Snapshot · Lex Fridman Podcast
The German Navy paid SS concentration camp prisoners in the Shoe Runners Unit to test drug combinations including methamphetamine mixed with cocaine in chewing gum.
Where this was said
At 24:49 · chapter starts 23:45
Ohler grew up fascinated by the walled city of Berlin and drove there the night the Wall fell. In New York in the early 1990s, he was a novelist living for $300/month in pre-Giuliani Manhattan, took LSD for the first time, and heard about Kurt Cobain's death just before a cassette of Berlin techno arrived and changed his musical world. He moved to Berlin in the mid-90s for the electronic music scene — parties in abandoned East German buildings, the famous Tresor club in a former bank vault. His friend Alex the DJ first told him 'the Nazis took a lot of drugs.' Ohler didn't believe it — but an antique dealer had found original 1940s Pervitin tablets in an old Berlin apartment, and they were still potent decades later. That story, combined with a professor's claim that 'there would be no Blitzkrieg without methamphetamine,' launched Ohler into the archives.
The German Navy hired the SS's 'Shoe Runners Unit' at Sachsenhausen concentration camp — prisoners who tested shoe soles by walking for days on different terrain replicas — and gave them cocktails of methamphetamine, cocaine, and experimental combinations in chewing gum. The goal: find a drug to keep soldiers awake and combat-ready for seven days straight.
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