Benzedrine, Pervitin, and WWII

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

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Speaker 2: Wilson.

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Speaker 1: Hey. For obvious reasons, I have been thinking about people in military gear being very, very aggressive a lot. I hate it, Yeah, I hate it so much. That made me think about a topic that I've sort of had on a back burner for a while and been like, how do I tiptoe around this one and like really get into it because there are a lot of opinions within the history space about it. That is the use of very powerful stimulants during World War Two, particularly among the Wehrmacht, that's the Nazi German military forces. Listen, I'm not accusing anybody of using anything. I'm not saying anything is happening. I'm just saying it reminded me of that seeing aggressive behavior of people in uniforms reminds me of films I have seen of weirdly aggressive behavior of people in uniforms. So in twenty fifteen, this whole topic really exploded in the consciousness of a lot of historians that particularly are interested in World War Two. Because a non historian writer named Norman Ohler, who is German, published a book that was titled Der Toto Rausch probably said that very poorly, but that means the Total Rush. And it was about drug use in Nazi Germany, specifically in the military as well as in the civilian population. And that book was translated into English. It was published in twenty seventeen as Blitzed Drugs in Nazi Germany. That book became a New York Times bestseller. It won a lot of awards, and this was a really attention getting book in both languages. It was also translated into more than a dozen others. It's a very popular piece of writing. Ohler, who had actually intended to write a novel, initially got so deep down the rabbit hole of archival information that he found available that that led him to pivot to writing a nonfiction book. And in that book he really laid bare something that had already been talked about for years and in some cases been speculated about. And there is supporting documentation that people already knew before that. But this really put the whole puzzle together in a way that was new, and that is the seemingly contradictory use of methamphetamine in the military of an administration that touted, in its very warped ideology, purity and strength and health as the signifiers of a perfect race of humans. There has been in the last decade plus as this book has been out, a lot of push and pull from historians, as researchers really tried to identify the true degree to which drug use was or was not pervasive among the German public and its mililitary during that time, and how that compares to stimulant use by the Allies. This is a tricky thing to measure because it's not as though everybody is recording every time they pop a tablet in their mouth. A number of historians have indicated that they feel Oler is a bit too sensationalist in his work, But there is, at the same time plenty of information that shows that there was definitely a lot of stimulant use during World War Two, and it was not all in Germany's ranks. So today we are going to look at all of that and figure out how speed impacted the war, but also the public in general and how it continues to And to kick all of this off, we are going to talk about a German chemist who is often credited with the invention of methamphetamine, although as we will see, that is not entirely accurate. Fritz Kurt Hauschild was born on December eighth in Kimnitz, Germany. His father was a doctor and Fritz also studied medicine, but he really focused on chemistry. He enrolled in medical school in Guttingen, Germany at the age of twenty and four years later, in nineteen thirty two, he became a certified chemist. Two more years after that, he completed a doctorate in medicine when he submitted his dissertation, which was titled on the Pharmacology and Chemistry of Curing.

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Speaker 2: Curing is an alkaloid that is used for its anti inflammatory properties. He took his exam and received his full medical credentials that year. He had a year long residency. During that time he worked in two places. One was that a women's clinic. He also worked at the Pharmacological Institute of Leipzig. When his residency ended, he was hired at the Pharmacological Institute as an assistant and he worked there for two years before moving on to the Temler works.

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Speaker 1: So tem Leverka was founded in nineteen seventeen as a German pharmaceutical company, and it still exists today as the Temler Group, although it is now part of the larger company a Nova Group. In nineteen thirty three, Temler started a large expansion initiative, so when Housechild entered the company in nineteen thirty seven, it was already rapidly growing. In nineteen thirty six, Benza Dream was used by a number of athletes at the Summer Olympic Games in Berlin, or at least that was the rumor in Germany. We are absolutely coming back to benson Dream, but at the time amphetamines were absolutely legal in sport. There were not any doping tests for it, so it is actually unclear who may or may not have been using it. But in Germany there was a common belief that the American competitors specifically were using benzadrene because it was the only way in their minds to explain the US team's performance. Remember, the nineteen thirty six Games were supposed to be this showcase of German superiority, and when people like Jesseoaans really trounced them, it made them and immediately think there must be something suspicious going on. This belief inspired the German pharmacological industry to seek out their own stimulants that they could give athletes and other people to give them an edge. At Timler, that project fell to Fritz hou Shilden. He turned to the nineteenth century work of a Japanese chemist named Nagai Nagaoshi, as well as to European chemists who had worked on ephadrin projects. So for context.

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Speaker 2: Nagai was born west of Osaka in the Tokushima Prefecture in eighteen forty five. That was just as the fall of shogunate rule was beginning. Japan was shifting away from isolationist policies, and like hou Schild's father, Nagai's father was in medicine. He practiced herbal medicine, so Nagui also went into chemistry. That was something he decided after spending more than a decade studying in Germany. During that time, he had assimilated into German culture in a lot of ways. He had converted to Christianity, married to German woman, and embraced Western science. When he went back to Japan in eighteen eighty three, he worked to combine the science training he had received in Europe with the traditions of Asian herbal medicine, and he did this in his lab at the University of Tokyo, where he was a chemistry and pharmacology professor.

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Speaker 1: The guy started working with a plant called mahuang. The Latin name is Efedra senica and Efedro senca is an herb that grows as a shrub and the stem and branches of it are the parts that are used for herbal medicine. It has been used for centuries in Asia to treat an assortment of symptoms usually associated with cold, so think things like congestion, fever, and headaches. It has also been marketed throughout the years as a weight loss supplement around the world, although its use was banned in the US in two thousand and four because of the risks of things like high blood pressure, heart attack, and stroke, as well as mental side effects like anxiety and irritability. But Nagai is the first person to isolate the chemical compound of fedrin from mahuang, and he did this after he noticed a crystalline substance in the extractions that he had taken from the plant and started experimenting with that. In eighteen eighty five, Die Nipon Pharmaceutical Company started manufacturing a fedron based on this work for asthma treatment, and then building on that work. Over the next several years, Niguai's lab was able to synthesize the first methamphetamine. That lab continued in this area of research for years in the hands of Nagai's proteges, and over time the intense stimulant nature of methamphetamine was studied, continuing well after Nagai died in nineteen twenty nine. At the same time that Nagai and his lab were working with herbal extractions, other scientists were working on ways to synthesize a fedrin without the mahuang. One of these was Romanian chemist Lazar at Ilianu, working on creating similar molecular compounds.

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Speaker 2: To those in ephedra. He did manage to synthesize amphetamine in Berlin, that was in eighteen eighty seven, but he didn't go much farther than that with his work. He moved on to other projects, specifically developing a method for refining crude oil. It wasn't until a few decades later that another chemist, Gordon Alice, started to work on the idea of using synthetic afedrin to create amphetamine. Alice, who was British but was working in the US at the time, was apparently not even aware of the work that Adelianu had done. Alice was hoping to capture the medicinal benefits of a fedrin in regard to things like asthma, and once he had his synthesized version, he tested it first on his pet guinea pig, who showed improvement in congestion, and then with a colleague standing by for observation and safety, Alice tested it on himself and like his pet, he could breathe better, and he also noted that he kind of felt amazing. He was also apparently very talkative and apparently his blood pressure was very high. So with this early testing completed, Alice patented amphetamine sulfate in nineteen thirty two, and then he pitched his invention to the pharmaceutical industry and the company Smith, Klein and French partnered with him to roll out the drug known as Ben's a Dream. And that was as we mentioned, Ben's a Dream that athletes used at the nineteen thirty six Berlin Olympics. Makes sense that they would if it was letting people breathe better and have more energy.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Coming up, we will talk more about Houshold's work, but first we'll pause for a sponsor break. By the time Fritz Houshald turned to Negui's work, many chemists and pharmacologists around the world knew about that work, and after studying the available information and through his own experiments, Houschuld and his team at Temler were able to create a synthetic form of the Guy's methamphetamine that did not require the e fedrasenca plant. By the end of nineteen thirty seven, Temler had patented how Child's production process and had put the drug into the market under the brand name Pervetin. There was a massive marketing campaign behind this launch. Temler hired an agency called mattisen Son, and the agency's approach was inspired by the marketing of Coca Cola. This was also because Coca Cola was considered their main competitor. So when this is written about in a lot of modern articles, it's often kind of described as this being an issue of Temler trying to counter the cocaine containing SODA's effects on consumers and offering theirs as an alternative. But that's not really correct, because Coca Cola no longer contained cocaine after nineteen twenty nine, so almost a decade before Temler patented their process, and even when Coca Cola did still contain cocaine, it was a very very small amount, so probably not really comparable to what Temler was making with pervetin. But nothing about the promotion of pervetin described it as a drug. They just described it as something that could enhance a person's life, and as a consequence, nineteen thirty eight saw a lot of households in Germany buying pervetin over the counter. So at face value, this would seem like it's contradictory to the late nineteen thirties ideology of Nazi Germany. At that time, when that warped concept of physical purity was being touted as the apex of humanity, drug use was generally really looked down on. Drugs were associated with weakness and the lower class, and yet pervetin was just happily adopted throughout all levels of German culture. And that's because it was marketed not as a drug but as a supplement that made people better, and so that was right in line with the Nazi ideal of a superhuman and it made people feel strong and confident, and that also did align with the Nazi ideology. Advertisements for pervetin touted it as a quote stimulant for the psyche and the circulatory system, and those ads then offered a list of things that pervetin could treat, including depression, hypotension, fatigue, narcolepsy, and postoperative convalescence. Knowing that this drug makes people intensely energetic makes it seem pretty dangerous to give to somebody for postop recovery. But it was so dangerous in so many other ways that that seems kind of a small, petty detail.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, it was translating one of the packaging or one of the advertisements that I found online, and I was just thinking, like how many people popped their stitches because they were like, I feel great, Yeah, I gotta get out of this bed even though I'm supposed to be resting. Gotta get movin U. Although there had been some clinical trials before pervetin went to market, they were certainly not as robust as anything that would be legally required today. After it was released, a psychiatrist named Fritz Flugel ran his own tests on patients at a psychiatric hospital, and while he did see increased energy that in some cases seemed at least in the short term, almost miraculous, Flugel also saw the downside. He noted that the drug could increase anxiety, and he actually reported this to Temler, so there was a degree of understanding that pervetin might have some unwe wanted side effects, including being habit forming inside of Temna Verka. The package label on pervetin was updated with this information to suggest a slightly lower dose and to include the warning that it was to be used quote only from time to time, with an exclamation point on the end. Listen. That warning was certainly not enough to keep people from developing habitual use problems with it. Perveton users didn't experience fatigue, and initially anxiety and stress were replaced with a sense of euphoria, so of course it was addictive. The perception of performance enhancement made it very popular for both students and professionals, and then eventually, to expand the user market, Temler started producing a chocolate that contained pervetin and that was designed to appeal to housewives who wanted a boost to get their daily chores done more quickly. In a paper published in Psychiatric Times and twenty sixteen, author Greg Agigean cautions that it's actually really difficult to understand the true degree to which Germans were using pervetin quote. In the years leading up to the Nazi seizure of power, doctors dominated public discussions about drug consumption, and they tended to reinforce a familiar distinction. While prescribed drugs were hailed as epitomes of medical progress, drugs taken by lay people for personal enjoyment, such as cocaine and opium were demonized and associated with the socially deviant and marginalized, such as criminals and homosexuals. This therefore means that one needs to be on guard for the often unacknowledged biases of existing sources of information. Really, that's good advice for any research. Yeah, even people that are contemporary accounts consider going on have biases. It is not only our lens as we look back. Pervetin, though, got the attention of a physiologist named Otto Friedrich Ranka. Ranca was born in Munich in eighteen ninety nine. He was the son of a psychiatrist, and as a young man he studied both medicine and mathematics. He became part of the Military Medical Academy in Berlin in the mid nineteen thirties, specializing in aviation medicine. He became a member of the Vermacht Medical Corps in the late nineteen thirties, rising up through the ranks as an advisor to eventually become director of the Research Institute of Defense Physiology for the Nazis. In that role, Ronca was ever on the lookout for anything that would give Germany the upper hand in the coming war. One particular area of concern was fatigue among the troops.

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Speaker 2: Pervetin though was already sort of tested on the general public throughout nineteen thirty eight, so Ka had an enough information to believe that it had the potential to be quote an excellent substance for rousing a weary squad. Even so, he did conduct his own tests, beginning with German medical officers. He used a blind study where some participants got pervetent, another's got benzoderam or caffeine or placebos. In these tests, Roanka gave the participants math problems to solve, and he kept them at it for more than ten hours. The Pervetent group whipped through all of these tests. Although there's answers were not necessarily correct, they were alert, not necessarily focused in a functional way. Though Still, Ronka thought this test was a success and he deemed pervetent quote a militarily valuable substance.

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Speaker 1: Next, Ronca wanted to expand his test to the troops, and he pitched that, but initially nothing moved forward because the proposal got a bit wadded up in the Reich's bureaucracy. But while there wasn't an official endorsement or order to use it, a lot of the medical officers that Ranka had worked with were still taking Perveton on their own after the testing ended. They liked the effects, and through their use, use then spread quickly to other members of the military. By the time the war was eminent, a lot of the Wehrmacht was already taking pervetin.

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Speaker 2: Raka himself took pervetin and he got in the habit of working for days at a time without any sleep. He noted in writing that Perveton enabled him to go for dozens of hours without feeling tired. The marketing of Pervetin had in fact appealed to a lot of the Third Reich's officers as they sought to keep up with just an ever growing list of demands from Adolf Hitler. As they reported and conferred with one another about how effective this vrog was at making them ultra productive, it was only natural that Germany's military leadership would support the idea of giving it to soldiers.

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Speaker 1: So the first group of soldiers to be officially issued perveton by the Wehrmacht was the third Tank Division, and this was done in nineteen thirty eight when Germany moved into occupied Czechoslovakia, starting with the annexation of what Germany called Sudetenland. That's a made up propaganda term for the areas of the country that had a German speaking population. And while it was successful, this occupation was not a combat situation. Ranka and other Vermocht medical officials were really curious to see how pervetin worked in active battle.

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Speaker 2: So when Germany invaded Poland in the autumn of nineteen thirty nine, a lot of its soldiers were using pervetin and they subdued Polish resistance within a matter of weeks. The success of the German army in this first Blitzkrieg stoked the drug's reputation as one that was associated with strength and success, so both the military and the general population use continued to grow to go up. During the invasion of Ardan and France in nineteen forty, a route that had been believed to be impassable by the Allies, perveten fueled the Germans through dense forests that would have deterred most other enemies. We have to note here, though, that although many soldiers were taking pervetin, and though it was issued to German soldiers with a degree of frequency, there was not ever a blanket order regarding perveten's distribution to the Wehrmach's troops. Yeah, I just want to make that very clear, because sometimes you'll read accounts that suggest that this was given out as a standard part of ration packs, and in some cases it was issued, but it wasn't all the time to all ration packs. As we know today, the side effects and dependency that come with methem fatamine use are absolutely horrible. In addition to substance use disorder, users frequently develop insomnia, confusion, anxiety, mood instability, psychosis, and a decline in cognitive function, and these side effects can continue when a person is not actively using the drug, and these side effects absolutely started to appear in the German population that used pervetin. The usual packaging of pervetin was a small metal cylinder with a screw cap that contained thirty tablets. Each tablet contained zero point zero zero three milligrams of methanphetamine. The label had a contradictory message to that only from time to time copy that we mentioned earlier, it suggested taking two to four tablets each day. Complaints started rolling into Temler's offices about the problems civilians were having with it. The company did not take the drug off the market, though, it just transitioned from it being available over the counter to requiring a prescription. That happened in nineteen forty one, while the war was still in full swing and German soldiers were still being issued methamphetamine pretty routinely. According to an account written by a German medical officer in nineteen forty two, when some of the men in his unit were exhausted to the point that they had laid down in the snow to just wait for death, he administered pervetin, and thirty minutes later they were all up and cheerful.

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Speaker 1: Pervetin was a boon in the eyes of Nazi military leadership. Soldiers that used it did not get tired, They did not complain of hunger, even if their rations were running out. They felt euphoric and confident, even in the horrific conditions of war. Prolonged use led to a lot of problems. Of course, the combination of substance misuse and combat stressors le to a very high degree of psychosis in soldiers, and this manifested in a variety of ways, the paranoia that's common from methamphetamine use, as well as deaths by suicide, and in some cases, soldiers even turning on their own comrades, so some of them were shooting themselves and some of them were shooting the men alongside them. Even if a soldier was not experiencing these psychological problems from using pervetin, the drug was still taking a toll on the body. We know, living in a constantly stimulated state without rest is incredibly bad for anyone, and young men who should have been healthy started having heart attacks. Heinrich Bull, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in nineteen seventy two, was from an anti Nazi family, but was conscripted into service for Germany during the war. He was in his early twenties and he got hooked on purvetin, so much so that he wrote his family numerous times asking them to send him more. What he was issued by the Vermacht as a soldier just wasn't cutting it. He wrote about how the drug made him forget how awful the reality was that he was in and that it enabled him to feel happiness again, as well as being better for his alertness than multiple cups of coffee. And of course, Adolf Hitler was also interested in the benefits of a drug that could make him more alert and seemingly stronger. He began receiving IV doses of methamphetamine from his doctor, although these were typically combined with other things like glucose and vitamin His doctor, Teoda Morrel, kept copious notes about the treatment that he gave the furor. There have been a lot of rumors and incorrect information about Hitler's various health concerns over the years, although before the war he seemed to only be dealing with fairly minor list of things like ezema, insomnia, and some gi issues, But starting in nineteen forty one, he started to have an array of problems, and Morrell gave him many medications in addition to methamphetamine, including yucadol, which is a version of oxycodone. There have been a number of historians who believe that Hitler's use of pervetin began to affect his judgment and caused him to make a number of miscalculations that were instrumental in bringing about the fall of the Third Reich.

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Speaker 2: In a moment, we'll talk a little bit about the use of stimulants among the Allies in World War Two, as well as another Axis power. We will do that after we hear from the sponsors that keep Stuffy Mius in history class going. Stimulant misuse during the war was not an exclusively German problem. Just as Fritz Household had been inspired in part by the rumors of beneficial drug use on the part of US Olympians in creating pervetin, the Allied forces were very interested in this alleged miracle drug that the Germans had created that enabled their military to fight with greater vigor. So it wasn't long before the Allies were testing out pervetin with their own people. Specifically pilots. According to a BBC article from March of twenty twenty four, this interest started after a vial of pervetin tablets was found in the pocket of a German pilot after he had been shot down. The Allies tests noted increased alertness with pervetin use, but they also documented the downsides like agitation and the way pilots started to have psychological issues and perception problems after taking multiple doses. While it made people more alert initially than it led to things like compulsive behavior and poor decision making, so methamphetamine use was as an option for US and British forces, although ben Zadream was still given to Allied soldiers. Japan was also aware of Germany's use of pervetin for performance enhancement, and they started to manufacture their own version, called Philipon, which was given to kamikaze pilots. Near the end of nineteen thirty nine, Reich health leader Leonardocanti tried to pull back on perveton use as the drugs and negative side effects were reported up the chain of command. He actually made a speech at one point to the Nazi Parties Medical Association stating quote Anyone who thinks they can eliminate fatigue with pervetin can be certain that its boosting effect will one day abruptly cease. It may be useful to combat fatigue in the case of a short flight, but in the long term only sleep can truly compensate for a state of fatigue. We have to pause here for a moment because a lot of the time articles about pervetin's un use by the Third Reich make it sound almost like Kanti was because some kind of a reasonable voice here within the Nazi structure, and that's flatly not correct. To be clear, Kanti was a monster. His only interest was in protecting German assets. He was one of the architects of the various processes of so called racial enhancements under Hitler's rule. That meant he helped plan programs like Tiergarten Strasofour, which murdered more than seventy thousand people because they had incurable diseases or hereditary conditions that fell outside of that Nazi ideal of physical perfection. He also worked on a children's euthanasia program with doctor Carl Brandt, which led to the murders of thousands of babies and children. His concerns about Pervetent were linked to just making sure they had enough warm bodies to keep killing their enemies, and about maintaining a image of a perfect race. This was not out of any kind of altruistic or even medically ethical motivation.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I get a little bit frustrated when it's like, well, one Nazi understood, and I'm like, oh, that's not given too much credit. My guy was still a Nazi, that's the problem. Still a Nazi, and he did horrifying things. Those are only a couple of the horrifying things that he did that Tracy just mentioned. But even though he did raise a flag over this, Kanti's concerns were dismissed and his warnings were not heated by his superiors. In their eyes, if pervoting got them closer to their goals, it was worth any of the downsides, and Timbler, the company that made it, didn't seem to be especially worried about the side effects either. By nineteen forty, the company was producing more than eight hundred thousand pervetent tablets a day just to try to keep up with demand. The use of methamphetamine made Germany formidable and terrifying to its enemies for a while. Anyway, Soldiers who don't sleep can keep marching. Tank drivers could just keep going, constantly advancing the line as they were ordered to go for days without stopping, and remember they were all happy and confident as well. The blitzkrieg strategy of relentless surprise attacks was made possible in large part by the troops being drugged. Nineteen forty was really the heyday of purveton use for Germany. By the end of that year, instances of heart attacks among the troops and officers had started to tally up, and soldiers were given less and less of the drug over time. There were still instances, though, of surge rationing during demanding campaigns. After the Reich collapsed and after Hitler's suicide, and well after the war was over, Temler continued to manufacture Pervetin for prescription use. It also continued to sell it to military organizations. It was purchased in bulk by both East and West German militaries because even though it had caused a lot of trauma in its World War II use, it was still perceived as being worth all of those problems if it could give soldiers an edge and enable them to continue fighting for longer with fewer rations. West Germany discontinued their issuing of perveton to soldiers in the nineteen seventies, but East Germany continued well into the nineteen eighties, and Germany was not the drug's only market despite those early tests with pilots during World War II, after which perveton use was abandoned, the US also reportedly used pervetin during the Vietnam War.

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Speaker 2: Leonardo Conti was unsuccessful in his effort to limit purvetent use in the German army. He died by suicide in a cell in Nuremberg on October sixth, nineteen forty five, rather than facing trial. Fritz Hauschuld died in Leipzig on January thirteenth, nineteen seventy four. His invention, Pervetent stayed on the market until nineteen eighty eight. As we mentioned earlier, throughout the Second World War, the United States used benzadrine for all the same reasons that the Germans were using pervetin. Similarly, benzadrine had a huge jump in civilian use after the war was over, as soldiers returned home to non military work and as new users picked it up. Benzadrine became available only with a prescription in nineteen fifty nine, but for a long time, and fetamine was prescribed in the US with pretty minimal medical consultation for everything from depression to weight loss. It is of course also habit forming. In nineteen seventy and fetamine was classified as a controlled substance when the Controlled Substances Act was passed, and today it's a Schedule too drug that means it has the potential for abuse and dependence. For context, another Schedule two drug is fentanyl. Methamphetamine is of course still a commonly taken drug, and meth labs making the crystallized version of it seem to pop up everywhere and create a scourge on communities due to its high degree of addiction. I saw more articles about this that would talk about the war and then be like and last year eleven thousand meth labs were busted in this country and that was from various countries. I'm pulling numbers, but it's an ongoing, big problem. Yeah. And also to be clear, stimulants are still part of military programs around the world.

00:34:37
Speaker 1: I also have a little bit of listener mail which is very peppy and about a thing I'm addicted to, which is handicrafts, which just seems a little bit more of a positive note to end this one on. Yeah, this is from our listener. I'm guessing Gina. Her spelling makes me not ae hundred confident of that, so hopefully I got it right. Gina writes high Lovelies. I just listened to the Embroidery series and I wanted to write in with two related points. One, you noted that humans often turned to embroidery and other handwork during challenging times. During winter twenty twenty, we all remember that first winter of the Covid lockdown. I started a seasonal project called Winter of Care and Repair, in which I mended, tended, repaired, maintained, or otherwise cared for my belongings each day between the winter solstice and spring equinox. I have always been into knitting, quilting, sewing, etc. And had been getting into visible mending at the time, so ended up doing a lot of garment mending and doing something with my hands and eyes and brain is really grounding for me as well. Six years later, Winter of Care and Repair is still going strong with people all over the world creating care and repair plans of their own. And I get so much feedback about how much people love doing something with their hands when things are stressful. So there is an online spot other listeners want to go check this out. Just do a search for winter care and Repair you will find it. Gin writes too, I wanted to share this really amazing Spanish author illustrator embroiderer Beeleima. She published this amazing autobiographical graphic novel based on her childhood perception of her mother's struggles with mental illness. Illustrated in both drawings and embroidery, it is available in both French and Spanish, but not English yet. I found this book when walking through a bookshop in Spain. The obviously embroidered book cover stopped me in my tracks as I glimpsed it out of the corner of my eye. Both the story and the illustrations are tremendously impactful. She is super talented and I highly recommend checking out her work and for the obligatory pet tax. Are two little furry loves. Lucy is our fifteen and a half year old Border Collie mix, pictured here enjoying a sunny December Day at the beach Skippio is our two year old one eyed rescue cat seen here assisting my partner with some vehicle mechanics that he clearly takes very seriously, and a bonus picture of the two of them snuggled together. Seriously. I cannot even okay, this dog is so I love old dogs. There's just something so sweet about them that transcends what the Earth should even allow in terms of sweetness. And this kiddy is so sweet, and I love the their buddies. Okay, but I was very excited that Beelema's work came up because, in case you don't know Gina or other listeners, there has actually been a short film made out of that graphic novel, which is also animated embroidery. Nice. I haven't seen it. I've only seen the trailer for it. It looks brain breakingly amazing, and because I'm also an animation it really hit my magic zone where the backgrounds are all hand embroidered and then scanned in, and then the animation uses embroidered components that are then digitized and animated, and it looks like it's so beautiful I can't even amazing, So seek that out. There have been a few articles about it lately because it has finished recently and it's starting to be shown, and I just am blown away by how beautiful it is. I love when art surprises me, and I really love that kind of way of blending things. I am also very fascinated by the idea of, you know, how kids perceive things like like mental illness in their authority figures. And it's just a beautiful story and it's an amazing, amazing piece of work as a graphic novel. And I am so excited for this movie. So thank you, thank you, thank you for writing me that, because it reminded me that I could tell people about the follow up to it that has taken several years to complete. So I am not sure yet where to see it, so hopefully I will find that out soon because I want to see it desperately. It is very much in my wheelhouse. If you would like to write to us and share your thoughts on embroidery or animation or anything really uh, you don't even have to have pet pictures, although we sure do love them. You can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Thank you for joining us, and if you have not subscribed to the podcast yet. That is very easy to do. You can do it on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere you listen to your favorite shows.

00:39:28
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