(Peter Andres’s Post from the TIME on 08 January 2020.)
Methamphetamine
Became a Key Part of Nazi Military Strategy: In The Art of War, Sun Tzu wrote
that speed is “the essence of war.” While he of course did not have
amphetamines in mind, he would no doubt have been impressed by their powerful
war-facilitating psychoactive effects.
Amphetamines—often
called “pep pills,” “go pills,” “uppers” or “speed”—are a group of synthetic
drugs that stimulate the central nervous system, reducing fatigue and appetite
and increasing wakefulness and a sense of well-being.
The
quintessential drug of the modern industrial age, amphetamines arrived
relatively late in the history of mind-altering substances—commercialized just
in time for mass consumption during World War II by the leading industrial
powers. That war was not only the most destructive war in human history but
also the most pharmacologically enhanced. It was literally sped up by speed.
Few drugs have received a bigger stimulus from war. As Lester Grinspoon and Peter Hedblom wrote in their classic 1975 study The Speed Culture, “World War II probably gave the greatest impetus to date to legal medically authorized as well as illicit black market abuse of these pills on a worldwide scale.”
Japanese,
American and British forces consumed large amounts of amphetamines, but the
Germans were the most enthusiastic early adopters, pioneering pill-popping on
the battlefield during the initial phases of the war.
Nazi
ideology was fundamentalist in its antidrug stance. Social use of drugs was
considered both a sign of personal weakness and a symbol of the country’s moral
decay in the wake of a traumatic and humiliating defeat in World War I.
But
as Norman Ohler shows in Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, methamphetamine was
the privileged exception. While other drugs were banned or discouraged,
methamphetamine was touted as a miracle product when it appeared on the market
in the late 1930s. Indeed, the little pill was the perfect Nazi drug: “Germany, awake!” the Nazis had commanded.
Energizing and confidence boosting, methamphetamine played into the Third Reich’s obsession with physical and mental superiority. In sharp contrast to drugs such as heroin or alcohol, methamphetamines were not about escapist pleasure. Rather, they were taken for hyper-alertness and vigilance.
Aryans,
who were the embodiment of human perfection in Nazi ideology, could now even
aspire to be superhuman—and such superhumans could be turned into
supersoldiers. “We don’t need weak people,” Hitler declared, “we want only the
strong!” Weak people took drugs such as opium to escape; strong people took
methamphetamine to feel even stronger.
The
German chemist Friedrich Hauschild had been aware of the American amphetamine
Benzedrine ever since the drug has been used as a doping product in the Olympic
Games in Berlin in 1936. The following year he managed to synthesize
methamphetamine, a close cousin of amphetamine, while working for
Temmler-Werke, a Berlin-based pharmaceutical company.
Temmler-Werke
began selling methamphetamine under the brand name Pervitin in the winter of
1937. Partly thanks to the company’s aggressive advertising campaign, Pervitin
became well known within a few months. The tablets were wildly popular and
could be purchased without a prescription in pharmacies. One could even buy
boxed chocolates spiked with methamphetamine. But the drug’s most important use
was yet to come.
Dr.
Otto F. Ranke, director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, had
high hopes that Pervitin would prove advantageous on the battlefield. His goal
was to defeat the enemy with chemically enhanced soldiers, soldiers who could
give Germany a military edge by fighting harder and longer than their
opponents.
After testing the drug on a group of medical officers, Ranke believed the Pervitin would be “an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad…We may grasp what far-reaching military significance it would have if we managed to remove the natural tiredness using medical methods.”
Ranke
himself was a daily user, as detailed in his wartime medical diary and letters:
“With Pervitin you can go on working for 36 to 50 hours without feeling any
noticeable fatigue.” This allowed Ranke to work days at a time with no sleep.
And his correspondence indicated that a growing number of officers were doing
the same thing—popping pills to manage the demands of their jobs.
Wehrmacht
medical officers administered Pervitin to soldiers of the Third Tank Division
during the occupation of Czecholslovakia in 1938. But the invasion of Poland in
September 1939 served as the first real military test of the drug in the field.
Germany overran its eastern neighbor by October, with 100,000 Polish soldiers
killed in the attack. The invasion introduced a new form of industrialized
warfare, Blitzkrieg.
This
“lightning war” emphasized speed and surprise, catching the enemy off guard by
the unprecedented quickness of the mechanized attack and advance. The weak link
in the Blitzkrieg strategy was the soldiers, who were humans rather than
machines and as such suffered from fatigue.
They
required regular rest and sleep, which, of course, slowed down the military
advance. That is where Pervitin came in—part of the speed of the Blitzkrieg
literally came from speed. As medical historian Peter Steinkamp puts it,
“Blitzkrieg was guided by methamphetamine. If not to say that Blitzkrieg was
founded on methamphetamine.”
In
late 1939 and early 1940, Leo Conti, the “Reich Health Führer,” and others
sounded the alarm bells about the risk of Pervitin, resulting in the drug being
made available by prescription only. But these warnings largely fell on deaf
ears, and the new regulations were widely ignored. Use of the drug continued to
grow.
At
the Temmler-Werke factory, production revved into overdrive, pressing as many
as 833,000 tablets per day. Between April and July 1940, German servicemen
received more than 35 million methamphetamine tablets. The drug was even
dispensed to pilots and tank crews in the form of chocolate bars known as
Fliegerschokolade (flyer’s chocolate) and Panzerschokolade (tanker’schocolate).
Armies
had long consumed various psychoactive substances, but this was the first
large-scale use of a synthetic performance-enhancing drug. Historian Shelby
Stanton comments: “They dispensed it to the line troops. Ninety percent of
their army had to march on foot, day and night. It was more important for them
to keep punching during the Blitzkrieg than to get a good night’s sleep. The
whole damn army was hopped up. It was one of the secrets of Blitzkrieg.”
The
Blitzkreig depended on speed, relentlessly pushing ahead with tank troops, day
and night. In April 1940, it quickly led to the fall of Denmark and Norway. The
next month, the troops moved on to Holland, Belgium, and finally France. German
tanks covered 240 miles of challenging terrain, including the Ardennes Forest,
in 11 days, bypassing the entrenched British and French forced who had
mistakenly assumed the Ardennes was impassable. Paratroopers sometimes landed
ahead of the advance, causing chaos behind enemy lines; the British press
described these soldiers as “heavily drugged, fearless and berserk.”
General Heinz Guderian, an expert in tank warfare and leader of the invasion, gave the order to speed ahead to the French border: “I demand that you go sleepless for at least three nights if that should be necessary.” When they crossed into France, French reinforcements had yet to arrive, and their defenses were overwhelmed by the German attack.
“I
was dumbfounded,” Churchill wrote in his memoirs. “I had never expected to have
to face…the overrunning of the whole communications and countryside by an
irresistible incursion of armoured vehicles…I admit it was one of the greatest
surprises I have had in my life.” The speed of the attack was jaw-dropping.
High on Pervitin, German tank and artillery drivers covered ground night and
day, almost without stopping. Foreign commanders and civilians alike were
caught entirely off guard.
Some
users reported negative side effects of the drug. During the French invasion,
these included a lieutenant colonel with the Panzer Ersatz Division I, who
experienced heart pains after taking Pervitin four times daily for as many
weeks; the commander of the Twelfth Tank Division, who rushed to a military
hospital due to the heart attacked he suffered an hour after taking one pill;
and several officers who suffered heart attacks while off duty after taking
Pervitin.
Amid
growing worries about the addictive potential and negative side effects of
overusing the drug, the German military began to cut back on allocations of
methamphetamines by the end of 1940. Consumption declined sharply in 1941 and
1942, when the medical establishment formally acknowledged that amphetamines
were addictive.
Nevertheless,
the drug continued to be dispensed on both the western and eastern fronts.
Temmler-Wenke, the maker of the drug, remained as profitable as ever, despite
rising awareness of the negative health effects.
