Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself

Not a new subject of course, but I'm surprised at how widespread it seems to have been. Always thought it was only high-ranking Nazis and die-hards.
"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.”
www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/20/promise-me-youll-shoot-yourself-florian-huber-review?fbclid=IwAR2BTYdmqhxVsHXVdCwgUlbbpAqi6zBwO9XPYhfzi1Cw_5oi3t7cnKm3HlU

 

Despair can overwhelm the strongest. I've seen it first hand.

 

Three reasons for suicide then: avoid rape or shame after rape, Avoid prosecution and a criminal's execution, and destruction of their whole social construct. I've long recognized the first two but hadn't thought about the last one.

 

Yeah, the last one just seems to fit in with the whole Wagnerian Nazi world view.

 

For some this was the true final solution.

 

Interesting article, thanks for posting.

 

Thinking about it, you can almost see the logic in it (suicide). They went from being top-dog to being pounded to a pulp and hated by nearly everyone. Their cities and economy were in ruins, a third of their country was going to be Russian, and most of their military-age men were either dead, maimed, or-if they were real lucky-in a Western Allied POW camp. Their "Infallible Fuhrer" was dead and...there was no expectation that there would even BE a Germany after the war. Allied occupation was probably going to be harsh-much harsher than the Versailles Treaty. In short, there was every expectation that for the foreseeable future Germany was going to enter a "dark age".
"Dying is easy. It's living that is hard!"

 

I would have run toward the sun in the afternoon and kept running till I hit water...