The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler’s Germany, 1944–1945

Among the Nazi regime’s rulers, suicide could be seen and portrayed as heroic self-sacrifice, eminently preferable to the ‘cowardice’ of capitulation. This was, of course, how Hitler’s own death was advertised.³⁹ For military leaders, too, death at one’s own hand was seen as a manly way out rather than yiel0ding and offering to surrender. In extreme cases, like that of Goebbels, there was the sense that after Germany’s defeat there was nothing for him, his wife or his children to live for. His life, stated Goebbels at the end, had ‘no further value if it cannot be used in the service of the Führer and by his side’. His wife, Magda, thought along the same lines, giving as justification for taking her own life and those of her children that ‘the world to come after the Führer and National Socialism will no longer be worth living in’.⁴⁰

More prosaically, and for many, no doubt, the prime motive, Nazi leaders feared retribution at the hands of the victors, particularly the Russians. ‘I do not wish to fall into the hands of enemies who, for the amusement of their whipped-up masses, will need a spectacle arranged by Jews,’ was Hitler’s own inimitable way of expressing this fear.⁴¹ While most were prepared to take their chance, and disappeared into hiding, or simply stayed where they were and waited to be arrested, a fair number of other leading Nazis and military leaders felt suicide was their only option. Bormann trying to flee from Berlin, and Himmler, Ley and Göring in Allied custody, were among those choosing to end their own lives, along with 8 out of 41 Gauleiter and 7 from 47 of the Higher SS and Police Leaders, 53 out of 554 army generals, 14 of 98 Luftwaffe generals and 11 from 53 admirals.⁴²

For ordinary citizens, too, thoughts of suicide were commonplace. This was especially the case in Berlin and eastern parts of Germany, where despair and fear combined to encourage such thoughts. ‘Many are getting used to the idea of putting an end to it. The demand for poison, a pistol and other means of ending life is great everywhere,’ an SD report had already noted at the end of March.⁴³ ‘All Berliners know that the Russians will soon be in Berlin, and they see no alternative—other than cyanide,’ one pastor had remarked around the same time. He blamed the rise in suicidal tendencies on the horror stories in Goebbels’ propaganda about the behaviour of the Soviets.⁴⁴ This was undoubtedly a major contributory factor. But the propaganda had, as we have seen, some basis in fact, and tales of terrible experiences at the hands of Soviet soldiers, especially the rape of German women, circulated by word of mouth and independently of Goebbels’ machinations. Women committed suicide rather than face the likelihood of being raped. Others killed themselves afterwards. More would have done so had they possessed the means.⁴⁵

In Berlin, where suicide statistics, if incomplete, exist, the trend is plain to see. At the peak in April and May, during the battle of Berlin, 3,881 people killed themselves. Overall in 1945 there were 7,057 suicides in the city, 3,996 of them women, compared with 2,108 in 1938 and 1,884 in 1946. In Hamburg, by contrast, there were only 56 suicides in April 1945.⁴⁶ In Bremen, flattened by repeated bombing, suicides rose markedly in 1945, but the level remained in fact lower than it had been in 1939.⁴⁷ There was a sharp rise in Bavaria in the final phase of the war, though the figure of 42 suicides in April and May 1945 was scarcely on a comparable scale with that of Berlin and accountable at least in part by the disproportionate number of Nazi functionaries there who took their own lives. Some other parts of western Germany also had modestly increased suicide rates in 1945, but nothing remotely comparable with those of Berlin.⁴⁸ Plainly, the suicide wave was first and foremost a phenomenon of those parts of Germany where fear of occupation by the Red Army was most acute.

Panic gripped the people in eastern localities as the Red Army approached. Along the front line, in numerous places in Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Silesia and Brandenburg, there were hundreds of suicides. No overall total can be calculated, but it is presumed to have been in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.⁴⁹ In Demmin, a town in western Pomerania of some 15,000 inhabitants before the war but by this time also housing numerous refugees, more than 900 people, the majority of them women, committed suicide in the three days following the arrival of the Red Army on 1 May.