Hitler's
Drugged Soldiers
By
Andreas
Ulrich, Translated
from the German by Christopher Sultan
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The
following was originally published at: http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/.
Special thanks to Doug Nash for bringing the
article to our attention. Please understand that
we do not wish to promote the use of drugs in the
hobby. This is just for historical research
purposes.
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The
stimulant Pervitin was delivered
to the soldiers at the front.
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The
Nazis preached abstinence in the name of
promoting national health. But when it came
to fighting their Blitzkrieg, they had no
qualms about pumping their soldiers full of
drugs and alcohol. Speed was the drug of
choice, but many others became addicted to
morphine and alcohol.
In a letter
dated November 9, 1939, to his "dear
parents and siblings" back home in
Cologne, a young soldier stationed in
occupied Poland wrote: "It's tough out
here, and I hope you'll understand if I'm
only able to write to you once every two to
four days soon. Today I'm writing you mainly
to ask for some Pervitin ...; Love,
Hein."
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Pervitin,
a stimulant commonly known as speed today, was the
German army's -- the Wehrmacht's -- wonder drug.
On
May 20, 1940
, the 22-year-old soldier wrote to his family again:
"Perhaps you could get me some more Pervitin so
that I can have a backup supply?" And, in a
letter sent from Bromberg on
July 19, 1940
, he wrote: "If at all possible, please send me
some more Pervitin." The man who wrote these
letters became a famous writer later in life. He was
Heinrich Boell, and in 1972 he was the first German to
be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in the
post-war period.
Many
of the Wehrmacht's soldiers were high on Pervitin when
they went into battle, especially against
Poland
and
France
-- in a Blitzkrieg fueled by speed. The German
military was supplied with millions of methamphetamine
tablets during the first half of 1940. The drugs were
part of a plan to help pilots, sailors and infantry
troops become capable of superhuman performance. The
military leadership liberally dispensed such
stimulants, but also alcohol and opiates, as long as
it believed drugging and intoxicating troops could
help it achieve victory over the Allies. But the Nazis
were less than diligent in monitoring side-effects
like drug addiction and a decline in moral standards.
After
it was first introduced into the market in
1938, Pervitin, a methamphetamine drug newly
developed by the Berlin-based Temmler
pharmaceutical company, quickly became a top
seller among the German civilian population.
According to a report in the Klinische
Wochenschrift ("Clinical
Weekly"), the supposed wonder drug was
brought to the attention of Otto Ranke, a
military doctor and director of the
Institute for General and Defense Physiology
at
Berlin
's
Academy
of
Military Medicine
. The effects of amphetamines are similar to
those of the adrenaline produced by the
body, triggering a heightened state of
alert. In most people, the substance
increases self-confidence, concentration and
the willingness to take risks, while at the
same time reducing sensitivity to pain,
hunger and thirst, as well as reducing the
need for sleep. In September 1939, Ranke
tested the drug on 90 university students,
and concluded that Pervitin could help the
Wehrmacht win the war. At first Pervitin was
tested on military drivers who participated
in the invasion of
Poland
. Then, according to criminologist Wolf
Kemper, it was "unscrupulously
distributed to troops fighting at the
front."
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Heinrich
Boell as a soldier (around 1943):
"Send me Pervitin."
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Thirty-five
million tablets
During the short period between April and July of
1940, more than 35 million tablets of Pervitin and
Isophan (a slightly modified version produced by the
Knoll pharmaceutical company) were shipped to the
German army and air force. Some of the tablets, each
containing three milligrams of active substance, were
sent to the Wehrmacht's medical divisions under the
code name OBM, and then distributed directly to the
troops. A rush order could even be placed by telephone
if a shipment was urgently needed. The packages were
labeled "Stimulant," and the instructions
recommended a dose of one to two tablets "only as
needed, to maintain sleeplessness."
Even then, doctors were concerned about the fact that
the regeneration phase after taking the drug was
becoming increasingly long, and that the effect was
gradually decreasing among frequent users. In isolated
cases, users experienced health problems like
excessive perspiration and circulatory disorders, and
there were even a few deaths. Leonardo Conti, the
German Reich's minister of health and an adherent of
Adolf Hitler's belief in asceticism, attempted to
restrict the use of the pill, but was only moderately
successful, at least when it came to the Wehrmacht.
Although Pervitin was classified as a restricted
substance on
July 1, 1941
, under the Opium Law, ten million tablets were
shipped to troops that same year.
Pervitin was generally viewed as a proven drug to be
used when soldiers were likely to be subjected to
extreme stress. A memorandum for navy medical officers
stated the following: "Every medical officer must
be aware that Pervitin is a highly differentiated and
powerful stimulant, a tool that enables him, at any
time, to actively and effectively help certain
individuals within his range of influence achieve
above-average performance."
"Their spirits suddenly improved"
The effects were seductive. In January 1942, a group
of 500 German soldiers stationed on the eastern front
and surrounded by the Red Army were attempting to
escape. The temperature was minus 30 degrees Celsius.
A military doctor assigned to the unit wrote in his
report that at around
midnight
, six hours into their escape through snow that was
waist-deep in places, "more and more soldiers
were so exhausted that they were beginning to simply
lie down in the snow." The group's commanding
officers decided to give Pervitin to their troops.
"After half an hour," the doctor wrote,
"the men began spontaneously reporting that they
felt better. They began marching in orderly fashion
again, their spirits improved, and they became more
alert."
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Towards
the end of the war, Germany
used
younger and younger soldiers. More
and more of them relied on drugs
or alcohol for courage and
endurance.
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It
took almost six months for the report to
reach the military's senior medical command.
But its response was merely to issue new
guidelines and instructions for using
Pervitin, including information about risks
that barely differed from earlier
instructions. The "Guidelines for
Detecting and Combating Fatigue,"
issued
June 18, 1942
, were the same as they had always been:
"Two tablets taken once eliminate the
need to sleep for three to eight hours, and
two doses of two tablets each are normally
effective for 24 hours."
Toward the
end of the war, the Nazis were even working
on a miracle pill for their troops. In the
northern German seaport of Kiel, on March
16, 1944, then Vice-Admiral Hellmuth Heye,
who later became a member of parliament with
the conservative Christian Democratic party
and head of the German parliament's defense
committee, requested a drug "that can
keep soldiers ready for battle when they are
asked to continue fighting beyond a period
considered normal, while at the same time
boosting their self-esteem."
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A
short time later,
Kiel
pharmacologist Gerhard Orzechowski presented Heye with
a pill code-named D-IX. It contained five milligrams
of cocaine, three milligrams of Pervitin and five
milligrams of Eukodal (a morphine-based painkiller).
Nowadays, a drug dealer caught with this potent a drug
would be sent to prison. At the time, however, the
drug was tested on crew members working on the navy's
smallest submarines, known as the "Seal" and
the "Beaver."
Alcohol consumption was encouraged
Alcohol, the people's drug, was also popular in the
Wehrmacht. Referring to alcohol, Walter Kittel, a
general in the medical corps, wrote that "only a
fanatic would refuse to give a soldier something that
can help him relax and enjoy life after he has faced
the horrors of battle, or would reprimand him for
enjoying a friendly drink or two with his
comrades." Officers would distribute alcohol to
their troops as a reward, and schnapps was routinely
sold in military commissaries, a policy that also had
the happy side effect of returning soldiers' pay to
the military.
"The military command turned a blind eye to
alcohol consumption, as long as it didn't lead to
public drunkenness among the troops," says
Freiburg
historian Peter Steinkamp, an expert on drug abuse in
the Wehrmacht.
But in July 1940, after
France
was defeated, Hitler issued the following order:
"I expect that members of the Wehrmacht who allow
themselves to be tempted to engage in criminal acts as
a result of alcohol abuse will be severely
punished." Serious offenders could even expect
"a humiliating death."
But
the temptations of liquor were apparently
more powerful that the Fuehrer's threats.
Only a year later, the commander-in-chief of
the German military, General Walther von
Brauchitsch, concluded that his troops were
committing "the most serious
infractions" of morality and
discipline, and that the culprit was
"alcohol abuse." Among the adverse
effects of alcohol abuse he cited were
fights, accidents, mistreatment of
subordinates, violence against superior
officers and "crimes involving
unnatural sexual acts." The general
believed that alcohol was jeopardizing
"discipline within the military."
According
to an internal statistic compiled by the
chief of the medical corps, 705 military
deaths between September 1939 and April 1944
could be linked directly to alcohol. The
unofficial figure was probably much higher,
because traffic accidents, accidents
involving weapons and suicides were
frequently caused by alcohol use. Medical
officers were instructed to admit alcoholics
and drug addicts to treatment facilities.
According to an order issued by the medical
service, this solution had "the
advantage that it could be extended
indefinitely." Once incarcerated in
these facilities, addicts were evaluated
under the provisions of the "Law for
Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary
Diseases," and could even be subjected
to forced sterilization and euthanasia.
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Drugs
were also a problem on the home
front, but the Nazis tried harder
to control their abuse.
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Executing
a bootlegger
The number of cases in which soldiers became blind or
even died after consuming methyl alcohol began to
increase. From 1939 on, the
University
of
Berlin
's
Institute
of
Forensic
Medicine
consistently
listed methyl alcohol as the leading factor in deaths
resulting from the inadvertent ingestion of poisons.
The execution of a 36-year-old officer in
Norway
in
the fall of 1942 was intended to set an example. The
officer, who was a driver, had sold five liters of
methyl alcohol, which he claimed was 98 percent
alcohol and could be used to produce liquor, to an
infantry regiment's anti-tank defense unit. Several
soldiers fell ill, and two died. The man, deemed an
"enemy of the people," was executed by a
firing squad. According to the daily order issued on
October
2, 1942
,
"the punishment shall be announced to the troops
and auxiliary units, and it shall be used as a tool
for repeated and insistent admonishment."
But soldiers apparently felt that anything that could
help them escape the horrors of war was justifiable.
Despite general knowledge of the risks involved,
morphine addiction became widespread among the wounded
and medical personnel during the course of the war.
Four times as many military doctors were addicted to
morphine by 1945 than at the beginning of the war.
Franz Wertheim, a medical officer who was sent to a
small village near the Western Wall on
May
10, 1940
,
wrote the following account: "To help pass the
time, we doctors experimented on ourselves. We would
begin the day by drinking a water glass of cognac and
taking two injections of morphine. We found cocaine to
be useful at
midday
,
and in the evening we would occasionally take Hyoskin,"
an alkaloid derived from some varieties of the
nightshade plant that is used as a medication.
Wertheim adds: "As a result, we were not always
fully in command of our senses."
German doctors experimented on themselves
To prevent an "outbreak of morphinism, as
occurred after the last war," Professor Otto Wuth,
a master sergeant and consulting psychiatrist to the
military's senior medical command, wrote a
"Proposal to Combat Morphinism" in February
1941. Under Wuth's proposal, all wounded who became
addicted as a result of treatment were to be centrally
recorded and reported to the "District Medical
Board," where they would be either legally
provided with morphine or routinely examined and sent
to drug rehabilitation treatment centers. "In
this manner," Wuth concluded, "morphine
addicts will be recorded and monitored, and the entire
group will be prevented from becoming criminal."
The Nazi leadership was more lenient with those who
became drug-addicted as a result of the war than with
alcoholics, probably because the Wehrmacht was
concerned that it could be sued for damages, because
it was in fact responsible for dispensing the drugs in
the first place.
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