Germany overran its eastern neighbor by October, with 100,000 Polish soldiers killed in the attack. But the invasion of Poland in September 1939 served as the first real military test of the drug in the field. Wehrmacht medical officers administered Pervitin to soldiers of the Third Tank Division during the occupation of Czecholslovakia in 1938. And his correspondence indicated that a growing number of officers were doing the same thing-popping pills to manage the demands of their jobs.
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. 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.” 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. Ranke, director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology, had high hopes that Pervitin would prove advantageous on the battlefield. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletterĭr. But the drug’s most important use was yet to come. One could even buy boxed chocolates spiked with methamphetamine. The tablets were wildly popular and could be purchased without a prescription in pharmacies. Partly thanks to the company’s aggressive advertising campaign, Pervitin became well known within a few months. Temmler-Werke began selling methamphetamine under the brand name Pervitin in the winter of 1937. The following year he managed to synthesize methamphetamine, a close cousin of amphetamine, while working for Temmler-Werke, a Berlin-based pharmaceutical company. 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. “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. 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. Rather, they were taken for hyper-alertness and vigilance. In sharp contrast to drugs such as heroin or alcohol, methamphetamines were not about escapist pleasure. Energizing and confidence boosting, methamphetamine played into the Third Reich’s obsession with physical and mental superiority. Indeed, the little pill was the perfect Nazi drug: “Germany, awake!” the Nazis had commanded. While other drugs were banned or discouraged, methamphetamine was touted as a miracle product when it appeared on the market in the late 1930s. 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.īut as Norman Ohler shows in Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany, methamphetamine was the privileged exception.
Nazi ideology was fundamentalist in its antidrug stance.
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