By the early 1930s, Adolf Hitler presented himself to the German people as a model of moral purity. He did not smoke, he did not drink alcohol, and he spoke openly against the use of illicit drugs. The image was carefully crafted and widely believed. Yet behind that public facade, the man who would lead Germany into a world war was becoming dependent on a growing cocktail of dangerous substances, administered by a personal physician whose methods were largely unknown even to those closest to the Führer.
Following the First World War, Germany’s economy lay in ruins. Under the crushing financial impositions of the Treaty of Versailles and its war reparations clause, the Weimar Republic had found an unlikely source of revenue: the global drug trade. Between 1925 and 1930, Germany became responsible for forty percent of global morphine production, along with significant quantities of cocaine. Berlin alone produced over two hundred tons of opiates for world markets.
In essence, the Weimar Republic had become the world’s drug dealer. It was a striking hypocrisy that Hitler, who wanted the German people to see him as a paragon of spiritual and social virtue, presided over a nation actively profiting from narcotics. In 1933, a law was passed that threatened prison time for anyone caught selling illegal drugs or even taking them, yet purchasing the same substances from a pharmacy without a prescription remained perfectly acceptable. Medical confidentiality did not exist.
Doctors were required to report anyone holding a narcotics prescription for more than two weeks to the police. Those judged Aryan and therefore salvageable were cut off the drugs cold and sent to concentration camps for re-education. Repeat offenders were sent to camps such as Dachau, alongside political prisoners and career criminals, to dry out in brutal conditions. It was around this time that Hitler’s own private relationship with drugs began.
For years, he had suffered from severe stomach and intestinal discomfort, a lingering consequence of being gassed during the First World War, along with chronic constipation. In 1936, Heinrich Hoffmann, the official photographer of the Nazi Party and Hitler’s personal friend, introduced him to Dr. Theodor Morell. Morel was famous among Berlin’s celebrities for his vitamin and energy shots, and he had successfully treated Hoffmann for gonorrhea.
Impressed, Hitler asked Morel to address his own ailments. Morel prescribed a capsule of healthy intestinal bacteria called Mutaflor, an experimental treatment at the time. It eased Hitler’s stomach pain, and he promptly appointed Morel as his personal physician. Morel soon introduced Hitler to Pervitin, a methamphetamine that had been patented by the German pharmaceutical company Temmler in 1937 and made available to the general public.
The marketing strategy mirrored that of the American Coca-Cola Company, with illustrated advertising, free samples for doctors, and kickbacks on sales. It was a massive success. Morel also began injecting Hitler with more than twenty different compounds, most frequently a drug called Eukodol, a combination of oxycodone, cocaine, and amphetamines, used to help Hitler maintain his frenetic pace of work. Often, Hitler demanded a second injection shortly after the first.
His near-daily drug use came to include barbiturates, opiates, testosterone, and other stimulants, with a barbiturate usually administered late in the evening to bring him down so he could sleep. Not everyone was convinced of Morel’s genius. SS physician Dr. Ernst Günther Schenck grew suspicious of the treatments, which Morel kept carefully secret.
Schenck managed to obtain a packet of the mystery drugs and sent them for analysis. The results showed a methamphetamine concentrate mixed with cocaine. This explained the pattern: stimulants by day, sleep aids by night. Hitler authorized the mass use of Pervitin for the military just before the invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939.
Reports from frontline commanders were positive. German soldiers who took the drug stayed awake for days at a time, walked for miles without resting, and felt no pain or hunger. But as the drug was widely distributed, the effects turned sour. Soldiers crashed and required significant downtime.
This has led some historians to debate whether the German forces’ failure to immediately push on to Dunkirk after their month-long blitzkrieg through France in June 1940 was due to exhaustion. Reich Marshal Hermann Göring assured Hitler that the Luftwaffe could handle the nearly half a million Allied troops trapped against the English Channel, and pilots and aircrew were also issued Pervitin to keep them alert on constant flying status. But it is equally true that after almost a month of being drug-fueled, the average German soldier in France was worn out and virtually unable to continue without considerable rest. In 1941, Leo Conti, the Third Reich’s health director, recommended placing Pervitin on a restricted list due to its adverse side effects.
He faced resistance. Although sales to the general public without a prescription were eventually halted, Conti’s report was blunt: an entire nation was becoming addicted to drugs, and the disturbing after-effects would fully obliterate the favorable success achieved after use. He warned that the emergence of tolerance could paralyze whole sections of the population, and that anyone seeking to eliminate fatigue with Pervitin could be sure it would lead to a creeping depletion of physical and psychological performance reserves and finally to a complete breakdown. The drugs had consequences far beyond the home front.
Many soldiers died from heart attacks, and some field leaders under the influence made horrendous tactical decisions. Hitler was not immune. According to many German soldiers and officers who knew him, his mental abilities declined, and his flawed decisions grew in abundance and severity. By 1942, he was completely in the grip of the drugs, and his soldiers and nation paid the price.
Generaloberst Hans Bauer, Hitler’s personal pilot, best friend, and closest confidant, later recorded the transformation. He stated that Hitler’s mental acuity steadily declined. He was alert and anxious but not always logical in his decisions. When pressed by senior military leaders with recent frontline experience as to why he had issued certain orders, Hitler would often rant and demand obedience.
Bauer noted that it was not the same man in 1944 that he had first come to know in 1932. The Hitler who had been best man at his wedding was not the same man who eventually shot himself in the bunker. Even Hitler’s decision to invade the Soviet Union in 1941 may have been influenced by his drug use. In 1940, Hitler had stated in company that Germany was not ready to embark on any operations against Stalin until perhaps 1943.
The general staff had informed him that German industry was not ready, especially in terms of transportation, and that unless Britain was out of the war, it would not be a wise decision. Morel began increasing Hitler’s dosages in the winter of 1940, and the decision to attack the Soviet Union was made despite those warnings, delayed only briefly by the defection of Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess to Scotland, the securing of the Balkans, and the need to invade Crete, all in the spring of 1941. As Germany’s fortunes waned after 1942 and defeat followed defeat, Hitler became ever more reliant on drugs. The excessive doses he took the night before the Allied landings in Normandy were so heavy that he slept through the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944.
Due to his standing orders, no military units were allowed to move from their pre-positioned locations, a decision that disgusted Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt. According to Colonel Hans von Luck, no movement order came from the Führer. Even the tanks could not move to address the invasion without orders from Hitler personally. Von Luck recalled that his division commander would not answer his request to engage the British paratroops, and they were forced to wait, losing the initiative.
Others who met Hitler during the war also witnessed the decline. His hands shook, often attributed to Parkinson’s disease, and his complexion grew pale and gaunt. Highly decorated soldiers who met him late in the war described a man unrecognizable from the one who had awarded them their earlier honors. As the war continued and Hitler consumed more drugs, his decision-making became increasingly impaired.
This was a genuine benefit to the Allies, who were able to capitalize on his many tactical and strategic errors. The energetic, mesmerizing speaker of the 1920s and 1930s, the man who had seemed so dynamic and invincible, had been transformed by years of chemical experimentation into a paranoid, erratic leader whose judgment failed exactly when Germany needed it most. The price of his addiction was paid by the soldiers who fought his wars and by the nation he destroyed.