Play Audiobook Sample
Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich Audiobook
Play Audiobook Sample
(0.00) - 0 listener ratings
Quick Stats About this Audiobook
Total Audiobook Chapters:
Longest Chapter Length:
Shortest Chapter Length:
Average Chapter Length:
Audiobooks by this Author:
Publisher Description
The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs.
On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact, troops regularly took rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to explain certain German military victories.
Drugs seeped all the way up to the Nazi high command and, especially, to Hitler himself. Over the course of the war, Hitler became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—including a form of heroin—administered by his personal doctor, Dr. Morell.
While drugs alone cannot explain the Nazis’ toxic racial theories or the events of World War II, Ohler’s investigation makes an overwhelming case that, if drugs are not taken into account, our understanding of the Third Reich is fundamentally incomplete. Carefully researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws surprising light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.
Download and start listening now!
“The book is an impressive work of scholarship, with more than two dozen pages of footnotes and the blessing of esteemed World War Two historians…Ohler offers a compelling explanation for Hitler’s erratic behavior in the final years of the war, and how the biomedical landscape of the time affected the way history unfolded.”
— New Republic
Quotes
-
“Makes readers look at this well-trodden period in a new way and does it in a readable, inviting format.”
— Newsweek -
“[A] fascinating, engrossing, often dark history of drug use in the Third Reich.”
— Washington Post -
“Despite the Nazis’ all-out war on drug use, virtually everyone, from housewives to the Führer, was drugged up…Ohler’s account is full of rich character studies.”
— New York Times -
“I had thought nothing could make [Nazis] more horrifying, but that was before I encountered Blitzed."
— Esquire -
“Explosive…Ohler describes the chemical ignition of the first assault on the Western front with a novelist’s flair.”
— Rolling Stone -
“A fascinating, most extraordinary revelation.”
— BBC World News -
“Ohler’s astonishing account…looks set to reframe the way certain aspects of the Third Reich will be viewed in the future.”
— Guardian (London) -
“The picture [Ohler] paints is both a powerful and an extreme one…Gripping reading.”
— Times Literary Supplement (London) -
“Tells a deliriously druggy tale of the Third Reich.”
— Paris Reviews -
“A compelling piece of serious scholarship…that professional historians seem to have missed.”
— Military.com -
“An intense chronicle of ‘systematic drug abuse’ in Nazi Germany…Written with dramatic flair…this book adds significantly to our understanding of the Third Reich.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
Awards
-
An Amazon Best Book of the Month for March 2017
-
A BuzzFeed Books Pick of Incredible Books to Read This Spring
-
A New York Times Bestseller
-
One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2017
-
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
-
A New York Time Pick from Paperback Row
Blitzed Listener Reviews
Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
About Norman Ohler
Norman Ohler is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Blitzed, as well as the novels Die Quotenmaschine (the world’s first hypertext novel), Mitte, and Stadt des Goldes, translated into English as Ponte City. He was cowriter of the script for Wim Wenders’s film Palermo Shooting.
About Stefan Rudnicki
Stefan Rudnicki first became involved with audiobooks in 1994. Now a Grammy-winning audiobook producer, he has worked on more than five thousand audiobooks as a narrator, writer, producer, or director. He has narrated more than nine hundred audiobooks. A recipient of multiple AudioFile Earphones Awards, he was presented the coveted Audie Award for solo narration in 2005, 2007, and 2014, and was named one of AudioFile’s Golden Voices in 2012.