their whipped-up masses, will need a spectacle arranged by Jews,’ was Hitler’s own inimitable way of expressing this fear.41 While most were prepared to take their chance, and disappeared into hiding, or simply stayed where they were and waited to be arrested, a fair number of other leading Nazis and military leaders felt suicide was their only option. Bormann trying to flee from Berlin, and Himmler, Ley and Goring in Allied custody, were among those choosing to end their own lives, along with 8 out of 41 Gauleiter and 7 from 47 of the Higher SS and Police Leaders, 53 out of 554 army generals, 14 of 98 Luftwaffe generals and 11 from 53 admirals.42
For ordinary citizens, too, thoughts of suicide were commonplace. This was especially the case in Berlin and eastern parts of Germany, where despair and fear combined to encourage such thoughts. ‘Many are getting used to the idea of putting an end to it. The demand for poison, a pistol and other means of ending life is great everywhere,’ an SD report had already noted at the end of March.43 ‘All Berliners know that the Russians will soon be in Berlin, and they see no alternative—other than cyanide,’ one pastor had remarked around the same time. He blamed the rise in suicidal tendencies on the horror stories in Goebbels’ propaganda about the behaviour of the Soviets.44 This was undoubtedly a major contributory factor. But the propaganda had, as we have seen, some basis in fact, and tales of terrible experiences at the hands of Soviet soldiers, especially the rape of German women, circulated by word of mouth and independently of Goebbels’ machinations. Women committed suicide rather than face the likelihood of being raped. Others killed themselves afterwards. More would have done so had they possessed the means.45
In Berlin, where suicide statistics, if incomplete, exist, the trend is plain to see. At the peak in April and May, during the battle of Berlin, 3,881 people killed themselves. Overall in 1945 there were 7,057 suicides in the city, 3,996 of them women, compared with 2,108 in 1938 and 1,884 in 1946. In Hamburg, by contrast, there were only 56 suicides in April 1945.46 In Bremen, flattened by repeated bombing, suicides rose markedly in 1945, but the level remained in fact lower than it had been in 1939.47 There was a sharp rise in Bavaria in the final phase of the war, though the figure of 42 suicides in April and May 1945 was scarcely on a comparable scale with that of Berlin and accountable at least in part by the disproportionate number of Nazi functionaries there who took their own lives. Some other parts of western Germany also had modestly increased suicide rates in 1945, but nothing remotely comparable with those of Berlin.48 Plainly, the suicide wave was first and foremost a phenomenon of those parts of Germany where fear of occupation by the Red Army was most acute.
Panic gripped the people in eastern localities as the Red Army approached. Along the front line, in numerous places in Pomerania, Mecklenburg, Silesia and Brandenburg, there were hundreds of suicides. No overall total can be calculated, but it is presumed to have been in the thousands, perhaps tens of thousands.49 In Demmin, a town in western Pomerania of some 15,000 inhabitants before the war but by this time also housing numerous refugees, more than 900 people, the majority of them women, committed suicide in the three days following the arrival of the Red Army on 1 May.
There was enormous fear in Demmin in the days before the Russians entered. The feeling of terror mounted as the frightening noise of Soviet tanks rolling into the town could be heard. German soldiers fled that morning, blowing up the bridges over the two local rivers as they went. White bedsheets were hung out of windows to offer surrender, though a group of Hitler Youth fired at the Soviets. One man shot his wife and three children before blasting off a Panzerfaust, then hanging himself. Families barricaded themselves into their homes, blocking the doors with furniture. Then they heard loud, foreign voices, banging and kicking at the doors, before Red Army soldiers, many looking very young, broke in, demanding watches and jewellery. The other ominous demand was ‘Frau, komm!’ Plundering, marauding troops, often under the influence of drink, roamed the streets. The town’s representatives were peremptorily shot. The houses of suspected Nazi Party members were set on fire, and the flames spread, engulfing neighbouring properties until much of the town centre was burning.
In the horror, women were paralysed with the all too justified fear of being raped. They tried to hide, or dressed in men’s clothes, but were all too often found. Many were raped numerous times. In this scene of Sodom and Gomorrah (as it appeared to one witness), terrified individuals decided on the instant to kill themselves, and sometimes their families, with whatever method was to hand—poison, shooting, hanging, or drowning in the local rivers, the Peene or the Tollense. In one case, the death of thirteen family members is recorded. In another, a mother pushed her two tiny children in a pram while her six-year-old followed on his bike. Under a large oak tree on the edge of town, she poisoned her children, then tried to hang herself but was cut down by Soviet soldiers. She said she had seen propaganda posters claiming that the Russians killed children by putting an axe through their skull. There was something approaching mass hysteria among the townsfolk. Entire families headed for the river, tied themselves together, and plunged into the cold water. Many elderly people were among those who took their lives that way. For weeks afterwards, swollen corpses were found floating in the rivers. In some instances, panic- stricken women took their children by the hand and jumped into the water. One girl, eleven years old at the time, fleeing from her burning home, was dragged back by her grandmother as her mother suddenly grabbed her and made for the riverbank. ‘We all thought we were going to burn to death,’ she recalled, many years later. ‘We had no hope left for life, and I myself, I had the feeling that this was the end of the world, this was the end of my life. And everyone in Demmin felt like that.’50
The rampaging of the Red Army and the gross maltreatment of the conquered German population were only gradually brought under control by the Soviet authorities once the war was over. But in the first days of May 1945, the war still continued. And so did the suffering.
III
Donitz’s cabinet, fully formed on 5 May, bore only partial resemblance to the one nominated by Hitler. All that Donitz had learnt from Bormann, arising from Hitler’s Testament, was the names of three intended ministers: Bormann, Goebbels and, to replace Ribbentrop as Foreign Minister, Arthur Sey?-Inquart, the Reich Commissar in the Netherlands.51 In establishing his administration, set up in the northernmost extremity of the Reich in somewhat primitive accommodation in the Naval Academy at Flensburg-Murwik after a hasty departure from Plon as British troops approached, Donitz had to presume that Bormann and Goebbels were dead or captured, while Sey?-Inquart was involved in negotiations with the Allies about a partial capitulation and also therefore unavailable to take up his nominated position. In any case, Donitz was determined to form his own cabinet, not simply take over one prescribed for him.52
Nevertheless, continuity was the hallmark of the new government. What was later claimed to have been an ‘unpolitical’ cabinet included several high-ranking SS officers and a Party Gauleiter (Paul Wegener of Gau Weser- Ems). The Minister of the Interior, Wilhelm Stuckart, an SS-Obergruppenfuhrer, who had in effect run the ministry as Himmler’s State Secretary during the last months of the war, had been a participant in the notorious Wannsee Conference that in January 1942 had determined policy on the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question’. Herbert Backe, the Minister for Agriculture, had the rank of an SS-Gruppenfuhrer and had helped shape policies imposing starvation on occupied Soviet territories. Otto Ohlendorf, deputy State Secretary in the Reich Economics Ministry, was an SS-Gruppenfuhrer who had formerly headed the SD-Inland in the Reich Security Head Office and had led Einsatzgruppe D in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. As late as 16 May Ohlendorf was in discussion with Donitz about reconstructing the security service, also for possible use by the occupying powers.53 (In all, 230 of the 350 or so members of Donitz’s administrative personnel in Flensburg had belonged to the security services.54)
There was no place for Himmler, viewed as an obvious liability in any prospective dealings with the western Allies. But it was easy to see why he thought he might have a part to play and sought after 2 May to enter the Donitz government. He offered his services to Donitz in any capacity, but, enquiring how the Wehrmacht regarded him, perhaps had his eye on taking over as War Minister.55 Himmler argued that he would be crucial in the struggle against Bolshevism and required only a brief audience with General Eisenhower or Field-Marshal Montgomery to gain recognition of this. He was told in no uncertain terms, however, that ‘every Englishman or American who thought for half a second of speaking to him would in the next half a second be swept away by public opinion in England and the USA’.56 His ‘treason’ against Hitler in the last days was reportedly also a reason why Donitz rejected any involvement in his administration by Himmler.57 Donitz finally broke
