Norman Ohler

But Kershaw really does.

I think he's really good.

But in his biography of Hitler, he just writes one sentence like,

And then he had a crazy doctor called Morel who gave him dubious medications and drugs.

And he stops there.

And then he goes on to describe whatever.

I think he wrote the best biography of Hitler.

That was very surprising to me, you know.

I didn't know this myself.

I never planned to write this book.

It kind of happened to me, and...

I decided to team up with the leading German historian on National Socialism, Hans Mommsen, who has passed away by now.

He was quite old, but quite ready to be my mentor for this book Blitzt.

And he was...

maybe even shocked when I came back from the military archive of Germany with like a lot of copies, all relating to the systematical drug use of the German army, including

an experiment done by the Navy, who had always pretended to be the clean, in German we say Waffengattung, weapon.

Like you have the Army, you have the Air Force, you have the Navy, and in Germany they had the SS.

And the Navy always pretended to be like, we weren't really Nazis, we were like, you know, the German Navy, we had our ethics code.

But I found in the archive that the Navy did human experiments in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, trying to find a new wonder drug because they had new, what they called wonder weapons or what Hitler called wonder weapons.

He always talked about these wonder weapons.