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Blitzed by Norman Ohler
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Blitzed

Drugs in the Third Reich

$17.96

Retail price: $19.95

Discount: 9%

This title is not eligible for purchase with membership credits. Why?

Narrator Stefan Rudnicki
Translator Shaun Whiteside
Length 7 hours 19 minutes
Language English
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The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs.

On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact, troops regularly took rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to explain certain German military victories.

Drugs seeped all the way up to the Nazi high command and, especially, to Hitler himself. Over the course of the war, Hitler became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—including a form of heroin—administered by his personal doctor, Dr. Morell.

While drugs alone cannot explain the Nazis’ toxic racial theories or the events of World War II, Ohler’s investigation makes an overwhelming case that, if drugs are not taken into account, our understanding of the Third Reich is fundamentally incomplete. Carefully researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws surprising light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.

Norman Ohler is an award-winning German novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He spent five years researching Blitzed in numerous archives in Germany and the United States, and spoke to eyewitnesses, military historians, and doctors. He is also the author of the novels Die Quotenmaschine (the world’s first hypertext novel), Mitte, and Stadt des Goldes (translated into English as Ponte City). He was cowriter of the script for Wim Wenders’ film Palermo Shooting. Visit him online at www.NormanOhler.com.

Stefan Rudnicki is an avid audiobook narrator, receiving numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine. He is also a Grammy-winning audiobook producer.

Shaun Whiteside has translated widely in both French and German, including Sybille Steinbacher's Auschwitz: A History.

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Reviews

“Makes readers look at this well-trodden period in a new way and does it in a readable, inviting format.”

“[A] fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich.”

“Despite the Nazis’ all-out war on drug use, virtually everyone, from housewives to the Führer, was drugged up…Ohler’s account is full of rich character studies.”

“I had thought nothing could make [Nazis] more horrifying, but that was before I encountered Blitzed."

“Explosive…Ohler describes the chemical ignition of the first assault on the Western front with a novelist’s flair.”

“Ohler’s astonishing account…looks set to reframe the way certain aspects of the Third Reich will be viewed in the future.”

“A fascinating, most extraordinary revelation.”

“The book is an impressive work of scholarship, with more than two dozen pages of footnotes and the blessing of esteemed World War Two historians…Ohler offers a compelling explanation for Hitler’s erratic behavior in the final years of the war, and how the biomedical landscape of the time affected the way history unfolded.”

“The picture [Ohler] paints is both a powerful and an extreme one…Gripping reading.”

“Tells a deliriously druggy tale of the Third Reich.”

“A compelling piece of serious scholarship…that professional historians seem to have missed.”

“An intense chronicle of ‘systematic drug abuse’ in Nazi Germany…Written with dramatic flair…this book adds significantly to our understanding of the Third Reich.”

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