Harsh reality of Life : Mass Suicides

It was 1945, in the final hours of the WWII.

The Nazis were losing ground, and the fate of Germany had been decided.

But if you walked through the streets of Berlin, you wouldn’t see liberations, you’d see some of the most horrific images known to man.

Mass suicides.

All at once, thousands of people giving up on their life, losing all hope.

Mothers, fathers, the youth, the elderly, everyone lost their will to live, the hope for a good life, the dream for a greater Germany.

It’s easy to look at the Germans as a whole and paint them with an evil brush. You might even think that most people deserved this fate.

But no. These were ordinary people.

These were people who had known extreme poverty and hardship, these were people who saw the crippled, lifeless husk Germany was after WW1, these were people promised a prosperous, liberated, powerful country with socialist benefits. These were people forced to obey a madman.

In one tiny town, 1000 people killed themselves in 3 days.

They knew it was over, they knew that they would be victims of torture, rape and violence like many prisoners of war. The debt Germany was saddled with for WW1 was so enormous it took until 2010 to pay it off. Only God knew what would happen to them this time.

Germany was finished.

The mayor of Leipzig and his wife killed themselves.

Ordinary people, a woman and a soldier, committed suicide.

And people finally opened their eyes, and gouged out the face of a their leader:

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These are the people history has forgotten.

Very few things are as horrific as seeing thousands willfully give up on life. But these people did.

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The harsh reality is:

The German people were victims of Hitler’s tyranny too. Most of them had no choice.

But history doesn’t remember them.

They don’t want to.

These are people who spent their lives suffering, were abandoned by their country, scorned by the victors of the war, and ignored by the future.

The most desolate of all people.