HIGH HITLER: HOW NAZI DRUG ABUSE STEERED THE COURSE OF HISTORY — German writer Norman Ohler’s astonishing account of methamphetamine addiction in the Third Reich changes what we know about the second world war, the Guardian gushes.

But does it really? It’s been common knowledge for decades that Hitler consumed large quantities of pharmaceuticals, particularly at the end, when his personal physician in the bunker (Dr. Morrell, pictured with Hitler atop the Guardian’s article) was an astonishingly bad quack. But this article sounds like yet another example, as former PJM columnist Ron Rosenbaum has written, of a German author attempting to shift the blame for WWII.

There’s an industry of German writers, as Rosenbaum described in his recently updated book Explaining Hitler, producing material in which Hitler is made out to be some kind of superhuman beast to exculpate German responsibility for their crimes under the system of government known as National Socialism, or find some sort of excuse ala Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud” to explain it all away – being unloved by his parents, having malformed genitalia, etc. And/or books and films like The Reader, whose protagonist is depicted as illiterate while serving as a concentration camp guard to symbolically excuse the German people’s supposed lack of awareness over the terrifying scale of the crimes being committed on the outskirts of their towns and via their railroad system.

Claiming Hitler was high as the proverbial moonbat during much of WWII seems like yet another example of this cottage industry at work, and as Rosenbaum noted, winds up telling us much more about the authors who write them, than the actual history of WWII. But taken en masse, and with the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling, combined with what Glenn would call the education apocalypse, they’re likely having an effect on how future generations will view WWII.