On 20 April 1945, Adolf Hitler’s birthday, 21-year-old Friederike Grensemann said goodbye to her father, who had been called up to the Volkssturm, the “People’s Storm”, a hastily assembled, motley crew of men who had up to this point been excused from military service. A last-ditch attempt to shore up the Third Reich in the face of allied invasions on all sides, it was neither properly uniformed nor adequately equipped. Most of those who served in it were doomed to failure, and they knew it. As her father left the house, he turned to his daughter and handed her his pistol. “It’s all over, child,” he said. “Promise me you’ll shoot yourself when the Russians come, otherwise I won’t have another moment’s peace.” He told her to put the barrel in her mouth and pull the trigger. Then he left. Ten days later, as she saw the first Red Army soldiers walking down the street, she took the weapon out, released the safety catch and pressed the barrel into her mouth as instructed. Looking out into the backyard, however, she saw a rubbish bin full of discarded weapons. Maybe the Russians wouldn’t get her, she thought. Perhaps they weren’t as bad as Nazi propaganda had made them out to be. She went down to the rubbish bin and threw the pistol in. She had decided to live.
She was one of the lucky ones. All over the eastern parts of Germany, people killed themselves to avoid being shot or captured by the Red Army troops, who were rampaging through the region looting, raping and killing. This was a suicide wave on a gigantic scale, people ending their lives in myriad ways. An estimated 10,000 women in Berlin alone took their own lives after being raped by Red Army soldiers. Many more killed themselves, as Grensemann had contemplated doing, in anticipation of the Soviet troops’ brutal revenge on the Germans for the millions of deaths inflicted by Hitler’s armies on their own population. Often a father would kill his entire family before taking his own life.
The writer and documentary film-maker Florian Huber begins his account of these events with a gripping narrative set in the small Pomeranian town of Demmin, where it is estimated that more than 1,000 people perished out of a total population of 15,000, a number swollen further by thousands of refugees fleeing from areas to the east. Terrified at the approach of the Red Army, whose atrocities had already been widely reported by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s media, inhabitants began the wave of suicide, many whole families walking into one of the surrounding rivers to drown. Enraged by fierce resistance from fanatical members of the Hitler Youth, the Soviet troops set light to the town centre, looted inns and liquor stores, and launched an orgy of rape and destruction, triggering a second wave of suicides. Demmin was perhaps an extreme example, but in April and early May similar events were taking place everywhere in the path of the Red Army.
But fear of the Soviet troops, or, for women, shame and despair after being raped by them, were not the only reasons Germans killed themselves in what was undoubtedly one of the greatest mass suicides in history. Huber also notes the many suicides of committed members of the Nazi elite, starting of course with Hitler himself, and encompassing not only his immediate subordinates such as Goebbels and Martin Bormann but also government ministers, gauleiters (district officials), army generals (53 of them), SS officers and hundreds more. It was not so much fear that drove them as despair and disorientation – the movement that had given their lives meaning and purpose was crashing into ruins around them. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim, in his classic study of suicide, called this phenomenon “anomie”, the loss of a framework of values that left people without any sense of a moral basis, however warped, for their lives. As Magda Goebbels, who killed her six children before she and her husband killed themselves, wrote: “The world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism won’t be worth living in, so I have taken the children with me.”
Huber does not make it clear enough that many leading Nazis saw the act of self-destruction as a message, demonstrating to future generations of Germans their willingness to sacrifice themselves for a cause they believed was certain to be resurrected. Like the Romans of old, they were dying an honourable death, rather than face ignominy and humiliation at the hands of the victorious allies. The head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, took cyanide when he was captured by the British, while the “second man in the Third Reich”, Hermann Goering, killed himself after being condemned to death by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg to avoid undergoing the dishonouring ritual of hanging. All of these beliefs were utter illusions, of course: the Nazi party never did revive, and those who had led or served it have earned nothing but scorn and contempt from subsequent generations of Germans.
Huber tells the shocking stories of ordinary German suicides with literary power and skill, making excellent use of unknown material in the admirable, privately run German Diary Archive at Emmendingen, in south-western Germany. But after the first 130 pages or so, the book comes badly unstuck. Instead of setting these stories more deeply in their context, and exploring the less immediate factors that lay behind Germans’ decision whether or not to kill themselves, such as religion, gender, age, generation, political beliefs and so on – factors that determined the widely varying incidence of suicide between different groups of people – he launches into more than 100 pages of a banal, unvarying narrative of the Nazi years. This is designed to show “the Germans’ unbounded admiration for Hitler” and their happiness and fulfilment under his rule. Only in this way, he says, can we understand why so many of them killed themselves when the dream fell so spectacularly into ruins.
If this was really the case, then why weren’t there more German suicides, especially in the western parts of the country, which was overrun not by the Red Army but by the western allies? Just as significant, he paints a portrait of an entire nation seduced by Hitler and overwhelmed at the end of the war by “complicity, culpability, guilt” and fear of the victors’ revenge. This is not only seriously inaccurate – millions of Germans were longing for the end of the ruinous regime of the Nazis by the last months of the war – but also seems designed to let the Germans, or those who supported the Nazis, off the hook by portraying them as innocents who were seduced by a charismatic leader and paid for it with their lives. In the end, this is another narrative of Germans between 1933 and 1945 as victims; which is perhaps why this book has been a bestseller in Germany.
Nor is it as original as the publishers claim; the assertion that this is “one of the last untold stories of the Second World War” is very much wide of the mark. In particular, Christian Goeschel’s Suicide in Nazi Germany, published by Oxford University Press in 2009, and translated into German two years later, covers much of the same ground and does so with proper attention to the many and varied factors that lay behind the wave of self-destruction at the end of the war. Among the many noteworthy features of Goeschel’s fine book is its painstaking compilation of statistics, on which Huber seems to have drawn without proper acknowledgment. And one of Goeschel’s chapters, on the suicides of Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1945, points to an egregious omission from Huber’s book. After all, they were Germans too.
• Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945, by Florian Huber, translated by Imogen Taylor, is published in the UK by Allen Lane (RRP £20) and in Australia by Text. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
