WASHINGTON — A new book sheds new details on one of the lesser-known historical facts of World War II: the degree to which the German army was dependent on drugs, specifically methamphetamine.
In “Der totale Rausch” (The Total Rush), German author Norman Ohler examined German and American records to find that the German army regularly gave its soldiers Pervitin, which contained the key ingredient methamphetamine, and which at the time was considered an energy pill that “became a drug of choice, like people drink coffee to boost their energy,” Ohler tells Deutsche Welle, a German news agency.
“The company wanted Pervitin to rival Coca Cola. So people took it, it worked and they were euphoric — a mood that matched the general mood before the war,” Ohler told the British news site The Independent.
“Mr. Ohler explains how the Nazis rejected recreational drugs such as cocaine, opium and morphine which were readily available in Germany during the 1930s and condemned them as ‘Jewish’, the Independent reports.
The Germans used Pervitin during the Blitzkrieg campaigns in the Sudetenland and Poland in 1939, and 35 million pills were ordered for troops in preparation for the invasion of France in 1940, Ohler says.
Pervitin was outlawed in 1941, Ohler says, but the distribution of the pills in the military “was then kept under wraps.” He says he spoke with a doctor who issued the pills for years after that, and the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel reports that the German military’s “Guidelines for Detecting and Combating Fatigue” in 1942 were basically the same regarding the drug.
The British and Americans, feeling they needed to keep up, began taking amphetamines — what is referred to as speed today. “Basically, the Germans used crystal meth, and the Brits used speed,” Ohler says.
German use of Pervitin has been known for years, but Ohler’s book not only details the scope of its use in the Wehrmacht, the German army, but the extent to which Adolf Hitler used various drugs during the war.
Hitler didn’t take Pervitin, Ohler says, but had a growing dependence on a drug called Eukodal, a powerful painkilling narcotic given by his person physician, Dr. Theodor Morell. Ohler calls it “a pharmaceutical cousin of heroin” and says it kept the Nazi leader in a deluded state as its war effort fell apart, perhaps influencing decisions that cost lives.
Eukodal “made him euphoric even when reality wasn’t looking euphoric at all,” Ohler says. “The generals kept telling him: ‘We need to change our tactics. We need to end this. We are going to lose the war.’ And he didn’t want to hear it. He had Dr. Morell give him the drugs that made him feel invulnerable and on top of the situation.”
