The focus of Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself is not on those who were the most culpable for the evils of Nazi Germany. Rather, it looks at the many ordinary Germans who took their lives, or contemplated doing so, during the last days of the Third Reich. It’s a remarkable book — grim and fascinating. Florian Huber, a German documentary-maker, tells the story well. He quotes liberally from diaries, memoirs and other eyewitness accounts to describe the great death urge that overtook Germany.

The woeful pursuit of finality is the focus of Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself. The title foreshadows an under-represented history that is equal parts terrifying and tragic, and delivers on both counts ... The exact number of suicides is incalculable, but through gruesome examples, Huber conveys the enormity of the dreadful phenomenon ... Imogen Taylor delivers a vivid translation of the carefully researched work, bringing to life examples both sincere and senseless ... Amid the nearly unbearable darkness, Huber injects notes of hope ... Illuminating yet haunting, Huber’s study offers an uncommon portrait of Hitler’s barbaric reach to manipulate and massacre, reminding us of the well-known and tragic conclusion — amid the days of the Third Reich, human suffering emerged the victor.

If you’re German, it can be hard to discuss the war ... And that’s why Florian Huber’s book about mass suicides in the last year of the war is so intriguing. Because here is a German dealing directly with German trauma ... It’s horrific, but it’s not a new story ... Nonetheless, Huber tells this terrible history with compassion and care. He writes with an ease that makes the book flow smoothly despite the bleak nature of the subject matter, aided by a fine translation from the German by Imogen Taylor. You would have to be heartless not to be moved as you read this litany of rape and suicide ... In these terrible circumstances, it is perhaps surprising that more people were not driven to suicide. Why this didn’t happen is not an issue that Huber properly addresses. Instead, he believes the suicides were an 'epidemic'. But is this the correct way to describe the scale of what occurred? One problem is that no one knows exactly how many Germans took their own lives. Huber, rather confusingly, quotes two different estimates for the toll in Demmin ... Ultimately, the book offers us confirmation of truths we already knew. War is hell and ordinary people suffer.

The author suggests that guilt was...widespread. I question this, recalling a passage of Alan Moorehead’s superb book Eclipse, about his experience of 1945 Germany. He encountered little sense of guilt, he wrote, but rather an overpowering sense of defeat, such as had not existed in 1918, created by the devastation and occupation of the country ... unsatisfactory because it poses far more questions than it can answer ... The author’s relatively brief bibliography suggests that he may have read less than many other European writers about 1945 Germany, because books on the war command so poor a sale in his country. Many foreigners have written more graphically and interestingly than he does, about those ghastly times.

Huber retells the self-annihilation of May 1945 in dispassionate, vivid detail, but after a while the sheer repetition of 'ordinary Germans' ending their lives begins to dull the senses. At around about halfway through the book, he shifts the narrative back to the early days of optimism, when Hitler first came to power. It’s a rather jarring turn in direction that revisits some well-trodden ground, although Huber seeks to find new paths by using the recollections of some of the diarists he introduces earlier in the book. But little new light is shed on what we already know. Nonetheless, reading the testaments of people who’d come through a period of great uncertainty in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with the liberal order seemingly spent, it’s hard not to hear faint echoes in our current plight. As they do now, people then craved simple, emotional answers to complex economic and political problems.

...offers a grimly compelling insight into the psychology of fanaticism ... Although he does not make the links explicit, the background Mr Huber sketches provides some important context for the suicides. They were not simply driven by fear of the Red Army’s depredations. They reflected the implosion of a Nazi fantasy which had grown even more zealous as its evil became more obvious. Self-destruction did not signify a search for honour or redemption, but rather the collapse of a twisted idea of what honour meant.

Huber retells the self-annihilation of May 1945 in dispassionate, vivid detail, but after a while the sheer repetition of 'ordinary Germans' ending their lives begins to dull the senses. At around about halfway through the book, he shifts the narrative back to the early days of optimism, when Hitler first came to power. It’s a rather jarring turn in direction that revisits some well-trodden ground, although Huber seeks to find new paths by using the recollections of some of the diarists he introduces earlier in the book. But little new light is shed on what we already know.