The Hidden Story of Nazi Drug Abuse | Blitzed: Nazis On Drugs | Documentary Central

[Music] [Music] on the 17th of January 1940 a meeting took place between Hitler General Eric Fon manstein and the commander of a paner division win roml they discussed plans to push through the ardens and invade France Hitler was attracted to the surprise attack and agreed to the proposition when one looks at the blitz cre through the Arden garan said to his troops I expect you to go without sleep for 3 days now three days in a tank and an armored Fighting Vehicle during the early days of summer but it happened to be extremely hot would have tested anyone's resilience drugs therefore seen as legitimate and legitimized by the regime were a very good source of energy and stimulus during a very difficult period for this post to be successful the Army would have to drive for days without stopping and without sleeping now pertin well that's a miracle drug because what that means is our guys don't have to rest they can just keep going they can do a forced March through the ardm forest for 3 days and just keep going they don't need to sleep what an advantage that is because if speed of maneuver is what it's all about speed and and your ability to keep going are absolutely crucial elements of what you're trying to achieve on the 10th of May 1940 pertin was taken in the Millions German propaganda often depicted Germany's quick Victory due to the morale of the national socialists but in reality paner troop unit drivers were taking two to five perverted tablets a day to ensure they didn't sleep and they didn't [Music] stop Berlin was very cheap in the 20 the economy was very bad the state was not very strong Germany had lost the first world war one also saw a um reaction really against the defeat they were trying to escape it and that's why drugs played such a large part life in Germany after the end of the first world war was incredibly difficult initially and that's in those first years that's when you've got kind of wheelbarrows of cash hyperinflation you know massive massive unemployment and a lot of Civ unrest as well but as the 20s develop and so Germany starts to get itself back on the tracks again um there was a feeling of uncertainty but also a sense of anything is possible um sense of let's experiment let's try out new things politically culturally uh socially so especially in Berlin it was a very open and and and free time this is where they were having these incredible nightclubs and Cabaret and so on this was a place where you could have free love you could take drugs you could drink as much as you like you could take heroin basically do anything you wanted so I guess Berlin acquired its own kind of flavor or at least reputation for being um sexually open um promiscuous uh place where anything goes and that decadency led to Great military inspiration but also great political and social change I [Applause] [Music] out manufacturing drugs was an important part of the German pharmaceutical uh economy and the German economy as a whole that that started in the 19th century uh when a German chemist actually extracted morphine um from from opium from uh poppy seed and and made pharmaceutical development possible in a way in the versai treaty there was a sub treaty that Germany had to sign which would disable the German economy to continue manufacturing the drugs with which they made so much money so Germany economy desperately tries to continue producing cocaine Heron morphine and was the world supplier actually at the time uh for these drugs and if you haven't got the resources yourself then what you tend to do is Strive that little bit harder to kind of find Alternatives so it's no surprise that the pharmaceutical industry is absolutely at the Forefront the Germans invented methadone because they couldn't get access to to the Opium poppy uh and morphine so they they invented their own forms of of morphine and heroin in order to help deal with pain but also calm people it led to them developing new drugs with new inspiration from the military and there were new linkages between the needs of perhaps an expanding nation militarily and the way in which the pharmaceutical industry could help that [Music] desire ptin was developed by the tler company in Berlin um after the Olympic Games 1936 they were not sure what petine is good for so they basically thought it's good for everything so pertin is developed in it's methamphetamine uh the whole point of it is is you know it's pain relief but it's also to stop you sleeping how boring is sleeping it stops you working we've got a new Germany to build we want people to work really really hard and this is a way where you can counteract the biggest problem of of human endeavor which is the need to sleep and rest if you can take a pill that cuts that out how fantastic is that we can see how popular methamphetamine actually was um when we look at um a chocolate that um the the hilderbrand company put on the market it was a box of chocolates um and each little portion contained um 13 migs of methamphetamine it was also stressed that you even lose weight while eating that that sweet uh because methamphetamine is a slimming age and you you're not hungry anymore when you're on when you're on meth that the ads at the time show a very happy German frine or house FR um grabbing into the the box and and and and taking one of these chocolates I mean it's worth remembering all drugs were either prescription drugs or freely available at that point in Germany right the L up to that point there had been no prohibition of drugs there was no such Concept in Germany at that time there had never been any ban drugs so they didn't they just didn't think in those terms the newest findings by brain scientist s show that there is a mechanism in our brain that um inhibits us from killing and there's ways to get around that that mechanism and um using certain um synthetic stimulants such as me methampetamine are an effective way of bypassing that inhibition to kill armies have always taken drugs in order to influence the outcome of war in order to improve their fighting capab abilities and methamphetamine is a very potent substance so it certainly has a very strong effect on the individual Soldier and if we have millions of soldiers uh on methamphetamine it will have uh a definite effect on the outcome of battles and of whole campaigns Henrich Hoffman was an old friend of Hitler they knew each other from the 20s Hoffman was a photographer in Munich and he became Hitler's official photographer um he would do all the port most of the portraits of Hitler that we know and published uh photo books of Hitler that became bestsellers actually in Nazi Germany showing Hitler's private life showing him in the mountains looking into the distance and and kind of stylizing Hitler um as as the as the the good dictator um the the father of of the German Nation morel's treatment of Hoffman uh was obviously a key step in his introduction to Hitler without Hoffman he'd never have met Hitler he'd never have become Hitler's personal physician and Hoffman also played um quite an important role in Hitler's private life uh you could say because he introduced Eva Brown to Hitler Eva Brown was working for him she was 19 at the time um she was his his assistant in his in his photo lab so he brought the the two together and um he brought another person to Hitler which was Theo Morel because um in 36 Hoffman was suffering from gunara and Morel treated him and after successful treatment um Hoffman arranged um a dinner at his private house in munic where Hitler also was present and Eva Brown was present and Morel was was there and then Morel and Hitler started talking Hitler told Morel that he's suffering from stomach cramps and his regular doctors can't cure that and then Morel suggested his probiotic medicine called muta flu muta flu was and I suppose is because it's still on the market uh a medicine containing active life bacteria so Hitler received that probiotic remedy that was able to kill uh enough of his uh bad uh in Flora that he um actually got over his problems and um then started uh believing that Morel is the the guy who who who has the right medicines Fedor Morel was Hitler's personal physician and increasingly Hitler came to rely on him not only as a doctor that pretty much prescribed whatever Hitler acquired he was also his Confidant Morel had a very successful practice um in the center of Berlin um right on kist and Dam which is the main Boulevard he was expensive um he was known to treat diseases that don't exist his patients loved him maybe because of the strong drugs he gave them but um he seems to have been like a jovial character he was popular with celebrities uh in in the German Capital he was popular with actors and actresses uh that had to go on stage and maybe experience stage fright he would give them an injection that made them feel confident so he was a type of doctor feel good so he had a career that's why his wife criticized him when he took the job as Hitler's personal physician she said you don't we don't need that you can stay in Berlin practice is going well why would you do that because in the beginning actually Hitler paid him quite a low salary but he loved the power of treating the most powerful man in Europe theor Morel is essentially a quack I mean he is a trained doctor but he's into alternative means of medicine he manages to Veil his way into Hitler's Inner Circle and then becomes completely indispensable I mean so much so that kind of Hitler barely can exist a day without Morel kind of you know ingesting him with a whole cocktail of drugs it's Hitler's dependency on him that ensures that Morel stays in that inner circle and stays having that incredible influence there are others around but there morel who is above all as the war progresses and hit the stress and physical mental strain on Hitler comes greater um so morel's influence becomes greater the uh generals were always uh hugely suspicious of morel right from the start a that he had so seemed to have so much influence over Hitler that he was there the whole time he was to put it mildly a very unprepossessing uh character he was very much a medical man a doctor he always wanted to be a military man when he became personal physician of Hitler he felt ridiculous being the only one in the head quarters without a uniform um and he reacted in a way um that's a bit comical actually he started making his own fantasy uniform that looked like a military uniform and that made him even more ridiculous within inner circles because military man obviously immediately realized that this is a uh a uniform that he made up and uh made fun of him and he put the SS runes onto uh his uh label the SS immediately said you have to take him off you're not a member of the SS so he was never accepted by any uh military U organization and um Hitler actually liked that because that meant that he had full control over Morel that Morel had no powerful organization behind him the time that they spent together was was very important and morel's um impact on Hitler was undoubtedly quite significant during that period [Music] the core of the National Socialist ideology is stands the purity of the blood Hitler represented or was supposed to represent the whole nation so his body in a way is the symbol for what the Nazis called the folk Cur or the people's body they saw the nation as one body and Hitler was the representation of that body even the greeting H Hitler in a way refers to the health of Hitler because H in German means also means being healthy so to show Hitler as this clean and healthy T TOA was of utmost most importance um to the cult that the Nazi party created around him well Hitler's uh movement very much depended on the idea of regeneration uh which meant clean living which meant the whole of their art which was sort of produced and ansy art was you know the perfect naked body um through a Athletics uh through clean living so for Hitler to in any way um vary from what he pretended to be his self-denial no alcohol no smoking um and in fact of course no meat but uh we soon found that he of course was being injected with substances which were probably far worse a series of new legislation such as the 1935 nurenberg race law condemned drug users Jews and homosexuals alike suggesting that they were toxic for the country's welfare the Nazis in a way invented the War on Drugs when they prohibited drug use after they took power so they used um their drug policies early on to control uh the population and to especially oppress uh minorities like the the Jewish minority in Germany by calling them um uh drug users and saying that many uh drugs are particularly used by Jews [Music] young medical officers started to become obsessed with a performance-enhancing meth based pill stocking up on the drug in preparation for the Poland deployment many of Hitler's soldiers didn't realize it was a powerful drug and considered it to be an alternative to [Music] coffee for the first time petine was used um when German troops marched into the Sudan land which was part of uh Czechoslovakia and the first time it was used on a massive scale was in the attack against Poland well the head of defense mechanism Professor Dr um granka um had not really planned it to be used but he had allowed a certain amount or given a certain amount to medical officers who then distributed it within their regiments they realized that actually ptin could have a tremendous effect in the way that the tank crews could keep going when normally they would have to stop and relax and sleep and rest and so forth Oto Ranka was um the head of the institute for defense phys physiology in 38 Ranka realized that there was medicine out there um which might help him fight his two main um enemies and those were fear and fatigue and that medicine was perinee well he was like the father of ptin in the ver so he was in a way responsible for performance enhancement for the German Army I think pertin obviously had more effects than just a purely physical one I mean the way that it gave such confidence um aggression too it seems from some of the uh studies um It produced a sense of euphoria which uh me meant of course that they were less uh susceptible to cowardice or to fear and this made a huge difference um to surprising the enemy so the soldiers didn't need to be brainwashed there was no sense of negative effects by taking pavinee everyone loved it and uh everyone felt good taking it so you would just take it every day and you would always feel good and there was no realization in the beginning that you actually become addicted and that tolerance builds up and that um it might have negative side effects that only came to light later on well the problem with with any drug is that at some point you've got to stop taking it because otherwise you're going to die I you just can't keep taking drugs forever raises your heartbeat your heart's going to explode your head's going to explode you know they're obviously not good for you particularly methamphetamine however if you keep taking it day after day after day after day there's no rest bite you can't sleep the effects build up and up and eventually become paranoid and a bit stereotyped the most dangerous and pentious effect of methamphetamin by far is that it suppresses sleep human beings sleep for a very good reason we need to be replenished we need to uh process what we've seen if you have protracted periods without sleep what happens is the kind of dreaming world starts to bleed into the waking world so that's where you start to experience the deterioration in your your your mental health because you you lose the ability you increasingly lose the ability to distinguish between the waking world and the dreaming world I mean there are several difficult questions about drug use in war time I me I mean one of them is does it change people's behavior so they they kind of lose their moral compass and I think it can in some ways um once you get paranoid then you you you start to think differently so you you know you've lost control of your normal rational faculties also if you're completely out of it so that you know you you you're so high that you kind of don't know what you're doing then you may well do things in war that you regret the same way as when people get out of it in non in war time they regret what they do so so those are two independent variables which can both contribute to people doing things which they really would prefer not to have done I think the drugs that Hitler took made him Bolder they made him perhaps um Carry Out certain decisions that he may not otherwise have done um he certainly felt that at certain times he needed that extra stimulus particularly earlier in the war to continue the increasingly difficult um daily working hours that he had to cope with I think that the Nazi regime had a completely different culture and the the culture of drug taking in the Nazi High command was something that was um recognized um if not understood a large number of the the Nazi hierarchy were very much dependent upon drugs I think interestingly a number of them were actually quite shy individuals and it allowed them to uh come out of themselves be more more charismatic be more perhaps authoritarian but increasingly those drugs were becoming heavier more potent and really did undermine their ability to make clear decisions there's a danger in the way some people have talked about the Nazi drug use because some people have presented this as if it's saying well the Nazis were just off their based on drugs they were just out of it and therefore we don't have to look at their genocidal ideology their monstrous characters and so on there's a real danger in over that this the role of drugs in the Third Reich are very real they did play a factor but I think there's a real danger in overstating the moral nature of what happened methamphetamin like other drugs like caffeine like alcohol they are tools to achieve goals goals the methamphetamin is just a tool to help you make be better at your goal it's it's not the the driver of the morality of your act Hitler we know had a number of underlying difficulties what we would call today as personality disorder he had you know the maniacal fantasies he had weren't as a result of his drug misuse these were already in place uh from his childhood in many ways the Pharmaceuticals he was being prescribed May well have been uh medicating against some of the effects of his of his you know predisposing [Music] personality the German Blitz Creek of 19 1940 was so named because it was very fast the original idea of blut really came from guderian's book uh published in 1937 called akum Panza which basically means Lookout tank uh the idea that you can break through uh with a combination of tanks and aircraft and so astonish your enemy um that they didn't know what to do hin scaran was called um the fast Heights he was um one of these um avanguard thinking if you will um paner generals and uh uh was responsible for developing the blitz Greek uh strategy one of the greatest challenges of all for the Germans is the Need for Speed and because of the resource poor nature of Germany because of their geographical isolation and their limited access to the world's resources the Germans and the prussians before them have always their way of war is to completely overwhel their enemy very very quickly by rapid maneuver this was what they achieved on the 10th of May when they came through the Eiffel from the Eiffel through the Arden uh in southern Belgium and into France and when those tanks kept going uh once they' made their breakthrough um the French were completely flabbergasted and able to react Communications are vital in any battle but when one is trying to plan and execute a fast moving battle with armored fighting Vehicles they become all the more important because the distances that are being traveled on various fronts are going to be far greater certainly than in the first world war and one of the great reasons why in 198 the British army was limited in their range was because they didn't have mobile field Raad radios Hines gadarian and others um was at the center of the demand that the German Armed Forces should develop and should use small radios that could be put into armored fighting Vehicles the strategy was decided on February 17th 1940 uh during um uh a breakfast in the reich's chancell three tank generals uh raml good Ian and F manstein were having this meeting with Hitler they said um we should go through the Aden mountains using tanks as the decisive force to move ahead but basically Aden mountains were like a a tight window through which uh the German Army could could squeeze through but the Western allies thought it would this would be impossible because you can't move tanks quickly through the mountains um but this is exactly what they proposed and hit said this is how we're going to do it and Ranka suddenly was um being invited Ed um to give talks about uh pavinee in front of generals and uh to um explain how methamphetamine could be used because time was the decisive factoran was also asked to write um the so-called stimulant decree uh detailing uh how the German troops should actually take methamphetamine once the attack starts pertin this methamphetamine which they had produced uh in 35 million doses which is astonishing uh was distributed but particularly to the paner Troops with the armored troops at the front the tank troops were totally exhausted after taking ptin over several days well they once they had broken through and once uh they had basically cut off the British at dun Kirk um then they did have time on their hands apart from anything else they also needed time uh to service their vehicles I mean after the distance they had traveled so the two in a way went together so if you were taking for instance uh methan amphetamine for 3 or 4 days as in the ardan offensive then would take you 2 or 3 days to re reestablish restabilize your normal sleep wake cycle and so we see the seventh Panza division making the most extraordinary strides forward being known by Hitler as the ghost division not necessarily just because the enemy didn't know where they were but because he didn't know where they were roml was pushing the boundaries of what armored fighting Vehicles could achieve and the men that drove those machines could achieve and drugs undoubtedly would have been a part of that success so from that point of view um it was definitely a breakthrough in uh the use of uh drugs in Warfare the problem was that when France surrendered in in third week of June 1940 Britain didn't surrender too and Germany knew that Britain had to be knocked out of the war before it could think about regaining its strength and then turning its attention to the east but the battle Britain is a is an aerial battle that wages over Southern Britain predominantly throughout the summer months of 1940 and the ltw fail spectacularly due toight operations the German Pilots took perver in talas to stay away many of them taking off their breathing masks to shove their faces with the pills although the Germans were using performance enhancing drugs during the Battle of Britain they couldn't defeat the Royal Air Force and suffered their first Maj defeat in the war thereafter operation Seine was called off operation San was the German project to invade uh Britain after the fall of France Hitler had hoped of course that Britain would make want to make peace and this is why in fact it was the one moment in the whole War when Germany could could have won uh and it was when uh Churchill refused to have any form of negotiation at that moment when the British army was trapped in Dunkirk and nobody really knew what the future would hold but Hitler's idea of uh um a cross Channel Invasion um was never entirely convincing because although they created and collected these sort of barges to take the soldiers across and the strength of the British Navy the Royal Navy was still very great indeed and he really said we will only do it if uh guring can actually destroy the Royal Air Force because without air power the Royal Navy would have been vulnerable operation Seine is the planned invasion of Southeast Britain by the Germans and the interesting thing about it is what a complete mess the whole plan was because Germany was the only nation in the world that had a combined general staff which was the okw the over Commando Devar and yet they didn't make the most of that so what what happened was when Hitler was preparing for dealing with Britain in July 1940 he retreated to his country home in the mountains the burkus Garden in in Bavaria the berhoff and asked all his service Chiefs to come and visit him one by one there's absolutely no combined operations planning there's no joined up thinking whatsoever um they haven't got even through the first line of defenses um by September 1940 which is the RAF they haven't gone through the second line at all which is the Royal Navy and mines and all the rest of it in in the shipping and nor have they even got close to coming up against the third lineer defense which of course is is is the soldiers on the ground which can mount to about three two and a half million by that point so they are very very long way off from ever happening and if you think about the Jeopardy that face the Allies for Operation Overlord D-Day in June 1944 and you think how many things had to be in place before that could even be considered to be a goer complete control of air space control of the Seas all the rest of it uh complete control of intelligence networks uh um and winning the Espionage War none of that was in place in 1940 and there was quite a lot of Jeopardy for D-Day so operation Seine had it ever been attempted I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever would have been the biggest disaster the Germans faced up until that point the fact that the British are fighting on their home soil or at least above their home soil they're fighting for their very survival the Germans have been fighting in Scandinavia Poland the low countries and then France they are tired they are ready to pack their bags have some rest and recuperation starting a whole new campaign at this point which is something that was really pushing them a little bit too far the Germans thought that they were INF fuor when it came to uh technology and also training of their pilots so they they try to make up it by uh giving the luffer pilots methampetamine pertin so they could fly more missions and longer missions the lack of success of the LOF weffer uh is is interesting was it down to perverting were were their pilots you know um overly medicated or is the explanation just the superiority of the technology of the Spitfire to begin with they attacked the airfields to destroy the fighter command um and that actually is started to present a real danger but British Air production aircraft production was much higher than in Germany um and also um guring handled his Pilot so badly that they were given no rest whatsoever and so they were given ptin to keep them going um but this also LED with its side effects of quite often lack of judgment after excessive use of pervitin and um double vision and all these other things and I think is one of the great contributory factors to the astonishing level of crashes when the the British examined German planes um that had been shut down over Great Britain they found ptin and they um there was a discussion within Royal Air Force whether petine or methampetamine should also be used um on this side and uh tests were being done with um British Pilots giving the methampetamine and amphetamine and then the decision was made that British uh Pilots should use amphetamine so in a way the Nazis started a pharmacological arms race now in contrast to the Germans and Japanese with their methyl amphetamine the Americans and the British use amphetamine sulfate that's not not as strong and it doesn't last this long and where it really came to the fall was in the North Africa campaign so here we are we're fighting Ramen in North Africa we've got The Desert Rats The Desert Rats are getting up in the evenings taking amphetamine sulfate harrying the Germans through the night the Germans can't sleep because they're on their crystal meth they get very confused by what's going on Brits and the ozes go back and they sleep in the day because the amphetamine sulfat is worn off the Germans can't sleep because the methal amphetamine continues so day after day night after night the Germans are awake and awake and awake and getting more and more disturbed by the fact that they they can't really fight back at night cuz it's too dark and they can't can't sleep in the day in February 1941 Conti delivered another warning to the party explaining that there was an immediate danger to the health and the future of the nation his message was eventually acknowledged by the Reich Hill fura and on the 12th of June 1941 pervon was declared to be an intoxicant and made subject to the Reich opium laws leoti was the so-called health furer of the Nazi State and he was against pavinee uh he made it a prescription based drug in November 1939 and he made it illegal in um in this early summer of 1941 um but uh the German ver replied to him in a letter saying uh that this is a law that that doesn't really apply to us we do whatever we want well when an article appeared in the Milano newspaper that um the German Pilots had been using a so-called pill of Courage which was pertin in order to um to fight as they were able to fight um there was there was a discussion in German High command saying uh foreign uh media is now saying we're we're only so good in fighting because we're using drugs so this contributed uh to the controversy within German High command whether pavinee should be used and Conti used uh that argument saying we have to ban this this is against our ideology the uh the Vermont always said if this is beneficial for a war effort we are going to use it and uh if there is um physical harm for certain people we just cannot take that into account the overall effort is of uh most importance although Cony had been successful in Banning periton the Germans barely took any notice of the law consumption increased by over 1.5 million units a year [Music] the vermac decided to develop new Miracle weapons the plan was to launch small size attacks and surprise the enemy this Mission would require the men to spend several days underwater and it was decided that they would need something stronger than pertin the search for a new Miracle Dru began the Navy in early 1944 had developed new Mini submarines which were made by one or two persons only and which were basically floating Torpedoes and the idea was to send those mini submarines all the way up to the temp's Estuary and and and British ports unnoticed the problem was that these missions would have to last more than 4 days and up to a week cuz you couldn't sleep in those mini submarines you had to stay awake so so the Navy was looking for new drugs well the Navy had um a doctor called oovi um which was responsible for developing this wonder drug that would keep you awake for a week was in fact a combination of ooal Hitler's favorite opioid cocaine and methamphetamine which are in a way the three most potent drugs in the world all rolled up into one pill we recruited 16 to 18 year old um youngsters for these um highly d Transmissions um the results were catastrophic they started to hallucinate um they felt totally sick uh and most of them were completely incapable so it was it was a useless sacrifice so the Navy thought that they should do proper tests now for uh the new wonder drug because they didn't give up on the idea of the wonder drug and then they started doing tests in the concentration camp of saxonous and the shoe Runners unit um was testing shoe souls for the ger ger shoe industry these Gastly uh tests were done uh supposedly to try out different forms of the sols of uh boots for the German Army uh because of course they didn't have the leather anymore they needed to have artificial products and so these poor prisoners 20 a day were dying as they were being forced to keep walking walking walking uh you know 40 kilm or more on a totally insufficient diet the Navy hired uh this penalty unit paid the SS money to able to use uh these inmates and gave them um different um dosages and different kinds of drugs and then they had to start walking with um backpacks filled with stones had to start they they started at 8:00 p.m. at night and had to walk all through the night and then they checked which inmates on which drugs would walk uh for the longest period of time and um that's how they made the decision which drug would be the best to give to the young German Navy soldiers on their missions um against Great Britain Morel began giving Hitler more testosterone for his libido and gave Eva Brown medication to suppress menstruation Hitler and brown began enjoying an exciting sexual relationship and Hitler often had to conceal wounds on his body from her aggress sexual behavior Hitler's drug consumption was too insane to really sustain it over a long period of time because he was taking so many different things um on a daily basis um with interactions between the drugs um it was it is of no surprise that his health deteriorates after short period of time actually I mean he was continually sort of experimenting but it was really once he started uh giving him not just the peltin and the the methamphetamine uh in the earlier stages um it was really when he started to give him ucal um in 1943 that I think one can talk about a serious addiction oal is a so-called opioid a half synthetic opioid it could compare it to heroin the result is like a mixture of being like on cocaine and herin at the same time so you're relaxed and stimulated um and um Hitler apparently loved that feeling because he receives IOD more than any other opiate in 43 he switches to yucal uh now this is at the time really of the battle of Kus which was one of the sort of crushing defeats for the vmar uh which came also with the invasion of North Africa and the invasion of Sicily and Hitler's fear that musini and his regime was going to collapse had really got him into a very nervous State and this is when morel decided to inject him with ucod for the first time which of course had a uh quite a uh an element of opium in it it dawned on the fur's headquarters that victory was no longer possible in the East the fura was in denial and refused to give up any conquered territory he started distancing himself from conventional living and he chose to contain himself where possible in his bunker [Music] in mid 1944 had explosion in the barracks through Hitler across the room damaging his ears severely this assassination attempt was known as operation Valkyrie when the bomb plot of the 20th of July 1944 took place and there was the explosion Hitler of course suffered eard drums imploding and um a lot of uh superficial damage but he was not actually uh broken up in the way that some of his uh Entourage uh me number of whom were killed well Morel is being rushed to the scene after the bomb goes off and uh gives Hitler an injection without writing in his notes what's in the injection he just writes X and um a few minutes later um hundreds of splinters are removed from Hitler's body and his perforated eard drums are being treated with an acid and the doctor who performs these actions uh uh writes down that he's completely surprised um how little pain Hitler is feeling or How brave he is he was actually able to meet musolini the very same day musolini arrived by train on that on July 20th 1944 and Hitler through morel's help um I suppose um or at least through an injection that Morel labeled as X um is able to kind of continue working it would make sense for Morel to also give an opiate at that moment but he doesn't write it he just writes X he again uh boosted by some of morel's drugs um saw himself as a man of destiny that somehow Providence had intervene to save him everybody who saw Hitler in the part of 194 was shocked to the core on seeing it there the fur from that they remembered if you like from the news reels uh of the earlier stages of the war completely gone here was an old man looking 20 years older than his age shuffling around twitching in many ways um and they could hardly believe what had happened to it now most people thought it was the effect of the bomb plot and uh the way that he'd been blown up there but of course his Entourage knew uh that it was and of course the effect of the drugs that he'd been taking as [Music] well Hitler's drug intake was no longer effective and his physical deterioration was starting to demotivate others and if you've got a character who was already on the Spectrum who was already a sociopath who was already displaying huge evidence of extreme paranoia and mood swings the kind of drugs he's taking is only going to make that worse which is then going to massively affect his decisionmaking processes as well as his mental and physical state so the idea that these drugs didn't affect him didn't make him um less effective as a commander in chief whether it be of the Armed Forces or indeed of the state clearly they did they must must have done the body was uh should we say wasting away in many ways and um he also of course had a skin which was uh becoming more and more uh paper-like in a way and of course it was the veins which was morel's problem there are several notes by Morel where he um documents discussions he has with Hitler trying to convince Hitler to take breaks from the daily injections because he can't can't get the needle into the vein anymore because the Hitler veins were scarred um it shows you the enormous extent of of of Hitler drug use when you see someone that's been misusing amphetamines across a length of time you do see that there's a sort of increase in feeling paranoid persecuted uh there's a level of disarray and dangerousness that that runs along with continued and sustained use with you know larger doses so uh I wouldn't have thought that um Hitler's body was a pretty sighted tool by that stage there was a conflict which I call a doctor's War which happened uh in the fall of 1944 a new doctor comes into headquarters and accuses Morel of poisoning Hitler and in the beginning himler takes um this new doctor's position and they try to get rid of morale but when himla realizes that Hitler will stand up to his personal physician himla quickly drops his attempts to get rid of morel and the other doctor has to leave during that particular period particularly September to December 1944 um the only way that uh Morel could keep him going was by constant injections of ukad um and this was having uh an appalling effect upon Him Britain began to bomb the pharmaceutical factors of the Reich which caused Great disruption to the manufacturer and distribution of Hitler's favorite drugs due to supply issues Morel became ever more fearful for the supply of drugs needed by the furer morel writes about sending his helpers on motorcycles through bombed out Berlin from Pharmacy to Pharmacy to still find drugs to still be able to to to hand in the the the prescriptions and and and get the medications and um this becomes more and more difficult Hitler who before had received anything he wanted and had received the most powerful and euphoric making substances now receives drugs that don't make him happy anymore Hitler's socalled Naro decree of March the 19th 1945 was to destroy almost everything which could be of use to the Enemy by that he was thinking of course of the Red Army of the Soviet Union and that meant of course the uh terrible fate for the German civilian population the neuro decree is Hitler's order that if Germany is going down then everyone else is going down with it so they're going to it's scorched Earth policy in effect he ordered the destruction of every German Factory every building of importance every cultural heritage site so as you Retreat as you pull back you deny your enemy any of your assets so you destroy factories you destroy anything in its wake uh even works of art but by this stage Hitler believed that the German people were uh basically had showed themselves not to be sufficiently strong to resist and therefore they deserve to die he basically ordered the complete destruction of [Music] Germany well Hitler fires Morel um a few days before he commits suicide and after um his last birthday on April 20th Morel leaves the bunker devastated um is reported to have wept and uh kind of lost his senses and uh is able to catch one of the last planes out of Berlin which lands south of Munich Hitler's reasons for getting rid of Theodore Morel was that I think he realized that was it the end was very very close uh Morel could do very little more for him um Hitler was any really at that stage interested in the cyanide capsules uh which he was in fact already Distributing uh to some of his um colleagues um and Associates and particularly the secretaries in the uh bunker almost like sort of sweets to be sucked on takeoff for the next world uh as far as hit was concerned uh the end was very very close Morel could do no more uh and apart from anything else we probably find that actually Morel had have actually no more drugs to give him by that stage I think Hitler suicide is a combination of internal actual actual physical pain and obviously um the external situation there are a number of contributory factors I think behind Hitler suicide uh he'd always talked of suicide from a very very early stage uh uh he bitterly criticized general paus for refusing to kill himself at Stalingrad when they finally surrendered but above all he was probably suffering from uh withdrawal symptoms but he hated the idea of being taken alive and being taken back to Moscow in an iron cage this was his sort of worst nightmare he was determined to kill himself uh interestingly using both poison and a gun at the same time uh and then to have his body set on fire so he could not be really be recognizable once news of his death became public many of The reiches Who obedient members followed suit following the war Morel was tracked down by a US news reporter Tanya long he was taken to prison following her article and was interrogated and subject to investigation by the US Secret Service American investigators write in several reports that they couldn't make sense out of morel he was contradicting himself in what uh he and how he described uh his job as Hitler's personal physician Americans kept him for quite a long time uh for um 2 years and then dumped him outside the Munich train station he was he was quite a a big man and he was wearing US Army code that was way too small for him and he was lying there on the pavement when a half Jewish Red Cross nurse found him and picked him up and um took him to a hospital in tan which is in this the south of Bavaria um apparently he did not recover being incarcerated and interrogated by the Americans for two years he claimed that they tortured him removed his toenails to extract his uh Secrets um so he dies in um summer of 47 although the Germans were heavily involved in Mass drug consumption during the second world war they weren't the only once Britain Japan and America were also subject to drug highs one report stated British soldiers were given more than 72 million amphetamine tablets during the course of World War [Music] II so drugs have been used in conflicts for thousands of years uh just different drugs I suppose typically alcohol has been the drug people used to get courage and also to come down after fighting to try to dampen down the the stress and the distress drug consumption in Germany during World War II was extremely high but one has to remember that in almost every war beforehand alcohol had always played a very large part I mean the B resued the rum to the Navy and also to the soldiers before going over the top it was basically to dull the fear as far as possible and that was of course one of the elements in ptin which was uh gave them a form of euphoria one thing that lots of people will be puzzled about when they hear this story when they hear wait a minute all German men between 18 and 30 were taking uh methamphetamin uh for years is surely after the war there were huge numbers of methamphetamin addicts it's worth noting in in the aftermath of war that the the market becomes flooded with pertin and methamphetamin a lot of that um of that stash ended up uh on the black markets uh in Germany after the war which was the place where you got things because everything else was destroyed so petine didn't leave the scene and actually continue to be used um after the war uh by the people who wanted something to pick them up again [Music] [Music]

Channel: Documentary Central

Views: 453,677

Keywords: Doco, Documentaries, Documentary, Episode, Movie, Movies, Online, Series, TV, full documentary, history documentary, adolf hitler, crystal meth, nazi germany, full length documentaries, world war 2, military history, world war ii, tv shows - topic, documentaries to fall asleep to, documentaries real stories history, documentaries 2023, documentaries 2023 bbc, documentary movies based on true story, Nazi, Drugs, Nazi Drugs

Id: 7DtR-CNZN44

Length: 58min 3sec (3483 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 30 2023