re: #312 Barefoot Grin

I think he was basically doing speedballs.

There’s a book called Blitzed (in English) which is all about the Nazis and their drug consumption. I haven’t read it, but I’ve read articles about it, such as this one from the New Yorker, from last year. It begins as follows:

Norman Ohler is the author of the international best-seller “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich,” which advances the case that large swaths of the German population, the Nazi Party, and the Wehrmacht used and abused an array of stimulants and narcotics. Chief among them was methamphetamine, in the form of a pill called Pervitin. According to Ohler’s reading of Hitler’s medical records, late in the war the Führer himself was hooked on a proto-speedball that consisted of cocaine and an opiate called Eukodal, administered by his private physician. The book, while delightfully nuts, in a “Gravity’s Rainbow” kind of way, has been praised for its meticulous research. A couple of critics have mistaken it for an apologia, a plea to cut the Nazis some slack, but Ohler said last week, “Nowhere do I say this. This would be a truly disgusting thing to assert.”

newyorker.com

Ohler is not a historian, but his work is meticulous. Apparently the Nazis were drugged-up nutcases.