Moreover two million German womenWhatever their age, from girls to older women, they were subjected to “terrible abuse”.Real rape orgies by Red Army soldiers” in the final stage When was World War II Hitler’s Fall it was a fact. It is estimated that there are 10,000 in Berlin alone. And many took their own lives. Being systematically and brutally coerced or feared being coerced by Russian troops was one of the main reasons for the attack. silenced “epidemic suicides“Traveling the German population inside The last months of the Third Reich. A subject of “taboo” from which the veil is now withdrawn German historian Florian Huber (Nuremberg, 1967) explanatory essay ‘Promise to shoot yourself’ (Attic of Books).
Huber researched records and diaries and collected a large number of documented cases and testimonies from ordinary Germans of all ages, occupations and social classes, alone or in groups. whole families poisoned with cyanidedrowned in rivers and lakes, hanged themselves, cut their wrists or shot, suicide wave In a country where taking your life for honor is not considered, as in Japanese culture.
children and babies
Many dragged their children with them. Huber, who has reported numerous other cases, including three girls aged three months, three and five years, and three girls aged six, describes “more than a third of the nearly 200 unnamed deaths in the Demmin cemetery as boys, girls or infants.” The tailor’s wife, Ms. Pfeifer, from Lossen (Lower Silesia), drowned in the Peene river, one-week-old child “hung in desperation her three children aged eight to thirteen, and then herself”. or “The young Miss Lemke from Kurzig (Brandenburg): “She committed suicide with her two children. Her husband was a soldier. She had left her gun to him.”
One of those creepy scenes is the corpses two little girls lying on their backs Minutes after her mother, dressed in black, shot herself in the basement after poisoning them, she was captured in April 1945 by American photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White, who also took several photos of the suicides. Three bodies in an office of Leipzig Town Hall: treasurer, wife and daughter, young woman lying on a sofa. Repetitive prints in many homes.
Suicide came to be seen as a last resort before complete surrender.
The chaos of the end of the war makes it impossible to have definitive data, but Huber calculates that the war is over. tens of thousands what was “a mass phenomenon of appalling proportions”. A significant part of the book is devoted to the exceptional case of the figures of the town of Demmin, where it was burned by the Russians, while most of the grown men were at the front. There, between 28 April and 3 May 1945, about 1,000 of its 15,000 inhabitants committed suicide “as if the desire to die had suddenly taken over the whole world”, also a reflection of what had happened in countless rural cities. Germany.
Author, Nazi propaganda against the Germans Fear of looting, massacre and rape that “Soviet monsters” will bring Far from instilling in them a “spirit of fanatical resistance” in the lands they had conquered until they reached Berlin, they put and established civilians in “an uncontrollable state of terror”. He brings together countless examples in Demmin: “Soldiers who repeatedly raped a young woman in an asparagus field. A 64-year-old woman was raped in the middle of the street in front of her daughter and granddaughter”… “People expected chaos and anarchy, terror, oppression, violence and humiliation. (…) Suicide has come to be seen as a last resort before complete surrender,” says Huber.
“Cyanide is spoken everywhere and seems to be present in large quantities. But whether it should be used or not is not even discussed,” said one doctor.
“It was an extreme expression of the senselessness and pain that people feel at their bad judgment, defeat, humiliation, loss, shame, personal suffering, and violation.” “They don’t see any other way out”In early March 1945, Father Gerhard Jacobi told Danish reporter Jacob Chronica in Berlin that he had listened to his sermon against self-immolation. It was the priest who told him about a “suicide epidemic” and said his congregation had admitted to buying him cyanide ampoules.
“There is talk of cyanide, which seems to be present in large quantities everywhere. But whether or not it can be used is not even discussed. Only the required amount is negotiated lightly and casually, as if talking about food.” , said Dr. Hans von Lehndorff. In her diaries, Chronica admitted that she also took the necessary dose in case “things got unbearable”, and since 1944 she wrote: “Poisoning was a regular topic of conversation in Berlin”here a report noted high demand for cyanide.
Huber finds no imitation in wanting to pursue the same ending chosen by its leader, Adolf Hitler, who shot himself in the bunker of the Berlin Chancellery on April 30, 1945, with his lover Eva Braun, biting a poison capsule. “I and my wife chose death to avoid the misfortune of being deposed or capitulated,” said the Führer himself, and ordered that their bodies be cremated immediately, probably in the image of their death, according to Huber’s estimation. Mussolini equivalent and her lover were executed and hanged by the masses in Milan two days ago.
Suicides of the Nazi leadership
In addition to many generals and officers, powerful members of the Nazi leadership, unable to withstand defeat and fearing punishment for the crimes committed, imitated Hitler: the foremost, his confidant. Martin BormannReichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (after being stopped by the allies in May), Hermann Goering Already imprisoned in his cell during the Nuremberg trials in 1946, or the Propaganda Minister is also in the bunker Joseph Goebbels with his wife Magda and their six children.
He left a note: “Our great idea dies, and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have ever known in my life. It is not worth living in the world that comes after the Führer and National Socialism. That’s why I took the children with me.” words indicating other convinced and determined NazisThe arrogance of success and power, seeing the collapse of a whole system of values they believed in with blind faith, “hopeless and surprised”, living in a “permanent state of intoxication” based on “the pride and enthusiasm of being special” for 12 years. At that moment Huber emerged, “the guilt of having participated, the shame of looking the other way, the hatred of others and themselves, the fear of revenge and violence, the despair of feeling empty.”
this Hitler’s death was surprisingly met with “great indifference”.. Few of his millions of followers did more than just shrug: “When the time came, the masses had abandoned him. They calmly took the portraits of the Führer off the walls and buried them in the garden.” As the young Lore Walb, who promoted him to the category of “ultra-dad,” wrote in his diary in May 1945: “Hitler is dead. But for the rest of our lives, we and those after us have to endure. This is the burden He has placed on us, the result of His rule. ”