The beauty of Pervitin lay in the delightful feelings of euphoria, self-confidence and sharp mental focus it gave its users. It could also banish sleep for up to 48 hours or more. This made the drug especially useful during the invasion of Poland in September 1939 and then again in the rapid offensive by tanks through the Ardennes Mountains in May 1940. Officers and military doctors provided a torrent of appreciative testimonials. “I’m convinced that in big pushes, where the last drop has to be squeezed from the team, a unit supplied with Pervitin is superior.” Pervitin’s effects were deemed “fabulous.” Ohler writes of the French campaign: “In less than 100 hours the Germans gained more territory than they had in over four years in the First World War.” Winston Churchill, he records, was “dumbfounded.”

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The strengths of Ohler’s account lie not only in the rich array of rare documents he mines and the archival images he reproduces to accompany the text, but also in his character studies. One such character is Otto F. Ranke, the head of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology and the key player in liaising between Temmler and the armed forces, who was himself becoming steadily more habituated and experiencing alarming side effects from Pervitin overdose. Ohler’s portrait of Ranke, based on a close analysis of his correspondence and notes from the field, is persuasive, even if the larger conclusions Ohler draws are unsubstantiated. For whether the availability of Pervitin was simply a supplemental aid or whether it provides an essential explanation for the success of the blitzkrieg approach remains an open question.

Similar problems arise in the other major tale at the heart of “Blitzed”: Hitler’s own journey into addiction (or in Ohler’s terms, his “polytoxicomania”). Here the prime character is Theodor Morell, Hitler’s private physician, a slick and fawning charlatan. Ever anxious to keep his patient in top form, first for the Nazis’ huge open-air rallies and later for vital meetings with top generals or world leaders, Morell plied Hitler not only with sundry quack remedies but also with near-daily injections. Initially these consisted of glucose and multivitamins for rapid energy. But by the fall of 1941, when Hitler briefly fell ill, they additionally included steroids and hormonal concoctions made from pigs’ livers and other animal offal. And in the summer of 1943, in the run-up to a crucial Axis summit, Morell introduced the opioid Eukodal, a drug Ohler describes as a “pharmacological cousin” to heroin. Once hooked, Hitler asked for it frequently. Eventually he was on an ever-varying cocktail of about 80 substances, more than a dozen of them psychoactive. But it is above all Eukodal that Ohler sees as the key to Hitler’s ever more implausible megalomaniac overconfidence and buoyancy in the face of one military setback after another.

Ohler effectively captures Hitler’s pathetic dependence on his doctor and the bizarre intimacy of their bond. His suggestion that Hitler had, by the end of his life, become a “junkie” in the throes of addiction and withdrawal is a proposition that should be considered seriously. But while “Blitzed” repeatedly tacks back and forth between the medicating of the supreme commander and the major mistakes of judgment with regard to military tactics that characterized his conduct of the war, the connections between events remain unclear.