What happened to all of the legal methamphetamine brands during WW2? Are the empty (or even unopened) containers still out in the wild somewhere?

by ilustrado

I find the legal use of meth very very interesting, this post is referring specifically to brands such as Philipon, Pervitin, among others. Obviously the legality prevents these products from "existing" in modern time, but it seems like it was on such a large scale that unopened containers or just empty containers for general historical memorabilia purposes would be all over the place.

commiespaceinvader

I have previously written on the use of Pervitin by the Wehrmacht here and here but there is little information on its post-war history aside the fact that Temmler, the company who invented Pervitin, continued to produce it as a medical product in the Federal Republic of Germany up until 1988.

While the East German holdings of Temmler were disassembled and eventually expropriated, the West German holdings continued production in Hamburg and Marburg. What Pervitin they hadn't been delivered to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe in 1945 they would have either kept (in the West German case) for further sales or these would have been part of the things expropriated and most likely either sold to the West German holdings or destroyed.

What was in storage by Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe would have passed into Allied hands and either taken by the Allies for a variety of purposes, including destruction or handed over back to the property of the German state in 1949. While I could not find any documentary evidence for this, it stands to reason that the German state either sold some quantities back to Temmler or destroyed what remained after the best by date was crossed.

As for Pervitin in private hands, the most likely outcome there would be that it found its way on the blackmarket or was directly taken by those who had it.

You might come across an empty container for Pervitin in pill-form these days but since a lot of it was shipped in cardboard, it is unlikely that many containers except those kept by Temmler as part of their company history would be still around after more than 70 years.