—

But if Britain doesn't have a standing army anymore, it's much easier—

Well, I—

—than if it still had one.

I think it's still extremely difficult to invade, but it's much easier to neutralize Britain, to make sure that Britain is not a player in the war. If Hitler had not invaded at all, anyhow, that might have been better.

Also because of his—not respect, but non-hatred—of the British Empire.

Right.

Because they're also white supremacists, so why would we fight them? It doesn't make sense. The French, in Hitler's eyes, were already basically half-black.

If we're to talk about counterfactual history, about the possible trajectories of the war that would lead to Nazi victory, one of the big mistakes is the invasion of Britain. You already mentioned the mistake with Dunkirk, but beyond that, if they even captured mainland Europe, they could have just neutralized the British threat and not invaded Britain, and then gone after the oil, which was much needed, maybe in the Middle East.

So focus on that campaign before invading the Soviet Union. Then maybe wait for the Soviet Union to invade them through Poland, which would likely be coming, or wait until 1943, something like this, to invade the East without the Western front having to be there.

The other really big mistake is declaring war against the United States, having complete disrespect for the United States and declaring war on the United States, which didn't have to be done at all. So it's collecting enemies when those didn't have to be enemies.

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.

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, the degeneration of his cognitive abilities—did not allow the Wehrmacht to fight in the most effective way. Hitler was a very bad leader after Dunkirk.

So can you speak to the morphine? What kind of drug is morphine?

Morphine was developed in the 19th century by a German, a young chemist called Sertürner. He wanted to know what the potent alkaloid in opium was. Opium is a natural drug, but there's something in opium that is actually decisive, and that's morphine. So he was able to extract that from opium.

This young guy basically invented morphine, which then became very important in wars. The American Civil War, especially, is unthinkable without morphine. Or at least it would have been very different, because with morphine you can treat people, amputate people, fix people up, and send them back into battle.

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.

So Göring was taking morphine.

Yeah. Morphine is the classic. You don't eat opium. You take what's active in opium, and you inject it. That's very potent. That numbs all your pain. You don't have pain anymore if you're on morphine.

It also affects judgment.

I've never taken morphine, so I cannot really say. There are a few junkies who are highly creative on it. A lot of musicians in the '60s were using heroin, which is a more potent form, or a semisynthetic opioid. Morphine is an opiate, and heroin is an opioid.

That's why Hitler liked Eukodal, which is OxyContin, oxycodone. He injected that.

Which is another opiate, heroin-like.

It was a product by the Merck company from Darmstadt, Germany. They made Eukodal, which, when Germany lost the war, had its patent basically taken by America and then ended up in oxycodone.

If you inject Eukodal, that was a very popular drug in the '20s. Apparently, it gives you the most beautiful high on Earth. You're super high. You feel extremely well, and you can think very clearly. You feel like this is how life should feel.

High on Eukodal—this is like Klaus Mann, the son of Thomas Mann. He used Eukodal. Quite a few doctors actually used it, and probably quite a few Jewish doctors also used it, because this was a doctor's drug. Doctors knew how to set the injection. It was a great experience.

Hitler really loved to be on Eukodal. He would use Eukodal every second day. In the beginning, 10 milligrams intravenously; then he raised it to 20 milligrams.

I spoke to someone who had 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 the Hitler drug experience. I should have done it. A proper historian never does that, okay?

But I thought I should take quite a few drugs that I write about to understand them better. 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 the king's high. If you do that properly, obviously you get addicted to it.

I'd be scared to try.

Very intense experience.

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 mean, there is a risk that comes along with it, right?

Well, but not for Hitler, because he got the Eukodal from the pharmacy. He knew exactly what was inside. It was made by a pharmaceutical company.

No, I mean, the risk of addiction.

Yeah, that is a big risk. But there's also the risk of getting impure stuff—like heroin on the street—and dying from an overdose. The addiction thing is very serious. I think it happens quite quickly with Eukodal because it's such a great feeling. So why wouldn't you do it over and over again?

The opioid receptors in the brain want you to take it. If you don't take it, you get withdrawal symptoms and you feel like shit. That's the problem with opioids, with morphine. That's what happens, and that's what happened to Hitler.

I generally say yes to most things, but those drugs—cocaine doesn't scare me. Heroin scares me. The opioids scare me. Oxycodone scares me.

Because they really make you physically dependent. I don't even know if cocaine makes you physically dependent. It makes you psychologically addicted, but you actually have to get it; otherwise, you feel bad. That's a physical, terrible addiction.

And also, for life to feel like less when you're not on it. That scares me.

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 Pervitin.

All right, you have to take me through the full drug cocktail that Hitler was on: Patient A of Morell's. Let's start at the beginning. We're big on setting context here, so tell the story of Dr. Theodor Morell. How did he meet Hitler?

Morell had his practice on Kurfürstendamm, which is the main boulevard of Berlin, in the west of Berlin—a kind of fancy street. He was a celebrity doctor, which was a new type of doctor, in a way: a Dr. Feelgood. He was one of the first Dr. Feelgoods.

You didn't go to him when you had a disease. You went to him when, let's say, you were an opera star in the Berlin Opera and you had a big premiere. You would go to Morell in the afternoon, and he would give you a nice shot.

He was not a quack. He just knew his drugs, and he believed in treating someone even if that person didn't have a disease. If you can make that person feel better, it's good—especially if that person pays. He said, "Everyone who pays my fee, who comes to me and wants a testosterone hormone injection, a vitamin injection, or an opioid injection, gets it from me." He didn't have any scruples.

I mean, we should also say he was pretty innovative and extremely knowledgeable. You mentioned hormones, but also probiotics. He knew his shit.

He was a bit of a nerd.

A legitimate doctor, he just didn't have boundaries about what he used.

He had a very unappealing physical appearance, and I think that was a problem for him. He was known to have very bad eating habits. Sauce was running, and people were easily disgusted by him. He was an outsider. He was really like a freak.

But when people looked at him after he had given them an injection and said, "Thank you," and, "I feel so great now," that's what kind of made his day.

One day, a man entered his doctor's office on Kurfürstendamm named Hubertus Hoffmann. Hoffmann was a photographer, and he had gonorrhea. Morell, because he knew about alternative ways to treat it, actually cured him.

Hubertus Hoffmann said to Morell, "I have a good friend, and I think you should meet him. I'm going to have a dinner in Munich, and I think it would be really worth your time to come." Morell came, and the good friend was Hitler, because Heinrich Hoffmann was Hitler's photographer.

In German, we have a formal "you," which is "Sie." If I don't know you so well, I say "Sie." If you're my close friend, I say "du." Hitler only had about 4 people he would say "du" to. He would always use "Sie"—the distance. It was always about distance and respect and borders and boundaries.

What are the 2 again? "Sie" and what?

"Du."

"Sie" and "du"?

Yeah. "Sie" is the formal one, and "du" is the informal one.

In Russian, there's the same thing: "vy" and "ty." That's a big thing.

Also in French, you have that. You have that in Spanish. Only in English you don't have it.

It is part of the cultural discourse of when you upgrade from the "vy" to the "ty," from the "Sie" to the "du"—

Right.

—or from the "du" to the "Sie."

From the "Sie" to the "du."

"Sie" to the "du."

That would be the upgrade, because you become more intimate.

Yeah, and you ask, "Can I go from 'Sie' to 'du'?"

Yeah. The older person must suggest it, I think.

Yeah. Okay. Beautiful. Language.

Hoffmann was a Duzfreund of Hitler, as we say. He was quite close to Hitler, and that's why he could make that close connection. He had a dinner with just him, Hitler, Eva Braun, Hitler's girlfriend, and Morell. They sent a plane to Berlin to pick him up, so it was VIP treatment.

And this is 1936?

'36. They had spaghetti with tomato sauce on the side, I read in the description of this event. The tomato sauce was on the side, and there was nutmeg.

What is nutmeg? It's a spice.

Yeah, it was with nutmeg, which is an unusual recipe, I guess, but that's what they had. Spaghetti wasn't a fancy thing. It came from Italy, from Mussolini, who invented fascism in Italy and was Hitler's role model for a long time, until Hitler surpassed him, obviously.

The spaghetti came from Italy, and it was a big thing. Morell had the big problem that spaghetti is hard to eat, right? He couldn't even eat it. It was a catastrophe.

But he got out of it because Hitler complained about stomach problems. Hitler was a terrible vegetarian, a so-called cake vegetarian. He would only eat sweets, like cake. No meat, of course, but he wouldn't eat healthy stuff. He was bloated the whole time because he only ate cake and white bread, and that's not good.

So he voiced that, and Brandt was also there—his official doctor from the SS. Hitler said, "My doctors can't cure me." Morell was like, "This is my chance. Thank you, God."

He told Hitler about probiotics, which Hitler had never heard of. Brandt, the doctor, hadn't heard of them either, because it was a new thing that you could give someone. Hitler asked, "What is that?" Morell said, "These are live bacteria from German soldiers from the First World War who were fighting in Serbia."

There was 1 soldier who didn't get the stomach flu when all the others drank the water in Serbia and got sick. This one man's gut bacteria were cultivated into a medicine called Mutaflor. This is a true story.

Morell told Hitler about it, and Hitler said, "This is amazing. I have to try this." It helped. He took Mutaflor, and it cured him. He suddenly had no bloating anymore, and Hitler's farting was really bad—so bad that it diminished his ability to work.

Suddenly he could work. He said he felt better. He didn't have the pain. He felt great, so he really thought that Morell was a wonder doctor. He asked Morell pretty quickly afterward, "Do you want to be my personal physician?"

Morell's 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." He said, "Come on, man. This is the chance you only get once in your life."

At this point, Hitler's a really big deal.

He's the most powerful man in Europe. There had not been war crimes because the war hadn't started yet. Obviously, there were concentration camps, and a lot of crimes had been committed, but it was also kind of hushed up. It wasn't as huge a thing as we now know it became.

Morell never really had any conscience problems. He just thought it was great: "I'm going to be the doctor. I'm going to be part of history." So he became the personal physician.

Being this vitamin guy, 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.

Hitler was like, "Okay." Morell told Hitler about them, and Hitler said, "Okay, I want to try these vitamins." What they did from the beginning was injections because Hitler didn't want to take a pill. The pill takes too long, and it goes through the tract that he had problems with—his digestion. He believed in the injection, and Morell was a masterful injector.

The needles were thicker than they are today, but Morell could give you an injection without you feeling any pain. Hitler was quite impressed, so he got a vitamin C injection. Hitler loved the daily injection, so he got hooked on it. Once he got the injection, the day was good.

He never got sick, actually. He could stand for a long time with his arm raised. He went to the gym, basically. He had a gym where he exercised so he could have his arm up for hours when a military parade would walk by.

So he was quite fit, and he was never sick. Morell was giving him the daily injection, and they lived happily ever after, basically, until the Soviet Union attack.

Wait, wait, wait. He literally lifted his arm so he could do the Heil Hitler salute?

Yeah, I found a document for that.

That’s funny. Oh God, that’s dark.

He had an expander, we say. I don’t know, do you use that word in English?

Expander? Oh, like a band.

Yeah, it’s like this. You do like—

Yeah, yeah, I have one of those.

Yeah, that’s what he did—in front of the window.

Wow. And I do those kinds of exercises. Well, at least he’s not doing it in front of a mirror. Okay, wow, that’s dark. I mean, those little details are yet another reminder that he’s just a human being.

I mean, it’s hard to keep your arm up for hours. You can’t let it down. If you keep it up, that’s what it’s all about, you know?

He was very much about the façade, right? It’s very important to present himself in a certain kind of way when he’s giving the speeches.

Yeah, everything was orchestrated. The Nazis were masters in propaganda. They really knew how to create the perfect image.

Okay, so let’s go into the cocktail. It started with the vitamins. This is in 1936.

Right. I think it was pretty harmless in the beginning. Just the addiction to the injection was the main thing that happened—that Hitler needed his doctor. But from 1936 to 1941, only vitamins and glucose were being injected, so I don’t think it really harmed him. I mean, it might have benefited him. He never got sick. He was fit.

That was phase one of his drug use: the vitamins, until 1941.

So, you think the tweaking at the Olympics—you’ve talked about it before—but you’re saying this person we’re watching in the video here is not on drugs?

I don’t know. I don’t think so.

So the video could be faked. It could be sped up.

I think it’s fake, because I think someone read my book, thought that Hitler was always on meth, and created this. But I might be wrong.

Yeah, and the narrative takes hold. I think the thing you mentioned is that he could be on sugar, so it could be a lot of elements.

He was also a weird guy. Maybe he was really just rocking because he was so happy with 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.

I think especially if I stay up all night, I’ll get fidgety. You can just be caught in a certain moment when you’re being very fidgety.

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, so—

That’s important to say.

—he was definitely not on methamphetamine. So what is said here about Hitler tweaking on meth at the 1936 Olympics is definitely false.

Okay, there you go. So when did it start getting more serious—the injection and the kind of drugs he was taking?

This was a day in August of 1941. Germany had invaded the Soviet Union on June 22nd. So this was about 6 weeks into the campaign, which was called Unternehmen Barbarossa.

Germany was doing pretty well, and it came to a crucial moment where High Command said, “Now we’re going to take Moscow.” Hitler said, “No, we’re going to split up the troops and take Leningrad,” which is now Saint Petersburg, in the north. “And in the south, we’re going to go for the oil fields, basically.” That was his plan. He said, “Let’s not do Moscow.”

High Command was like, “This is the biggest mistake. We must take Moscow. If we take Moscow, we’re going to win.” Hitler became ill for the first time on the day this decision was made.

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 will we continue towards Moscow?” He had the Russian flu—in German, the Ruhr—which is a flu-type disease with a very high fever. They were in the field, camping out in the east. Maybe he drank water that wasn’t good, or maybe he had something else. They tested everything meticulously, but he got sick. He had a high fever, he felt like shit, and he said to Morell—

You can see it in Morell’s notes. Morell 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.

He describes how Hitler then asks him—basically says, “Vitamins are not enough anymore.” He was very weak. He must go to the military briefing, but 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.

Morell kind of fought with himself, and then he decided to inject an opioid into Hitler’s veins intravenously, the strongest application possible. This was Dolantin, which is a German opioid that was legal.

I was once an exchange student in Flint, Michigan, in 1988, and I was number 1 on 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 Flint Central. They had a number 1 player, Marc Restaino.

You still remember? Wow.

He was feared. No one could beat him. On the day of the match, I had the Russian flu, basically. I was the hope. I was the number 1, the wonder kid from Germany.

They took me to a doctor, and the doctor gave me an injection. I don’t know to this day what it was, because I was a kid. I got the injection—I was 17—and I felt great. The flu was gone like this. It was probably an opioid, something that just shuts off all the pain and gives you energy.

I beat this guy. In a way, I totally thought of a new technique by playing very high balls. In a direct, fierce competition, I would have lost, so I played something that in Germany we call “Lüddeln,” which is something you don’t really do. You just play high balls.

Lobbing, yeah, yeah.

Which is not pretty to look at, but it’s very effective. He just lost his nerve, and I beat him 6–0, 6–0, something like that. Sensational.

So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up and goes into the meeting room. He dominates the meeting room. He feels great. In front of everybody, no one is able to overpower him in that meeting. He was very good in the room.

The troops are split up. 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 not to take Moscow.

I think it’s one of the biggest blunders of the Eastern Front—not taking Moscow. I think they had a straight shot, given the disorganization.

Right. They had the one-time thing, the one-time moment where they could have done it. The German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war—only if they did it very fast and by 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. At one point, this ends, you know? You can’t take meth for the rest of your life. You’re just going to end up being a nervous wreck. But you can do it for 2 months. You could do it, but then it stops.

I think if you’re really honest about where you have the asymmetry of power, it’s in the speed of the Blitzkrieg. That’s similar to Genghis Khan, who had a very small military. At its peak, I think it was probably 100,000, and every soldier of Genghis Khan’s had 5 horses.

The whole point was that they could move really fast. Not just fast, but they could move on all terrain, so they could go around. 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, and attack from all kinds of sides, that’s why you can conquer as much as Genghis Khan was able to conquer.

The same thing with the Nazi forces: this was their biggest advantage. Not using that was essentially the end of its effectiveness.

I think that’s also why the tank troops were such a good weapon, because they can go off-road, while military vehicles and cars cannot do it. A tank can even go through a forest and just kill small trees and run over them. So those were kind of the 5 horses—that was the idea 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 of campaigns.”

Was that one of the first times he tried an opiate like that—an intense one?

That was the first time.

And then that was it for him? He loved it?

Well, not immediately. You can see when you study his medications that this is the turning point, in a way. Now he deviates from the vitamins. He becomes more interested in what’s out there, and from ’41 to ’43, he tries out a lot of medications that he didn’t try before.

Before that, it was quite conventional, mostly vitamins and glucose. But now he becomes experimental, and he discusses this with Morell. Morell is also very experimental. They really nerded themselves into, “What can we use?”—bull’s testicle extracts, for example.

So Morell, in order to present those things to his patient, created a pharmaceutical company that he ran. He was the personal physician of Hitler, and he was also the CEO of Hammer Pharmaceuticals, which had its production site in occupied Czechoslovakia.

For example, at one point, when Germany had invaded Ukraine, Morell asked for a monopoly on all the organs of all the slaughtered animals from all the slaughterhouses in Ukraine. This was a huge logistical operation. All the slaughtered animals’ organs were removed for the personal physician of the Führer and sent in military trains back to the factory in occupied Czechoslovakia.

The military became really upset with that because they said, “We need our trains to transport back our wounded soldiers.” Now there were cars full of offal, pigs’ hearts, and pigs’ livers. It was totally bizarre.

Morell was this good-natured Dr. Feelgood in the beginning, but when Ukraine was occupied, he became a business freak who made a lot of money with his dubious hormonal concoctions. 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.

At his factory, he made the famous pig-liver extract that was then tested by Hitler. Hitler said, “That’s a good medication. I feel more—I have more energy. This can also be sold to the German military.”

That’s how it worked, because the regulations at the time made it very difficult to bring a new medication onto the market. To bring medications onto the market, you need certain test phases and all of that stuff. That’s hard to do in a war, especially in World War II.

So Hitler said to Morell, “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, like, a decree—“because I’m the president, you know, I can order that it’s going to be legal all over Germany.”

So Hitler was a real drug guy. He liked drugs.

Well, he liked to experiment, I would say, with drugs and with Morell. They never—he was against drugs, you know?

But that’s a crazy thing for a guy who didn’t do anything, right?

It’s a big contradiction, or it’s a big irony, or it’s very weird.

But isn’t it even a bit of a mystery? At that stage, I’m sure he was paranoid about being killed and all that kind of stuff. So he must have really trusted Morell, right?

Yeah, he trusted Morell because Morell was not part of any organization. He was a loner coming from his own VIP doctor’s office, and now he was basically Hitler’s toy. Hitler could get access to all kinds of medications through him, and Morell would never say it to anybody. He would just write it down.

This was kept quite secret. No one knew what was going on between the two men.

It’s just so interesting, because why would he? There might be—can you maybe even speak to that? Why did Hitler trust another human being this much? You could probably make the case that nobody was closer to Hitler than Morell.

That is certainly the story I’m telling.

Isn’t that crazy? What is it about Morell? This guy who’s—I guess he’s fat and weird, and nobody really likes him.

He was not a threat to Hitler. Hitler hated all the super-smart medicine people. 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.

Morell was harmless. Morell basically did what Hitler wanted. They wouldn’t say, “We’re going to take drugs together today. It’s going to be fun.” Hitler was always about optimizing his performance because he knew, “Only I’m doing this. I have to…”

He always thought he was going to die young, so he was always thinking, “I don’t have unlimited time.” The clock was always ticking, so he had to always be the high performer.

When Hitler first experienced the beauty of the opioid high that was given to him intravenously in August 1941, his eyes opened. He didn’t think this was a drug. He thought, “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 eight hours. I can convince all the generals. I can do my job. I’m happy.”

Hitler was also depressed. He really appreciated what the drug gave him, but he never thought, “Now I’m becoming a drug addict.”

Oxycodone, in general, begins to work within 30 to 60 minutes and lasts for about 4 to 6 hours. This is a long-lasting thing.

Yeah, but this is what you swallow. If you get an intravenous injection, it works after 1 second.

Wow.

You get the injection, you’re high, but—

But it lasts for many hours.

Yeah. That’s why people love heroin when they take it, because you feel like shit, you take the injection, and you feel great. It’s in your system for quite a while. You can go into the meeting quite comfortably.

Into the meeting. Yeah, okay.

There’s the briefing. It starts at 1:00. Morell comes, and you can see this in the notes: “I have to be at the Führer’s bedroom at 12:00.”

Then you chat a bit, Hitler rolls up his uniform sleeve, and he gets the injection, maybe at 12:30. Then the high comes on, and it’s very stable. You feel great. This is a pure product from the Merck company. This is not some heroin from the street.

Morell knows exactly what dosage you want right now, so you feel at the top of your game. You don’t feel intoxicated. I mean, you are, but it makes you clear.

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 are, because the others are just mortals. They’re sober. They just sit there, and they haven’t slept very well, or they have problems with them, and you’re way above them.

What do we know about the general psychological effects of it? Does it boost your confidence? Does it boost aggressiveness? What effect did it have on his vision of the world?

It makes you feel extremely confident. You have a lot of energy, but it’s not too much. Let’s say you take cocaine or methamphetamine—you’re like—

That’s why Hitler was never a meth guy. I also think this video is fake. He didn’t take meth. I studied the things Morell gave him. He gave him a lot of things, and only twice was it methamphetamine. That’s not a lot for Hitler—twice.

I read that the multivitamin had some amphetamine and maybe meth in it, a little bit, or no?

It’s—

Multi—

Vitamultin.

Vitamultin.

Vitamultin is interesting because it was a little bar of candy lying next to his food, so he would just eat it. It tasted nice. It had some sugar in it.

I read through all of the ingredients. There were different types, and there was never methamphetamine in it.

Oh, there isn’t? Okay.

No. There was an SS doctor, Schenck, who claimed that Morell made special Vitamultin in his lab with meth in it, but I think he just made that up.

Okay.

There was never any proof of that.

That’s a really important line to draw. The Nazi army, at scale—not everybody, but some fraction, especially during the French campaign—used meth.

Right.

And then there’s Hitler, who used a lot of drugs, but meth was not one of them, really.

No, meth was for the foot soldiers, you know? He didn’t even talk about meth. This was not something that concerned him. This was something that made you function.

He signed—I mean, it went over his desk—the stimulant decree, but I don’t know if he really read it or understood it. He probably knew Pervitin because everyone knew it. Maybe they discussed it, but they probably also would not—

There was a point when there was a conflict about methamphetamine in the army. This was when the Secretary of Health of the German government, the Nazi government, Conti, started writing to the army and said, “You must stop this. This is against Nazi ideology.”

But the army basically didn’t listen to him and kept on using meth all the way to the end. So maybe Conti discussed this with Hitler, but—

If Hitler had said, “We stop the methamphetamine,” it probably would have stopped. But Conti saying that wasn’t enough. I don’t think Hitler was really into meth. It wasn’t his thing. He was more into opioids and these weird hormonal things.

Those things, 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 who gives you the injections. Göring was high on, and addicted to, morphine from 1923 until the Americans captured him in 1945. That’s 22 years he was functioning on morphine.

When they captured him, he had—I write about it in Blitzed—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. He lost a lot of pounds and became more of a haggard Göring, who was then in Nuremberg, this haggard kind of guy defending what he did.

Hitler was really an opioid guy, while the army was really meth-ed up. That’s how you could sum it up briefly.

He did try cocaine. Why didn’t he get into cocaine?

He started cocaine after the bomb attack by Stauffenberg on July 20, 1944. When this bomb went off, it actually killed a few people in the room. This was during a military briefing. Stauffenberg put a bag with explosives under the table, and the table actually saved Hitler’s life because it was a good German-quality oak table.

The table was so stable that the bomb explosion just blew up the table, while Hitler, behind it, was protected. Stauffenberg had the bomb and put it next to Hitler, but 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.

Hitler survived, but he was quite injured, which Nazi propaganda always denied. They always said the Führer was miraculously unharmed, but he was quite harmed. There were over 100 splinters from the wood everywhere. His eardrums were blown out, which is quite an injury, I guess. He was bleeding internally, and he was basically shell-shocked.

Then a new doctor came in. His name was Keesing. Morell was not an ear, nose, and throat specialist. In Germany we have—well, I guess worldwide—the ear, nose, and throat specialist, right? So an ear, nose, and throat specialist from the German army called Dr. Keesing was ordered to come into headquarters after the bomb attack to treat Hitler’s blown eardrums.

Keesing gave Hitler cocaine because cocaine at the time was being used. It wasn’t Schedule I. It had the effect of numbing pain. You could put it on a certain place where you had pain, and it would numb that area.

Hitler had never taken cocaine before, but he became very interested in it. Keesing writes a meticulous report about his experiences with Hitler. That report alone is really fun to read. It’s about a 15-page report that he wrote for the American military after the war. When he was being interrogated by the American military, he described what happened between Hitler and him.

He realized that Hitler really liked cocaine, and then Hitler 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 liquefied cocaine.

It was liquefied.

Liquefied cocaine. Hitler loved it, and he said things like, “Finally, I can think clearly again.” 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 person. It’s not a very humble drug. It increases the ego.

Hitler liked that because, after the bomb attack, he thought everyone was a traitor. He didn’t feel safe anymore in his own bunker. The right wing is always paranoid: “Who’s the enemy? They’re behind us. They’re stabbing us in the back.” Hitler was this type of person.

The cocaine stabilized him, and Keesing realized that this guy was a drug guy. He didn’t know. He came in and saw the Führer for the first time. He was in awe, but a drug wreck was approaching him. As soon as Hitler had some cocaine in his system—this was the summer of 1944—he was a little bit better.

He had already taken a lot of opioids and a lot of other drugs, as well as dubious hormonal concoctions that led to autoimmune diseases in Hitler. Maybe he even had Parkinson’s. Morell basically turned him into a physical wreck.

Giesing also writes about this. He was trembling before he went into the room for the first time where the Führer was. Then there was an old guy in blue pajamas coming up to him and shaking his hand. “That’s the Führer,” he thought. Giesing was totally shocked because the destiny of the German nation, the whole of Europe, everything, hung on this guy.

Whenever Hitler took cocaine, he was a little bit better.

Yeah, and I’m sure Hitler could have sensed that.

The problem with the cocaine was that Keesing was, at least later in his discussions with the U.S. military, a conscientious guy. He described himself as a conscientious person: “I had problems giving Hitler more cocaine.”

Then Morell started disliking Keesing because Hitler spent more time with Giesing than with him. There was a doctor’s war, as I call it. Giesing then tried to get rid of Morell because he could suddenly see that Hitler was receiving a lot of drugs.

Keesing would give Hitler cocaine and then leave the room. Morell would come in and give him Eukodal, an opioid, intravenously, which created the speedball effect: cocaine and an opioid at the same time. That creates a really crazy high, but it’s not stable anymore. That’s the kind of high you have at the end of your drug career. You take the speedball.

So a speedball is a combination of a stimulant—

Right.

—and a depressant: cocaine and heroin.

Opioids are depressants.

Yeah. So combining cocaine and heroin. Wow.

I’ve never had a speedball, but I think it’s the most hardcore drug experience you can have. Hitler had this in the summer of 1944 for quite some time.

The doctors really fought for influence over Hitler. Keesing teamed up with Himmler, the head of the SS, and basically said to Himmler, “This Morell guy…” Himmler was really suspicious of Morell because Morell was spending so much time with Hitler. There was no control. “What is he actually giving to the Führer? The Führer doesn’t look good anymore.”

Giesing was trying to get Morell out, maybe because he wanted Hitler to have better health, or maybe because he wanted the job himself. He certainly tried to get rid of Morell, and it came to a high-noon situation—a duel between the 2 doctors.

This is why I think it’s completely insane that Hollywood hasn’t bought the rights yet. This doctor’s war alone would make an incredible movie.

You mean for the entire Blitzed story, or—

Yeah, of course.

Some of the greatest movies—I mean, like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

You can do a drug movie about the Nazis.

One of my favorite movies is probably Downfall, which is about Hitler in the bunker. Does Downfall have a drug component to it?

No.

They missed the drug angle.

Because my book hadn’t been out yet, they didn’t know about it.

That’d be 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.

Well, you could explain it as an extremely stressful position. He’s losing the war. The physical-wreck aspect, though—

And there were 2 bedrooms in the bunker in Berlin. 2 bedrooms: 1, of course, for Hitler, and the other for Morell. No one else was sleeping in the bunker. You can see the importance of Morell, especially in those last months, in the bunker.

They didn’t get that when they made Downfall. It’s still an interesting movie, but I can’t take it seriously because they didn’t see this as a drug component.

It’s missing.

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 Blitzed would be really nice. It’s not easy to do.

No.

There’s something about making a movie involving drugs that means you can go too far into Tarantino territory—

Right.

—where it becomes something else, which is also incredible and awesome, but it’s a different thing.

Well, he invents history, and he’s very open about it: This is not what actually happened.

Yeah.

I think a Blitzed movie would have to stick to the facts. I’ve spoken with some very good German directors, and it’s just very hard to do.

But if you do it well, that’s a legendary movie.

I think it would be.

Yeah, that would be incredible. Can you speak at a high level about the period from 1941 to 1945? What were some behavioral changes or changes in decision-making that we can trace in Hitler that could be attributed to drugs? How did they change him?

An interesting event is July 1943, in a villa in Northern Italy, where Hitler meets Mussolini. Mussolini is basically fed up with the war, and he wants Italy to leave the Axis. Hitler is really pissed when he hears that.

He knows that's what the meeting is all about. Mussolini—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. Still, Italy is the most important ally, and now Mussolini is quitting in the middle of the war. What is going on here?

Morell writes about this quite a lot. Hitler is in a terrible mood. He really doesn't want to go. He might lose his temper or whatever. He's not happy.

That's actually the day when he receives Eukodal for the first time. He says, under such stress, “I'm not gonna go.” He threatens to call off the whole thing. The plane's already waiting in Obersalzberg, everything is ready, and he says, “I'm not meeting this guy.”

Then Morell gives him Eukodal, and you can see the time when he gets it. That's when he has this effect for the first time: “I can do anything. This is great. I'm gonna explain to Mussolini that he's not gonna leave the war effort.” On the way to the plane, he says to Morell that this Eukodal is really helping him, and he wants another shot. He receives another shot, so he has quite a lot of Eukodal in him when he speaks to Mussolini.

There are the people who write the protocol of the meeting, as well as other people around. It's not just 2 people in the room. There are, I don't know, 15 or 20 people in the room. A lot of people talk about that meeting in their memoirs.

Mussolini is not able to say 1 word, basically, because Hitler is so high and so charged. He's just telling him the whole time how great this is, what they're doing right now. Of course, it's not even possible that Mussolini is going to leave. “We are in this together.” He explains everything, the whole thing, for about 2 hours, and Mussolini is just sitting there.

Then a messenger comes in and says, “Rome has just been bombed.” Hitler knows, but he can't say anything, and he stays. That meeting was very much influenced by his Eukodal. That's probably why Eukodal became such an attractive drug for him: what happened was so successful in Hitler's eyes.

This happened for the first time in July 1943. He didn't take Eukodal the whole time. It only started in July 1943; he started with regular opioid use. You can see that he takes it more and more regularly now. Not every day, but sometimes. In September 1944, he takes Eukodal every 2nd day, which is a junkie rhythm.

You take it, and the next day you don't take it. Then you take it again.

Why is that a junkie rhythm?

You don't take it all the time because you need to—I don't know—relax. You take it maybe Saturday night, and the high lasts till Sunday morning. Then Sunday, when the high slowly wears off, you sleep, and then you wake up and you're hungry. Maybe you eat. Then the next day, Monday, you're gonna do it again. That's this rhythm.

And it was more potent than Dolantin?

Dolantin.

Dolantin.

Eukodal is said to have the best effect, in the sense that it's not about strength. You just increase the dosage and you have a stronger effect, but you can't increase it too much because then you're gonna die. That's also the problem with opioids. If you take too much, you're going to die because you're just gonna have a heart attack.

There are nuanced differences that are hard to convert into words, I guess.

Different molecules have different effects. Eukodal apparently had the best effect. That's why they had the OxyContin epidemic in America. 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 as dangerous as injecting. But apparently the effect of this particular type of opioid is so pleasant that it just is more attractive, maybe, than Dolantin.

Is it possible to try to reverse-engineer the effect of Hitler's drug use on the outcome of World War II? If he didn't use any drugs, would the Nazis have been more successful or less successful? What do you think?

I think it would be speculative to answer, but I can try. The war is so complex. There are many different ways this war could have played out and ended, but I think it would always have ended with a German defeat.

I don't think it would have ended with a German defeat.

Well, if you don't attack the Soviet Union, then of course you can win. But as soon as you attack the Soviet Union—

As we talked about, I think the probability of success is low. But I would put it at, I don't know, 10%. Again, extremely speculative.

But if you do a Blitzkrieg-type 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 gaining oil from the Middle East. Maybe make the Africa campaign the central point in the very beginning, so that you have the resources essential for the industrial capacity of Germany that's required to keep manufacturing and keep fueling the planes, the tanks, and the mechanized aspect of the army.

There are a lot of paths to this. But I think it's probably fair to say that a reasonable, thoughtful, calculated, disciplined leader would not have done any of the things Hitler did, even in the beginning. It requires insanity, hatred, ideological self-capture, where you tell yourself narratives that rapidly deviate from ground truth, from first principles of things.

You're just an insane person, an insane dictator drunk on power. It's impossible for you to make great military decisions at that point.

Yeah, you would need an impossible Hitler who was 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 in this way, with the drugs. Hitler without drugs is unthinkable for me. You cannot separate this.

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 perfect Hitler, which is theoretically impossible.

Theoretically possible in the 20th century. You could think of a Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great-type character who would really internalize the sense—in Hitler's case, that the German people are superior—without the hatred, without the ideology, but with the murderous ability to dehumanize the rest of the world and see the German people as superior. So it's fair to do the Lebensraum and all of that kind of stuff.

Right. What you described as this feeling of superiority and conquering countries was basically what the Wehrmacht, the high command, were going for. They wanted to eliminate Hitler in Operation Valkyrie, not because they thought, “He's an evil guy, he's killing the Jews.” They wanted to eliminate him because he was no longer the effective decision-maker they needed to win the war or to end it in a different way.

I spoke with Anthony Beevor once about the attempt by British intelligence to assassinate Hitler. He had seen some evidence that, at a certain point in time, they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler—or malfunctioning Hitler, which he was after the summer of 1943—was better for Britain than killing Hitler and then having to deal with some kind of situation where maybe the army would have taken over the country. That would have been more uncomfortable for Great Britain than having the continuation of the degenerating maniac.

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?

It's quite well documented because people at the time were keeping diaries and writing about it, writing about their experiences. Morell also wrote quite a bit about what happened in the bunker.

One thing that changed was that Eukodal was no longer available, so the drug that Hitler had actually 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.

There's a report of Morell—the overweight person—riding on a motorcycle through bombed-out Berlin, from pharmacy to pharmacy, basically going into the pharmacies and trying to score Eukodal. 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 made that switch. He also didn't realize for a long time that he was becoming physically dependent on a drug, that he was becoming a drug addict. This realization happens in the last weeks in the bunker because Goebbels understood it, and Goebbels wanted that bedroom, the 2nd bedroom.

So he said to Hitler, “Do you understand what's going on, that Morell turns you into a drug addict?” At one point, Hitler realized what Goebbels was saying was true because he felt the withdrawal. He was shaking and felt like shit, and Morell was giving him weird stuff in the end.

One time, he gives him harmine, which is an MAO inhibitor and is actually part of ayahuasca, because he still had that in his doctor’s bag. It hadn’t been used yet, so he gives him that, which also creates some kind of weird high. But at one point Hitler really realizes what’s going on.

This is late April, so very late in the game, and there are a few reports of what actually happens. Some say that Morell has to kneel in front of him, and Hitler puts a gun to 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 Morell is described as being in tears as he leaves the bunker. He gets one of the last planes out of Berlin.

He survives?

Yeah. He goes to this research lab, and this is May 2, 1945. He has a little apartment in this research lab. His wife is still in Berlin. He’s all alone, and he starts doing his taxes, which kind of shows you that he was probably insane at that point.

Just totally out of touch.

Why would you do your taxes? Maybe he was bored. Maybe he hadn’t done his taxes for so long because he always had to treat Hitler, and then he thought, “Now what am I going to do? I’m just going to do my taxes.” Very German thing to do.

He’s just a strange character. I mean, you tell this whole story…

I would put that in the movie for sure—him doing his taxes.

That’s how the movie ends.

Then the Americans move into Bavaria and liberate Bavaria from National Socialism, which was a great job they did there. I’m also thankful not only to the Red Army but also to the American forces. I’m really very thankful that they did, because National Socialism was hard to beat. It was a beast. It was hard to beat.

They capture Morell and interrogate him, and he actually lives for another 2 years in American custody in Germany, in a military prison. After these 2 years, his health is really bad. He has heart problems, and the Americans dump him in front of the Munich train station in a much-too-small uniform jacket, probably an American uniform. He’s lying on the pavement in front of the train station.

A half-Jewish nurse who is walking around there finds him, and he says, “I’m Theo Morell. I was the personal physician of the Führer.” She’s like, “This is 1947. Germany’s in ruins.” She brings him to a hospital. His wife comes from Berlin for the last time, and they meet in a hospital at Tegernsee, a beautiful lake in Bavaria. Then he dies. So that was the end of Morell.

Did somebody try to talk to Hitler about this? What about Eva Braun? Did anybody close to him try to talk to him about it?

Well, Goebbels did.

But that was at the very end. You would imagine maybe the generals, or friends, or his inner circle. The reason I mention Eva is because of the personal relationship and because she was close to him.

There is a certain tension between Eva Braun and Morell. I could very well imagine that she talked with Hitler about it, but there’s no record, so I don’t know exactly.

They had a very intimate relationship. Eva Braun was not just the dumb blonde who played no role. They actually spoke every day. When Hitler was in the military headquarters, he would phone her every night at 10:00 p.m. They would have a long phone conversation. They had a very deep relationship, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t really like Morell for the obvious reasons. He was closer to Hitler than she was. If you count 1 plus 1, it’s 2.

But she could have not liked him because she might have cared for Hitler. You can see the effects of drugs on humans that you care for.

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-a-Lago.

Oh, Mar-a-Lago? Yeah.

Yeah, that was what it was. It actually became an official headquarters for Hitler, so he would make decisions from there. It was not just a vacation place.

Morell was often there, and Eva Braun was always there. That was her place. She was running that place. She was the woman of that place. Hitler was often 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.

She also had a good relationship with Morell, and there’s a paper by Morell where she comes to him in the morning and has scratch marks. Apparently, they had violent sex. So Morell is also kind of a witness to that. I found that in Washington, D.C., in the National Archives.

Wait, Hitler and Eva had violent sex? What do we know about Hitler’s sex life? It’s not really known, right?

I found it interesting that Morell describes these scratch marks. 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.

I don’t think that affected the military operations of the Wehrmacht.

The drug use did. His sex life—if he had had sex with a lot of people, maybe with his generals, maybe then it would be worth writing about because perhaps he dominated these 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 I also don’t want to see Hitler having sex.

I don’t think anyone wants to see Hitler having sex.

But Eva Braun is an interesting character because she had more of a say than historians attributed to her for a long time. Then a biography was written about 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 who just played no role. She was quite opinionated and active.

She filmed him a lot. She was always filming at the Berghof. You can go online and look at the Eva Braun clips, and you will see Hitler in color at the Berghof, meeting children and petting them on the head. She was contributing to the myth of this private, good private man. So Eva Braun is an interesting character for sure.

I found one note that, in the beginning, when Morell started with his drugs, she said to Morell that she wanted the same medications—not drugs, the same medications—as Hitler, so she would be on the same wavelength with him. She wanted to be on the same wavelength. She didn’t want to lose this world.

But Hitler became such a polytoxicomanic drug user that, of course, Eva couldn’t keep up with that. They weren’t a drug couple. I didn’t see any evidence 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 Morell in the beginning and then changed her opinion. I’m pretty sure she talked with Hitler about it, but there are no records of their private conversations.

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. This is the story of the people who resisted from within Germany.

Right.

In particular, let’s talk through the story of the 2 key figures in the movement who happened to also be in love.

The main guy is Harro Schulze-Boysen. He caught my attention when I was doing research in an archive in Munich, researching drugs in the Luftwaffe, Göring’s Luftwaffe. I mean, the Luftwaffe was a very drug-promiscuous place. A lot of people in the Luftwaffe were high.

Oh, so more for entertainment versus the practical aspect? So it’s less about meth optimizing human performance and more about just exploring?

The number 3 of the Luftwaffe, Ernst Udet, committed suicide in the fall of 1941. He had had 7 Pervitin tablets for breakfast.

Okay.

So he was really high on meth. He really enjoyed it. 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.

I found this letter, and that was really a coincidence, while I was looking through the drug stuff. I was searching for drugs, and I found this letter by Harro Schulze-Boysen, who had nothing to do with drugs. It was the last letter that he wrote in his life.

He wrote it to his father, and he said, “Everything I have done, I’m totally fine with it, and I know it’s very hard for you. I’m mostly sad for you and Mother and my brother, that you have to go through this. 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?” I Googled him, and there were not so many hits, but I read a little bit. He had actually formed, together with his wife, Libertas, which means freedom—

Good name.

He had formed the largest resistance network against the Nazis that ever existed. There were over 100 people in Berlin who were all connected, and they were from all walks of life. There were some artists; others were workers. Some were leftists, while others were patriots.

Harro always believed that people could come to an agreement, that it was possible to actually talk about things. He was a true democrat, maybe you could say, or a true—I don’t know—libertarian.

He had to learn a hard lesson: with Nazis, you cannot argue, because they’re 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.” In Gegner, opponents could all write. Whoever the opponents were, they could all write in The Opponent. So you read all kinds of texts and opinions, and he thought when Hitler took power in 1933 that he could continue to publish The Opponent, because 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.

In April 1933, 2 months after Hitler took power, they had a meeting with the editorial staff. They discussed the new issue, and then there was a knock on the door. It was the SS, and they beat up everybody and destroyed the typewriters and the printing press they had in the office in Berlin.

They took Harro and his best friend, who was half Jewish, to one of these early concentration camps, and they tortured both of them. Henry Erlanger was killed. He didn’t make it. At that moment, Harro realized who he was against. He realized that he had to fight the system.

The way he fought the system was later echoed during the ’60s. We also had cultural and political changes in Germany during the ’60s. They called it “March through the Institutions.” That is a way to infiltrate the system, 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 Harro decided to go into the Luftwaffe, and he was working in the Luftwaffe Ministry, a huge building still intact today in Berlin on Wilhelmstrasse. It’s quite an interesting building that was the power center of the Luftwaffe, or one of the most important structures in the whole Nazi regime.

He was working there, and he worked his way up and 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 clothes, posing as vacationers. But they were actually soldiers supporting Franco and were part of Franco’s victory later on.

Harro had this information, and he tried to pass it on to the BBC. He failed to pass it on. He met a BBC journalist during the Olympic Games in Berlin and told him about this, but the BBC guy was too afraid to make this public, and he buried that information.

Harro is just a very interesting character, and he was in love with Libertas, and Libertas with him. Harro came from a bourgeois, very educated family. His great-granduncle was von Tirpitz, who built up 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 even very straight-laced.

Libertas came from a castle north of Berlin. She was this bohemian, aristocratic Bohemian type. She was very good-looking, always playing music. They fell in love. They met on the Wannsee on boats. Harro was rowing, and she was on a sailboat belonging to a guy Harro also knew. He was rowing, and he saw his friend on the sailboat. He looked at Libertas, she looked at him, and they fell in love in 1934.

The other guy, Harro’s friend, 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.

What happened that night was that Harro didn’t sleep with Libertas. For her, that was very unusual because everyone wanted to sleep with her, but Harro wanted to keep his clothes on, and it was a very warm night. I researched this quite thoroughly. I know exactly the temperature.

When you read The Bohemians, you really experience the life of these people and what they experienced, but nothing is invented, which is very tricky to do. What happens that night is that Libertas wants to take off his clothes, and he doesn’t want to take them off. Why? From the torture in April 1933, he had quite a lot of scars. The SS had even carved swastikas into his thighs with knives.

So he didn’t want to show that to her. He hadn’t had a girlfriend for a while. He couldn’t open up emotionally because he was fighting the Nazis. It was very secret. No one knew about this—that he was long-term planning his life to fight the system that he hated so much because they had killed his best friend before his eyes.

At one point, Libertas did take off his clothes, and she saw this. She was naive. She was even a member of the Nazi Party, but she wasn’t a very active party member. She worked for MGM, actually, in Berlin—a Hollywood film studio office in Berlin, Germany, which was one of the biggest movie markets. She was the press girl. She did the campaigns for the big Hollywood movies in Germany.

So just a regular German girl?

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 The Bohemians. The German emperor apparently was bisexual and went to that castle, and they had homosexual meetings there with Libertas’s grandfather. So she came from a very unusual family.

Yeah. But what I mean by a regular German girl is that it’s not obvious that a person like that would hold a crucial role in the resistance against the Nazis.

No, not at all. That was always a problem because for her, it was weird that someone was against the system. But Harro told me—Harro was totally convinced that fascism was wrong and that he had to fight it. More and more, Libertas became convinced, and then more friends came into the group.

The way Harro organized this resistance group was through parties. They were like a power couple of Berlin, and they had a great loft apartment. They moved together to a loft apartment on a side street off Ku’damm, with a huge room, and there they had parties every second Thursday night. They would invite friends, and once they trusted someone personally, 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 immediately, either the person would jump on it and respond, or they would go somewhere else and get a drink at the bar. They weren’t into it. That was the way of recruiting people, and it was so efficient that the Gestapo was not able to understand this group for a long time, or even recognize that there was a group.

The Gestapo was very good at infiltrating, for example, communist resistance groups, because you just had to go in as a Gestapo guy and be a communist. You just said the right words and they would, at one point, take you. But with Harro and Libertas, it wasn’t so easy. They would sniff you out.

These parties were what, like intellectuals? Artists and that kind of stuff?

Yeah, yeah. They had music, they would dance, they would sleep with each other. They also—

Oh, sex stuff too.

Well, they had—and this is, again, kind of a parallel to the ’60s—the idea that if you’re against fascism, if you’re for freedom of everything—

Yeah, free love, the whole thing.

Yeah, they had free love, but it wasn’t a dogma. There was also a female doctor there. She was quite square, I guess you would say, and she was against this. She said, “This is too complicated. We are a resistance group. What if there’s jealousy, and what—” This could compromise operations. And it did sometimes.

That’s why The Bohemians is a very interesting subject, because sometimes it just doesn’t work. In a way, it works because love really bonds them together. But especially Libertas and Harro, they had a terrible marriage sometimes. They really fought, because Libertas wasn’t so much intellectually convinced. She was more of a resistance fighter from the heart. She felt that the Nazis were not good, but Harro was more the analytical guy. So they had a lot of friction, and it’s a fascinating story.

They came quite far. 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 the Allies, to the Western Allies and to the Soviet Union. So he went a step further than just being a resistance group. He became, you could say, a traitor, or—

He would give information to the Soviets.

Yeah, he would, because he said—

As part of the resistance.

Yeah, they can beat Germany. But that was also discussed in the groups. It’s very interesting to see: some said, “We can’t do this because the Soviet Union is also a totalitarian regime.” But then Harro said, “Yeah, but they’re going to beat Hitler.” So The Bohemians is a very interesting topic.

What lessons do you learn from these folks, maybe about why so few resisted Hitler while in Germany?

I mean, it was extremely dangerous.

Is it purely the danger? Is it also that people believed it was hard to be an independent thinker and take yourself outside the propaganda? Because they were also swimming in propaganda.

The chances of succeeding were quite small because the system was extremely strong. If you made a joke about Hitler in a restaurant and the wrong person heard it and ratted on you, you would land in a concentration camp. So people were very, very careful.

At parties, Libertas would sing, and they would drink and dance, and then suddenly the political discussion would start. You had to have guts to actually not leave the party but stay, because they were risking their lives, basically. As soon as they were found out, they would be dead. People don’t want to die when they’re in their mid-20s. They were pretty young.

Libertas would often say, “We can’t win. Why are we risking our lives—for what?” So one time they did a Gelbe Sättel Aktion. They produced leaflets—small pieces of paper with glue on one side—and the paper said what the Nazis had done. The Nazis had set up a huge exhibition hall called the Soviet Paradise in the center of Berlin. I’d never heard about this before. I found it when I researched The Bohemians, and it was the most popular exhibition during the whole war.

Two million Germans saw this. They went into the exhibition and saw how horrible the Soviet Union was, how horrible communism was to people. So it was a propaganda show. The group decided to make these leaflets, which didn’t say “The Soviet Paradise,” but “The Nazi Paradise, torture, SS torture, hunger, war, how long will it last?”

They glued more than 1,000 of these stickers everywhere in Berlin in May 1942, at night. They organized it so that two people, a man and a woman, would always go out together. They had the stickers with them, and they would pretend to kiss and lean on a wall. While they were kissing, one would put the sticker on, and then they would move on in the dark.

The next morning, tens of thousands of Berliners saw these things all over the city. So, did it make a difference? It made a difference on that day. It was a very dangerous thing to do, and no one got caught. In the morning, a lot of people saw that there was actually resistance, that there were people who did something against it. So I think they did something.

I was reading about protests in recent human history, and many of them don’t have an effect until they do. It’s like this threshold effect. It’s very hard to know, because it’s a match that lights a fire. Sometimes the spark takes a little bit of time to propagate through whispers.

What happens is that people start whispering. It’s the whisper network of people talking, and sometimes it just takes that one sticker to begin the whispers. Then, a few months later, the regime is overthrown. It’s funny, but it’s hard to trace back what was effective and what was not.

Harro was convinced that the system would lose, so he thought that maybe they could make a contribution and make it happen faster. Maybe they would be that spark. When he thought there was this possibility, he had to try it. That was his conviction. He would put his life on the line for that possibility.

How did they get caught?

They were approached by the Soviet Union, which wanted to recruit them as spies. They didn’t want to do that. Harro refused Soviet intelligence.

These are documents that were found in the early ’90s. One of the sons of a member of Harro’s group—a good friend of Harro—went to Moscow to look at the files. He found furious Soviet KGB descriptions of this weird guy, Harro, who didn’t want to be a proper Soviet spy and just said, “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.”

Still, they collaborated with the Soviet Union. They accepted a radio transmitter from the Soviet Union with which they were supposed to send military information by radio to Moscow. They struggled with the technology. The Russians gave them an apparatus with only Russian instructions, and it was very difficult. They made mistakes.

What actually got them caught was that, at one point, the Russians answered and sent them a message through the ether, and that message was decoded. But the Nazis intercepted the message and were able to decode it. The message gave Harro’s name and address, which was a total intelligence blunder. Or maybe they just wanted to give them up and have their revenge, because Stalin did crazy stuff like that.

Suddenly, the Gestapo knew that Harro Schulze-Boysen, a high-ranking officer in the Luftwaffe Ministry, was giving military information to the Soviet Union and apparently meeting with all kinds of friends. So the Gestapo started observing the group for months. At one point, the group realized that they had basically been found out, and then it was already too late.

They captured quite a few of them, and quite a few were tried in military courts, received the death penalty, and were executed. Harro and Libertas were among them. That last chapter of their lives is very well documented, and it actually ends with the letter I found at the beginning. The last thing Harro did was write that letter.

To his father.

What’s very interesting is what happens with Libertas, because she was taken into custody. The Gestapo asked one of their secretaries, Gertrude Breiter, to go in and pose as a friend to Libertas. Libertas fell for it and started telling that secretary, who pretended to be her friend and helped her with certain things, her secrets. That kind of broke the neck of the group.

It’s a very tragic ending. 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 obviously had a lot of humor. They had parties to recruit people.

What lessons can we learn from that about how to resist totalitarian regimes? Is there some deeper wisdom?

I just think it’s admirable to be brave and not do things 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 what my conscience would have been like, but I’m probably more the fleeing type. A lot of writers would just leave Germany. Thomas Mann just left Germany and lived in Pacific Palisades.

And then maybe write and criticize, but leave first.

He criticized it from the outside, and he was quite influential. He worked for the BBC. They did shows against the Nazis. So maybe you could do more when you leave.

Let’s say we see something today. 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 smartphones, or do we do something against it? What do we do? Every situation has very different conditions. I think it’s probably even harder now to be in the resistance than it was back then.

But I think, at the end of the day, it does boil down to facing yourself, looking at yourself in the mirror—facing your conscience and doing the courageous thing. I think that in itself is like the tree falling in the forest, even if there’s nobody there to hear it.

Just the fact that it exists, somehow through the karma channels of the world, can materialize into progress, into a revolution against oppression. Something about that human spirit still shining through can start a revolution.

It is that spirit that actually made us human. It is that neuroplasticity in our brain: we do not just repeat the conditioned sets that we ought to repeat, but actually dim down the command center in the brain and let other parts of the brain react, which is basically the psychedelic experience. That, I think, contributes to the evolution of our species.

Our species is certainly threatened with extinction. So I think if we somehow care for the human race, resistance becomes a very immediate and important topic. You can resist, obviously. Your brain is yours. You can resist in many ways—by thinking, just by thinking.

That’s 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. It was very conservative—I don’t know if conservative is even the right word—but Ronald Reagan was president.

So I thought my writing could change the brainwaves of the readers, basically, and therefore have a neuroplastic effect on the reader. That’s what literature is. I started off as a novelist, and that’s really literature. It’s about what you see right now and how you describe it. You do it in ways that, when you read a good book, you feel good because suddenly you see different things and your brain changes. You become freer, 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. I think it resembles, a little bit, what this group did: just living differently. That’s why I said in the beginning that Nazis were bad dancers. Actually, I think they were good dancers at the parties, you know, and they were like, “I think it’s big.”

Dancing can be a form of resistance.

Yeah, 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 your spirit of that resistance into writing, that's beautiful. Some of the greatest literature does exactly that.

Right. That is the aim of my next book.

Is it still called Stoned Sapiens?

Yeah, it's called Stoned Sapiens.

Great title, great title. So what is this lens that you're looking at all of human history through?

I discussed this with the already mentioned Antony Beevor, who is the master of historical nonfiction books, and 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, you know? Obviously, it will always be a selection. That's clear.

That's why I also think that historical science is basically a fictional science. I mean, I have a foreword—the Blitzed foreword basically tells that story. Don't take it with a grain of salt. Not only Blitzed, but every historical book, because we weren't there, you know?

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?” And the guy wasn't there. So historical science is a fiction. But it's a certain type of fiction, and it's based on facts.

I'm not inventing anything in Stoned Sapiens, and I'm highly interested in very early human history, where 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 would diminish 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. I was sitting with these Viet Cong generals in Hanoi just a few weeks ago, researching whether they supplied heroin. There's never been evidence that it happened this way. They just looked at me and said, “There's no Viet Cong.” I said, “What are you talking about?” They said, “You are the Viet Cong.”

They 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.

The very early beginning of Stoned Sapiens goes back to about 1.5 million years ago, to Homo erectus, which has also become kind of famous by now. Homo erectus is the first human that really gets shit done, you know.

Yeah, they get moving.

Yeah, they move.

And why were they moving?

Why were they moving? You can examine exactly where they originated, which is also disputed by now. The leading theory is the Great Rift Valley, because 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 do we still find them.

But we know for sure that in the Great Rift Valley there was a plant called khat, which is plant speed. It's still being used now in Ethiopia, Yemen, and around the Horn of Africa. Khat is very normal to use. You chew the leaves, and it gives you an effect like an amphetamine. It's basically a plant amphetamine.

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. It's interesting because they were able to do certain things. They shed their fur. They were the first ones to suddenly be naked, and that had the effect that sweat glands were produced.

Homo erectus could sweat when they were very hot, which animals couldn't do because they had fur. An antelope can run faster than Homo erectus, but after 10 minutes the antelope has to stop, like what dogs do, with its tongue hanging out. Humans didn't have to do that because they were sweating, so they could develop jogging mode, basically.

They were jogging. They were not sprinting to get the animal; they were jogging it. When the animal couldn't continue and had to rest, the humans would come and hunt it down. So Homo erectus was evolutionarily very successful.

Later, one of the species coming out of Homo erectus was Homo sapiens. At one point, there were only 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. There was a real danger of extinction.

They were vulnerable, you know? 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 human consciousness, we wouldn't be here. That is what made us, in the end, superior to the other animals.

So how did this happen? You can 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. Iboga is now the hot thing of the psychedelic renaissance. 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 the elephants were walking backward and behaving in an unusual way. Then people were also using it. This was going on for over 100,000 years in the rainforest. So you can write a story about that, you know. Was it maybe iboga? Of course, you can't prove it. Maybe the frontal cortex grew by itself, you know?

That's a really compelling story. That's one of the great mysteries: How did the light turn on? The magic of human cognition and consciousness.

Like Sapiens by Harari, which is a great book, he also misses that. When it comes to those moments, he writes, “We don't understand how the first cognitive revolution and the second cognitive revolution actually happened.”

So I find it interesting to look at whether it could have been drugs. I include everything he leaves out. I look at it thoroughly in Stoned Sapiens.

I mean, he does a good explanation of interesting consequences: our ability to imagine ideas and share them, collaborate on them, and the imagination, all that kind of stuff. But the why—the transitions, why did it happen—he doesn't provide, right? There are some theories, but if iboga is one of them, that's a compelling one. That's a really compelling one.

Yeah, I'm still researching this book and writing it. I also want to go there, because they still take iboga in Gabon, for example. I also interviewed one of the leading iboga experts at Columbia University for Stoned Sapiens, and he described how iboga works in the brain.

He's never taken iboga himself.

Oh, interesting.

He just relies on the data. He doesn't want to be personally influenced. But he said he will take it at a certain point in time. Right now, he's still just working with data and with patients, examining the brain through brain scanners to see what actually happens.

Classic psychedelics, like LSD or psilocybin, dock at certain points. They interact with certain receptors. It's quite well understood how they work. He said iboga is completely different.

He also showed this with his hands, because he's so mesmerized by his own findings. It's kind of everywhere at the same time in the brain. He says it's like a spa for the neurons, basically.

His findings show—and these are academic findings at Columbia—that iboga is as if it knows our brain from a long time ago. He said to me, “It's as if iboga would know our brain for a long time.” It knows exactly if you're addicted to something or if you're depressed.

Depression literally is a depression in the neuronal network. Depression is a thought loop, for example, or a system of thought loops: “I'm not worthy,” “I'm not whatever,” “I can't do it.” You always go back. This really kind of depresses your brain in a way.

Iboga sees this immediately, takes the depression out, and makes your brain work well again. So this is what his findings are. He says he's totally convinced this is a neurotechnology. He doesn't call it a plant; he calls it 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 Stoned Sapiens must be written, because there's so much that historians have shied away from.

It all started when I was on the island of Crete, the biggest island of Greece. Crete—that's another Harari moment. On Crete was the first so-called high culture of Europe, the Minoan culture. You might have heard of the Minoan culture.

No one can explain so far why, there on Crete, suddenly in Europe, they started making amazing structures and amazing art. How did it happen there that this totally backwards place—Crete, I mean, backwards as any other place—became so intricate, that such intricate objects were being made and that the culture was developing so intensely?

I was thinking about that. That's how the book started.

I was with my kids on vacation in Crete. If you go to Knossos or Phaistos, the big archaeological sites, or to the museum in Heraklion, you don't find an answer. Why did it happen there?

Then I found an old book in an old bookshop, and it described an excavation site at the sea. It was maybe a maritime place, basically a harbor. While I was swimming there, I found on the sea floor the remnants of a wall. It was a harbor wall that was out, breaking the waves.

Then I climbed over the fence, because the archaeological site is still fenced off. It's not officially explained what it is, and the walls in there are the biggest walls of the whole Bronze Age. It was actually quite a big harbor.

The next step is: What did they trade? They traded olive oil, because Crete was the first place to produce olive oil. I also found—and this is historically documented—that opium was made in Crete and the poppy flower was growing there. This was the harbor, and they became incredibly wealthy through the olive oil and opium trade through that harbor.

So you could say that the whole of European high culture, which goes from the Minoan culture to Athens, started basically with them being drug dealers, in a way. I mean, it was the most potent medicine, because it was the only medicine that numbed the pain for sure. Opium works, and the Minoans developed that.

It's a bit similar to the Blitz experience. The more I researched, the more I found that there's this whole component to human history that could be a really critical component.

I'm really interested in the origins. There are certain leaps, like the origins of human civilization and then the origins of Homo sapiens. Those are really big leaps.

I mean, there's some evidence that they came through the area where iboga was, but there's no academic proof. I guess an academically trained historian couldn't really write about that. But I can write about it. I can write about possibilities.

Yeah. Sometimes, the farther into history you go, the more it's about writing the possibilities.

It's also interesting: Why did the Neanderthals die out? What we can compare is the cave art, and the cave art of the Neanderthals is much simpler than ours. If you really get into the cave art, I don't know if you've done that.

I have not, no.

It's quite fascinating. Picasso looked at some of the cave paintings in southern France, and he said, “We didn't learn anything new.” If you study them, they're really good. But only the humans are good. The Neanderthals were worse artists than us.

You can also see that there's a very famous one from Algeria with a shaman. Around his body, mushrooms grow out of it, so he was a mushroom shaman. Mushrooms seem to have been part of it, at least in that area.

That's the “Stoned Ape” theory that Terence McKenna proposed. I think a lot of evidence kind of points to the idea 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 happier with what they had. They were not progressing all the time.

We have this transcendental kind of moment, which is the psychedelic experience. I guess you could think of it without that, but it makes more sense to imagine Sapiens as Stoned Sapiens—as a species that was able to incorporate psychoactive components into its development. It makes a lot of sense.

What about religion, one of the great technologies that humans have developed, if you can think of it that way? Religion evolved in different kinds of ways. Do you think there's a connection between psychedelics and religion—the development of religion throughout different parts of the world?

Well, I think Moses is quite interesting. Moses was a traumatized man who had fled Egypt, where he had killed a man who had been beating up a Hebrew. Moses took revenge and killed him, so he was running from the law. In the Bible, it says—I think—66 people were together with him in the desert, in the Sinai, and they had been fasting for days with no alcohol, so it was basically a psychedelic retreat.

This is being examined by Israeli scholars, and I think it's very interesting work. They examine in detail what the Bible says, and the Bible mentions the acacia several times in the passage where Moses sees the burning bush and then gets the Ten Commandments. The Egyptian acacia grows right in the Sinai area and contains DMT.

There's this Israeli research that Moses was actually having a trip, basically. He was seeing—he was hallucinating—the burning bush. If you take LSD and look at a bush in the heat, it will move. It might resemble a burning experience.

He went up the mountain, which takes 3 hours, while the others were staying down. With a DMT-type of experience, it's not that everyone in the group has the same experience, as with ayahuasca. Sometimes one person has an incredible experience, while another person might not feel that much at all.

Moses felt a lot. You do feel a lot when you have something to work through, and he certainly had 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.” For him, it's extremely, extremely important.

What he receives on the mountain is that there's someone speaking to him, and he understands that God is not many gods, just 1 God. He has a revelation. I think, when I read these examinations by these scholars, it makes a lot of sense to imagine that the Jewish religion comes from Moses' trip.

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. They get intoxicated to get closer to God. They're not as straight-laced as the Christians. They just allow alcohol. It's like the blood of Christ.

Stoned Sapiens is a book about religion. Islam and intoxication are also a very interesting topic, because you have the Sufis, who intoxicate themselves to get into ecstasy, to be closer to God.

Then you have the conservative Islamic scholar Ibn Taymiyyah, who defended Damascus against the Mongols by combining anti-drug rhetoric: “They're bringing drugs to us, and they are not good Muslims.”

So, drugs in religion. Sometimes drugs help religion; they 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, is very famous in Germany. It's called the Reinheitsgebot. Beer can only contain 3 things: water, hops, and barley, or something like that. That's the Purity Law, and that was done by the church in the 16th century.

In Germany, for a long time, this was seen as quality control: beer has to be pure; it 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.

Witches were also brewing crazy beer: you drink it, you have visions, and you dance around the fire. The church didn't like this, so the church said, “This is the beer now.” Hops, especially, was the new ingredient in the beer. The Purity Law is the first prohibitionist law in the Middle Ages in Europe.

Yeah. I think as society develops more and more, it seems to resist—certainly psychedelics—it seems to resist drugs. I don't know what that's about.

One of the very fascinating turning points that I've been able to pinpoint—or at least I think this is what happened—is: When did 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, in Uruk. It was Gilgamesh, and they wrote the Epic of Gilgamesh about the great king. But that was 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, something like that.

What happened in the thousands of years before? There's no source that there were rulers. It seems like humans were quite good at organizing themselves without kings before these first kings came.

I mean, for thousands of years from the end of the Ice Age until the Sumerian high culture, there were no kings. People were quite able to organize their communities. There was, for example, Çatalhöyük in eastern Turkey, which was working for around 2,000 years without any hierarchies.

I think that is quite interesting. Why do hierarchies suddenly start, and what makes the hierarchy stronger? Again, I'm still researching this, but in Sumeria, we can see that it's the beer that destroys the hierarchy-free society.

I mean, beer is quite old. The first beer was made in Göbekli Tepe, the famous first kind of structure of humankind. I also write about that, because it's very interesting.

Small detour: What is Göbekli Tepe? No one knows how they made it, but they made it. But why did they make it? I think they made it because they were creating a meeting place. Why was that so important?

There were not so many humans at the time. There were 1 to 4 million; those are the estimates, on the whole planet.

They were usually living in small communities of 100 to 500 people, not more. So the problem then is inbreeding. Inbreeding means degeneration, so it’s a problem. We are not genetically very diverse as humans, actually, so the people of Göbekli Tepe were meeting people from different areas, having sex with people they usually wouldn’t see, and creating healthy children.

Göbekli Tepe was active for 1,600 years, and I think it was an evolutionary kind of machine. It was like we were going to create a party place. 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.

Then, after 800 years, they started making beer there, and the situation slightly changed. They found these places where they made beer. You can still find the chemicals, and it’s certain that they made beer there. Once they made beer, they created different stone circles, and somehow it changed.

We can see clearly how it changes in the Sumerian high culture, when beer becomes a business. Beer is made by the priests, by the ruling class—or the ruling class emerges. Monasteries often brew beer, and that was also the case in the Sumerian high culture. They made beer and labeled it. The beer would be attributed to the temple that made it, and it would be sold, so that temple would rise in status and make money.

That’s how hierarchies started. The hierarchy, which is the big problem right now—we have these hierarchies, 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 and overcome the nation-states, we could create a planetary, probably AI-assisted, open-source, AI-assisted planetary society where everyone has the same political rights and there are no more borders. There would be 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 breaking the resistance of those who don’t like that, and there’s a lot of resistance, obviously.

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 are slowly moving toward. 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 some other guy will come.”

That’s why I’m not taking a position and saying, “This country is better,” if a nation-state makes war against another nation-state. Basically, both nation-states are waging war, and who has to suffer is us. It's Stoned Sapiens, it's the human species.

Speaking of which, I have to ask you: I’ve done psilocybin a bunch, and I’ve done ayahuasca, but I’ve never done LSD, acid, and you have quite a bit of experience with it. 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—

Right.

—except in the context of Stoned Sapiens. What’s LSD like?

Well, this is probably the third book that we want to talk about, which is Tripped, because Tripped is an examination of the history of LSD. That sounds maybe less interesting than it actually is. I find it fascinating.

I first tried LSD when it was given to me by my girlfriend at the time, Anya, in Lower Manhattan on a Saturday night in 1993. I was 23. She said, “Let’s take LSD.” I had never really taken any drug. I had maybe smoked a bit of weed, but I didn’t know what a strong drug was.

She gave me this paper, and I took it. We walked around in the East Village, the pre-gentrified East Village. It was pretty cool, actually. It didn’t work for about an hour. Then I had a falafel or something and went into the toilet, and there was a mirror.

I was peeing, and there was this mirror, but the walls had lines. They were painted in lines. Suddenly, these lines started to vibrate, and then the trip started. It was so powerful that I thought I would go insane. It was the worst trip I’d ever had.

You got scared?

It was so strong. I was totally scared. I didn’t know what it was. I suddenly walked up to my girlfriend and said, “It’s working.” She said, “Yes, it’s working. I feel it also.”

I went into No Tell 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.

I was in the bar, and I saw my friend Dora Espinoza from Peru. She was quite a small woman. She was only 1 meter 50, so she was quite short. Short is the right word. But on LSD, she was like this.

Like, tiny.

I saw her down there and said, “Dora, do I look normal? Because you look very small.” Dora said, “No, you look fine.” I said, “Okay, I gotta get out of here.”

Then we walked up to 2nd Avenue, and we saw a bunch of Puerto Rican kids killing one of them. It was a gang, more of a druggy kind of gang. Manhattan back then was kind of dangerous in the East Village. They killed one of them on the hood of a car. In front of our eyes, we saw it, and I said, “Do you see this? Thank you, my God.”

Then they resurrected him. They gave him mouth-to-mouth, and the guy was fine again. We walked past, and we were not sure anymore what we were seeing. This was a very strong hallucination.

Then we saw a full-blown racial riot on 2nd Avenue. People were smashing in taxi windows and pulling the drivers out. It was like Grand Theft Auto.

Grand Theft Auto? Yeah.

Right, it was like that.

So most of this is basically hallucinating?

I think so, yeah.

But it felt real.

It felt totally real. I was happy when the trip was over because I thought I had gone insane, basically. I thought there was a switch in my brain that had been switched, something chemical. I thought I had a chemical imbalance in my brain and was going to be crazy for the rest of my life.

After about 10 hours, the effects suddenly wore off, and I became normal again. I thought that was quite fascinating. In hindsight, I thought it was a great experience, even though it was quite scary.

It also had moments of incredible perception. I could see that atoms are not rigid. Obviously, everything’s moving in our universe. Everything. There’s nothing fixed, you know? I could see that everything was basically alive, and that my previous perception of how the world is was just my conditioned perception.

The world was very different. Just how you look at it, it looks different.

So it was freeing in a way?

Yeah, totally freeing. It was also much stronger than all the LSD I’ve taken since, and I’ve taken high doses, so I’m not even sure if that was LSD. There are also other compounds that are quite rare, like DOM or whatever. Maybe it was something else.

But I’ve also spoken to LSD experts by now, for the book Tripped. 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.

What happens in the brain is basically that the default mode network receives less energy, and other parts of the brain communicate better. If this happens for the first time, your brain may be totally surprised by this firework that’s going on, and then it creates hallucinations so it can somehow make sense of it.

There are a lot of things firing, and then you see things that maybe are not there. But that’s not usual on an LSD trip. You don’t have such hallucinations. I’ve never had such hallucinations afterward again.

What’s the usual experience on LSD?

It really depends on the dosage. If you microdose, it’s just like drinking an espresso that lasts maybe 2 or 3 hours in a very pleasant way, so you’re just slightly buzzed.

Is it visual artifacts, like—

No.

Color?

Then you would take more. Maybe if you take 50 micrograms, the colors become more intense. But if you take a microdose of 10 micrograms, nothing happens. The trip starts with about 100 micrograms.

I took a swimming trip in Thailand in January, and I took about 200 micrograms, which is quite a lot. It was so beautiful on this island, and I thought, “Will it be more beautiful if I’m on LSD now?”

Of course, every LSD trip also tells you about your life and some things you didn’t understand. Suddenly, you see, “Oh, it’s like this.” It’s very good for reflecting on your life, but it’s also a lot of fun.

I swam for about 3 hours through the ocean, which is something you usually don’t do. I like swimming, but after 10 or 20 minutes, I go out. But I was swimming and swimming.

Yeah, for me, on psilocybin and ayahuasca, there’s an intensification of the beauty of the world around you, whether that’s nature, people, your own memories of the past, or your imagination manifesting itself in different kinds of visuals.

On ayahuasca, I saw dragons of different kinds, and they were just really beautiful. Maybe I’ve never taken a heroic dose of psilocybin, but everything was always so beautiful. I was grateful to be alive, grateful to be in this world, and grateful to appreciate it in this most intense way.

There's something about, like you said, seeing the individual atoms. There are certain ways to deconstruct, visualize, reinterpret, or re-visualize the world that make you appreciate, “Holy shit, this is really awesome. This is really special.” That can only be done through the process of showing you a slightly different version of it.

When the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz developed LSD in 1943, they were trying to answer the big question: “What is it good for?” Albert Hofmann, the chemist, found it basically involuntarily. 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. All the LSD stuff is in the Novartis archive.

I always think it’s kind of interesting to imagine this intoxication room. This was 1943; there was a world war going on everywhere in Europe except in Switzerland, which is a neutral country. But Basel, where LSD was found, is like a stone’s throw from the German border, so you could actually hear the war going on.

They created a nice room within the company, and all the employees could voluntarily go and take LSD. They were the first people to take LSD, and they had no idea that there would eventually be MKUltra. They were just trying out something that one of their guys had developed.

I read through all these reports, and they all had a great experience, sitting in a nice chair and looking out the window. They reported things like, “I just had to laugh the whole time. I felt so good. I realized things about my life.” It created in them a heightened sense of sensitivity and the feeling that this is the life, that this is how life should feel.

So the CEO, Arthur Stoll, was really trying to figure out what he could market it for, because he thought maybe this was a game changer in mental health. This was before antidepressants and before antipsychotics, and it was in the middle of World War II, which had already created millions of traumatized people. How do you treat these people? They thought LSD could be a really big thing.

I just told you about when I first took LSD. I was interested in LSD, but I never thought I would write a book about it. I used it once in a while when I wanted to understand something about my life or just enjoy a day in the ocean.

But I read a study that microdoses of LSD could, at one point, help against Alzheimer’s disease, 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 also discussed it with a leading Alzheimer’s expert whom I interviewed for Tripped, and he said, “Wow, this is amazing.”

LSD interacts with the very same receptors, the 5-HT2A receptors in the brain, that Alzheimer’s disease destroys. LSD basically does the opposite of what Alzheimer’s does.

I discussed this with my father, and he said, “So why can’t I buy LSD in the pharmacy if it’s so good?” He had been a judge before. He actually put people in prison for drugs. So he said, “You better bring me the story.”

I did a kind of research loop. This is the book Tripped. Then I came back to him in the end with the true story of why LSD was made illegal, and that is quite fascinating.

The Swiss CEO, Stoll, had learned biochemistry from the Jewish German god of biochemistry, Willstätter. Richard Willstätter was a Nobel Prize winner in chemistry. His work involved extracting potent alkaloids from so-called poisonous plants and making poison.

Paracelsus taught us that 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 extract a potent alkaloid, maybe you could turn it into a medicine.

Stoll learned this from Willstätter, and there was another man who was learning from Willstätter: Richard Kuhn. So Kuhn and Stoll were the 2 students of Willstätter. Stoll left and became the CEO of Sandoz, where he developed the pharmaceutical branch of the company.

Kuhn became Hitler’s leading biochemist. He was responsible for finding a truth drug and also for developing nerve gas. But Kuhn and Stoll stayed friends even after the Nazis took power.

I researched Stoll’s papers in the archive. In the ’20s, he would communicate all the ergot research to Kuhn. LSD is an ergot product; ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. Kuhn would come to the Sandoz lab, and they would do experiments together.

Then, in 1943, Kuhn was a hardcore Nazi scientist, especially looking for a truth drug at the time. I was looking through the archive because I wanted to find a connection showing that Stoll had also sent LSD to Kuhn.

When I was researching Blitzed in Dachau, I had found that the SS had conducted experiments in the Dachau concentration camp with mescaline and another hallucinogenic substance that was not named. Mescaline has a problem.

The idea behind a truth drug is that I give you something without you noticing it, something that doesn’t smell or taste like anything. After half an hour, I know that something is working in your brain, and you become insecure because suddenly something is working in your brain.

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 that it had a bitter taste and was hard to make. LSD is very easy to make—not very easy, but quite easy—and it’s odorless and tasteless.

I somehow had the notion that LSD had a Nazi past, which is something that no one ever thinks about. LSD is the hippie drug, right? It’s a drug of the peace people. But I wanted to see all the papers of Stoll, the CEO.

The archivist already knew that he was the Swiss archivist. This was not a public archive. In a public archive, such as the National Archives of the United States, you see what’s there, you have the right to see it, and there’s freedom of information.

But in a company archive, like the Novartis archive, the archivist can just say, “No, I can’t find this.” You’re basically at his mercy.

So I bribed him with LSD, because he didn’t want to show me the Stoll papers. I said to him, just to distract him, “Have you ever seen LSD?” He said, “No. Why? How would I see it?” I said, “Well, I have some here.”

I had some; I had just gotten it from a friend.

What does LSD look like? Tabs or—

Yeah, a tab. I had a sheet of paper. The funny thing about it is that these are different designs. You can put it on your tongue.

Oh, and you can put it on your tongue? Is that how people usually take it?

Right. Yeah, you take it like that. The one I had was given to me by a Swiss friend, and it had—here, you can see certain prints on it.

Oh, yeah.

It had the old logo of Sandoz from the ’40s. So the guys who make this illegal LSD in Basel, in some kind of lab, know where it comes from. They made a joke by using the old Sandoz logo.

I showed this to the archivist, and he said, “This has the old logo of our company.” I said, “Well, it was made by your company.” He said, “I know this, but it’s not—this is very interesting, actually.”

I said, “I’m going to gift you one of these trips now.” He said, “Wow, you really would do this?” I said, “You can archive it.” He laughed, and then he actually took one. That broke the ice.

That’s great.

Then he said, “Okay, I’m going to show you now the correspondence of Stoll, our CEO. It’s no problem.” He went to the next room, looked for about 10 minutes, and then brought me these boxes.

I actually saw the correspondence between Stoll and Kuhn, between the Swiss CEO and the German Nazi scientist, and what they were talking about. Then I found a smoking gun: in October 1943, Kuhn acknowledged that he had received half a gram of ergotamine, which is the precursor drug to LSD.

So it’s highly likely that the Nazis used LSD together with mescaline in Dachau.

When the Americans liberated the Dachau camp, they had a special unit called Alsos with them. Alsos’s job was to find German scientists and interview them, to get their knowledge for the nuclear program mostly, but also for biochemical weapons.

One of the first people they interrogated was Richard Kuhn. Kuhn immediately collaborated because he didn’t want to go to the Nuremberg trial. He wanted to continue his career. He was an opportunist, so I guess his Nazi convictions were not so strong after all, because he also liked the Americans.

He immediately told the Americans about LSD. The next day, a very high-ranking general flew from the United States to Frankfurt and went to Heidelberg to speak to Kuhn again. Then he took off his uniform and went in civilian clothing to Basel, because Switzerland was neutral, and received the first LSD from Stoll’s son.

So the American general had LSD. This was in the summer of 1945. Then the American military started to examine LSD. Could LSD be the truth drug? If the Nazis thought so, maybe it was true, because the Nazis were cutting-edge scientists, as evil as they were.

In Dachau, this was presumably used for the different experimentation that was done?

I read one report from a man who was an inmate. He received it in coffee and had a full-blown psychedelic trip. An SS officer was asking him questions, and the man had such a great trip.

I would always imagine you'd have a terrible trip in a concentration camp, but 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. He only said it was so horrible when the trip ended, he became sober again, and he was just an inmate again in the concentration camp.

I mean, one of the things you get from books like Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl is that, in the concentration camp, the slightest good things are so rich in feeling.

Right.

You just get— So, I would actually expect to have incredible trips there because you're just grateful for anything positive.

Yeah, I didn't think about that.

It becomes intensified.

Makes sense.

But from the perspective of the Nazis, they were trying to develop the truth drug.

They miserably failed, because LSD is not the truth drug. LSD leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy, other parts of the brain think more, and the brain becomes neuroplastic. The neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, so you might understand something about your life.

You might not. 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 and have different ideas, so it doesn't work as a conditioning drug.

The CIA then took over the LSD experiments that the U.S. military had taken over from the SS. Now it's in the CIA's hands. In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was founded, because America didn't have a Central Intelligence Agency before. They had military agencies like the OSS. Now they had the CIA, and Allen Dulles, the first director, said, “Brain warfare is going on now between the Soviet Union and us. This is the Cold War. Maybe they're using something against us. We have to be prepared for the brain warfare, because communism is a propagandistic system.”

So they were always either really afraid or just pretending to be afraid that the Soviet Union would develop the truth drug quicker than they would. The LSD truth-drug program, which was labeled MKULTRA—the infamous MKULTRA—is a mind-control program. LSD played a big part in it.

It's a deeply illegal one.

It certainly was. It was never approved by Congress or anything like that.

It's probably deeply unethical, maybe one of the more un-American, unethical things done in recent times.

It's certainly unethical. It continues the Nazi human experiments.

Right.

That's what the CIA did.

It's continuing one of the worst aspects of what the Nazis were doing. They defeated the Nazis and carried the flag forward. It's just dark.

This is basically the reason why LSD at one point became illegal. Stoll still wanted to put it on the market, but Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKULTRA, really didn't want LSD to be on the market—not because he thought it wasn't good or that it was dangerous for anybody, but because he wanted to control LSD. He wanted LSD to be his, so he could use it for MKULTRA experiments.

He couldn't really stop legitimate LSD research, which was always going on until it was prohibited in 1966. There was legitimate LSD research done in universities, which came to all kinds of conclusions. But the decisive thing was a visit by Gottlieb to Stoll's office in Basel, where he came with a suitcase containing $240,000 to buy the world's supply of LSD, because he had information from the American ambassador. He said, “I think—we think by now Sandoz has produced about 400 kilograms of LSD.” That was the price for those 400 grams.

Stoll said, “No, actually, we have produced only 400 grams.” But he said, “I'll sell everything to you, of course.” The pressure he received from the CIA was significant, because the CIA and the FDA were quite friendly organizations. The CIA had a certain influence on the FDA, at least back then.

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 as a pharmaceutical company, then LSD is not going to be one of these products.” Stoll basically betrayed LSD. He said, “Okay,” and LSD was only distributed as a research drug. It was never sold by the company.

Researchers could actually write to Sandoz, “I'm doing this and this test, and I'm a neuroscientist. I need LSD.” Then they would receive it. But mostly, what happened to the LSD was that it went into the CIA's hands, and then it was used in MKULTRA.

But then it spilled out, obviously, because one of the guinea pigs was Ken Kesey. He received $75 for taking LSD for the CIA, and he was working in Menlo Park in a psychiatric ward. On LSD, he basically had the idea to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. He understood that these people might not be 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.

That neuroplasticity leads you away from one way of thinking. You realize that there are different ways. So I would say the tendency of LSD is more to increase—

Empathy? That kind of thing?

—empathy, diversity, all these kinds of things.

So, because you mentioned the effect of LSD on you as a writer, that it at least changed the way you write—

Well, 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. We did the LSD, the 3 of us, on Christmas. We did mushrooms on Mother's Day.

Whenever my mother takes LSD—and Alzheimer's is a horrible disease, obviously—for example, on Mother's Day, there was a newspaper lying on the balcony. We were sitting in the sun, and she was on mushrooms. It was just a microdose. It's not that you have a trip, but you have that stimulation of your brain. That's what you have.

Even her brain, attacked by Alzheimer's, reacted more strongly than my father's. He always says, “I never feel anything from a microdose.” You're not supposed to feel anything, but my mother suddenly picked up the newspaper, which she hadn't looked at for a year. On a mushroom microdose, she picked up the newspaper and started reading the headline to us, which was about the Ukraine war.

She'd never heard about the Ukraine war. She had problems pronouncing the word “Ukraine,” because that was a new word for her. She hadn't been part of the news cycle for about a year, and this was because of the mushroom microdose.

So, this book—how did it change my writing? On an emotional level, writing—

Right.

Taking LSD and then writing about LSD changed something in my family. It improved the health of my mother, which made me very happy and very satisfied.

Yeah, there's a deep personal connection, but I even mean on Ken Kesey's side. What does it do?

I know what you mean.

Writing, I don't know. Again, as a fan of writing, it feels like writing is suffering, kind of. When I see these great writers in history talk about writing, it seems like it's really hard. It's a kind of torture. You have Hemingway, and you have the Kerouac stories that just flow out of you. But a lot of times, it's really disciplined, day after day. You're really digging and digging.

So, it's interesting what that looks like under the different supplements. Stephen King famously—and there's a lot of people—they go to the drugs, to the alcohol. You have Hunter S. Thompson, who, when given the option, just says yes to all of it. The mind is a weird thing.

A lot of writers talk about how they're not really developing the ideas. They're plugging into something; they're channeling a voice from somewhere else.

Right.

With psychedelics, it certainly feels like you're modifying the channel, or you're expanding the channel, or you're directing the channel in a different direction.

Yeah.

That's why I asked.

I think for me, writing has 2 important parts, and 1 of them is the actual writing part. That's the painful part that you talk about. It's basically discipline and focus. It becomes harder and harder to focus because of the telephone.

Yeah, distractions.

There's a place in Switzerland, the Nietzsche House. I go there as much as I can to write. It's in Sils-Maria, and it's quite high up. Nietzsche went there every summer from 1882 to 1888, with the exception of 1887. He didn't go that summer. I don't know why.

He stayed there for 3 months and wrote most of his work in that room.

Yeah.

That room is still there, and his desk is still there. You can rent rooms in the Nietzsche House, and it's great. I do this as often as I can. 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 Nietzsche House.

Also, the Nietzsche House is magical, so it gives you so much. I would never take drugs in the Nietzsche House, because it would disturb the clarity that is in that house. When Nietzsche wrote Zarathustra and—

You can sense his presence a little bit?

Yeah, I speak to him quite a bit.

Yeah?

His door is always open.

Is he an asshole? Is he a nice guy?

No, he's a nice guy.

Nice guy.

His room cannot be rented. It's always a museum-type room. I never thought of him as an asshole. He's a total weirdo, obviously.

He had issues, like struggling to get laid.

Yeah, I think he had a lot of problems.

That's one of them. But he had a lot of good qualities, too.

But he's also part of Stoned 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 medical history, and he takes quite a bit of hashish; he smokes.

Is it to help with the stomach issues or whatever, or is it—?

No, he's interested in what happens in the brain.

Oh, interesting.

This comes back to your question: How did the drugs change my writing? Well, first of all, it's this discipline. I can do it up in the Nietzsche 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. LSD helped me, just on the first trip, to realize that it's not all black and white. The world is quite colorful, and there's the abyss, and there's also the horror. I was a happy-go-lucky kid. I never thought that the world was so deep as I understand it now.

So LSD makes the world deeper. For me to understand the world better and to understand myself better, it improved my writing, but I would not write on LSD. On LSD, you want to walk in the forest or 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 write poetic lines. That could be done on LSD because you have— When I was researching Stoned Sapiens, I did one LSD trip from the Nietzsche House. I went quite high up in the mountains on LSD, and I just thought about the book and looked at the different chapters, just seeing how they worked together, kind of like a macro view, without taking too many notes, just letting it play out in my mind.

When I walked down, I passed a cave, and I realized a lot about people's relationship to caves and the cave paintings. In the cave walls, you see all the arteries of the rocks. On LSD, you see all of that, and you see how alive it is and how beautiful it actually was for humans to use that canvas and work their cave paintings in there. I never had an appreciation of that before.

Yeah, you're right. On psychedelics, you're able to detect the aliveness of the details, if I can put it this way.

For me, it's a very creative drug, but for other people it might not be. I cannot advertise it, because if you have a psychological problem, maybe it's overwhelming.

That's actually a good thing to say at this moment, from my perspective, and maybe you can comment on it. In general, when people ask me—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.

Then, as a second step, if I'm talking to specific people on a case-by-case basis, I can discuss my experience and let that be an inspiration. I'm very hesitant to recommend something that could be so powerful because I don't know. I had a tremendously positive experience, and I was sure I would be meeting some demons. I thought I would have some demons in the basement or something, but I didn't meet them—not yet.

People might have some demons that they meet, and then it might destroy them, or it might change them in a way they don't like. 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. Scientifically, there have been studies where psilocybin helps with extreme depression and PTSD and all these kinds of things.

But I'd be very nervous about that too, because 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. I have heard a lot of stories of people who have taken incredible journeys, sometimes difficult journeys, with psychedelics and have come out much happier and much freer and have healed some of the things they've been going through.

But when people ask me whether I recommend them or not, I'm too afraid to say yes. I think the right thing is always, in general, no. Be very careful.

Yeah, I think it would be irresponsible to recommend it to people you don't know. Maybe if you know a friend and the friend asks you, then you could. Maybe I would say to a friend, "Yeah, I think you would be fine taking it." But even that is a big responsibility, because the German book Tripped is called The Strongest Substance, and LSD is actually the strongest substance because it works in microgram dosages.

Even the strongest snake poison, cobra toxin, if you use that in microgram dosages, you don't feel anything. But if you take 250 micrograms of LSD, it can totally overpower you. If you have an unstable psyche, it could turn you mad.

Do you understand how it compares to psilocybin, ayahuasca, and DMT? How does LSD compare to those? Is it similar territory, just more intense?

LSD and psilocybin are like cousins.

Distant cousins, or—?

No, quite close cousins. I spoke to a neuroscientist from a university clinic in Zurich who's been researching psilocybin and LSD since the early '90s. He puts people in brain scanners, for example, so he sees exactly what happens in the brain on LSD or psilocybin.

When I asked him that very same question, he said, "LSD is the more sophisticated molecule." What he meant by that is that LSD docks onto more receptors than psilocybin. Psilocybin interacts with about 5 different types of receptors in the brain, and LSD with around 9. That makes LSD a more complex molecule.

That's why it already works in very small quantities, because it's like a key that's perfect for our brain. Our brain really reacts strongly to LSD. With psilocybin, you have to take milligrams, not micrograms. Mushrooms are also described as the softer psychedelic experience because it only lasts for about 5 hours, whereas LSD lasts around 8 hours.

LSD also comes from a mushroom, but it's an ergot, which is a fungus, and it's turned into a diethylamide. You extract the potent acid from ergot, which is lysergic acid, and turn that into a diethylamide. So it's a processed drug in a way. It's a potent processed drug that works for mass movements quite well.

That's why it was so popular in the '60s, because people could just make it. Mushrooms have to grow. The hippie movement could never have been sustained on mushrooms because so many mushrooms don't even grow. A good LSD chemist can make LSD for the whole world, basically.

Can we go back to something we talked about at the beginning, about Berlin? It'd be fascinating to learn more about this culture. Are you still connected? I'm sure you've been to some wild parties. I've been told that Berlin has some wild parties.

Well, it had them in the '90s. It had the best clubs that I— I mean, it was just a dream. You go into this club, take MDMA, and the DJ is amazing, the sound system is crazy, and there are about 500 people on MDMA just dancing for 8 hours.

And that's when electronic music was really—?

Yeah, it was really good. A friend of mine, he runs a club of visionaries, which is kind of a famous underground club in Berlin. He asked me in the early 2000s, when this club was offered to him, "Should I do this?" I said, "Gregor, techno is over. Electronic music is dead."

Obviously, it's not dead; it's still going on. But in the '90s, it was new. You really went into the club and heard something you'd never heard before. The first time, I came from New York, and New York was a very old-school, kind of urban place—rock and roll or grunge music.

I came to Berlin, to a club called I Am A Bucket in East Berlin. It doesn't exist anymore. It was in a rundown, totally rundown squat. I went to the bar and had a beer, and I looked around. There were just a few people on the dance floor and this electronic music that I'd never heard before.

The guy in front of me looked like an East Berlin skinhead, but he was totally smiling. I'm sure he was on ecstasy, and he was disassembling an imaginary machine. I just looked at this guy. For 1 hour, he was doing the most complicated things. I thought, "This is a totally different way of moving," and I liked that, actually. I liked to dance in clubs.

Yeah.

I did this for about 2 years very intensely with my girlfriend at the time. We went out a lot, from Friday to Monday, basically. A lot of people still do that in Berlin, but it means that you can't really work.

Yeah, you escaped that. It's interesting that you were able to do that for a short time, just as an experience, and then go on to be extremely productive.

For me, it was also research, even though I didn't know it.

I mean, life is research in a way, if you allow it to be.

I could not have written these books on history and drugs without having had these drug experiences. When I wrote about methamphetamine and the Nazis, at a time when weed was illegal in Germany, I asked a friend of mine—she's a cannabis dealer, I guess you would say—"Can you also get me crystal meth?"

She was shocked. 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 for Taxi Driver: he had a gun in his drawer.

So he would play and get the vibe of danger. And so I wanted to have this crystal meth. This Polish guy sold it to me, and he gave it to me without me saying anything. Maybe my friend said, “He’s a writer,” or something, but he gave me a Xerox copy of the patent for Pervitin from 1938. This was a crystal meth dealer who actually had historical knowledge about it.

Mm-hmm. Did you ever try it?

Yeah, well, then I tried it because I really wanted to. I couldn’t really write about it in the same way without having tried it. I can’t recommend it. It feels very toxic. When you take a psychedelic, I can say with a clear conscience that 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 into your central nervous system, your heart starts pounding, and your blood pressure rises. It’s stressful on the organism; it’s toxic.

The effect in the brain is not so interesting as with LSD. You couldn’t go crazy, I would say, on crystal meth. You’re just very much awake, but you don’t have crazy thoughts that you can’t evaluate anymore. So it’s a very, very different drug, but taking that, of course, made me understand better how a soldier feels in a tank taking it.

Yeah, I think that’s really important to do. I have to ask: your friend Alex, who—it sounds like he’s taken every single drug there is. Has he spoken about what the most interesting drug is? What’s his favorite drug? He seems like a connoisseur, right?

But he’s not a psychedelic guy.

Oh, well, then, okay.

He’s more into the addictive drugs.

It’s very difficult, I guess. That would be a special person who could be a full-on explorer of the drug space. If you get into psychedelics, then you don’t really want to do the hard drugs, and if you get the hard drugs, you don’t want to—

Right. They contradict each other.

They do contradict each other.

It’s why we spend less and less time together.

Since you mentioned Kerouac, listen, I love Kerouac. Do we know any famous writers who have used drugs as part of their writing? Kerouac is one.

Do we know any famous writers who have not used drugs as part of their writing?

Interesting. I didn’t actually know this story, to be honest. I love Kerouac—

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 a politician, you can’t really do it.

That’s right. Rock stars—you can be a rock star or you can be a writer.

Yeah, you can be an artist and take drugs.

You mentioned that Kerouac did what?

Amphetamine.

Speed. Basically, speed.

The legend has it that “On the Road” was written in 2 weeks on speed, basically without sleeping, using an endless paper roll in his typewriter, so he was just writing. 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. I can take amphetamines and have a really good time and write 20 pages, but then the next day 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. Also, I think if you take a lot of amphetamines, you get into kind of psychedelic spaces at a certain point, where you start hallucinating. If you write “Blade Runner,” maybe it helps you. So amphetamines can also be creative, I guess. It’s just not my type of drug.

They’re certainly not as creative as psychedelics, but it also depends on the person. Malcolm Lowry, “Under the Volcano”—he was drinking a lot. Hemingway was drinking a lot, and they could only write when they were drunk. When I’m drunk, I can’t write. I just can’t do it.

Write drunk, edit sober.

And that’s advisable. 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. You feel so confident. You just write.

But writing is about nuances, especially literary writing. Maybe a nonfiction book would be easy on amphetamines, but a novel—it’s all about being very, very open. Amphetamines close you. You become like a machine; you write.

But if you’re on the right track, like Kerouac with “On the Road,” he had the right track. He was on it; he was going. But you could also be on the wrong one and then write 200 pages, and you just have to throw it away. Probably he did a lot of that also.

Yeah. And also, “On the Road” is a particular kind of book.

It’s an amphetamine book.

You want the spontaneity, the speed of—

It’s about speed. It’s about moving fast, but not stopping. It is a speed book. That’s a great book.

It’s such a great book. But I’ve recently been rereading all of Dostoevsky—going through “Notes on the Underground,” “The Idiot,” “Crime and Punishment,” and “The Brothers Karamazov.”

Which one’s your favorite?

“The Brothers Karamazov.” I read in both Russian and English. For the longest time, it was “The Idiot,” until—it’s a complicated philosophical issue. When I was younger, I thought Prince Myshkin, the main character in “The Idiot,” was not as flawed as I believe he is now. I think Dostoevsky tried to create a Jesus-like character in Prince Myshkin and kind of failed because he was too giving in a way that was actually counterproductive and destructive to the world, which he tried to fix in “The Brothers Karamazov” with Alyosha Karamazov.

But anyway, I don’t think you could do that. I’d be very surprised to learn that Dostoevsky did any drugs.

Also, there was not so much available.

That’s true.

Alcohol, of course, nicotine, and coffee. Those are really powerful drugs.

And I’m also doing a podcast with Chuck Palahniuk, author of “Fight Club” and many other amazing books.

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.

I mean, in that case, as he said, the movie is great, and that is almost like a larger-than-life thing. Sometimes the book and the movie and those things can influence culture.

That certainly influenced culture.

To where, like, “Okay, this has a life of its own.” I’d like to think some of your work might influence how we perceive history. That’s really important. That’s really powerful—not just to change, but to expand our conception of history, which is important to do. Are there particular books, fiction or nonfiction? You were both a fiction writer and a nonfiction writer. Are there books that had an influence on you?

Yeah, it’s “Ulysses” by James Joyce. “Ulysses” is good, but only when you’re in your early 20s, living in New York, writing your first book, and you’ve just taken LSD.

Oh, nice.

Then I read it, and it opened up.

It made sense?

Well, it just showed me that it’s a very experimental novel, so it opens up. You don’t have to understand everything, but it shows you that there are 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. 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.” Then a Moroccan came and said, “Why are you reading a racist book?” I’m like, “What are you talking about? This is world literature.”

He said, “Yeah, right. He’s killing an Arab without consequence. No, actually, there’s a consequence, but no reason, basically. Just because he’s bored. So this is racist.” That argument made no sense to me because I was just interested in how Camus constructed it. It was a stylistic experience for me to read that.

I always love books, and “The Stranger” is a short book. I love books that are able to accomplish so much in so little—in so few pages, in so few words.

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: every sentence in Nietzsche is chiseled and perfect. I mean, 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. For me, Nietzsche is also like a poet. The aphorisms are poetry. So Nietzsche, stylistically, since you asked, was very important to me. So Camus, Nietzsche, James Joyce, and Kafka also. I like Kafka always. And I like Thomas Mann. I don’t know how well he translates, but in German, his take is interesting. He’s a very funny guy. Even though he talks too much, he’s good.

So I always wanted to have these guys as my colleagues, basically.

Mm-hmm. Are they there somewhere in your head as you’re writing?

Less and less. But it was an incentive to be part of that club—to be able to write a book, and it’s out there, and it’s perfect, and you are on one level with Camus. It’s very hard to do.

Let’s say you become a carpenter, which is also a very challenging job, but you don’t have these kinds of great—well, you have Jesus, I guess, as your potential colleague.

Yeah, true.

I just like these writers—the ones I mentioned, and also Thomas Pynchon.

Who wrote “Gravity’s Rainbow,” which I think is one of the best novels of the 20th century. 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’s not known how he did it, because he lives a completely obscure life. Basically, no one knows who he is. So he’s also a very interesting colleague.

It’s widely regarded as one of the most challenging and significant works of postmodern literature.

It’s pretty good.

Set primarily in Europe at the end of World War II, the novel centers on the design, production, and deployment of the German V-2 rocket. The narrative follows several characters. It lists the characters.

Well, Slothrop is the American agent who’s the main character. He works for Allied Intelligence, and he’s a really funny guy. He smokes a lot of weed, and he’s in bombed-out Berlin after the war. It’s just funny to go with him through that. He’s a great character. It’s a great novel. It really is.

So it does give a window into history also.

It does, yeah. But that’s not why it’s interesting to me. It makes it especially interesting because of the way he describes these situations. The way he writes is phenomenal.

Oh, it’s a Pulitzer Prize and all.

Oh, but I’m sure he didn’t take it.

It’s on lists.

Because, yeah, he declined. Well, no one knows who he is. I know a little bit. I know who 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 amazing.

I think that’s a beautiful thing, but from my perspective—

He wouldn’t appear on the podcast?

He would not.

It would be great if he would come on the podcast.

He would not, right. Well, I believe it’s possible, but with people like that, it has to be a long journey. For me, for example, I just interviewed Terence Tao, who’s one of the greatest mathematicians, one of the greatest living mathematicians, probably one of the greats in history. There’s another I want to speak with, which is Grisha, Grigori Perelman, who’s a Russian mathematician more akin to Thomas Pynchon. He declined the Millennium Prize—the $1 million prize. He declined everything: the Fields Medal, the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics. He just lives with his mom now and quit mathematics.

Like Kirillov, he also lived with his mom.

There’s something really beautiful about a human being like that.

Right.

Especially because in his case it was done for principles. He has a certain set of principles, and no amount of money—nothing—could buy him or—

Yeah, that’s amazing, actually.

A really interesting guy I met a few days ago told me that there’s nothing more exhilarating—perhaps only a rich person can say this—than saying no to a lot of money. He said it with so much confidence that I somehow believed him. But the deeper truth there is living by principles and having integrity. There is something deeply fulfilling in that.

If that means saying no to money, or if that means standing up to Hitler and risking your life, that’s a deeply fulfilling thing. This is a 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?

I somehow think that the universe has a big story to tell, or that it’s telling a big story the whole time, and our consciousness is part of that bigger story. The consciousness of the whole universe—the big, huge story—is probably the meaning of life. Or the meaning 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. The mountains actually take you quite high up into the atmosphere, and they’re made of all kinds of minerals. So they’re receiving cosmic energy that comes and hits our planet.

Walking up there, if you’re on LSD, you’re more open somehow because you’re not closing with your default mode network that says, “This is the tree, this is the path, and this is the mountain, and now it’s 2:00 and I have to go back because of the rain.” You’re more open, so you’re more perceiving. That was at least the impression I had.

I couldn’t put into words exactly what I was perceiving, but I was perceiving more of the bigger story. I think that is inspiration, and I think those moments bring you quite close to the meaning of life. I wouldn’t put that meaning of life into words. It’s an experience, and for me as an artist, it was an important experience to get close to that.

That is what you can achieve in each of your professions. A mathematician comes to that point when he sees more or grasps connections. 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 meaning of everything.

Of this bigger story that’s being written.

Yeah. I mentioned to you my Substack, which I think is going to be the best Substack.

Do you think it’s possible it’s the greatest Substack of all time in history?

That’s what it’s going to be.

It’s going to be, yeah.

Stoned Sapiens Substack, but something else...

I just hope you actually do it.

Well, you should become a subscriber.

I will definitely subscribe.

I really realized that there is a greater, bigger story, and it’s somehow interesting to try to open up. That’s why I like to be in nature quite a lot. You get better access.

We live boxed in. Walter Benjamin called us boxed human beings. We’re living in the cities, we’re waking up, and we’re doing all these things. Therefore, it’s good to be outside the system. I hope that my art can contribute to freeing the brainwaves to understand a bit more.

What that is, I don’t know, but I think the process of understanding more and connecting in different ways is what I’m going for, because I think that is the meaning of life.

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.

It was great. Thank you.

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. And now let me leave you with some words from the great Terence 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 featherbed." Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.