Norman Ohler
German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.
Norman Ohler did not write this page. ppll compiled it from their own words, each linked to the source. Is this you? · Report a mistake
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- Found in pieces, 25 August 1939. War the next morning. Otto Völzing bags the ivory in the Hohlenstein-Stadel. The dig stops. The fragments sit in a box of animal bones. Hahn opens it in 1969. The figure we have now was only finished in Ulm in 2013. Mammoth tusk. Cave-lion head. Human legs. Seven cuts on the left arm. 31 centimetres. The date is on the layer, not the ivory: 39.000–41.000 years. A second, smaller one was carved at Hohle Fels. Not a one-off. Conard reads shamanism. Fair. Nobody has found the plant. The oldest statue we have is a crossing. The dose is still missing. Paper: doi.org
What they believe
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Hitler did not mind that his early audiences were drunk, because drunk people are more susceptible to right-wing populism.
But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others.
youtube.comSaid 19 Sept 2025This on korrents
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Recent
Hitler did not mind that his early audiences were drunk, because drunk people are more susceptible to right-wing populism.
But it was used by right-wingers, and Hitler didn't mind because people who are drunk are more susceptible to right-wing populism, I would claim now here, and Hitler would agree. So he did not think it was bad that these people were a bit drunk, or maybe even very drunk, because if you're drunk you also get aggressive against others.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The German Navy, which insisted afterwards that it had kept its ethics, bought concentration camp prisoners from the SS to test methamphetamine-and-cocaine combinations on them.
So the Navy hired the shoe runners unit from the SS, paid them money, and then gave them drugs, different kinds of drug combinations, methamphetamine combined with cocaine and chewing gum and all kinds of things. So this is a big thing, you know. And there are documents to it.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
Drugs are the missing link historians never had for the one thing they could not explain: why Hitler went from militarily effective to disastrous.
And he said this is actually the missing link that historians did not have, especially to explain Hitler's degeneration as a leader. He made very good decisions, good in meaning militarily effective decisions in the beginning of the war, and very bad decisions for the German war effort towards the end. And you can link that to drugs.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
Show 19 more
The idea of driving the whole German army through the Ardennes, not the methamphetamine, is what won the campaign in the West.
That was the victorious idea. So it's not the drugs. Actually, that idea to go through the Ardennes Mountains, if you think monocausal, you would say that's the reason. That idea was genius, and Hitler immediately understood it, because before, the plan was to attack in the north of Belgium, which is the same as World War I.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
Hitler's decision to attack the West was ideological and irrational, and his own high command planned a coup in November 1939 to stop him ordering it.
His officers didn't think so. High command said, “No, we're not going to attack the West; we're going to lose.” And Hitler was fanatic about it, he really wanted to attack it. They were planning a coup against him in November 1939 just to prevent him ordering the attack on the West, because it would have been a catastrophe for Germany.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The main opponent of the German soldier was not the British, French or Russian soldier but fatigue, and the army's physiologist set out to defeat it chemically.
And that was not the British soldier, not the French soldier, not the Russian soldier. That was fatigue. He had been looking for a way to keep a soldier awake longer.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
An entire army was prescribed methamphetamine by written decree, with dosages, intervals and side effects specified.
And he gave lectures in front of the officers, and he wrote a stimulant decree where a whole army is prescribed a drug, in this case methamphetamine. How much should be taken? At what intervals? What are the side effects?
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The Wehrmacht lost its innocence in Rommel's night push through the French countryside, driving tanks over sleeping men.
That is when the Wehrmacht lost its innocence in that push of Rommel through the French countryside, because you don't do that, you know? Your enemy is sleeping.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
France had a drug regulation too — three quarters of a litre of red wine per man per day — which is why its army was asleep when the meth-fuelled Germans arrived.
Because the French also had a drug regulation. They received three quarters of a liter of red wine per man per day. So, of course, at night they're going to be sleepy on red wine, and the Germans were on meth and they were just running over them.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The drug history of the Third Reich excuses nobody, because in law being intoxicated while committing a crime you planned does not diminish your responsibility.
And I spoke with my father, who had been a high judge in Germany. What does the law actually say? And the law says if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The order to stop the tanks outside Dunkirk threw away a complete victory over Britain: the whole British military was encircled and got out.
So the tank generals received the Halte Befehl, the stopping order. They didn't believe it when they received it because this would have been a complete victory over Great Britain. This would have been the end of Great Britain. The whole British military was encircled, but they did get out through Dunkirk.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
Hitler stopped the tanks at Dunkirk because he feared his own high command and had been convinced by Göring's morphine-high promise that the Luftwaffe could finish the job.
This was just because Hitler was afraid of the power of his army high command, and convinced by Goering's morphine-high vision that he would stop it with the air force, which he couldn't.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
Hitler took methamphetamine exactly twice; the record of everything his doctor gave him says so.
That's why Hitler was never a meth guy. That's also why I think this video is fake. He didn't take meth. I studied Morell's, the things he gave him. He gave a lot of things, and only twice was meth.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The decision to split the German forces away from Moscow was taken by a Hitler who had just been given his first intravenous opioid, and that is probably why Moscow never fell.
So Hitler receives this Dolantin injection, and he gets up, he goes into the meeting room, he dominates the meeting room, he feels great. He decides, you know, in front of everybody, no one is able to… no one overpowers him in that meeting. He was very good in the room. And the troops are split up. Like Leningrad is now a target. This weakens the general thrust towards Moscow. This is probably why they didn't take Moscow.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The German war machine could only ever win lightning wars, because it was always the weaker side.
And the German war machine could only win in so-called speed wars, like lightning war. Only if they would do it very fast and surprise, because they were always weaker, basically.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
Hitler went into opioid withdrawal in the bunker because British bombers had destroyed the Merck factory that made his drug.
One thing that changed was that Eukodal was not available anymore, so the drug that Hitler actually had become physically addicted to was suddenly not available anymore. This had to do with the bombardment of the Merck company, the factory in December 1944. British bombers destroyed the production facilities.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
British intelligence dropped its plans to assassinate Hitler because a drugged, malfunctioning Hitler was better for Britain than whoever would replace him.
And I spoke with Anthony Beevor once about the attempt of British intelligence to assassinate Hitler, and he had seen some evidence that at the point in time, they dropped those plans because they knew that drugged Hitler or malfunctioning Hitler, which he was after, you know, the summer of 1943, is better for Britain than, you know, killing Hitler and then having to deal with, like, some kind of, you know, maybe the army would have taken over the country
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
LSD was made illegal because the head of MKUltra wanted to own it, not because anyone thought it was dangerous.
And this is basically the reason why LSD at one point became illegal, because it did not get the chance. Stoll still wanted to put it on the market, but Sidney Gottlieb, the head of MKULTRA, he really didn't want LSD to be on the market. He didn't want it because he thought it's not good or dangerous for anybody, he just wanted to control LSD.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
LSD has a Nazi past nobody thinks about: Sandoz shipped its precursor to Hitler's chief biochemist in 1943, and it was probably used in Dachau.
And then I found a smoking gun: October 1943. Kuhn acknowledges that he receives half a gram of ergotamine, which is the precursor drug to LSD. And so it's highly likely that the Nazis used LSD together with mescaline in Dachau.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
LSD is not a truth drug and never could be — it takes you toward your own truth, not out of it.
They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
The Neanderthals lost to us because they had no drug culture — they were too sober for the future.
And I think, a lot of evidence kind of points to it that we were able to develop our consciousness in a better way than the Neanderthals, who did not have a drug culture. They were basically too sober for the future. We assimilated them.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
Human hierarchy began with beer: when temples in Sumer started brewing and branding it, they got rich, and the ruling class emerged.
They make beer. They labeled the beer, and the temple that would make the beer, the beer would be attributed to that temple. It would be sold, so that temple rises in status, makes money. That's how hierarchies started up.
Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA | Lex Fridman Podcast #481 Said 19 Sept 2025
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 7 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Loved The Magic Mountain
The result was one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century (except my own, of course), but genius does not abolish the moral circumstances of its production.
stonedsapiens.substack.com 1 Sept 2026
Liked Fatherland (film)
Indeed, almost nothing happens in the conventional cinematic sense. In a way, it is a boring movie, and that’s what I like about it.
stonedsapiens.substack.com 1 Sept 2026
Disliked The Odyssey (film)
There is not much to say about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. It is a conventional film about a conventional man doing conventional things in an extraordinarily expensive way.
stonedsapiens.substack.com 21 Jul 2026
Show 4 more
Mixed on Sapiens
Like Sapiens by Harari, which is a great book, he also misses that. When it comes to those moments, he writes, “We don’t understand how the first cognitive revolution and the second cognitive revolution actually happened.”
lexfridman.com 19 Sept 2025
Loved Fight Club
He’s a great writer. Fight Club influenced me quite a bit. I think the novel is even better, maybe, than the movie. But the movie’s great.
lexfridman.com 19 Sept 2025
Loved The Stranger
But the most influential book, maybe, is The Stranger by Camus.
lexfridman.com 19 Sept 2025
Mixed on Ulysses
It’s Ulysses by James Joyce. Ulysses is good, but only when you’re like in your early 20s, living in New York, and you’re writing your first book, and you just have taken LSD.
lexfridman.com 19 Sept 2025
Where they publish
Site normanohler.de His site: the books, talks and news. Has a feed.
Link verified 20 Sept 2026.
x.com @normanohler Their X account.
Recent
- Found in pieces, 25 August 1939. War the next morning. Otto Völzing bags the ivory in the Hohlenstein-Stadel. The dig stops. The fragments sit in a box of animal bones. Hahn opens it in 1969. The figure we have now was only finished in Ulm in 2013. Mammoth tusk. Cave-lion head. Human legs. Seven cuts on the left arm. 31 centimetres. The date is on the layer, not the ivory: 39.000–41.000 years. A second, smaller one was carved at Hohle Fels. Not a one-off. Conard reads shamanism. Fair. Nobody has found the plant. The oldest statue we have is a crossing. The dose is still missing. Paper: 1 Oct 2026 doi.org
- An avalanche buried her. The brain ran out of air. Seven years of fog. Then the root -- not the 36-hour flood. Milligrams of bark. Six weeks. Therapy in the room. Three patients. Two said the symptoms left and stayed gone. One improved, then slipped. Carhart-Harris is on the paper. The plant that interrupts an opioid is being asked to rewire a hypoxic brain. n=3. No control. Heart first. Paper: 30 Sept 2026 frontiersin.org
- Last week: vilca up the nose at 3,000 meters. This week: the brew. Same family of molecules. Different machine. The Andes used a snuff. The Amazon used a MAOI vine so the DMT could be swallowed. Rio just counted the drinkers. 808 people heading into ceremony. The questionnaire came first. Twenty-one cups and more: less alcohol, less depression, less anxiety, less stress. More spirit. More metaphysics. Association, not proof. History is still faster than the lab. Paper: 29 Sept 2026 nature.com
Show 17 more
- Hofmann built four rings. Davis took them off, one by one. Nine simpler copies. The vision lives in two of them - A and D. That pair still makes a mouse twitch its head. Remove those and you get UCD0076: almost no 5-HT2A, a pull toward 2C, and the psychosis-like running stops. Eighty years after Bicycle Day they are counting which rings they can throw away. Paper: 26 Sept 2026 pnas.org
- They asked a model for Western civilization. It made a myth and called it Prometheus. Proof. Dome. Steam. Dam. Chip. Star. Two minutes. Then: Accelerate. The archive used to take a life. Now the fire edits itself. 25 Sept 2026
- Berlin still queues. The till does not. Clubcommission counted the rooms this summer. 39% of clubs finished the year in the red. A decade ago that was 21%. The door now brings in most of the money. The bar brings in a fifth. Those two numbers have swapped places. People drink less. They leave earlier. Only 8% of the clubs own the floor they play on. I remember when the building was the cheap part. English write-up (The Berliner): https://t.co/YARLjNt6Py The study (German, official): 24 Sept 2026 clubcommission.de
- They tried this in 2022. Same five names. Researchers asked for a hearing. DEA withdrew. Today the list is back. 4-OH-DiPT. 5-MeO-AMT. 5-MeO-MiPT. 5-MeO-DET. DiPT. DiPT does not open the eyes. It retunes the ear. Shulgin wrote it down in 1976. A paper this April called the effect "diptogenia". Schedule I means the map of that door gets harder to draw. Diptogenia paper: https://t.co/55gtzSr9Jr DEA proposed rule: 23 Sept 2026 federalregister.gov
- Flood dose interrupts an opioid. Small daily doses are being tested on Parkinson’s. One published patient. Validated scales. Walking improved. Sleep did not. The mechanism talk now is myelin — the wrapping on the wire. Same root. Different clock. Heart first. Read the paper: 22 Sept 2026 doi.org
- Peyote was already a religion when the laboratory was still a rumor. 1897: Heffter isolates mescaline. 2026: a magnet in Boston finally watches it work. The cerebellum — the brain’s sensory firewall — turns down. Its connections to hippocampus and skin sense turn up. Raw signal where the filter used to sit. Same serotonin door as LSD. Different room. Read the paper: 21 Sept 2026 doi.org
- One year ago today. Four hours with @lexfridman: Pervitin, Dunkirk, Hitler’s last days, the CIA’s LSD - and the "Stoned Sapiens" book I am still writing. If you haven't heard it, check it out. Thank you for the discussion, Lex. 19 Sept 2026
- The famous one again. Harbin put CBD on the plaque. It stuck to Aβ42 oligomers and stopped them stacking. In the sick cells it switched on autophagy and caspase-3. In healthy cells it nudged the wrong way. The worm that can’t swallow and wastes away on amyloid: FAAH was the lever. Delete the enzyme - same rescue as the plant. Not a high. Not a patient. A non-intoxicating cannabinoid talking to the protein that builds the disease. Paper: 18 Sept 2026 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Hofmann made it as a medicine. The CIA turned it into a weapon. Now a single 100-microgram tablet has beaten placebo in two Phase 3 anxiety trials. Effects by day two. Filing planned for 2027. The molecule is circling back. New Scientist: 17 Sept 2026 newscientist.com
- Same island. Same limestone. This summer I went into those Sulawesi caves with my son — harness, helmet, ropes through slits the public never sees. 50.000-year-old paintings. He may be the youngest person in modern times to have seen them. The teeth in this paper recorded the habit. The walls recorded the story. Check out my Substack about it: 16 Sept 2026 stonedsapiens.substack.com
- The FDA livestream yesterday was not a result. It was the state asking how to supervise a trip. Same week: agency authors in the New England Journal on a framework for psychedelic drugs — blinding, durability, intermittent dosing. Psilocybin and methylone already have priority vouchers. Noribogaine is in a U.S. Phase 1. Read more about it in this publication: 15 Sept 2026 nejm.org
- The famous one is CBD. The neglected one is CBC. Florida A&M put both into mice with chemo-resistant triple-negative breast tumors. Together: tumors ~4× smaller than untreated. Invasion cut in half. The two molecules raised each other’s blood levels. Not a high. Not a patient trial. A pair of plant compounds walking past doxorubicin resistance. Paper: 14 Sept 2026 pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- They didn’t wait for farms. Sulawesi, up to 25.000 years ago: foragers sucked betel nuts for the arecoline. The teeth recorded it. Science Advances calls it the earliest habitual plant-drug use we can prove. Stoned long before we were sapiens-with-cities. Read the paper: 12 Sept 2026 science.org
- No walls. No army. No palace. At 3.000 meters they built a temple, invited rival elites into a sealed room, and blew vilca up their noses. Bufotenine. DMT. 5-MeO-DMT. Twenty minutes of black-and-white fire. Then they carved the drip into the stone. Science, yesterday: mind-altering drugs helped raise Andean civilization. 11 Sept 2026 science.org
- Official Washington used to seize this plant. Today it interviews the man who put it on the president’s desk. @w_bryan_hubbard on #TheSecretaryKennedyPodcast. The raid is over. The briefing began. 10 Sept 2026
- The molecules used to hide in trip reports and photocopied pamphlets. Now they have a public encyclopedia. https://t.co/60uIt3AwKa — open psychopharmacology. Effects, chemistry, the catalog the underground kept for decades. Bookmark it: 9 Sept 2026 dose.wiki
- A fly has 166.000 neurons. We have 86 billion. They just finished the fly. Ours is next. 8 Sept 2026 cell.com
Link verified 23 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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