After Reading 'Blitized'

After reading 'Blitzed' by Norman Ohler, a book covering 1920s/1930s/1940s meth use by the German public, I came to look at typical behavioral and conditions of meth-users.

Meth-users will build up a sense (fake) of feeling full of energy and positiveness.  No matter what they are doing, it's all super-positive.

Meth-users will push themselves, reaching absolute maximum physical exhaustion (it could be a 'rush' that goes on for twelve hours.  But if you were a binge-user, then this 'push' could continue (with more meth) for three to five days.  Course, at the end of this period (3-to-5 days), you 'crash'.  The crash-period?  If you go and read up on the topic, most will tell you that a minimum of two days are required, but you could be in a tired or listlessness state for up to a week (7 days).

The perfect drug for a blitzkrieg?  Yes.  If you meth'ed-up tens of thousands of German front-line soldiers, and pushed them for an entire week....then you'd reach a 'crash-period' where that group would be pulled to the side and rested, with a second group starting their part of the blitz.

One of the curious things about heavy use of meth is that your appetite diminishes (to a great extent), and you start to carve off pounds very easily.  My humble guess is that a German soldier in 1939 on the blitzkrieg....probably lost eight to fifteen pounds over the one-month war in Poland.  Course, at the end of this....they went into a restful period, and regain the weight eventually.

But all of this leads onto poor sleep patterns, restlessness, various delusions, hyped up aggressiveness, and just plain irritability.  If some officer came to you and ordered you to massacre some entire village, you'd likely do it without a lot of thinking (something that was seen in Greece, France, and USSR).

The problem with paranoia?  Well, most meth-users (long-term) will talk about psychosis and hallucinations.  Obsessive behaviors will start up, and you will start to imagine things which just don't fit into reality.

Doctors talk about the issue of meth affecting the brain....where acts of violence are acceptable and part of the 'high'.  Mood swings are considered 'normal' and part of the high.  All of this leads onto violent acts that either involve the meth-user, or the people around the meth-user.

Used in a war-time scenario?  You are unleashing some group on society where there is minimal control of the group, and the outcome is likely to be fairly violent, and destruction will be the normal result in the end.

So then you start to look at long-time use by a soldier.  High blood pressure, damaged blood vessels, increased chance of strokes, liver damage, critically harming the lungs, and increased chance of early death.  You can toss in loss of memory along the way, along with inability comprehend reality.

It would be interesting to see the death statistics of German soldiers who survived the war in 1945, and how many were dead within ten years after the war.  The ones who survived another fifty years?  I would make a humble guess that they were the ones who never utilized meth during the war.

All of this pondering over the German soldier use of meth, lays out a number of issues, which I now question.  Did you have generals also using meth to a high degree?  Was the delay at Dunkirk mostly over the fact that German troops were on a 'crash' and the general staff planned out a ten-day rest period before the final push?  All of the acts of violence shown in France....due to meth-use?  A lot of questions here.