Edited by: Domenico De Berardis, National Health Service, Italy
Reviewed by: Casimiro Cabrera Abreu, Queen’s University, Canada; Michele Fornaro, Columbia University, USA
Specialty section: This article was submitted to Affective Disorders and Psychosomatic Research, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychiatry
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Living conditions in concentration camps were harsh and often inhumane, leading many prisoners to commit suicide. We have reviewed this topic in Nazi concentration camps (KL), Soviet special camps, and gulags, providing some preliminary data for our research. Data show that the incidence of suicide in Nazi KL could be up to 30 times higher than the general population and was also much higher than in Soviet special camps (maybe due to more favorable conditions for prisoners and the abolishment of death penalty), while available data on Soviet gulags are contradictory. However, data interpretation is very controversial, because, for example, the Nazi KL authorities used to cover-up the murder victims as suicides. Most of the suicides were committed in the first years of imprisonment, and the method of suicide most commonly used was hanging, although other methods included cutting blood vessels, poisoning, contact with electrified wire, or starvation. It is possible to differentiate two behaviors when committing suicide; impulsive behavior (contact with electrified barbed wire fences) or premeditated suicide (hanging up or through poison). In Soviet special camps, possible motives for suicides could include feelings of guilt for crimes committed, fear of punishment, and a misguided understanding of honor on the eve of criminal trials. Self-destructive behaviors, such as self-mutilation in gulag camps or prisoners who let themselves die, have been widely reported. Committing suicide in concentration camps was a common practice, although precise data may be impossible to obtain.
Suicides under extraordinary or extreme conditions, such as prisons, war conflicts, or concentration camps, have been studied previously (
Prisoners are generally more likely to commit suicide than other people. Suicide rates in prisoners are estimated to be 55–107/100,000 (
In prewar Berlin, it has been pointed out that suicides were significantly more common in Jewish citizens than in the general population, and timing was often closely associated with anti-semitic persecution (
Suicidality has been described in Lodtz ghetto: some authors calculated a suicide rate of 85 per 100,000 in 1942 (
The topic of suicides in the Nazi KL has been studied more widely in memoirs than in medical or historical literature (
The main purpose of Nazi KL existence was to eliminate the Nazi Government’s enemies. In Nazi KL history, two periods must be differentiated, the prewar period from 1933 to 1939 and the war period from October 1939 to the end of war in 1945 (
Some authors have reported suicides in Nazi KL based on psychiatric interviews with the former prisoners. They described suicide as more frequent in those inmates who suffered the cruelest abuse, suffering from infectious diseases, forced to participate in medical experiments, during periods of mass extermination, and generally in autumn and winter (
There are several problems that make difficult a correct approach to this analysis (a) in the Nazi KL, mostly after 1940, suicides frequently passed unnoticed because death was so common, and only suicides committed by a well-known inmate or by a terrible method were noticed (
In Nazi KL, men and women of different age, race, nationality, profession, and social strata committed suicide. Some authors assess that suicides were most often committed by Jewish prisoners due to the fact that they were the largest group. But the Jewish group was extraordinarily inhomogeneous, composed of individuals from various social strata, cultures, and language groups (
Inmates, especially in their first period of imprisonment, are often desperate about their lack of freedom and the strict rules (
The methods to commit suicide in Nazi KL were varied, although these methods are related to the internal structure of the camps. For example, the camp authorities confiscated all knives and razor blades to avoid committing suicides by cutting blood vessels (
The most frequent method to commit suicide in KL was hanging. In the early months of the Third Reich, camp guards often encouraged prisoners to kill themselves, even bringing them rope with which to do it. Suicide by hanging took place in isolated places, committed during night hours, when vigilance was lower, and there were many objects with which the inmates could commit suicide by hanging, such as belts, scarfs, or others, so giving prisoners rope with which to hang themselves was an act of mental torture.
Suicide through poisoning was very rare and used by prisoners who were members of the camp resistance movement and who had access to poisons or chemical substances. Some prisoners committed suicide by different poisons: iodine, cyanide, arsenic, strychnine, or even by swallowing cement (
Some authors (
There are also descriptions of cases of mass suicide; it is reported that some soviet prisoners flung themselves onto the electric wires when they did not receive any food and water for days (
In most of cases, medical doctors in the camps falsified the primary cause of death, including suicide, on the prisoner’s death certificate. Sometimes, suicides were photographed by staff in various camps, as Auschwitz and Dachau (
In Nazi KL, the desire to die in prisoners who committed suicide was deep, and they did not treat suicide as an act of demonstration as they did not want to gain the attention of others (
Some authors (
We can differentiate two forms of behaviors when committing suicide in Nazi KL (a) impulsive behavior, such as crossing SS guard lines to get shot or touching the electrified barbed wire fences and (b) premeditated suicide, by hanging up or poisoning. These methods require more reflexion, looking for isolated places or poison to have. In case that we would consider self-starvation (“muslims”) as a suicide method, we could include it in this point.
Finally, it is noteworthy that some protective factors have been described (
In May 1945, the Soviet secret service, the NKVD (
Data on suicides in Soviet special camps in Germany have not been published in the scientific literature, except the preliminary data provided by our group about Soviet Special Camp number 7, created in Sachsenhausen KL (
However, we want to emphasize that a high number of suicides committed by general population, Nazi leaders, and lower officials, occurred in Germany around the period of German surrender in 1945. During 1945, in the months around the end of the war, direct propaganda to the population exhorting to self-sacrifice and carrying cyanide capsules was quite common. Suicide levels reached their maximum in Berlin in April 1945 when no fewer than 3,881 people killed themselves (
The most commonly reported method for suicide in this Special Camp was hanging. Although it is not easy to establish, among the possible motivations for committing suicide, we can mention feelings of guilt for crimes committed, resignation or fear of punishment, and misguided understanding of the honor on the eve of criminal trials. Some authors reported suicidal tendencies in Nazi leaders (
The gulag (
Suicides in Soviet gulag camps have also been studied (
Maybe only active suicides were reported as such, but passive suicides were not. Self-destructive behaviors, such as self-mutilation in gulag camps or prisoners who let themselves die, have been widely reported. Self-mutilation was, in many cases, an attempt to save one’s life by escaping slave labor, being sent to the hospital, or even released as invalid (
Suicides in KL are difficult to study because few documents are disposable, except data from interviews and testimonies. Moreover, there are a huge number of potential confounders in this topic: bias, because it is a self-report (recall bias), different religious, political and moral values, the setting (monitoring of the inmates, the kind and number of available tools), the time of imprisonment, etc. The topic of suicides in the Nazi KL has been studied more widely than in Soviet camps (Special camps and gulags), and there are marked differences between them, not only in the incidence rates (lower in the Soviet ones) but also in the possible motivation and suicidal behavior of suicidal inmates. The incidence of suicide in Nazi KL can be up to 10–30 times higher than for the general population. The main conclusions of topic analyzed are there are no specific profiles of suicidal group in the camps; the most frequent method to commit suicide was hanging; and the highest incidence of suicides occurs in the first years of imprisonment. Data on suicides during the Holocaust need to be analyzed in their fullness.
FL-M and EC-G both contributed ideas to the writing of the present mini-review.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This study was supported by a grant (UCJC 2013-47) of the Camilo José Cela University (II Convocatoria de Ayudas a la Investigación Competitiva).