Comedian Owen Benjamin Dives Deep On Hitler And Nazis’ Meth Use

Comedian Owen Benjamin recently released a series of posts and videos discussing Hitler and Nazis’ meth use.

Owen, in a post with a video depicting the German population and soldiers, wrote, “Now you think this looks like a good time, but this is after over a billion doses of pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine called Pervitin was issued to the population.”

“Hitler was dosing himself daily with meth injections and adrenaline in his eyeballs. True story,” added Benjamin.

PERVitin was nazi meth that they pumped into the whole population. “Germany awake” was the slogan for the movement and the pills.
It’s my opinion that this is why they got so into fashion and cleanliness. I’ve known people who do a lot of meth and it gets very very leather… pic.twitter.com/XXuWiD4snc

— Owen Benjamin 🐻 (@OwenBenjamin) June 28, 2024

I know you think this looks like a good time, but this is after over a billion doses of pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine called Pervitin was issued to the population. Hitler was dosing himself daily with meth injections and adrenaline in his eyeballs. True story. That makes… pic.twitter.com/4YQaME6JT1

— Owen Benjamin 🐻 (@OwenBenjamin) June 30, 2024

Watch him break it down in a comedic way here:

Per NPR:

There have been many books written about Hitler, but a new one called “Blitzed” focuses on something that’s often in the background in biographies – Hitler’s drug use, drugs including oxycodone and cocaine prescribed by his doctors. The book is also about how the German soldiers in World War II were amped up by methamphetamine, which enabled them to keep fighting for days without sleeping. The book is based in part on papers that were declassified in the past few years, as well as the private records of Hitler’s personal physician, Dr. Theo Morrell, who kept track of the approximately 90 varieties of injections and pills he gave to Hitler, including treatments made from animal hormones. My guest is the author of “Blitzed,” Norman Ohler. He’s a German novelist and filmmaker. He planned to write a novel about drugs in the Third Reich, but after starting to do the research, he decided he wanted to write about the facts.

Norman Ohler, welcome to FRESH AIR. So just to set the context, before the war, Germany was already a major manufacturer and exporter of opiates. What were some of the drugs Germany was known for before the war started?

NORMAN OHLER: Basically, all the drugs we know today at one point were German products. Heroin, for example, was a patent by the Bayer Company. Cocaine was a trademark of the Merck Company in Darmstadt. It’s surprising to see that Germany, at one point, was an inventor of drugs of all kinds.

GROSS: So Germany also manufactured a lot of methamphetamine under the trademark name Pervitin.

OHLER: The irony of the story is that when the Nazis took power in 1933, they imposed strict laws against drugs. They were the first German government to actually wage a war on drugs. But then, in the mid-1930s, there was a company in Berlin called Temmler which developed a new type of medicine – as they called it in the beginning – which was methamphetamine, which they branded as Pervitin. And Pervitin, methamphetamine – which we now know as crystal meth or that – at least it’s the street name – was perfectly legal and was seen as a legitimate way of boosting your daily performance. It was like a potent cup of coffee.

GROSS: Hitler, you say, had a reputation for being anti-drug, for being a teetotaler and for being something of, like, a health fanatic, like a vegetarian. This was part of his myth. But you document that he was taking an extraordinary cocktail of drugs. What are some of the drugs that he took during the war years?

OHLER: Hitler met a doctor called Theo Morell in 1936, and Morell was famous for giving vitamin injections. And Hitler, with his healthy diet, immediately believed in this doctor and got daily vitamin injections for about five years and said to everyone that wanted to hear that Morell is elevating his healthy diet onto a scientific level by giving him these vitamin injections.

But then in – as the war turned difficult for Germany in 1941 against Russia in the fall, Hitler got sick for the first time. He couldn’t go to the military briefing, which was unheard of before in military headquarters, and Morell gave him something different that day. He gave him an opiate that day, and he also gave him a hormone injection. And Hitler, who had suffered from high fever, immediately felt well again and was able to tell his generals – to go to the meeting and tell the generals how the war should continue, how the daily operations should continue.

And he was really struck by this immediate recovery from this opiate, which was called Dolantine. That’s a brand name of the opiate that he was taking that day. From that moment on, he asked Morell to give him stronger stuff than just vitamins. And we can see that from the fall of 1941 to the winter of 1944 Hitler’s drug abuse increases significantly.

GROSS: So would you run through some of the drugs that Hitler took over the course of the war?

OHLER: I could identify three phases in Hitler’s drug career. The first one are the vitamins given in high dosages intravenously. The second phase starts in the fall of 1941 with the first opiate but especially with the first hormone injections. Morell was really into giving steroids, animal products. He manufactured concoctions of animal organs in his own lab in occupied Czechoslovakia and gave those to Hitler. So these are, I guess, we could call them typical doping substances. He gave a lot of those between 1941 and 1943. And then in ’43, the third phase starts, which is the heavy opiate phase. Before a decisive meeting with Mussolini, Morell gives Hitler a half-synthetic opioid, as it’s called, with the brand name Eukodal. The active ingredient is oxycodone.

Hitler high on methamphetamine at the 1936 Olympics. Ngl he looks like me vibing to music pic.twitter.com/GmkpxEH1oC

— A Real Sigma Male (@ArealsigmaMale) June 22, 2022