by Norman Ohler
Once not so very long ago
Sweet alcohol, that beast,
Brought warmth and sweetness to our lives,
But then the price increased.
And so cocaine and morphine
Berliners now select.
Let lightning flashes rage outside
We snort and we inject! . . .
At dinner in the restaurant
The waiter brings the tin
Of coke for us to feast upon—
Forget whisky and gin!
Let drowsy morphine take its
Subcutaneous effect
Upon our nervous system—
We snort and we inject!
These medications aren’t allowed,
Of course, they’re quite forbidden.
But even such illicit treats
Are very seldom hidden.
Euphoria awaits us
And though, as we suspect,
Our foes can’t wait to shoot us down,
We snort and we inject!
And if we snort ourselves to death
Or into the asylum,
Our days are going downhill fast—
How better to beguile ’em?
Europe’s a madhouse anyway,
No need for genuflecting;
The only way to Paradise
Is snorting and injecting!14
In 1928 in Berlin alone 160 pounds of morphine and heroin were sold quite legally by prescription over the pharmacist’s counter.15 Anyone who could afford it took cocaine, the ultimate weapon for intensifying the moment. Coke spread like wildfire and symbolized the extravagance of the age. On the other hand, it was viewed as a “degenerate poison,” and disapproved of by both Communists and Nazis, who were fighting for power in the streets. There was violent opposition to the free-and-easy zeitgeist: German nationalists railed against “moral decay” and similar attacks were heard from the conservatives. Though Berlin’s new status as a cultural metropolis was accepted with pride, the bourgeoisie, which was losing status in the 1920s, showed its insecurity through its radical condemnation of mass “pleasure culture,” decried as “decadently Western.”
Worst of all, the National Socialists agitated against the pharmacological quest for salvation of the Weimar period. Their brazen rejection of the parliamentary system, of democracy, as well as of the urban culture of a society that was opening up to the world, was expressed through tub-thumping slogans directed against the degenerate state of the hated “Jewish Republic.”
The Nazis had their own recipe for healing the people: they promised ideological salvation. For them there could be only one legitimate form of inebriation: the swastika. National Socialism strove for a transcendental state of being as well; the Nazi world of illusions into which the Germans were to be enticed often used techniques of intoxication. World-historical decisions, according to Hitler’s inflammatory text Mein Kampf, had to be brought about in states of euphoric enthusiasm or hysteria. So the Nazi Party (NSDAP) distinguished itself on one hand with populist arguments and on the other with torch parades, flag consecrations, rapturous announcements, and public speeches aimed at achieving a state of collective ecstasy. These were supplemented with the violent frenzies of the Brownshirts (SA) during the early Kampfzeit, or period of struggle, often fueled by the abuse of alcohol.* Realpolitik tended to be dismissed as unheroic cattle trading: the idea was to replace politics with a state of social intoxication.16 If the Weimar Republic can be seen in psychohistorical terms as a repressed society, its supposed antagonists, the National Socialists, were at the head of that trend. They hated drugs because they wanted to be like a drug themselves.
Switching Power Means Switching Substances
. . . while the abstinent Führer was silent.
—Günter Grass17
During the Weimar period Hitler’s inner circle had already managed to establish an image of him as a man working tirelessly, putting his life completely at the service of “his” people. A picture was created of an unassailable leader-figure, entirely devoted to the Herculean task of gaining control of Germany’s social contradictions and problems, and to ironing out the negative consequences of the lost world war. One of Hitler’s allies reported in 1930: “He is all genius and body. And he mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.”18 Hitler allegedly didn’t even allow himself coffee and legend had it that after the First World War he threw his last pack of cigarettes into the Danube near Linz; from then onward, supposedly, no poisons would enter his body.
“We teetotalers have—let it be mentioned in passing—a particular reason to be grateful to our Führer, if we bear in mind what a model his personal lifestyle and his position on intoxicants can be for everyone,” reads an announcement from an abstinence association.19 The Reich Chancellor: ostensibly a pure person, remote from all worldly pleasures, entirely without a private life. An existence apparently informed by self-denial and long-lasting self-sacrifice, a model for an entirely healthy existence. The myth of Hitler as an anti-drug teetotaler who made his own needs secondary was an essential part of Nazi ideology and was presented again and again by the mass media. A myth was created that established itself in the public imagination but also among critical minds of the period, and still resonates today. This is a myth that demands to be deconstructed.
Following their seizure of power on January 30, 1933, the National Socialists suffocated the eccentric pleasure-seeking culture of the Weimar Republic. Drugs were made taboo, as they made it possible to experience unrealities other than the ones promulgated by the National Socialists. “Seductive poisons”20 had no place in a system in which only the Führer was supposed to do the seducing. The path taken by the authorities in their so-called Rauschgiftbekämpfung, or “war on drugs,” lay less in an intensification of the opium law, which was simply adopted from the Weimar Republic,21 than in several new regulations that served the central National Socialist idea of “racial hygiene.” The term Droge—drug—which at one point meant nothing more than “dried plant parts,”* was given negative connotations. Drug consumption was stigmatized and—with the help of quickly established new divisions of the criminal police—severely penalized. This new emphasis came into force as early as November 1933, when the Reichstag passed a law that allowed the imprisonment of addicts in a closed institution for up to two years, although that period of confinement could be extended indefinitely by legal decree.22 Further measures ensured that doctors who consumed drugs would be forbidden to work for up to five years. Medical confidentiality was considered breakable when it came to detecting consumers of illegal substances. The chairman of the Berlin Medical Council decreed that every doctor had to file a “drug report” when a patient was prescribed narcotics for longer than three weeks, because “public security is endangered by chronic alkaloid abuse in almost every case.”23 If a report to that effect came in, two experts examined the patient in question. If they found that hereditary factors were “satisfactory,” immediate compulsory withdrawal was imposed. Although in the Weimar Republic slow or gradual withdrawal had been used, now addicts were to be subjected to the horrors of going cold turkey.24 If assessment of the hereditary factors yielded a negative result, the judge could order confinement for an unspecified duration. Drug users soon ended up in concentration camps.25
Your identity card at the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions could be a matter of life and death. You were defined by a number (as a dealer, prescription forger, Eukodal addict, artist, etc.) and a color (purple: Jew; red: held for drying out, etc.).
Every German was also ordered to “convey observations about drug-addicted acquaintances and family members, so that corrective action can be taken immediately.”26 Filing systems were put in place in order to establish a thorough record, enabling the Nazis to use their war against drugs to feed into a surveillance state quite soon after they came to power. The dictato
rship extended its so-called health leadership into every corner of the Reich: in every administrative district there was an “anti-drug consortium.” Doctors, pharmacists, social security authorities, and representatives of the law such as the army and the police were all involved, as well as members of the National Socialist People’s Welfare, establishing a full-blown anti-drug web. Its threads converged in the Reich Health Office in Berlin, in Principal Department II of the Reich Committee for the People’s Health. A “duty of health” was postulated, which would go hand in hand with the “total containment of all demonstrable physical, social and mental damage that could be inflicted by alcohol and tobacco.” Cigarette advertising was severely restricted, and drug prohibitions were put in place to “block any remaining breaches of moral codes in our people.”27
In autumn 1935 a new Marital Health Law was passed that forbade marriage if one of the parties suffered from a “mental disturbance.” Narcotics addicts were marginalized into this category and were branded as “psychopathic personalities”—without the prospect of a cure. This marriage prohibition was supposed to prevent “infection of the partner, as well as hereditarily conditioned potential for addiction” in children, because among “the descendants of drug addicts an increased rate of mental deviations” had been observed.28 The Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring took compulsory sterilization to its brutal conclusion: “For reasons of racial hygiene we must therefore see to it that severe addicts are prevented from reproducing.”29
Worse was to follow. Under the guise of “euthanasia,” those considered “criminally insane,” a category including drug users, would be murdered in the first years of the war. The precise number of those affected is impossible to reconstruct.30 31 Of crucial importance to their fate was the assessment on their file card: a plus (+) meant a lethal injection or the gas chamber, a minus (–) meant a deferral. If an overdose of morphine was used for the killing it came from the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions, which had emerged from the Berlin Drug Squad in 1936 as the first Reich-wide drug police authority. Among the “selecting doctors” a mood of “intoxicating superiority” prevailed.32 The anti-drug policy served as a vehicle for the exclusion and suppression, even the destruction, of marginal groups and minorities.
Anti-Drug Policy as Anti-Semitic Policy
The Jew has used the most refined means to poison the mind and the soul of German people, and to guide thought along an un-German path which inevitably led to doom. . . . Removing this Jewish infection, which could lead to a national disease and to the death of the people, is also a duty of our health leadership.
—Medical Journal for Lower Saxony, 193933
From the outset, the racist terminology of National Socialism was informed by linguistic images of infection and poison, by the topos of toxicity. Jews were equated with bacilli or pathogens. They were described as foreign bodies and said to be poisoning the Reich, making the healthy social organism ill, so they had to be eradicated or exterminated. Hitler said: “There is no longer any compromise, because such a thing would be poison to us.”34
In fact the poison lay in the language itself, which dehumanized the Jews as a preliminary stage to their subsequent murder. The Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935 and the introduction of the Ahnenpass (Proof of Aryan Ancestry) manifested the demand for purity of the blood—this was seen as one of the supreme goods of the people, and one most in need of protection. Needless to say, this produced a point of intersection between anti-Semitic propaganda and anti-drug policy. It was not the dose that determined the poison, but the category of foreignness. Propagated as the standard work on the subject, the central, entirely unscientific thesis of the book Magische Gifte (“Magic Poisons”) posits: “The greatest toxic effect is always produced by narcotics alien to the country and the race.”35 Jews and drugs merged into a single toxic or epidemiological unit that menaced Germany: “For decades our people have been told by Marxists and Jews: ‘Your body belongs to you.’ That was taken to mean that at social occasions between men, or between men and women, any quantities of alcohol could be enjoyed, even at the cost of the body’s health. Irreconcilable with this Jewish Marxist view is the Teutonic German idea that we are the bearers of the eternal legacy of our ancestors, and that accordingly our body belongs to the clan and the people.”36
SS Haupsturmführer Criminal Commissar Erwin Kosmehl, who was from 1941 director of the Reich Central Office for Combating Drug Transgressions, asserted that “Jews play a supreme part” in the international drug trade. His work was concerned with “eliminating international criminals who often have roots in Jewry.”37 The Nazi Party’s Office of Racial Policy claimed that the Jewish character was essentially drug-dependent: the intellectual urban Jew preferred cocaine or morphine to calm his constantly “excited nerves” and give himself a feeling of peace and inner security. Jewish doctors were rumored to be “often extraordinarily addicted to morphine.”38
In the anti-Semitic children’s book Der Giftpilz (“The Poisonous Mushroom”) the National Socialists combined their twin bogeymen, Jews and drugs, into racial-hygiene propaganda that was used in schools and nurseries.39 The story was exemplary, the message perfectly clear: the dangerous poison mushrooms had to be eradicated.
While the selection strategies in the battle against drugs were directed against an alien power that was perceived as threatening, in National Socialism they almost automatically had anti-Semitic connotations. Anyone who consumed drugs suffered from a “foreign plague.” Drug dealers were presented as unscrupulous, greedy, or alien; drug use as “racially inferior”; and so-called drug crimes as one of the greatest threats to society.40
It is frightening how familiar many of these terms still sound today. While we have driven out other Nazi verbal monstrosities, the terminology of the war on drugs has lingered. It’s no longer a matter of Jews—the dangerous dealers are now said to be part of different cultural circles. The extremely political question of whether our bodies belong to us or to a legal-social network of social and health-related interests remains a virulent one even today.
Mixing an anti-drug campaign and anti-Semitism—even in a children’s book. “Just as poisonous mushrooms are often difficult to tell from good mushrooms, it is often difficult to recognize the Jews and confidence tricksters and criminals.”
The Celebrity Doctor of Kurfürstendamm
The word “JEW” was smeared on the plaque of a doctor’s surgery on Bayreuther Strasse in Berlin’s Charlottenburg district one night in 1933. The name of the doctor, a specialist in dermatological and sexually transmitted diseases, was illegible. Only the opening hours could still be clearly seen: “Weekdays 11–1 and 5–7 apart from Saturday afternoon.” The overweight, bald Dr. Theodor Morell reacted to the attack in a way that was as typical as it was wretched: he quickly joined the Nazi Party to defuse future hostilities of that kind. Morell was not a Jew; the SA had wrongly suspected him of being one because of his dark complexion.41
After he had registered as a Party member, Morell’s practice became even more successful. It expanded and moved into the lavish rooms of a nineteenth-century building on the corner of Kurfürstendamm and Fasanenstrasse. You joined, you flourished—that was a lesson Morell would never forget, right until the end. The fat man from Hessen hadn’t the slightest interest in politics. The satisfaction that made his life worthwhile came when a patient felt better after treatment, obediently paid the fee, and came back as soon as possible. Morell had developed strategies over the years that gave him advantages over the other doctors on Kurfürstendamm with whom he vied for well-to-do clients. His smart private practice was soon seen as one of the most profitable in the area. Equipped with the most up-to-date technology—all originally bought with the fortune of his wife, Hanni—over time it had the whole of high society beating a path to the door of Morell, a former ship’s doctor in the tropics. Whether it was the boxer Max Schmeling, various counts and ambassadors, successful athletes, busi
ness magnates, high-powered scientists, politicians, half of the film world: everyone made the pilgrimage to Dr. Morell, who specialized in new kinds of treatment, or—as some mocking tongues had it—in the treatment of nonexistent illnesses.
There was one field in which this modish, egocentric doctor was considered a pioneer: vitamins. Little was known at the time about these invisible helpers, which the body itself can’t produce but which it urgently needs for certain metabolic processes. Injected directly into the blood, vitamin supplements work wonders in cases of undernourishment. This was precisely Morell’s strategy for keeping his patients interested, and if vitamins weren’t enough, he deftly added a circulatory stimulant to the injection mixture. For male patients he might include some testosterone with an anabolic effect for muscle building and potency, for women an extract of nightshade as an energy supplement and for hypnotically beautiful eyes. If a melancholy theatrical actress came to see him to get rid of stage fright before her premiere in the Admiralspalast, Morell wouldn’t hesitate for a moment, but would reach with his hairy hands for the syringe. He was said to be an absolute master of the injection needle, and there were even rumors that it was impossible to feel the prick as his needle went in—in spite of the size of the implements at the time.