In general, the suicides of Nazi Germany are associated above all with those of the high officials of the regime who took their own lives at the end of the Third Reich (Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering), and those of the military commanders defeated or fallen in misfortune, among them Marshals Model, Rommel and Kluge, and the most direct conspirators of the coup of July 20 – the Operation Valkyrie— like Tresckow and Beck. The most frequent stereotype in the popular imagination is that of someone in uniform firing a shot with a regulation pistol, as the film recurrently showed Collapse, with the Führerbunker, the last refuge of the Nazi leader, which became an orgy of self-liquidation in April 1945. And yet the truth is very different. Thinking of suicides in the bloody twilight of National Socialist Germany, we should visualize a housewife drowning her young children and then hanging herself, or a family killing each other by ingesting poison.
And it is that the suicides of civilians occurred in a much higher quantity than those of the military or the hierarchs of the party. In fact, they constituted a true epidemic, a phenomenon of collective madness in which fear of revenge by Soviet soldiers and despair, among other factors, converged, and which reached staggering proportions, with tens of thousands of cases. He reveals it in a shocking book, Promise me you’ll shoot yourself, the story of mass suicides at the end of the Third Reich (Attic of the Books, 2022), the German historian Florian Huber (Nuremberg, 55 years old) who has investigated unpublished documentation on this terrible and largely ignored chapter of the Second World War.
Huber, producer of various international award-winning history documentaries on contemporary issues, begins his book with a paradigmatic case, that of the small town of Demmin, in Western Pomerania, in which an astonishing wave of suicides took place, more than 700 people, 10% of the population, before the advance of the Soviet troops and the taking of the town, on May 1. People of all ages, professions and social classes committed suicide. And they took babies and children to the grave with them. “It was as if the desire to die had taken over the whole world,” writes Huber.
The young wife of a Wehrmacht lieutenant put a rope around her three-year-old son’s neck and strangled him before hanging herself. A 71-year-old health insurance manager also hanged himself with his wife and his daughter after similarly killing their 2-year-old and 9-year-old grandchildren. In the house of the Günther merchant family, 12 people died: poisoned, slitting their wrists, or shot with a hunting rifle. One witness recalled the horrific sight of a procession of women raped by Soviet soldiers (as many as two million German women were sexually forced at the end of the war) staggering to the Tollense River to throw themselves into the current and drown, some with children of the hand and many with stones in pockets, bags and backpacks, like a multiplication of virginias woolf pomeranians
These are just some of the cases that the author describes in his book. When asked what the worst image is for him, the one that has affected him most personally, he replies: “In the list I found in which the gardener of the Demmin cemetery wrote down the dead that arrived on those critical days, hundreds and hundreds of names of men, women and children, with data on age and cause of death, a list of horror written by hand, included case number 135 of a girl barely one year old, who died on May 1, 1945, ‘strangled by his grandfather’. She affected me so strongly that I couldn’t even mention it in the book. And she is still haunting me.”
After the taboo of mass rapes of German women by especially Soviet troops (a taboo to which books such as berlin the fall, by Antony Beevor), was the one of mass suicides. “They were completely taboo for decades in our country. First in communist East Germany, because the stories would have cast a shadow over the glorified Red Army. Later, because these people did not fit into the official scheme of the Germans under the Third Reich, since they were neither villains nor victims. As a result, they have remained forgotten until I published my book.” How many people are we talking about? “My research clearly suggests that the number must be in the tens of thousands, from all over Germany. However, at the chaotic end of the war, official statistics, documentation, or medical reports all but ceased to exist. Therefore, it is impossible to give an exact figure.
Surprisingly, suicide occurred more among civilians and ordinary people than among the military. “One of the most shocking results of my study is the fact that the phenomenon was by no means confined to hard-core Nazis who really had a lot to fear. No, they were men, women and children alike, young and old, workers and businessmen, nurses and doctors, a kaleidoscope of German society. He could hit anyone. Therefore, when we talk about these epidemics of suicides, it is not at all an exclusive Nazi phenomenon, but rather a generalized feeling of doom throughout German society.
The mass psychology of Nazism
A part of the book is devoted to explaining the mass psychology of Nazism that led inexorably, if defeated, to suicide. What were the steps in that process? “We must not forget that during the Third Reich, the Germans had been kept in a permanent state of emergency and excitement for 12 years. In the previous years of peace, everything was hope and glory, faith and love for the Führer. In the first stage of the war, a feeling of pride, power, superiority and hatred came. In the final years, it was all pain, fear, despair, and even self-loathing. This process culminated in the devastating experience of holy Germany on the brink of annihilation.”
Huber explains that there were many more suicides in the Germany invaded by the Soviets than in the one entered by the other Allies, despite the fact that —he himself highlights it— one of the best-known cases of multiple suicides is from the mayor of Leipzig, a city that the Americans conquered. “For years and years, Nazi propaganda had hammered the fear of ‘Mongolian monsters’ into the hearts of the people. And when the Red Army finally crossed the German borders in the East, Soviet soldiers actually committed countless atrocities among civilians. So there is no doubt that in the parts invaded by the Soviets there were many more suicides than in other parts. Again, without being able to give exact figures, I calculate that the ratio must be at least 20 to 1. As for Leipzig, it is true that the most impressive and, on the other hand, extremely rare photos of German suicides are those taken there. With the troops, as I explain in the book, were two women war photographers, Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White, who took these unforgettable pictures of Germans, including entire families, who had killed themselves just minutes before. It is remarkable that the best photos of this mass phenomenon have been taken by two women”.
The suicide epidemic invites us to reflect on how easy it seems to kill oneself. How could so many people face that decision psychically and above all materially? “Committing suicide is never easy and whoever does it must be in an extreme state of mind,” says Florian Huber. “In Germany in 1945 many factors came together to create such a state: fear of violence, fear of Russian revenge, feelings of guilt and complicity, loss of meaning in life, loss of home and loved ones, and a certain contagious atmosphere: when more and more people around you kill each other, you tend to do the same”. As one witness of those dark days observed, “death has lost its majesty, and has become an everyday thing.”
As to what means were used for suicide… “People used any available means to kill themselves, hanging, shooting, stabbing, slitting, poisoning or drowning themselves. Many even killed their children before.”
Huber admits that his book deliberately focuses on ordinary Germans, not the military or the political world. “But of course there were many high-ranking officers who committed suicide as well. One statistic counted 53 generals from the land army, 14 from the air force, and 11 admirals. Keep in mind that this list only includes the top brass.”
In Collapse the horror of the death of the Goebbels family was shown in great detail, with Magda Goebbels, that Medea of Hitlerism, poisoning her children. “Some Nazis committed suicide when they learned that Hitler was dead, even then they wanted to follow the Führer wherever he went. But aside from that, Adolf Hitler’s suicide had nothing to do with this mass phenomenon. First, because many Germans had stopped caring about the leader. Second, because the radio news about his death did not say that he had committed suicide, but that he had fallen heroically fighting. So Hitler died with one last big lie.”
When asked about other episodes in history similar to the mass suicide of Germans, the historian mentions the self-inflicted death in the year 73 of the thousand inhabitants of the Jewish fortress of Masada in the war against the Romans, and that of a multitude of Japanese civilians. , including entire families, during the Battle of Okinawa, also in 1945. And today, can similar phenomena occur? “I don’t see any conflict today where a reaction on that scale could happen. The circumstances in which Germany had to witness its own sinking in 1945 were exceptional and unlikely to be repeated.”
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