Re: Pervertin or how German Supersoldiers High on Crack travelled through Space and Time Buy my Book
I came across a post on the bird site yesterday calling into attention the use of pervitin, more or less adderall, among German troops during WW2. For context pervitin tablets were indeed issued to a lot of military personnel back in those days, specifically to aircraft pilot and sometimes tank crews on long missions. The drug as some of you may have heard keeps you awake and alert, along with a slew of side effects and a non negligible chance of addiction.
In a discussion that brought to view just how willing people are to buy into Nazi propaganda in the year of our f*cking lord 2023, I pointed out a few things, uphill and having to indulge a lot of sidetracking.
The use of pervitin has always been a little overstated ever since it came to the internet's attention, and I certainly would never call it a key component of the Blitzkrieg when, in the theaters of war where actual Blitzkrieg was employed, its success was more due to a combination of innovative doctrines, intact fuel supplies and a big fat helping of dumb luck. It was a bold move highly relying on capturing enemy fuel depots with fast, surprise deep strikes supported by a lot of armored and air forces, and it was only sustainable in neighboring, industrialized countries.
One can argue if the USSR was industrialized at the time, but it stopped mattering when the Russians removed their entire industry from the West to beyond the Ural mountains. The Blitz stalled there.
"But if it didn't work, then why did the Nazis do it so often ?"
Well the answer to that is twofold. The first, longer answer is that Nazis were a bunch of f*cking morons. Maybe not one by one, but as a government in charge of military procurement, they were one bunch of goofy motherf*ckers. Gaggle of functional shit-for-brains really.
The Nazis gave every one of their tanks in the middle of the war two coats of anti-magnetic paint, which took almost a full day to cure, despite being the only major nation to use magnetic antitank mines. The Nazis kept using slave labor drawn from their prisoners of war, including in the manufacturing of their overengineered armored vehicles, resulting in poor quality products or, you know, a few rivets in your magnificent Tiger tank being replaced by a cigarette butt. The Nazis spent more than half the cost of a strategic bomber on every V2 rocket, not including design costs, for less than half the payload. It ended up killing more Germans and slave workers than British people in London, for literally no strategic or tactical result with 0.4 person killed per every rocket.
The second, shorter answer is that pervitin was not used that much. A lot of the arguments trying to boost its importance come from a single book, "Blitzed" by Norman Ohler, now available in twenty languages apparently, where grand claims are made by a historian who was probably more than a little tired of seeing Buzzfeed rack in the big bucks instead of him.
End note; I was called out by a bird siter after the conversation that inspired this post for even beginning to fact-check this, which they considered, and I quote, "fangirling over nazi stats". I cannot stress this enough, learning the 'bad' parts of history does not make you bad person, it is how you interact with the resulting knowledge. Unlike what they implied, I had to look for those supporting evidence. I had a hunch that such a grabbing headline about super-drugs would be fake, I knew offhand that V2 rockets killed more blues than reds, but when I had to research all that jazz about Nazis and their superweapons it was to dunk on them, not make another History Channel documentary about a time-travelling bell.
Stay critical, fascists can eat shit.
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