History of Europe

Mass suicide in Demmin:We still wanted to live!

The end of the war also means traumatic experiences for many who lived through it. Brigitte Roßow was ten years old when she witnessed and was affected by the unprecedented mass suicide in Demmin at the beginning of May 1945.

In 2020, after 75 years, Brigitte Roßow told the story of her trauma for the ARD television documentary "Children of War" and the Nordmagazin on NDR television.

by Jan N. Lorenzen and Siv Stippekohl

The scars stayed. She finds it difficult to talk about it, she does not complete some sentences. Every time something falls out of her crippled hand, the memory comes back. Images of a hayloft in the spring of 1945 haunt her in nightmares. The image of the woman who hanged herself, the little child whose throat was being squeezed, how she fought back because she didn't want to die. "I will never forget that. It's in my memory. I was only ten years old. I was still a child," says Brigitte Roßow.

Escape from the Red Army into the forest

For a long time, young Brigitte Roßow didn't hear much about the war. In March 1945, towards the end of the Second World War, she was ten years old. Only the father is missing, he is at the front. The mother is alone with three children, with Brigitte, her almost 14-year-old brother Winfried and her four-year-old sister Sigrun. School lessons, says Roßow, have not been taking place for a long time, a military hospital is housed in the school. But in Demmin it stays quiet, only now and then do the children see airplanes in the sky.

Brigitte Roßow remembers soldiers who then, at the end of April 1945, warned of combat operations in the neighborhood and advised them to leave their houses. The family hastily packs up what they can use on the way and flees with other women and children into the forest to escape the advancing Red Army.

A farmer takes the group in briefly and provides them with milk. And:Brigitte's mother once went with a Russian and said she should take care of little Sigrun until then.

Demmin burns - young women hand out razor blades

After the Soviet troops marched into Demmin, the city burned for days. Much was destroyed - the church remained standing.

From afar, Brigitte sees the sky turning red. Demmin is on fire. The bridges behind them have been blown up, and the way back to the city of 15,000 is blocked. The forest floor trembles. "We heard the tanks coming close, we wanted to get out of the forest, we got scared because the ground was shaking," Brigitte Roßow recalls. A woman suggests hiding with a relative. Once there, everyone crawls onto a hayloft. Above are already young women with a small child. "Oh man," exclaims Brigitte Roßow, "they were crazy and gave out razor blades."

The cousin cuts her and her son's arms

According to Roßow's memory, around 15 to 17 people panicked in the hayloft at the time. They think the Russians are taking the children away. A cousin of Brigitte Roßow is also on the ground, she lets herself be infected by the hysteria, cuts open her forearms and her little son with a blade. An old woman tries to hang herself, says Brigitte Roßow, "and then she whined up there and then they said:'Quiet! You're going to get the Russians up here!' They squeezed the little boy's throat because he started crying. I never understood that, I couldn't understand that - so the child wouldn't make any noise!"

"I didn't keep still when my mom cut"

The elderly lady who hanged herself is dead. So is the child whose throat was squeezed. Brigitte Roßow falters and is close to tears as she continues:The cousin says her boy is dying away. "And all of a sudden, when my cousin's boy's head fell to the side, Mom did it too." Brigitte's mother begins to open the arteries of her children and herself with one of the razor blades. However, makes the cuts incorrectly and not deep enough. And:Brigitte doesn't keep her arm still, squirms:"I just knew:I didn't want to die. And I didn't keep still either!". Her brother Winfried also defends himself and flees. He jumps down from the hayloft. Brigitte remembers a big mess, a scuffle, the women who want to stop Winfried. And the fact that her brother is returning, accompanied by Soviet soldiers.

The soldiers tend to the wounds

His arm is bandaged. The soldiers are upset and threaten to shoot Brigitte's mother. Winfried stands protectively in front of her with his sisters, little Sigrun in the middle, and says they should shoot him - but not his mother. "And then they stroked him," says Roßow. "They were very angry that my mother cut our wrists." The soldiers treat the wounds, disinfect them. Sigrun yells like crazy, Brigitte refuses. Later her injury will become inflamed and fester, home remedies such as chicken fat will not help. She never went to a doctor, she accepted it. The little finger of the right hand can hardly be moved, writing is not easy. "There must have been tendons cut," she says, twisting her scarred wrist. She just had to learn to use her left hand.

You couldn't talk about what happened

The family lives on in the destroyed Demmin. In 1946 the father returned from American captivity. She never spoke about the events later, either with her mother or with her brother, you just couldn't. "Mum must have felt very guilty and blamed herself for doing it," says Brigitte Roßow, struggling to regain her composure. "We were very attached, my mother was the most important person in our... that's obvious."

She has often searched for an explanation, wondering if her mother had been raped like so many women in those early days of May. The mother always said no. To this day, Brigitte Rossow wonders what happened to those young women who distributed the razor blades in the hayloft. Were they fetched beforehand? It remains a mystery.

Drowned, hanged, shot, poisoned

"Struggled by Grandfather":This is how the Demminer Totenbuch documents the death of a girl who was not even a year old.

It is also unclear how many people killed themselves in Demmin in the spring of 1945. The book of the dead, created by the daughter of the cemetery gardener in early May, lists hundreds of dead people. It was probably around a thousand dead, if not more, who took their own lives in Demmin at the end of the war. More than anywhere else. People have drowned themselves, hanged themselves from window crosses, shot themselves or poisoned themselves. Whole families were wiped out, mothers walked into the water with their children by the hand - with backpacks weighed down with stones and their babies in their arms. Corpses drifted into Tollense, Trebel and Peene, they were buried in mass graves. Desperation and shame, but also ideological guilt, patriotism and panic fueled by Nazi propaganda drove masses of people to their deaths.

"People haven't been normal anymore"

Brigitte Rossow survived the hayloft, she stayed in Demmin. When neo-Nazis exploit the events of 1945 and march through Demmin every year on May 8th, they don't dare step outside. She only knows these pictures from television and from the documentary "Über Leben in Demmin" by Martin Farkas. "I would never have gone out because I don't understand it at all. They throw wreaths on the Peene! And even children do that! That's such nonsense!" What she likes, however, is the quote from the diary of a teacher on the memorial stone in the cemetery, which wrote on May 1, 1945:"Free dead, lost for the meaning of life". Brigitte Roßow nods to this. "That's true. That's how it really was," she says. As a child, she had to experience how contagious despair is and what panic can do.

The memory of the unimaginable will not let go of her. "People weren't normal anymore. I can't explain it any other way. Maybe we children were even more normal, because we wanted to live!". And adds:"All I know is:I didn't want to die. And I don't think Mom wanted it either."