Language:
English
Year of publication:
2007
Titel der Quelle:
German History
Angaben zur Quelle:
25,1 (2007) 22-45
Keywords:
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
;
Suicide Religious aspects
;
Judaism
Abstract:
A socio-psychological examination of Jewish responses toward Nazi racism in the form of a study of the phenomenon of suicide. The number of Jewish suicides rose remarkably under the Nazi regime. Suicide levels rose each time the Nazis launched direct actions (e.g. the April 1933 boycott, the Anschluss in Austria, and the "Kristallnacht" pogrom), and subsided temporarily afterwards. The first deportations to the East, in 1939-41, also engendered a rise in the suicide level. The overwhelming majority of German Jewish suicides derived from despair and a desire to preserve individual dignity and agency. During the deportations, suicides were, in a sense, acts of resistance, based on the will to control one's own fate despite Nazi attempts to be the only arbiters over the lives and deaths of Jews. Notes that in the Nazi camps cases of suicide were rare because, under camp conditions, a voluntary death was not a dignified end but a form of surrender.
DOI:
10.1177/0266355407071991
URL:
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