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Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Suicide in Nazi Germany, pages 152–153:

Many [anticommunists] committed suicide in 1945. Along with Hitler, top [anticommunists] like Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler all committed suicide. Bernhard Rust, Reich Minister of Education, killed himself on 8 May 1945. Himmler committed suicide in Allied captivity. He bit into a capsule of potassium cyanide which he had carried in his mouth at an interrogation centre near Lüneburg on 23 May 1945 after the British had identified him and had ordered him to strip naked. A British eyewitness complained about Himmler’s easy death, given the crimes he committed.¹⁶

Reich Minister of Justice Thierack, responsible for the radicalization of the German legal system described in the previous chapter, killed himself in a British internment camp in October 1946.¹⁷ Field Marshal Walter Model, [an anticommunist] who had declared his loyalty to Hitler after the failed assassination attempt of 20 July 1944, shot himself in a forest near Düsseldorf in late April 1945. He did so to avoid surrender.¹⁸

When hearing the news of Hitler’s death, some [other Fascists] reportedly committed suicide immediately, thereby following their leader into death. Goebbels, Hitler’s official successor as Reich Chancellor, had his children poisoned before requesting a SS guard to shoot his wife and himself. In a letter on 28 April 1945 to his stepson Harald Quandt, Goebbels claimed that his death would set a heroic precedent for a new Germany which would ‘survive this war, but only if it has precedents at hand on which it can lean itself’.¹⁹

Suicide figures among the party and SS top echelons were staggering. Eight out of 41 party regional leaders who held office between 1926 and 1945 and 7 out of 47 high SS and police leaders committed suicide, followed by an unknown number of lower [Axis] officials. For these [anticommunists], life was impossible after the Third Reich’s downfall.

Fear of Allied retribution and the notion of self‐sacrifice may well have motivated these suicides. In the Army’s top echelons, suicide was also widespread, perhaps because of the Army’s complicity with [war] crimes. According to a 1950 statistic, 53 out of 554 army generals, 14 out of 98 Luftwaffe generals and 11 out of 53 admirals killed themselves.²⁰

Upon learning of Hitler’s death Gauleiter Jakob Sprenger of Hesse‐Nassau and his wife committed suicide on 8 May 1945 in the Tyrol, a region where many leading [anticommunists] had fled.²¹ On the same day, [Berlin] unconditionally surrendered to the Allies. Some top [anticommunists] immediately committed suicide. Josef Terboven, Gauleiter of Essen and Reich Commissioner in occupied Norway, committed suicide in a spectacular way on 8 May 1945, detonating 50 kilograms of dynamite in his bunker.

Wilhelm Rediess, higher SS and police leader in Norway, shot himself in Oslo on the same day. Odilo Globocnik, responsible for the mass murder of Jews in occupied Eastern Europe, bit on a cyanide capsule on 31 May 1945 in Austria after the British had captured him.

Rudolf Höss, formerly commandant of Auschwitz, claimed in his autobiography, written whilst he was awaiting trial in Cracow in 1946, that upon hearing of Hitler’s death he immediately thought of committing suicide together with his wife and children in northern Germany. Höss emphasized his loyalty to Hitler as well as his fear of being prosecuted by the Allies for the unparalleled crimes he had committed. He declared:

On our escape we heard on a farm that the Führer was dead. Upon hearing this, my wife and I simultaneously thought: Now we have to go, too! With the Führer being dead, our world had also fallen. Did it make any sense to live? We would be persecuted and searched for everywhere. We wanted to take poison...

He went on to claim in a rather unconvincing manner that he and his wife decided ‘for our children’s sake’ not to do it.²² In Berchtesgaden, home to Hitler’s alpine residence, some [anticommunists] listening to the radio broadcast of Hitler’s death in a pub supposedly went outside and shot themselves.²³

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(Tagged as NSFW for the sensitive subject matter.)

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