The thought of living on is unbearable, and it is equally unthinkable that I could now live a happy life with you, darling Inge, and our dear little girl, because the war—which seems to me as good as lost, what with the indestructible Bolsheviks on one side and the Americans joining on the other—will leave me unable to earn sufficient money, either now or in the future. The first and last cause of my despair is the hopelessness of victory.
This very thorough suicide note was found by the Berlin police on the body of a fifty-six-year-old teacher from Weissensee. It was addressed to his wife and dated 21 August 1943. The defeat of the German army at Stalingrad six months before had triggered a first spate of suicides throughout the Reich—suicides that had their root in the specific fear of Bolshevism and the more general fear of Germany’s bleak future.
This phenomenon was not restricted to civilians. After the debacle of Stalingrad, more than two thousand cases of suicide among Wehrmacht soldiers were reported in a few months—twice as many as in the first three years of the war. After the D-day landings in 1944, the Luftwaffe recorded another significant rise in suicides and suicide attempts. At this stage, however, incidents were still isolated, often planned long in advance, the decisions explained in suicide notes. Suicide in Germany still followed the classic pattern it had known in times of peace.
• • •
The military setbacks and blows to morale suffered at Stalingrad and on D-day, as well as the demoralising air raids on German cities, had cast a dark shadow, and not only over the prospect of victory. They also added a new—and quite unforeseen—dimension to the gruesome imagery used in anti-Allied propaganda. Portraying the enemy as barbarous murderers had been useful in rousing the German people to support the war effort, but there was nothing rousing in the thought that those same barbarous murderers were about to take Berlin and sweep triumphant across Germany. Rather than being bolstered by hate and pride, the German psyche was consumed by existential fear. The fear of invasion, of losing honour, homeland, family. The fear of losing life and its meaning.
In autumn 1944, this fear was fanned into panic in Germany’s eastern territories by the media’s widespread and sensationalist coverage of the Nemmersdorf massacre. Although German troops had managed to halt the Soviets’ advance at Nemmersdorf and even push them back across the border, the terror of what had happened there—and what was yet to come—had the nation firmly in its grip.
‘It was still hard to understand what was going on,’ Hans von Lehndorff wrote in his diary, ‘and no one dared voice secret fears in public.’ In those last weeks of the year, von Lehndorff, a thirty-five-year-old doctor from the East Prussian town of Insterburg, spotted many villagers staring dreamily into the sky, watching the birds head south for the winter. ‘They must all have felt the same when they saw them: “You’re all right, you’re flying away! But what about us? What’s to become of us and our country?”’
At night, the villagers had seen the eastern border towns under shellfire, bright pulsing points in the distance. It was fewer than thirty kilometres from Insterburg to Nemmersdorf. Even without the constant, hysterical propaganda, the fate of the neighbouring town made their blood run cold. They knew that just across the border were millions of Soviet soldiers who’d waited four years for the moment when they could finally set foot on German soil and overrun the enemy towns. They knew that when the huge wave of rage and hatred broke they would be the first to be hit.
When the Soviet attack on East Prussia began on 13 January 1945, Hans von Lehndorff took charge of a military hospital in Königsberg. People in the ‘fortress of Königsberg’, which was soon surrounded by Soviets, seemed to him detached from reality. In his diary, he describes being visited on 23 January by an elderly lady, who asked for long-deferred surgery on her varicose veins, even as the cannons were thundering outside. She wouldn’t hear of fleeing the city. Von Lehndorff couldn’t believe his ears when he heard her say: ‘The Führer won’t let us fall to the Russians; he’d sooner gas us.’ The doctor glanced furtively about him, but no one, he said, seemed to think anything of this remark.
It wasn’t long before he himself had started to feel a vague sense of doom. ‘It doesn’t really matter what happens to us now,’ he wrote. Only a few days later, the Russian artillery was shelling Königsberg. Hans von Lehndorff went with his assistant, a young doctor, to visit her parents in the suburb of Juditten and help them prepare to flee westwards. This young woman, whom he respectfully calls ‘Doktora’ in his diary, was to become his closest companion in the months that followed. Even the worst times are easier to bear when there’s someone to share them.
In Juditten, the young woman’s parents told them that they had abandoned their plans to flee. Instead, after thirty years of happy marriage, they were thinking of putting an end to their lives. Neither their daughter nor her colleague could talk them out of it. They clearly didn’t even try. The brief notes in von Lehndorff’s diary betray neither surprise nor outrage, nor even resistance to the idea, which had by now become commonplace.
They are not the only ones faced with this decision. Wherever you go these days, people are talking about cyanide, which seems to be available in any quantity. The question of whether to resort to it is not even debated. Only the requisite quantity is discussed—in an easy, offhand manner, the way people usually talk about, say, food.
These few lines succinctly describe the symptoms of the epidemic that began in East Prussia and would soon sweep the country. Against the backdrop of the physical, emotional and mental horrors of Germany’s downfall, social conventions classifying suicide as an extreme, almost incomprehensible act no longer seemed to apply. Condemned by the church over the centuries, it had, until now, been considered immoral, and forbidden as a sin. The subject of a potent taboo, it provoked a profound horror, and had been spoken of only in hushed tones behind closed doors, prompting feelings of shock, shame and guilt. The act itself was regarded as unnatural; by committing suicide, victims positioned themselves outside or even against the accepted social order.
The power of this taboo quietly faded away as Germany began to fall to the Soviets in the east and to Allied forces in the west. The well-ordered society that had once upheld it was now in the process of destroying itself; people were coming to expect chaos and anarchy, terror, oppression, violence and humiliation. They felt a nameless fear of the future. Suicide was no longer a sin; it was now seen as a last resort before total surrender. It was a consolation to the desperate to know that they could cut short their suffering on earth. Soon, people all over Germany were talking openly about putting an end to it all—about ways and means and the right place and appropriate time. The taboo was broken.
This became plain to Hans von Lehndorff on the night of 28 January 1945, when he and his young colleague returned once more to Juditten to check on her parents, and found that the elderly couple had already put their plan into action. Von Lehndorff notes their suicide in his diary without a flicker of surprise, as if her parents had simply been out when they arrived:
We return to Juditten that night and find the dead couple in their beds, carefully laid out by the elder daughter, who’s already left the house. The windows are open. It’s icy in the room. For a while we stand there in silence. Out on the stairs we say the Lord’s Prayer.
But the night wasn’t over yet:
As we’re coming out of the front door, a woman rushes towards us from across the road. ‘Frau Doktor, is that you? Come quickly, my husband has poisoned himself with gas.’
The epidemic had begun. In the weeks leading up to and beyond the surrender of Königsberg on 9 April, von Lehndorff recorded more and more incidents confirming his diagnosis. He and his assistant treated people who’d been in a deep sleep for days after taking large quantities of tablets. They noticed the envy with which the living eyed the dead. Von Lehndorff struggled for days to dissuade his theatre nurse from killing herself. He gave speeches in the operating theatre of the military hospital, ‘to fight the risk of contagion posed by suicide’. He found one of his colleagues dead, his wrists slit; others he was able to save from bleeding to death.
Von Lehndorff and his assistant’s deep faith saved them from being sucked into this maelstrom. The words of the gospel helped them hold firm. But even this source of strength was not inexhaustible. A few days after Königsberg was taken, von Lehndorff was unable to stop a Soviet soldier raping his young assistant. After this, he broke down and retreated inside himself. He, too, was ready to burn his bridges behind him. ‘A thorn is piercing what is left of my soul. I creep away and let myself fall on an iron bedstead. Now to sleep and sleep and see nothing more. It is enough.’ It was Doktora who fetched him back and reminded him of their shared faith. She begged him to leave, to make his way west alone, even though she no longer saw this as a possibility for herself. ‘There’s nothing more you can do here,’ she told him. ‘I have my tablets, and besides, I know that God demands nothing impossible.’
One morning in July 1945, two months after the end of the war, Doktora didn’t wake up. On her table lay a note, saying that she had taken some sleeping pills and wasn’t to be woken. ‘All feeling has died in me. I go about my day’s work as if it were no concern of mine. Am I perhaps already dead inside?’ The next day, her heart stopped.
• • •
Hans von Lehndorff wouldn’t set off for the west until two years later. His Königsberg diaries were published some years after that as part of the series Dokumentation der Vertreibung der Deutschen aus Ost-Mitteleuropa (Documents on the Expulsion of Germans from Eastern Central Europe). This sprawling collection of primary sources, selected from a fund of material ten times the size, made more than a thousand eyewitness accounts available to the public soon after the end of the war. Reading them, you can trace the wave of suicide as if on a map, from East Prussia to the Oder-Neisse line and into the smallest villages. Like mass exodus, looting and rape, suicide inevitably accompanied the final battles for the Third Reich. This first wave of suicides in the eastern Reich followed close behind the advancing Red Army, sometimes even preceding it.
Few of the accounts in the collection are as extensive or detailed as von Lehndorff’s journal, but they nevertheless confirm his experiences in Königsberg. All along the roads leading west, men and children and women and soldiers hanged or drowned or poisoned or shot themselves or each other, together or alone.
In the town of Liebemühl, for example, a family was found united in death: ‘Dead bodies sitting on the sofa, draped over chairs, lying in the beds.’
In the district of Osterode: ‘Shudder after shudder ran down our spines. If I had any poison, one man said, I’d poison myself and all the family.’
In the West Prussian city of Elbing: ‘The most senior constable said absently that Herr Hauptmann had shot himself at the command post last night.’
In the town of Tempelburg: ‘In the course of the morning, the landlord came back inside from his garden and said that there were four corpses (men and women) under a tree in the garden and three corpses hanging in the tree.’
In Treptow, near the Baltic: ‘When I said goodbye, he said: “This is the last time we’ll see each other.” He seemed to have made up his mind. He didn’t leave his place of work and I later heard that he’d ended his life that very day.’
In Belgard in Middle Pomerania: ‘Mass graves had been dug in the cemetery because there was no other way of burying the corpses. A lot of people had taken their own lives.’
In Lauenberg: ‘It’s hardly surprising that about 600 inhabitants chose to die on that terrible night.’
In Occalitz in Pomerania: ‘In the forest alone, 62 people from Occalitz went to their deaths—they drowned in the lake, were shot by Täger the forester, took poison or hanged themselves.’
In Labischin: ‘Several Germans, especially Baltic Germans, committed suicide on the very first day, some together with their entire families—taking poison or slitting their wrists.’
In Kurzig in East Brandenburg: ‘Young Frau Lemke shot herself and her two children. Her husband was a soldier. He’d left her his pistol.’
In Lossen in Lower Silesia: ‘In her despair, the master tailor’s wife Frau Pfeifer hanged her three children, aged between eight and thirteen, and then herself.’
Near Breslau: ‘In the night, I poisoned myself with Quadronox (approx. 10 pills), but unfortunately came round again three days later.’
In the Silesian city of Liegnitz: ‘Countless suicides were committed over the course of those days. My daughter and a woman with two little girls wanted to do it too. The desperation was indescribable.’
In Possen in Lower Silesia: ‘My uncle, mother and younger brother committed suicide by shutting the coal-fired stove too soon. They wanted me to go with them, but after a while I could bear it no longer and ran away.’
In Sternberg in the Sudetenland: ‘The list of people who have committed suicide out of fear of the Russians is growing longer and longer.’
In Mährisch Schönberg: ‘On the evening of 8 May our landlady hugged my wife and said: “Now we’ve put the worst behind us.” Later she and her husband chose to commit suicide.’
• • •
Only a few years separate such accounts from the experiences they describe. When people came to record their memories, they were still reeling from what they’d been through, and the suicides’ personalities, motives and past histories merge into a blur, subsumed by the chaotic end of the war and the arrival of the Soviet army. Occasionally, though, an eyewitness account gives you a sense of the state of mind of these people on the edge of the abyss. One such account is the story of Johannes and Hildegard Theinert.