Nowhere in the western territories of the German Reich was mass suicide as rife as in East and West Prussia, Silesia, Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Brandenburg or Berlin. Fear of the Red Army was so firmly rooted in people’s minds that the Soviets’ approach often triggered deadly panic. As Soviet troops marched into the towns and villages of the east, the rumours and propaganda were transformed again and again into dire reality. Women in particular saw no other way out than to kill themselves, and often their children too. There was a general feeling of desperation.
But this feeling wasn’t limited to the east. In western Germany, too, many people no longer saw a future for themselves. All over the country, people felt frightened and helpless as they found themselves confronted with imminent defeat and the collapse of the social order. They sensed guilt closing in on them and feared that revenge and retribution were inevitable.
Herr Reidel from Rüsselsheim, in the Rhine-Main region, was a good-looking and imposing young man. He had left Rüsselsheim—a city important to the German arms industry because of its automobile factories—after the 1944 air raids and moved with his family to Siefersheim, fifty kilometres away. In this tight-knit village, Reidel was surrounded by an aura of rumour and secrecy. He and his family—his strikingly dressed wife and smart little girls—held a strange fascination for the local children. They presented an idyllic family picture such as most people in Germany hadn’t seen since before the war. Johann Radein, who was just a boy at the time, devotes an entire chapter of his childhood memoirs to the Reidel family, who intrigued him. ‘Aged twelve, I always wonder why Herr Reidel isn’t a soldier at the front. I get no answer from the grown-ups.’
But Johann felt drawn to Herr Reidel. The boy often found him outside the Reidels’ house, staring up at the sky through his binoculars, on the lookout for enemy aircraft. Herr Reidel would explain to Johann in expert detail all about the different kinds of planes circling overhead and occasionally looping down, trailing a wisp of smoke. At other times, Johann found him in his garden, sowing or weeding; he sometimes invited Johann to help him pick cherries. But Johann never solved the mystery of Herr Reidel—never worked out who or what he was, or how he’d managed to escape active service.
I don’t dare ask him any questions, this fair, good-looking man with his flashing eyes, lively manner and brisk gestures. But when his charmingly dressed, curly blond daughter comes hand-in-hand with her friends to visit her father, the happy man devotes himself so intently and lovingly to them that he forgets I’m there, and I slip away from the intimate scene.
The village of Siefersheim made it through to the end of the war without bloody battles or losses, and in March 1945 it was occupied by US soldiers. The villagers took down their pictures of the Führer, burnt their brown shirts and tried to look ahead. But Siefersheim was not to escape altogether, and the horrors of defeat were finally visited on the village one day in June, when Herr Reidel, friendly neighbour and loving father, dispatched his entire family. Six-year-old Sigrid, baby Else, his wife and himself—he shot them all with his pistol. Johann Radein heard the news at the house of a friend, the son of the village mayor, who immediately rushed to Reidel’s house:
My friend and I follow. At the scene of the crime, we wait at the gate with two grown-ups. When Mayor Espenschied re-emerges from the Reidel family’s house, he looks very pale and sounds agitated as he says: ‘I told them so.’
The mayor had known that Reidel had two pistols in his possession, and had urged him to get rid of them or hand them in. Since the war had ended, he’d often tried to talk him out of his Nazi beliefs and suicidal plans, too. ‘It’s over. You have to resign yourself to that.’ But Reidel didn’t want to resign himself to the loss of his world and a life among enemies. In the note addressed to the parish of Siefersheim found in his house, he said he had chosen to commit suicide with his family so as not to burden anyone.
Now the rumours about Reidel ran riot. The villagers, seeking to explain the inexplicable, searched for motives in his past. One man suspected that he’d been involved in the Rüsselsheim massacre. In August 1944, after an air raid on Reidel’s hometown, American airmen from a plane shot down by the Luftwaffe had been marched through the town, and members of the public had pelted them with stones and roof tiles, and hit them with hammers and spades. Six of the airmen died, and it was rumoured that Reidel was on the US military’s wanted list. But the rumours were never confirmed. Even in later years, Johann Radein was unable to solve the mystery of Herr Reidel’s guilt and desperation. ‘I’ll never forget the sight of those two horse-drawn carts carrying the children and their parents round the edge of the village to the cemetery,’ he wrote.
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An hour further south is Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, where elementary school teacher and regional poet Leopold Reitz was a member of the Nazi Party and local group leader. Reitz came from a family of vintners, and most of his poems are devoted to the topic of winegrowing; they celebrate, in bucolic tones, the vineyards of his home soil and the charms of the Palatinate countryside. When war broke out, he began to keep a diary, which shows his struggle to define his own position. He is often vague and elusive, taking refuge in longwinded descriptions of nature. Leopold Reitz shrank from self-examination, unable to judge or justify himself or his involvement in the party.
He was, though, perceptive enough to have noticed a change among his fellow townspeople since war first broke out on the Eastern front in 1941—known in Germany as the ‘year of the great murder’, or the ‘year of widows and orphans’. As the casualty rate soared, soldiers’ death notices in the newspapers were no longer displayed as prominently; they literally shrank in size, so numerous now that they had lost their earlier shock value. People waited daily for telegrams bearing news of loved ones’ deaths. ‘Death is no longer sublime,’ Reitz wrote. ‘Dying has become more of a matter of course.’ As the end of the war drew near, he noted, people were responding to the Nazis’ jingoistic propaganda with increasingly fatalistic slogans of their own. ‘The motto of the day is: make the most of the war, because peace is going to be dire.’
When his son-in-law pays an unexpected visit from the front, having survived the retreat from France, Reitz finds him neither glad to be home, nor relieved to have escaped death. Instead, he is demoralised, apparently done with life, unable to imagine a future for himself and his family. Reitz observes:
Not only before battle—at home, too, a soldier has to come to terms with himself. Or as people say here: ‘Anyone still alive in 1945 has only himself to blame.’
Meanwhile, he said, the wireless blared out heroic folk songs about the sweetness of dying for one’s country.
In late March, American troops captured Neustadt. A few days later Leopold Reitz heard that the head of a local viticulture school had hanged himself. This was the first in a series of suicides to be mentioned by Reitz. ‘Hanged, shot and arrested are now words as common as eat and drink.’ He continued to record such cases until May 1946, a year after the war ended. The last, Frau R. from Gommersheim, hanged herself—from a sense of guilt, Reitz guessed, and out of despair at the death of her fallen son. ‘The list of dead friends and acquaintances grows longer and longer,’ he wrote. ‘Dr Müller and his housekeeper had already written suicide notes, but let themselves be talked out of it.’
The suicidal mood was widespread elsewhere in western Germany too. Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, a well-off middle-class woman from Hamburg who kept a kind of journal in the form of unsent letters to her children, observed it in her own family, even before the war had really got going. Anticipating the destruction to come, her daughter, Jacoba, thought of taking her life together with her husband and their five-year-old son. ‘I could see the idea taking root in her,’ Wolff-Mönckeberg writes. ‘I could see the despair in Jacoba’s usually clear eyes.’ In Hamburg, as in other parts of the country, the news of Germany’s defeat in the Battle of Stalingrad in February 1943 prompted many people to speculate out loud about the end of the war and the arrival of the Allies. Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg reports that a Frau Schlensog told her there would be nothing left but to take poison. She said it quite calmly, apparently, ‘as if she were suggesting pancakes for dinner tomorrow’. Wolff-Mönckeberg’s ex-husband did indeed go on to commit suicide a few months after British troops marched into Hamburg, one of many in that city who chose to end their lives at this time.
In Giessen, in Hesse, a fifteen-year-old schoolboy records in his memoirs how his teacher, the irritable Herr Frank, poisoned himself along with his wife when the Americans entered the town. In the small village of Södel, an elderly businessman hanged himself in his garden after writing a suicide note: ‘I am awfully sorry to leave you, but you mustn’t hold it against me; the war compels me.’ In the neighbouring town of Friedberg, a thirty-five-year-old man hanged himself on 4 February 1945. His wife then killed their two small children and slit her own wrists.
In February 1945, a young woman from Ostwestfalen heard from a fellow student about the many crimes committed over the course of the war in the name of the German people. ‘A friend of mine killed herself when she heard the truth,’ the young woman said, ‘and she wasn’t the only one.’
In Upper Bavaria, the authorities registered ten times as many suicides in April and May as in the same months in previous years. Two German psychiatrists investigating suicidal behaviour in northern Baden and Bremen established that there had been a steep rise in numbers in both places in 1945.
From the front, too, soldiers sent news of the deaths of many comrades who were unable to cope with defeat and loss of faith. An officer in Norway reports in his war journal on 4 May 1945: ‘A wave of suicides is beginning. Officers ring up to say goodbye before they die.’ In Rotterdam, a sailor in the German navy heard bells ringing during his watch on 8 May and realised that the war was over. He decided to shoot himself when his watch came to an end. ‘Given my conduct throughout the war, I had no hope of survival, and felt that only death could mask my shame.’