The role amphetamines would play in the Second World War was based, either directly or indirectly, on preliminary studies conducted by various pharmaceutical companies that showed the drug could enhance intellectual performance by elevating wakefulness. Further research conducted by both the Allied and Axis militaries showed it also increased aggression. This wasn’t a revved-up form of coffee, but something very different. From the battlefields of the South Pacific to the skies over London and Berlin, to the Führerbunker where Hitler would spend his last days – the drug was everywhere. Indeed, amphetamine was the soul of this new kind of hyper-mobilized warfare, the very essence of blitzkrieg.
It isn’t too farfetched to speculate that amphetamine may have altered the history of the twentieth century, for there are a few remarkable, albeit little-known, facts regarding its role that lie at the doorstep of the century’s central atrocity, the Holocaust.
Beginning in October of 1942, Adolph Hitler received daily injections of amphetamine from his personal physician, Dr. T. Morell, injections that gradually increased over time, impairing what was already precarious judgment. I believe the significance of this timeframe lies in the fact that the injections coincided with the stoking of the first fires at concentration camps across Eastern Europe. This is to say that the massive scope and madness of Hitler’s “final solution” may have been fueled to some degree by a steady stream of this crystalline powder. The degree, however, is open to speculation.
According to the National Parkinson Foundation, Morell gave these injections in an inept attempt to treat what is now believed to have been symptoms of Hitler’s Parkinson’s disease. As can be seen in various film footage, tremors began to shake the left side of Hitler’s body as early as 1940. The tremors first appeared in his left arm, and then later in his left leg. He also incurred other classic symptoms of Parkinson’s, developing gravely, unintelligible speech patterns, a left leg that he had to drag, and an unchanging, zombie-like facial expression.
The first symptoms were apparent as early as 1934 in Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will, which was made in Nuremberg during the Second Annual Nazi Party Congress, when Hitler was forty-five years old. In the film, the movement of Hitler’s left arm appears severely limited, as he keeps it clamped against his side. By the autumn of 1942, when the tremors became noticeable to those around him, he was fifty-three, and was taking a whole host of drugs thought to calm such tremors and treat fatigue, depression and anxiety. His daily diet of drugs included Dalmann tablets (which contain caffeine), Brom-Nervacit, and methamphetamine – all of which, ironically, would only increase his tremor.
Of course the Nazis’ assault on European Jews predated Hitler’s use of methamphetamine. As Daniel Jonah Goldhagen puts it in his book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, “Hitler opted for genocide at the first moment that the policy became practical.” We know much of how his mind worked, as he documented the development of his political thinking in Mein Kampf, written in 1924 while imprisoned at Landsberg after a failed putsch. Published shortly after his release, the memoir lays bare a blueprint for the coming cataclysm in which Germany would dominate the continent by pushing eastward for lebensraum, or living space. Thus, as Hitler came to power, he was, by and large, simply doing what he said he would do. Following this logic, it would be an overstatement to characterize Krystalnacht, the infamous Night Of The Broken Glass, as a carefully calibrated act of terror. It would be similarly inaccurate to view the horror that followed as a mere methamphetamine-inspired rampage.
And yet there is a difference between the relatively small-time terror of Krystalnacht, intended largely for political ends, and following through with the systematic slaughter of six million human beings. Something truly evil seemed to work its way more deeply into Hitler’s psyche in the years following Krystalnacht. On January 20, 1942, German officials gathered at Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, to discuss the final destruction of European Jewry. Before what became known as the Wannsee Conference, the solution to the Jewish question was less final, being more of the tenor of Krystalnacht. After the conference it was most final, with new concentration camps going up in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
Also of great significance is the aspect of what the decision to enact this policy of systematic mass slaughter meant for Hitler personally: it was not only homicidal but suicidal. By initiating his final solution he surely knew that he either had to win the war or die – and by January of 1942 America, the world’s greatest industrial power, was an enemy combatant. To military observers the tide of the war had turned unmistakably and irrevocably against Hitler. On the surface it would seem that the decision reached at Wannsee was a needlessly cruel and insane raising of the stakes, as it made far less likely, if not impossible, the idea of Germany suing for peace. Without that option, Hitler’s very survival was made less likely, if not impossible. In retrospect, having methamphetamine injected into one’s arm daily would seem to explain a lot.
Although methamphetamine is water-soluble and therefore very “injectable,” doing so is, according to the Consumer Report on Licit and Illicit Drugs, “among the most disastrous forms of drug use yet devised.” The high is nearly instantaneous and wildly intense. It is also a very long way down when the effect of the drug wears off. During this period of withdrawal – now commonly known as “tweaking” – the user is typically prone to violence, delusions, and acute paranoia. All of these behaviors are hallmarks of Hitler’s mindset as the war came to its apocalyptic conclusion on the European continent.
Again, it is possible to overstate the effect these daily injections had on Hitler’s judgment and therefore the course of history. This is due to the simple fact that he was violent, delusional and paranoid long before Dr. Morell found the first vein in Hitler’s forearm. But from that moment on, Hitler was also suicidal.