A Luftwaffe pilot spearheading an aerial formation removes his breathing mask
and pops a Stuka-Tabletten, washing the bitter, flowery pill down with nothing but spit.
A Panzer driver breaks a piece of Panzerschokolade in half with his back teeth and rides his metal
steed through a tree. A footsoldier tips the last of his "magic biscuits" into his palm,
knocking it back with a swig from his canteen. A German housewife peels away the wrapper of
a Hildebrand chocolate and munches down more "magic biscuit" than the pilot, tank driver,
and soldier combined. They are all of them slapped into a state of heightened alertness and detached
euphoria. All fears of their oncoming toil are pumped out of their bodies by their fast-beating
hearts, and they know exactly what they're doing. The pilot feels as if he's up above his aircraft,
watching himself soar through the clouds. The driver could plough through the forest all day and
all night, or until his tank runs out of juice. Owl-eyed, the soldier marches straight and tall,
taking more sweet, cool air into his lungs than he ever has before, and eager to charge into
battle alongside his equally pepped-up comrades. The housewife sweeps every atom of dust from
the shelves and has her home spotless before the sun reaches its highest point in the sky.
What do these four Germans have in common? They're all alive in
the first years of the Second World War, and they're all high on meth.
Doubtless, you've heard that German Blitzkriegs were hastened by methamphetamine,
though, in this video, we're going to pop a Panzerschokolade ourselves
and delve a little deeper into the "geary" side of Germany and her military during World War II.
Also, a shoutout to our loyal supporter Jonathan Finck, who suggested this video!
While amphetamines are derived from Ephedra sinica,
methamphetamines don't grow on trees. So where did the Germans get all their meth from?
Well, methamphetamine, a drug in the amphetamine class, was first synthesized in 1893 by Japanese
chemist Nagai Nagayoshi, though the crystalline form of the drug wasn't born until 1919,
when Akira Ogata, another Japanese chemist, concocted methamphetamine hydrochloride.
During the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, the German pharmaceutical company Temmler-Werke's
head chemist, Dr Fritz Hauschild, noticed that American athletes were dosing Benzedrine,
a legal amphetamine at the time, with great success, so he steered Temmler in that direction,
taking lessons from the aforementioned Japanese chemists and discovering his
own method of synthesising delicious meth. Fritzy trademarked it "Pervitin," and by 1937, it could
be purchased in pill-form over the counter of German pharmacies without a prescription.
Soon after the Nazi Party took power in January 1933,
drugs became taboo, and strict punishments -- including imprisonment,
imprisonment in concentration camps, and even euthanasia -- were set in place. Though,
despite reaching "A PHARMACY NEAR YOU" more than four years after the Nazis gained power
and imposed their anti-drug policies, Pervitin remained on the shelf, marketed to the German
people as a miracle substance to meet the demands of an "energy-tense time," as one doctor put it.
The people gobbled it up, and Pervitin became as much a part of their daily lives as a hot cup of
joe. Pervitin was the very best friend of Germans performing arduous physical or mental tasks.
Labourers became more machine than man. Nurses worked long into the night without batting an eye.
Students crammed like they'd never crammed before. The shy became the life of the party.
That housewife from our intro, she cleaned her house, yeah, but she lost her love-handles in the
process, too, as Pertivin had the added effect of murdering one's appetite. To put it simply,
the German people were awake! A charismatic leader with a to-die-for moustache was hoisting them out
of their depression, and they were pepped up on Temmler's "magic biscuits," and they were awake!
It's only logical that the military followed suit.
It all started with Dr Otto Friedrich Ranke, the director of the Research Institute of Defence
Physiology, which was charged with boosting the performance of the German military through
the medicinal science of physiology. It's not an aspect of the military you hear about every day,
though it turned out to be of great significance to the Wehrmacht and the world during the Second
World War. As part of his gig, Ranke was tasked with finding new ways to invigorate the personnel
of the armed forces -- to blast fatigue out of existence. He read all about Fritzy's new "magic
biscuit," Pervitin, and he liked the prospects, so he got his hands on some and started running
some tests, concluding it was "an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad" and a
"militarily valuable substance." With subsequent insight, however, Ranke came to understand that
the drug had some nasty side effects, deeming it a "double-edged sword." But by this point,
the Wehrmacht was already divvying it out to its troops -- though not in a methodical way -- in
preparation for the September 1939 invasion of Poland.
After crossing the Vistula River in Poland, the 3rd Panzer Division reported on the
effects of Pervitin, stating: "Often there is euphoria, an increase in attention span,
clear intensification of performance, work is achieved without difficulty,
a pronounced alertness effect and a feeling of freshness. Worked through the day, lifting
of depression, returned to normal mood." And another report read: "Everyone fresh and cheerful,
excellent discipline. Slight euphoria and increased thirst for action. Mental
encouragement, very stimulated. No accidents. Long-lasting effect. After taking four tablets,
double vision and seeing colours. The feeling of hunger subsides."
Now, I don't know about "double vision" and "seeing colours," but the rest of
these symptoms allowed Wehrmacht soldiers to forget all about the specifics of what they
were doing in someone else's country, block out all those pesky emotions like fear and shame,
and absolutely Blitzkrieg poor Poland, with one senior German lieutenant even stating that it was
simply a "matter of dividing up the country" -- as if the Pervatin had made the invasion that easy.
While Dr Ranke was smashing a fair bit of Pervitin himself at this point, he was more than a little
concerned with the carefree way in which it was distributed through and used by the Wehrmacht,
and back in Germany, the Reich Health Führer, Leonardo Conti, was expressing
similar concerns for German civilians, managing to get Pervitin changed to a prescription drug.
Though, as far as the military was concerned, the invasion of Poland was a success, and the benefits
of Pervitin outweighed the negatives, so in April 1940, they sent out the "stimulant decree,"
basically making Pervitin a part of a ration kit. Part of the decree read: "The experience of the
Polish campaign has shown that in certain situations military success was crucially
influenced by overcoming fatigue [, which] can in certain situations be more important than concern
for any related harm if military success is endangered by sleep." As for the civilians,
"prescription" was a pretty loose term, and they basically got all the Pervitin they wanted anyway.
With Pervitin in their lunchboxes, the Wehrmacht Methkrieged the Low Countries and France, pushing
the Allies into the sea at Dunkirk, though after this, the shock-value was lost, and lightning-fast
warfare was no longer suitable for the type of war which ensued. As the Germans enacted
Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, the comedown became just a little too
real. German veteran Ottheinz Schultesteinberg, a medical officer during the war, said: "In Russia,
it was a war of attrition, positional warfare. In such circumstances Pervitin was no use: it just
exhausted you. [...] Sleep deprivation simply didn’t bring any tactical advantages any more."
So what exactly was the comedown like, and what was the fate of Pervitin in the Wehrmacht and
back home in Germany? Well, on top of inducing circulatory problems and fatal heart attacks,
Pervitin basically drained users of their ability to be happy without being "on something," and
thus, people became hugely addicted to it. While searching for their next hit,
addicts suffered from the sweats, dizziness, shaking, depression, rotting teeth, organ failure,
and even paranoia, delusions, hallucinations, and psychosis. In some instances, these psychotic
comedowns were so bad that addicts put a gun to their own head and blew our their brains.
Reich Health Führer Conti expressed his concerns, saying, "this is an immediate danger to the health
and future of our people" and, "our young soldiers look extraordinarily ill, often grey
and sunken-cheeked." And while he did achieve a formal victory on the 12th of June 1941, when he
successfully subjected Pervitin to the Reich opium law, which should have regulated the substance,
it continued to pump like a poison through Germany and the Wehrmacht throughout the Second World War
and beyond -- albeit to a lesser degree in the military, which could no longer rely on Methkrieg
tactics. As the Reich Health Führer feared, Pervatin had given rise to a nation of addicts,
and methamphetamine was only deemed illegal in Germany after her reunification in 1990.
So, yes, meth was circulating through the Wehrmacht during the Second World War,
especially in its opening years, though the addiction issue, as we hope you've learnt today,
went wayyy further than the military, quite literally rotting the German people
and pervading through German culture long after the war -- just like meth and other
forms of amphetamines plagued and continue to plague other nations all around the world.
It's also important to clarify that, while Pervitin may have put a little extra speed in
Blitzkrieg operations, it merely supplemented other factors which made Germany so effective
during those opening years, notably the element of surprise.
There were, of course, factors which also limited the effectiveness of the drug,
such as the need to refuel vehicles; in other words, even if the drivers could go all night,
they're trucks and tanks weren't hooked up to bottomless sources of fuel. To reiterate, Pervitin
was not responsible for Germany's early success; it was merely one of many enzymes in the equation.
Though what are your thoughts? Was Pervitin less or more vital to early German Blitzkrieg tactics
as we've depicted in this video? Was the Pervitin problem in Germany not quite as
bad as or even worse than we've suggested? Please let us know down in the comments.