Stuff You Should Know - Were Nazis Drug-Fueled Crankheads?

Episode Date: April 4, 2019

Nazis were bad people. And it turns out a lot of them were high as kites on speed. Was this a recipe for disaster? Yes it was.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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That's a lot over today. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's other Josh over there, the OJ. You're the OJ. Yes. He's the OJ.

That's right. We should probably come up with a different nickname for you, Josh. That's right. So oh yeah, this is Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Nazi crankhead edition. We've been doing a lot on Nazis lately. Have we? I guess we have.

We did the July 20th plot to assassinate Hitler. Sure. This one? Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot. I thought this was interesting, and I remember hearing a lot about this when, I mean, there have been plenty of people in books about Nazis doing lots of drugs, but the big one

that came out called Blitz from author Noman Oler really made a lot of hay in the news. For sure. It was a big deal when it came out, just I think in 2017, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, and we are endorsing that book as a good read. Have you read it? I read a lot of it. Okay, I heard it's a very exhaustive book. It's pretty exhaustive.

So I have not read it, but it does seem, from some of the stuff I've read about it, some of the book reviews are like, yeah, this guy's got the goods. This guy, Norman Oler, spent like five years at least in the archives. So this isn't just like conjecture. This is very well researched and fact-based, well, I guess there's a little conjecture to it because he's basically saying drugs drove the Third Reich initially, and then just like anybody becoming strung out on a drug, it led to the deterioration and ultimately downfall of the Third Reich.

And that's a big, big thing to say. There are very few things in history, especially massive world-changing things like the Third Reich and World War II and the Holocaust that you can just pin one thing on. And I'm sure he's not saying like, that is it, there's nothing else to it, but he's saying like, this is a huge contributor of it. And he's not the first person to say, yeah, the Nazis did a lot of drugs. He seems to be the first author to really say, yeah, the Nazis did a lot of drugs, and this was the result.

Yeah. And I think from the parts of the book that I read in doing this research, it's not much of a leap. So when you have facts and like the number of pills, which we'll get into and what these pills were, there's just no disputing the physiological effect that it has on people and what these drugs do, because that's why they were taking them. So it's not much of a leap, even though it is some conjecture to say, you know, the Blitzkrieg was probably super effective because they were all on crank.

Yeah. It gives Blitzkrieg bop like a new meaning, you know, that was totally off the cuff too. Off the dome. Yeah. So should we talk about old Germany and sort of the seed of this whole thing? Yeah. But first, one more thing while we're kind of on this particular riff. Yes.

I don't know, because again, I haven't read the book. I don't know that Oler is saying, and I don't think he is, that like the Holocaust wouldn't have happened if Germany hadn't been hopped up on drugs. He's not saying that. Some people do say that. There's some revisionist historians who say, yeah, it was drugs that had gripped Hitler's mind and had he not been on drugs, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened. That appears to be patently untrue, the earliest deaths, executions in the Holocaust that I

found go back to 1933 and the Nazis had such a tenuous grip on power that they had to basically make it look like these executions of these four Jews at Dachau were them trying to escape, like they were shot trying to escape. Right. That's a real obvious lie that three SS officers and the Camp Commandant at Dachau were indicted for murder. That's how new the Nazis were into power, that these guys were indicted for murder. The indictments went away, but again, this was 1933, way early, way before anybody was

on drugs. The Holocaust was just, that was like the earliest beginnings of the Holocaust, and it showed this mentality and this drive and desire to carry out the Holocaust later on. So anybody who says that it was drugs that brought about the Holocaust is wrong, from what I understand. So you mentioned 1933. That is interesting, that data is because there were plenty of drugs, the Nazis weren't doing them yet, but they started passing laws in 1933 as one of the big first moves of the

Nazis to clean up the land, to clean up the Weimar Republic, which is what Germany was basically known as from 1918 to 1933. Yeah. The Weimar Republic was an experiment at democracy in Germany, and it almost took like the last five years of the Republic showed like economic growth. It was during the Jazz Age, so everybody was kind of partying, as we'll see. And it wasn't until the Great Depression started in 1929 that this really fragile Republic, this really fragile democracy, just could not handle that kind of economic hit.

And it gave Hitler and the National Socialism Party this perfect entree into power by saying, first of all, we can turn things around economically. The Weimar Republic couldn't do it. And secondly, this whole Weimar Republic thing, everybody's on drugs. They're all degenerates, and then they used that idea of degenerate art, of people being on cocaine and morphine, and tied it in with Judaism. And so anybody who was on drugs, anyone who was gay, anyone who was, say, like a Roma, they were all tied in with the Jews, and all of those people were subject to the Holocaust

right out of the gate. Yeah. And so the stage is set, they're locking up, they're imprisoning, they're sterilizing addicts, denouncing these users. And then, and these are, like we said, cocaine and morphine, which Germany was like one of the leading, or maybe the leading producer of cocaine in the world at the time, right? You gotta tell them those statistics. Yeah.

In the 1920s, Germany, companies in Germany generated 40% of the world's morphine and controlled 80% of the global cocaine market. That is... In the 1920s. Astounding. And so you can imagine that the Weimar Republic is awash in this. Oh, sure. And so there really was like a lot of, I mean, there was tons of, wow, I almost just said

something else. There were tons of horrible broken lives and addiction, there was a lot of homelessness, there was a lot of prostitution. There was a lot of, I mean, issues and problems that the society had. But there was also a lot of really interesting and good things that was coming out of this combination of a democracy awash in drugs. There were things like a lot more gender equality than there had been before. There was a lot of androgyny going on and kind of like the art and social scene.

There was some really good art coming out. But again, the Nazis came along and denounced it as degenerate art and actually held the exhibition, Chuck, in 1937, a degenerate art exhibition where they showed everybody in Germany, this is bad art, and we're going to destroy a lot of this and replace it with the three Ks. It was Kinderkutsch, I think Kutsch, yeah, K-U with an umlaut C-H-E and Kirsch, which is family home and church, and that is what our art, that is what our culture is going to be about.

So, the Weimar Republic provided this really great foil to what the Nazis were kind of rousing Germany out of like, hey, let's all get off the cocaine, let's all get off the morphine, and in fact, if you know an addict, tell the cops, you neighbor, you co-worker, you family member, go and form on the drug users in this country. Let's clean Germany up, let's clean Germany's bodies up, and let's move forward with an emphasis on family home and church. That's what the Nazis came to Germany with in 1929, 1930. Right, and as this is going on, literally as all this stuff is happening in the 1930s,

early and mid 1930s, they're denouncing these people, locking them up, talking about how toxic these drugs are, Germany and companies in Germany were switching over to synthesizing drugs and making speed and all kinds of drugs, synthetic, like precursors to oxycontin and meth, basically, there was a firm in Berlin called the Timler Firm, and they were headed up, and this was in 1937 by a man named Fritz Hauschild, who later on was the sort of leading dude in East Germany's sports doping program, so he knows what he's doing. So they synthesized basically crystal meth into something, at least as the same kind of active ingredients, as a little pill called pervitin, P-E-R-V-I-T-I-N, and it wasn't just

the army that used this, and we'll get into all that because the German military was definitely hopped up on what we now know as crystal meth, but this stuff was over the counter at first, and a lot of Germany was using this, housewives were using it, and we should say that this same stuff was going on as Benzedrine in the United States, like the whole world was hopped up on speed in the 1930s, but not just the 30s, well into the 60s easily. Well, I mean, starting in the 1930s, and so pervitin was over the counter at first, eventually some alarm bells started going off, so they were like, we might want to make this prescription and then they said, well, you know what, we don't know if the general public should have

this at all, but we totally want our military to still have it. Yeah, it was called the Stimulant Decree, where the head of the German Physiology Department in the Defense Ministry, his name was Otto Ranke, he said, give me 35 million of those stimulant tabs because we're waging a war on exhaustion, as we'll see. Before we hop into the military, you want to take a break? Yes. Okay, I'm ready. We need to shave our heads, too.

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Okay, Chuck. So in Germany, there's a really important point that I don't want to gloss over. Everybody went from this, as far as the Nazis were concerned, it was kind of shiftless, high unemployment, fragile economic state, where a lot of people were selling and doing cocaine and morphine recreationally and to stave off depression. I mean, they were in a pretty bad spot as a country. Or to lose weight or like, you know. Well, no, not yet.

Not yet. That was not the point of it yet. It was strictly to get high is what they were doing in the Weimar Republic. So the weight loss was just a perk. When the, well, no, that was a Nazi thing. So then the Nazis come along and they say, we're not doing cocaine and morphine anymore. Let's try these other synthetic stimulants that can be produced strictly in Germany. And one of the things that is a benefit is weight loss, or I saw first date jitters or

just self-confidence, depression, anything you could think of that you might need a little boost for, pervitin was advertised for. I almost have prescribed, but like you said, it was over the counter. And so it's really interesting that Norman Oler makes this point. Around the time the pervitin came out and started to come into widespread use, the German economy started cranking into full gear. So one of the first points that Oler makes is without this speed, Germany probably wouldn't have been able to get onto wartime footing as fast as it did.

Because it happened overnight in terms of like huge social change. And that was a big part of it was this pervitin, the speed that everyone in Germany was on and now thinking about the German, the health of the German country in Germany itself. Yeah. And if you think about a military being hopped up on speed, it has a lot of, initially may have a lot of advantages in that not only are you feeling euphoric and confident and you're super focused, but you can also battle it up and war it up for two days straight without sleeping and still feel good.

So they were passing them out literally in chocolates. Some of them were called Panzer Schokolade Tank Chocolate for the tank drivers and tank crews. And then they would give them to the Air Force, they would give them to pilots and they called it either Pilot Salt or Pilots Chocolate. And between April and July, just what is that, four months? Yes. In 1940, more than 35 million doses of pervitin were manufactured for the Army in the Air

Force alone. That is so crazy. Over three and a half, four months, 35 million doses. And I mean, there are plenty of accounts like on record. This is not speculation at all. It was a Nobel Prize winner named Eindrich Bohl who won the Nobel Prize in 1972 for literature. And he was in the Army back before he was an author. And like there are letters home where he's like, perhaps you could obtain some more pervitin

for my supplies and just send it on over. So they love the stuff. Yeah. Oh yeah, they loved it. Not just like the actual like soldiers loved it, which they very much did from all appearances. But also the people running the show of the military, the Wehrmacht, loved it too. They were on it. Well, they were on it themselves, sure.

But they also loved like the effects, like it turned German soldiers into like super soldiers basically. They didn't need sleep. They could hike through forests for days on end. And they did actually. The Blitzkrieg into France was carried out over about three plus days. And Norman Euler says in his book that in less than a hundred hours, Germany gained more land in France than it did throughout the entirety of World War I.

And it was because it was one big push all the way into France that took place over three days nonstop. There wasn't like, let's move like 20 miles and then camp for the night and then pick up the next morning. It was a nonstop move into France. And from what I understand, no one in the modern world had ever seen anything like that from a military. It didn't make any sense.

And that was it for France. I mean, like this was May of 1940. France fell like almost immediately just in the face of this. And they'd used the same tactic in Poland the year before. And all of this was, it's not like, oh, this coincides with the time that the military was ordering pervitin. It's documented that pervitin was the reason that these pushes were able to happen and why Germany looked like they really were going to take over the world in the early stages

of World War II. Yeah. And this stuff was, I mean, it was from the top down. And we'll get to Hitler's drug use in the third act of this podcast because that stuff is super interesting. But it was definitely top down. Like the head of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, basically the lead physiologist for the German military.

His name was Otto Runk. Yeah. I mentioned him. Yeah. Yeah. He was, he was hopped up on it himself. He's the one that endorses from the beginning. And basically it's like medically documented that he, he essentially at a certain point

was living in a constant state of speed meth overdose. So all right, so the Army, the Air Force, everyone's all hopped up on this drug. They are literally like prescribing this as like these young like 17, 18 year old German soldiers are, are signing up for the Army or did they sign up or did they just get absorbed? It depends on when in the, in the war you're talking about toward the end of the war, they had no choice. They were just drafted. Well, at any rate, they would say like, here's your outfit.

It's very sharp. I think you must admit. You go boss. Yeah. And the soldier would say, thanks a lot. And they would say, here's your weapon and here's your speed. Like put this under your tongue starting now. Yeah.

And then here's all the rest of your speed to carry around with you. Just come back when you need some more. Yeah. And the short term, you know, it's, it's like we've done plenty of episodes on drugs and on crystal meth and the short term, we've been on crystal meth while we've done the episode. Is that what you're saying? No.

I see what you mean. The short term effect was, was great. And like you said, they made so many gains so much more quickly to the point where Churchill was apparently dumbfounded by how fast they operated. But like over time, it's going to have the effect of any other drug. Just because it comes packaged and marketed as a prescription doesn't mean it wasn't crystal meth and over time, what happens is sleep deprivation and very poor decision making, not sharp focus and soldiers who would die of heart failure or who would take their own

lives during psychotic breakdowns and, you know, withdrawal when they couldn't get their hands on the pervitin. So this very much ended up biting them on their German Heinies, even after their initial successes. Right. I mean, you can point to the places where the, where the war started to turn that coincide with, you know, points where it had been years that the German army had been on stimulants and speed for basically every day since then.

And like, I mean, you don't even have to, you could be the most drug naive person in the world and you still know that staying on speed for three years is, there's eventually going to be a bottoming out. And that's not a place where you want to be as a military, especially when you're deep into Russia in the winter. If your whole army is bottoming out on after Matthews. Yes. That's not good.

And that seems to be what happened. Like one of the reasons why the Russia offensive was, was, was not, was not successful is because there was a lot of, a lot of, I keep using the word fallout or bottoming out. What's it called when like you, oh, crashing from speed, crashing, sure. And like, and, and suffering from psychosis and all sorts of other problems. And then even if it wasn't directly, like their, their decision making wasn't affected or even if you take all that out, being in Russia, caught in Russia in the winter, while being addicted to speed for three years, that is not a good place.

Your body's not in the kind of place where it can fight off pneumonia easily or stay warm easily. It's severely compromised just on like say a first dose of speed in that situation. But after being on speed every day for three years, that's a really bad situation. So in that sense, at the very least speed would have contributed to a really huge setback for the German army that a lot of people point to is one of the, at least the, the real nail in the coffin for Germany, which was Russia not being successful in Russia turning the tides and pushing Germany back or the German army back into Germany and then chasing it

into it. That was a, that was a big deal and it's possible that speed played a really big factor in it. Well for sure. I mean, we talked about older speculation about some of this stuff, but again, it's, it's sort of a numbers game. I mean, there, there are studies that show that if you take crystal meth a lot for three years that two thirds of the people who, who use that drug in that way are going to suffer from serious psychosis.

So it's just a math problem. If that many pills were literally being handed out in the army and they were all using it for that amount of time, then that means according to studies that two thirds of the German army at some point were suffering from psychosis, drug induced psychosis. That's not good. No. So apparently toward the end of the war, German chemists were trying to come up with new drugs.

There was one that didn't get deployed, but that was tested or I think it might have been deployed. I can't remember. I'm called drug nine or DIX, Robin numeral nine. And it was basically like cocaine and morphine and then another kind of morphine. And it was, it was meant to combat the, to get the German army back on its feet. But it was just so over the top that it was never, never issued in, in like any kind of wide supply because it was just, it was basically like here, addicts, here's a brand new super

drug that's going to keep you going, but it, it didn't quite work, but they found, I saw that in tests on, on concentration camp inmates, they would, they would hike in a, in a circle, like 90 kilometers in a day without rest. So it would work, but I think they also tried it on some, some one man subs and it didn't work out very well. D nine. So sounds like, like the dude in college that's like, dude, I got some D nine, man. It was this like, this German drug back in World War II that was a combination.

It's the ultimate super drug and some guy in Indiana is making it now. Yup. Yup. That's where they would make it. In fact, it was just, you know, white crosses smashed up. Right. And mixed with, you know, Pillsbury's sugar cookie dough. All right.

So I think we should take another break and we're going to finish up with what I think is the most interesting part of this whole thing, which is Adolf Hitler's rampant drug use in his, his own Michael Jackson-esque personal doctor who, who injected him on a daily basis, right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the nineties called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the nineties. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the nineties. Listen to Hey Dude, the nineties called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get second hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention. Because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it.

So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop? But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too.

Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, so there's this doctor. His name was Dr. Morel, Dr. Theodore Morel. And he kind of wormed his way into, he was not a highly thought of doctor. He was not highly credited to begin with. He was sort of known as a quack. He was a dermatologist though.

And I think that's how he first curried favor with Hitler was in curing his long time eczema. Right. And he also practiced, he worked on venereal diseases and stuff like that. And starting in 1936, he managed to worm his way in there such that Hitler made him his private physician. And it's like, you always hear about these private physicians, whether it's Michael Jackson or Elvis or anyone in this high position of power or a world leader who has their own doctor feel good, essentially.

And that's what happened with Hitler. I mean, should we just go ahead and talk about the daily routine? Sure. There's so many interesting things here. First of all, Hitler had bad, I guess you would call it IBS, notoriously flatulent and diarrhea and just had a bad, bad stomach problems and intestinal issues. Like gas that Dr. Morel once noted in his journals, because he kept extensive journals on treating Hitler, who he called patient A. He referred to it as colossal gas, the likes

of which he's never seen before. Like that was the kind of gas that Hitler was dealing with. Of course, Hitler had the worst farts of all time. Of all time. Worst farts in history. So he goes vegetarian. Which did not help things. It did not help things because he basically subsisted on a diet of baby food.

They didn't call it baby food or serve it to him with a plastic spoon from a little tiny jar, but he ate pureed watery vegetables basically, which is not going to cure your flatulence. And he started to get doped up a little bit from Morel and he's like, hey, I feel a little bit better with this stuff. And it got to the point where he didn't care what he was getting as long as the result was that it made him feel better. And so eventually Morel got up to the point where he was injecting him daily, multiple times a day with anywhere from, I've seen 25 to 90 different drugs over the course of

about nine years. Yeah. And so in all of this, it started in 1936 and like you said, ran for nine years. And at first, Dr. Morel was one of the first doctors in Germany to espouse the healing and health benefits of vitamins. Before that, vitamins weren't really thought of as healthy and he was like, no, they're super healthy. Watch, I'll show you on DeFührer.

And remember, one of the things about Nazi Germany was that you kept your body pure to help the German state. It was like a component of fascism was like being pure and drug free. But if they were vitamins and they were injected by a doctor, that's fine. We can do all those. So this idea of keeping Hitler seeming like fit and active and like full of spit and vinegar, you know, that was supposedly from Morel's vitamin injections. But then as time went on and Hitler started to suffer more ill health again, some of these

vitamins were supplemented by just straight up straight up drugs that were produced by Germany, like pervitin and like you could all. Yeah. So Hitler's getting injected with and like you said, he like Hitler notoriously was thought of as a tea totaler. He didn't even drink coffee. Right. He quit smoking and he was supposed to be this picture of health all the while he's

getting injected with everything from literal cocaine to morphine to precursors to oxycontin to extractions of bull semen, because Hitler very notoriously had issues in the ED department. Right. Testosterone. I mean, it's crazy the amount of drugs that he was getting injected with multiple times daily. I saw 80 was the high estimate on with one source. I saw 90 elsewhere.

And a cocktail and not just like here's one drug and then the next day here's a different drug, a cocktail of up to combinations of up to 90 different drugs during the course of this time repeatedly getting injected like daily injections apparently toward the end of the war. Hitler's veins had started collapsing. But to Hitler or at least the way that Hitler pretended was that this was his doctor shooting him up with vitamins when he got cocaine, it was given in the form of eye drops. Yeah.

Well, that was early on like this was before they started shooting him up. They would give it to him and eye drops at 10 times the concentration that because cocaine was used in medicine a little bit, but at very low doses. So he would ramp it up by 10 times squirt it in his eye and eventually like anything else you have to ramp it up to get that same high. So that's when the injection started. Well, he also started snorting it. I saw to clear his sinuses and keep his throat clean or throat to ease his sore throat.

Just stupid stuff like that. But it was through that Elvis paradigm, which was if a doctor's giving it to me, it's legal. It's not a drug drug. It would have been scandalous if it had gotten out that Hitler was snorting cocaine because again, like the Nazis had associated that with degenerates in the Weimar Republic. So no one did cocaine. If Hitler had been caught doing cocaine, that would have been a big deal. Yeah.

And by all accounts, by the end of the war, those final dark, dark days of Hitler at the bunker. And this we know this stuff because Dr. Morel left behind a treasure trove of documentation to kind of cover his own butt just in case anything ever happened. So we have all this documentation, but from what everyone has written in history in the final days, Hitler was just a straight up junkie. Yeah. That's certainly how Euler characterizes the whole thing.

And it's not just him. Like a lot of people are like, no, Hitler's health declined tremendously. Like he didn't go into the war with too many health problems aside from eczema and something called spina bifida occulta, which they think is responsible for his problematic bowels and gas. Right. But like he didn't have massive problems. He didn't have Parkinson's.

By the end of the war, he seemed to have developed Parkinson's. He had trouble walking. He was very much emaciated and shallow. So Euler for the first time really lays this at the feet of Dr. Morel and his injections. Because not only, again, not only is it like cocaine and morphine and Oxycontin and speed that he's giving Hitler, some of these other concoctions are like really not good. There was an anti gas pill called Dr. Cooster's anti gas pills. Yeah.

It had strict nine in it. He had 16 pills a day. Yeah. Hitler took a lot of those. And if you take a lot of strict nine every day, over the course of years, it's going to have some really negative impacts on you. So not only was it that Hitler was addicted to drugs, he was also being given some very poisonous toxic materials by his doctor in other ways too.

And that was, it cumulatively had this effect. But I think the big money thing, Chuck, is like, how did it impact Hitler's judgment? How does that correlate toward the end of the war? And that's where Oler's really going to town. He's like, dude, Hitler was, like you said, just totally addicted to drugs, morphine, Oxycontin, speed, cocaine by the end of the war. And it had clouded his judgment. And even I think- No coffee.

No coffee still. I think it might have been Himmler or Spear. One of his close advisors had said, like, man, when the war started, Hitler could make a decision in a snap by the, toward the end of the war, by 1943, it was just like a nightmare watching him go back and forth and try to come to a conclusion in his decision. And that that was directly related to the drugs he was on. Well, and increasingly sequestered and paranoid, like the whole thing was a recipe for disaster. Yeah.

You, you know, if you talk about Morrell, what he had to gain was obviously the prestige of being Hitler's personal physician, but he had a lot of money in the, in the game here because he was cranking out this preparation that he called Vitamolten that was marketed across Europe. And he was essentially in the drug business, like he was making tons of money and he could try to out Hitler as his star patient. Right. And so far as to basically, he wrote a letter to the Reich Health Office because, you know,

eventually doctors and people started coming out and saying, Hey, like this stuff is not good. We need to outlaw this. This is having a bad effect. And so he wrote the Reich Health Office and said, the Fuhrer has authorized me to do the following by bring out and test a remedy and then apply it in the Fuhrer's headquarters and apply it successfully. Then it could be applied elsewhere in Germany and no longer needs authorization.

So, yeah, it's like just try to try to come back with a response to that. Yeah. And in the meantime, I'm building a factory and getting rich, making speed for all of Germany. Yeah. This Vitamolten, there was like a billion packets ordered by just, you know, the Wehrmacht alone, let alone like all of the German people that he sold a lot and made a lot of money off of it.

But from what seems to be, I guess, Oler's research has kind of shown that Morel was very much dedicated, not just as a doctor, but like personally to Hitler too. And that he most likely over the years, historians have accused Morel of purposefully trying to harm Hitler or something along those lines. But the apparently Oler's like, no, this guy really was a true believer and was really like very much proud that he was Hitler's physician. He didn't know what he was doing. He definitely turned Hitler into an addict of multiple drugs, a super, I think a super

addict is how Oler puts it, but he was still devoted to him. He wasn't doing it to cause deliberate harm. Right. Yeah, it's just so interesting this same thing with like Michael Jackson and Elvis. It's like there's this weird thing that happens where these doctors completely sell their souls to work alongside these people in positions of power and essentially kill them eventually by just feeding them whatever drug they needed. Like he was not only on speed, obviously to counteract that, you need something to bring

you down. Right. So then he would get injected with something called Yucadol. That's the Oxycontin relative. Yeah. Yeah. So he, I mean, he didn't know which way it was up at a certain point. Eventually like he would, he fired Morel on April 17th.

Two weeks later, Hitler put a bullet in his brain. Morel gets tried for war crimes and goes to jail. And then I believe died of a stroke in 1948. Yeah. So he was not tried for war crimes, but he was interrogated. I thought he was. No, he wasn't. He was interrogated in prison for two years by the allies who just pumped him for all

the information they could get about Hitler. So he was just in prison being questioned? Yes. Oh, interesting. And he ended up producing or contributing to like a 47 page report about Hitler and Hitler's health that the allies had that didn't come out until I think the nineties in the US. Yeah.

But he was a huge trove of information. But more than that, in the fact that he got Hitler addicted to Oxycontin that led to Hitler making some terrible decisions to becoming increasingly paranoid, to stop listening to his generals, to becoming embarrassed for these defeats and like withdrawing even further. And then ultimately losing the war and taking his own life. In that sense, the world owes a tremendous debt to Theodore Morel. It's kind of funny when you think about it. Like we owe that dude.

And imagine this also another way to look at this Chuck. Imagine that you had gotten behind this cult of personality, this leader, this charismatic leader who said, we are going to take over the world and you decided that you were on board with that. You were a German who was going along with it. Maybe you were pepped up on a little bit of speed. And then over time, right in the middle of this taking over the world thing that's actually starting to seem like it might work, that leader decides that he's going to go and get

hooked on like five different extraordinarily addictive drugs right in the middle of taking over the world. And then that would be the thing that brought about the downfall, which you, which older makes the cases like, yes, you can lay a lot of this, the downfall of the third Reich at the feet of drugs. Well, I mean, it's certainly, you can't fault older for going there because it is such a juicy thing to take all these facts about all this drug use, rampant drug use. And then years later, go back and say like, what if this hadn't happened or what was the

overall effect? Not just that they did these drugs, but what, how did it affect history? Right. Super interesting. Yeah. It's extraordinarily interesting. I mean, that's, that's good stuff. Oh, I found one other thing too.

I want to mention. What you got? There's something called Mutaflore or Mutaflore M-U-T-A-F-L-O-R. It's still available. It was Hitler's go-to probiotic and it was isolated in 1917 from a stool sample taken from a World War I soldier who while everybody else in his troop was like getting dysentery left and right, he was healthy. And this doctor noticed and isolated a particular kind of bacteria in this guy's stool.

And you can buy pills made from that line of bacteria to this day, except it's illegal in the US for some reason, which makes me really want to see what it's all about. But you're eating World War I poop bacteria when you take this Mutaflore, but it was given to Hitler and apparently it worked. Wow. So Hitler's probiotic. Which I'm sure- I got some B9 and some Mutaflore.

I'm sure Mutaflore is like, please don't call it Hitler's probiotic. We're still trying to sell that stuff. Yeah. Well, if you want to know more about Hitler and drugs, just go read Blitzed, The Third Reich and Drugs by Norman Oehler, or you can go read all the book reviews about it like I did. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this an epic pants story in the science of breakups.

You were talking about getting pantsed. Oh yes, I remember. So this is from Anonymous. Hey guys, it happened in high school. I was gathering up the nerve to ask a girl out on a date that I had to crush on to set the scene and highlight the level of embarrassment I'm setting myself for. It's worth noting that at this point in my life, I'd never actually asked a girl out this boldly.

I was going to do it face to face in the classroom in front of her friends and my friends. Jeez, that's not a good idea. Can't you like catch her by her locker? She's not surrounded by people. She was hopped up on Purvitan feeling really confident. Maybe. This is out of character for me, but I couldn't find the courage on my own, so I confided in a close friend who agreed to be my wingman.

He was very supportive, plus he had insider info that he had actually heard her say that she liked me. Man, remember those days? How sweet that was. Yes. Did she like me? Yes, no. She likes me.

Yes, no, or maybe. The teacher left the classroom for a minute and my trusty mate said I should go for it and do it right now. With the encouragement from him, I needed, and I was nervous as H, I walked over to her table of friends, interrupted them, had her full attention and started asking her out on the date. I was actually doing it, guys. I felt amazing and then bam, my super supportive mate had set me up and pants to me in front

of her and the whole class. Oh, no. Oh, it gets worse. Yes. Uh-huh. No, I'm not going to say it. I'm not going to say it. I think you know what's coming.

The execution was perfect, guys. 100% pants, full Monty, before the whole class and for a whole second before I could halt the process. Dude, could you imagine? I would never recover. No. I'd move. I'd go home and be like, we have to move to a new school, a new state, maybe a new country.

It's funny you mentioned that because I think every school also had some kid who didn't show up after summer the next fall and when, in fact, his dad got a transfer, but there would be some story cooked up on why the kid had to move. I saw him on a milk carton. There was a kid at our school who supposedly moved because he masturbated in class and got caught and I don't think any of it was true. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

But is there like a kernel of truth to that? You know what I mean? I don't know. I remember his name like years later. The playground? Say it. I actually don't say. But it's funny.

I haven't thought about that since the ninth grade. I'm going to totally look him up and see if he's out there. Anyway, guys, the betrayal was second to Judas and the wave of embarrassment so gargantuan that all I could do is just take a seat and die inside. We were in art class, but if the subject was advanced, panting, my mate would have gotten an A plus. He's like, I was so embarrassed I couldn't even pull my pants up when I took a seat. I just sat down with my bare butt and fruit basket right on the lunchroom bench.

I just gave into it, guys, and went dong out for the rest of the semester. What? No, no, no. He didn't say that. I was like, wow, good for this guy. I was just riffing on your bit. Like, I feel like I'm about to throw up. I look green right now, right?

So he keeps saying mate. It turns out he is Australian because he says P.S. in Australia instead of saying pants, we say dact, D-A-C-K-E-D. I saw that somewhere. Pants refer to pants like tracky-dacks or track pants. To put it in a sentence, my mate is such a dog, he full-dacked me in front of this chick I like. And that's from Anonymous.

Thanks a lot, Anonymous. I appreciate you sharing that, even though it was anonymously. That's right. If you have a horrifically cringe-worthy story, we want to hear it. We'll make it through it together. You can go on to stuffyoushouldknow.com and check out our social links. You can also hit us up via email if you want to stuffpodcast.ihartpodcastnetwork.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works.

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