Quoting Christian Goeschel’s Suicide in Nazi Germany, page 152:
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 [anticommunist] 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.
I have no comment.
Doubt that notion of self-sacrifice as the author puts it has anything to do with it.
Idealism rots the brain to a point that this is a super typical option instead of paying consequences or even cope with cognitive dissonance. Jehovah’s Witnesses’s negative to blood is mere ideology, yet it kills a lot of them, while also many are killed for very preventable deaths just to show off and please the leaders.
I am not saying it is actually the case here, but that the possibility is not fantasious.
Seems to me that suicide took care of the Nazi problem better than bourgeois justice systems ever did. Critical support.
Fascist cowards will aways be cowards.
