"Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself"

January 27, 2020
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.