Norman Ohler

I said, so what did you do?

And he said, well, there were SS at the station where I was working and I was too scared.

I didn't do anything.

So I thought that he made himself guilty, I thought.

And my father, for example, reacted very strongly because of that.

He never called him by his first name, the father of his wife, because he still had that, you know, he was a Nazi because he was working for the railway.

So I wouldn't excuse people, actually, and I certainly would not excuse high-ranking politicians that make policies because the genocidal policies that the Nazis developed and the war policies that they developed had nothing to do with drugs.

And I never write that in any, you know, because there's no documents.

If I would find documents that say, yeah, but the Nazi ideology has nothing to do with drugs, maybe with alcohol, you know, but it's... And I spoke with my father who had been a high judge in Germany.

What does actually the law 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, right?

your responsibilities only diminish, let's say you're a totally normal person, never done any harm to anybody, and suddenly you take a drug or you're totally drunk and you don't know what you're doing and you kill someone, then a judge could say maybe you have a lesser responsibility.

But this is not the case with the crimes of National Socialism.

And I never even hinted that in my book.

So I think that criticism by Evans

was short-sighted.

I think he's not right about that.

He thought the book was very successful because a lot of right-wing people bought it, but that's simply not true.

To the contrary, I got an angry letter by a German army employee, quite a high officer and a military historian.

And he said that I, he also thought I overemphasized the drug use of the methamphetamine in the Western campaign because he said the German army was just so good.