Norman Ohler
Norman Ohler is an award-winning German novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. He spent five years researching Blitzed in numerous archives in Germany and the United States, and spoke to eyewitnesses, military historians, and doctors. He is also the author of the novels Die Quotenmaschine (the world’s first hypertext novel), Mitte, and Stadt des Goldes (translated into English as Ponte City). He was cowriter of the script for Wim Wenders’ film Palermo Shooting. Visit him online at www.NormanOhler.com.
All Books By Norman Ohler
Blitzed
- By: Norman Ohler
- Narrator: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
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4.05(9637 ratings)
The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs.
On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact, troops regularly took rations of a form of crystal meth–the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to explain certain German military victories.
Drugs seeped all the way up to the Nazi high command and, especially, to Hitler himself. Over the course of the war, Hitler became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs–including a form of heroin–administered by his personal doctor, Dr. Morell.
While drugs alone cannot explain the Nazis’ toxic racial theories or the events of World War II, Ohler’s investigation makes an overwhelming case that, if drugs are not taken into account, our understanding of the Third Reich is fundamentally incomplete. Carefully researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws surprising light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.
... Read moreThe Bohemians
- By: Norman Ohler
- Narrator: Peter Ganim
- Length: 11 hours 50 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: July 14, 2020
- Language: English
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4.07(89 ratings)
“A detailed and meticulously researched tale… that reads like a thriller.”—New York Times Book Review
From the New York Times best-selling author of Blitzed, the incredible true story of two idealistic young lovers who led the anti-Nazi resistance in the darkening heart of Berlin
Summertime, 1935. On a lake near Berlin, a young man is out sailing when he glimpses a woman reclining in the prow of a passing boat. Their eyes meet—and one of history’s greatest conspiracies is born.
 
Harro Schulze-Boysen already had shed blood in the fight against Nazism by the time he and Libertas Haas-Heye began their whirlwind romance. She joined the cause, and soon the two lovers were leading a network of antifascist fighters that stretched across Berlin’s bohemian underworld. Harro himself infiltrated German intelligence and began funneling Nazi battle plans to the Allies, including the details of Hitler’s surprise attack on the Soviet Union. But nothing could prepare Harro and Libertas for the betrayals they would suffer in this war of secrets—a struggle in which friend could be indistinguishable from foe. Drawing on unpublished diaries, letters, and Gestapo files, Norman Ohler spins an unforgettable tale of love, heroism, and sacrifice in The Bohemians.