Here’s a little light relief from some of the heavy stuff. It’s a musical interlude with an anti-Nazi message. Die Krupps are a German Metal/Industrial band, who presumably take their name from the big German armaments firm. The video and song’s based on the fact that during the Second World War the Nazis kept the German army, the Wehrmacht, fighting by giving them Privitin – the drug amphetamine, commonly called ‘Speed’.
It begins with a statement by the band that they do not condone Fascism or drug taking, before showing the airmen of the Luftwaffe zooming around the sky snorting the drug like it was going out of fashion. They are then either shot down by the RAF, or collide, and fall to Earth, on which is projected the grotesque face of Hitler himself.
However grotesque the video is, it’s based very solidly on fact. The Nazis did use drugs to keep their pilots in the air. I’ve forgotten precisely what the drug was, but it got into American drug culture as ‘Nazi Crank’, and became a real problem among some Native Americans.
The video also reminds me of one of the transatlantic underground comics, or comix, that was around in the 1980s. This was Hitler’s Dope, the cover of which featured the Fuehrer snorting something highly suspicious while behind him and to his right sat a bare-breasted Eva Braun. As the people, who produced the comix tended to be college-educated Hippies with left-wing political views, I doubt very much that this was a piece of pro-Nazi propaganda.
Just as I don’t believe that the real goose-stepping idiots of the Far Right anywhere in Europe, whether Germany, France, Britain or wherever, would find the video’s depiction of the Nazis and the Luftwaffe remotely attractive.
It would probably send them berserk with rage. Which is a very good reason to show it!
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