Pictured: Adam Czerniaków, a Jew and unwilling accomplice who chose suicide over deporting children to their death.

Already in 1933, the rise of German Fascism and its antisemitic policies indirectly encouraged Jews to take their own lives. However, during the 1930s some Fascists went a step further and explicitly encouraged Jews to kill themselves. For example, quoting from Christian Goeschel’s Suicide in Nazi Germany, page 98:

Fritz Rosenfelder, a Jewish businessman from Stuttgart and a passionate member of a local gymnastics association, shot himself in the summer of 1933. […] His suicide note, reprinted in a contemporary anti[fascist] exile pamphlet, conveys his feeling of stigmatization:

My dear friends!
Herewith my final farewell! A German Jew could not stand living with the feeling that the movement with which the German nation wants to be saved regarded him as a traitor. […] Don’t mourn—but try to enlighten and to help the truth become victorious.⁸

The extreme anti‐Semitic [Fascist] paper Stürmer, edited by Julius Streicher, Gauleiter of Franconia, quoted from Rosenfelder’s suicide note and commended his suicide as a positive contribution to the solution of the Jewish question in Germany:

If the Jew Fritz Rosenfelder wanted to contribute to a change of the attitude of Germans towards the Jews, he died in vain. We think of him, now that he is dead, without any feelings of ‘hatred and resentment’. On the contrary, we feel happy for him and would not mind if his racial comrades sent their regards in the same way. Then, ‘reason will have returned to Germany’, with the Jewish question solved in a simple and peaceful manner…

To underline the point, the paper printed the story on its front page.⁹

Page 101:

[Fascist] officials forced Viennese Jews to sign a declaration committing themselves to their imminent emigration and then told them that the ‘way to the Danube [was] always open’, thereby encouraging them to kill themselves. After a Jewish shopkeeper had committed suicide together with his family in Vienna, storm troopers plastered his shop windows with placards saying ‘Please imitate’.²³

They expressed the same sentiments towards political prisoners (some of whom were no doubt of Jewish descent). Pages 77–8:

Especially in the early months of the Third Reich, the [Fascists] often encouraged imprisoned opponents to kill themselves, even bringing them rope with which to do it. For contemporaries, hanging was a particularly disgraceful way of capital punishment, reserved for criminals.⁸⁹ Giving prisoners rope with which to hang themselves was therefore particularly humiliating. After being arrested, Friedrich Schlotterbeck, a communist, was told by Gestapo officers shortly before Christmas 1933: ‘The best thing you can do is hang yourself […] You’ll save yourself a lot of trouble that way.’⁹⁰

A man from Düsseldorf who had been arrested and interrogated by the Gestapo in 1933 confirmed this practice. He later remembered that the officer interrogating him had threatened: ‘We’ll make you talk. We have very nice methods. Tomorrow your comrades can write of you that you were ‘suicided by the Gestapo’.’⁹¹

[…]

Albert Funk, a former communist Reichstag deputy and trade‐union leader from Dortmund was arrested on 16 April 1933 by the police and taken to prison. […] A contemporary exile publication […] reported that the [Fascists] had tortured Funk so badly that he, in despair, jumped out of the window into the prison yard. The [Fascists] allegedly encouraged other prisoners witnessing Funk’s death to follow his example. The guards reportedly shouted: ‘You Moscow swine can jump out of here, too.’⁹⁸

Surprisingly, however, the situation differed in the 1940s. Pages 107 & 115–6:

After the beginning of the deportations, [Axis] and state attitudes towards Jewish suicides underwent a fundamental transformation. No longer did the [Fascists] encourage Jews to commit suicide. At the beginning of the deportations in 1941, the Berlin Gestapo issued deportation orders a week before the actual deportation. But later, according to an eyewitness account, the [Fascists] changed this policy and did not tell Jews in advance of their deportation, because many Jews had used the interim to kill themselves.

The Jews were to become neoslaves now, and masters do not like it when their property expresses autonomy, especially when that property still has use to them. The Fascists now tried to discourage Jews from attempting suicide, not through compassionate conversation, but through punishment:

Herta Pineas, who had been working at the Levetzowstraße collection point for the deportees in 1942, later remembered what had happened to those who had attempted suicide, but who survived: ‘If not successful, suicide was a criminal offence!’ Typically of the Third Reich, this practice did not have a legal basis. The Gestapo denied survivors any food and put them onto the next available transport to the East.⁵⁰

[…]

SS attitudes towards suicide of camp inmates underwent a fundamental transformation once killing on a mass scale had begun. No longer did guards encourage prisoners to commit suicide. The SS severely punished suicide attempts, since suicide was an expression of self‐determination. Suicide ran counter to the [Fascist] total claim over the lives and bodies of the inmates.⁸⁷ […] ‘If a guard wants to drive someone into suicide, he subjects him to chicanery until he [the inmate] cannot stand it any longer; if he wants to kill him immediately, he does; but if he wants to prevent the suicide, the man who has undertaken the failed attempt receives 25 lashes.’⁹⁰

With the arguable exceptions of Auschwitz and maybe several other camps, punishment was usually ineffective:

[Axis] attempts to prevent Jews from committing suicide were not effective. A study compiled for Goebbels during the war, and presented to Hitler, calculated that the number of Jewish suicides increased from 94 in the third quarter of 1940 to 160 the third quarter of 1941, a rise of 70.2 per cent. Jewish suicide levels rose even further in the fourth quarter of 1941, when there were 850 Jewish suicides in the Altreich, an increase by a staggering 516 per cent compared to the fourth quarter of 1940.⁵²

[…]

In a camp purely dedicated to extermination, such as Treblinka, […] suicide out of sheer despair was so widespread that the SS forced Jewish inmates to go on night‐watch to prevent other inmates from killing themselves. Nevertheless, many Jews committed suicide, either by taking poison they had found in the luggage of those who had already been gassed, or by hanging—a slow and painful way of dying.⁹⁴

At best, somebody might have taken the failed suicide to an inadequate hospital. Pages 111–2:

In most cases, those Jews who had attempted to kill themselves in Berlin but failed were taken to the Jewish hospital, where they usually perished. Take the case of 64‐year‐old Harry S. from the middle‐class Halensee district. He overdosed on sleeping pills at his home on 13 March 1943. The police commented on his death at the Jewish hospital rather laconically: ‘Reason… : fear of evacuation. Relatives already evacuated…’⁶⁹

(Emphasis added in all cases.)

I have read a very plausible rumor that some neofascist gentiles on the world wide web try to bait Jewish youths into attempting suicide; what may at first seem like a ‘downgrade’ is in reality an atavism.

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If you yourself are feeling suicidal, please click here to find a hotline.

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Events that happened today (September 10):

1887: Giovanni Gronchi, Fascist Italy’s (briefly serving) Undersecretary for Industry and Commerce, was born.
1939: The Canadian declaration of war on the Third Reich received royal assent, and to make matters worse for the Fascists, Polish insurgents killed their Waffen‐SS general Wilhelm Fritz von Roettig. (On the other hand, the Third Reich might have been happier to learn that the submarine HMS Triton accidentally sunk HMS Oxley near Norway, becoming the Royal Navy’s first loss of a submarine in the war.)
1942: The British Army carried out an amphibious landing on Madagascar to relaunch Allied offensive operations in the Madagascar Campaign, frustrating Vichy France.
1943: In the course of Operation Achse, the Wehrmacht began its occupation of Rome.