Quote · Lex Fridman Podcast
#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA
Where this was said
Response to historian criticism
At 31:18 · chapter starts 29:37
Ohler's girlfriend pushed him to try the archives; a monocausal professor gave him the filing 'signatures' for Professor Ranke's files — the head of Army Institute for Physiology, whose job was to improve soldier performance. At the archive in Freiburg (deliberately decentralized, a post-Nazi design choice), Ohler held Ranke's handwritten war diary and original letters to the Temmler company about production timelines. The tricky part: nothing was labeled 'drugs' in the finding books; everything was catalogued by name, position, and campaign. No one had come looking for drugs before. Ohler also describes the Navy's human experiments at Sachsenhausen — the Shoe Runners Unit testing meth-cocaine combinations in chewing gum — and how Hans Mommsen, the greatest National Socialism historian of his generation, declared that historians had 'missed' the drug angle entirely.
An antique dealer in Berlin found original 1940s Pervitin tablets in an old medicine chest; they remained potent 70 years later.
