Suicide in Nazi Germany

As Christian Goeschel notes at the beginning of this work, most people are aware that Hitler and his closest entourage killed themselves at the end of the Third Reich. But was this ‘orgy of self-immolation’ unexpected, or was it rather ‘the culmination of broader and deeper trends in ideology and behaviour’ (p. 1)? To answer this question, Goeschel examines suicide in Germany from 1918 to 1945, analysing both the subjective meanings of suicide, and its changing social and cultural significance. He comes to the conclusion that the wave of suicides that affected the general population and key Nazis in 1945 was a predictable, if not necessarily inevitable, response to war's end and the breakdown of the Third Reich. Goeschel's book begins with a chapter on the Weimar Republic, which both provides a stand-alone analysis of suicide between 1918 and 1933, and provides context for what follows. In this period, suicide was viewed as a touchstone for the health of the nation, and contemporaries often cited suicide rates, which rose alarmingly in times of economic crisis, in their arguments to undermine the Republic's legitimacy

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