Joe Rogan Experience #2183 - Norman Ohler

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. (drumbeats)

Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (rock music plays) 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.

(laughs)

Uh, 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-

Blitzed.

... Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. And, um, I mean, the Nazis were really into meth basically. They were the first ones to understand that methamphetamine can be... can change the war effort. They, they basically doped their soldiers. So that was an interesting story that I told in Blitzed and also, uh, I, I spoke about Hitler's consumption, which is quite outrageous actually. And while I was doing the research, I was in many archives because, um, I'm not a historian. I, I, I usually write novels. I started out writing three novels and then suddenly I became a nonfiction writer. I, I, I was, I was trying to understand what does that mean, and I, 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.

Mm.

But to actually go into the archive is very time-consuming, but I thought everyone does that. Actually, no one does that.

(laughs)

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. And so it's a, it's an intense experience to go to that archive and actually look at... Because they, they wrote down everything, like every experiment the, the Nazis did in concentration camps was like written down because it was like pseudoscience. 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, 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, that's quite strange, that's quite interesting obviously.

Mm.

I need to get to the bottom of this, so I asked the archivist, "Can I see like all the, 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, 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, that psychedelic theme for another book, and this other book is now being published as Tripped.