What happened to addicts in Nazi Germany?

by battletoasta
commiespaceinvader

Adapted from an older answer:

Regarding drug use in Nazi Germany, one thing that sticks out to people who don't study this particular subject is that Nazi Germany in continuation of the Weimar Republic had a rather liberal drug policy and that addicts were, in some ways surprisingly, not targeted the same way alcoholics were.

Germany from the Empire onward and through the Weimar Republic had a virtual monopoly on manufactured, chemical, and industrial drugs. Both Morphine and Heroine were produced by companies such as Bayer in large quantities and apparently frequently prescribed by German doctors until the 1950s as a remedy for various ailments and diseases. It is however, very difficult to come by actual numbers for drug use and especially drug addicts, meaning people who engaged in the recreational use of these drugs.

Jonathan Lewy in his article The Drug Policy of the Third Reich published in Social History of of Alcohol and Drugs, Volume 22, No 2 (Spring 2008) argues on good basis that all numbers concerning how many drug addicts there were in Germany and how many people used drugs for recreation are at best guestimates. He writes:

Like many drug statistics, the reported numbers of addicts are mere guesstimates rather than reliable figures, mainly because it is next to impossible to differentiate between addicts and users. Oberregierungsrat Erich Hesse, a high ranking official in the Reich Health Office in the 1930s and 1940s, reported that from 1913 until 1922 there was an increase of opiate (i.e., heroin and morphine) addicts in Prussia from 282 to 682; the number of addicts increased with the appearance of wounded soldiers from the frontline, and by 1928 there were 6,356 morphine addicts in Germany, of whom 560 were physicians. In 1931, Hesse reported that the addiction rate in Germany was significantly lower, with 0.3 addicts per 10,000 males and 0.1 addicts per 10,000 females, roughly producing the result of 1200 addicts in Germany. The mysterious ways of drug statistics and estimates cannot be explained, but certainly these numbers are only as useful as the impressions of any lay observer.

In further studies conducted by Labor and Health agencies in the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, these numbers were readjusted to be higher but are still not wholly reliable. An interesting conclusion they assert however, is that most of the non-medical use of morphine and heroin in Germany concerned WWI veterans. Leonard Conti, Reich leader of physicians, in 1942 claimed Germany did not have a drug problem but needed to prepare for one since war produces drug addicts.

Concerning drugs other than morphine and heroine, Lewy shows that while cocaine consumption fell in Nazi Germany compared to the 1920s, Pervitin consumption rose. The methamphetamine gained popularity among civilians and the Wehrmacht alike and was only in 1942 placed on the list of controlled substances, mainly because the Wehrmacht claimed priority in receiving pervitin. Up until that point Pervitin production had risen to 9 million tablets a year, approximately half of that for civilian use.

Cannabis on the other hand seems to have been a non-problem. Lewy asserts that this is due to the fact that there was little knowledge about the drug among the German population. While I haven't done the same research as Lewy with the primary sources, I would be hesitant to ascribe to this very general statement since the cultivation of hemp for the primary purpose of rope and clothing production did have a tradition in certain areas of Germany and I'd find myself hard pressed to believe that this did not result in its consumption. But apparently, according to the files Lewy went through, it hardly appeared as a police matter throughout the war.

It is – as already noted – an interesting observation is that Nazi Germany en large continued a rather liberal drug policy adopted in the Weimar Republic. No drug laws adopted the language of racial hygiene, drug addicts were in stark contrast to alcoholics not perceived as racial deviants, and the typical tools of the Nazi state such as imprisonment in a concentration camp or sterilization were not applied to them.

This seems very strange at first glance since Nazi Germany did not only consider alcoholism a severe deviation, it also passed laws and imprisoned people in concentration camps for being habitual criminals and who is more habitual than an addict?

Lewy writes:

Since there is nothing more habitual than addicts consuming their drug of choice, it stands to reason that drug addicts were sent to concentration camps at will; but no record of this happening has ever survived. In fact, drug addiction was not reported in any of the concentration camps or prisons. In spite of the fact that the police seemed to have received carte blanche to dispose of addicts, it refrained from doing so. Why?

An answer could be found in what may have appeared as a trifle semantic argument. Drug use was never a crime in Germany; thus habitual drug users, or drug addicts, were not criminals. Therefore, they were not considered habitual criminals and could not be sent to a concentration camp.

What he refers to here is the simple fact that Germany did not – and still doesn't – criminalize the use but rather the possession and dissemination of drugs. And unlike the addiction to alcohol, the addiction to drugs was not regarded as hereditary by the Nazis simple because of the fact that the use of drugs had been more of an uppler class phenomenon until the 1920s and unlike alcoholism, which is severely influenced by factors like poverty did simply not display throughout several family generations and if it did, not a way that the Nazis regarded as socially problematic and thus deviant.

As Lewy concludes: "drug policies played only a minor role in Nazi German policies." Germany was a society of drinkers, not of pushers or stoners. According to Richard Grunberger, The 12-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 30 for the numbers of alcohol use in Nazi Germany, were massively on the rise: Between 1933 and 1945 the already considerable beer consumption in Germany increased by 23%, wine consumption almost doubled, and champagne consumption increased by a staggering 500%. During the Nazi reign, it seems that the Germans were wasted rather than blitzed.

Sources aside those cited: