Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself. The Downfall of Ordinary Germans in 1945

Collective passion gave way to the sober desire for a quiet, circumscribed life, without risks, without intense surges of feeling or near-uncontrollable emotion. To some outsiders, the atmosphere in postwar Germany seemed severe and sterile, and its people stony, joyless and cold.

In March 1945, Lore’s fear of destruction made it impossible for her to imagine life after the collapse of the regime. Her fear of the Americans was scarcely less acute than her fear of the Russians. It was terrible to have to admit that all those victims had died in vain. For Lore Walb, 8 May 1945 was a black day. Germany’s unconditional surrender brought her no relief—only grief and distress. Her usually neat handwriting is shaky, uncontrolled, a clear sign of her turmoil.

Fuelled by subliminal feelings of guilt, shame and complicity, reinforced by a long-fomented hatred of the enemy, the Germans’ fear of defeat fed a final, grand, collective delusion—that defeat could still be averted.

Victory or downfall—the slogan captured the national mood. René Juvet noticed that, having heard about the crimes in the east, his colleagues were afraid of retribution. Hardly anyone denied these things in private.

The lightning victories of 1939 to 1941 brought new heights of euphoria. Once again, Hitler’s onwards-ever-onwards principle proved effective. The reports of success from battleground after battleground—Poland, Denmark, Norway, France, Africa and the Balkans—threw the German people into a frenzy of joy, happiness, satisfaction and triumph, a blend of emotions which left them susceptible to that particular sense of superiority that the Nazi ideologues had been inculcating in them for years.

The Germans followed their Führer into the detested war without protest, because they believed in his genius and in the justice of the cause. They may have feared him, but they had no qualms.

In late 1933, faith in economic recovery asserted itself. The decline had in fact begun to slow under the Weimar government, and the economy was only just beginning to pick up, but a lot of demonstrative first-sod-cutting gave the impression that Hitler alone was responsible for the upturn.

Johann Radein, from Siefersheim, was born in 1932. ‘Like all those of my generation who grew up in the National Socialist age, I felt as if life always had been this way and always would.’

Until 1929, the Nazi Party had little clout in Giessen. That had changed when the Great Depression hit, and in the 1930 elections the Nazis had won almost twenty per cent of the vote. Now, just two years later, on the eve of another election, Reiner saw brown SA uniforms everywhere.

For the young Melita Maschmann, Germany was, more than anything, a feeling—a dark, tragic feeling for her homeland, instilled in her by her parents. ‘Even before I knew the meaning of the word “Germany”, I loved it as something mysteriously overshadowed by grief, something infinitely dear and vulnerable.’