💭 Before and during World War II, Germany’s Nazi Party condemned drug use. But the book, “Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich,” claims German soldiers were often high on methamphetamine issued by their commanders to enhance their endurance. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler himself was a substance abuser. Author Norman Ohler joins “CBS This Morning: Saturday” to discuss his book.
In 1944, World War II was dragging on and the Nazi forces seemed to be faltering. Yet, in military briefings, Adolf Hitler’s optimism did not wane. His generals wondered if he had a secret weapon up his sleeve, something that would change the war around in the last second.
Author Norman Ohler tells Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that Hitler did have a secret, but it wasn’t a weapon. Instead, it was a mix of cocaine and opioids that he had become increasingly dependent upon. “Hitler needed those highs to substitute [for] his natural charisma, which … he had lost in the course of the war,” Ohler says.
Ohler’s new book, Blitzed, which is based in part on the papers of Hitler’s private physician, describes the role of drugs within the Third Reich. He cites three different phases of the Fuhrer’s drug use.
“The first one are the vitamins given in high doses intravenously. The second phase starts in the fall of 1941 with the first opiate, but especially with the first hormone injections,” Ohler says. “Then in ’43 the third phase starts, which is the heavy opiate phase.”
Hitler met a doctor called Theo Morell in 1936. Morell was famous for giving vitamin injections, and Hitler, with his healthy diet, immediately believed in this doctor and got daily vitamin injections.
But then as the war turned difficult for Germany in 1941 against Russia in the fall, Hitler got sick for the first time. He couldn’t go to the military briefing, which was unheard of before, and Morell gave him something different that day. He gave him an opiate that day, and he also gave him a hormone injection.
Hitler, who had suffered from high fever, immediately felt well again and was able to go to the meeting and tell the generals how the war should continue, how the daily operations should continue. And he was really struck by this immediate recovery from this opiate, which was called Dolantin. From that moment on, he asked Morell to give him stronger stuff than just vitamins. We can see from the fall of 1941 to the winter of 1944 Hitler’s drug abuse increases significantly.
👮 Police in Peru Seized Over 50 Bricks of Cocaine That Were Wrapped in Nazi Swastikas
🛑 Anti-drug police in Peru have seized packages of cocaine with a picture of the Nazi flag on the outside and the name Hitler printed in low relief. The discovery was made on Thursday in the port of Paita, on Peru’s northern Pacific coast close to its border with Ecuador. (May 25)
💭“አዲሱን የዓለም ሥርዓት ለማስጠበቅ ልዩ ቀውስ ያስፈልጋል።…አዲሱን የዓለም ሥርዓት ለመጠበቅ የመንግስት ያልሆኑ ተዋናዮችን እና ስልጣን የተሰጣቸውን ግለሰቦችን ማስወገድ ግድ ነው”። “Extraordinary Crisis Needed to Preserve New World Order….The elimination of non-state actors and empowered individuals “must be done” in order to preserve the new world order.
💭 The Washington Post has analyzed photos of shrapnel and satellite imagery and cross-referenced video to confirm that Ethiopia used a Turkish drone in January in an attack that killed at least 59 civilians sheltering in a school in Tigray, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported, citing an analysis by the paper published on Monday.
On January 7, a school was struck by a drone-delivered bomb, killing at least 59 people and gravely injuring dozens more, according to aid workers whose organizations worked at the camp for internally displaced people in Dedebit, located in the northern Ethiopian region of Tigray.
According to The Washington Post, more than 300 civilians have been killed by drone and air strikes since September, including more than 100 since the start of this year.
Weapon remnants recovered from the site of the strike by aid workers showed internal components and screw configurations that matched images of Turkish-made MAM-L munitions released by the weapons manufacturer. The MAM-L pairs exclusively with the Turkish-made Bayraktar TB-2 drone.
Military experts from the Dutch nongovernmental organization PAX and Amnesty International also identified the weapon used as a MAM-L bomb that is fitted to a TB2 drone, Politico earlier reported.
The attacks have drawn criticism from US President Joe Biden and a warning from the United Nations that they may constitute a grave violation of international law, Politico said.
Drones are rapidly turning into the decisive weapon of the conflict and have helped Ethiopian government forces turn the tide against rebels from the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, which governed the country for nearly three decades before 2018.
Turkey has exported Bayraktar armed drones manufactured by defense contractor Baykar Makina Sanayi ve Ticaret Anonim Şirketi (Baykar), which is run by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s son-in-law Selçuk Bayraktar. Ukraine, Poland, Qatar, Libya, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia and Azerbaijan have all taken delivery of the armed drones.
According to Turkey’s 2021 export figures announced by the Turkish Exporters Assembly in early December, Turkey’s arms sales reached a record level, with the biggest increase to African countries.
In the first 11 months of 2021, Turkey exported $2.793 billion worth of defense products, an increase of 39.7 percent compared to the same period of the previous year. The Turkish defense industry, which set an export record of $2.7 billion in 2019, is preparing to set a new record by closing this year with exports of more than $3 billion. For the first time the defense sector had a 1.8 percent share of Turkey’s total exports in November 2021.
“All sides to the year-long conflict in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray region have committed violations that may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on January 9, 2022
💭 Another callous drone attack by evil Abiy Ahmed in an IDP [internally displaced persons] camp in Dedebit, Tigray has claimed the lives of 56 Christians so far. The drones are supplied and operated by Turkish, Iranian, UAE and China Mercenaries – and with the permission of the USA, Russia and Europe.
At least 56 people have been killed in an air strike at a camp for internally displaced people in Ethiopia’s northern region of Tigray, according to Reuters.
There were at least 30 others injured, two aid workers told the news agency, citing local authorities and eyewitness accounts.
The workers sent Reuters pictures of people wounded in hospital, including many children,
The government has been accused of targeting civilians in the 14-month conflict with rebellious Tigrayan forces – which it has previously denied.
Military spokesman Colonel Getnet Adane and government spokesman Legesse Tulu did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The aid workers, who asked not to be named because they did not have permission to speak to the press, said the number of casualties was confirmed by local authorities.
The camp that was hit by the strike is in the town of Daedaebeet in the northwest of the region, near the border with Eritrea, they said.
Posted by addisethiopia / አዲስ ኢትዮጵያ on December 15, 2021
The UAE is running a huge airlift arming an Ethiopian regime committing mass atrocities in Tigray. That inhumane adventurism is a strategic problem for Israel, too
The Abraham Accords gave Israel new leverage across the Arab world. Israel has new allies, notably the United Arab Emirates. It’s now vital to examine what these allies might be doing — especially when they contradict the founding values of the State of Israel.
Genocide scholars are sounding the alarm over Ethiopia, where the UAE is arming the government. Emirati-supplied weapons are encouraging Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to go all out for a military solution, which risks mass ethnically-targeted violence.
Israel should stop its new ally before a blunder becomes a crime.
The war in Ethiopia broke out last year, pitting the Ethiopian government and its allies—Eritrea and Ethiopia’s Amhara regional state—against the Tigray region. All sides share responsibility for the war. Once it began, the Ethiopian government chose to fight with unspeakable brutality against Tigrayan civilians.
I receive daily calls from Tigrayans. My instinctive greeting, by now, is to offer condolences. Every single caller has lost a family member, often in one of the 260 documented massacres. I don’t ask about the daughters, sisters and mothers who have been raped. I hear about deaths from disease, of people who cannot get medicine because the hospitals were ransacked. I hear about children and their mothers perishing from hunger, because food was looted and plow oxen slaughtered.
This suffering is unseen. Journalists are forbidden from travelling to Tigray. The few aid workers let in work under a rigidly enforced code of silence.
Faced with imminent annihilation, Tigrayans rallied and fought back. Last June, they defeated the Ethiopian army and reoccupied their region. The government imposed a starvation siege: only about ten percent of the needed emergency aid has been allowed to get through.
Today the Tigrayan people are facing an even greater threat. Abiy Ahmed has rallied his supporters around a campaign of blatant ethnic hostility. They portray the Tigrayans as a “cancer,” “weeds,” “daylight hyenas” and “rats.” One of Abiy’s leading supporters was videotaped saying that they should be destroyed with the “utmost cruelty.”
Local militia and vigilantes are mobilized to the front line. They also instructed to patrol their own neighborhoods, far from the front line, to identify “enemies”—in practice, any Tigrayan. At least 40,000 Tigrayan civilians are believed to be held in internment camps and police stations in and around the Ethiopian capital.
Anyone who speaks of peace is hounded. A singer, Tariku Gankisi, was asked to perform at a rally, and he deviated from the script, telling the crowd, “This is no time for singing, there is nothing to sing about.” He called for peace. His microphone was shut off and the official media rounded on him, trying to force him to grovel and apologize.
Prominent elders of the peacemaking community, academics and businesspeople have also been targeted for online vilificationand real life intimidation for standing for peace or reaching out for dialogue with the opposition.
Among Tigrayans, I hear the sentiment that Ethiopia no longer wants them, and in turn they no longer want to be part of Ethiopia.
International efforts to negotiate a political solution are getting no traction. Efforts by the African Union, Kenya and the United States have been rebuffed. The Tigrayans say that they cannot trust Abiy. For his part, Abiy promises he will crush Tigray.
Abiy is emboldened by the weapons he has obtained on a global arms-buying spree. His supplies include the usual suspects—China, Russia, Ukraine and eastern European countries that manufacture small arms—and also Turkey and Iran. His most significant supplier has been the UAE, which is running a massive airlift of lethal equipment, including drones.
The UAE is a newcomer to the Horn of Africa. It sees opportunities for investment in agriculture and ports, and wants to make Ethiopia part of its security perimeter in the western Indian Ocean. Abu Dhabi was the sponsor of the peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea in 2018, which won Abiy Ahmed the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Nobel committee didn’t give Eritrean president Isaias Afewerki a share in the award, because he is a totalitarian despot who runs his country like a personal fiefdom. Isaias didn’t mind. He got what he wanted, which was a security pact against Tigray — whose leaders had run Ethiopia for the previous quarter century and had fought a war against him.
It seems that when Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed hosted Isaias and Abiy, he promised them ongoing financial and military support. He is certainly fulfilling that promise to Abiy, even though in doing so he is defying the U.S. policy of trying to de-escalate the Ethiopian war in favor of a negotiated peace.
The UAE belatedly reconsidered its support for proxies and its air campaigns in the wars in Libya and Yemen, but not before irreparable damage had been done to those countries. It should not have to re-learn this lesson at the expense of Ethiopia. With 110 million people, characterized by significant ethnic and religious diversity, the collapse of the country would be a calamity of surpassing size.
Israel should be worried. It has ties to Ethiopia dating back to the time of Emperor Haile Selassie. It has a deep connection to the country’s historic Jewish community, the Beta Israel. It has a security interest in a country strategically positioned at the southern end of the Red Sea arena, neighboring Muslim-majority countries.
Over the years Israel has cut deals to secure its strategic interests, and to get Ethiopia to allow its Jews to emigrate. Thirty years ago, during the last months of the communist military regime, Israel reportedly supplied munitions to the Ethiopian air force in return for expediting Operation Solomon which airlifted out 39,000 Beta Israel. Recently, as the Red Sea arena has become a theater of strategic rivalries and turmoil, Israel has kept a close eye on possible threats in the region, including militant groups.
And with the Abraham Accords, Israel is becoming a partner to bin Zayed’s adventurism. In Washington DC and European capitals, Israeli and Emirati diplomats work hand in glove. The allies are building a new security architecture for the region — which is also giving the Emiratis a free pass when they go rogue.
Emirati arms may save Abiy Ahmed’s government, but, as we have seen from Libya and Yemen, saving a government may come at the cost of losing a functioning state. That could destabilize the Horn of Africa for an entire generation.
Worse still, knowingly or not, the UAE is abetting an Ethiopian regime committing mass atrocities that are escalating by the day. The warning sirens of genocide are blaring, loudly.
Israel took a moral stand against genocide in Rwanda and Darfur. It must act now when Tigrayans face that hideous prospect. It should tell its new-found ally in Abu Dhabi to stop, now, in the name of humanity.
💭 Ethiopian journalist Solan Kolli on Tuesday won the Rory Peck prize for his coverage of the devastating conflict in the Tigray region of his home country.
💭The Rory Peck Award is an award given to freelance camera operators who have risked their lives to report on newsworthy events.