Pervitin tablets potent after 70 years
An antique dealer in Berlin found original 1940s Pervitin tablets in an old medicine chest; they remained potent 70 years later.
Snapshot · Lex Fridman Podcast
#481 – Norman Ohler: Hitler, Nazis, Drugs, WW2, Blitzkrieg, LSD, MKUltra & CIA
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Sep 19, 2025
Where this was said
Response to historian criticism
At 41:32 · chapter starts 29:37
Ohler's girlfriend pushed him to try the archives; a monocausal professor gave him the filing 'signatures' for Professor Ranke's files — the head of Army Institute for Physiology, whose job was to improve soldier performance. At the archive in Freiburg (deliberately decentralized, a post-Nazi design choice), Ohler held Ranke's handwritten war diary and original letters to the Temmler company about production timelines. The tricky part: nothing was labeled 'drugs' in the finding books; everything was catalogued by name, position, and campaign. No one had come looking for drugs before. Ohler also describes the Navy's human experiments at Sachsenhausen — the Shoe Runners Unit testing meth-cocaine combinations in chewing gum — and how Hans Mommsen, the greatest National Socialism historian of his generation, declared that historians had 'missed' the drug angle entirely.
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