Cyanide Tooth How Does This Spy Movie Legends Works
The cyanide tooth serves as a secret pill hidden in false teeth. The mysterious world of espionage features many emergency cyanide pills. It also includes a fake tooth with a hidden chamber. We all know about these pills. James Bond and Captain America make enemy prisoners foam at the mouth. They stumble after taking their secrets to the grave and beyond.
Is little more than a pop-culture legend. Actually, the prevalence of emergency suicide measures in spies stories are generally excessive.
Myth or not, this phenomenon is such a popular pop-culture trope probably because of the use that movies, comics, and TV have given to it. However, there have been tons of people that actually hide cyanide capsules in their mouths.
According to Vince Houghton, a curator at the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C., a lot of Nazis chose that way to die during WWII.
Houghton referred to the May 1945 suicide of high-ranking Nazi Heinrich Himmler, who bit into a cyanide pill while in confinement. A list of his Nazi collaborators preferred the same way out at the end of the war.
Some Allied forces also carried deadly suicide pills in case they were caught behind enemy lines. The use of the cyanide tooth pill or their specter lasted through the Cold War.
Cyanide Tooth: The Fast-acting Poison
A cyanide tooth contains a lethal, fast-acting poison. This poison became almost synonymous with the idea of a suicide pill. People widely know this concept around the world. It is also well recognized in pop culture.
In a 2013 Wired article, we learned that the cyanide tooth pill that appears in Skyfall, a Bond movie, science writer Deborah Blum explained it as a “famously fast-acting poison due to its ability to induce extreme chemical suffocation of cells and to disrupt enzymatic processes.”
This pill can kill someone in minutes. Deborah Blum points out its lethal mystique, which still exists today. This pill represents a unique cloak-and-dagger trope rooted in history. It might surprise you that false teeth with hidden chambers also exist in real life.
Deborah tells that obviously, there are artificial teeth that have been used by spies and soldiers, but most of the time, it has been practiced to cover microdots, film, those types of things.
These teeth would often have been placed in on molars, somewhere in the back of people’s mouths where they would be hard to be detected. This makes sense, too; if you are a spy or a soldier, you don’t want the enemy to discover your trick.
Houghton, the person from the Spy Museum, said that there is no real collection of someone that ever covered a cyanide tooth in a fake tooth. There is no evidence we can see of someone using a hollow tooth now or in the past.
Cyanide Capsules In the Past
Most cyanide capsules are huge, which makes the legend more apocryphal and anecdotal. Accidental swallowing poses a danger with cyanide teeth or capsules. During World War II, the pills were about the size of a pea. This size makes it too big to hide safely inside a fake tooth.
There are confirmed examples of capsules hidden in the ends of pens and temples of glasses, where they could be secretly chewed.
In new research, French scientists studied remnants of Adolf Hitler’s teeth to confirm that he died in 1945. And also, that he died after using a cyanide pill and shooting himself in the head.
In this investigation, published by the European Journal of Internal Medicine during 2018, attempts to end the conspiracy theories about Hitler’s death.
This scientific investigation of the German dictator’s teeth and skull demonstrates that he died in 1945.
Philippe Charlier, author of this research, confirm to the AFP all this data after confirming that those teeth were of the German dictator.
All this establishes that Adolf Hitler died in his bunker after the Russian invasion. So, the investigation validates that he didn’t escape to Argentina in a submarine; he is not in an unknown base in Antarctica either.
In late April 1945, as Soviet forces assaulted Berlin, Adolf Hitler started plans for his suicide. His program involved testing SS-supplied cyanide capsules on his Alsatian, Blondi, and dictating a final testament.
Two days earlier, Mussolini was executed after been captured by the Allies. Mussolini had been shot by a firing unit and then was hung by his feet in a public place in a suburban square in Milan, Italy.
Rumors said that Hitler couldn’t cope with all this and decided to kill himself. He will never accept his defeat, so he preferred to die by his terms because a similar fate seemed inevitable.
Late on April 30, the corpses of Hitler and Eva Braun (his new wife), were discovered in his bunker, with a bullet hole in Hitler’s head.
Captain America: The First Avenger
During WWII, cyanide capsules we very common among spies. As such, after executing Abraham Erskine, HYDRA agent Heinz Kruger tried to escape using the Fieser Dorsch.
Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) pursued Kruger and frustrated his escape. Before anyone could question him, Kruger swallowed a cyanide capsule. He hid the capsule inside a fake tooth. He died quickly after threatening Captain Rogers. Kruger warned that he was the beginning of many HYDRA missions.
Cyanide pills appear in Captain America: The First Avenger, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Agent Carter T.V. series.
So, these pills, also known as the suicide pill, is a small capsule that contains a lethal substance designed to be swallowed deliberately to end one’s own life quickly.
So, Kruger causing his own death in the movie during WWII makes sense. These capsules we pretty common among spies and soldiers as we learn earlier in this blog.
Chester Phillips remarked in his interrogation of Arnim Zola that Zola was the only HYDRA agent that the strategic scientific reserve caught alive because he didn’t use a cyanide pill.
“Cyanide. You get a painless death, and nobody gets the satisfaction of watching you hang.” ― Roger Dooley to Ernst Mueller.
