My knowledge on the history of drugs is pretty limited. Mostly I know that hard stuff that we know of today started coming down the pipes in the 1800s (morphine, heroine, cocaine), but other than that, it’s not something I’ve paid a lot of attention to. So, when Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany came along, I was more than a little intrigued.

It describes the rampant drug use in the country leading up to and throughout World War II, and boy was there a lot of it. I had no idea that Germany was responsible for the development of so many hard drugs. In the 1800s, their education system was second to none and produced quite a few talented chemists. As a result, the country created all of the drugs mentioned in the previous paragraph. At the time, they were intended for medical use to relieve pain and improve the mental well being of patients. These substances wouldn’t become controlled or outright banned until much later as people began to realized how dangerously addictive they were.

After Germany lost the First World War, there was huge pressure for them to stop production of these drugs. As the country reoriented their drug industry, they came up with a new upper that became extremely popular: Pervatin. This was the brand name for what we today call crystal meth. With Germans heavily focused on rebuilding after the war, they took these pills like crazy. The company that made them didn’t put a lot of time into due diligence, checking for nasty side effects. They just marketed as a miracle pill that would help keep users awake for hours on end, able to do far more work than usual. This resulted in a bottom up adoption of the drug within society. The Nazis didn’t even have to force people to use it, they were already knocking them back every chance they had.

This sets the backdrop for much of the book, as Pervatin was widely used for strategic reasons by the Nazis during the war. It’s what fuelled their Panzer divisions that plowed through the Ardennes Forest. The Luftwaffe regularly took the pills before sorties as well. The German military was well known for their speed during the war. They had a team of scientists looking into all sorts of ways they could keep soldiers awake and fighting alert for longer.

There’s no way to know if every soldier was taking Pervatin all the time, but supply orders that survived the war suggest that it was in high demand. There would be cases where divisions would be asking for the stuff in the tens of millions.

The book also spends quite a lot of time discussing the exploits of Hitler’s personal physician, Theodor Morell. Apparently, from the start of the war he was plying Hitler full of all sorts of concoctions. Pervatin being one of the major standouts, the other being something called Eukodal, which had oxycotin as a major component. Over time, cocaine also made it into the mix. Morell was a total quack who was giving Hitler all sorts of drugs for whatever aches or pains he complained of.

It sounds like a lot of this information was only released to the public in the last five years, which would explain why it seems to be coming out of left field. Of course, one of the biggest risks with such revelations is that shitty people will use drugs as excuse for the Nazis’ atrocities. The author makes a point of addressing this, emphasizing that people like Hitler were already thoroughly terrible long before they got on all these drugs.

It doesn’t seem that the drugs argument has really become a thing to explain Nazi Germany, but the book was quite the interesting read. Most of the data comes from official documents from the war, so I see no reason to doubt that stuff like Pervatin was regularly in use during this time. It would explain quite a lot about how the German military was able to push themselves so hard. By the sound of things, it wasn’t a matter of grit but rather pills.

Pennywhether

pennywhether@posteo.net

May 8, 2021