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The son was worried - his diary note showed it: “Father is still very much alive from the fight.

He had taken a Pervitin at two o'clock and now he is taking his 15 different sleeping pills and other medications in a spoon to be able to sleep. ”On November 2nd, 1964, Paul Adenauer worried:“ How should all this go on?

Because his father was Konrad Adenauer, at that time 88 years old and had left the Bonn Chancellery for a good year, from which he had directed the fortunes of the newly founded Federal Republic since 1949.

With tremendous energy that was astonishing not only for a man his age, but also enormous for someone more than two decades younger than his long-term competitor Ludwig Erhard.

Pervitin in different dosage forms

Source: Wikimedia / CC-BY-SA 1.0

Published under the CC-BY-SA 1.0 license

A discovery by the Berlin historian Daniel Koerfer now sheds new light on the efficiency of the “old man from Rhöndorf”, as Adenauer was called half mockingly, half admiringly at the beginning of his term of office - precisely the so far neglected diary entry of his son.

Accordingly, the former Chancellor took performance-enhancing amphetamine, and the way Paul Adenauer noted this suggests: not for the first time.

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Koerfer presents his find more incidentally in the completely revised new edition of his doctoral thesis "Battle for the Chancellery", which has now been published 33 years after the first edition.

The fact that a historian takes the trouble to revise his own qualification work is already commendable.

Federal Minister of Economics Ludwig Erhard, US President John F. Kennedy, Federal President Heinrich Lübke and Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer 1963

Source: picture alliance / Heinz Ducklau

In contemporary history this is particularly worthwhile, because here the number of accessible sources naturally increases significantly.

When Koerfer wrote his book for the first time, Adenauer was just over 15 and Erhard had been dead for less than ten years. Since then, numerous materials have been available for the first time from the state, but also through private bequests, editions and the like, which open up new perspectives.

For example the diary of Paul Adenauer, who was born as the eldest surviving son from his father's second marriage in 1923 and died in 2007 - like his three biological and three older half-siblings, he was over 80 years old.

The notes were published in 2017 as a cooperation between the (state) Federal Chancellor Adenauer House and the (CDU-related) Konrad Adenauer Foundation.

The note of November 2, 1964, of course, has remained unnoticed until now.

Election poster of the CDU from 1957

Source: picture-alliance / Mary Evans Pi

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In doing so, she could clarify the riddle of Konrad Adenauer's astonishing productivity into old age.

If he took Pervitin after his term in office, there is much to suggest that he did so during his years as Chancellor.

What was it about?

Pervitin has been the trade name for high-purity, industrially produced methamphetamine since 1938.

From 1934, the German pharmaceutical factory Temmler had developed a manufacturing process for this synthetic substance, which had previously only been produced on a laboratory scale, and which was patented in 1937.

At the end of the 1930s, pervitin, whether as a tablet or added to chocolate, became a bestseller in Germany.

In small doses, methamphetamine proved to be a more effective variant of caffeine: performance-enhancing, concentration-enhancing and apparently without side effects.

In 1939, foreign visitors were amazed to see that the white “miracle pills” had become a mass phenomenon.

Whether Konrad Adenauer came into contact with the substance at this time remains to be seen.

Monument to Konrad Adenauer in Cologne

Source: picture alliance / imageBROKER

The positive experience in Germany in 1938/39 was based on the decision of the Wehrmacht leadership to equip the soldiers of the Wehrmacht with pervitin.

In the Polish campaign, men had taken the stimulant on their own initiative and thus possibly strengthened their performance.

The "Panzerschokolade" and the "Stuka pill" were quickly seen as true miracle weapons.

From the beginning of 1940, the military therefore systematically relied on Pervitin.

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For the invasions in Norway in April and in Belgium, the Netherlands and France in May 1940, the particularly stressed units were given the funds.

In the corresponding instruction it was said: "To break through the need for sleep, stimulants such as caffeine, Scho-Ka-Kola, strong tea are available as lighter remedies, and the waking agents - pervitin and others - as stronger ones."

It soon became clear, however, that methamphetamine had side effects after all, and that, as with almost all drugs, was dependent on the dose and duration of regular use: dependence on the one hand, and increasingly necessary and longer periods of deep sleep on the other.

That is why it was subject to the rules of the Opium Act (today the Narcotics Act) and taken out of free trade.

Nevertheless, many soldiers continued to procure the pills - the best-known case is Heinrich Böll, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature and was addicted to methamphetamine.

After 1945, Pervitin remained legally available on medical prescription and illegally through various channels in West Germany.

Because patient records are considered intimate under data protection law, even for people who have long since died, regardless of whether they are prominent or not, archives almost never make them available, if they are preserved at all.

One of the few exceptions is Adolf Hitler's treatment notes.

For this reason, historical studies will probably fail to explain Konrad Adenauer's drug consumption as a whole.

Historically speaking, there is also no doping ban for politicians.

When the founding chancellor was officially prescribed the amphetamine, there was no violation of the law - unlike in 2016, when the Green politician Volker Beck accidentally found 0.6 grams of the illegal methamphetamine crystal meth;

the proceedings against him were dropped on payment of a fine.

Ludwig Erhard and Konrad Adenauer - allies and enemies at the same time

Source: picture alliance / Photo12 / Ann R

So even if Adenauer's political successes, the establishment of West German democracy, ties to the West and the economic miracle made possible by Ludwig Erhard at the beginning, albeit against the will of the Chancellor, were to a certain extent supported by the drug of the Wehrmacht: The achievement of the "old man" does not represent that in the shadows.

Daniel Koerfer: Fight for the Chancellery.

Erhard and Adenauer "(Benevento Verlag, Munich. 987 pp., 32 euros)

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