“They sicken of the calm who know the storm.”
― Dorothy Parker, Sunset Gun: Poems
“The rain set early in tonight,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
And did its best to vex the lake:
I listened with heart fit to break.
When glided in Porphyria; straight
She shut the cold out and the storm,
And kneeled and made the cheerless grate
Blaze up and all the cottage warm;”
― Robert Browning
Porphyria Sick Pale Love[r]
Mass suicides in 1945 Nazi Germany
The Deputy Mayor of Leipzig and his wife and daughter, who committed suicide in the Neues Rathaus as American troops were entering the city on 20 April 1945.
During the final weeks of the Third Reich and the war in Europe, many civilians, government officials and military personnel throughout Germany committed suicide. In addition to high-ranking Nazi officials like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Philipp Bouhler and Martin Bormann, many others chose Selbstmord (German for "suicide", literally "Self-murder") rather than accept the defeat of Germany.[1] Motivating factors included fear of reprisals and atrocities by the Allies and especially the Red Army, Nazi propaganda that glorified suicide as preferable to defeat, and despondence after the suicide of Adolf Hitler. For example, in April 1945, at least 1,000 Germans killed themselves and others within 72 hours as the Red Army neared the East German town of Demmin.[2] In Berlin alone more than 7,000 suicides were reported in 1945; most of them were women.
Three distinct periods of suicides have been identified between January and May 1945 when thousands of German people took their own lives. Life Magazine reported that: "In the last days of the war the overwhelming realization of utter defeat was too much for many Germans. Stripped of the bayonets and bombast which had given them power, they could not face a reckoning with either their conquerors or their consciences."[1] German psychiatrist Erich Menninger-Lerchenthal [de] noted the existence of "organised mass suicide on a large scale which had previously not occurred in the history of Europe […] there are suicides which do not have anything to do with mental illness or some moral and intellectual deviance, but predominantly with the continuity of a heavy political defeat and the fear of being held responsible"…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_suicides_in_1945_Nazi_Germany