The final days of World War II in Europe. Nazi Germany is teetering as Western Allies move in across the Rhine and the Soviet Red Army sweeps into the country from the east, with stories of its war atrocities preceding it.
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On April 30, Nazi leader Adolf Hitler commits suicide, putting a bullet to his head. Other high-ranking Nazi leaders do the same. But they aren't the only ones to take their own lives. By May 8, the day Nazi Germany unconditionally surrenders, thousands of ordinary German men, women and children had killed themselves in a national wave of suicides.
It's a story that German author and documentary historian Florian Huber detailed in his bestselling 2015 German-language book, which was released Thursday in English as Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945 by British publisher Allen Lane. The translation, by Imogen Taylor, was also released by Text Publishing in Australia one month ago.
"What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood years of deprivation, aerial bombing and deaths in battle, to do this?" Allen Lane's description of the book asks. This is the question that Huber sets out to answer through eyewitness testimony and archival research.
The book zooms in on the small northeastern German town of Demmin, where up to 1,000 Germans, out of a population of roughly 15,000, killed themselves — including children whose parents admonished them to do so. Some parents even took the lives of their own children before killing themselves.
"Over years, people had been indoctrinated by German propaganda about what was bound to happen should the [Soviet] enemy set foot on German soil," Huber said in a 2015 interview with DW. Rumors of pillaging, rape, and barbaric disfiguration committed by the Red Army terrified the German populace.
"People believed that the only way to escape these horrors was to commit suicide," the author added. Drownings, shootings, hangings and ingesting poison were the common means of taking one's life.