The product you see here turns out to have been ubiquitous and super important in recent world history: Pervitin was a methamphetamine synthesized by Germans in 1937, and the Nazis were addicted to it.
In _Blitzed_, Norman Ohler reveals the macabre dependency of both Hitler and the Nazi military on drugs. The trajectory is fascinating: while pre-Nazi Germans were consuming massive amounts of cocaine and morphine in the 1920s (made possible by German leadership in chemistry — their companies manufactured a great deal of the world’s supply of these drugs), once the Nazis got into power they banned these substances, and deliberately tried to portray users as “weak”, making their bodies polluted and unhealthy.
Enter the German chemical company Temmler-Nerke, the creators of Pervitin. Sold as a stimulant that would boost German productivity, housewives, students — and eventually, the Nazi army — took it in great amounts. The crystal meth even found its way into chocolate bars.
In critical ways Pervitin and like products shaped world history. The first moment was in May of 1940. By this time Pervitin was not available for civilians, but the German military commissioned 35 million tablets for their soldiers. They amassed on the border of Luxembourg, high on meth, and very very alert. The next three days the Nazis did their Blitzkrieg, taking France within a hundred hours, unmoved by sleep. It was more land than they ever got in the Western Front in WWI.
Towards the end of the war, the role of meth, as well as other drugs, also figured prominently, but for very different reasons. By this time Hitler had been using not just Pervitin, but also a concoction of morphine, oxycodone in the form of a drug called Eukadol, and a multitude of hormones and snake-oil products (including seminal extract from bulls) –all given to him by his trusted doctor, Theodor Morell. The Nazi leader and vegetarian sociopath so into purity that he wouldn’t even drink coffee was hopelessly and pathetically addicted. Before the new year in 1945, the British army managed to bomb Germany’s drug-producing factories, and the plug that had kept the Nazis and their leader going was taken out.
Source(s): _The New Republic_ “The Third Reich was addicted to drugs,” Jessica Loudis, March 6, 2017. _The Guardian_, “High Hitler: how Nazi drug abuse steered the course of history,” Sept 25, 2016, Rachel Cooke.
