Suicides of German Jews in the Third Reich

This article re-examines Jewish responses towards Nazi racismby studying German-Jewish suicides. Its purpose is twofold.First, it moves beyond the discussion of suicide as a statisticalincidence and asks what motivated German Jews to commit suicide.Statistics, however elaborate, disregard individual fates andcircumstances. While not entirely dismissing suicide statistics,this article is primarily concerned with qualitative questionsof social context and individual motives. It introduces hithertoneglected archival sources, including suicide notes. These sourcesallow us to assess the impact of Nazi racial policies on individualsuicides and to study the emotional effect of Nazi policieson German Jews. This article also takes up the question as tohow far, if at all, German-Jewish suicides can be considereda form of resistance towards Nazism and to what extent theywere an act of despair and hopelessness. The Nazis claimed tobe the arbiters over the lives of Jews once the deportationsstarted in 1941. The vast majority of Jews left in Germany afterNovember 1938 were fairly elderly. They could not be expectedto go into hiding, and their will to live may have been less,as was, undoubtedly, the ability or desire to start a new lifeelsewhere. In this bleak context, the overwhelming majorityof German-Jewish suicides derived from personal despair andthe desire to preserve individual dignity and agency. Nazi racialpolicies coalesced in a condition of anomie, an overturningof normal life and its norms and values that increases the likelihoodof suicide, prompted by the collapse of hope in the possibilityof a future. Emile Durkheim originally developed the conceptof anomic suicide as a way to explain suicide as a social phenomenon.This concept helps us understand the suicides of German Jewsin the Third Reich both in their wider political and privateimplications.