The German people reacted to the news of Hitler's death in 1945 with an incredible number of suicides.

The German people reacted to the news of Hitler's death in 1945 with an incredible number of suicides.

 Between 10% and 20% of Nazi and military leadership committed “selbstmord”, but even more staggering was the amount of normal citizens ending their lives. They often killed their family in the process.

The scale of this mass suicide has only become clear in the last 15 years, and it is therefore impossible to estimate its total quantity.

It was a taboo subject for a long time, particularly in the former East-Germany, and the exact cause of many deaths went unrecorded at the time.

But there are thousands of stories of husbands feeding their wives poison and then shooting themselves, of housewives drowning their babies and then hanging themselves, and of entire families slitting their wrists in one last gathering. Although these tales include local hardcore Nazis, most were ordinary people.

German suicide had propagated in January 1945, when general Konev’s troops crossed the German-Polish frontier. Nazi propaganda hysterically warned against subhuman retaliation of the “Mongol hordes”, terrifying the population, who in part took to self-murder.

When Hitler shot himself on April 30, his death was announced by the radio as having been heroic, fighting to the last breath. It was followed by a large suicidal wave, both among Nazi top brass and regular folks, which intensified when Germany surrendered on May 8.

The bulk took place in the Soviet conquered parts of the country. In the town of Demmin, for instance, around 1,000 of the 15,000 inhabitants committed suicide, according to recovered cemetery records. 

It may have been due to the fact that the Soviet treatment in the town was extremely harsh. Nevertheless, a remarkable amount of suicides also occurred in British and American zones.

Having been discovered so late, it is not possible to get to the bottom of what exactly motivated the suicidal waves. Nazi brainwashing? Fear of Russian violence and rape? The influence of Hitler’s nihilism?

The lack of a future? Shame? The sense of being lost without a Führer? Death and violence having become a daily companion?

We’ll never know for sure.

Still, it went accompanied by another unprecedented phenomenon: the large amounts of cyanide capsules that were handed out by Nazi authorities to the public in the final months of the war. This must have contributed to a certain suicide culture.