by Norman Ohler
But which doses had proved to be best? Richert once again: “The goal of keeping people awake and efficient for days and nights without, or with only minimal, sleep lies within the realm of possibility with the application of substances A–D. Substances B and C take priority.” “B” and “C” were cocaine salt and cocaine base, each 20 milligrams in chewing gum. Consequently Richert’s decision was that the young marines should plow their way through the final waves of the war while chewing cocaine gum—for four sleepless days and nights per mission.
“Secret Command matter!”: Naval drug tests at Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
As pointless and inhuman as these experiments were, the navy doctor seemed to have enjoyed his business trip. He even planned further tests. These were to examine “how the capacity for concentration in the course of such sleepless days and nights reacts under the effects of medication.” Due to time constraints, or perhaps because the Allies were advancing steadily further, these follow-up experiments were never carried out.
There were no members of the navy medical service among the accused at the doctors’ trials in Nuremberg. Even after the war they always claimed never to have had anything to do with the SS. But that is not the case. The quest for so-called performance-enhancing drugs, which had begun at the Military Medical Academy with Ranke, had perverted into enacting experiments on human beings at concentration camps authorized by the German Navy.
Going Under
On December 7, 1944, Dönitz stood in Dresden in front of five thousand members of the Hitler Youth. Most in the crowd were only teenagers, fifteen or sixteen, and there were even ten- to twelve-year-olds. On the podium, beside the microphone, a mini-U-boat had been positioned, looking like a large-scale urn, decorated with garlands of flowers. The Grand Admiral was hailing it as Germany’s only hope of a final victory: the intention of his speech was to recruit volunteers. Countless members of the Hitler Youth signed up and over the next few days were driven in trucks with blacked-out license plates to the ports where they were to be deployed. Only there were they given uniforms for these top-secret missions.27 Obviously these young men didn’t know what awaited them when they pulled on their caps, each with a little gold sawfish28 stitched on to it, and clambered aboard the hastily riveted-together torpedo vehicles and received their just-as-hastily-pressed pills or cocaine-spiked chewing gum. Soon most of them would drown wretchedly, like kittens in a sack.
Senior Midshipman Heinz Mantey described a training voyage on the Seehund in which he and his leading engineer were given pep pills whose contents they could only guess at: “We felt somehow elated and almost weightless, everything appeared in improbable colors.”29 Soon aural hallucinations set in, and Mantey and his fellow pilot thought they were hearing otherworldly music. The fittings in the boat began to glow and changed shape and size in front of their eyes. But there was more to the experience than just pleasant visions. The effect grew stronger and stronger, until it became frightening. Confused, they rose to the surface and meandered around for hours. They were completely unable to remember their course later on.
Suicide mission with cocaine chewing gum.
This zonked odyssey was not a one-off case. One midshipman reported that “the pep pills were doled out very generously.”30 He himself never ran out. Another Seehund pilot confirmed that at the start of the mission he had been given five small red pastilles, with the instruction to take them one at a time in the event of fatigue. Knowing nothing about the effects and possible side-effects, he took all the doses prophylactically within two hours. As a result, he stayed awake for four consecutive days and nights.
Another pilot described his mission in detail: in January 1945 it was his task to establish whether the Thames estuary was suitable as an area of operations for missions lasting five days and four nights. Everything in his diving boat was crammed in so tightly that he could barely squeeze himself through the gap. And then there was the high dosage. “It was frightening.”31 His seat was adjusted, he was strapped in, surrounded by defective technology and hastily cobbled-together apparatus, cut off from contact with the outside world, inexperienced in navigation, alone on the high seas with a lot of drugs in his blood, in a metal box full of explosives: it is not a surprise that he didn’t ever arrive at the Thames estuary.
Others completely lost control of the situation. The drug took hold of one midshipman, and the constant rocking immediately affected his bowels. Meanwhile the unchanging rhythm kept pumping from the engines like a heartbeat. When he had to take a pee he did it sitting down, right into the bilge, where his turkey breast snack lay spoiling in the oily water. “I’d never been seasick, but now I threw my guts up, and kept on spewing. It wasn’t seasickness, it was sickness, and the temptation just to let everything go became stronger and stronger. We had now spent two days without proper sleep. I was sweating in spite of the cold. All that sitting was grueling. Rocking, stench, noise, damp.”32
The navy’s doped-up small battle units stood in for the last remains of a once-feared army that wanted to conquer the world. As late as April 1945 Seehunde were still setting off. One commander stated that he had taken several tablets even before the launch. On the high sea he saw houses and streets appearing in front of him. “Suddenly I had the feeling that a crow was trying to hack away at the back of my neck. I jerked my head around and looked into the grinning engines of a Lockheed Lightning that was speeding toward us. At the same moment two black dots came away from the body of the plane.” He and his engineer somehow escaped unharmed. From the fifth until the seventh day of their mission they each took between fifteen and twenty tablets per day, a sorry record. When their mini-U-boat reached the base at IJmuiden, where the partially destroyed cranes of the docks stood out against the low sky, the men tied a white towel to the periscope and sat down with their arms round each other on the edge of the turret. They surrendered, regardless of whom they were surrendering to, regardless of what happened to them. “Seven days without sleep were over at last.”33
The Reich didn’t only collapse in the dense claustrophobia of the Führer’s bunker in Berlin. It also went into terminal decline in the freezing waves of the North Atlantic while its navy was chemically pumped up on cocaine chewing gum tested on concentration camp inmates. There the mini-submarines bobbed, dived, and drifted, and jammed inside them were the young torpedo fodder of the navy, on the hardest drugs that soldiers have ever taken. Hellmuth Heye, the admiral responsible, commented on the missions on April 3, 1945, in a radio address delivered at 2:48 p.m.: “Situation reports show that fighting group did and risked everything in full deployment to fulfil the mission task. In spite of an uncertain situation at the front and unverifiable rumors, the troop marched onward against the returning tide. Again it has been proven that there is still a way if the Führer and the troops are cast from the same mold. If immediate success eluded us, there still remains the achievement of which we may be proud.”34
Perhaps the Führer and the troops were cast from the same mold—they were, at least, taking similarly powerful substances. Heye’s assertion that the pilots climbed enthusiastically into their doomed vehicles was pure cynicism. These involuntarily spaced-out men certainly didn’t want to belong to a “fighting elite” anymore. What happened here was that their last reserves had just been chemically unlocked.
Heye survived the war. Throughout his life he remained associated with the German armed forces, and in 1961 he became ombudsman to the military within the CDU-led federal government under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. His soldiers, embroidered gold sawfishes on their caps, still lie in their steel coffins at the bottom of the sea.
Brainwashing
After his arrest by the Americans, SS-Hauptsturmführer Dr. Kurt Plötner of Leipzig University was described as having “a strong physique, a round head shape, mid-blond hair, blue eyes.” He had “horn-rimmed glasses, was short-sighted, with full cheeks, beardless. Sword scar on the left temple—phlegmatic type.”35 In Dachau concentr
ation camp,36 as department head of the Institute of Practical Military Research, he had tested “chemical methods for the abrogation of the will.” They were based on experiments undertaken in the Auschwitz extermination camp by Dr. Bruno Weber, the director of the Hygienic Bacteriological Research Center in Auschwitz, with barbiturates, morphine derivatives, and mescaline. These experiments were inspired by the Gestapo, where there was frustration at their limited success in gaining information from imprisoned Polish resistance fighters.* Unlike Sachsenhausen, which was chiefly concerned with endurance tests, Auschwitz was focused on brainwashing and consciousness control.
Plötner continued this barbaric series of tests in Dachau, and gave unwitting prisoners mescaline, a psychoactive alkaloid that occurs naturally in the Mexican peyote cactus. The substance, which has been used for thousands of years in rituals by America’s indigenous cultures to commune with ancestors and gods, can cause powerful hallucinations. In the 1920s mescaline was popular among thinkers, artists, and psychologists, as it supposedly expands consciousness. Aldous Huxley would describe the effect in his book The Doors of Perception. But the development of the effect of a drug is always dependent on the circumstances under which it is taken. Plötner did not intend to liberate his guinea pigs’ thoughts with mescaline, quite the contrary. Like his predecessor, Dr. Weber in Auschwitz, he wanted to find out whether better results could be achieved through brainwashing in interrogations.37
“All questioning is a forcible intrusion. When used as an instrument of power it is like a knife cutting into the flesh of the victim,” Elias Canetti wrote in Crowds and Power.38 If a person’s freedom relies largely on the protection of personal secrets, Plötner attempted to develop a particularly sharp blade to penetrate deep into the hidden heart of the individual. For a test group of thirty people the perverted SS shaman secretly dissolved mescaline in coffee or alcohol and began an innocuous conversation with the unsuspecting test subjects. After thirty to sixty minutes a change took place. The alkaloid had passed into the bloodstream via the mucous membrane of the stomach. The experimental subjects who were “opened up” by the drug were now informed that in this special zone where the interrogation was taking place Plötner had direct access to their soul. He suggested they should tell him everything of their own free will or something terrible would happen. The perfidious strategy worked: “When the mescaline took effect, the investigating person could extract even the most intimate secrets from the prisoner if the questions were asked skillfully. They even reported voluntarily on erotic and sexual matters. . . . Mental reservations ceased to exist. Emotions of hatred and revenge could always be brought to light. Tricky questions were not seen through, so that an assumption of guilt could easily be produced from the answer.”39
Plötner could not finish his series of tests. The Americans liberated the camp and confiscated his documents. It was a treasure trove for the U.S. Secret Service. Under the leadership of Charles Savage and the Harvard medic Henry K. Beecher, the experiments were continued under the code name Project Chatter and other rubrics at the Naval Medical Research Institute in Washington, DC. These were used as a matrix for extensive series of investigations that spanned the whole of the 1950s, involved thousands of human guinea pigs, and whose results would be used by the Americans to try to unmask Soviet spies in the Korean War. Like the Germans, they were concerned with “becoming precisely acquainted with the way in which these drugs took effect, as a practical instrument for their possible use on (civilian and military) prisoners.”40 Just as the victorious United States appropriated the Third Reich’s discoveries in rocket science and the exploration of outer space, the Nazi drug experiments were imported to explore inner worlds.41 The secret U.S. program MKUltra, based on Plötner’s initial work, took “Mind Kontrol” as its goal—the spelling with a “K” could be read as a nod to its German origins.
Plötner himself was never punished for his crimes but lived in hiding in north Germany as “Herr Schmitt” until 1952. In the soccer World Cup year of 1954 the medical faculty of Freiburg University appointed him as an extraordinary professor.
Twilight of the Drugs
The higher a man rises the more he has to be able to abstain. . . . If a street-sweeper is unwilling to sacrifice his tobacco or his beer, then I think, “Very well, my good man, that’s precisely why you’re a street-sweeper and not one of the ruling personalities of the State!”
—Adolf Hitler42
The first American convoy entered the conquered port of Antwerp on November 28, 1944. Allied supply routes were in this way secured. In December U.S. troops advanced on a broad front from the West toward the border of the Reich. Morell wrote on December 9, 1944, about his visit to Hitler: “Wanted to do without injection, but then on request, because of imminent major efforts, 10 ccm glucose plus homoseran 10 ccm intramuscular.” On the following night Eukodal was also injected into the vein.43
During that winter those “major efforts” were multiplying to an alarming extent. Hitler, self-stylizing himself as a kind of fleshly seismograph for the coming defeat, experienced the “most intense levels of stress of his whole life . . . and the very greatest nervous tensions caused by imminent events and the constant terror attacks on Germany cities.”44 He repeatedly professed he needed an injection to be able to endure it all. On December 10, 1944, he was traveling toward yet another of the Führer headquarters, this time called Adlerhorst (“Eagle’s Eyrie”), near Bad Nauheim. From here he planned his illusionary blow against the West, the second Ardennes offensive. His personal physician noted: “Called 4.30 this morning. Führer having convulsions again. Eukodal Eupaverin i.v. Most exciting day of whole life. A great victory must be won! 11.30 in the morning: Führer still having convulsions and has had no sleep, although big discussions are constantly necessary. Departure dependent on a few important pieces of news that are awaited. Larger injections in the train not possible because of inevitable cold when stepping outside, but in his view one more big intravenous injection necessary.”45
On December 11 the desolate luxury train arrived at the new headquarters in the Taunus mountain range near Frankfurt at the crack of dawn. Hitler summoned the commanders of the Western Front, who had for security reasons been divided into two separate groups. Everyone’s guns and bags were confiscated and then the baffled generals were driven back and forth through the bare winter forest to make them lose their bearings. At last they stopped in front of a bunker. The generals walked between rows of black-clad SS men toward a “bent figure with a pale, sunken face, collapsed on his chair, with trembling hands, hiding his left, violently twitching arm to the best of his ability,” as General Hasso von Manteuffel described him.46 The frightening, drooling wreck’s name was Adolf Hitler. He had just slurped down two rice gruel soups to give him some strength and acted as if he had the situation under control. He set out a kind of attack plan to the toadying officers but had to admit that this was a gamble, and was “disproportionate to our available forces.”47 In Morell’s notes the ghostly meeting is whitewashed thus: “Führer had discussion lasting several hours with about forty to fifty generals. Führer supposed to have been very fresh and lively, inspiring and impulsive. Excellent health.”48
This second Ardennes offensive proceeded quite differently from the first, in the spring of 1940. This time it relied on tricks and the hope of bad weather, so that the Allied pilots couldn’t bomb the remaining German outposts too easily. SS-Obersturmbannführer Skorzeny was operating with a thousand men in stolen American uniforms with D IX in their combat packs behind enemy lines to cause confusion. This spread a rumor that they were planning to assassinate the American commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and, for a short time, some U.S. units were actually quite preoccupied by the extra security measures they had to put in place.
But the superficiality of the German action soon became apparent. Both the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS were knocked back amid great losses. On December 19, 1944, Hitler ate spinach soup and then ordered “liver
and Pervitin, requested because of current excess of work.”49 So he was now taking methamphetamine as well—Morell doesn’t say whether it was injected or taken orally. The former seems likely, since he mentions it in a single breath with the liver preparation that he always injected. After the war Ernst Günther Schenk, formerly Himmler’s nutrition adviser, claimed that Patient A also took the stimulant orally on a regular basis, as a clandestine mixture with the Nobel-Vitamultin: he reportedly examined one of the gold-wrapped bars in the Institute for Defense Pharmacy at the Military Medical Academy and presumably discovered that it contained both Pervitin and caffeine.
The Führer also spent New Year’s Eve of 1944–45 in a state of intoxication: first, in combination with glucose, he took a hormone-rich animal liver injection, then a holiday gift of Eukodal was taken intravenously. Although the dosage level went unrecorded, Morell did record the effect: “Führer is almost calm. The trembling in his left arm or rather his hand only very slight.”50
As usual the state of the dictator’s health was lauded to the outside world. In the edition of the weekly magazine Das Reich published on the last day of 1944, Joseph Goebbels wrote: “The man whose goal it was to save his people, and furthermore to shape the face of the continent, is entirely averted from the everyday joys and bourgeois comforts of life. More than that: in fact, they don’t even exist for him. . . . You need only linger in his presence to feel physically how much power he exudes, how strong he is.” The propaganda minister also had an explanation for the obviously poor posture of the head of state: “When he holds his head slightly bowed, it comes from studying so many maps. . . . He is modesty personified. If the lunch and dinner tables of our whole nation were laid like that of the Führer, we would not need to be worried about German food supplies.”51