Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945

One of the last major stories on the Third Reich that remains largely untold is that of the extraordinary wave of suicides, carried out not just by much of the Nazi leadership, but by thousands of ordinary Germans, in the War’s closing period. Some of these were provoked by straightforward terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many could not be explained in such relatively straightforward terms. Florian Huber’s remarkable book confronts this terrible phenomenon. Other countries have suffered defeat, but not responded in the same way. What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood years of deprivation, aeriel bombing and deaths in battle, to do this?