Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945

by Florian Huber

The extraordinary German bestseller on the final days of the Third Reich

One of the least understood stories of the Third Reich is that of the extraordinary wave of suicides, carried out not just by much of the Nazi leadership, but by thousands of ordinary Germans, in the war's closing period. Some of these were provoked by straightforward terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many could not be explained in such relatively straightforward terms.

Florian Huber's remarkable book, a bestseller in Germany, confronts this terrible phenomenon. Other countries have suffered defeat, but not responded in the same way. What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood years of deprivation, aerial bombing and deaths in battle, to do this?

In a brilliantly written, thoughtful and original work, Huber sees the entire project of the Third Reich as a sequence of almost overwhelming emotions and scenes for many Germans. He describes some of the key events which shaped the period from the First World War to the end of the Second, showing how the sheer intensity, allure and ferocity of Hitler's regime swept along millions. Its sudden end was, for many of them, simply impossible to absorb.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, Germany, War, Holocaust, Historical

292 pages, Paperback

First published February 16, 2015

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The love of death which is the under-pattern of the German living caught up with the high officials of the regime, and they gave a great party, toasted death and Hitler and poisoned themselves…”
- Elizabeth “Lee” Miller, War Correspondent (1945)

“In many German families, honor came before life. On 20 April, the Fuhrer’s birthday, twenty-one-year-old Friederike Grensemann said goodbye to her father, who had been called up to the Volkssturm to defend the city. They said little. Friederike’s father was already wearing his uniform and armband and went to fetch his leather coat. Then he pressed his pistol into his daughter’s hand. ‘It’s over, my child,’ he said. ‘Promise me you’ll shoot yourself when the Russians come, otherwise I won’t have another moment’s peace…’”
- Florian Huber, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945

(Warning: This review – and the underlying book being reviewed – deals extensively with the topic of suicide).

The title of Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself has been carefully chosen to grab your attention. There is no subtlety here. Instead, the words leap off the cover and grab you by the collar, giving you a little shake along the way. Even if you have no interest in the topic – and frankly, you probably don’t – you will be unlikely to resist taking a deeper look. Despite its gratuitous designation, however, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself is a sober – and sobering look – at one of the many violent consequences that marked the end of the Second World War.

Even if you only have a passing knowledge of World War II, you probably know that suicide played a marked – and grim – role in events. In the Pacific Theater, the Japanese used premeditated suicide tactics – namely kamikaze pilots, but also kaiten manned torpedoes – as a way to overcome a shortage of oil and trained personnel. Indeed, in preparing for a potential Allied invasion of the Home Islands, self-immolation became a strategic imperative. Meanwhile, in the European Theater, most of the top Nazis chose to kill themselves rather than face the natural and obvious consequences of their actions. The list includes Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Martin Borman (his body found decades after the war, fragments of a glass ampule in his jaw), Joseph Goebbels (who murdered his six children before departing), and – of course – Adolf Hitler.

Less well known – and the subject of Huber’s book – is the mass suicides of “ordinary Germans” in the waning days of Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.

Huber’s monograph has an interesting – and effective – back-flowing structure. It begins with a case study centered on the town of Demmin in northeastern Germany. Here, facing occupation by vengeful Soviets, hundreds of people killed themselves, often destroying elderly parents or young children beforehand. The deaths occurred by shooting, hanging, drowning, and by poison, especially the ubiquitous cyanide ampules:

Potassium cyanide…is the potassium salt of hydrocyanic or prussic acid, a colorless crystal that resembles coarse table salt and, like salt, dissolves easily in water. If swallowed, it is converted into hydrocyanic acid in the stomach and becomes highly toxic. This causes a painful corrosion of the stomach lining, but the way the poison kills is to attack the human respiratory system by preventing the cells from using oxygen. Internal suffocation follows, during which the body spasms as it struggles for air until, eventually, circulation shuts down altogether. Cyanide…poisoning is a very effective way of ending a human life…

From Demmin, the book does a reverse telescope, zooming out to take in the bigger picture of civilian suicides all across Germany. Total numbers were in the thousands, and occurred even in the west, which was overrun by troops from Great Britain and the United States who were far less feared than their Soviet counterparts.

(Nazi propaganda, in an effort to stiffen resistance in the east, had inculcated a deep fear of the Red Army into the citizenry. Ultimately, that fear was born out, as the Soviets raped thousands of women. Historian Anthony Beevor, who wrote The Fall of Berlin 1945, estimates that Soviet troops committed over a million sexual assaults).

Following this section, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself loops back in time, to the rise of National Socialism, engaging in a discussion of the way that Nazism pervaded the everyday lives of everyday folks. Huber is a German historian, and he takes advantage of a number of unpublished manuscripts, letters, and diary entries to follow a handful of people as they devote their lives – or have their lives devoted – to Hitler’s cause. In this way, you see how men and women came to believe in Hitler, trust in him, at times to worship him.

This is a slim volume, with my advanced reading copy less than three-hundred pages long. With space at a premium, Huber does not spend much time on the debate over how much popular support the Nazis actually had. Some historians, such as Peter Longerich, have noted that Nazi approval rates varied widely, and tended to nosedive as Hitler began threatening his neighbors in the late 1930s. The upshot is that not everyone was a dyed-in-the-wool, death’s-head-sporting, fully-committed Nazi, despite Goebbels’s best efforts.

Nonetheless, the accounts featured here come from people who were clearly ardent followers. They fully bought into Hitler’s vast designs to turn much of Europe and the Soviet Union into a German colony. When that dream evaporated in fire, ruined cities, and invasion, they were left struggling to understand an inconceivable new world.

Huber does not delve too deeply into the psychology of suicide, which is a weakness. Since he is unable to interview those who took their own lives – and can only count them – we do not have a clear understanding about what went into that last, desperate decision. Huber offers only surface insights into causation: fear of the Soviet invasion; fear of Soviet occupation; and the failure of the Third Reich itself. None of this takes into account individual factors such as depression which – as we know today – might predispose someone to killing themselves. There is also no exploration of the phenomenon of suicidal contagion, and how that might have played a role in places like Demmin, where suicidal ideation spread like Covid-19 and death came in clusters.

Frankly, Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself is not an easy sell. I hesitated to read it, and I’ll read anything about World War II.

That said, I certainly don’t regret picking this up. It is rather well-written and translated, nicely organized (delivering a solid finishing kick), and explores a small, relatively unknown corner of a titanic conflict. While an unpleasant topic, there is nothing leering or exploitative or overly detailed. The most graphic thing in Huber’s book is its inclusion of the “Leipzig Waxworks,” the series of photos taken of suicide victims by Margaret Bourke White and Lee Miller. The pictures themselves are not grisly; the dead look asleep and untroubled. That does not mean they will not haunt your dreams.

Suicide is a complicated and uncomfortable subject. It is difficult to talk about because there is some indication that the mere mention of self-harm may lead to its increased occurrence. On the other hand, ignoring it means that people who might need help do not seek that help.

Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself delivers a simpler conclusion: That those who most wholeheartedly chose to follow darkness ended their journey by finding the darkness.

(I received a copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review)

[Nika · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars

What can Florian Huber's work tell the reader who is familiar with the history of the Third Reich? It raises the heavy subject of the wave of suicides that swept through the Reich in its final months. What motivated ordinary people to take their own lives?
The author points out that an epidemic of suicide swept across the whole of the failing Nazi Germany, “from east to west, Königsberg to Berlin, Demmin to Siefersheim.” Self-destruction was a radical response to the collapse of a world to which most Germans had grown accustomed.

Untold numbers of Germans turned on themselves the violence that had become part of their everyday life. The epidemic, which claimed tens of thousands of victims, was an extreme expression of the meaninglessness and pain people felt in the face of defeat, humiliation, loss, shame and personal suffering.

People were driven by fear of the rapidly approaching enemy armies. The fear of revenge grew as the front lines drew closer. Despite attempts at self-deception, it became increasingly difficult to ignore the imminent defeat in the war. Predictably, the suicide rate in the eastern part of the country, where people were awaiting the invasion of the Red Army, was noticeably higher than in the western part. The fear of Soviet retaliation was easy to understand. Many people on the home front had heard of the horrendous crimes against civilians committed by the Führer's troops in the East. However, there were also many cases of suicide in the western part of Germany.

It was not only fear that pushed ordinary citizens to the extremes. One of the motives was a keen sense of the collapse of all the ideals systematically hammered into people's heads for 12 years. With the fall of the Reich, it was as if the world ended for a large part of the population. Many genuinely saw no point in continuing with their lives after such an existential collapse. The emotional strain of having to move from the reality they believed in to the reality that surrounded them, which was becoming louder and more tangible, was overwhelming.
Added to the fear and collapse of the old world was a sense of guilt, which some of them felt they could not escape if they remained in the post-Hitler world. A vague feeling that there was no escape from reckoning was haunting them.

The author notes that "the wave of suicides cut across all professions and classes, affecting both sexes and all age groups."
We see among the victims of this suicide epidemic individuals who worked for the state, ideological supporters of Nazism, entire families of merchants, doctors and teachers, elderly and young, women and girls who preferred death to the high risk of being raped, and mothers who decided to end their lives and take their children with them.
Perhaps the most depressing part of the book was the one that describes the plight of children. It is painful to read about mothers going to the river to drown themselves and their children, sometimes infants. People driven to despair should evoke compassion in any person with empathy.

There was an increase in suicides and suicide attempts after the Stalingrad debacle and after D-Day. But in those periods, it was mainly people in the military who resorted to suicide.

The author looks at the changes in public consciousness in the last years of the Weimar Republic and after Hitler and his party came to power. It highlights the humiliation experienced by many Germans after the Treaty of Versailles was imposed on them. Not surprisingly, most felt that the victors' decision to blame Germany alone for the First World War was unfair. This is not to say that their feelings were necessarily correct. The Treaty of Versailles was exploited by various forces in Germany as pretext and 'excuse.'

Against the background of a difficult economic situation and unemployment, one can almost understand the disillusionment of many citizens with the Republic and its shaky democracy.
The fact that the situation had begun to improve even before Hitler came to power went largely unnoticed. People attributed the improvement in the economic situation to the new government, which took full advantage of this. As Ian Kershaw wrote, Hitler's only talent was propaganda.

We can probably cautiously conclude that the bitter disillusionment with a socio-political situation coupled with the difficult economic conditions of many are important factors that contribute to the fascization of a significant part of society. Especially when followed by demoralizing propaganda.

The book also examines how public consciousness developed in the last years of the Weimar Republic and after Hitler and his party came to power. It examines the mood in society during the “happy years" when the country seemed to go from one victory to another. It looks at how people reacted to the military setbacks and the air raids on German cities, and how they took the failed assassination attempt on the life of Hitler in July 1944 and the news of his suicide in 1945.

The excerpts from the diaries of eyewitnesses are amply quoted, including entries made by foreigners living in Germany.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 5 out of 5]

"That is, in effect, the terrible tragedy of the German people: they can't muster the strength or see their way to freeing themselves from the rule of evil. ~Jacob Kronika

It is widely known that Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva committed suicide at the end of WWII. What is perhaps less well known is that tens of thousands of other Germans did the same. Yes, you read that right: tens of thousands, including many children who were killed by their parents before they committed suicide.

Why? What would lead ordinary citizens to kill not just themselves but their children as well? German soldiers, SS members, the Gestapo... it is easy to see how they could have killed themselves before being captured by the Allies, before being tried for the atrocities they committed. Ordinary citizens though? What would drive so many of them to take their own lives and those of their children? What could be the cause of the epidemic of suicide throughout Germany?

In "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself": The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945, Florian Huber takes us inside Germany during the Third Reich, into the homes and lives of German civilians who killed themselves at the end of the war. It is a fascinating account, one that had me gripped from the beginning. 

We first learn of the city of Demmin where between 700 and over 1000 citizens killed themselves in the wake of advancing Allied troops. At first it appeared they were merely afraid. After all, these people had been fed propaganda about the horrors the Russians and Americans would inflict upon them: they would cut out their children's tongues and drink their blood. They would rape and pillage and kill and torture. Why wait around to endure that? Of course, some of this was true -- it's estimated that up to two million women were raped by Russian soldiers in the final days of the war. You can see why many would choose death rather than face being raped, tortured, murdered. Yet fear was not the only motivation.

Anyone who has ever attempted suicide knows the absolute despair and hopelessness, the utter anguish that leads to this most extreme and final (if all goes as planned) act. Others might have a difficult time understanding how anyone could take their own life.  The author has done an outstanding job of taking us into the minds of these people, what they were thinking and feeling as the Allied troops advanced and the world they knew was coming to an end. 

Whilst it's easy for me to understand those who killed themselves, it was chilling to read the accounts of those who first killed their children.  Mr. Huber shows clearly and precisely how this happened. He shares diary and memoir entries and suicide notes, helping us understand what was going through these parents' minds. These parents believed their children would be tortured and then killed or else live a life of abject misery; they thought they were protecting their children by taking their lives.

This is not an easy book to read because of the subject matter, though it is easier to read than accounts of what the Nazis did to millions of Jews and other people during the war. It is bleak subject matter, and yet it is a riveting account. It is an eye-opening look into what ordinary Germans were thinking and feeling.

The author not only writes of the end of the war and the suicides. He also examines the period leading up to Hitler's ascent and during the war. He shows how so many people fell under Hitler's spell, how Hitler gave them hope and pride again after Germany's defeat in the First World War. They centered their entire worldview around Hitler's words and promises and by the time they began witnessing crimes against the Jews, they were so wrapped up in Hitler's spell that they chose to turn a blind eye to the evil going on all around them.

I did not want to feel compassion for these people who had, to varying degrees, supported Hitler and yet it is impossible to read this book and not feel sympathy. Florian Huber masterfully takes us into their lives, minds, and hearts. Explores what it was like for their entire worldview to shatter, to lose everything that had given their lives meaning, to realise they had been complicit in evil, to feel guilt and remorse and shame. To despair of ever again having a normal and happy life. The author does not make excuses for the blind eye many German civilians turned to what was going on all around them, but he does help us understand how and why they did.

I am so glad I read this book and highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in WWII. It is obvious Mr. Huber thoroughly researched the subject matter, and he does an excellent job of putting it all together to shed light on something I did not know anything about.  

I offer my sincere gratitude to the author Florian Huber, Little, Brown Spark, and NetGalley for providing me with a DRC of this book in exchange for my honest review. 

[Michael Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

update....

"My father, raised in Berlin under the Nazis, saw in European fascism a course that any country could take. He knew that US democracy was not exceptional in its capacity to resist the forces that shattered his family and devastated his youth. My mother, a court stenographer in US criminal courts for 44 years, saw in the anti-Black racism of the American legal system parallels to the vicious antisemitism she experienced in her youth in Poland, attitudes which enabled eastern European complicity with fascism. And my grandmother, Ilse Stanley, wrote a memoir, published in 1957, of her experiences in 1930s Berlin, later appearing on the US television show This is Your Life to discuss it. It is a memoir of the normalization years of German fascism, well before world war and genocide. In it, she recounts experiences with Nazi officers who assured her that in nazism’s vilification of Jews, they certainly did not mean her."

-Author, Florian Huber

========

What we are seeing here today....

https://www.theguardian.com/world/202...

===========

"The good Lord has sent us a man called Adolph Hitler. He's sent him to save Germany"

After documenting copious suicides among the elite and ordinary Germans, alike, in the second half of the book the author gives a broad sweep of the Nazi era. He traces the dark exhilaration that overtook previously sane individuals as they came to feel that only Hitler could solve all their problems.

"When people sense crimes are being committed in their name, they can become even more fanatical in their devotion to the cause, so that an all-out drive for victory, or else martyrdom, seem the only ways these sins can be redeemed.....After defeat, the epidemic of German suicides reflected their despair over the implosion of the Nazi fantasy."

When political scientist, Hannah Arendt, returned to Germany after the war, among the survivors she encountered a population prone to self-pity, denial, or apathy. There was indifference to those who had suffered. This was not entirely unprecedented because of the indifference to Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) in 1938, when Jewish shops in Berlin were vandalized and looted. And recent scholarship shows an awareness of the camps much earlier in Germany than citizens were willing to admit.

The people took down their portraits of the Führer and buried them in the backyard and tried to pretend nothing happened.

If Arendt attempted to press the conversation into what happened, she was met with a deluge of stories about how Germans suffered, claiming that they had suffered as much as any other nation or people impacted by the Reich and the war. This included Germans who had been leaders in the Hitler Youth Movement. Otherwise there was a lack of feeling, including over the loss of family and friends.

It wasn't until the 90's that Germans finally started to face up to what had happened. This was spurred along by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the discovery of large caches of documents that had been tucked away in East Germany. Unfortunately, there has been a recent surge of white nationalism and political gains by neo-Nazis in Germany.

Was die Erfahrung aber und die Geschichte lehren, ist dieses, daß Völker und Regierungen niemals etwas aus der Geschichte gelernt und nach Lehren, die aus derselben zu ziehen gewesen wären, gehandelt haben." (Hegel)

To put it more succinctly in English: "History teaches us that man learns nothing from history."

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adolf Hitler war nicht der einzige, der sich am 30. April 1945 das Leben nahm. Am selben Tag hatten sich 200 km nördlich von Berlin, in Demmin, bereits 21 Menschen selbst getötet. Und dies war nur der bescheidene Auftakt zu einer beispiellosen Selbstmordwelle. Allein in der 15000 Einwohner zählenden Kleinstadt sollten in den nächsten Tagen über 1000 Menschen freiwillig den Tod suchen. Sie erhängten sich, vergifteten sich, Mütter banden sich mit ihren Kindern an Steine, bevor sie sich gemeinsam ertränkten, Väter erschossen ihre Familien und danach sich selbst. Ähnliches wiederholte sich anderswo, in Neustrelitz, Neubrandenburg, Teterow, aber auch in Berlin oder Leipzig. Eine Selbstmordepidemie breitete sich vom Osten ausgehend über ganz Deutschland bis nach Siefersheim in der Pfalz aus.

Als ich zufällig über eine Rezension dieses Buches stolperte, war ich geschockt. Ist nur mir dieses Ereignis entgangen? Das große Verdrängen nach dem Krieg wich zwar ~25 Jahre später einer regen Erinnerungskultur, die Massenselbstmorde wurden trotzdem nicht wahrgenommen oder blieben lokale Randnotizen. Erst seit wenigen Jahren wird auch über diese Toten in einer breiterer Öffentlichkeit gesprochen.

Einen wichtigen Beitrag dazu leistet der Historiker Florian Huber mit diesem Buch. Neben einer gründlichen historischen Analyse lässt er vor allem Augenzeugen zu Wort kommen, etwa die Pelzhändlerin Marie Dabs aus Demmin oder die junge BDM-Führerin Melitta Maschmann. Die Tagebücher, Briefe, Erzählungen und Erinnerungen von Menschen, die das ganze Grauen selbst erlebt haben, sind wie ein Fenster in die Vergangenheit. So gelingt es eindrücklich, das Geschehene lebendig und anschaulich zu machen.

In den Teilen eins und zwei werden die Ereignisse in Demmin und im übrigen Deutschland geschildert. Endlose Flüchtlingstrecks zogen durch Demmin. Die Wehrmacht setzte sich panikartig nach Westen ab, sprengte alle Brücken und überließ die Bevölkerung schutzlos dem Vormarsch der russischen Armee.

Am 29. April schrieb der junge Wehrmachtssoldat Gustav Adolf Skibbe in sein Tagebuch:
»Muttis Geburtstag. Welch schwermütige Gedanken schweifen hinaus. Unser Büro wird geräumt unter Fliegerbeschuß, Tiefflieger, verschiedene Tote unter den Flüchtlingen. Hochbetrieb, eine Armee flutet zurück, ein grausiges Schauspiel. Nachts Verlagerung der Hafenbrücke, niemand soll heraus aus Demmin.«

Vordergründig war es die Angst vor den Russen, die viele Selbstmorde, besonders im Osten in den Einfallsschneisen der Roten Armee erklärt, bestärkt durch die Propaganda von den kinderfressenden, roten Bestien. Tatsächlich waren die russischen Soldaten seit über drei Jahren ohne Pause im Einsatz und hatten in unbändigem Hass auf die deutschen Invasoren keine Hemmungen mehr, zu vergewaltigen und zu plündern. Am Ende steckten sie halb Demmin in Brand.

Doch Angst allein als Motiv ist zu kurz gegriffen. Im dritten Teil zeichnet Florian Huber die 25 Jahre deutscher Geschichte nach, die den Weg in die Katastrophe bereiten, ausgehend von der unsäglichen Demütigung durch den Versailler Vertrag, über die Wirtschaftskrise bis zur großen Wende, die Adolf Hitler verspricht, und die ihn in den ersten Jahren wie einen Messias erscheinen läßt. Es war eine Hochschaubahn der Gefühle, ein Rausch mit bösem Erwachen. Das Ende kam nicht nur als kriegerische Niederlage, es fühlte sich an wie das Ende der Welt, der Untergang des deutschen Volkes, die Vernichtung aller Hoffnung, aller Werte, allen Glaubens, allen Halts. Eine kollektive, schwere Depression, nur so ist eine Selbstmordrate erklärbar, die 5 - 10 mal höher ist, als im Vergleichszeitraum der Vorjahre.

Als am Ende alles zusammenbrach, stürzten auch die hochgezüchteten Gefühle in sich zusammen. Sie verschwanden im Sog des Untergangs. Zurück blieb ein Reservoir an schwarzen Gefühlen, die im Schatten des Erfolges gewachsen waren: die Schuld des Mitmachens, die Scham des Wegsehens, der Hass auf die anderen und sich selbst, die Angst vor Rache und Gewalt, die Trauer über den Verlust, die Verzweiflung vor dem Nichts.
Die Selbstmordepidemie, die in Wellen von Ost nach West durch das verglühende Reich gerollt war, von Königsberg bis Berlin, von Demmin bis Siefersheim, war eine Antwort auf den emotionalen Untergang gewesen. Eine radikale Antwort, in der Deutsche die ihnen alltäglich gewordene Gewalt gegen sich selbst wendeten. Die Selbstmordwelle mit zehntausenden Toten war der extreme Ausdruck einer Sinnleere und eines Schmerzes, in den sich die Menschen angesichts von Irrtum, Niederlage, Demütigung, Verlust, Scham, persönlichem Leid und Vergewaltigung geworfen sahen.

Zehntausende Selbstmorde ist die Schreckensbilanz weniger Tage. Der vierte Teil beschreibt die Agonie danach. Nicht nur die Städte waren verwüstet, auch die Menschen waren seelische Ruinen. Man war nicht mehr fähig, sich dem Geschehenen zu stellen. Man konnte nur die Augen schließen und die Realität verweigern.

Hannah Arendt erlebte die Deutschen bei ihrem Besuch in einer beklemmenden Sprachlosigkeit und Verweigerung. Sie betrachteten sich als Opfer einer unbegreiflichen Apokalypse, die unversehens hereingebrochen ist. Keiner wollte beteiligt gewesen sein, niemand wollte etwas gewusst haben. Gelähmt im Vakuum zwischen einer verdrängten Vergangenheit und einer unvorstellbaren Zukunft. Mit einer fast zwanghaften äußeren Betriebsamkeit wurde das Gefühl innerer Ohnmacht kompensiert:

»Beobachtet man die Deutschen, wie sie geschäftig durch die Ruinen ihrer tausendjährigen Geschichte stolpern und für die Zerstörung ihrer Wahrzeichen ein Achselzucken übrig haben oder wie sie es einem verübeln, wenn man sie an ihre Schreckenstaten erinnert, welche die ganze übrige Welt nicht loslassen, dann begreift man, dass Geschäftigkeit ihre Hauptwaffe bei der Abwehr der Wirklichkeit geworden ist.« (Hannah Arendt)

Das Buch hat mich bei aller Grausamkeit der Thematik gefangen und ich habe die 300 Seiten in kurzer Zeit geradezu inhaliert. Der Autor hat für das heikle Thema einen angemessenen Ton getroffen, ohne Pathos oder Sensationslust. Und er dringt weit unter die Oberfläche der reinen Fakten vor. Die Bestandsaufnahme und Interpretation der Ereignisse in Verbindung mit dem O-Ton zahlreicher Zeitzeugen aus unterschiedlichen Milieus machen Geschichte verständlich. Das Buch sollte Pflichtlektüre für alle an der jüngeren deutschen Geschichte Interessierten sein!

[Valerity (Val) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just the title of this book, of course grabs you, but once you fully realize what the subject matter is you prepare to settle down for a serious read. And this is truly a serious story that has needed to be shared for a long time. Maybe it was waiting for the right author, or perhaps the time wasn’t right. That’s kind of hard to believe though, as long as it’s been now. But the stage is set, and its time the world knows about this, or at least the parts that didn’t already.

I personally have read my share of books about WWII and the holocaust, and I’ve never run into any mention of this story before. I’ve never seen it discussed online when discussions were being had about those kinds of books either. So I was blown away to read this well-researched book about the suicides of so many regular German people (non-Nazis). Juxtaposed to that, it also follows along with a few folks who became invested in the whole Hitler message. Some as part of the Hitler Youth programs, and some as adults. They became true believers.

I recommend this book for anyone, history lovers, WWII buffs, those who read holocaust memoirs, It’s just such a compelling story. Advanced electronic review copy was provided by NetGalley, author Florian Huber, and Little, Brown, Spark.

[Bill Kupersmith · Rating 5 out of 5]

The title is even more hair-raising in the original, Kind, versprich mir, dass du dich erschiesst, Kind (“child”) providing an especially poignant touch. These words were spoken by a father to his 20-year-old daughter as he gave her a pistol when the invading Russian army was about to enter Berlin in 1945. The mass rapes committed by Soviet soldiery against German women (some two million, although other nationalities, even ‘liberated’ Russian women prisoners, were also victims) were well-known to most students of the history of the Second World War. News to most of us (even to contemporary Germans, which made this book a best-seller in its homeland) is the epidemic of suicides, not simply top Nazis, but entire families of ordinary Germans. An epicentre was the north German town of Demmin (pop. 15,000), overrun by the Russians on 30 April 1945. Literally overnight about 1000 people ended their lives, mostly by drowning in the rivers circling the town. Whole families, women, children and men, tied themselves together and plunged into the waters, often carrying rucksacks full of stones.

After the terrifying close-up account of what befell the people of Demming, the focus shifts to other areas in Germany. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler shot himself. But there seems to have been no shortage of cyanide. The suicides were no confined to areas in the path of the Russians. (Of course American soldiers committed rape too, but apparently nothing on the same scale.) The most shocking pictures of suicide victims (reproduced in this book) were taken by the famous American photographer Margaret Bourke-White.

Florian Huber summarises: “It wasn’t only fear of the Russians and of the victors’ retaliation the inspired such a sense of doom and despair in the population. The example of Demmin shows that the wave of suicides cut across all professions and classes, affecting both sexes and all age groups. Even a person’s closeness to or distance from the Nazi regime made no difference. What can the inner world of these Germans have looked like if the coming defeat made them see death as the only way out?” That is the lead-in to the third part of this book, an account of the pre-war period of the German people’s experience under the Nazi regime. It was seldom mentioned afterwards that for most Germans - if one wasn’t either Jewish or a committed leftist - life was comparatively very good, offering full-employment, excellent social-services, and a strong sense of national pride and identity. Two of Huber’s witnesses were girls who wrote memoirs of the period, Renate Finkh and Melita Maschmann. They became leaders in the League of German Girls - the female branch of the Hitler Youth. They recalled the exuberance of the early Nazi period and their total infatuation with Hitler. Neither was preoccupied with hatred for Jews. (Merlita’s ‘best friend’ literally ‘was Jewish’ - she wrote her memoir in an unsuccessful bid to achieve forgiveness). They were shocked to see how the Germans were treating the occupied Poles, but only after the war could they come to believe that the death camps weren’t allied propaganda.

From despair the German survivors embraced a state of mass amnesia, throwing themselves into hard work and reconstruction. Huber quotes some contemporary criticism from Hannah Arendt that struck me as breathtakingly stupid - that’s simply what traumtised people do. (Arendt later lost her own status as a pundit with Eichmann in Jerusalem.) But Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself takes a place alongside Sarah Helm’s Ravensbrück as the most moving historical book on the Second World War I’ve read in years. The juxtaposition seems most appropriate.

[Darya Silman · Rating 3 out of 5]

If history books had trigger warnings, then Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself by Florian Huber would deserve a long list. Starting with the description of a suicide wave in Demmin, a small town in the northeast, the author extrapolates it to the whole of Germany. In the wake of the advancing Russians from the east and allies from the west, Germans went through an existential crisis that resulted in thousands of suicides at all societal levels, from ordinary mail carriers to Hitler himself. Inadvertently, the propaganda machine had affected all Germans from 1933, be they pro- or anti-Nazis. The year 1945 brought a real threat in the form of the vengeful, barbarian Red Army, eager to take revenge on Germans for the atrocities committed against the Soviet population. To live a horrible life or to die was the only choice Germans saw. They hanged themselves, drowned in rivers and ponds, and shot or took poison. Often, whole families were wiped out in that manner, with adults killing children, then themselves. In the Demmin alone, the number of suicide victims varies from 400 to 2,000; the exact figures are hard to estimate since the bureaucratic system collapsed.

The book's second part looks at the Nazi ideology from the ground level, mainly through the eyes of two teenage girls. They both were swept by the hurrah-patriotism of the 1930s-40s. As the author shows, Nazism, with its grandeur parades and loud slogans - and Hitler as its new God - gave the population the feeling that usually the cults provide, a sense of belonging. Being a cog in a giant mechanism was better than being left behind. Turning a blind eye to some regime flaws was better than going against the mainstream. Antisemitism was a distant theory not associated with neighboring friendly Jews. Consequently, when Germany was about to collapse, and the regime demerits came to light, many Germans lost all hope and will to fight.

To me, the book provided a new perspective on the Nazi ideology. I read history books on the Third Reich that dryly talked about the subject; Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself is as raw and relatable as it can be. Reading about mothers in Demmin who drowned their kids... that gets to the nerve.

[Mikey B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Page 108 (my book) Marguerite Bourke White after photographing suicides and Dachau

“What kind of people were these, whose acquiescence, either passive or criminal, had made it possible for such evil forces to grow?

So, the first part of this intense book examines the suicides in a small German town, Demmin, just before and when the Soviet Army took over in 1945. There were well over one thousand suicides – by shooting, hanging, poison (the village pharmacists contributed), and by drowning (there was a nearby river). Entire families would commit suicide, including small children and babies.

We often think it was the top tiers of the Nazi elite who did this, but in Demmin and elsewhere, it was all classes and levels of society.

The author goes on to pose the question “Why”.

Page 132

If ordinary people found it so hard to imagine living on after the collapse of the regime that they condemned themselves and their loved ones to death, it is important to find out what life meant to them.

Page 109

It was the violence that the Germans turned against themselves, the widespread tendency towards self-destruction.

Page 115 Magda Goebbels letter (wife of Josef Goebbels), prior to poisoning herself and her children

Our glorious idea is ruined, and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have known in my life. The world that will come after the Fuhrer and National Socialism won’t be worth living in, so I have taken the children with me. They are too good for the life that will come after us…

The author examines how Nazism beginning in 1933 inculcated the entire nation. It made a national movement, a national community of believers with a great deal of religious symbolism and iconography. It was a faith with the Fuhrer being at the center of it. Many Germans had a large picture of him in their homes.

Page 190 Sefton Delmer, a British journalist wrote in 1936

“They were adoring his firm ruthless rule. They were in raptures at being told what to think, whom to hate, when to cheer.”

After the war brutality surfaced more and more. Germans saw it constantly in the millions of foreign slave labourers in their factories and farms. They saw Jews with the Star of David being rounded up. And most of all from their soldiers – the letters, their home leave and the wounded would recount the atrocities committed in the name of Nazism. They knew that retribution was coming when Soviet soldiers, after four years of their country undergoing massive killings and devastation, would show no mercy when entering Germany.

After Stalingrad there was a spate of suicides as some saw the beginning of the end of the dream.

Page 219 Renate - a female member of Hitler youth movement for girls

In summer 1943, the obligatory “service in the east” jolted Renate out of her apathy. She, too, was sent to Wartheland to help Germans who had been settled on the farms of displaced Poles… In Posen she was met by the… representative of the League of German Girls [who told her] there was no need to be shy or polite with these creatures; they mustn’t be allowed to forget that the Germans were the master race… You could just throw the rich Poles out of their flats… “Get out pigs. Easy as that.” By then most of the Polish inhabitants had been driven out.

This is a very searing and powerful book probing into the dark essence of what happened to the German people under Hitler – and how they coped, or didn’t, after the collapse in May 1945.

[Marquise · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very harrowing true account of the tragic social phenomenon that took place in Germany during and after April 1945, when tens of thousands of German citizens committed suicide and murder-suicide to escape the Soviets as well as for the inability to deal with the consequences of the defeat.

Huber is dispassionate and non-judgmental about the suicides: he doesn't condemn the people who chose that way out, and he does include the compassionate accounts of those who preached against it as well. But he also doesn't go for the "poor Germans!" blanket exculpation, because he makes it clear that plenty of people chose to end their own lives out of cowardice and unwillingness to pay for their complicity or active support of the Nazi regime. Both sides are portrayed here, the really innocent victims driven into suicide by rape, starvation, and violence from the Soviets and the disillusioned NSDAP supporters witnessing the crumbling of former glories as well as the fanatics that couldn't digest the Götterdämmerung and keep on living.

My only complaint would be that I wish Huber had gone on for longer about the case of the military and the Hitlerjugend. He does mention the former also experienced a suicide epidemic by the end of the war, but it's scattered mentions all over the book, and I'd have liked an examination of this aspect of the suicide epidemic, especially when there are accounts of fighting personnel going out on kamikaze missions, and the Hitlerjugend were infamous for their to-the-last-man suicidal stands. Huber does dedicate a chapter or two to the fanatical kids who grew up indoctrinated by the Party and never knew anything else, but again it's not much. I guess this isn't necessarily an oversight but just the liminations in scope of the book's subject. It's about the civilians, after all, the ordinary people, who aren't often the primary subjects of history books about war and wartime events.

[Radiantflux · Rating 4 out of 5]

85th book for 2019.

In this book Huber explores what at first glance what seems like a fairly niche and predictable story—the mass suicide of Nazi sympathizers in the immediate aftermath of Second War World—but ends up offering a fascinating social history dovetailing German lives both immediately before and after the war.

What I found most interesting was his examination of personal diary records to make a compelling argument for the mass appeal of the Nazis in the pre-war years. Something that I had previously not understood. While the Nazis weren't into red baseball caps, Hitler's campaign slogan was essentially "Make Germany Great Again", and it was this promise and it's success to regain German pride through strong leadership against enemies both local and foreign that does much to explain the cult-like status of Hitler in pre-war Germany. The parallels to today's US politics are of course obvious.

4-stars.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Promise me You’ll Shoot Yourself – You reap what you sow

As an Anglo-Pole part of me screams you reap what you sow, after my Grandfather fought from the 1st September 1939 and then on 17th September the Russians entered eastern Poland, my family’s home. Due to this collaboration the Poles found out early what being occupied meant for them under Russians, with many Poles exiled to slave camps deep inside Russia in cattle trains that the Nazis would later use in the Holocaust.

Part of my also understands the dread that the Germans will have felt when the words of failure “The Russians are coming” were uttered. The reputation of what was happening to German females preceded the Red Army’s advance and it was not nice. In fact, the Nazi Party and its leadership had for years telling the German people that the Russians were inhumane.

For many Germans talking about the events before, during and directly after the Second World War is hard. But there is one subject that for many years has been a taboo subject, the suicide of a large number of Germans. Florian Huber’s book deals with the subject head on, the reasons behind the mass suicides in the final year of the war. Huber is a German who is dealing with this trauma, head on, and this makes for a fascinating book.

Roughly a quarter of the book is taken up with a mass suicide that took place in Demmin in East Germany. Many residents in Demmin killed their families and then themselves after at the Red Army approached and when they arrived at the end of April 1945.

Huber uses some excellent source material such as the letters many left behind after their suicides and the heavy pathos within those letters. Reading that with the defeat of Germany some people could not see a reason to continue on with their lives. We learn that cyanide is readily available in any quantity that you required.

Huber actually answers his questions quite clearly, even though he does try to explain why Germans killed themselves, at times we do get a familiar history of the Third Reich, even if they are from personal perspectives. During the course of the book he also points out that Demmin had a high proportion of Nazi voters at the 1933 elections, when Hitler would eventually be appointed Chancellor.

He also noted that after 12 years of Hitler’s rule and the imbibing of his and the Nazi Party ideology, that many must have believed heavily in it. That with the failure of the German war effort and subscribing to the Nazi moral and social norms, must have thought that this would mean the total disintegration of German society. One thing is clear, is those that did commit suicide clearly supported Hitler and the Nazi Party, and had cheered at the successes in the east, looked the other way as Jews and Slavs were murdered. Ignored the Russian slave labour, after triumph in Eastern Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Estonia as well as Russia.

Those believers would have thought their personal, and national world had collapsed and that they expected to reap the whirlwind of revenge of the Red Army. It estimates that tens of thousands committed suicide in the last year of the war. It is only within the last few years that the Germans have started looking back in and researching some of their darkest chapters. It is clear that the fear of retribution played a very large part in the suicide maybe some were fearful of facing up to the crimes they and their country had committed.

What this book does show is how many is that those who had completely been taken in by the Nazis and Hitler, that their ideology was complete fantasy. Suicide was one way of not having to face up to the reality of the crimes committed in their name. I prefer to salute those Germans who survived, as far braver and accept the new reality of their country as light was shed on the darkest parts.

Huber has shone a light on the darkest period and made an interesting contribution to the later war years history of Germany.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a decent read. Huber starts out relating to the reader the phenomenon of multiple suicides among German military members and civilians as the Russian army advanced into Germany at the end of WWII. The account is absolutely horrific, with parents hanging their kids before slipping the nooses around their own necks, drowning their family members, shooting them, taking poison. He starts the book by elaborating on suicides in the town of Demmin, where a large number of suicides were documented, but also throws in enough examples of self-immolation from other areas to establish beyond doubt that it wasn't a localized phenomenon.

I know there are some who will be of the opinion that you reap what you sow, and there is certainly some justification for that opinion here, but I didn't find that I was satisfied with that explanation. It's true that the Russians were, in general, brutal bastards. Civilians were murdered and raped in the thousands, businesses were looted, homes burned. It still doesn't add up to adequate justification for suicide, at least in my opinion. Or at least it doesn't justify ending your child's life. I just couldn't find any reason to it. If you think you're going to be killed, at least try to take one with you.

Huber attempts an explanation in the last half of the book, essentially a history lesson in how Hitler came to power and resulting national shame because of Nazi excesses in Russia and, you know, the whole holocaust business. Certainly nothing to be proud of, but if citizens of a country with a terrible leader were required to commit suicide, there wouldn't be a Canadian left standing. Of course there's the matter of negative propaganda which actually recommended not allowing yourself to fall into Russian hands....that certainly gave official sanction to something that otherwise might seem sinful.

I found the book enjoyable, not in a happy way, but I still don't understand how someone could dangle their kids, propaganda and Russians bedamned.

[Boudewijn · Rating 3 out of 5]

Het is een van de vergeten episodes in de Duitse geschiedenis: de zelfmoordepidemie die direct na de bevrijding door de Geallieerden van het Duitse nazi juk plaatsvonden. Centraal staan de gebeurtenissen in de Oost-Duitse stad Demmin, waar bijna 700 mensen zich van het leven beroofden na de Russische bezetting.

Het boek opent met de ‘bevrijding’ van de stad Demmin, die - nadat ze de oorlog ongeschonden door is gekomen - te midden van plunderingen en groepsverkrachtingen in vlammen opgaat. Aangrijpende verhalen van moeders die hun peuters verdrinken, ouders die eerst hun kinderen en dan zichzelf doodschieten.

Het centrale deel bestaat uit een overzicht van hoe dit zo ver heeft kunnen komen. Hoe deze mensen tot hun daad kwamen. Het geeft een goed beeld van de staat van het Duitse geweten, de adoratie van Hitler, de opwinding in de eerste oorlogsjaren tot en met de gelatenheid en afstomping van de latere oorlogsjaren, als de krijgskansen zich tegen Duitsland keren.

De auteur weet dit op overtuigende wijze over te brengen en je krijgt een beeld van de vertwijfeling maar vooral van het besef dat de zogenaamde idealen die ze zijn bijgebracht, de offers die ze gebracht hebben, dat dit alles voor niks is geweest. Verraden door de Führer, verzwolgen door de afgrond die zich opende.

De zelfmoordepidemie blijft tot op heden ten dage buiten beschouwing in het Duitse ‘herinneringsoffensief’. Het is een van de laatste onbesproken taboes van de oorlog, waardoor hun daden een zuiver persoonlijke tragedie blijft.

[Vonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Florian Huber has written a fascinating part of history that few know little about. Morose yet interesting. When Hitler committed suicide there were many normal day to day people killing themselves, children, parents. They killed themselves when the Russian army invaded as they didn't want to face uncertainty under their rule. They didn't want to live in a world where Hitler didn't rule. The book is harsh, raw and very descriptive. It's not an easy read but a engrossing read.

[Abril Camino · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me ha parecido que el libro iba de menos a más, lo cual es curioso porque la información va cronológicamente hacia atrás (comienza con la oleada de suicidios y acaba analizando el ascenso de Hitler al poder). Quizá con otra estructura me habría gustado más, aunque es indudable que es un ensayo sobre un tema muy interesante y muy poco conocido.

[beth · Rating 5 out of 5]

I suppose that, somewhere below waking consciousness, I knew that any serious doubts would have swept away the foundations of my life.

***

‘It was best to forget, to draw a line under the past, avoid explanations, rewrite one’s part in things,’ Roussel said. ‘Disappointed love can produce talented authors.’

Current contender for book of the year.

[anastasia ♥ hiraeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Es tut mir Leid. Ich habe dieses Mal keine Worte. Wahnsinn.

[Neil Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

Florian Huber touches a raw nerve in the translation of his book that was a bestseller in his native Germany, the harrowing account of the suicide epidemic that swept Germany, particularly the Eastern regions of Pomerania and East Prussia, in the final weeks and days as the Nazi regime entered its death throes. Told through the fate of the small town of Demmin, where almost 1,000 women, children and men drowned, shot, poisoned or hanged themselves in April/May 1945, the book recreates the horrors of the Red Army advance into Germany at the end of the war and the accompanying atrocities that were visited upon the civilian population, the brunt of which fell on women. Over 2 million women are estimated to have been raped during this period in Germany; 10,000 committed suicide in Berlin alone after being assaulted.

The author is balanced, and doesn’t gloss over the fact that the Russian atrocities were fueled by revenge, rage and dehumanization after almost 4 years of a Nazi war of extermination on their soil.

At the heart of Huber’s work however is the search for a psychological explanation for the mass waves of suicide, which went beyond fear and terror of a fate worse than death at the hands of the advancing vengeful Soviet ‘Mongol hoard’ and exasperated by Nazi propaganda. For it was not just in the East that the suicide epidemic took hold, many in the West also chose to end their lives, and here the explanation did not lie with fear of mistreatment by the Allies.

To understand just why people’s lives became hopeless and meaningless with the collapse of the regime, Huber devotes the second part of his book to understand how National Socialism provided self-esteem and a sense of belonging to the lives of ordinary Germans who felt humiliated, lost and without purpose after the treaty of Versailles, and who suffered hyperinflation, unemployment, poverty and hunger throughout the 1920’s. Hitler replaced all this with economic growth, prosperity, confidence, hope and employment in the 1933-39 period, and up until the invasion of the Soviet Union people were swept along in the foreign policy and military successes accompanying this as Germany regained her power, dignity and self-respect. This was a dreamlike, golden, happy time for the Germans. That sense of purpose, honor and pride were lost as the War itself was lost and the future promised by the Third Reich evaporated. The overblown emotions, pride, confidence and arrogance were replaced by guilt, shame, fear, despair and hatred leading to a collective National mental breakdown.

Told through diaries, memoirs and recollections this is a frank, unblinking and stark telling of one of the more tragic side stories around the collapse of the third Reich. It shines a harsh light into the German National psyche of the time - how it was shaped, moulded, manipulated and how it’s collective conscience reacted to the seismic unraveling of it’s World and reality. Huber also harshly exposes how many refused to accept the truth or repent for crimes committed, instead responding with anger, hatred or refusal to acknowledge guilt, a fact which made the de-Nazification of society even more painful and the subsequent re-emergence of Germany and its coming to terms with the past all the more miraculous.

[Hermien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een zeer leesbare intrigerende en fascinerende analyse van het Duitse volk in de jaren voor en aan het einde van de Tweede Wereldoorlog.

[Maine Colonial · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just as you might describe the adoration of Hitler as an example of mass hysteria, you could say the same for the epidemic of suicides as the Third Reich fell. Florian spends the first half of the book describing suicides in the east, as the Soviet Army rolls in. Certainly there was plenty to be fearful of, because the conquering Red Army did engage in widespread rape and violence. But parents killed their children and then themselves, by poison, shooting, and drowning, in the tens of thousands.

In the second half of the book, Huber explores how the German psyche was shaped by Nazism and its propaganda machine, leading to the acceptance of the regime’s horrors and the fear of (rightful) retribution that would come if the Third Reich fell.

The organization of the book doesn’t help Huber. The stories of all the suicides lose their shocking effect after 100 pages or so. It would have been better to begin with his second half, where he describes the depression caused by Germany’s WW1 defeat and the imposition of the Treaty of Versailles, then the euphoria of Hitler’s restoration of national pride (as long as you were “Aryan”). Of course, once the “man of peace” showed his true colors, the country and its people were on the road to ruin, and Huber includes first-person testimonies of ordinary Germans for the whole 12 years of Nazism.

For those who have read a good deal of WW2 German history, this book doesn’t add a lot. It’s not a bad treatment of its subject, but its organization and flow could be improved.

[Rolf Akker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whole villages committed suicide in Germany at the end of the war. This books tries to answer the question behind this collective suicide and dwells into the psychology of Germans before, during and even after the war. It gives a valuable insight into the minds of ordinary Germans and their participation in WWII.
This is one of the best books I read about the psychology of the german civilian and their perspective on the evolution of things in WWII

[Matti Karjalainen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nimestään ja takakannen esittelytekstistä huolimatta Florian Huberin tietokirja "Lupaathan tappaa itsesi" (Atena, 2016) käsittelee yhtä lailla saksalaisten suhdetta kansallissosialismiin Hitlerin valtaannoususta toisen maailmansodan loppuun kuin itsemurha-aaltoa, joka puhkesi maan itäisissä osissa puna-armeijan vyöryessä kohti Berliiniä. Järkyttävää mutta samalla kiinnostavaa luettavaa.

[Kusaimamekirai · Rating 5 out of 5]

“But the tyranny forces him to keep going, the same as always, the same as since 1933. That is, in effect, the terrible tragedy of the German people: they can’t muster the strength or see their way to freeing themselves from the rule of evil.”-A Danish journalist in Germany, 1945

“From tsunami to genocide, often all that survives of a human disaster in social memory is the number of deaths. If an event is large-scale and tragic enough, it will progress from news to history; the apparent objectivity of the death toll allows it to act as an official confirmation of the catastrophe. If, on the other hand, there is no verifiable figure, because it can’t be established or doesn’t arouse enough interest, the event fails to capture the public’s attention and doesn’t pass into collective memory.”


In the face of the worst horrors, the most unimaginable circumstances, what force keeps man wanting to wake up to the another day?
As the war reached its death throes in late April 1945, many ordinary Germans were unable to answer that question and chose instead to end their lives by their own hands. What followed were a wave of suicides that the author describes as unprecedented in modern history. In small towns and large cities, Germans shot, poisoned, drowned, and hanged themselves and their loved ones rather than face the brutal vengeance that was sure to come at the hands of the advancing Russian troops.
These suicides transcended class, age and gender. They occurred over all swaths of German society:

“People went to their deaths in droves: young men and women, staid married couples, people in the prime of life, the retired and the elderly. Many took their children with them: infants and toddlers, schoolchildren and adolescents. The victims could not be easily categorized. Hundreds were refugees from Pomerania, East and West Prussia and elsewhere, but there were also hundreds from Demmin and the surrounding area. Blue- and white-collar workers died, clerks and tradesmen, doctors and pharmacists, housewives and war widows, shopkeepers and policemen, managers and accountants, pensioners and teachers. Among the dead were a butcher, a carpenter, a cartwright, a charwoman, a tax clerk, a mechanic, a manager, a chef, a hotelier, a joiner, a chemist, a postman, a post office assistant, a retired postal inspector, a well-digger, a turner, a dentist, a seamstress, a tax inspector, a cattle dealer, a midwife, a retired customs clerk, a notary, a forester, a road-mender, a prison warden, a farmer, a smith, a former headmaster, a paver, a barber and a mayor.”

Reading their stories directly from their own words (there are a remarkable number of diaries from the period), I struggled to wrap my head around the scope of the misery. How could this happen? Such death on such a large scale couldn’t simply be fear of the Russians, as terrifying as they were, could it?
The author argues that while the fear of a Russian army looking for revenge (the Germans when invading Russia were particularly brutal in raping and exterminating whole villages) was a major factor, just as important was the loss of identity. It is perhaps difficult for us to imagine but doom 1933-1945, Hitler was the center of the German universe. Every home, every social club, every school, provided a relentless reinforcing of the idea of Hitler as savior. When that was gone, it is difficult to quantify how disorienting that must have been for people. The idea of continuing life in the postwar most likely never even occurred as a possibility for many:

“The Germans incomprehensibly long resistance was not only a result of the regime’s coercive terror and propaganda. They were also driven by a fear of the void and by the loss of a sense of purpose in life. They wanted to postpone the inevitable…After twelve years imbibing Nazi ideology, those who had believed in it, identifying as part of the national community and subscribing to its moral and social norms, faced not just a collective loss of meaning but the threat of personal disintegration. The emptiness they felt was palpable.”

It was this sense of loss that perhaps made it difficult for those Germans that chose to live to acknowledge what had happened. Rather than come to terms with what they had actively or passively supported, many Germans looking around at the destruction of their country, considered themselves the victims Some instead never spoke of the years between 1933-1945 at all. It was as if they never happened or “year zero” as some referred to it. It wouldn’t be until the 1980’s that Germany would begin to fully reckon with its past and yet the suicides remain a topic that is rarely discussed.
As such, this book provides am exceedingly powerful first step to a better understanding of that time. We know of the pain of those years in abstract terms. X number killed in this battle. X number killed in this bombing raid. But to understand the mass suicide of ordinary Germans is to understand the heart of war and its greatest tragedy.

[Lurdes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Moi, moi bo, e exactamente o que buscaba á hora de entender o auxe no nazismo en Alemaña.

A primeira metade narra da epidemia de suicidos do final da Segunda Guerra Mundial. A segunda metade, en cambio, narra o por que deses suicidios comezando na subida ao poder de Hitler en 1933.

Ultra ben investigado, moi ben narrado e moi contundente á hora de entender o sentimentos que houbo na xente de a pe mentres se desenvolvía o Holocausto.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a baby boomer, I can vividly remember class visits from local veterans of World War II who would come to our schools to do presentations of their experiences; what it was like to fight at Iwo Jima, being a part of one of the first details to liberate a concentration camp, a young soldier who toured Hitler’s bunker before it was imploded and filled with dirt. We also had older people come in who told us about growing up during the Depression. As children, we were encouraged to ask, to learn from their stories, and hopefully that would be a civic lesson.

But it wasn’t until the past few years that I realized the German side of me was like virtually all the Germans of my generation. We didn’t ask questions like “What did you do in the war, daddy?” of our grandparents. There was not a lot of discussion of “war stories” in public places. Or even in private places, for that matter. No. We didn’t talk about it, except maybe for the Wiederaufbau or Wirtschaftswunder in the post war years. We occasionally heard about the deprivations during the war, but rarely what led up to them. We just didn’t talk about it. I reasoned this was, in a large sense, my generation’s gift to theirs.

Much of this narrative focuses on the town of Demmin, in the northeastern corner of present day Germany, which experienced between 700-1000 suicide in the week of April 28-May 3, 1945. A wave of hundreds of suicides occurred as the onrushing Soviet counteroffensive was putting an end to World War II. It is filled with accounts of people who threw themselves into the Peene River, weighted down by backpacks filled with rocks to ensure suicidal success. Married couples died together. Near Danzig, present day Gdansk, Poland, more than 600 people killed themselves.

Propaganda that the coming Soviet hordes were motivated to commit murderous retribution and rapes were underscored by slogans like, “Enjoy the war, the peace with be terrible.” Appeals were spread that the most patriotic thing Germans could do was let the Soviet army be greeted by corpses in every town. Even German military leadership was caught up in the hysteria. “Of the 554 generals in the army, 53 killed themselves, aside from them 14 of 98 air force generals and 11 of 53 admirals.” But all classes, professions, religions were equally represented in the wave of self-inflicted deaths. Many convinced themselves that they were part of a great historic movement. They remembered the “good years” before the war, when Hitler’s policies seemingly brought prosperity and happiness; they could not envision such a time happening ever again. Others who witnessed atrocities in concentration camps and in the east could not imagine escaping the same fate when the Russians arrived, causing feelings of desperation that the war must be won. When it was clear it wouldn’t be, suicide was seemingly the only option left. Still others rationalized that Hitler could not have been aware of such atrocities, but perhaps he knew more than he let on. Self-pity crowded out feelings of responsibility or empathy. In the coming years, collective amnesia of the survivors became dominant.

The title of this book, “Child, promise me that you will shoot yourself,” is shocking and immediately caught my attention. I guess that’s why it’s taken me a couple of years after reading this book to find the words to evaluate it. No doubt the events described and chronicled by Huber are tragic. But as I think about it as an American living through the seeming ascendance of fascism in the United States today, my sympathy for these people is very limited, if it exists at all. It seems to me that the vast majority of these suicides were the true believers, the ones who bought the lies of the Third Reich wholesale and saw themselves as something extraordinary. The great irony—although some Germans and collaborators were arrested, sentenced and executed—is that during the Adenauer years, most of them would likely have gotten on with their lives and never been held accountable. For example, the vast majority of judges and legal structure of the Third Reich continued on in the Federal Republic of Germany. They had secure, well-paid jobs with generous pensions and died as notable citizens in the new world. Many who received long sentences in the late 1940s were released mere months or a short few years later and resumed their professions. Much of this was due to Cold War politics, but most was due to the Adenauer-inspired public policy of historically-mandated forgetfulness.

When I finished reading this book, my sympathies were largely with those who died. I knew there was something wrong with that and could never articulate why. Now I can find the words that are anything but pitying or commiserating. The world is better off without sick fanatics like most of these people were. I feel even stronger about this because I see these same people through my community and nation now.

[Alicia Bayer · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a rare DNF for me, as I just couldn't make myself plod through any more of this book. While it sounded like a fascinating and dreadfully important story -- tens of thousands of ordinary Germans killed themselves at the end of WWII -- I told my 21 year old yesterday that I just gave up reading it because it was a surprising mix of depressing and (as hard to believe as it seems) boring.

I frequently update Toria on whatever books I'm reading at the time that are especially interesting, as we carpool for the 1 1/2 hour trip to and from our UU church on Sundays. We both love books and share a love of non-fiction especially. In this case, I whispered in the pews before church started, "It felt like reading an endless series of rapes and suicides written in an accounting ledger."

The author uses real journal entries and letters to list family after family in plain, unemotional tones as their women (from children to the elderly) were raped again and again by Russian soldiers and the parents killed their children and themselves. Sometimes they failed. Sometimes they killed themselves for other reasons. But it's just "this awful thing happened to this person on this date, then they all killed themselves this way, then this journal entry said this person was despondent, then he killed himself this way, then this happened in the news and the weather was this way, and then this family hid in the cellar and then killed themselves this way."

Important history? Absolutely. I'm not sure anybody needs the minute by minute log of it this way though. Apparently the second half is the author trying to make sense of it and another review called it the "less successful" half of the book. That makes me even more glad I just gave up on it.

I read a digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review.

[Katedurie50 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had no idea of the scale of mass suicide in Germany in 1945 (though everyone knows about Goebbels and his family). The opening of this history, told in a rather easy narrative flow despite the darkness of its subject matter, details the almost unimaginable mounting of deaths as the Soviets arrive. On one day, 600 bodies are pulled out of the river in Demmin, a town in Pomerania. Add hanging, poison and, for the few with access to guns, shooting as ways to die and there is the sense of an epidemic as fear and suffering, present and anticipated led many to end not just their own lives but those of their entire families. Those left alive were the more traumatised - some had made attempts to cut the veins in the wrist which rarely worked and they were bandaged up to live on.
The second half of the book is less successful; it loops back to 1933 and tries to explain the bond between Hitler and the faith of so many. But Huber is less impressive as an analyst than storyteller, and ultimately we cannot know how many died because they chose not to live, like Magda Goebbels, in a post Nazi world, as against- for instance- the many victims of rape...or displacenent or loss.

[Maarit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Teoksen aihepiiri oli hyvin kiinnostava, mutta harmittavasti sitä käsiteltiin kunnolla vain kirjan alkupuoliskolla. Itsemurha-aallot olivat erityisen tavallisia juuri sodan loppuvaiheessa, kun neuvostoliittolaiset joukot tunkeutuivat Saksan alueelle tehden tuhojaan samoin kuin saksalaiset olivat heidän alueillaan tehneet. Itsemurhista puhumisesta tuli tuolloin arkipäivää ja massahysteria valtasi ihmisiä hyvin helposti varautumaan pahimpaan.

Kirjan loppupuoliskolla siirryttiin sitten siihen tavalliseen "kuinka Hitler nousi valtaan, teki Saksasta suurvallan, aloitti sodan ja hävisi sen" jankkaukseen, jonka keskiössä ovat tosin osittain kirjan alussa esiintyneiden henkilöiden mielipiteet ja ajatukset ennen tuhoon ja joissain tapauksissa myös hyvin epätoivoisiin tekoihin ajautumista. Kirjan lopussa kävi ilmi myös se, ettei tätä ilmiötä ole aikaisemmin juurikaan tutkittu, vaan se on jätetty käytännössä huomiotta muiden asioiden ollessa painavampia.

[Andrew Richardson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great topic, but a book that is marred by repetition and lack of focus on the topic. A large chunk of the work explores the German seduction by the Nazi party, gives personal reminiscences of how broad support was earned, then the effects of war and slow realisation that the lie couldn't continue. All of that is interesting and plausible enough, except that it's unrelated to the book's premise of mass German suicides at the end of the war. This book could have been profitably cut by a third to retain its core focus on the subject matter. In saying that, it was still an interesting read.