Norman Ohler is an author and screenwriter whose books include "Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany," "The Bohemians: The Lovers Who Led Germany's Resistance Against the Nazis," and "Tripped: Nazi Germany, The CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age." www.normanohler.de Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
There we go. Pleasure to meet you. I'm very happy to be here. I'm actually quite thrilled.
I'm quite thrilled to have you here. This is your book. It's called Tripped, Nazi Germany, the CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. First of all, how did you get involved in studying this?
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...
serious archive because they host like all the documents what the SS did in Dachau and so it's a it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at because they wrote down everything like every experiment the Nazis did in concentration camps was like written down because it was like pseudoscience
So I found documents while I was researching Blitz relating to tests with psychoactive substances. And that was like, that was not what I expected because the Nazis had been, you know, enthusiastic about methamphetamine. But I'd never, that was the first time I saw like something that related Nazis and psychedelics. And I thought that's quite strange. That's quite interesting, obviously. Yeah.
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