Potassium cyanide, commonly known as cyanide, is the potassium salt of hydrocyanic or prussic acid, a colourless crystal that resembles coarse table salt and, like salt, dissolves easily in water. If swallowed, it is converted into hydrocyanic acid in the stomach and becomes highly toxic. This causes painful corrosion of the stomach lining, but the way the poison kills is to attack the human respiratory system by preventing the cells from using oxygen. Internal suffocation follows, during which the body spasms as it struggles for air until, eventually, circulation shuts down altogether.
Cyanide or prussic acid poisoning is a very effective way of ending a human life. It is also an extremely agonising one. In a worst-case scenario, the fully conscious victim has to endure several minutes of violent death throes. A pinch is enough to kill. A lethal dose of cyanide fits into a tiny glass ampoule that can be carried everywhere—in a handbag, a small pouch around the neck, a gap left by a tooth, or simply in the mouth. For chemists, pharmacists or doctors, the poison, whose few basic components are widely used in industry and agriculture, is relatively easy to produce.
In the spring of 1945, large quantities of cyanide and prussic acid were circulating in Germany, in response to an explosion in demand. An SS report published at the end of March found that more and more Germans were contemplating suicide. All over the country, people were trying to get hold of poison or other means of ending their lives.
In Berlin, this was nothing new; forty-three-year-old journalist Margret Boveri noted that poison had already been a common topic of conversation in the German capital when she came back to live there in March 1944, after some years as a foreign correspondent in Stockholm, New York, Lisbon and Madrid. Her voluntary return coincided with the Battle of Berlin. RAF Bomber Command destroyed large areas of the city, killing thousands of people and leaving several hundred thousand homeless. Reports from the front told only of disaster, and the government spouted nothing but stale propaganda. Margret Boveri found her fellow Germans scared, apathetic and in a very divided state of mind:
They should have been mutually exclusive, yet how closely linked they were, those two responses: on the one hand, conforming to the status quo, and on the other, mistrusting everything the powers that be said and did. Everyone knew defeat was imminent, and yet they lived as if the existing state of affairs would continue indefinitely.
The proximity of death and its insinuation into their daily lives was more than most people could stand. Unbearable scenarios threatened at every turn: being buried under debris or lying burnt in a cellar—while beyond lay the no-less-terrifying prospect of Allied capture and all it entailed: imprisonment, ill-treatment, retaliatory violence. After a few months in Berlin, Margret Boveri, too, had succumbed to the general mood. Her May 1945 musings on poison are as methodical as an instruction manual. She informed herself by talking to people and reading up on the subject in her encyclopaedia.
I’d had a small tin of strychnine since last July, but was always on the lookout for cyanide and eventually managed to get hold of some this February (brave men do still exist). I’d meant to get in touch with pharmacist friends while there was still time and find out how it is transformed into prussic acid, which kills painlessly when inhaled.
Boveri wore her cork-stoppered glass ampoule on a string around her neck, but she began to have her doubts about its effectiveness, and these doubts were fed daily by conflicting rumours. One woman, for example, told Boveri about her failed attempt to kill herself with cyanide. Like Boveri, she had worn the poison next to her body, and someone had suggested that the powder might have lost its effect after being chemically altered by her body heat. The closer the end came, Boveri said, the more absurd the rumours became: ‘In the last days before capitulation there was said to be widespread bartering: poison in exchange for bazookas.’
Nowhere was demand as high as in Berlin. Nowhere was it as easy to get hold of the deadly ampoules. Various sources suggest that the party was not only aware of this, but actively involved in distribution. The local health authorities themselves were said to have dispensed cyanide to the public. Rumour had it that on 12 April, after the last performance of the Berlin Philharmonic (Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony and the finale from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung), uniformed Hitler Youth boys stood at the exit with baskets of cyanide capsules. According to the logic of the regime, the German people would inevitably be brought down as the regime itself collapsed. All those unable to make the ultimate sacrifice at the front were to take their fate in their own hands.
In the last weeks of the war, Berlin became the centre of the suicide epidemic. Once the Red Army had reached the Oder, it was clear that Berlin would be attacked by the Soviets from the east, and not, as many would have preferred, by Allied forces from the west. On the eve of the battle, there were nearly three million civilians still in the city. Some were Berliners; others were refugees from the eastern territories. Two-thirds of them were women; the remaining third were those too young or too old for military service. In their neighbourhoods, streets, flats and houses, these people waited for the war to come—waited for the onslaught of two and a half million Soviet soldiers. Last-minute radio broadcasts and propaganda articles in the Nazi newspaper Der Panzerbär painted a terrifying picture of Soviet conquest, but it was already clear in any case that the Soviets would mobilise all their destructive power in the final battle for the capital—the enemy’s den. The official rhetoric of fear and sacrifice was accompanied by talk of poison and guns and putting an end to it all—talk that had been bubbling beneath the surface for months. The epidemic hit Berlin at full force, and thousands were driven to suicide.
• • •
The Danish-German journalist Jacob Kronika stayed in Berlin to the bitter end, observing people’s changing attitudes to death. In his diary he tells the story of a dying man trapped between two walls in an air raid. When a doctor arrives to administer a lethal injection to spare him hours of agony, the man only asks for a cigarette and then looks on, unperturbed, as she does the deed. ‘Can we really have reached the point where a cigarette means more to us than life and death?’ Kronika asked. In the next day’s entry, he describes receiving a phone call from an old acquaintance. The man says goodbye to him in a businesslike manner and explains that he’s decided to shoot himself and his wife with his revolver.
Kronika regarded such submission to fate as peculiarly German. The tremendous fighting power that had sustained the Germans through a six-year war against half the world waned when the people were faced with the challenge of taking control. ‘This paralysed nation no longer has the courage, will or power to act. It continues to let itself be maltreated, though the maltreatment costs it life and future.’ While Kronika waited in vain for some sign of rebellion against the senseless mania for sacrifice, the Germans became more and more withdrawn. What energy they could muster they put into killing themselves.
On 7 April, on his way to a press conference at the Propaganda Ministry on Wilhelmplatz, Jacob Kronika found himself on one of his many rambles through the bombed-out wastes of Berlin. Heading north through the pleasure grounds of the Tiergarten—now a ghost park, after being battered by bombs, its woods chopped down for fuel—he came upon a small crowd of people on Siegesallee. A man had hanged himself from a tree, in public and in broad daylight. Kronika watched as his corpse was taken down without a word and loaded into a car. He called his account of this incident ‘An Everyday Event in Berlin’.
Not many people watch the spectacle, and the few who do watch in silence. The event leaves no particularly deep impression on them. Day by day, night by night, so many suicides take place in this falling city that one more or less makes no difference.
Later that day, not far from the Tiergarten, Kronika was stopped by uniformed men on Hercules Bridge as he made his way over the Landwehr Canal to the Swedish embassy. The bodies of a woman and two small children had been pulled out of the cold canal water onto the bank, the children tied together with a length of coarse rope. ‘Presumably a mother who had put an end to her life and that of her children,’ Kronika mused. ‘Why? We shall never know.’ He was reminded of the portentous words that the vicar of Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church had addressed to his congregation a few weeks before. As the Battle of Berlin drew nearer, the vicar’s warning of an epidemic was proving true. ‘Death will catch up with all of us one way or another! But many people can’t wait! The suicide epidemic is sweeping the country!’
Even the top echelons of the state were not immune to the devaluation of human life or the indifference to the rising number of suicides. A few days later, Jacob Kronika heard that General Field Marshal Walter Model had taken his life after the defeat of his army in the Ruhr. Model, one of the most highly decorated commanders of the Wehrmacht and a devoted servant of the regime, was a key figure in the final battle on the Western front. His death must have had a considerable impact on frontline leadership. But when Kronika went to the Propaganda Ministry in the hope of finding out more, no one could give him any information. Instead, a ministerial spokesman told him that he saw no reason to waste time on a single suicide, when there were more than enough every day. ‘There are droves of potential suicides around,’ the spokesman said, ‘all waiting for the right moment.’ His words left no doubt about the German people’s ultimate duty towards their leaders:
We see something heroic in the various forms of harakiri committed by mayors, district councillors and chief administrative officers, often together with their entire families. It would no doubt be for the best if the only Germans found by the advancing enemies were dead Germans.
One of the sources of this overt nihilism was the notion of lost honour. The concept of honour, whether racial, military, familial or feminine, occupied an important place in Nazi ideology, so its loss was regarded as a threat to the very foundations of life. ‘If you are dishonoured,’ a teacher in Berlin told a class of girls when collapse was imminent, ‘you have no choice but to die.’
In many German families, honour came before life. On 20 April, the Führer’s birthday, twenty-one-year-old Friederike Grensemann said goodbye to her father, who had been called up to the Volkssturm to defend the city. They said little. Friederike’s father was already wearing his uniform and armband and went to fetch his leather coat. Then he pressed his pistol into his daughter’s hand. ‘It’s over, my child,’ he said. ‘Promise me you’ll shoot yourself when the Russians come, otherwise I won’t have another moment’s peace.’
‘He also instructed me to put the barrel in my mouth,’ Friederike would later remember. ‘Then another hug, a kiss! All in silence. He went.’
The young woman felt bound by her father’s wish. When she saw Soviet troops approaching the family home on Kurfürstendamm ten days later, she remembered her promise. The moment had come to honour it. She felt for the pistol in her coat pocket and was choked by fear.
It was so hard to decide! I hesitated. The pistol in my hand was threatening and tempting at the same time. I crept into a corner, took the pistol out of my pocket, with the safety catch still on, and pointed the barrel down my throat!
She never forgot the life-or-death minutes that followed. Staring out into the backyard, she saw a rubbish bin full of guns. A thought darted into her mind: maybe the Russians wouldn’t even get her? Maybe they weren’t such awful Untermenschen as people said? Friederike chose to live. She ran down to the yard and threw her gun into the rubbish bin. She never saw her father again.
• • •
Around 170,000 soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians had lost their lives in the Battle of Berlin by the time the fighting ended on 2 May 1945, but it wasn’t until much later that the wave of suicides receded from the city. Even during battle, large numbers of Nazi officials, Wehrmacht officers and soldiers shot themselves or deliberately exposed themselves to enemy fire. Many estimates suggest that about ten thousand women in Berlin committed suicide after being raped. On the first day of Soviet occupation, there were reportedly a hundred suicides in the suburb of Friedrichshagen alone, and the stories persisted through the summer and into autumn—stories of married couples shooting themselves amid the rubble, of women jumping out of windows, of poison victims lying wrapped in blackout paper at the side of the road, of families hanging from windows, of dead party functionaries and Nazi Women’s League leaders. There was talk of a bank manager who had killed himself along with his wife and daughter, and of an actor who had taken poison together with twenty others in the leafy suburb of Bestensee.
• • •
On 6 May 1945, Jacob Kronika writes about the death of an acquaintance, Marie von Gerstorff, opposed to Hitler and his policies, who took cyanide a few hours after her home was seized by the Soviets. The other residents of her villa buried her in the garden. Before bringing his diary of the German suicide epidemic to a close, Kronika comes full circle: he has recently spoken with another member of the Protestant clergy about how such desperate acts should be judged. Theologian Otto Dibelius prefers not to condemn those who have fled the horrors of life. But he does condemn their actions: ‘It is up to us, as Christians, to judge and condemn the act of flight itself. It is a sin.’
They were almost the same words that Kronika had heard in Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church two months before. Since then, thousands had fallen prey to the epidemic. The vicar’s prophecy had come to pass. But the fearless Danish journalist who had chronicled the epidemic ends his journal by confessing that even he couldn’t remain immune to that black maelstrom. ‘Who are we to judge?’ he writes. ‘I myself was among those who secured the necessary dose of poison before the Battle of Berlin, so as to be able to “escape”, should things become unbearable.’