En 1945, el Tercer Reich cayó y Adolf Hitler se suicidó en su búnker de Berlín. Pero no fue el único que decidió acabar con su vida. Con la caída del régimen nazi, miles de alemanes de a pie se ahorcaron, pegaron un tiro, envenenaron o ahogaron, siguiendo al Führer a la muerte. Muchas de estas muertes fueron provocadas por el terror ante el avance de las tropas soviéticas o por los sentimientos de culpa, pero, como sucede a menudo, la explicación no es tan sencilla.

Florian Huber explora con maestría el porqué de este terrible fenómeno. Alemania no ha sido el único país en perder una guerra, pero en ningún otro lugar se respondió de manera tan cataclísmica. Otros países, como Japón, tenían una cultura del suicidio por honor, pero no así Alemania. ¿Qué llevó, pues, a familias enteras a acabar con sus vidas, incluso a matar a los niños y bebés?

En esta original y brillante investigación histórica, Huber explora las raíces y consecuencias de la relación entre los alemanes y el Tercer Reich y lleva a una nueva comprensión de lo que supuso la caída del nazismo para Alemania. Prométeme que te pegarás un tiro es una explicación magnífica de uno de los episodios menos conocidos de la historia europea del siglo xx y una ventana a la psique de un pueblo que pasó en pocos años de la cima del mundo a lo más hondo del abismo.

There is no denying that I come away from this book with mixed feelings. On one hand, while I was aware of that there were numerous suicides in the final days of the Nazi regime, and the immediate aftermath of its fall, I wasn't aware that the numbers of suicide/murders were in the tens of thousands; so this is an important phenomena to bring out of the shadows. However, I didn't find this material all that well organized and questions are begged that to answer would mean interrogating the nature of German social psychology at least back into the 19th century; such as the prevalence of suicide in an honor-driven society. Perhaps that is making this too hard though; whereas one can make a weak argument that there could be some personal deniability for not being aware of death camps, no adult German could lack awareness of the dirty war that was being waged in the Soviet Union in their name, that retribution would be paid back in kind, and there could be no denial that this doom would be deserved. ( )

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. ( )

I've heard about German suicides to avoid perceived horrors of Russian capture and want to learn the actual details.