KGBoy

I have been practising ambush tactics in heavy forest cover. The scenario I am working from in this case is Boy's vs. Men from CMBN. Spoilers follow! Forest settings create a set of way points that more resemble star constellations than a grid. Unfortunate gaps and disastrous clumping (1 grenade and ouch!) can result. In this case, a fair hard obstacle run and short set up time before the Axis shows. I've been trying to add the screen shot but for some reason I am only allow 53k which is too low resolution. Will try a follow up to begin. Hopefully...

What I have tried to do (sometimes successful) is to delay the entry into the field of fire till late in the minute. You have more control on the exit with target sighted. Often doesn't work but lessens kill odds a bit. Anyone have reload stats based on experience? Panzerfausts can be quick!

Sheds or outhouses (can't figure which they are) work!

There is book and here is a review ICYMI Allies heard the good news and developed their own versions. I recently ran across articles on American hopes for a Manchurian Candidate scenario which led to some simply appalling and inhumane experimenting on hapless individuals. Could find it if interested...

Very good idea V!

That's pretty cool chuckdyke. Vey small incremental move.

Thanks all!

Watching a Bill Hardenberger tip he stated the partial hull down was acceptable. At any rate I stopped worrying about it after that. Probably means full hull down not possible considering the cover? If both were available full hull down would happen prior to partial, I assume. That is logical one hopes!

That is what happens. I am amazed at the older movies I can dredge up and then they start showing more. Mind, in Canada the selection is considerably less. They seem to have gotten a load of Russian shows more recently. Hence the eastern front focus. However only a Russian could watch an 8 part drama series based on Dostovesky's life and be happy.

Most interesting and fair enough and much appreciated! Still doesn't explain the inability to walk through a properly blasted opening to the other side on the second pic. What is stopping them? Dark matter?

The most harrowing 4 part Einsatzgruppen is on Netflix.

Yes. That is what I have found. When watching playback the front gun could be firing madly but the other is seeing nothing and still managing to get shot. Tried putting the HT parallel to the target. Oops!

First I have seen of it is the CMBN scenario A Strange Awakening. Looks cool but how do you get them both to fire? Does the 2nd MG only fire when running away? I prefer back up when running away in a Halftrack. I tried targeting with with the Halftrack and then also targeting with the men inside but to no avail.

Very good to know ASL (and not ALS like I want to keep typing).

Here's another no go in the same scenario but across the street from the previous. 2 teams blasting. One, the wall the other, the house. Both blasts are successful but neither team wants to walk through the opening. Each will run to where the other is but only by circling around to the front and thereby dies in a hot zone. In this one I tried blasting the wall to the house instead of the wall but the result is the same -- a no go. Scenario is Linking Up and Breaking Out. One of my faves. Except for this!

Yes, I think you are correct. Good eye!

Door on the right is a door whereas door on the left is not. Team runs out of right door and then runs around the house and enters left door house from the front. Rather that should be tried to enter as they all wound up on the casualty list. Must be something about sitting asymmetrically to the grid square.

om Fortress Crete Colin Thubron Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped a German general in the mountains of Greece during World War II. Was it worth it? March 11, 2021 issue Books Discussed in This Article: Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete by Patrick Leigh Fermor, with a foreword by Roderick Bailey New York Review Books, 206 pp., $24.95 The Cretan Runner: His Story of the German Occupation by George Psychoundakis, translated from the Greek and with an introduction by Patrick Leigh Fermor New York Review Books, 330 pp., $19.95 (paper) Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure by Artemis Cooper New York Review Books, 448 pp., $19.95 (paper) Estate of William Stanley Moss/Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive/National Library of Scotland Patrick Leigh Fermor and William Stanley Moss (top row, second and third from left) with ­other members of the group that abducted the German general Heinrich Kreipe, Crete, April 1944 In one of the most audacious feats of World War II, two British undercover agents and a group of Greek partisans in Nazi-occupied Crete kidnapped General Heinrich Kreipe, the commander of the German garrison’s foremost division. Over eighteen days, with a net of enemy troops tightening around them, they marched him across the island’s mountains to be transported on a motor launch to Egypt. “Of all the stories that have come out of the War,” a radio announcer declared triumphantly, “this is the one which schoolboys everywhere will best remember.” The exploit was celebrated in 1950 by its deputy leader William Stanley Moss in his book Ill Met by Moonlight, which became a popular movie produced and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The leader of the operation, Patrick Leigh Fermor (played onscreen by Dirk Bogarde), was to become a legendary figure in postwar Britain and Greece, as well as the most revered travel writer of his generation. But his full account of the action, Abducting a General: The Kreipe Operation in Crete, wasn’t published until several years after he died. Beside its sheer drama and the frequent fineness of Leigh Fermor’s writing, the story resonates with half-answered questions. Was the exploit worth it? What, if any, was its strategic effect? Above all, were the atrocities visited afterward on Cretan villages by the Germans an act of vengeance for the abduction? Recent years have seen a surge of interest in Leigh Fermor’s life and work. Since his death in 2011, a fine, full-scale biography by Artemis Cooper has appeared; his archive at the National Library of Scotland has been mined for new material; and two volumes of his letters, Dashing for the Post and More Dashing, in which he recounts inter alia his periodic returns to Crete, were edited by Adam Sisman. On the last of these journeys, in 1982, Leigh Fermor was delighted—and perhaps relieved—at his rapturous reception from his Cretan comrades-in-arms, still inhabiting his wartime haunts: whiskery old men now, who feasted him mountainously for days. Their memories are long and bitter. The Nazi occupation of Crete, and of all Greece, was a particularly brutal one, in which perhaps 9 percent of the nation’s population perished, and almost the entire Jewish population of the island, destined for death camps, was drowned when their transport ship was mistakenly torpedoed by a British submarine. Hundreds of villages, including many in Crete, were razed. These memories have recently surfaced again in the rhetoric of Greek politicians. Germany, ironically, is Greece’s main creditor. In protesting German stringency in the face of their towering debt, the Greeks raised the old question of war reparations, maintained by Germany to have been settled in 1990. In 2015 the Greeks demanded a further $303 billion for damaged infrastructure, war crimes, and repayment of a Nazi-enforced loan from Greece to Germany. The present Greek prime minister has pursued this less stridently than his predecessor, but the demand remains. This rankling bitterness would not have surprised those members of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) who operated undercover in the Cretan mountains, and who witnessed firsthand the Greek hatred of their oppressors. Part of Leigh Fermor’s motive in producing his own account of Kreipe’s abduction was to pay tribute to the intransigent courage and resolve of the local inhabitants. Yet the writing of the operation originated by chance. In 1966 the editor of Purnell’s History of the Second World War, an anthology of feature-length essays, commissioned Leigh Fermor to record the operation in five thousand words. But Leigh Fermor was not one for shortcuts, and he produced over 30,000 words, almost a year late. Eventually a version appeared in Purnell’s History, stripped down by a professional journalist, and shorn of most of the color, drama, and anecdote that characterized the original. It is easy to see how this original—published as Abducting a General —exasperated the Purnell’s History editor. From the start, although it records every tactical move, it reads more like a vivid and expansive adventure story than a military report. On the night of February 5, 1944, signal fires glitter on a narrow Cretan plateau as Leigh Fermor parachutes out of a converted British bomber. It is the start of things going wrong. Clouds close in, and his fellow officer “Billy” Moss cannot drop down after him. It is two months before they rendezvous on the island’s southern shore, after Moss has arrived from Egypt by motor launch. Leigh Fermor was twenty-nine, Moss only twenty-two, but both had seen hard war service. Moss, a captain in the Coldstream Guards, had fought in North Africa, but had no previous experience of guerrilla warfare. Leigh Fermor, on the other hand, had already been in Crete fifteen months, disguised as a shepherd, gathering intelligence and organizing resistance. He spoke fluent Greek and had struck up warm friendships among the andartes, the region’s guerrillas. The island where they landed was the formidable German Festung Kreta, Fortress Crete, garrisoned by some 50,000 soldiers, but menaced by a hinterland of lawless mountain villages. The British target at first had been the brutal General Friedrich-Wilhelm Müller (who would be executed for war crimes in 1947). But he had recently been replaced by General Kreipe, a veteran of the eastern front, who for propaganda purposes was considered an equally promising prize. Such a kidnapping would undermine the morale of the German forces, Leigh Fermor wrote; it would inspirit the resistance (which had suffered recent reverses) and prove a setback to the Communist propagandists who were seeking to divide the Greek island as they had the mainland. He proposed to his SOE superiors in Cairo that the action should be “an Anglo-Cretan affair”: It could be done, I urged, with stealth and timing in such a way that both bloodshed, and thus reprisals, would be avoided. (I had only a vague idea how.) To my amazement, the idea was accepted. In a curious lapse of German security, Kreipe was driven unescorted each evening five miles from his divisional headquarters to his fortified residence. At a steep junction in the road Leigh Fermor, Moss, and a selected band of andartes lay in wait after dark until a flashed warning from an accomplice signaled the car’s departure. As the Opel’s headlights approached, the two SOE officers, wearing the stolen uniforms of German corporals, flagged it down with a traffic policeman’s baton. On one side Leigh Fermor saluted and asked in German for identity papers, then wrenched open the door and heaved the general out at gunpoint. On the other, Moss, seeing the chauffeur reach for his revolver, knocked him out and took his place at the wheel. Meanwhile the Cretan guerrillas manacled the general, bundled him into the back of the Opel, and dragged the driver to a ditch. Leigh Fermor put on the general’s hat, three andartes held the general at knifepoint on the seat behind, and Moss drove off in the direction that the enemy would least expect: toward the German stronghold of Heraklion. Along the road, and within the city’s Venetian walls, the general’s car, with its signature mudguard pennants, cruised past raised barriers and saluting sentries. In the blacked-out streets the car’s interior was almost invisible. Moss drove through twenty-two checkpoints. Occasionally Leigh Fermor, his face shadowed under the general’s hat, returned the salutes. Then the car exited the Canea Gate and they went into the night. In the eighteen days that followed, the party often split and reformed. The Opel was abandoned near a bay deep enough to give the impression that a British submarine had spirited the general away. Anxious that no reprisals should be taken against the Cretans, Leigh Fermor pinned a prepared letter to the front seat: Gentlemen, Your Divisional Commander, General Kreipe, was captured a short time ago by a BRITISH Raiding Force under our command. By the time you read this both he and we will be on our way to Cairo. We would like to point out most emphatically that this operation has been carried out without the help of CRETANS or CRETAN partisans and the only guides used were serving soldiers of HIS HELLENIC MAJESTY’S FORCES in the Middle East, who came with us. Your General is an honourable prisoner of war and will be treated with all the consideration owing to his rank. Any reprisals against the local population will thus be wholly unwarranted and unjust. Beneath their signatures they appended a postscript: “We are very sorry to have to leave this beautiful motor car behind.” Other signs of British involvement—Players’ cigarette stubs, a commando beret, an Agatha Christie novel, a Cadbury’s chocolate wrapper—were scattered in the car or nearby. At daybreak the general was hidden in a cave near the rebellious village of Anoyeia. Leigh Fermor was still in German uniform when he entered the village with one of the andartes. “For the first time,” he wrote, I realised how an isolated German soldier in a Cretan mountain village was treated. All talk and laughter died at the washing troughs, women turned their backs and thumped their laundry with noisy vehemence; cloaked shepherds, in answer to greeting, gazed past us in silence; then stood and watched us out of sight. An old crone spat on the ground…. In a moment we could hear women’s voices wailing into the hills: “The black cattle have strayed into the wheat!” and “Our in-laws have come!”—island-wide warnings of enemy arrival. Yet his party’s progress soon came to resemble a royal procession. Guerrilla bands and villagers who recognized what had happened greeted them with jubilation and supplied food, guides, and escorts. But the going was very hard. Thousands of German troops were fanning across the mountains in search of them. Reconnaissance planes showered the country with threatening leaflets. Still, the group vanished from German sight among the goat tracks and canyons east of Mount Ida, whose eight-thousand-foot bulk straddles a quarter of the island. They crossed it in deep snow. The general was a heftily built, rather dull man who trudged with them in reconciled gloom. He was not a brute, like Müller, but the thirteenth child of a Lutheran pastor whose chief worry, at first, was the loss of his Knights’ Cross medal in the scuffle. Sometimes a mule was found for him, but he fell twice, heavily. “I wish I’d never come to this accursed island,” he said. “It was supposed to be a nice change after the Russian front.” On the slopes of Ida one dawn, where the two SOE officers and the general had been sleeping in a cave under the same flea-ridden blanket, Leigh Fermor placed the incident that he celebrated more than thirty years later in his A Time of Gifts. Gazing at the mountain crest across the valley, the general murmured to himself the start of a Horatian ode in Latin. It is one that Leigh Fermor knew (his memory was prodigious), and he completed the ode through its last five stanzas: The general’s blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine—and when I’d finished, after a long silence, he said: “Ach so, Herr Major!” It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together. By now German troops were spreading across the long southern coast, from which the general would most likely be shipped to Egypt on a motor launch or submarine summoned by radio. But the radios and their clandestine operators were forced to relocate continually by German maneuvers, a crucial wireless-charging engine broke down, and messages (carried by runners) quickly became redundant as enemy troops took over remote beaches. Yet Leigh Fermor’s party, sometimes guided by andartes’ beacons, slipped through the tightening cordon, and arrived at the defiant haven of the Amari Valley villages. It was another eight days, far to the west, before they found an undefended beach, made contact with a radio operator and with SOE headquarters in Cairo, and were promised a boat for the following night. In a last, ludicrous hitch, as Leigh Fermor and Moss attempted to flash the agreed Morse code signal for the rendezvous into the dark, they could not remember the code for “B.” But another of the group did; the motor launch returned, and they embarked for Egypt in euphoria, after shedding their boots and weapons for those comrades left behind. It was soon after his capture, on the road beyond Heraklion, that General Kreipe, a tried professional soldier, asked, “Tell me, Major, what is the object of this hussar-stunt?” In Abducting a General Leigh Fermor stresses morale: the blow to German confidence and the boost to Cretan resistance and pride. Immersed as he was in the emotional politics of the island, he felt the endeavor to be worth the risk. But others questioned it. Strategically it was irrelevant, and under his eventual interrogation the general yielded nothing of interest. “Kreipe is rather unimportant,” concluded the British War Office. “Rather weak character and ignorant.” The historian M.R.D. Foot, to Leigh Fermor’s irritation, called the abduction merely a “tremendous jape,” and even before the project was sanctioned, a senior SOE executive in Cairo, when asked if it should proceed, objected. The executive later wrote: I made myself exceedingly unpopular by recommending as strongly as I could that we should not. I thought that if it succeeded, the only contribution to the war effort would be a fillip to Cretan morale, but that the price would certainly be heavy in Cretan lives. The sacrifice might possibly have been worthwhile in the black winter of 1941 when things were going badly. The result of carrying it out in 1944, when everyone knew that victory was merely a matter of months would, I thought, hardly justify the cost. The cost may have been high. Some three and a half months after the general’s kidnapping, with the brutal Müller again the island’s commander, the Germans razed to the ground the recalcitrant village of Anoyeia. Müller’s order of the day was unequivocal. For Anoyeia’s longtime harboring of guerrillas and of British intelligence, for its murder of two separate German contingents, and for its complicity in Kreipe’s abduction: We order its COMPLETE DESTRUCTION and the execution of every male person of Anogia who would happen to be within the village and around it within a distance of one kilometre. Nine days later the Amari villages suffered the same fate, with 164 executed. The Greek newspaper Paratiritis, an organ of German propaganda, cited their support for the Kreipe abduction as the reason Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor Archive/National Library of Scotland Patrick Leigh Fermor (right) and Yanni Tsangarakis, Hordaki, Crete, May 1943 Leigh Fermor, by then convalescing in a Cairo hospital, was shattered by the news. Yet in retrospect he realized that some four months—an unprecedentedly long time—had elapsed before the German reprisals, which were usually instantaneous. There are historians who agree that citing Kreipe’s abduction was little more than an excuse, and that the real, unpublishable reason was that within two months the German forces were to start their mass withdrawal west across the island, exposing them to hostile regions like Amari that flanked their line of retreat. Colonel Dunbabin, Leigh Fermor’s overall commander, in his final report on SOE missions in Crete, shared this assessment, adding that Müller’s purpose was “to commit the German soldiers to terrorist acts so that they should know that there would be no mercy for them if they surrendered or deserted.” When Leigh Fermor returned to the island soon after, his Cretan friends comforted him that the German revenge would have happened anyway: “These were consoling words; never a syllable of blame was uttered. I listened to them eagerly then, and set them down eagerly now.” These thoughts and memories, of course, were written in retrospect. By the time of their composition in 1966 and 1967 Leigh Fermor had already completed a novella, a brief study of monastic life, and three travel books, including two fine descriptions of Greece, Mani and Roumeli. His Abducting a General, besides its value as a war document, slips readily into narrative reminiscent of a dramatic travel book, peppered with anecdote and irresistible asides. This is part of its allure. Military data merge seamlessly with the evocation of people and landscapes. A threatening storm is evoked in images of aerial pandemonium above a landscape of rotting cliffs and lightning-struck gorges. (One sentence of Proustian complexity runs to 138 words.) A cave in which the abduction party shelters from the exposing daylight is described with an eye for more than its military use: It was a measureless natural cavern that warrened and forked deep into the rocks, and then dropped, storey after storey, to lightless and nearly airless stalactitic dungeons littered with the horned skeletons of beasts which had fallen there and starved to death in past centuries: a dismal den, floored with millennia of goats’ pellets, dank as a tomb. The second, shorter section of the book is devoted to Leigh Fermor’s contemporary War Reports. Most valuable is his account of another evacuation. In September 1943 Italy surrendered to the Allies, and General Angelo Carta, commander of the 32,000-strong Italian Siena division occupying eastern Crete, was being hunted by the Germans. Through Carta’s counterespionage officer Franco Tavana, who handed over detailed Italian defense plans, Leigh Fermor organized the general’s escape, from a chaotic beachhead, to Egypt. Even the reports are vivid with incident. On a clandestine visit to Tavana, Leigh Fermor hid under a bed from intruding Germans, “clutching my revolver, and swallowing pounds of fluff and cobwebs.” Crouched in the cellar of an Orthodox abbot, while sheltering from an enemy patrol—“It was a very near thing”—he glimpsed the Germans’ boots two feet above him through the floorboards. Elsewhere he describes how—heavily disguised—he taught a trio of drunken Wehrmacht sergeants to dance the Greek pentozali. It comes as a shock to realize that any Allied operative arrested on the island would be brutally tortured, then shot. Leigh Fermor’s courage, generosity, and high spirits famously endeared him to the Cretans. He sang, danced, and drank with them. Naturally generous and uncritical, he describes almost every mountaineer as a model of hardiness and bravery: “Originality and inventiveness in conversation and an explosive vitality…. There was something both patrician and bohemian in their attitude to life.” He might have been describing himself. “We could not have lasted a day without the islanders’ passionate support.” Among the Cretans Leigh Fermor most admired was a slight, high-spirited youth named George Psychoundakis (affectionately code-named the “Changebug”), whom the SOE used as a runner carrying messages over the mountains. This impoverished shepherd, whom Leigh Fermor’s confederate Xan Fielding called “the most naturally wise and instinctively knowledgeable Cretan I ever met,” could cover the harsh terrain at lightning speed, although he dressed in tatters and his disintegrating boots were secured with wire. After the Occupation ended he was mistakenly interned as a deserter and eventually went to work as a charcoal-burner to support his destitute family. It was at these times—in prisons, and in a cave above his work-site—that he labored on the book that became The Cretan Runner. It was translated by Leigh Fermor, who had discovered its author’s whereabouts after the war. Uniquely, it is a narrative written from the lowliest rank of the Greek resistance, by a man who was barely educated, and records four years as a dispatch carrier through the precipitous harshness of western Crete. Sometimes he rendezvoused with British arms drops or guided escaping Allied soldiers to the sea, and he evaded capture by swiftness, resourcefulness, and a profound knowledge of the terrain. He wrote: My tactics on the march were to know few people, in order that few should know me, even if they were “ours” and good patriots. I kept my mouth shut with everybody, even to the point of idiocy, and these two things kept me safe to the end. His book is an unaffected day-by-day drama, direct and demotic at best, only occasionally swelling into literary grandiloquence when he feels the subject (patriotism, the dead) requires it. Years later this self-taught prodigy translated the Iliad and the Odyssey into his vernacular Cretan, using the meter of the seventeenth-century romance Erotokritos, and was richly rewarded by the Athens Academy. Leigh Fermor’s translation of this difficult work arose from his love of Cretan culture as well as respect for Psychoundakis. But his personal immersion in the island came at cost. One of his War Reports expands wretchedly on his accidental shooting of a partisan and great friend, Yanni Tsangarakis. Its recounting clouded his face even in old age. And misgivings that his Kreipe operation—brilliant and brave as it was—brought retribution on the island he loved may never have quite left him.

As we are on the topic of halftracks. The scenario I am playing has a couple of halftracks with 2 MGs. I've been trying to get the 2nd MG to shoot something. Anything! I've set the HT to sit sideways to the target but even then the 2nd operator will sit at the gun and not do anything. Both are equally placed to the target yet only one shoots. Plenty of ammo is available. Is there a trick to this?

Just wanted to bring this thread back for all newbies. Amazing work Drifter Man! Thanks.

LOL. Even one that looks as friendly as that?

In another thread on the Netflix series The Liberators there were exceptions made to the depiction of artillery taking out tanks as 'unrealistic'. In the show it portrayed artillery bombardments on the scale of WWI where you measured the coverage in sq. meters. There is nothing like that scale of bombardment in CM (that I have seen). I am curious Sarge SH whether the pics that you have were just gotten or saved from a while ago?

A 105mm shell killed it. I heard it couldn't happen?

Reviewed: Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Ohler, translated from the German by Shaun Whiteside Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 292 pp., $28.00 Heinrich Hoffmann/ullstein bild/Getty Images Adolf Hitler presenting Theodor Morell, his personal physician, with the Knight’s Cross of the War Merit Cross at his headquarters, 1944 Norman Ohler, a German journalist, novelist, and filmmaker, was intrigued when a disc jockey in Berlin told him that the Third Reich was riddled with drugs and suggested that somebody should make a film about it. Ohler began to study the subject, thinking at first to write a novel, but then decided not to treat it as fiction, even though he lacked historical training. After his research in German and American archives had progressed, Ohler approached one of the leading German historians of the Nazi era, the late Hans Mommsen. Mommsen was impressed by his findings and became his unofficial supervisor. At the core of Ohler’s book lie the fundamental paradox and shameless hypocrisy of Nazism. Its ideology demanded purity of body, blood, and mind. Adolf Hitler was portrayed as a vegetarian teetotaler who would allow nothing to corrupt him. Drugs were depicted as part of a Jewish plot to poison and weaken the nation—Jews were said to “play a supreme part” in the international drug trade—and yet nobody became more dependent on cocktails of drugs than Hitler, and no armed forces did more to enhance their troops’ performance than the Wehrmacht did by using a version of methamphetamine. Although Ohler’s book does not fundamentally change the history of the Third Reich, it is an account that makes us look at this densely studied period rather differently. In the nineteenth century, Germany led the world in chemical and pharmaceutical research. In 1805, while Goethe was writing Faust in Weimar, Friedrich Wilhelm Sertürner was experimenting with opium poppies in Paderborn and eventually isolated morphine. In 1827, the pharmaceutical industry began with Heinrich Emanuel Merck, an apothecary in Darmstadt who, Ohler writes, had a “business model of supplying alkaloids and other medications in unvarying quality.” A quarter of a century later, morphine became available for pain relief in military surgery. Germany maintained its lead over the world mainly because the country had so many well-educated chemists. One from the Bayer Company in 1897 synthesized aspirin from willow bark. Eleven days later, the same man, Felix Hoffmann, created diacetyl morphine, which was trademarked as Heroin. Bayer advertised and sold it as a cure for headaches, for cough relief, and to help babies sleep. Profits were enormous. Political and social upheaval only seemed to increase the market. Even in revolutionary Petrograd, the consumption of cocaine soared among young commissars and their mistresses from noble families, as memorably depicted in M. Ageyev’s Novel with Cocaine. In bankrupt Germany after World War I, the psychic and physical trauma of the conflict made Germans desperate for the industry’s products. Opiates were preferred to alcohol, as popular songs in Berlin cabarets revealed: Once not so very long ago Sweet alcohol, that beast, Brought warmth and sweetness to our lives, But then the price increased. And so cocaine and morphine Berliners now select. Let lightning flashes rage outside We snort and we inject! In 1925 the immensely powerful chemical and pharmaceutical corporation I.G. Farben was created out of an amalgamation of many different companies. In the following year German exports of opium accounted for 40 percent of the global market, while just three German companies controlled 80 percent of the worldwide cocaine market. The drug-fueled escapism of the Weimar years helped turn Berlin into what Alfred Döblin called the “Whore of Babylon,” while the collapse of the currency in 1923 contributed to the collapse of liberal and conservative institutions and values. For both Communists and Nazis, the impression of total dissolution offered an obvious target. The Nazis seized the opportunity to imply that Jews were behind every aspect of the Weimar Republic, which they called the “Jewish Republic.” Jews were equated with toxins, bacilli, and pathogens. Having falsely accused Jews of being organizers of the drug trade as well as its main clients, the Nazis, through the Reich Health Office, introduced laws and regulations to control drugs and the lives of addicts. They were termed “psychopathic personalities” and forbidden to marry. Compulsory sterilization was introduced. “For reasons of racial hygeine,” the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring stated, “we must therefore see to it that severe addicts are prevented from reproducing.” The parallel with anti-Semitic legislation, particularly the Nuremberg Race Laws of 1935, was entirely clear. In deliberate contrast, the Nazis portrayed Hitler as the archetypal clean-living man, sacrificing himself for his country through overwork. “He is,” the Nazi official Gregor Strasser wrote, “all genius and body. And he mortifies that body in a way that would shock people like us! He doesn’t drink, he practically only eats vegetables, and he doesn’t touch women.” Rather as Soviet Communists were at one time expected to forswear bourgeois love to focus their emotions on their great leader Stalin, Germans were encouraged to indulge in a collective ecstasy over Hitler. And yet already in the spring of 1936, Hitler started on the path to becoming a drug addict himself, of the very sort that the Nazis wanted to prevent from reproducing. Dr. Theodor Morell, a specialist in skin conditions and sexually transmitted diseases, had become a member of the Nazi Party in 1933 after someone smeared the word “jew” outside his office (though he wasn’t Jewish). Using his wife’s money, he set up a medical practice on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin and became increasingly fashionable. He prescribed “vitamins” to his growing clientele, but they were often enhanced with testosterone and anabolic steroids for men or an extract of nightshade for women, which gave their eyes a hypnotic effect. He became famous for his dexterity with injections. In the spring of 1936, a telephone call from Nazi Party headquarters in Munich summoned him to cure Hitler’s photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, of gonorrhea. A plane was sent for him and afterward Morell and his wife were given a holiday in Venice. At a dinner party arranged by Hoffmann, Morell was introduced to Hitler, who talked of his intestinal pains. Morell suggested he might have a cure, and soon the Führer became known in the doctor’s notebooks as “Patient A.” Morell’s success, according to Ohler, lay in not questioning or touching Hitler too much. Instead he simply provided short-term stimulants with his apparently painless injections. On some occasions he was injecting Hitler several times a day. Depending on his patient’s state of mind and body, the shots could include glucose, cocaine, morphine, and essence of pig’s liver and heart. Hitler, the dedicated vegetarian and teetotaler, saw his intravenous diet of animal extracts and hard drugs as medicine. He furiously rejected any doubts expressed by his entourage about Morell’s treatments. In order to ward off criticism, he even made his doctor an honorary professor. Morell prospered and acquired a handsome villa next door to Dr. Josef Goebbels on Schwanenwerder Island in Berlin, but he had little time to enjoy it. During this pre-war period, the reviving German economy concentrated on synthetic alternatives for many products—among them Buna to replace rubber and gasoline made from coal. The British naval blockade of Germany in World War I had caused serious shortages of many raw materials, and Hitler was determined that when he next took Germany to war, the country would be fully prepared. Even drugs were synthesized by the major pharmaceutical companies, including Bayer and Merck. The use of Benzedrine by American athletes in the 1936 Berlin Olympics prompted the Temmler company on the edge of Berlin to focus on creating a more powerful version. By the autumn of 1937, its chief chemist, Dr. Fritz Hauschild (in postwar years the drug provider for East German athletes), created a synthesized version of methamphetamine. This was patented as Pervitin. It produced intense sensations of energy and self-confidence. In pill form Pervitin was marketed as a general stimulant, equally useful for factory workers and housewives. It promised to overcome narcolepsy, depression, low energy levels, frigidity in women, and weak circulation. The assurance that it would increase performance attracted the Nazi Party’s approval, and amphetamine use was quietly omitted from any anti-drug propaganda. By 1938, large parts of the population were using Pervitin on an almost regular basis, including students preparing for exams, nurses on night duty, businessmen under pressure, and mothers dealing with the pressures of Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church—to which the Nazis thought women should be relegated). Ohler quotes from letters written by the future Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll, then serving in the German army, begging his parents to send him more Pervitin. Its consumption came to be seen as entirely normal. Not surprisingly, the military advantages of Pervitin soon became apparent. Professor Dr. Otto F. Ranke, the director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, believed that it was the solution to an army’s most critical weakness—fatigue. He began to carry out comparative trials, using Pervitin, Benzedrine, caffeine, and placebos on four separate groups of soldiers performing a range of tasks, both physical and mental. Those given Pervitin increased their output and stamina much more than the other groups, but they made far more mistakes in tests requiring calculation or other intellectual activities. Ranke was not dismayed by this. As far as he was concerned, the most important effect of drugs was the artificially stimulated ability to keep going when enemy troops had collapsed from exhaustion. Ranke was aware of side effects such as sleeplessness and protracted exhaustion afterward, but enthusiasm for the drug spread from the doctors and others who had been involved in the trials. During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, medical officers reported back enthusiastically to Ranke on the effects of the Pervitin distributed in their units: Everyone fresh and cheerful, excellent discipline. Slight euphoria and increased thirst for action. Mental encouragement, very stimulated. No accidents. Long-lasting effect. After taking four tablets, double vision and seeing colors. Double vision was hardly a beneficial effect for tank gunners, and yet panzer divisions were uniformly excited by the drug’s possibilities. Apart from banishing hunger and stimulating physical and mental activity, it also seemed to reduce inhibitions and fear. Back in the Reich, however, the minister of health, Leo Conti, became concerned at the way the entire nation seemed to be addicted. Conti made Pervitin available only by prescription starting in November 1939. But the Wehrmacht high command saw no disadvantages, especially for the strategy being developed for the invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940. This plan consisted of an attack on neutral Holland and Belgium to force the French and British to come to their aid, followed immediately by a deep panzer penetration from the Ardennes in Belgium all the way across northern France to the Somme estuary, thus cutting off the British and French formations. Even Hitler was shaken by its daring, but as the army’s commander in chief recognized, the Germans would have a much higher chance of success if their leading troops could keep going without stopping to rest. Ohler found that the Temmler factory went into overdrive, manufacturing 833,000 pills a day to meet the Wehrmacht requirement for 35 million pills. General Heinz Guderian told his troops before the attack: “I demand that you do not sleep for at least three days and nights, if that is required.” The speed of the German advance through the Ardennes to the Meuse River took the French army completely by surprise. General Ewald von Kleist’s panzer group was across the river before French divisions reached their positions. The arrogance of victory was of course heightened by the effects of Pervitin. Colonel Charles de Gaulle was enraged when he heard of the enemy panzer crews refusing to accept surrender from French units. They told surrendering French soldiers to throw away their weapons and march to the rear. The German panzer divisions, having outstripped their own supply columns, simply filled up at roadside gas stations or abandoned military barracks. These panzer troops appeared to the British and French alike to be armored supermen, even though German ground forces were in fact far less mechanized than their own. It was the Wehrmacht’s speed and ruthlessness that defeated the French and British armies, which still acted as if it were 1918. They had no idea how the Germans managed to advance day and night without sleep. The official French report on their defeat described it as a “phénomène d’hallucination collective.” Ohler is on less certain ground when he ascribes Hitler’s famous order to halt the tanks short of Dunkirk to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring’s morphine dependency. It is certainly true that Hitler was persuaded by Göring that the Luftwaffe could deal with the British forces cornered there, but there were practical reasons for this advice. The terrain in front of the German forces was criss-crossed with waterways and the ground was too soft for tanks. Their crews were exhausted and the vehicles themselves were desperately in need of maintenance before they were turned around to attack the French and British defensive positions south of the Somme River. Morell, meanwhile, had ambitious plans. He created a preparation called “Vitamultin” and had it manufactured by a company in which he owned half the shares. The plan was to persuade Hitler to take it regularly as his own personal brand, and then repackage it under different names for consumption by individuals and organizations, from the German Labor Front to the SS. The head of Luftwaffe medical services refused to accept this plan and Morell had him fired. His position as the Führer’s physician was by then unassailable. But Ranke, as head of the military research initiative, rejected Vitamultin for the army and stood firm, although with the approach of the invasion of the Soviet Union he did nothing to reduce the use of Pervitin. Unlike the invasion of France, Germany’s Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union could not be won with the Wehrmacht’s secret chemical weapon. The distances were simply too vast. One of the three army groups alone consumed 30 million tablets of Pervitin in the first few months of the campaign, yet it failed to produce a decisive result. Hitler, now based in his East Prussian bunker headquarters, needed constant attention. From August 1941 to April 1945, Morell was with Hitler 885 out of 1,349 days. He kept very detailed—although chaotic—notes, out of fear that if Hitler died, the Gestapo would punish him particularly. In a desperate attempt to cure “Patient A” of a sudden illness in August 1941, Morell tried everything he could, starting with Vitamultin, as well as the usual stimulants. Soon afterward he began injecting Hitler with other substances, including by-products of uterine blood, the sexual hormone Testoviron, and even Orchikrin, a derivative of bulls’ testicles. The stress of setbacks on the eastern front made Hitler demand more and more of Morell’s drug cocktails. Morell’s notebooks provided Ohler with a terrifying list of eighty-nine remedies, of which seventeen were psychoactive, consciousness-changing drugs. Day after day, Morell noted “injection as always,” without specifying its contents. What Ohler calls this “polytoxicomania” certainly contributed to Hitler’s fantasies about maps showing German progress as he lost all touch with the reality on the battlefield. In mid-1943, after the Battle of Kursk, a major disaster for the Germans on the eastern front, and the collapse of Italy, Morell, fearing that he could not cope with Hitler’s deteriorating condition, resorted to an even stronger drug, Eukodal, a synthesized form of opium. But the Wehrmacht’s retreats and defeats, especially in North Africa, meant that Germany could no longer obtain supplies of raw opium. Morell, by now a very rich man with all the different factories and pharmaceutical enterprises he had been acquiring through the shameless exploitation of his position, combed occupied Europe to obtain the supplies he needed to keep the Führer happy. In the attempt to assassinate Hitler at his East Prussian headquarters on July 20, 1944, his eardrums were perforated by the bomb explosion. He was treated by the specialist Dr. Erwin Giesing with cocaine on fifty occasions in seventy-five days. Hitler loved the effect of cocaine and badgered Giesing for more, but in October, Morell put him back onto Eukodal. Not surprisingly, a doctor’s war developed between the two men. Giesing accused Morell of poisoning the Führer, but he chose the wrong drug to attack, and Hitler refused to abandon his personal physician. All of this coincided with planning the attack that, in Hitler’s fantasy, would be a turning point in the war: the Ardennes offensive. (In the month before the start of the campaign, Ohler writes, high doses of cocaine and Pervitin had been administered to a unit of prisoners at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, who for four days were sent on long forced marches “to establish the tolerability and effectiveness” of the drugs in great volume.) Whether Hitler’s trembling hands were the result of Parkinson’s or the direct consequence of excessive drug use is impossible to say, but the deterioration in his appearance toward the end of 1944 shocked many who had not seen him since earlier in the year. By February 1945, supplies of Eukodal had begun to run out, and Hitler was soon suffering withdrawal symptoms as the end approached in the Führerbunker in Berlin. Albert Speer complained that history always emphasized terminal events, and thus overlooked the early achievements of Nazism. He could not have been more wrong. The ghastly and grotesque end of the Third Reich revealed its true basis of lies, hypocrisy, futile slaughter, and pointless cruelty. It is not hard to see why Hans Mommsen was fascinated by Ohler’s research. He was the leader of the functionalist school, which believed in the chaotic nature of the Nazi regime and that Hitler was a “weak dictator.” Nothing seems to demonstrate this better than Hitler’s drug addiction. Ohler’s book may well irritate some historians; he makes flippant remarks and uses chapter titles such as “Sieg High!” and “High Hitler.” But as Ian Kershaw, the great biographer of Hitler, has recognized, he has written “a serious piece of scholarship,” and one that is very well researched.