By the way, I highly recommend this Youtube channel. The host is a serious academic, and the host being German with a thick German accent, adds a certain something to his analysis of WWII.

“Side effects were so serious that the army sharply cut back its usage in 1940.[147] Historian Lukasz Kamienski says “A soldier going to battle on Pervitin usually found himself unable to perform effectively for the next day or two. Suffering from a drug hangover and looking more like a zombie than a great warrior, he had to recover from the side effects.” Some soldiers turned very violent, committing war crimes against civilians; others attacked their own officers.[147]”

The war crimes line might be a little ingenuous, but may explain some cases. I’ll bet the Wehrmacht did not care for fragging officers too much.

The citations are from this book:

Lukasz Kamienski (2016). Shooting Up: A Short History of Drugs and War. Oxford University Press. pp. 111–13. ISBN 9780190263478.

Robert Harris ["Fatherland"] wrote a novel about the Dreyfus affair a few years ago. The main character is a French army colonel who assumed command of the statistical section of the General Staff 2eme Bureau. At one point he meets the ruined wreck of a man who is his outgoing predecessor. I still more or less remember the line, something like, “Colonel XXXX paused to reflect on the implications of inheriting command of an intelligence unit from a man dying of tertiary syphilis.”

Implications, indeed.

There is a book I want to pick up, but haven’t got around to about the effect of syphilis on the Tudor dynasty.

I can’t be a hundred percent sure, but I suspect that “gleets” (i.e. gonorrhea) would definitely have been around in the old world, and certainly crabs and so on. On the other hand, with sanitation and hygiene being what they were at the time, it would be hard to tell STDs from other run of the mill dermatological complaints.

Still not a smallpox armageddon, but between syphilis and sugar the Old World certainly took a couple of lumps to leaven the gains.

Parallel question: what STDs did definitely exist in the Old World before circa 1500?

I think it was in a Barbara Tuchman book that I read something about medieval kings being impulsive and making poor decisions, which may have been a result of F.A.S.

It would be very interesting to go back and be able to do a really thorough medical history on a lot of these characters, and find out what the hell was really going on. Morell, who was the doctor who was dosing Hitler with all kinds of really weird shit, including meth, was a syphilis specialist in the twenties and thirties… You line up some of the available information, and it looks a lot like Hitler may have gotten syphilis early in his life (one book has it that he acquired it from a Jewish Viennese prostitute he was in love with…), and was operating for much of WWII in a state of syphilitic madness. Plus, drugs.

Makes you wonder, it does.

And, as an ironic afternote? Guess who was treated by one of Morell’s understudies, a man popular in the celebrity circles of post-WWII America? Yeah; JFK. Indicators show that he was high as a kite during the first meeting he had with Khruschev, and that the impression Khruschev took away was that Kennedy was a nutty pushover. It wasn’t until just before the Cuban missile crisis that some of Kennedy’s advisers pushed “Dr. Feelgood” out of his circle, and dried him out.

There is a lot of history that we think we know, but we really don’t. Maybe all it would take to stop WWII in its tracks would be to go back in your time machine, and cure Hitler of his syphilis, instead of kill him.

Makes ya wonder, doesn’t it?

The other thing is that the Israelis are dead serious about enforcement–Things that would get a shrug and a “Oh, well… Things happen…” in the US Army or Marine Corps will put an Israeli officer in jail for a lengthy sentence. I think there was a case back in the early 2000′s where some knucklehead had a negligent discharge on an operation where they were taking prisoners in Gaza, and the officer who was in charge was court-martialed, found guilty of negligence himself for not emphasizing weapons safety enough in his leadership for that operation, and then jailed for a long time. I know of similar cases in the US Army from Iraq where they actually killed civilians inadvertently, and that was written off as an accident.

Things like that are why I laugh every time I hear some jackass activist talk about the IDF committing atrocities. The Palestinians are in for a harsh shock the first time they deal with anyone besides the goody-two-shoes Israelis. Were they bordering on the US, I think we’d have probably carpet-bombed Gaza and the West Bank sometime in the 1970s, and turned both locations into training areas a la Vieques down in Puerto Rico. And, more than likely, there wouldn’t have been a peep out of the usual suspects, who’d have quite sensibly recognized that arguing for leniency with regards to the Palestinians would be a good way to get lynched by the rest of us.

You look at the numbers, and start comparing percentages, and the Israelis have taken staggering losses, losses we would simply not tolerate, and which would have likely led to the general public demanding outright genocide to stop it. As in, probably well beyond what happened to Germany and Japan…