#2183 - Norman Ohler

Joe Rogan (0:00)

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SPEAKER_2 (1:05)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

SPEAKER_3 (1:07)

Shrain by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

Joe Rogan (1:14)

Pleasure to meet you.

Norman Ohler (1:15)

I'm very happy to be here. I'm actually quite thrilled.

Joe Rogan (1:18)

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?

Norman Ohler (1:32)

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

The Nazis were really into math 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 Blitzed. 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 non-fiction 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 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 a very serious archive because they host like all the documents, what the SS did in Dachau.

So 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 pseudo-science. So I found documents while I was researching Blitzed relating to tests with psychoactive substances. And that was like, that was not what I expected because the Nazis had been enthusiastic about methamphetamine, but I had 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. I need to get to the bottom of this. So I asked the archivist, can I see like all the documents? What did the SS actually do with psychedelics? Which ones did they use? Why did they test them? What were they looking for? And he said, well, I'm very sorry, but all documents are in America, because when American military liberated Dachau, one of the things they do is they take a lot of documents, and they took all the psychedelic research done by the Nazis with them. So I knew I had to go to America, probably to the National Archives in College Park, close to Washington, biggest archive in the world, find it there. But I didn't have time while I was doing Blitzed. And Blitzed was also already a complete story. So I thought, I save that psychedelic theme for another book. And this other book is now being published as Tripped.

Joe Rogan (4:13)

Wow.

So before this, you had no understanding that the Nazis had used psychedelics. You only knew that they... We all know that the meth thing, and we've seen Hitler at the 36 Olympics, where he's rocking back and forth, or he's jacked out of his mind.

Norman Ohler (4:30)

I mean, the joke about Blitzed is that I was actually the first one to write about this. I mean, now we all know about it, but before that, no one knew about it. Before 2015, when this book was published in Germany, the Nazis were still seen globally and also in Germany as this pure movement that was... I spoke to my grandfather when I was a teenager, and I was obviously criticizing him for his involvement. I wanted to know what did he do, and he did some shit. Then he always said, under Hitler, everything was in order. He praised that law and order aspect. That law and order aspect of the Nazis obviously doesn't correspond to a drug-using society. No one knew that the Nazis were taking drugs until I found documents for Blitzed.