From tsunami to genocide, often all that survives of a human disaster in social memory is the number of deaths. If an event is large-scale and tragic enough, it will progress from news to history; the apparent objectivity of the death toll allows it to act as an official confirmation of the catastrophe. If, on the other hand, there is no verifiable figure—because it can’t be established or doesn’t arouse enough interest—the event fails to capture the public’s attention and doesn’t pass into collective memory.
In 1949, the Central Statistics Office of Greater Berlin pub lished a compendium called Berlin in Numbers, concerned, among other things, with the rise of suicide in and around Berlin in 1945. The statisticians report a total of 7057 reported cases, more than half of which (3881) fall in the month of April; the suicide rate in the German capital had quintupled compared with that of previous years. This figure is one of the few statistics available on the topic of suicide in Germany in 1945. It gives only a minimum estimate and casts a long and incalculable shadow that criminologists refer to as ‘the dark figure’.
To arrive at their estimate, the Berlin statisticians had no choice but to fall back on standard sources such as death registries and death certificates, as they would in peacetime. They must have been aware, though, that 1945 was no average year, and that the official figures available to them could provide only a glimpse of the full picture. The defeats inflicted that year led not only to the breakdown of local administration in Berlin and elsewhere, but eventually to the collapse of the entire state. Police, doctors, cemetery attendants and registrars were in many places unable to cope with the chaos caused by the destruction and mass death of those final months; they had to abandon their work temporarily or for good—if, that is, they didn’t leave altogether, like those who fled Germany’s eastern territories to move west. Shifting frontlines, long lists of missing soldiers, chaotic exodus in the face of the enemy, devastation of towns and villages and the need for anonymous mass graves meant that any estimate of the number of deaths in Germany in the last year of the war could only be rough. Often it was difficult to tell whether someone was a victim of military action, accident, natural causes or suicide.
The Nazi authorities stopped publishing suicide statistics when the war broke out, to avoid supplying the enemy with propaganda material. In 1939, the total number of suicides had been 22,273, as reported in the Statistical Yearbook for the Territory of the German Reich. For 1940, a year which saw the Wehrmacht storm from victory to victory, there was only internal party information, according to which the suicide rate in the Reich had fallen. But there is nothing to suggest how the numbers developed after defeats on all fronts and attacks on German territory. Nor are there figures for the suicide rate in the Wehrmacht during the last two years of the war, although the army had previously kept statistics. It was hard to tell, of course, whether a soldier killed at the front hadn’t, perhaps, actually committed suicide or deliberately sought death. And not all soldiers or officers wanted to report the suicides of their comrades or subordinates as suicide.
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Demmin, the site of probably the largest mass suicide in Germany, is a good illustration of the difficulties involved in counting the dead. On 19 May 1945, Sorge, the registrar, embarked on the task of recording the previous weeks’ deaths. By then the fires in Demmin had been put out and the new Soviet town commandant, Major Petrov, had taken office, but horses were still pulling covered carts up to the cemetery. Even the first death Sorge registered raises questions. Certificate no. 1 tells us that West Prussian refugee and retired postal inspector Wilhelm Schwarzrock died at 35 Frauenstrasse at 4 am on 1 May, the first night after the Soviet conquest of Demmin. But there is no mention of the cause of death. Nor is this an isolated case: hundreds of the deaths registered by Sorge between May and November 1945 had not been confirmed by a doctor. The seventy-four-year-old Schwarzrock could, of course, have died of an illness or a heart attack, but this is barely plausible in the case of thirty-nine-year-old Margarete Butz and her three small children—or that of forty-nine-year-old notary Georg Bader, who was found dead in Deven Wood on 15 May, together with his wife, forty-three, and their daughter, eleven. Perhaps Herr Sorge failed to add his usual footnote in these cases because the people who reported the deaths preferred not to identify them as suicides. In certain circumstances, relatives of suicides could expect to lose financial entitlements. Suicide, moreover, did not always appear as such to an outsider. The dark figure looms even over the meticulously kept death registers of Demmin.
The figures in the improvised death register kept by the cemetery gardener’s daughter, Marga Behnke, between 6 May and 4 July 1945 are even more imprecise. Behnke listed 612 dead altogether, 196 of whom were unidentified. In the column ‘Cause of death’, she recorded more than four hundred suicides by hanging, drowning and shooting, as well as isolated deaths due to illness, bullet wounds, shrapnel or simply old age. But in dozens of cases she was unable to give the cause of death, and instead put a question mark in the box or left it blank.
The first total figure appeared in a report published by Demmin’s district councillor in November 1945: seven hundred deaths by suicide. Subsequent accounts provided their own estimations, based on personal impressions or hearsay. Irene Bröker, the woman from Stettin who narrowly survived those critical days in Demmin with her son, speaks of six hundred corpses being pulled out of the Peene alone. A landowner from outside the town writes of 1200 registered suicides, though without explaining how he arrived at the figure. Marie Dabs, the furrier’s wife from Luisenstrasse, puts the number at over two thousand, Ursula Strohschein at several thousand. Norbert Buske, the eyewitness who, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, compiled some of these reports in his book about the end of the war in Demmin, speaks of more than a thousand. Almost twenty years later, Demmin’s regional museum carried out meticulous checks, comparing the suicide figures in the death registers with those in the cemetery nursery records. The end result was a cautious estimate of about five hundred certain suicides (men and women, and the children they took with them) and a note indicating the existence of a considerable dark figure.
If Demmin, the best-documented case so far, yields no more precise figure than between five hundred and more than a thousand, many scenes of suicide in eastern Germany resist even such a vague estimate. Our only sources are lone voices such as that of a municipal employee in Schönlanke, who wrote a retrospective account of the Red Army’s February 1945 invasion of the town: ‘In their fear of the brutes from the East, many people in Schönlanke (ca. 500!) took their lives. Entire families were wiped out.’ The town was a similar size to Demmin and suffered a similar fate, but it is now almost impossible to prove the accuracy or otherwise of the number of suicides cited in this report.
The total number of deaths claimed by the German suicide epidemic at the end of the Second World War eludes calculation, but whether we are talking about a low five-figure number or a high one, the suicides were a mass phenomenon of alarming scale, and for that reason they are significant. The causes go deeper than is suggested by the formulaic explanations of contemporary witnesses. It wasn’t only fear of the Russians and of the victors’ retaliation that inspired such a sense of doom and despair in the population. The example of Demmin shows that the wave of suicides cut across all professions and classes, affecting both sexes and all age groups. Even a person’s closeness to or distance from the Nazi regime made no difference. What can the inner world of these Germans have looked like if the coming defeat made them see death as the only way out?
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On the south-eastern edge of the old cemetery in Demmin, hundreds of dead from the suicide wave of 1945 lie buried, individually or in mass graves, marked or unmarked. A plain lawn with a few bare patches is dotted here and there with trees and memorial stones. At the edge of the grass, a heavy boulder is inscribed with words from the diary of a Demmin schoolteacher, written on 1 May 1945: Suicides, overwhelmed by doubts about the meaning of life. If ordinary people found it so hard to imagine living on after the collapse of the regime that they condemned themselves and their loved ones to death, it is important to find out what life meant to them. It is important to find out what was going on in their minds during those twelve years from 1933 to 1945—what buoyed them up, what they believed in. How did they feel about the Third Reich and its extremes—how did they experience them? And what did they feel when everything came to an end?