This Day in History: On this day (May 1) in 1945, hundreds of people (if not a thousand) killed themselves in the town of Demmin, Germany. The suicides occurred during a mass panic that was provoked by atrocities committed by soldiers of the Soviet Red Army, who had sacked the town the day before, and the feared return of the Russian soldiers was too much to bear. This was the largest mass suicide ever recorded in Germany. The suicide was part of a mass suicide wave amongst the population of Germany where, at the end of the Second World War, 10,000 people killed themselves.
The hatred between Germany and Russia was intense. One Russian intellectual, Ilya Ehrenburg, wrote that, “If you have not killed at least one German a day, you have wasted that day...If you leave a German alive, the German will hang a Russian and rape a Russian woman. If you kill one German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.”
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