- BERLIN (Reuters Health) -
The Nazis intended to put their entire army on cocaine in order to keep
tired, old or injured soldiers fighting when all else seemed lost toward
the end of World War II, according to a new book.
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- The mix of cocaine, amphetamine and morphine was made
into tablets that Hitler's military chiefs hoped would turn an army nearing
total defeat into fearless supermen able to march day and night.
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- German author and criminologist Dr. Wolf Kemper's book,
"Nazis on Speed," arrived in German bookstores this week. It
contains the first account of the D-IX pills, which were tested on prisoners
of war.
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- He told Reuters Health, "They played around with
various preparations for cocaine so it could be easily taken by troops
on the move. They made it into pill form and even created a chewing-gum
base cocaine.
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- "They were also experimenting, like the Allied armies
and practically everyone else involved in the war, with amphetamines...in
order to keep troops going for longer."
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- Kemper, who works at the North-East Lower Saxony College
in Lueneburg, northern Germany, has spent 3 years working with a number
of colleagues on the book, which examines many areas of drug consumption
in the 1930s and 1940s, within the civilian population as well as the armed
forces.
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- They trawled through military and university academic
files to unearth original accounts of the experiments with the D-IX cocaine
mix pills on concentration camp prisoners.
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- One eyewitness from the Sachsenhausen camp near Berlin
described watching other prisoners being forced to march until they dropped
from exhaustion, Kemper said.
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- Odd Nansen wrote of the "pill patrols" who
were given the D-IX tablets and then made to march carrying 20-kilo backpacks.
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- "They were guinea pigs for a newly-discovered energy
pill," his diary entry reads. "They were tested to see how long
the effects of the pill lasted for.
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- "At first they sang and whistled as they marched
but after the first 24 hours most of them had collapsed."
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- Kemper said, "By the end of 1944 the Nazis were
desperate for new soldiers and took on the old and the young and needed
something to pep them up. This D-IX mix was Hitler's last secret weapon
in his bid to win a long-lost war."
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- Preparations were made following the success of the experiments
to supply all of Hitler's soldiers with the drug, but mass-production could
not be achieved before the Nazis were defeated by the Allies.
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