Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself describes a wave of suicides that took place in the German town of Demmin between 30 April and 3 May 1945. The sheer scale of the deaths is almost unimaginable. As he writes: 

People went to deaths in their droves: young men and women, staid married couples, people in the prime of life, the retired and the elderly. Many took their children with them: infants and toddlers, schoolchildren and adolescents.  

These civilians killed themselves by any means available; hanging, shooting, poisoning, slit wrists. The town is on the intersection of three rivers, so self-drowning was common. Because the rivers are shallow and their currents weak, people filled rucksacks with rocks, sometimes tying small offspring to their chest before throwing themselves in.  

Demmin wasn’t unique. Mass civilian suicides ravaged Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war. Tens of thousands of people took their own lives. A minimum estimate for Berlin alone numbers over 7000 deaths in a few weeks. Huber sees this “black wave of self-destruction” as an interlude whereby society’s “suicide taboo” was lifted in incredibly extreme circumstances. 

Historians have asked how it came about that the Third Reich ended with thousands of people choosing both the timing and the manner of their own end. The number of suicides in the east of the country show that the terror of living under vengeful Russian occupation was an obvious factor. Yet there were also thousands in the west, suggesting other factors were at play. Having been intoxicated by a murderous and maniacally deluded regime, Huber concludes that defeat meant a “collective loss of meaning” to the extent of total “personal disintegration”. 

From his writings in 1940, however, the Nazi-resisting theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer shows that the regime lifted the “suicide taboo” before the mass suicides of 1945. He examines the suicidal tendencies inherent to Nazism in relation to euthanasia. Bonhoeffer decided self-chosen death should not be seen as a consequence of losing one’s sense of meaning, but as a final reassertion of demanding meaning on one’s own terms: “man’s attempt to give a final human meaning to a life which has become humanly meaningless.” Euthanasia means there is a disjuncture between the meaning people want to choose for themselves, and the meaning reality ever forces upon us — a meaning not always perspicuous to oneself, suggesting every moment of life matters, regardless of how we ourselves see it.  

A 25 year Polish man saw the regime up-close in 1945, before travelling to Rome to study for the Catholic priesthood the following year. Fifty years later, in 1995, Karol Wojtyła, then Pope John Paul II, described the increasing demand for medically-administered suicide in developed countries as demonstrative of a newer “culture of death”. This moris cultura is created by “powerful cultural, economic and political currents”, he said, conspiring around an excessive focus on “efficiency”. 

To see the meaning of life as something captured by what a person accomplishes, means the life prohibited by illness or infirmity from accomplishing very much at all appears meaningless. Such a person will probably present a significant burden of care and concern to their loved ones, restricting them from accomplishing as much as they desire as well. Borrowing from Bonhoeffer, again, to opt for medically-administered suicide then asserts a “final human meaning” — it decides to value that person’s prior achievements and free-up those around them to achieve whatever they want, unburdened.

John Paul II also claimed that euthanasia seems eminently reasonable for people used to taking “decisions into their own hands”. This connects with diagnoses of the contemporary world as characterized by poiesis. This means not seeing the world as having what Carl R. Trueman calls a “given order and a given meaning”, but rather seeing the world as one in which we’re expected to create our own meaning and purpose. This “expressive individualism” cannot abide the possibility that life has meaning beyond one’s own reckoning. Obstacles to expressing oneself then seem to deprive life of meaning itself.

Discussions of euthanasia never begin in such direct terms. Cultural tendencies require a lengthy gestation to break through to a moment where people begin, en masse, to consider it unquestionable that choosing the manner and timing of your own death is both eminently reasonable and morally desirable. Language plays a significant role. Those Germans who took their lives in 1945 committed what was called Selbstmord, literally “self-murder”. What we used to call “assisted suicide” is now the gentler and more seductive euphemism, “assisted dying”.

The new euphemism pretends that intravenously administering a lethal dose of deadly poison into the arm of an unwell person is merely a supportive gesture — generously assisting them along an otherwise inevitable trajectory which is already well underway.

In this it is quintessential Starmerism. It appears to surrender without reserve to an unchosen and inexorable inevitability. The same fatalism is applied to the economic “black-hole”, small boats, winter-fuel payments, and releasing prisoners early. But politics is always a choice — and the narrative about overwhelming and systemic inevitabilities is contradicted by the same government’s nimble and unexpected interventions: 24-hour courts, new smoking bans, scrapping the Freedom of Speech Bill, and Lords Reform. The Starmerite paradox is aptly shown by the decision to change a millennia’s old, steadily unbroken norm of human civilization by radically fast-tracking it through the legislative machine. 

Don’t expect such attention for the Belgian woman euthanized in her early 30s for suffering from depression

Another step in the playbook is to marshal the organs of the regime to wheel out human story after human story focusing only on the most inexplicably hard cases. Expect documentaries about tragic cases of locked-in syndrome, motor neurone disease, and early-onset dementia. Expect to be genuinely troubled by heartbreaking, tragic cases which would make anyone wonder if they’d opt for euthanasia in those circumstances, if it were their families having their lives turned upside down to care for what’s left of their mother or father. 

Don’t expect such attention for the Belgian woman euthanized in her early 30s for suffering from depression. Nor the 34-year old Canadian man who was unemployed, blind in one eye and depressed, and only saved after his mother pleaded with the doctor responsible to reconsider. Nor the 16-year old girl with a brain tumour. And definitely don’t expect much reporting on the apparently modest tweaks to the laws in those countries that were originally presented as gentle and caring — such that only an unfeeling monster would pretend that a rubicon was being crossed, and from that point there would be no return. 

Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself ends with the 1959 hearing of Paul Kittel, who was charged with multiple manslaughter for his role in the post-war suicides. In 1945 he and his family all agreed to die, so he shot his wife and then his two sons, before turning the gun on himself. But the trigger just clicked. He was out of bullets. The jury were understandably lenient, deciding he was of unsound mind at the time it happened.

We can’t begin to imagine what the remaining years of Paul Kittel’s life had been like. The problem for us is that, once the euthanasia rubicon is crossed, it’s never long before even being of unsound mind presents the option of a medically-administered death. The irony is that, had Kittel lived in today’s culture of death, he may not have survived at all.