Much is known about Adolf Hitler.
He was vegetarian, partial to the
toothbrush mustache, and a failed artist.
But as the new bestseller "Blitzed" 
reports in incredible detail,
Hitler was also a hardcore closet junkie,
ingesting mass amounts of narcotics
for much of World War II,
as was most of the Third Reich.
— How do you know that Hitler was on drugs?
— In Germany, we keep records of everything,
and I was fortunate enough to find
the records and notes of Theo Morell,
who was the personal physician of Hitler.
— Is there a certain aspect of it
that's like a Rorschach test?
What does it say about you, that you
looked at that evidence and you're like,
“Oh, it's totally drugs”?
— As a novelist, and as someone being
partly socialized in Berlin in the ‘90s...
— [LAUGHS]
Go on.
— Drugs certainly are not as alien to me,
in my field of work, or life, or research,
as they might be for a tweed-wearing
historian in a small German or British town.
So, maybe it had to be an out-of-the-box
person to approach it that way.
— Dr. Morell was a well-paid celebrity doctor of the ‘30s,
who was a pioneer in treating people with vitamins.
He was the sort of man who, when the war started,
designed himself a fantasy uniform,
with a lavish SS belt buckle,
that the SS forced him to remove.
— It was an important part of the Führer
cult to portray Hitler as a teetotaler
who wouldn't even drink coffee,
who wouldn't smoke cigarettes, no alcohol, no meat.
The problem started in 1941, in August,
when Hitler, for the first time, became sick.
And Morell gives him a hormone injection,
and gives him an opiate for the first time.
In ‘43, when he gets an opiate called Eukodal,
which is very strong, stronger than heroin,
with a very strong euphoric-making effect.
— We now know Eukodal as oxycodone,
which Hitler was mainlining.
But the Führer wasn’t the only one
who was high during the war.
— There's a lot to be found on
the meth abuse by the German army.
Methamphetamine reduces your need
to sleep, and also reduces your fear.
This actually happened before the attack on France.
For the campaign in the west,
35-million dosages of methamphetamine
were being shipped to the tank troops.
The west was sure that any army in the world,
this is just what human nature is,
has to rest at night, which the Germans just didn't do.
— The meth that was so successful in early
campaigns would eventually fail them later,
and, in 1944, when the Brits bombed
the factories that made the drugs,
Hitler and his doctor found themselves at odds.
— So we all know what happened to Hitler,
but what actually happened to Hitler's doctor?
— Morrell, at one point, writes, in ‘45, that
he’s sending two of his aides on motorcycles
through bombed out Berlin in order to
find pharmacies that still had drugs, in vain.
When he cannot even give Hitler a strong drug
on Hitler's birthday, April 20th, 1945,
Hitler fires him a few days later.
— But does painting Hitler and his cronies
as drug addicts humanize the Nazis?
— It's very important to realize that
that the politics, the planning,
has nothing to do with drugs.
Drugs were used later on in the war effort,
but would drugs lessen the responsibility?
My conclusion is no.
