#WWII #History #MilitaryHistory #Pervitin #WarSecrets #WorldWar2 #Documentary #HistoricalFacts
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00:00It's 1944, and you're about to go to war.
00:03Along with all the ammunition, comes a shipment of tons of a drug known as the Nazi cocktail.
00:09You march 90 kilometers in a single day with your buddies, carrying 20 kilos on your back, no sleep, barely
00:17any food.
00:18Your body should have quit long ago.
00:20But this is where the Nazi cocktail comes in.
00:23The Third Reich is losing on three fronts at once.
00:26Time is running out, and a team of naval pharmacologists gets a desperate assignment.
00:32Create a substance that keeps a human being going far beyond their natural limits.
00:37There was just one problem.
00:39They needed to test it, and this is where things start getting dark.
00:44Under the codename Pillenpatrouille, the Pill Patrol, and under Vice Admiral Helmuth Hay, the trials began at Sachsenhausen.
00:54What they'd created was a mix that should never have shared a single capsule.
00:59Five milligrams of Eucodal, five of cocaine, and three of Pervitin, an early form of methamphetamine.
01:07Mixing these three is where it gets truly extreme, because you've got three stimulants feeding off each other.
01:14Prisoners were forced to walk in circles with loaded backpacks for hours, then for days.
01:20Some managed up to 90 kilometers a day without stopping, without sleep, and with almost nothing to eat.
01:27They kept going until their bodies simply stopped responding.
01:32There were heart attacks, total exhaustion, deaths.
01:36The survivors weren't even treated as people.
01:40They became one more line in a technical report.
01:43And the next step was enormous.
01:47The regime planned to produce 100 million doses for pilots of one-man mini-submarines.
01:54Men sealed for weeks inside metal capsules underwater.
01:58But the war ended before the project could ever go into mass production.
02:03Yet here's the unsettling part.
02:05Those pills never really went away.
02:08Captagon.
02:09They pack you into a truck with 40 other men.
02:12They hand you a white pill stamped with two interlocking Cs.
02:16Three hours later the fear is gone.
02:18The exhaustion is gone.
02:19And so is anything that feels like doubt.
02:23Captagon was synthesized by a German chemist, Helmut Pels.
02:26That was in 1961.
02:28As a treatment for narcolepsy and attention deficit disorder.
02:32The base molecule is phenethylene, a compound the body breaks down into amphetamine and theophyllene at the same time.
02:40Two stimulants working in parallel.
02:43For decades it was a legal medication in Europe.
02:47It was pulled from western markets in the 80s.
02:49Once it was clear its potential for abuse outweighed any therapeutic benefit.
02:54But the pill didn't disappear.
02:57It migrated.
02:59In the Middle East's conflicts over recent decades, Captagon turned up again in the pockets of fighters on every side.
03:07It served the same purpose Pervitin had in the Yarden.
03:11Kill the fear.
03:12Suppress sleep.
03:13And send a young man charging a fortified position without his brain telling him to stop.
03:20Reports from captured prisoners described the same pattern again and again.
03:25The pill before combat.
03:27Euphoria during.
03:28The crash afterward.
03:30Some didn't remember what they'd done.
03:32Others didn't want to.
03:33What changed in 80 years wasn't the logic.
03:36It was the name on the package.
03:38Scopolamine.
03:40You're being interrogated in a room with a lamp overhead and you can't remember your own name.
03:45Tomorrow you'll have signed a confession you don't even know you gave.
03:49Scopolamine comes from the Henbane and Datora plants.
03:52And during World War I, intelligence services on several sides began using it to interrogate prisoners as an early truth
04:00serum.
04:02The subject slipped into deep confusion.
04:04Mental defenses crumbled.
04:06And he answered questions without really knowing who was asking, where he was or why.
04:12The next day he remembered next to nothing.
04:16German army doctors also used it to sedate the wounded in extreme psychological shock.
04:21And obstetricians used it in childbirth or under the name twilight sleep.
04:26The wounded soldier stopped screaming.
04:29The mother stopped remembering.
04:31The prisoner stopped lying.
04:33One plant.
04:34Three military uses.
04:35In Colombia today it goes by another name, Burundanga, and it's linked to robberies and kidnappings.
04:41But a century earlier it was an official military intelligence tool, handed out in small vials to interrogators with precise
04:48dosing instructions.
04:50Too little.
04:51And the prisoner kept resisting.
04:53Too much.
04:54And he fell into a coma or died.
04:56The margin was razor thin and mistakes never made it into any report.
05:02Morphine.
05:03It's August 1914.
05:06You fall into the mud of a French trench with a hole the size of a coin right above your
05:11heart.
05:12You shouldn't be alive.
05:13And technically in a few minutes, you won't be.
05:16But before your body even grasps what's happened, two medics drag you onto a wooden stretcher.
05:21And one pulls a metal tube the size of a pencil from his pocket.
05:25He presses it in.
05:26You feel a prick in your thigh, and then the pain, which was your whole world, becomes a distant idea,
05:33almost foreign, as if it were happening to someone else.
05:36The next thing you feel is something wet on your forehead.
05:40The medic is writing a letter, an M, in your own blood.
05:44The reason behind that gesture has to do with an invisible system almost nobody understood then, and almost nobody explains
05:51now.
05:52Most people assume that Mark was bureaucratic cruelty, a way of tagging wounded meat.
05:57The truth is the opposite.
05:59That M saved your life a second time.
06:02If the next medic down the evacuation line hadn't seen that letter, he'd have given you another dose.
06:08And a second dose of morphine stops your breathing.
06:12You'd have died in your sleep, smiling, completely at peace.
06:16Morphine was isolated from opium by a German pharmacist named Friedrich Serturner in 1804.
06:22And for over a hundred years, it was, quite literally, the only thing separating military surgery from torture.
06:29Every European army, British, French, German, Russian, Austrian, carried it in the standard medical kit.
06:36Without it, no amputation, no abdominal surgery, no chest wound ever reached a field hospital alive.
06:44Morphine held up the entire war from underneath.
06:47And here's the trap nobody saw coming.
06:50The problem wasn't at the front.
06:53It was what happened afterward.
06:55Four years later, when the armistice sounds and the trains start bringing men home,
07:00hundreds of thousands of veterans discover they can't sleep, can't eat, can't live in their own skin without sticking a
07:07needle in it again.
07:08And worst of all, nobody knows what to call it.
07:12The official figures were never tallied across countries, because no one wanted to count.
07:18That's why, even today, there's no real number for how many men came home from World War I dependent on
07:25morphine.
07:26And while those veterans desperately searched for something to calm the tremors,
07:30Bayer already had a new product ready, sold without a prescription,
07:34with a name that sounded like salvation.
07:38You pop a chocolate in your mouth, chew it, and realize you've been marching for three days straight through a
07:45Belgian forest without sleep.
07:47Pervitin was synthesized in 1937 by a chemist named Fritz Hauschild at the Berlin firm Temmler Werke,
07:56after he saw American athletes at the Berlin Olympics using Benzedrine to train longer.
08:02The German version was stronger, more stable, and more addictive.
08:08From 1938, it was sold over the counter in every pharmacy in the Reich,
08:13and it also came as chocolates called Panzerschokolade,
08:16with 13 milligrams of methamphetamine per piece against 3 milligrams in a regular pill.
08:23Before the French campaign, between April and July 1940,
08:28the Temmler factory produced 35 million pills for the Wehrmacht.
08:32It ran at 833,000 pills a day, seven days a week.
08:38Tank crews drove 155 kilometers without stopping or sleeping.
08:42The infantry marched three days straight through the Ardennes.
08:46Rommel noted in his diary that he took it as casually as his daily bread.
08:50And here's a detail almost nobody mentions.
08:53A young soldier stationed on the Eastern Front, Heinrich Boll,
08:58future Nobel Prize winner in literature in 1972,
09:03wrote letters home asking for Pervitin as casually as you'd ask for cigarettes.
09:08The letters still exist.
09:10In one from 1940, he writes,
09:13Send me Pervitin if possible.
09:16The man who decades later would win the Nobel for his humanist riding
09:20was begging his mother for methamphetamine from a trench.
09:25Mustard gas was a chemical agent used against the enemy line.
09:28You can't see it, you barely smell it.
09:31And by the time you realize what's happening,
09:33you've been breathing it for 10 minutes.
09:36Mustard gas, chemically known as dichloro-diethyl sulfide,
09:40was first used by the German army in July 1917 near Ypres.
09:46Unlike chlorine or phosgene, which killed fast,
09:49mustard gas was designed to do something different.
09:52Not to kill, but to disable.
09:54A dead soldier costs the enemy nothing.
09:57A blinded soldier, with blisters in his lungs and skin peeling off in layers,
10:02needs four men to carry him out,
10:04a doctor to treat him,
10:05and a hospital bed for weeks.
10:08Symptoms took hours to appear.
10:10That was part of the design.
10:12The exposed soldier stayed at his post unaware,
10:15contaminating comrades who touched him,
10:17soaking his clothes,
10:18the blankets,
10:19the trench floor.
10:21By the time the eyes burned and the eyelids sealed shut on their own,
10:25it was too late for the mask.
10:27The Allies adopted it quickly.
10:29By the war's end,
10:30both sides were using it as routinely as artillery.
10:33Mustard gas is estimated to have caused over a million casualties,
10:37dead and wounded,
10:39over the course of the conflict.
10:41Among those gassed in October 1918,
10:44near Ypres,
10:45was an Austrian corporal,
10:47who temporarily lost his sight
10:48and spent weeks in a field hospital.
10:51His name was Adolf Hitler.
10:53Some historians have speculated that the experience shaped something in him,
10:57but there's no way to know.
11:00Yuko Dahl.
11:01Dr. Theodor Morel was Adolf Hitler's personal physician from 1936
11:06and stayed with him without interruption
11:08until the final days in the Berlin bunker.
11:11His detailed medical notes,
11:13preserved in the archives and found by historians,
11:16document 800 injections,
11:19given to the Fuhrer over 1,149 days,
11:23a total of 74 different preparations,
11:26including testosterone,
11:28bull testicle extracts,
11:30barbiturates,
11:31megadoses of vitamins,
11:32and remedies for digestion and insomnia.
11:35Among them was Yuko Dahl,
11:38a synthetic opioid developed by German pharmacologists in 1916,
11:43as a stronger,
11:44purer successor to morphine.
11:46Hitler got his first injection in 1943.
11:51By January 1945,
11:54with the Red Army already on the outskirts of Berlin,
11:57he was receiving it regularly and ever more often,
12:01because of persistent abdominal pain
12:03and bouts of uncontrollable trembling in his hands.
12:07Heroin.
12:08Your mother has sent a package to the front,
12:11with tobacco,
12:12wool socks,
12:13and a syrup sold as a useful gift for a friend at the front.
12:17And what you've just put into your body is pure pharmacy heroin.
12:21You're in a trench in Belgium,
12:23your hands shaking from the cold,
12:25and three sleepless nights.
12:27You open the package that came from London,
12:30and drink a couple of spoonfuls of a sweet syrup
12:32any pharmacy in the British Empire sells.
12:35The label says buyer,
12:37says for coughs,
12:38says no risk of dependence.
12:41What it doesn't say is that the active ingredient is diacetylmorphine,
12:45a molecule two to three times stronger than morphine,
12:49able to cross the blood-brain barrier in seconds.
12:52The brand name came from the German heroish.
12:56Heroic,
12:57because that's exactly what patients said they felt when they took it.
13:01A heroic feeling.
13:02Invincible.
13:03Clean.
13:05Buyer launched it in 1898 as pills,
13:08as syrups for children,
13:09as remedies for tuberculosis.
13:11It was advertised alongside aspirin
13:13as one of the company's two great pharmaceutical hits.
13:16And once the war broke out,
13:18and morphine ran short,
13:19the front lines filled up with heroin as an unofficial substitute.
13:24Soldiers got it when there was no morphine left.
13:27London pharmacies put together gift kits with a syringe,
13:31ampoules,
13:32and a loving note for the boy in France.
13:35Most people assume heroin was always a street drug,
13:39dark,
13:39a thing of the underworld.
13:41The reality is that for 20 years it was a respectable pharmacy product,
13:46sold by one of Europe's most prestigious companies,
13:49prescribed to children with coughs,
13:51and sent by mothers to their sons in the trenches,
13:54as casually as sending chocolate.
13:56When the war ended,
13:59the damage was so vast that governments had to scramble to react.
14:04The United States had passed the Harrison Narcotic Tax Act in 1914,
14:10in the middle of the war,
14:12and a total ban on heroin production and possession came in 1924.
14:18The Treaty of Versailles forced Buyer to give up its commercial rights to two names,
14:22aspirin and heroin.
14:25The company's two biggest pharmaceutical inventions vanished with a signature,
14:30but the dependence was already planted in an entire generation.
14:34And while governments argued over what to do with the addicts coming home from the front,
14:39London pharmacies were selling something else,
14:42advertised as a miracle for polar explorers,
14:45benzidrine.
14:47You buy a cold inhaler at a New York pharmacy,
14:50crack it open with a knife,
14:52swallow the paper strip inside,
14:54and don't sleep for 36 hours.
14:57Benzedrine was synthesized by the pharmaceutical company Smith,
15:01Klein and French in the late 20s,
15:03as a nasal decongestant.
15:05It was sold over the counter in a plastic inhaler anyone could buy for a few cents.
15:10What the company hadn't foreseen,
15:12was what happened if someone broke the casing,
15:15pulled out the amphetamine-soaked paper strip,
15:18and swallowed it straight or dissolved it in coffee.
15:22The effect was brutal.
15:24Euphoria, energy, no sleep and no hunger for a day and a half.
15:30American soldiers discovered the trick before the high command did.
15:34They ordered inhalers by mail,
15:37crack them open in the barracks,
15:38and split the contents with their bodies.
15:41By the time the U.S. Army tried to regulate military amphetamine use,
15:46an entire generation of soldiers was already used to doing it on their own.
15:50The British went through the same thing in the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain,
15:55with pilots flying 12-hour missions over the continent.
15:59And while the Allies were finding the inhaler trick,
16:02in a German city called Berlin,
16:04a chemist was about to synthesize the strongest,
16:07purest, most addictive version of this entire family,
16:11cocaine.
16:12They offer you a pill that Shackleton and Scott carried to the ends of the earth,
16:16and you swallow it, thinking you'll last through the next offensive like a polar hero.
16:21It's called Forced March, made by Burroughs Wellcome,
16:25a British pharmaceutical company of unquestioned prestige.
16:28It's a gelatin capsule with coca leaf extract and kola nut,
16:32and the ads promise it boosts endurance,
16:35suppresses hunger, and pushes back the limits of human exhaustion.
16:40Ernest Shackleton took it to Antarctica.
16:43Robert Scott had it in his pack the day he froze to death at the pole.
16:48If it could help you survive 40 degrees below zero,
16:52surely it could help you survive a muddy trench in Picardy.
16:55That's what the soldiers thought,
16:57buying it with their own pay,
16:58or getting it in packages from home.
17:01The effect was immediate.
17:03Hunger vanished for hours,
17:05the cold stopped existing,
17:06and something even stranger appeared.
17:09Absolute confidence in yourself.
17:11A feeling that the bullet with your name on it hadn't been written.
17:14What the package didn't say was what happened four or five hours later.
17:19When the capsule wore off,
17:21and the body collapsed in on itself.
17:24A cocaine crash in a trench under artillery fire
17:28isn't something Burroughs welcome put in its brochure.
17:32And here's the fact that changes the picture.
17:35The original Coca-Cola,
17:37the one sold today in office vending machines,
17:40contained real coca leaf extract until 1903.
17:44Which means that when these soldiers swallowed Forced March in 1914,
17:49they weren't doing anything unusual.
17:51They were taking in concentrated form
17:54the same molecule their parents had drunk from a soda bottle ten years earlier.
17:59The British Army Council didn't ban the sale of cocaine to soldiers
18:04until 1916, two full years into the war.
18:10And only when newspapers began exposing
18:13that London pharmacies were openly selling cocaine and heroin kits
18:17labeled as gifts for the soldier at the front,
18:20The German High Command, meanwhile,
18:23had considered in 1914 distributing cocaine
18:26as a daily ration to every soldier
18:28to cut food consumption on long marches.
18:32They gave up for one simple reason.
18:34They didn't have enough raw material.
18:3825 years later, with another war,
18:40they'd have a different idea and a lot more factories.
18:43But before the German amphetamines,
18:45there was another substance every army handed out openly,
18:48by official order.
18:50At the same time, every day.
18:53Alcohol.
18:54You're ordered to drink 70 milliliters of rum at noon,
18:57in formation, in front of your comrades.
19:00And you're 19.
19:02That was the official ration of the British Royal Navy,
19:05issued every day without exception since the 17th century.
19:09French soldiers got a liter of cheap red wine called Pinard as part of their official pay.
19:15The Germans got schnapps before an attack.
19:18The Russians, vodka.
19:20The Austrians, wine.
19:23After the war, a medical officer with the Scottish Black Watch Regiment
19:27testified before a parliamentary commission.
19:29And what he said still makes British historians squirm.
19:33If it hadn't been for the rum ration, I don't think we'd have won the war.
19:38And that wasn't a figure of speech or some drunk old soldier talking big.
19:42It was a technical description of how the machine actually worked.
19:46Alcohol was an official part of military strategy on every side, no exceptions.
19:52Soldiers drank before the attack to drown out the fear of climbing out of the trench and running straight at
19:57a machine gun.
19:58They drank afterward to silence what they'd seen and what they'd done.
20:02They drank between attacks to survive one more dawn that might be their last.
20:07Alcohol was the only remedy available against what soldiers called shell shock,
20:12a trauma medicine still couldn't define, study, or treat.
20:16Doctors prescribed rest and peace of mind.
20:20In the trenches of Flanders, there was neither just a barrel of rum and another dawn.
20:26The tradition ran so deep that the British Navy kept the daily rum ration until 1970,
20:32more than half a century after the war.
20:35The day it ended has its own name in naval history, Black Tot Day, the day of the last drink.
20:41Sailors paraded in black armbands, as if at a funeral.