The New York Times BestsellerA fast-paced story that opens up a surprising World War II perspective: Nazi Germany's all-consuming addiction to drugs. The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental and moral purity. But as Norman Oehler reveals in this exciting new story, the Third Reich was drugged. On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical power and companies such as Merck and Bayer prepared cocaine, opiates and, above all, methamphetamines, which consumed everything from factory workers and housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact, troops regularly adopted a diet of crystal methamphetamine - the heightened energy and sense of invincibility even helped explain some of the German military victories. Drugs seeped right up to the Nazi high command, especially, to Hitler himself.