by Norman Ohler
While the tanks were trundling over the enemy, in his isolation in the Felsennest Morell became plagued by fears for his livelihood. Others in Hitler’s inner circle, such as the photographer Hoffmann, profited greatly from the successes of the Third Reich, and a kind of modern robber-baronhood had spread among the leadership clique. Morell, however, only received a basic income of three thousand reichsmarks a month for his treatments of Hitler, including medical treatment of his adjutants. “As all the other gentlemen are less free, I always sit on my own. . . . If it were not for the Führer, I would sometimes be glad to be at home. I’m about to turn fifty-four,” he complained in a letter to his wife, lamenting that his villa in Schwanenwerder “can only be maintained with a large steady income, so I must either earn a great deal from medicine or get myself an income from chemicals/pharmaceuticals.”* 88 It was the latter course of action that he would take in the end, with wide-ranging effects, not only for his patient.
The Miracle of Dunkirk—A Pharmacological Interpretation
We shall have lost almost all our trained soldiers within the next few days—unless a miracle appears to help us.
—General Edmund Ironside, chief of the Imperial General Staff89
On Tuesday, May 20, 1940, a courier aircraft from the propaganda ministry landed at the Felsennest, bringing the latest issue of the Wochenschau, the weekly newsreel produced under Goebbels’s instructions. Hitler walked down the hill to Hack, the village pub. There he sat down in the side room, watched the reel three times in a row, and dictated the changes he wanted. Then he showered in the bathhouse opposite and was driven back to his headquarters.90 The next morning the broadcast went back to Berlin, and from ten o’clock on Thursday morning it flickered across the screens of all the premier cinemas on the Kurfürstendamm. Of course, the Wochenschau edition of May 22, 1940, wasn’t about pep pills. It was about the “German sword, which is writing a new page of history,” about “the indomitable Aryan fighting spirit.”91
By now Guderian had occupied Abbeville, a major town on the Somme River. All French, British, and Belgian troops north of the “sickle cut” were thus cut off from all the units stationed farther south, and there was only one open Atlantic port, one last chance of escape: Dunkirk. Again Guderian worked faster than his enemies. It would take him no more than a few days to block the last escape route and thus encircle a million Allied soldiers. These squaddies were in fact a good sixty miles away, fighting the 6th and 18th Armies, exposed without protection to the deadly danger behind them. After only ten fighting days the British Empire was close to its downfall.
That morning Göring was a guest of Hitler’s at the Felsennest. Following the stomach injury that he had received during the storming of the Munich Feldherrenhalle in 1923, the second most important man in the state had developed a severe morphine addiction.92 Before he left his bedroom, “Möring,” as he was secretly nicknamed, took his craftsman-made syringe with its gold ring out of its light-brown deer-hide case, pulled it open as usual, drew back the sleeve of his green velvet dressing gown as he always did, bound his arm, narrowed his eyes to find the right spot, and gave himself a massive injection. It took only a few seconds for the morphine to enter his blood. A huge ruby brooch glittered spectacularly on his chest. Göring’s eyes were now big and gleaming, pierced with pinprick pupils. The world lay at his feet, and in his blissfully opium-soaked brain he decided that the glorious victory over the Allies should under no circumstances be left to the arrogant leaders of the army. The German generals, Göring feared, would otherwise win such respect among the people that they might undermine his own position as well as Hitler’s. It also seemed to be a praiseworthy task for the Luftwaffe: defeating enemy troops from above. His pilots just needed an open target—the Wehrmacht tanks had to retreat a bit to stay out of the danger zone. Göring nodded at this idea, which struck him as quite brilliant. As an indescribable feeling of well-being from the morphine rushed through him, he replaced his red pointed slippers with black high-sided boots and stamped out into the forest.
Beneath blossoming maple trees Hitler listened to his deputy’s idea over porridge, muesli, and apple tea. The two former fellow comrades trusted each other blindly. Hitler felt he was on the same wavelength with “Möring,” in a way that he wasn’t with the Pervitinated generals. For him, the “National Socialist Luftwaffe” was philosophically superior to the “Prussian Army.” So he agreed with his Reich Marshal’s haphazard suggestion and used the opportunity to eliminate the army supreme command as planned and impose his “Führer principle.” That morning he flew to Charleville, to the headquarters of Army Group A. At 12:45 an order was issued that still puzzles historians even today. It is the ominous Dunkirk “Halt Order,” which cannot be explained rationally.
When the British noticed that German tanks were stopping, they could hardly believe their luck. An unparalleled evacuation situation began straightaway, and everyone hurried toward Dunkirk. Within a very short time hundreds of rescue ships arrived: Royal Navy destroyers and other warships, launches, even packet steamers and confiscated private yachts, Thames barges—a colorfully assorted armada ceaselessly coming and going. The Allied troops crossed makeshift bridges made of lorries with planks laid on the top and made their getaway through the miraculous loophole of Dunkirk.
Guderian could only stand and watch. Through his binoculars he observed what was going on in the port town, into which the unstoppable stream of British and French soldiers was flowing. But he couldn’t advance, even though Göring’s high-handed plan to snatch victory from the air was a failure from the very beginning. The Reich Marshal had overestimated himself in his morphine dream. Now his Stukas were sinking over a thousand of the British rescue boats, but at the end of May clouds had gathered and obstructed their view. The Royal Air Force, whose bases were much closer, also played their trump card now: suddenly Spitfires appeared from above and conquered the sky. The commander in chief of the army, Brauchitsch, stood in the map house of the Felsennest, about to have a nervous breakdown. He devoutly implored Hitler to be allowed to strike again and bring the campaign to an end. But the dictator refused to budge. He would show the army. He and no one else would wage this war. Over 340,000 British, French, and Belgian soldiers escaped in this way. At the very last second the Allies averted a total defeat. Manstein, the inventor of the “sickle cut,” later called it a “lost victory.” When Guderian was finally able to enter Dunkirk at 9:40 on June 4, after ten days of incomprehensible waiting, all he found was the equipment that the British left behind: vast numbers of cars, trucks, and motorcycles; 475 tanks; many artillery pieces; huge quantities of ammunition and handguns—as well as the 80,000 French soldiers who did not get a spot on the British ships. What was also left was a bombed-out, smoking silhouette, a charred black carcass of a town that seemed to be laughing at him. The British had got their heads out of the noose.
The battle for Flanders was over, the first phase of the Western campaign at an end, finished. Contrary to later accounts, it had never been conceived consistently as a Blitzkrieg, but had, after the breakthrough at Sedan, boosted by the large-scale use of Pervitin on the German side, developed a dynamic of its own that was countered only by Hitler, who didn’t understand its speed. Regardless, the dictator claimed the victory as his own personal triumph. In future, in spite of his Halt Order, with its far-reaching consequences, he would see himself as infallible, and his entourage acted out this farce with varying degrees of enthusiasm. In the German press the campaign was presented as “the most astonishing event in all of military history, because in fact something was made possible that had, not without reason, been considered impossible.”93 Wilhelm Keitel, head of Wehrmacht High Command, described Hitler, after this “greatest military victory of all time,” as the “greatest commander of all time” (“grösster Feldherrn aller Zeiten”), which later, when Hitler’s startling weaknesses as supreme commander became all too obvious, was mockingly shortened to Gröfaz.94
The Dealer for the Wehrmacht
I had ordered you not to sleep for forty-eight hours. You kept going for seventeen days.
—Heinz Guderian95
Berlin, June 6, 1940: pale rain cut the deep-black stormy sky into strips, bounced off the bodywork of the cars, buses, and taxis, the raincoats of the pedestrians, pearled on caps, hats, and umbrellas. The forced euphoria of a news announcer rattled from the loudspeaker of the brand-new car radio, a Telefunken T655, announcing that the German troops were on the edge of Paris. “Ich bin wie ich bin” by Arne Hülphers and his orchestra now rang out inside the official car, while outside the advertising slogan “Persil bleibt Persil,” in bright-green neon letters, glittered in the dancing puddles.
At 10:52 p.m. Ranke’s train set off for the West from Anhalter Station; he had decided to drive to the front to investigate Pervitin use and to bring fresh supplies. His war diary for the next few weeks, preserved in the Freiburg Military Archive, gives an unadorned insight into the second phase of the campaign, concerned with the French heartland, the operation called Fall Rot (Case Red). Often Ranke’s sentences are choppy and the descriptions overhasty, full of abbreviations. They always involve a considerable quantity of methamphetamine: “14.6.40 Friday 9 a.m.: discussion with Lieutenant Colonel Kretschmar about military situation. Knows precisely, takes 2 tabs c. every 2nd day, finds it fabulous, is fresh afterward without subsequent tiredness, no mental underachievement on Pervitin, expressly confirmed in response to question from me.”96
A typically cagey note to the Temmler Works from the army during the Battle of France: “The Wehrmacht’s experience of using Pervitin has not yet reached any definitive conclusions. For military reasons it is also currently impossible to communicate these experiences.”
On Ranke’s personal Tour de France, in the course of which he covered over 2,500 miles, traveled along the sea, through the cities, and over the mountains, drugs played the decisive part. It is telling that he accompanied the most senior army officers, the Blitzkrieg inventors of Panzer Group von Kleist: Guderian and Rommel. Ranke was always wherever the most methamphetamine was being taken, where everyone was hopped up and needed him—because he had a serious quantity of hard drugs on him, which he willingly distributed: “16.6.40 Sunday: just before the planned departure my car appears with driver Holt, who couldn’t find us during the night. Hurrah. Packing 40,000 Pervitin. Set off 11 a.m. to XIV Army Corps, first chocolate (me at wheel), in Lormes market square 1 cup coffee, on to Montesauche. I ate only a box of biscuits all day.”97
Often on his explorations Ranke had his camera at the ready. His most frequent subject is initially surprising. He took pictures of sleeping people: soldiers stretched out on the grass beside a utility vehicle, slumbering drivers in their cars, officers who have fallen asleep in armchairs, a staff sergeant in a deck chair under a tree. The pictures seem to want to prove that Morpheus, Ranke’s archenemy, still hadn’t been defeated, but had to be caught in the crosshairs . . . with Pervitin, of course.
The external enemy caused fewer problems: when Paris fell into German hands in mid-June, the French Army put up no resistance. The picture that France presented during those days was a gruesome one: “Fields of rubble, charred cars, and dead horses in big squares surrounded by singed trees. Burned-out tanks and houses. On the retreat routes of the British and the French there lay a motley jumble of equipment, including abandoned gun mounts, defective tanks, etc., and on either side of the road retreating men, mostly on bicycles, packed with the bare minimum of belongings.”98
Ranke’s superior, Army Medical Inspector Waldmann, also traveled to the warzone and praised Pervitin without directly specifying it: “Maginot Front broken through. Extraordinary marching achievements: 60–80 km! Extra supplies, increased performance. Evacuation—all much better than 1918.”99 In this war the German troops dashed over the summer countryside with unparalleled speed. Rommel, who by now was avoiding roads to go round the last French defense positions, often drove cross-country, and on June 17, 1940, traveling 150 miles, established a kind of “military world record.” The head of the Luftwaffe staff noted: “The marching achievements are incredible.”100
In mid-June, Guderian reached the Swiss border at Pontarlier. The remaining half a million French soldiers standing on the Maginot Line were now also encircled, and the German Reich’s victory over its neighbor definitive. Only Hitler didn’t understand the speed with which everything was happening: “Your message is a mistake,” he cabled his general. “It must mean Pontailler-sur-Saône.” Guderian had to clarify: “No mistake. I myself am in Pontarlier on the Swiss border.”101 The speed of the thrust is clear from the account of a German war reporter:
The tanks, the artillery, the anti-aircraft guns, the supply columns come rolling in without interruption. Even at night we feel our way along the country road. No one thinks of sleep. A little piece of chocolate replaces lunch. On we head! We’ve now driven 300 kilometers in convoy, some of it across cornfields, meadows and ploughed land. Only the people behind the wheel can say what that means. Really, our drivers have done some incredible things over the last few days. We were so fast, the French population had no time to get away. “You Germans dash across the country like a whirlwind,” said one civilian. “A few days ago in Calais, and now in the South of France already.” He could only shake his head.102
It wasn’t just chocolate that replaced lunch, as the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger claimed. It was also the little round pills from Temmler; they drove away the feeling of hunger. Ranke, who was driving with Guderian and who had traveled over three hundred miles in just three days, was given confirmation by a medical officer of the Panzer troop that units were using between two and five Pervitin tablets per driver per day. German propaganda, however, tried to depict the surprisingly fast victory as proof of the morale of the National Socialists, but this had little bearing on reality. Ranke’s military medical diary is proof that other forces were involved, chemical ones: “Senior Staff Doctor Krummacher has experience with Pervitin. He introduces me to Colonel Stockhausen. . . . Signed out with Lieutenant Colonel Kretschmar, who insistently requests Pervitin. . . . Since the start of the campaign he has used a tube of 30 tabs apart from 6 tabs.”103
After seventeen days awake: sleeping after the Blitzkrieg.
Ranke wrote of Otto Kretschmer, the senior quartermaster of Panzer Group von Kleist, who was responsible for supplies, that he “was allowed several times by Pervitin to go on working in spite of being tired. He emphasized the positive effect on the mood, and also stressed that he always carried out difficult work that required strong concentration.”104
Mostly it was the “General Staff officers . . . who knew and valued Pervitin and asked me for it.” With Rommel’s leading medical officer, Senior Physician Wilhelm Baumeister, Ranke had “a detailed and gratifying conversation about Pervitin, science.” The Waffen-SS, who liked to boast of their fighting ability, couldn’t do without the medication either: “Set off 10 o’clock via the reconnaissance route of the 10th Panzer Division. Took pictures of the SS, very disciplined in spite of long journey. Dropped off 2000 Pervitin there with troop doctor.”105
Side-effects of the pharmacological mass abuse were also observed, but Ranke himself didn’t notice them—or he decided not to mention them in his notes. Older officers from the age of forty felt the effects of the use of meth on their hearts. One colonel with the 12th Panzer Division who was known to “take a lot of Pervitin”106 died of a heart attack while swimming in the Atlantic. One captain also had a cardiac arrest after using Pervitin at a stag party. A lieutenant general complained of fatigue during long periods of fighting and took Pervitin before driving to the front to join the infantry, against medical advice. There he suffered a collapse. A lieutenant colonel with Panzer Ersatz Division 1, who during the battles had “for four weeks taken daily 2 times 2 tabs Pervitin,” complained of heart pains and stressed in his report that his “blood circulation had been perfectly normal before th
e use of Pervitin.” He describes the prescribed mass drug use in critical terms: “Pervitin was delivered officially before the start of the operation and distributed to the officers all the way down to the company commander for their own use and to be passed on to the troops below them with the clear instruction that it was to be used to keep them awake in the imminent operation. There was a clear order that the Panzer troop had to use Pervitin.”107 Another staff officer made it known that he had taken four tablets of Pervitin on each of his thirty-three days of fighting within a month and a half. After that he was unfit for duty because of “chronic high blood pressure.”108 Dependencies also came to light. More and more men were fighting with the aftereffects of the drug, which could include low drive and depression. The longer they spent on meth, the less dopamine and serotonin was released in the brain. The worse the individual felt, the more he took to balance it out.
Ranke ignored all of this. The scientist, considered unimpeachable at his institute at the Military Medical Academy, whitewashed the inquiries into the stimulant prepared for Berlin. At the same time he revealed his own, very personal inadequacy: he knew the drug better than anybody, and he was aware of its dangers, but he had become dependent upon it and played down the negative effects both to himself and to others. A classic case of an addicted dealer.
War and Vitamins