Promise Me You/'ll Shoot Yourself

The extraordinary German bestseller on the final days of the Third Reich explores one of the least understood stories of this period: the wave of suicides carried out not only by much of the Nazi leadership but also by thousands of ordinary Germans during the war's closing days. Some of these suicides were provoked by terror in the face of advancing Soviet troops or by personal guilt, but many cannot be explained in such straightforward terms. Florian Huber's remarkable book confronts this terrible phenomenon. Other countries have suffered defeat but did not respond in the same way. What drove whole families, who had already endured years of deprivation, aerial bombing, and deaths in battle, to take such drastic actions? In this brilliantly written, thoughtful, and original work, Huber views the entire project of the Third Reich as a sequence of overwhelming emotions and scenes for many Germans. He describes key events that shaped the period from the First World War to the end of the Second, illustrating how the intensity, allure, and ferocity of Hitler's regime swept along millions. Its sudden end was, for many, simply impossible to absorb.