![]() There were hundreds and hundreds of names – men, women and children – and their ages and cause of death. “The groundskeeper for the Demmin cemetery kept a list of all the dead who arrived in those terrible times. These are just a few of the gruesome scenes recounted by Huber, who was most deeply affected by one dreadful story. Some led their children by the hand into the river after loading stones into their pockets, purses and backpacks, unwittingly emulating Virginia Woolf’s suicide in 1941. Afterward, many of the rape victims staggered down to the Tollense River and drowned themselves. Huber describes the horror of a witness to multiple gang rapes by Soviet soldiers (almost two million German women were sexually assaulted at the end of the war). In the Günther family home, 12 people died – some poisoned themselves, some slit their wrists, and some were shot with a hunting rifle. A 71-year-old health insurance administrator, his wife and daughter all hanged themselves after killing their young grandchildren. ![]() The young wife of a Wehrmacht lieutenant strangled her three-year-old son with a rope and then hanged herself. “It was as if the will to die had overcome everyone,” writes Huber. People of all ages, professions and classes killed themselves, often taking their babies and children to their graves. ![]() Huber, a producer of several international award-winning documentaries, begins his book in the small town of Demmin (northeastern Germany), where a shocking wave of 700 suicides took place – 10% of the population – as the Soviet Red Army closed in on the town. In Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945, German historian Florian Huber tells the story of the tens of thousands of civilians who killed themselves in a collective madness driven by hopelessness and fear of Soviet Army revenge. ![]() Yet most suicides in the bloody twilight of National Socialist Germany were by ordinary people – a housewife who drowned her young children and then hanged herself, or an entire family consuming poison in one final, fatal gathering. Downfall ( Der Untergang), a 2004 German-language historical war drama film, depicts the final days of Adolf Hitler and his staff holed up in the subterranean bunker headquarters known as the “Führerbunker.” Scene after scene shows Hitler and many government and military officials committing suicide by pistol and poison after learning of Germany’s defeat. Moviegoers and history buffs may also know that Tresckow and Beck, two leaders of the failed Hitler assassination plot – Operation Valkyrie – also committed suicide. Most people have heard how many top Nazis such as Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and Goering took their own lives at the end of the Third Reich, and how some defeated military commanders such as Model, Rommel and Kluge did the same. ![]()
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