Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Downfall of Ordinary Germans, 1945 Audiobook (Free)

Presented by Penguin.

One of the last major stories on the 3rd Reich that remains to be largely untold is that of the extraordinary influx of suicides, completed not only by a lot of the Nazi leadership, but by a large number of ordinary Germans, in the Second World War’s closing period. A few of these were provoked by terror in the face of advancing Soviet soldiers or by personal guilt, but many could not be described in such relatively straightforward terms.

Florian Huber’s remarkable reserve, a about Guarantee Me You’ll Take Yourself: The Downfall of Regular Germans, 1945 bestseller in Germany, confronts this awful phenomenon. Additional countries have suffered defeat, but not responded in the same way. What drove whole families, who in many cases had already withstood many years of deprivation, aerial bombing and fatalities in battle, to do this?

Within a brilliantly written, thoughtful and original function, Huber sees the entire project of the 3rd Reich being a series of almost overwhelming emotions and scenes for many Germans. He describes some of the essential events which designed the period through the First World War to the end of the next, showing the way the sheer intensity, glamour and ferocity of Hitler’s program swept along hundreds of thousands. For over twelve years a relentless and awful drama formed German life and its sudden end was, for a large number of people, basically impossible to soak up.