Drunk on Genocide: Alcohol and Mass Murder in Nazi Germany

Abstract

Ed Westermann is a highly prolific scholar and author on the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. Drunk on Genocide explores the intersection between alcohol, images of masculinity, and German atrocity on the Eastern Front. In his work, Westermann is struck by the number of times that excessive drinking figures in the mass murder of Jewish victims. The schnapps and cognac flowed freely at the Wannsee Conference that planned the Holocaust, during the roundups and shootings, and at post-massacre celebrations. Some of the sickening scenes of sadism and torture carried out by drunken SS-men, German soldiers, and foreign auxiliaries alike—all rendered here in full detail—simply beggar the imagination. Westermann must surmount two tall hurdles in this book. The first is Norman Ohler, the German journalist who published Der totale Rausch: Drogen im Dritten Reich in 2015. Ohler described the pervasive use of powerful pharmaceutical drugs throughout the Nazi chain of command—from the Führer HQ all the way down to the Landser at the front. The book was often sensationalist in tone, however, labelling the stimulant Pervitin (methamphetamine) “National Socialism in pill form” (p. 11). The book has been widely read, and any professor teaching a course on World War II today will find themselves fielding questions from students about the meth habits of German soldiers. Many scholars criticized Ohler’s evidence and argumentation, and accused him of attempting to excuse the crimes of the Third Reich, up to and including the Holocaust. After all, how could the Germans be guilty of anything if they were all “drugged up to the eyeballs” (p. 11), in the memorable phrase of British historian Richard Evans?