Sunday, September 25, 2016

So, you think you've heard it all about Nazi Germany? Welcome to the "untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs."


More placid Sunday reading.

High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history, by Rachel Cooke (The Guardian)

.. The book in question is The Total Rush – or, to use its superior English title, Blitzed – which reveals the astonishing and hitherto largely untold story of the Third Reich’s relationship with drugs, including cocaine, heroin, morphine and, above all, methamphetamines (aka crystal meth), and of their effect not only on Hitler’s final days – the Führer, by Ohler’s account, was an absolute junkie with ruined veins by the time he retreated to the last of his bunkers – but on the Wehrmacht’s successful invasion of France in 1940. Published in Germany last year, where it became a bestseller, it has since been translated into 18 languages, a fact that delights Ohler, but also amazes him.

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