False: Fluoride in tap water is used to control and pacify the population.

Context

Videos on TikTok claim that fluoride is added to tap water by the government to control the population by making them docile and submissive. Some videos claim that the Nazis used fluoride during WW2 to keep people who had been forced into concentration camps passive. 

The videos are not a new phenomenon and are part of a constant cycle of fluoride-based conspiracies circulating on TikTok. 

In Fact

No scientific evidence suggests that fluoride makes people docile, pacified, or submissive, nor that the Nazis used the chemical during WW2. Historical experts told PolitiFact in 2011 that they had found no evidence to support the claims of fluoride being used by the Nazis in any form of medical experiment, and they concluded that the claim is an urban myth.

Many fears against water fluoridation circulated at the height of anti-communist paranoia during the Cold War. These fears, spread by anti-communist groups such as the John Birch Society, suggested that fluoride could be used to weaken young men or poison unsuspecting Americans. A 2011 Science History Institute article reports that water fluoridation in the U.S. began in 1945, and by 1951, five million Americans were drinking from fluoridated water supplies. However, it soon became the target of anti-communist literature, and claims that fluoridation was a type of "red warfare" continued to circulate. These claims implied that communists had infiltrated the U.S. Public Health Service. However, there is no evidence that water fluoridation was part of a communist plot, and these claims were just paranoid beliefs of an early Red Scare.

However, this is still relevant in the fluoride conspiracies that circulate today as anti-communist rhetoric resurfaces. Through similar claims about the Nazis, theorists assert that the USSR used fluoride in the gulags to control its prisoners and keep them docile. However, no evidence supports this. 

Current conspiracies use this to spread fear and insinuate that the nation's citizens are at risk, while others suggest this is part of a scheme by a shadow government to keep the population from rising up as they implement more authoritarian control.

These claims of pacifying the population and planned control link directly to the New World Order conspiracy theory and tie into conspiracies about mind control. As explained by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, the theory asserts that a global elite or shadow government is trying to implement a one-world power and control the masses. Logically has previously investigated claims about the toxicity of fluoride, finding them to be false. 

The Verdict

The Nazis did not use fluoride to control prisoners, and there is no evidence that it can make people docile. Therefore, we have marked this claim as false.