Red Army and methanol poisoning

Just saw a document on the 1945 eastern front battles and a Russian veteran claimed that several Red Army soldiers died through methanol poisoning ( put among normal alcohol by Germans ) and also several lost their sight due to the poisoning when drank lesser amounts of methanol.

Does anyone know any numbers treated or dead for this poisoning?

 

Just curious if there is any new members who have read about this....

 

I believe it could be true. Anthony Beevor recounts similar stories in his book about Stalingrad.

 

Travel and Entertainment channel has a free preview. Forget name of show- but buddy with thick English accent buys WW2 memorabilia...They shot up a trailer with a belt fed machine gun. He bought a jeep which needed original parts...
Anyway, while stocking period parts and pieces for the (GP) Jeep, he bought some canned fuel for cooking rations.
The label on can said that the fuel was poison and not to ingest, but the show implied GI's would tame it somehow, then consume it. Wonder how they did that. ..Just in case.

 

Hope not the old story that putting the methanol through bread makes it drinkable...

 

That sounds interesting. Did a lot of guys try it.
...They must have drawn straws to see who'd ingest first.

 

At one time (and perhaps it still is) the cure for methanol poisoning was to keep the vitims blood level of ethanol elevated. I forget how long it takes methanol to clear the system in such case but seem to recall it being between 1 and 3 days. I did not read this in any medical text so it could well be urban legend.

Decided to look it up and these pages mention it:
http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1174890-treatment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ershdb/emergencyresponsecard_29750029.html

 

Sterno! It's mostly ethanol, and back in the day it was used by alcoholics, especially in "dry" counties where regular booze was illegal. It's mostly ethanol, but has some methanol added just so people won't drink it. Apparently you can drink quite a bit of it until you get sick or go blind.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterno#As_a_drink

 

The best way to prevent signifigant kidney and other organ damage from ingesting Ethylene Glycol is to induce an elevated blood ethanol level for 48 to 72 hours. Ethylene Glycol is not methanol; it's actually the functional ingredient in antifreeze. Pets drink puddles of it when people drain and refill their radiators, because it tastes sweet, which is why veterinarians developed the ethanol treatment to block the metabolic pathway in the liver to lethal byproducts in animals.

Ethylene Glycol has been used in several murders ("Can I freshen your drink, darling?"); the symptoms are often mistaken for acute food poisoning until it's too late, and it doesn't show up on most toxicological screenings.

Methanol attacks the optic nerve, blood vessels and brain; I'm not familiar with any medical intervention that can act as an antidote.

 

In hospital they use ethanol infusion and keep the blood ethanol level to 1 promille as long as needed. I think they check the methanol etc levels separately.

 

My father was in 1st Airborne Division, which was flown to Norway on VE Day. My father's regiment liberated a PoW camp of Soviet soldiers near Stavanger. The Red Army prisoners had been brutally treated and had lost all semblance of military discipline. They terrorised the local Norwegians and were stealing anything they could get. The British soldiers were hopelessly outnumbered and couldn't restore control. The situation got so bad that they had to rearm the German guards. The German were more frightened of the Soviet troops than the British. They had survived the war and there was no chance they were going to screw up their chances of getting home (eventually) by turning their weapons on the British, Crucially, they were disciplined and did what they were told by the British.
Anyway, the relevance of this to the original query is that some of the Soviet prisoners broke into some stores and started knocking back methanol.They were blinded. If the Germans slipped bottles of methanol amongst bottles of normal alcohol they wouldn't have had to try too hard to disguise it. The Red Army wasn't terribly fussy.