A long time ago in a faraway locale I worked for a warehousing company with a 24-hour operation. Part of my job was making sure inventory was properly recorded and so I spent a fair bit of time out in the warehouse, more frequently at year-end when the auditors came in for their "sober second look". One thing I made sure to tell the audit staff was to take great care out in the warehouse - the forklift drivers were super efficient but drove very fast. One fine day the morning shift foreman discovered the night shift had left their paperwork under his forklift's seat - along with several small packets of white powder. The powder turned out to be methamphetamine - which the entire night shift crew had been using. Big scandal, entire crew replaced - but - with the new crew, efficiency went way down. The HR guy pointed out the irony that the meth use that had gotten the crew fired had made them more alert and speedy workers, and effectively, more profitable employees.

Which is why the US Airforce to this day gives methamphetamine to pilots on long missions to maintain alertness.

It has always appeared to me that Adolf Hitler, particularly in his latter day speeches, seemd almost dementedly jerky and speeded up and obsessive - typical signs of methamphetamine use. Just take a gander at his behavior in some of these speeches (Ed: link removed as no longer valid).

Here's a review (Ed. link to Guardian article is removed temporarily, we hope) of an amazing new book on the subject.

This article confirms that not only Hitler, but the entire Nazi military, was habitually jacked up on speed and tweaking out. The Blitzkrieg through the Ardennes that bypassed the Maginot line and conquered France was fueled by methamphetamine - the entire army was active for over 72 hours non-stop thanks to speed.

Now Hitler's private doctor (and the military) had access to the best pharmaceutical-grade methamphetamine, which means some of the tweaker ills you can see any day on the streets of Bellingham due to impure criminal-grade meth were avoided. But long-term chronic use of methamphetamine "is neurotoxic to human midbrain dopaminergic neurons. It has also been shown to damage serotonin neurons in the CNS.This damage includes adverse changes in brain structure and function, such as reductions in grey matter volume in several brain regions and adverse changes in markers of metabolic integrity." (from Wikipedia) If Hitler was a habitual methamphetamine user for fifteen years, this pretty much explains his erratic and increasingly demented behavior over the course of WW2. And his cognitive decline and obsessive refusal to surrender.