In one German town, 1,000 people killed themselves in 72 hours
Rather than surrender to the Red Army, citizens of Demmin committed ‘selbstmord’
By April of 1945, both sides knew who was going to lose the Second World War. The Nazis could no longer hold back the enemy, and those active Allies — largely American, British, and Soviet troops — enjoyed a constellation of victories across the face of the soon-to-be defeated Third Reich. These soldiers took over towns, liberated prisoners, and in the case of the Red Army often terrorized civilians.
In the face of this prospect, thousands of Germans chose suicide over occupation. Not only was this a preferred method among high-ranking officials like Himmler, Goebbels, and Hitler — selbstmord (meaning “self-murder” in German)—was the avenue taken by many civilians as well. And perhaps there is no example of this more stark than what happened in the German city of Demmin in the days between April 30th and May 2nd, 1945.
Demmin, a modest town of about 16,000 people in the Pomerania region, was far from insulated from the anti-Semitism and furor that fueled Nazism. In the 1920s and 1930s, the area was a stronghold for the rising wave of nationalist right-wing parties. During the Weimar years, citizens of Demmin boycotted Jewish businesses, and in 1938, they sold the city’s only synagogue to a furniture company. Jews, unsurprisingly, moved elsewhere. The more fortunate ones left before the city’s virulent participation in Kristallnacht the year before the war began.
It’s impossible to say that the soldiers of the Red Army knew this history as they descended upon the town at the end of April, 1945. And in truth, little of it mattered. The issue was simple enough to both sides — the Soviets hated the Germans, and vice versa. Some eight out of 10 fallen Nazis were killed at the hands of the Red Army, while, at the same time, the U.S.S.R. lost 20 million lives during the war, nearly half of them civilians. And now the Russians, who had endured trauma in Stalingrad and beyond, had the upper hand.
Many Soviet soldiers believed there was no such thing as an innocent German. “If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day,” wrote influential Soviet intellectual Ilya Ehrenburg. “If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.” In other words, however bad the retribution, the German citizenry had it coming.
Numerous German cities experienced mass suicides at the end of the war. Over the conflict’s chaotic and desperate final months, Berlin witnessed around 7,000 people take their lives. But in terms of sudden and gruesome panic, it is hard to beat the heights of the conflagration at Demmin, a disaster in which an estimated 1,000 people took their lives, in a span scarcely longer than 72 hours.
Part of what made Demmin vulnerable was its geography. The city is surrounded by rivers, so when the Nazis destroyed the bridges to stall the advance of the Soviets, they trapped the city’s residents at the same time.
Anticipating the approach of the Soviets, Demmin’s residents hung white flags from its buildings in surrender. Still, a few bold members of the town aimed fire when the army entered the city. One teacher killed his wife and daughter before shooting an anti-tank grenade at the Red Army, then killing himself. Around noon, the first Soviet soldier was shot dead by a self-appointed militiaman, possibly this same teacher, further incensing the army as they advanced.
The real atrocities began in the evening, right around the time German citizens caught radio broadcasts of a parcel of news that did not bode well for the future of Nazi Germany: Adolf Hitler was dead, having taken his life that afternoon. Soon, Soviets began breaking into houses for loot, taking jewelry, heirlooms, and whatever else they found valuable. They broke into the city’s significant stores of alcohol, which emboldened their crimes. Later, they began taking gasoline and incinerating buildings. In just three days, 80% of the city’s structures were damaged or destroyed.
Yet perhaps the most terrorizing tactic of the invading Red Army was rape. At the twilight of the war, Demmin was but one of dozens of German cities traumatized by sexual assault, a condition that contributed severely to this lethal and widespread public panic.
The suicides themselves took a number of forms, and civilians exploited whatever they could get their hands on and whatever was nearby. People hanged themselves, slit their wrists, shot themselves and their family members, and ingested poison. Some jumped into the water to drown. A few who plunged into the Rivers Peene and Tollanse or who went to hang themselves from trees were thwarted by the Red Army, who retrieved them or cut their ropes.
A chilling aspect of the deaths and suicides in Demmin is how they happened at the level of the family and the household. The city’s official catalog of the event, which accounts for only 500 of the total people dead, recorded one boy who perished from being “strangled by grandfather.” Mothers drowned their children. Sons and daughters and elderly parents alike persuaded female family members who had been assaulted not to kill themselves. Like many atrocities of the era, many who were children at the time have begun to speak up about it in recent years, like Norbert Buske, whose mother was raped. He wrote a pamphlet called the End of the War in Demmin 1945. Another woman later found out that her mother, from whom she was separated at the time of the panic, had killed her two siblings.
Nazi propaganda encouraged suicide toward the end of the war, with the Party’s newspaper Völkischer Beobachter extolling the “pleasure of sacrificing personal existence” for the Fatherland. After the last concert at the Berlin Philharmonic on April 12, 1945, members of the Hitler Youth held baskets from which they passed cyanide capsules to the audience.
Suicide became a national trend, exercised by over 10,000 people.
And like in a cult, the mass suicides in Nazi Germany were in part a response to the shock of seeing a massive, inextricable lie come crashing down.
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