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00:14I'm sorry.
01:30On the 17th of January 1940, a meeting took place between Hitler, General Erich von Manstein and the commander of
01:38a panzer division, Erwin Rommel.
01:41They discussed plans to push through the Ardennes and invade France. Hitler was attracted to the surprise attack and agreed
01:49to the proposition.
01:50When one looks at the blitzkrieg through the Ardennes, Guderian said to his troops, I expect you to go without
01:57sleep for three days.
01:59Now three days in a tank in an armoured fighting vehicle during the early days of summer, but it happened
02:06to be extremely hot, would have tested anyone's resilience.
02:11Drugs, therefore, seen as legitimate and legitimised by the regime, were a very good source of energy and stimulus during
02:21a very difficult period.
02:22For this push to be successful, the army would have to drive for days without stopping and without sleeping.
02:28Now, Pervitin, well, that's a miracle drug because what that means is our guys don't have to rest.
02:36They can just keep going.
02:38They can do a forced march through the Ardennes forest for three days and just keep going.
02:42They don't need to sleep.
02:43What an advantage that is, because if speed of manoeuvre is what it's all about, speed and your ability to
02:50keep going are absolutely crucial elements of what you're trying to achieve.
02:55On the 10th of May, 1940, Pervitin was taken in the millions.
03:01German propaganda often depicted Germany's quick victory due to the morale of the National Socialists.
03:06But in reality, Panzer troop unit drivers were taking two to five Pervitin tablets a day to ensure they didn't
03:15sleep and they didn't stop.
03:27Berlin was very cheap in the 20s.
03:30The economy was very bad.
03:31The state was not very strong.
03:33Germany had lost the First World War.
03:35One also saw a reaction, really, against the defeat.
03:42They were trying to escape it, and that's why drugs played such a large part.
03:47Life in Germany after the end of the First World War was incredibly difficult initially.
03:51And that's in those first years, that's when you've got kind of wheelbarrows of cash, hyperinflation, you know, massive, massive
03:58unemployment and a lot of civil unrest as well.
04:00But as the 20s developed, so Germany starts to get itself back on the tracks again.
04:06There was a feeling of uncertainty, but also a sense of anything is possible.
04:12A sense of, let's experiment, let's try out new things politically, culturally, socially.
04:20So, especially in Berlin, it was a very open and free time.
04:25This is where they were having these incredible nightclubs and cabarets and so on.
04:30This was a place where you could have free love, you could take drugs, you could drink as much as
04:35you like, you could take heroin.
04:36Basically do anything you wanted.
04:38So, I guess Berlin acquired its own kind of flavor or at least reputation for being a sexually open, promiscuous
04:49place where anything goes.
04:51And that decadency led to great military inspiration, but also great political and social change.
04:59I am a member.
05:01I am a member.
05:08I am a member.
05:21Manufacturing drugs was an important part of the German pharmaceutical economy and the German economy as a whole.
05:27That started in the 19th century when German chemist actually extracted morphine from opium, from poppy seed,
05:36and made pharmaceutical development possible in a way.
05:39In the Versailles Treaty, there was a sub-treaty
05:41that Germany had to sign, which would disable
05:44the German economy to continue manufacturing the drugs
05:47with which they made so much money.
05:48So the German economy desperately tries to continue
05:51producing cocaine, heroin, morphine,
05:54and was the world's supplier, actually,
05:56at the time for these drugs.
05:59And if you haven't got the resources yourself,
06:01then what you tend to do is strive that little bit harder
06:04to kind of find alternatives.
06:06So it's no surprise that the pharmaceutical industry
06:10is absolutely at the forefront.
06:12The Germans invented methadone
06:13because they couldn't get access to the opium poppy and morphine.
06:17So they invented their own forms of morphine and heroin
06:21in order to help deal with pain, but also calm people.
06:24It led to them developing new drugs
06:27with new inspiration from the military.
06:30And there were new linkages between the needs
06:33of perhaps an expanding nation militarily,
06:36and the way in which the pharmaceutical industry
06:39could help that desire.
06:55Pevotin was developed by the Temmler company in Berlin
06:59after the Olympic Games, 1936.
07:02They were not sure what pevotin is good for,
07:04so they basically thought it's good for everything.
07:07So pevotin is developed in its methamphetamine.
07:10The whole point of it is pain relief,
07:12but it's also to stop you sleeping.
07:14How boring is sleeping?
07:15It stops you working.
07:16We've got a new Germany to build.
07:17We want people to work really, really hard.
07:19And this is a way where you can counteract
07:21the biggest problem of human endeavor,
07:24which is the need to sleep and rest.
07:26If you can take a pill that cuts that out,
07:29how fantastic is that?
07:31We can see how popular methamphetamine actually was
07:35when we look at a chocolate that the Hildebrand company
07:41put on the market.
07:42It was a box of chocolates,
07:44and each little portion contained
07:4613 milligrams of methamphetamine.
07:49It was also stressed that you even lose weight
07:51while eating that sweet because methamphetamine
07:55is a slimming agent.
07:56You're not hungry anymore when you're on meth.
07:59The ads at the time show a very happy German
08:03Fräulein or Hausfrau grabbing into the box
08:07and taking one of these chocolates.
08:10I mean, it's worth remembering all drugs
08:12were either prescription drugs or freely available
08:14at that point in Germany, right?
08:17Leading up to that point,
08:18there had been no prohibition of drugs.
08:20There was no such concept in Germany at that time.
08:22There had never been any banned drugs.
08:23So they just didn't think in those terms.
08:26The newest findings by brain scientists show
08:30that there is a mechanism in our brain
08:33that inhibits us from killing.
08:38And there's ways to get around that mechanism.
08:41And using certain synthetic stimulants such as methamphetamine
08:48are an effective way of bypassing that inhibition to kill.
08:53Armies have always taken drugs in order
08:55to influence the outcome of war,
08:57in order to improve their fighting capabilities.
08:59And methamphetamine is a very potent substance.
09:02So it certainly has a very strong effect
09:03on the individual soldier.
09:05And if we have millions of soldiers on methamphetamine,
09:08it will have a definite effect on the outcome of battles
09:12and of whole campaigns.
09:30Heinrich Hoffmann was an old friend of Hitler.
09:33They knew each other from the 20s.
09:35Hoffmann was a photographer in Munich.
09:38And he became Hitler's official photographer.
09:42He would do most of the portraits of Hitler that we know
09:46and published photo books of Hitler
09:49that became bestsellers actually in Nazi Germany.
09:52Showing Hitler's private life,
09:54showing him in the mountains,
09:55looking into the distance,
09:56and kind of stylizing Hitler as the good dictator,
10:02the father of the German nation.
10:05Morel's treatment of Hoffmann
10:06was obviously a key step in his introduction to Hitler.
10:10Without Hoffmann, he'd never met Hitler.
10:12He'd never have become Hitler's personal physician.
10:14And Hoffmann also played quite an important role
10:18in Hitler's private life, you could say,
10:20because he introduced Eva Braun to Hitler.
10:23Eva Braun was working for him.
10:25She was 19 at the time.
10:28She was his assistant in his photo lab.
10:32So he brought the two together.
10:35And he brought another person to Hitler,
10:37which was Theo Morel, because in 1936,
10:41Hoffmann was suffering from gonorrhea.
10:44And Morel treated him.
10:46And after successful treatment,
10:48Hoffmann arranged a dinner at his private house in Munich,
10:53where Hitler also was present,
10:55and Eva Braun was present.
10:57And Morel was there.
10:58And then Morel and Hitler started talking.
11:01Hitler told Morel that he's suffering from stomach cramps,
11:05and his regular doctors can't cure that.
11:07And then Morel suggested his probiotic medicine called Mutterflor.
11:13Mutterflor was, and I suppose is, because it's still on the market,
11:16a medicine containing active live bacteria.
11:22So Hitler received that probiotic remedy that was able to kill enough of his bad flora,
11:31that he actually got over his problems.
11:34And then started believing that Morel is the guy who has the right medicines.
11:42Theodor Morel was Hitler's personal physician.
11:47And increasingly, Hitler came to rely on him, not only as a doctor,
11:53that pretty much prescribed whatever Hitler required.
11:55He was also his confidant.
11:57Morel had a very successful practice in the center of Berlin,
12:01right on Kurfürstendamm, which is the main boulevard.
12:04He was expensive.
12:06He was known to treat diseases that don't exist.
12:09His patients loved him,
12:12maybe because of the strong drugs he gave them,
12:14but he seems to have been like a jovial character.
12:18He was popular with celebrities in the German capital.
12:22He was popular with actors and actresses that had to go on stage
12:26and maybe experience stage fright.
12:28He would give them an injection that made them feel confident.
12:31So he was a type of doctor feel good.
12:34So he had a career.
12:35That's why his wife criticized him when he took the job as Hitler's personal physician.
12:39She said, you know, we don't need that.
12:41You can stay in Berlin, practice is going well.
12:44Why would you do that?
12:44Because in the beginning, actually, Hitler paid him quite a low salary,
12:48but he loved the power of treating the most powerful man in Europe.
12:53Theodor Morel is essentially a quack.
12:55I mean, he is a trained doctor, but he's into alternative means of medicine.
12:59He manages to veil his way into Hitler's inner circle
13:02and then becomes completely indispensable.
13:05I mean, so much so that Hitler barely can't exist a day
13:08without Morel kind of ingesting him with a whole cocktail of drugs.
13:13It's Hitler's dependency on him that ensures that Morel stays in that inner circle
13:19and stays having that incredible influence.
13:22There are others around, but there's Morel who is above all as the war progresses
13:26and the stress and physical and mental strain on Hitler comes greater.
13:31So Morel's influence becomes greater.
13:34The generals were always hugely suspicious of Morel right from the start.
13:40A, that he seemed to have so much influence over Hitler that he was there the whole time.
13:45He was, to put it mildly, a very unprepossessing character.
13:48He was very much a medical man, a doctor.
13:51He always wanted to be a military man.
13:53When he became personal physician of Hitler, he felt ridiculous being the only one in headquarters
13:58without a uniform, and he reacted in a way that's a bit comical, actually.
14:06He started making his own fantasy uniform that looked like a military uniform, and that made
14:12him even more ridiculous within inner circles, because the military men obviously immediately
14:16realized that this is a uniform that he made up and made fun of him.
14:22He put the SS wounds onto his label, and the SS immediately said, you have to take him off.
14:29You're not a member of the SS.
14:31So he was never accepted by any military organization, and Hitler actually liked that, because that
14:39meant that he had full control over Morel, that Morel had no powerful organization behind
14:44him.
14:44The time that they spent together was very important, and Morel's impact on Hitler was undoubtedly
14:53quite significant during that period.
15:09The core of the National Socialist ideology stands the purity of the blood.
15:18Hitler represented, or was supposed to represent the whole nation, so his body, in a way, is
15:25the symbol for what the Nazis called the Volkskörper, the people's body.
15:30They saw the nation as one body, and Hitler was the representation of that body.
15:40Even the greeting, Heil Hitler, in a way refers to the health of Hitler, because Heil in German
15:47means also means being healthy.
15:50So to show Hitler as this clean and healthy teetotaler was of utmost importance.
15:59And to the cult that the Nazi party created around him.
16:05Well, Hitler's movement very much depended on the idea of regeneration, which meant clean
16:12living, which meant the whole of their art, which was sort of produced, the Nazi art, was,
16:17you know, the perfect naked body through athletics, through clean living.
16:22So for Hitler to in any way vary from what he pretended to be his self-denial, no alcohol, no
16:31smoking,
16:33and in fact, of course, no meat.
16:34But we soon found that he, of course, was being injected with substances which were probably
16:39far worse.
16:44A series of new legislation, such as the 1935 Nuremberg race law, condemned drug users, Jews
16:51and homosexuals alike, suggesting that they were toxic for the country's welfare.
16:57The Nazis, in a way, invented the war on drugs when they prohibited drug use after they took
17:06power.
17:06So they used their drug policies early on to control the population and to especially oppress
17:14minorities like the Jewish minority in Germany by calling them drug users and saying that many
17:23drugs are particularly used by Jews.
17:34Young medical officers started to become obsessed with a performance-enhancing meth-based pill stocking
17:42up on the drug in preparation for the Poland deployment.
17:45Many of Hitler's soldiers realized it was a powerful drug and considered it to be an alternative
17:59to coffee.
18:00For the first time, Pervitin was used when German troops marched into the Sudetenland, which
18:07was part of Czechoslovakia.
18:10And the first time it was used on a massive scale was in the attack against Poland.
18:15Well, the head of defense mechanism, Professor Dr. Ranke, had not really planned it to be
18:23used, but he had allowed a certain amount or given a certain amount to medical officers who
18:28then distributed it within the regiments.
18:31They realized that actually Pervitin could have a tremendous effect in the way that the
18:36tank crews could keep going when normally they would have to stop and relax and sleep and rest
18:41themselves.
18:42Otto Ranke was the head of the Institute for Defense Physiology.
18:48In 1938, Ranke realized that there was a medicine out there which might help him fight his
18:57two main enemies, and those were fear and fatigue, and that medicine was Pervitin.
19:05Well, he was like the father of Pervitin in the Wehrmacht, so he was in a way responsible
19:11for performance enhancement for the German army.
19:15I think Pervitin obviously had more effects than just a purely physical one.
19:19I mean, the way that it gave such confidence, aggression too, it seems, from some of the studies.
19:26It produced a sense of euphoria, which meant, of course, that they were less susceptible to
19:33cowardice or to fear, and this made a huge difference to surprising the enemy.
19:39So the soldiers didn't need to be brainwashed.
19:40There was no sense of negative effects by taking Pervitin.
19:45Everyone loved it and everyone felt good taking it, so you would just take it every day and
19:50you would always feel good, and there was no realization in the beginning that you actually
19:55become addicted and that tolerance builds up and that it might have negative side effects.
20:00So it only came to light later on.
20:01Well, the problem with any drug is that at some point you've got to stop taking it because
20:05otherwise you're going to die.
20:07I mean, you just can't keep taking drugs forever.
20:09It raises your heartbeat, your heart's going to explode, your head's going to explode, you
20:13know, they're obviously not good for you, particularly methamphetamine.
20:17However, if you keep taking it day after day after day after day, there's no respite.
20:22You can't sleep.
20:23The effects build up and up and eventually become paranoid and a bit stereotyped.
20:27The most dangerous and pernicious effect of methamphetamine by far is that it suppresses
20:31sleep.
20:32Human beings sleep for a very good reason.
20:35We need to be replenished.
20:36We need to process what we've seen.
20:38If you have protracted periods without sleep, what happens is the kind of dreaming world starts
20:45to bleed into the waking world.
20:47So that's where you start to experience the deterioration in your mental health because
20:53you lose the ability, you increasingly lose the ability to distinguish between the waking
20:57world and the dreaming world.
20:59And there are several difficult questions about drug use in wartime.
21:04I mean, one of them is, does it change people's behaviour so they kind of lose their moral compass?
21:09And I think it can in some ways, once you get paranoid, then you start to think differently.
21:16So you've lost control of your normal rational faculties.
21:20Also if you're completely out of it, so that you're so high that you kind of don't know
21:26what you're doing, then you may well do things in war that you regret the same way as when
21:31people get out of it in non-wartime they regret what they do.
21:35So those are two independent variables which can both contribute to people doing things
21:40which they really would prefer not to have done.
21:41I think the drugs that Hitler took made him bolder.
21:46They made him perhaps carry out certain decisions that he may not otherwise have done.
21:53He certainly felt that at certain times he needed that extra stimulus, particularly earlier
21:58in the war, to continue the increasingly difficult daily working hours that he had to cope with.
22:05I think that the Nazi regime had a completely different culture.
22:10And the culture of drug taking in the Nazi high command was something that was recognised,
22:18if not understood.
22:19A large number of the Nazi hierarchy were very much dependent upon drugs.
22:25I think interestingly, a number of them were actually quite shy individuals and it allowed
22:30them to come out of themselves and be more charismatic, be more perhaps authoritarian.
22:37But increasingly, those drugs were becoming heavier, more potent and really did undermine
22:43their ability to make a clear decision.
22:47There's a danger in the way some people have talked about the Nazi drug use.
22:52Because some people have presented this as if it's saying,
22:56well the Nazis were just off their face on drugs, they were just out of it,
22:59and therefore we don't have to look at their genocidal ideology, their monstrous characters and so on.
23:05There's a real danger in overstating, the role of drugs in the Third Reich are very real, they did play
23:13a factor,
23:14but I think there's a real danger in overstating the moral nature of what happened.
23:22Methamphetamine, like other drugs like caffeine, like alcohol, they are tools to achieve goals.
23:28The methamphetamine is just a tool to help you be better at your goal.
23:32It's not the driver of the morality of your act.
23:36Hitler, we know, had a number of underlying difficulties,
23:41what we would call today as personality disorder.
23:44He had, you know, the maniacal fantasies he had weren't as a result of his drug misuse.
23:51These were already in place from his childhood.
23:54In many ways, the pharmaceuticals he was being prescribed may well have been medicating
23:59against some of the effects of his, you know, predisposing personality.
24:25The German Blitzkrieg of 1940 was so named because it was very fast.
24:31The original idea of Blitzkrieg really came from Guderian's book published in 1937 called
24:41Achtung Panzer, which basically means lookout tank.
24:44The idea that you can break through with a combination of tanks and aircraft
24:49and so astonish your enemy that they didn't know what to do.
24:52Heinz Guderian was called the fast Heinz.
24:56He was one of these avant-garde thinking, if you will, panzer generals and was responsible for developing the Blitzkrieg
25:08strategy.
25:09One of the greatest challenges of all for the Germans is the need for speed.
25:16And because of the resource-poor nature of Germany, because of their geographical isolation
25:22and their limited access to the world's resources, the Germans and the Prussians before them have always...
25:30Their way of war is to completely overwhelm their enemy very, very quickly by rapid manoeuvre.
25:38This was what they achieved on the 10th of May when they came from the Eiffel through the Ardennes in
25:45southern Belgium and into France.
25:47And when those tanks kept going, once they'd made their breakthrough, the French were completely flabbergasted and unable to react.
25:58Communications are vital in any battle.
26:02But when one is trying to plan and execute a fast-moving battle with armoured fighting vehicles, they become all
26:10the more important.
26:11Because the distances that are being travelled on various fronts are going to be far greater.
26:17Certainly in the First World War, one of the great reasons why in 1918 the British Army was limited in
26:24their range was because they didn't have mobile-filled radios.
26:28Heinz Guderian and others was at the centre of the demand that the German armed forces should develop and should
26:38use small radios that could be put into armoured fighting vehicles.
26:44The strategy was decided on February 17, 1940, during a breakfast in the Reich's Chancellery.
26:53Three tank generals, Rommel, Guderian and von Manstein, were having this meeting with Hitler.
27:00They said we should go through the Ardennes mountains using tanks as the decisive force to move ahead.
27:07But basically the Ardennes mountains were like a tight window through which the German army could squeeze through.
27:13But the Western allies thought this would be impossible because you can't move tanks quickly through the mountains.
27:20But this is exactly what they proposed and Hitler said this is how we're going to do it.
27:24And Ranke suddenly was being invited to give talks about Pavitin in front of generals and to explain how methamphetamine
27:37could be used because time was the decisive factor.
27:40Ranke was also asked to write the so-called stimulant decree detailing how the German troops should actually take methamphetamine
27:49once the attack starts.
27:50Pervitin, this methamphetamine which they had produced, in 35 million doses, which is astonishing, was distributed, but particularly to the
28:01panzer troops with the armoured troops at the front.
28:03The tank troops were totally exhausted after taking Pervitin over several days.
28:08Well, once they had broken through and once they had basically cut off the British at Dunkirk, then they did
28:16have time on their hands.
28:17Apart from anything else, they also needed time to service their vehicles, I mean, after the distance they had travelled.
28:23So the two, in a way, went together.
28:25So if you were taking, for instance, methamphetamine for three or four days, as in the Ardern offensive, then it
28:32would take you two or three days to re-establish, re-stabilise your normal sleep-wake cycle.
28:36And so we see the 7th Panzer Division making the most extraordinary strides forward, being known by Hitler as the
28:45Ghost Division,
28:46not necessarily just because the enemy didn't know where they were, but because he didn't know where they were.
28:52Rommel was pushing the boundaries of what armoured fighting vehicles could achieve, and the men that drove those machines could
29:00achieve,
29:00and drugs undoubtedly would have been part of that success.
29:04So from that point of view, it was definitely a breakthrough in the use of drugs in warfare.
29:20The problem was that when France surrendered in the third week of June 1940, Britain didn't surrender too.
29:28And Germany knew that Britain had to be knocked out of the war before it could think about regaining its
29:32strength and then turning its attention to the east.
29:34But the Battle of Britain is an aerial battle that wages over southern Britain predominantly throughout the summer months of
29:411940, and the Luftwaffe have failed spectacularly.
29:46Due to night operations, the German pilots took permit and tablets to stay awake, many of them taking off their
29:51breathing masks to shove their faces with the pills.
29:55Although the Germans were using performance-enhancing drugs during the Battle of Britain, they couldn't defeat the Royal Air Force
30:03and suffered their first major defeat in the war.
30:07Thereafter, Operation C-Lion was called off.
30:13Operation C-Lion was the German project to invade Britain after the fall of France.
30:19Hitler had hoped, of course, that Britain would want to make peace.
30:23And this is why, in fact, it was the one moment in the whole war when Germany could have won.
30:28And it was when Churchill refused to have any form of negotiation at that moment when the British army was
30:35trapped in Dunkirk and nobody really knew what the future would hold.
30:38But Hitler's idea of a cross-channel invasion was never entirely convincing, because although they created and collected these sort
30:50of barges to take the soldiers across,
30:53the strength of the British Navy, the Royal Navy, was still very great indeed.
30:57And he really said, we will only do it if Goering can actually destroy the Royal Air Force, because without
31:03air power, the Royal Navy would have been vulnerable.
31:06Operation C-Lion is the planned invasion of south-east Britain by the Germans.
31:12And the interesting thing about it is what a complete mess the whole plan was, because Germany was the only
31:19nation in the world that had a combined general staff,
31:22which was the OKW, the Oberkommando de Wehrmacht, and yet they didn't make the most of that.
31:26So what happened was when Hitler was preparing for dealing with Britain in July 1940, he retreated to his country
31:35home in the mountains,
31:36the Berkusgaden in Bavaria, the Berghof, and asked all his service chiefs to come and visit him one by one.
31:43There's absolutely no combined operations planning. There's no joined up thinking whatsoever.
31:49They haven't got even through the first line of defences by September 1940, which is the RAF.
31:55They haven't gone through the second line at all, which is the Royal Navy and mines and all the rest
31:59of it in the shipping.
32:01Nor have they even got close to coming up against the third line of defence, which of course is the
32:06soldiers on the ground,
32:07which can amount to about two and a half million by that point.
32:11So they are a very, very long way off from ever happening.
32:14And if you think about the jeopardy that faced the Allies for Operation Overlord, D-Day in June 1944,
32:20and you think how many things had to be in place before that could even be considered to be a
32:25goer.
32:26Complete control of airspace, control of the seas, all the rest of it.
32:29Complete control of intelligence networks and winning the espionage war.
32:35None of that was in place in 1940, and there was quite a lot of jeopardy for D-Day.
32:39So Operation Sea Lion, had it ever been attempted, I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever,
32:44would have been the biggest disaster the Germans faced up until that point.
32:47The fact that the British are fighting on their home soil, or at least above their home soil,
32:53they're fighting for their very survival.
32:56The Germans have been fighting in Scandinavia, Poland, the Low Countries, and then France.
33:03They are tired. They are ready to pack their bags, have some rest and recuperation.
33:10Starting a whole new campaign at this point, which is something that was really pushing them a little bit too
33:17far.
33:17The Germans thought that they were inferior when it came to technology and also training of their pilots.
33:25So they tried to make up for it by giving the Luftwaffe pilots methamphetamine, Pervitin,
33:30so they could fly more missions and longer missions.
33:34The lack of success of the Luftwaffe is interesting. Was it down to Pervitin? Were their pilots, you know, overly
33:43medicated?
33:45Or is the explanation just the superiority of the technology of the Spitfire?
33:49To begin with, they attacked the airfields to destroy the fighter command.
33:55And that actually started to present a real danger.
33:59But British air production, aircraft production, was much higher than in Germany.
34:04And also, Goering handled his pilots so badly that they were given no rest whatsoever.
34:11And so they were given Pervitin to keep them going.
34:15But those also led with its side effects of, quite often, lack of judgment after excessive use of Pervitin.
34:23And double vision and all these other things.
34:26And I think it's one of the great contributory factors to the astonishing level of crashes.
34:31When the British examined German planes that had been shut down over Great Britain, they found Pervitin.
34:39And there was a discussion within the Royal Air Force whether Pervitin or methamphetamine should also be used on this
34:46side.
34:47And tests were being done with British pilots giving them methamphetamine and amphetamine.
34:52And then the decision was made that British pilots should use amphetamines.
34:57So, in a way, the Nazis started a pharmacological arms race.
35:04Now, in contrast to the Germans and the Japanese with their methamphetamine,
35:08the Americans and the British use amphetamine sulfate.
35:11That's not as strong, and it doesn't last as long.
35:14And where it really came to the fore was in the North Africa campaign.
35:18So here we are, we're fighting ramen in North Africa.
35:21We've got the desert rats. The desert rats are getting up in the evenings, taking amphetamine sulfate,
35:27harrying the Germans through the night.
35:28The Germans can't sleep because they're on their crystal meth.
35:31They get very confused by what's going on.
35:35Brits and the Austries go back and they sleep in the day because the amphetamine sulfate is worn off.
35:40The Germans can't sleep because the methamphetamine continues.
35:45So day after day, night after night, the Germans are awake and awake and awake,
35:50and getting more and more disturbed by the fact that they can't really fight back at night because it's too
35:55dark,
35:56and they can't sleep in the day.
35:57In February 1941, Conti delivered another warning to the party, explaining that there was an immediate danger to the health
36:06and the future of the nation.
36:08His message was eventually acknowledged by the Reich Health Fuhrer, and on the 12th of June 1941,
36:15Pervitin was declared to be an intoxicant and made subject to the Reich Opium laws.
36:22Leo Conti was the so-called Health Fuhrer of the Nazi state, and he was against Pervitin.
36:29He made it a prescription-based drug in November 1939, and he made it illegal in the early summer of
36:371941.
36:39But the German Wehrmacht replied to him in a letter saying that this is a law that doesn't really apply
36:46to us.
36:47We do whatever we want.
36:48Well, when an article appeared in the Milano newspaper that the German pilots had been using a so-called pill
36:57of courage,
36:58which was Pervitin, in order to fight as they were able to fight, there was a discussion in German High
37:06Command saying
37:08foreign media is now saying we're only so good in fighting because we're using drugs.
37:14So this contributed to the controversy within German High Command, whether Pervitin should be used,
37:20and Conti used that argument saying we have to ban this, this is against our ideology.
37:27Wehrmacht always said if this is beneficial for a war effort, we are going to use it,
37:31and if there is physical harm for certain people, we just cannot take that into account.
37:39The overall effort is of most importance.
37:43Although Conti had been successful in banning Pervitin, the Germans barely took any notice of the law.
37:49Consumption increased by over 1.5 million units a year.
38:06The Wehrmacht decided to develop new miracle weapons.
38:10The plan was to launch small size attacks and surprise the enemy.
38:14This mission would require the men to spend several days underwater,
38:19and it was decided that they would need something stronger than Pervitin.
38:24The search for a new miracle drug began.
38:28The Navy in early 1944 had developed new mini-submarines which were manned by one or two persons only,
38:37which were basically floating torpedoes.
38:40And the idea was to send those mini-submarines all the way up to the Thames estuary and British ports
38:46unnoticed.
38:47The problem was that these missions would have to last more than four days and up to a week
38:52because you couldn't sleep in those mini-submarines, you had to stay awake.
38:56So the Navy was looking for new drugs.
38:59Well, the Navy had a doctor called Odd Sechowski,
39:03which was responsible for developing this wonder drug that would keep you awake for a week.
39:08It was in fact a combination of oikodal, Hitler's favorite opioid,
39:13cocaine and methamphetamine,
39:15which are in a way the three most potent drugs in the world, all rolled up into one pill.
39:20They recruited 16- to eight-year-old youngsters for these highly dangerous missions.
39:28The results were catastrophic.
39:31They started to hallucinate.
39:33They felt totally sick.
39:36Most of them were completely incapable.
39:38So it was a useless sacrifice.
39:41So the navies thought that they should do proper tests now for the new wonder drug
39:45because they didn't give up on the idea of the wonder drug.
39:47And then they started doing tests in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen.
39:52And the shoe runner's unit was testing shoe soles for the German shoe industry.
39:57These ghastly tests were done supposedly to try out different forms of the soles of boots for the German army.
40:09Because, of course, they didn't have the leather anymore.
40:11They needed to have artificial products.
40:13And so these poor prisoners, 20 a day, were dying as they were being forced to keep walking, walking, walking.
40:19You know, 40 kilometers or more on a totally insufficient diet.
40:23The Navy hired this penalty unit, paid the SS money to be able to use these inmates and gave them
40:30different dosages and different kinds of drugs.
40:36And then they had to start walking with backpacks filled with stones.
40:40They started at 8 p.m. at night and had to walk all through the night.
40:43And then they checked which inmates on which drugs would walk for the longest period of time.
40:50And that's how they made the decision which drug would be the best to give to the young German Navy
40:56soldiers on their missions against Great Britain.
41:06Morell began giving Hitler more testosterone for his libido and gave Eva Brown medication to suppress menstruation.
41:16Hitler and Brown began enjoying an exciting sexual relationship and Hitler often had to conceal wounds on his body from
41:25her aggressive sexual behavior.
41:28Hitler's drug consumption was too insane to really sustain over a long period of time because he was taking so
41:35many different things on a daily basis with interactions between the drugs.
41:43It was, it is of no surprise that his health deteriorates after a short period of time actually.
41:52I mean, he was continually sort of experimenting, but it was really once he started giving him not just the
41:59pelveteen and the methamphetamine in the earlier stages.
42:03It was really when he started to give him Eukodal in 1943 that I think one can talk about a
42:09serious addiction.
42:11Eukodal is a so-called opioid, a half-synthetic opioid.
42:16He could compare it to heroin. The result is like a mixture of being on cocaine and heroin at the
42:22same time.
42:23So you're relaxed and stimulated and Hitler apparently loved that feeling because he receives Eukodal more than any other opiate.
42:32In 1943 he switches to Eukodal. Now this is at the time really of the Battle of Kursk, which was
42:39one of the sort of crushing defeats for the Wehrmacht, which came also with the invasion of North Africa and
42:46the invasion of Sicily.
42:47And Hitler's fear that Mussolini and his regime was going to collapse had really got him into a very nervous
42:54state.
42:54And this is when Morel decided to inject him with Eukodal for the first time, which of course had quite
43:00an element of opium in it.
43:05It dawned on the Führer's headquarters that victory was no longer possible in the east.
43:11The Führer was in denial and refused to give up any conquered territory.
43:15He started distancing himself from conventional living and he chose to contain himself where possible in his bunker.
43:39In mid-1944, an explosion in the barracks threw Hitler across the room, damaging his ears severely.
43:46This assassination attempt was known as Operation Valkyrie.
43:50When the bomb plot of the 20th of July 1944 took place and there was the explosion, Hitler of course
43:59suffered eardrums imploding and a lot of superficial damage.
44:05But he was not actually broken up in the way that some of his entourage, a number of whom were
44:12killed.
44:13Well, Morel is being rushed to the scene after the bomb goes off and gives Hitler an injection without writing
44:19in his notes what's in the injection.
44:21He just writes X.
44:23And a few minutes later hundreds of splinters are removed from Hitler's body and his perforated eardrums are being treated
44:34with an acid.
44:36And the doctor who performs these actions writes down that he's completely surprised how little pain Hitler is feeling or
44:46how brave he is.
44:48He was actually able to meet Mussolini the very same day Mussolini arrived by train on July 20th, 1944.
44:56And Hitler, through Morel's help, I suppose, or at least through an injection that Morel labeled as X, is able
45:03to kind of continue working.
45:06It would make sense for Morel to also give an opiate at that moment. But he doesn't write it, he
45:11just writes X.
45:12He, again, boosted by some of Morel's drugs, saw himself as a man of destiny, that somehow Providence had intervened
45:22to save him.
45:23Everybody who saw Hitler in the latter part of 1940 was shocked to the core on seeing it.
45:29The furor that they remembered, if you like, from the newsreels of the earlier stages of the war completely gone.
45:37Here was an old man looking 20 years older than his age, shuffling around, twitching in many ways.
45:45And they could hardly believe what had happened to it. Now, most people thought it was the effect of the
45:50bomb plot and the way that he'd been blown up there.
45:53But, of course, his entourage knew that it was, of course, the effect of the drugs that he'd been taking
45:59as well.
46:11Hitler's drug intake was no longer effective and his physical deterioration was starting to demotivate others.
46:19And if you've got a character who was already on the spectrum, who was already a sociopath,
46:24who was already displaying huge evidence of extreme paranoia and mood swings,
46:30the kind of drugs he's taking is only going to make that worse,
46:33which is then going to massively affect his decision-making processes as well as his mental and physical state.
46:40So the idea that these drugs didn't affect him, didn't make him less effective as a commander-in-chief,
46:49whether it be of the armed forces or, indeed, of the state,
46:53clearly they did. They must have done.
46:56The body was, shall we say, wasting away in many ways.
47:01And he also, of course, had a skin which was becoming more and more paper-like in a way.
47:09And, of course, it was the veins which was Morel's problem.
47:13There are several notes by Morel where he documents discussions he has with Hitler,
47:19trying to convince Hitler to take breaks from the daily injections because he can't get the needle into the vein
47:24anymore
47:25because Hitler's veins were scarred.
47:28It shows you the enormous extent of Hitler's drug use.
47:34When you see someone that's been misusing amphetamines across a length of time,
47:38you do see that there's a sort of increase in feeling paranoid, persecuted.
47:43There's a level of disarray and dangerousness that runs along with continued and sustained use with, you know, larger doses.
47:53So I wouldn't have thought that Hitler's body was a pretty sight at all by that stage.
47:59There was a conflict, which I call a doctor's war, which happened in the fall of 1944.
48:05A new doctor comes into headquarters and accuses Morel of poisoning Hitler.
48:10And in the beginning, Himmler takes this new doctor's position and they try to get rid of Morel.
48:16But when Himmler realizes that Hitler will stand up to his personal physician,
48:21Himmler quickly drops his attempts to get rid of Morel.
48:24And the other doctor has to leave.
48:26During that particular period, particularly September to December 1944,
48:31the only way that Morel could keep him going was by constant injections of Uckerdahl.
48:38And this was having an appalling effect upon him.
48:46Britain began to bomb the pharmaceutical factories of the Reich,
48:50which caused great disruption to the manufacture and distribution of Hitler's favourite drugs,
48:55due to supply issues, Morel became ever more fearful for the supply of drugs needed by the Führer.
49:04Morel writes about sending his helpers on motorcycles through bombed-out Berlin from pharmacy to pharmacy
49:11to still find drugs, to still be able to hand in the prescriptions and get the medications.
49:17And this becomes more and more difficult.
49:20Hitler, who before had received anything he wanted and had received the most powerful and euphoric-making substances,
49:28now receives drugs that don't make him happy anymore.
49:31Hitler's so-called Nero Decree of March the 19th, 1945, was to destroy almost everything which could be of use
49:39to the enemy.
49:40By that he was thinking, of course, of the Red Army of the Soviet Union.
49:44And that meant, of course, the terrible fate for the German civilian population.
49:51The Nero Decree is Hitler's order that if Germany is going down, then everyone else is going down with it.
49:56So, again, it's a scorched-earth policy, in effect.
49:59He ordered the destruction of every German factory, every building of importance, every cultural heritage site.
50:10So, as you retreat, as you pull back, you deny your enemy any of your assets.
50:15So you destroy factories, you destroy anything in its wake, even works of art.
50:20But by this stage, Hitler believed that the German people were, basically, had showed themselves not to be sufficiently strong
50:30to resist,
50:31and therefore they deserved to die.
50:33He basically ordered the complete destruction of Germany.
50:46Well, Hitler fires Morell a few days before he commits suicide, and after his last birthday on April 20th.
50:55Morell leaves the bunker, devastated.
50:59He's reported to have wept and kind of lost his senses, and is able to catch one of the last
51:08planes out of Berlin,
51:09which lands south of Munich.
51:11Hitler's reasons for getting rid of Theodor Morell was that I think he realized that was it.
51:17The end was very, very close.
51:19Morell could do very little more for him.
51:23Hitler was only really, at that stage, interested in the cyanide capsules,
51:27which he was, in fact, already distributing to some of his colleagues and associates,
51:33and particularly the secretaries in the bunker,
51:37almost like sort of sweets to be sucked on takeoff for the next world.
51:41As far as Hitler was concerned, the end was very, very close.
51:45Morell could do no more.
51:47And apart from anything else, we probably find that actually Morell had virtually no more drugs,
51:51to give him by that stage.
51:53I think Hitler's suicide is a combination of internal, actual physical pain,
52:01and obviously the external situation.
52:05There are a number of contributory factors, I think, behind Hitler's suicide.
52:10He'd always talked of suicide from a very, very early stage.
52:13He bitterly criticized General Paulus for refusing to kill himself at Stalingrad when they finally surrendered.
52:21But above all, he was probably suffering from withdrawal symptoms,
52:26but he hated the idea of being taken alive and being taken back to Moscow in an iron cage.
52:33This was his sort of worst nightmare.
52:35He was determined to kill himself, interestingly using both poison and a gun at the same time,
52:42and then to have his body set on fire so he could not be ready to be recognizable.
52:51Once news of his death became public, many of the Reich's obedient members followed suit.
52:58Following the war, Morell was tracked down by a U.S. news reporter, Tanya Long.
53:04He was taken to prison following her article and was interrogated and subject to investigation by the U.S. Secret
53:11Service.
53:14American investigators write in several reports that they couldn't make sense out of Morell.
53:19He was contradicting himself in how he described his job as Hitler's personal physician.
53:29Americans kept him for quite a long time, for two years, and then dumped him outside the Munich train station.
53:36He was quite a big man, and he was wearing a U.S. Army coat that was way too small
53:43for him,
53:43and he was lying there on the pavement when a half-Jewish Red Cross nurse found him and picked him
53:50up
53:51and took him to a hospital in Tegernsee, which is in the south of Bavaria.
53:58Apparently, he did not recover, being incarcerated and interrogated by the Americans for two years.
54:03He claimed that they tortured him, removed his toenails to extract his secrets.
54:10So he dies in the summer of 1947.
54:18Although the Germans were heavily involved in mass drug consumption during the Second World War,
54:23they weren't the only ones.
54:26Britain, Japan, and America were also subject to drug highs.
54:32One report stated, British soldiers were given more than 72 million amphetamine tablets during the course of World War II.
54:46So drugs have been used in conflicts for thousands of years.
54:52Just different drugs.
54:53I suppose typically alcohol has been the drug people used to get courage and also to come down after fighting
55:00to try to dampen down the stress and the distress.
55:03Drug consumption in Germany during World War II was extremely high.
55:06But one has to remember that in almost every war beforehand, alcohol had always played a very large part.
55:12I mean, the British issued the rum to the Navy and also to the soldiers before going over the top.
55:18It was basically to dull the fear as far as possible.
55:21And that was, of course, one of the elements in Pervitin, which gave them a form of euphoria.
55:26One thing that lots of people will be puzzled about when they hear this story, when they hear, wait a
55:31minute, all German men between 18 and 30 were taking methamphetamine for years, is surely after the war there were
55:40huge numbers of methamphetamine addicts.
55:42It's worth noting, in the aftermath of war, that the market becomes flooded with Pervitin and methamphetamine.
55:52A lot of that stash ended up on the black markets in Germany after the war, which was the place
56:01where you got things because everything else was destroyed.
56:04So Pervitin didn't leave the scene and actually continue to be used after the war by the people who wanted
56:12something to pick them up again.
56:36The war by the staff were very, very long, very beautiful.
56:41The war by the man that has been taken from theищ에는 approximately 21 years old where he was still waiting
56:51for people to get married.
56:51The war by the people that were taking place of the rest is a need for the empire.
56:52The war by the people that were taken off the war by the tigers members of the army of the
56:53hills, is the same thing where time has been done.
56:54I believe that it's been a long while, it was not a rewrite for the war.
56:54The war by the soldiers called the wreak and the soldiers are up-having at the war times, such as
56:55the military wars to freedom.
56:55It's been a long, it was a long history of a great time and it was to have to be
56:55used, because I was going to bring up the war by the people who ever been in order to the
57:00war by the war.
57:11To be continued...
57:42To be continued...
58:00To be continued...
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