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All That's Interesting

How Drugs Like Pervitin

And Cocaine Fueled The
Nazis’ Rise And Fall
By All That's Interesting
Published January 28, 2017 | Updated April 5, 2019

Despite Hitler's anti-drug rhetoric, Nazi

Germany used a little courage pill called
Pervitin to take Europe by storm. It turns out
it was pure methamphetamine.

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J
ust before meeting with Benito Mussolini in the
summer of 1943, Adolf Hitler was feeling
seriously ill.

Still, he couldn’t ditch an Axis power meeting, and

so Hitler’s personal physician injected the Führer
with a drug called Eukodal — think oxycodone
combined with cocaine — to perk him up.

The physician took a signi cant risk in doing so.

After all, Hitler was prone to latching on to
addictive substances and refusing to let go. But in
this case, the injection seemed warranted: Hitler
was doubled over with violent, spastic constipation,
refusing to speak to anyone.
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Immediately after the rst injection and despite his

doctor’s wishes, a revived Hitler ordered another
injection. Hitler then left for the meeting with the
gusto of a soldier half his age.

At the meeting with Mussolini, Hitler reportedly

spoke for several hours without stopping. The
Italian dictator — who sat massaging his own back,
dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief, and
sighing — had hoped to convince Hitler to let Italy
drop out of the war. He never got the chance.

This was but one episode amid Hitler’s almost daily

drug use, which included barbiturates, bull semen,
testosterone, opiates, and stimulants such as
Pervitin, a “courage” pill made out of
methamphetamine.

Hitler wasn’t alone in his use of Pervitin.

Throughout that time period, everyone from
German soldiers at the front lines to menopausal
homemakers wolfed down Pervitin like candy.

Widespread drug use wasn’t exactly new in the

country. A generation earlier, Germany was mired in
large-scale drug use — that is, until Hitler rose to
power in part on an anti-drug campaign. But when
Hitler changed course and became an addict, the
same fate befell many in his country.

By the outset of World War II, German soldiers

were using Pervitin to help them storm and
conquer much of Europe. The high eventually
vanished, however. By the end of the war, when
hubris had untethered the Nazis from reality,
soldiers used drugs like Pervitin simply to survive.

Norman Ohler’s recently-published book, Blitzed:

Drugs in Nazi Germany, tackles the role that drugs
 played in the Third Reich — and it’s overwhelming.

Nazi Drugs: The Poison In

Germany’s Veins

Georg Pahl/German Federal Archives

Drug users purchase cocaine on the streets of Berlin, 1924.

Although he would later usher the Third Reich into

a period of heavy drug usage, Adolf Hitler rst used
a radical anti-drug platform to seize control of the
state.

This platform was part and parcel of a broader

campaign built upon anti-establishment rhetoric. At
that time, the establishment was the Weimar
Republic, the unof cial name that Hitler had coined
for the German regime that ruled between 1919
and 1933 and that had grown economically
dependent on pharmaceuticals — speci cally
cocaine and heroin.

To give you an idea of this dependency’s scale, the

year before the victors of World War I compelled
the republic to sign the treaty of the International
Opium Convention in 1929, Berlin alone produced
200 tons of opiates.

In fact, Germany was responsible for 40 percent of

global morphine production between 1925 and
1930 (cocaine was a similar story), according to
Ohler. All in all, with their economy largely wrecked
by World War I, the Weimar Republic had become
the world’s drug dealer.

Pinterest
A 1927 German lm poster warns of the dangers of cocaine, opium,
and morphine.

Hitler wasn’t a fan of it. A teetotaler who wouldn’t

even drink coffee because of the caffeine, Hitler
avoided all drugs. Famously, he reportedly never
smoked again after throwing a pack of cigarettes
into a river at the end of World War I.

When Hitler and the Nazis took control of Germany

in 1933, they began extending Hitler’s no-poison-
philosophy to the country as a whole. The Nazis
had their work cut out for them, however.
Describing the state of the country at the time of
Hitler’s rise, German author Klaus Mann wrote:

“Berlin night life, oh boy, oh boy, the world

has never seen the like! We used to have a
great army, now we’ve got great perversities!”

So the Nazis did what they did best, and combined

their anti-drug efforts with their signature practice
of accusing those they didn’t like — particularly
those of Jewish descent — of being the ones
stabbing Germany in the back.

Nazis thus used propaganda to associate addicts

with these subjugated groups, coupled with harsh
laws — one of the rst laws the Reichstag passed
in 1933 allowed the imprisonment of addicts for up
to two years, extendable inde nitely — and new
 secret police divisions to bolster their anti-drug
efforts.

Ernst Hiemer/Norman Ohler.

An illustration from The Poisonous Mushroom as presented in Blitzed:
Drugs in Nazi Germany.

The Nazis also threw medical con dentiality out

the window and required doctors to refer any
person with a narcotics prescription lasting longer
than two weeks to the state. The Nazis then cut off
those who passed the ethnicity test cold turkey
and imprisoned those who did not, sending them
to concentration camps. Repeat offenders suffered
the same fate.
 On the surface, this large-scale shift away from
rampant drug dependency looked like a Nazi-
induced miracle. Of course, it only lasted until
Hitler had his rst taste of Pervitin.

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