"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"
The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945
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4.3 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Named a Best History Book of 2019 by The Times (UK)
The astounding true story of how thousands of ordinary Germans, overcome by shame, guilt, and fear, killed themselves after the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II.
By the end of April 1945 in Germany, the Third Reich had fallen and invasion was underway. As the Red Army advanced, horrifying stories spread about the depravity of its soldiers. For many German people, there seemed to be nothing left but disgrace and despair. For tens of thousands of them, the only option was to choose death -- for themselves and for their children.
"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" recounts this little-known mass event. Using diaries, letters, and memoirs, historian Florian Huber traces the euphoria of many ordinary Germans as Hitler restored national pride; their indifference as the Führer's political enemies, Jews, and other minorities began to suffer; and the descent into despair as the war took its terrible toll, especially after the invasion of the Soviet Union. Above all, he investigates how suicide became a contagious epidemic as the country collapsed.
Drawing on eyewitness accounts and other primary sources, "Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself" presents a riveting portrait of a nation in crisis, and sheds light on a dramatic yet largely unknown episode of postwar Germany.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
German historian Huber makes his English-language debut with a vivid and disturbing account of the "suicide epidemic" that swept across Germany in the final months of WWII. Drawing on war diaries, published memoirs, letters, and cemetery records, Huber first relates the events of April 30 to May 3, 1945 in Demmin, where advancing Soviet troops stalled by the German Army's destruction of the town's bridges looted homes, burned buildings, and committed mass rapes, setting off "an unprecedented wave of suicides" (estimates run from 500 to more than 1,000 deaths in the town). Huber describes mothers drowning their children in the Peene River, a schoolteacher shooting his entire family before firing on the Soviets and then killing himself, and three generations of family members who hanged themselves. From Demmin, Huber moves across Germany, exploring how the "tumultuous emotions" unleashed by Hitler's rise, combined with anti-Soviet propaganda, "the loss of a sense of purpose" as defeat loomed, and a yearslong "devaluation of human life," led to tens of thousands of suicides. Though the topic is relentlessly grim, Huber portrays his subjects with empathy and offers key insights into the German mindset before, during, and after WWII. Readers will be convinced that reckoning with the war's legacy requires studying this underexamined tragedy.
