Most people have heard how many top Nazis such as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering took their own lives at the end of the Third Reich, and how some defeated military commanders such as Model, Rommel and Kluge did the same. Moviegoers and history buffs may also know that Tresckow and Beck, two leaders of the failed Hitler assassination plot – Operation Valkyrie – also committed suicide.
Downfall (Der Untergang), a 2004 German-language historical war drama film, depicts the final days of Adolf Hitler and his staff holed up in the subterranean bunker headquarters known as the “Führerbunker.” Scene after scene shows Hitler and many government and military officials committing suicide by pistol and poison after learning of Germany’s defeat. Yet most suicides in the bloody twilight of National Socialist Germany were by ordinary people – a housewife who drowned her young children and then hanged herself, or an entire family consuming poison in one final, fatal gathering.
In Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945, German historian Florian Huber tells the story of the tens of thousands of civilians who killed themselves in a collective madness driven by hopelessness and fear of Soviet Army revenge.
Huber, a producer of several international award-winning documentaries, begins his book in the small town of Demmin (northeastern Germany), where a shocking wave of 700 suicides took place – 10% of the population – as the Soviet Red Army closed in on the town. People of all ages, professions and classes killed themselves, often taking their babies and children to their graves. “It was as if the will to die had overcome everyone,” writes Huber.
The young wife of a Wehrmacht lieutenant strangled her three-year-old son with a rope and then hanged herself. A 71-year-old health insurance administrator, his wife and daughter all hanged themselves after killing their young grandchildren.
In the Günther family home, 12 people died – some poisoned themselves, some slit their wrists, and some were shot with a hunting rifle. Huber describes the horror of a witness to multiple gang rapes by Soviet soldiers (almost two million German women were sexually assaulted at the end of the war). Afterward, many of the rape victims staggered down to the Tollense River and drowned themselves. Some led their children by the hand into the river after loading stones into their pockets, purses and backpacks, unwittingly emulating Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941.
These are just a few of the gruesome scenes recounted by Huber, who was most deeply affected by one dreadful story. “The groundskeeper for the Demmin cemetery kept a list of all the dead who arrived in those terrible times. There were hundreds and hundreds of names – men, women and children – and their ages and cause of death. It was a horrific, handwritten list. Number 135 on the list was a girl, barely a year old, who died on May 1, 1945, ‘strangled by her grandfather,’ it says. It affected me so much that I couldn’t even include it in the book, and it still haunts me to this day.”
The mass rape of German women by conquering soldiers, especially Soviet soldiers, followed by mass suicides, became a taboo subject in post-war Germany, as vividly described in Antony Beevor’s, The Fall of Berlin 1945. “They were completely taboo subjects for decades in our country.
The stories were banned in communist East Germany because they would have reflected poorly on the glorious Red Army. Later on, no one wanted to talk about the mass suicides because those who took their lives didn’t fit with the preconceptions of Germans living under the Third Reich – they were neither villains nor victims,” said Huber. “As a result, they were forgotten until I published my book.” How many people are we talking about? “My research clearly indicates that the number must be in the tens of thousands, from all over Germany. However, in the chaotic final days of the war, official statistics, documentation and medical reports almost ceased to exist. So, it’s impossible to give an exact figure.”
Surprisingly, more civilians and ordinary people committed suicide than members of the military. “One of my most startling findings is that the phenomenon was by no means limited to hardcore Nazis, who really had a lot to fear. In fact, it was men, women and children alike, young and old, workers and businessmen, nurses and doctors, a kaleidoscope of German society. It could hit anybody. These mass suicides were by no means exclusive to Nazis, but were the outcome of a widespread feeling of doom throughout German society.”