Otto Ranke News Today

Drugs have long played a role in wartime strategy, but the Nazis took chemical dependency to another level, the author of "Blitzed" told Insider.

Drugs have long played a role in wartime strategy, but the Nazis took chemical dependency to another level, the author of "Blitzed" told Insider.

Most of the time, history talks about how the soldiers were nourished with nutrient-packed chocolates and biscuits, providing them with coffee or cigarettes but the use of drugs in warfare to help increase their performance was a detail usually left out. 

Recent reports have revealed that "study drugs" are now widely used by students in British universities. This is unfortunately nothing new. The use of methamphetamine (a.k.a. crystal meth) was prevalent among German troops during World War II. It was issued in a pill form, known as Pervitin. The British became aware of this practice when they studied Germany's astonishingly successful invasion through the Ardennes in 1940, when German soldiers remained awake for days and stormed ac...

Before the First World War, the collaborative research efforts of the German university system and German corporations enabled the German corporate sector as a whole to obtain a virtual worldwide monopoly on drugs whose production required chemical expertise and industrial capacity. This research was fueled by revenues from the sale of morphine, an alkaloid found in opium, first identified by a German chemist in the early 19th century and patented by Merck soon afterward. German pharmace...