Norman Ohler

There we go.

Pleasure to meet you.

I'm very happy to be here.

I'm actually quite thrilled.

Well, this had a lot to do with my previous book, which is called Blitz, Drugs in the Third Reich.

And, I mean, the Nazis were really into meth, basically.

They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can change the war effort.

They basically doped their soldiers.

So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitz.

And also I spoke about Hitler's consumption, which is quite outrageous, actually.

And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives because I'm not a historian.

I usually write novels.

I started out writing three novels and then suddenly I became a nonfiction writer.

I was trying to understand what does that mean.

And I thought it meant to do historical writing to actually go into archives and look at original documents and not just lean on other books, which is what many historians actually do, which I found out later.

They just read books.

books from colleagues and then make up their own shit.

To actually go into the archive is very time-consuming, but I thought everyone does that.

Actually, no one does that.

So I was looking at all the archives, and at one point I was in the archive of the memorial of the concentration camp of Dachau, so very...