All through the summer and far on into the autumn, Sorge the registrar [in Demmin] listened to the grim stories of death... On 25 May, Elfriede Schultz, whose son-in-law had already been missing for some time, came to report the suicide of her daughter and grandchild. The death of three-year-old Gerd Wedhorn in a canal was registered by his mother, whose own suicide attempt had evidently failed. A musician reported that his wife and drowned herself and their child in Swan Pond. On 12 June, Marie Buchner told Herr Sorge of the deaths of her son, daughter-in-law, grandchild and three other members of her family, who had all been found together, hanged.
Germans shot, hung, took poison and hung themselves. Perhaps the hardest thing to read are the stories of parents who killed their children, often, in Demmin, by drowning. An eyewitness is quoted:
Dr. P told us that about 600 people, many of them children, had walked in to the [River] Peene. He'd had to help fish them from the water and lay them out in long rows. All day long, bodies had kept washing ashore.
Huber says that this aspect to the Second World War has rarely been acknowledged. East German and Soviet authorities wanted to avoid any accounts that would have undermined the image of the Red Army as a liberating force, so the stories of mass suicides in the face of the Russian advance, like the history of mass rape by the Soviet Army, were hidden or ignored. Huber's book is an attempt to both tell these stories and understand events.
But the book is very much one of two halves. The first half recounts horrific stories of suicide, based on diaries and eyewitness accounts. This material is shocking and likely to be new even to those who are well versed in the history of the Second World War.
In the second half of the book Huber tries to explain why the suicides happened. Here the book is much weaker. He begins by telling the story of Hitler's rise to power and the early "happy" years for the German people and economy under Hitler. He argues that Hitler's rise was accepted as it gave meaning and confidence to the German people following the disaster of the First World War and helped fix a national malaise. He shows how many, including opponents of the regime, found the new fascist government successful - often despite misgivings. In particular he shows that millions of ordinary Germans hero worshipped Hitler. Huber builds up an argument that millions of Germans bought into the Hitler myth, and the collapse of the regime took this away - leaving a void that for tens of thousands could not be filled. Huber writes:
The future they [Germans] had been promised was evaporating before their eyes, The Fuhrer had left them, and the Reich was collapsing, leaving behind it a gaping void. After twelve years imbibing Nazi ideology, those who had believed in it, identifying as part of the national community and subscribing to its moral and social norms, faced not just a collective loss of meaning but the threat of personal disintegration. The emptiness they felt was palpable. Many genuinely believed that the victorious Allied forces would wipe out the German nation and the best they could hope for was a life of oppression. Unwilling to face this reality, they chose suicide as a final act of resistance, of renunciation.
But if this is true, it doesn't explain the events described in Huber's book. Almost all the mass suicides took place in the East, in the face of the advance of the Red Army. There were suicides in the West, but they were tiny in comparison to the East. In addition, hundreds of thousands of people fled West towards the Americans and British. Were they fearful of all forces they would not have done this, expecting the same wherever they were and suicide numbers would have been similar on both fronts.
The war waged by the Germans in the East was a total war that saw the mass extermination of civilian populations, terror on an unbelievable scale and the systematic destruction of whole populations of Jews, Polish and Ukrainian people. It was a war that enabled the Holocaust. As Huber himself shows, Germans were increasingly aware of this, even if there was no official acknowledgement or reports. Several anecdotes from the book illustrate how the knowledge of events "in the East" shocked people. On one occasion a young Hitler Youth member tells of his horror at seeing some Nazis beating Polish forced labourers. Another telling story is of a German couple who kill themselves after learning of the atrocities.
Ordinary Germans in the East did not commit suicide just because their world was falling apart - they were terrified because they knew that the Russian army would bring violent revenge to their own homes - something played up by the Nazi regime. Huber's explanation is inadequate.
But there are other problems with the book. This is very much an account of "ordinary Germans". But which Germans matters. There are two aspects to this. Firstly the question of German Jews. As Richard Evans points out in his own insightful review in the Guardian, Huber doesn't refer to the German Jews who killed themselves after Hitler's rise to power. As Evans says "After all, they were Germans too." While Huber doesn't ignore the Holocaust - quite the contrary - there are some other strange omissions. As far as I could see Jewish people are not mentioned until page 159 - a strange thing in a book devoted to understanding the mindset of German people under Hitler. Huber's account of Hitler's rise initially focuses on his polemic around the Versailles Treaty, not his antisemitism. The account of the period of 1933 to 1939 barely touches on his shutting down of opposition and the first, systematic, state repression of Jewish people. This alleged "era of happiness" was marked by real improvements for Germans. But it was also the period when disabled people were killed, concentration camps set up and a mass state network of repression created. It is extraordinary that this is barely touched on.
The "ordinary Germans" narrative also hides another piece of analysis that Huber could have explored. This concerns who committed suicide. The accounts that Huber uses (and his use of archival material seems extensive) mostly seem to be middle class - shopkeepers, small business people, professionals. There are an absence of accounts from factory workers, labourers etc. This might just be selection bias that results from who kept diaries. Where working class people more or less prone to suicide? Did they buy in to the regime in the same way? The social base of fascism tends to be the petty bourgeois that are regularly quoted by Huber. But the author makes no attempt to explore this in a way that could illuminate our understanding of German society under Hitler, and who/why committed suicide.
As I read further into the book I became increasingly uncomfortable. It felt very much like Huber was arguing that Germans, collectively suffered as much as anyone, and that most Germans, despite being enamoured of Hitler and pulled into the myth, were ignorant of wider events. Huber appears to be saying that Germans were essentially innocent of the crimes of the Nazi regime. This is inadequate as even some of the anecdotes he uses makes clear.
There is something else missing from Huber's book - the discontent and opposition to the Nazi regime. Reading his account of Hitler's rise you get a sense of inevitability. But the Nazi victory was not inevitable, it was challenged and it almost didn't happen. Had the left organised differently, in particularly creating a United Front against fascism involving mass unity between Social Democrats and Communists then the Nazi movement might have been stopped. So there were literally millions of Germans who did not buy into the Hitler myth, and as the war went on, a growing number of Germans who understood that the war was lost and did not "subscribe to its moral and social norms". To say otherwise is to see the German population as an undifferentiated mass that all supported Hitler.
Huber's book is of some interest. The material on suicides will be new to most people, though its worth noting Richard Evans' caveat that it is "very much wide of the mark" to say this is an "untold story". But does the book explain what took place, and why? I don't think so and in fact I think the narrative it lays out is dangerous - both in terms of understanding Nazi society and offering us insights into fighting fascism today.
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