What was the suicide rate of slaves? Or Jews during the holocaust.

Suicide was a tragic and all too common reaction to the persecutions of the Nazi Regime, and even beyond, in a sense, as suicide was hardly unknown among exiles and survivors. This is a broad topic, so I will be focusing only on one aspect, specifically the German Jewish community, but of course welcome others to add in to discuss the conquered lands or the concentration camps. Even in the first days of the Third Reich, such actions can be seen, with several hundred Jewish persons killing themselves between 1932 and 1934, a rate 50 percent higher than Germany as a whole. Statistics are imperfect for the period since, although some studies were done official numbers never differentiated between Jewish and non-Jewish suicides for the period. Regardless of the exact numbers though, for the largely assimilated Jewish community of Germany, whose members had worked hard to be seen as Germans and self-identified as such it is not hard to understand the heartbreak and humiliation that such inhumane treatment would bring about with even with the mere installment of the anti-semitic regime, let alone the coming policies to implement that vision.

For the Nazis, of course, they didn't care, if not outright celebrated some of them, as was the case with the death of the Stuttgart businessman Fritz Rosenfelder, whose suicide note was published in excerpts by the Fascist tabloid Der Stürmer, with the commentary that "[W]e feel happy for him and would not mind if his racial comrades were to follow his excellent example. Then, ‘reason will have returned to Germany’, with the Jewish question solved in a simple and peaceful manner." Later, as Nazi officials worked to encourage emigration - at great cost - in the late '30s, suicide was openly presented to them as an alternative if they didn't like the idea.

Following the first 'wave', suicide as a reaction to further Nazi anti-Jewish policies seems to have been less pronounced, although my no means entirely dissipated, with notable suicides over the next few years that can be intimately linked to the further legal; privations brought upon the German Jewish community. The phenomenon remained enough of a problem that a study was commissioned by Berlin Jews in 1937. Although it was quickly banned by the Gestapo, it was published in a Dutch paper with disturbing findings, to wit.:

Whereas, between 1924 and 1926, there had been around 50.4 suicides per 100,000 Jews living in Berlin, these levels increased between 1932 and 1934 to 70.2 suicides per 100,000 German Jews.

Although there were other factors considered, including the Depression, and the aging Jewish population, the rise was conclusively linked to in part relate to the Nazi racial policies, something which of course publically resulted in the suppression of the study, but likely resulted in the dark approval of more than a few Nazi officials privately.

In any case though, however much there may have been a dip in the mid-decade, the sudden crash of the Anschluss into the Austrian Jewish community, where years worse of gradually worsening oppression instead was brought about in one fell-swoop. In a mere ten day span following the invasion, nearly 100 Vienna Jews are known to have committed suicide. The shop of one family who had done so jointly was quickly papered up with signs reading "Please Imitate". The Nazi pogrom of Kristallnacht later that year had similar effect tearing away what little hope might have remained for the few holding out. In one suicide note, that of 76 year old Hedwig Jastrow, she well illustrated the tragedy of having her sense of Germanness so forcibly taken:

Nobody must undertake any attempts to save the life of someone who does not want to live! It is not an accident, nor an attack of depression. I am leaving life as someone whose family has had German citizenship for 100 years, following an oath, and this oath has been always kept. For 43 years, I have taught German children and have helped them in all misery and for much longer, I have done welfare work for the German Volk during war and peace. I don’t want to live without a Fatherland, without a Heimat, without a flat, without citizenship, being outlawed and defamed. And I want to be buried with the name my parents once gave me and passed on to me, which is impeccable. I do not want to wait until it gets defamed. Every convict, every murderer keeps his name. It cries to heaven.

In the unending tragedy of this period though, things were only destined to continue turning for the worse. In 1941 began the deportations. The Jewish population, already deprived of much of their humanity, now deprived of their home, and as the deportations continued, more and more suspecting their ultimate fate, saw suicides rise even worse than before. In the Weissensee Jewish cemetery in Berlin, 811 burials of suicides were made in 1942 alone. The reaction of suicide to the discovery of being on the deportation list was frequent enough that it causes the Nazi authorities to cease issuing the list a week in advance, although if one name on the list ended up being dead, they would generally substitute another one in any case, treating them as numbers rather than people.

In all, it is nearly impossible to put an accurate number to Jewish suicides in this period. While the studies of the interwar period we can appreciate as at least being close, from 1941 onwards, we are dealing with much broader strokes, where at best partial numbers can be sussed out - unlike pre-war years, Berlin police tracked Jewish or non-Jewish in their numbers - and extrapolated upon. For Berlin, where records do exist, 1941 saw 332 Jewish suicides, or nearly 20 percent of the total. And specifically in the end of the year, with the first announcement of deportations in October, Jewish persons made up 40 percent. This statistic held on through 1942, with 886 Jewish suicides in Berlin that year, or 40 percent of all Berlin suicides. As in the previous year, these grouped around the deportations, with some estimates being that over 10 percent of designated deportees responding with suicide.

Looking more broadly at the German Jewish community nevers become less clear, and of course suicides of its members once they left Germany are even harder to track. Taking the span of the entire third Reich, 1933 to 1945 there is agreement that a large number of its members committed suicide against the backdrop of Nazi oppression, but beyond that, we only have estimates. With a community that initially numbered 525,000, various studies place those who chose suicide as being anywhere from 1% to 4% - or ~5,000 to 20,000 - this compared to a more 'normal' rate of under 0.03%.

As has already been noted, in large part, these suicides can be seen as reactions to the Nazi policies, to riff off Kaplan, the despair and loss of dignity experiences by the German Jewish population. It is rare in discussions within the Jewish community of these deaths, either at the time or later, to see strong censure of the decision, but instead generally a sense of respect for the decision made, and at least some echoed one writer who remarked "we envy those who muster the courage". For some though, suicide felt, if not like a victory, at least a way to maintain some level of control over their fate. Especially in the '40s, when suicides reflected more deliberate planning than the impulsive onoes of the early '30s, Jewish suicides, knowing their inevitable fate to be death, prefered to meet death now and on their terms rather than in the inevitable future and after untold humiliations. Although expensive and hard to come by, many who had the means began going about their normal day with vials of poison on their person, ready to act in a moment if necessary.

Although some scholarship, notably the 1984 work by Konrad Kwiet and Helmut Eschwege, look to portray suicide as an act of resistance, more recent works prefer to look at them as acts of self-assertion. Especially in the 1940s, when the Jewish population demographics skewed quite old, those younger and able often having fled abroad already, the primary concern evidenced is to die with dignity, and suicide offered one of the few ways have any control over that.

Sources

Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany by Marion A. Kaplan

Suicide in Nazi Germany by Christian Goeschel (Additionally, Goeschel's essay "Suicides of German Jews in the Third Reich" originally published in German History Vol. 25 No. 1, 2007)