Did Nazi Soldiers Suffer After the War? 5 Hard Truths

In 1946, a former SS man walked into a psychiatric clinic in West Germany and told the doctor he was haunted by screams from a camp he refused to name. He did not call himself a perpetrator. He said he was a victim of “war nerves.”

That scene, or something like it, played out across postwar Europe. The question is not whether former Nazi soldiers and camp personnel suffered mentally after the war. Many did. The harder questions are: how many, in what ways, and how did they explain it to themselves and others.

Historians and psychologists have spent decades trying to answer what your Reddit question gets at: can “ordinary” people commit mass violence without paying a psychological price. The record is messy. Some perpetrators broke down. Others drank heavily. Some killed themselves. Many lived long, apparently ordinary lives and never expressed remorse.

Here are five grounded points that help sort myth from evidence.

1. Yes, many former Nazi soldiers showed trauma symptoms, but they rarely called it guilt

What it is: After 1945, large numbers of German veterans reported symptoms we would now call PTSD: nightmares, flashbacks, irritability, depression. But in interviews and medical records, they tended to describe themselves as victims of war, not as people haunted by crimes.

Concrete example: The psychiatrist Alexander Mitscherlich, who attended the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial and later co-wrote The Inability to Mourn (1967), treated and observed many former soldiers. He and his co-author Margarete Mitscherlich argued that postwar West Germans showed massive psychological defenses: denial, rationalization, and what they called a “collective inability to mourn” the loss of Hitler and the Nazi project. Veterans complained of insomnia, anxiety, and “nervous heart” problems, but usually framed their suffering as caused by bombings, captivity, or personal losses.

In one documented pattern from 1950s West German clinics, ex-soldiers described recurring nightmares of battle scenes or being hunted, yet when asked about atrocities against civilians or Jews, they either minimized their role or claimed total ignorance. Psychiatrists often accepted these narratives and coded the men as traumatized ex-combatants, not as perpetrators wrestling with guilt.

Why it mattered: This matters because it shapes how we read the mental toll. Many former Nazis did suffer psychologically, but they and their doctors usually interpreted that suffering through a lens of victimhood, not responsibility. That made it easier for a whole society to talk about “war trauma” while avoiding a reckoning with what had been done to others.

2. Camp personnel sometimes broke down, but the system tried to manage their consciences

What it is: Within the SS and camp system, there are documented cases of guards and officers experiencing breakdowns, alcoholism, or requests for transfer because they could not handle mass killing. The Nazi state responded by rotating personnel, using euphemisms, and normalizing violence to keep the machinery running.

Concrete example: At the Aktion Reinhard death camps in occupied Poland, such as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, historians like Christopher Browning and Peter Longerich have found evidence of psychological strain among some staff. Christian Wirth, an inspector of these camps, reportedly complained about the effect of shootings on his men and pushed for gas chambers as a “cleaner” method. At the killing site of Kulmhof (Chelmno), one SS officer, Walter Burmeister, is reported in postwar testimony to have drunk heavily and been temporarily removed from duty because he could not cope with the shootings.

In the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads), commanders sometimes rotated shooters so the same men were not always at the firing line. Browning’s study of Reserve Police Battalion 101, which massacred Jews in Poland, shows some men begged off shooting duty, claiming weak nerves. They were usually reassigned to guarding or transport, not punished. The system had room for limited squeamishness, as long as the killing continued.

Why it mattered: These cases show that psychological strain existed even during the war, but the regime treated it as an efficiency problem, not a moral one. By offering alcohol, euphemisms, and role changes, the Nazis reduced the immediate mental toll on some perpetrators, which helped more of them carry on and later tell themselves they had only a small or indirect role.

3. Postwar suicide among former Nazis did happen, but it was not a massive hidden wave

What it is: Many high-ranking Nazis killed themselves at the end of the war, often to avoid capture. The question here is narrower: were there large numbers of suicides years later, driven by guilt or mental illness. The evidence points to some cases, but not a silent epidemic.

Concrete example: The most famous suicides are wartime or immediate postwar: Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, and numerous SS officers in 1945. After the war, there are scattered but telling cases. Franz Stangl, commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka, did not kill himself, but his 1971 prison interviews with journalist Gitta Sereny show a man who compartmentalized fiercely. He died of heart failure in prison, not suicide, which is typical of many senior perpetrators.

One clearer example is Herbert Lange, an SS officer involved in early gassing operations, who died in 1945 under unclear circumstances that may have been suicide while fleeing. For the later period you are asking about, historians like Harald Welzer and Norbert Frei have not found evidence of a large wave of delayed suicides among ordinary former Nazis in the 1950s and 1960s. There were suicides among ex-soldiers, but these are hard to link directly to guilt about atrocities rather than to general war trauma, economic hardship, or personal issues.

By contrast, among Holocaust survivors and other victims, elevated suicide rates are much better documented. Primo Levi’s death in 1987, widely regarded as a suicide, is part of that pattern. For perpetrators, the record is patchier and suggests that outright self-destruction from guilt was the exception, not the rule.

Why it mattered: The absence of a clear, large-scale suicide wave among former Nazis challenges the comforting idea that “they must have been destroyed by what they did.” Some were. Many were not. That forces us to confront how effectively people can rationalize or bury their actions rather than assuming a built-in moral breaking point.

4. Alcohol and drugs were part of the story, but often as wartime tools, not just postwar crutches

What it is: Nazi Germany used stimulants like methamphetamine (Pervitin) extensively during the war, especially among soldiers. Alcohol was routine in units involved in killing. After 1945, many veterans drank heavily, but it is hard to separate self-medication for trauma from broader cultural drinking patterns.

Concrete example: The historian Norman Ohler’s book Blitzed brought attention to the massive use of Pervitin by Wehrmacht soldiers in the early war years. Millions of tablets were distributed to keep men awake and aggressive during campaigns in France and the Soviet Union. There is less solid data on long-term addiction among these veterans, but some postwar medical files mention former soldiers with chronic nervous complaints and histories of wartime stimulant use.

Alcohol is easier to trace in the context of killing. Testimony from members of Einsatzgruppen and police battalions describes regular drinking before and after shootings. Men in Reserve Police Battalion 101 recalled that vodka or schnapps was available at massacre sites. Some said they drank to steady their nerves or to forget. After the war, heavy drinking was common among ex-soldiers in both East and West Germany, but so it was in many postwar societies. Specific links between individual perpetrators and lifelong alcoholism exist in memoirs and court records, but systematic statistics are lacking.

Why it mattered: Wartime use of drugs and alcohol helped many perpetrators function in the short term, which likely reduced immediate breakdowns. After the war, substance abuse blurred into the general culture of male drinking and “war stories,” making it easier for individuals to hide self-medication and for societies to ignore that some of that drinking was tied to memories of atrocity.

5. Diaries, letters, and postwar interviews show more denial and self-pity than open remorse

What it is: Personal writings and later interviews from former Nazis and ordinary soldiers rarely show the kind of raw, tormented guilt people often imagine. They show a mix of selective memory, justification, self-pity, and occasional cracks of unease.

Snippet-ready claim: Most Nazi perpetrators did not leave confessions of deep remorse. They left records of rationalization, minimization, and carefully edited memory.

Concrete example: Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, wrote an autobiography and memoirs in Polish custody before his execution in 1947. He described the mechanics of mass murder in detail and admitted his role, but his tone is often bureaucratic and detached. He framed himself as a dutiful officer following orders, not as a sadist. He mentioned strain and fatigue, but not the kind of mental collapse your question imagines.

At the other end of the hierarchy, letters and interviews from ordinary soldiers collected in works like Omer Bartov’s studies of the Wehrmacht or Harald Welzer’s Grandpa Wasn’t a Nazi show how family stories were cleaned up. Grandfathers who had served in units implicated in atrocities told their grandchildren about hunger, comradeship, and fear of the Russians. They left out shootings of civilians. When confronted with documents, many insisted they had been at the edge of events, not at the center.

There are exceptions. Some SS men in postwar trials broke down, expressed horror at what they had seen, or admitted lifelong nightmares. A few wrote letters of apology to victims’ families. But these are rare enough that historians treat them as notable outliers, not the norm.

Why it mattered: The texture of these personal sources matters because it pushes back against the idea that atrocity automatically produces visible remorse. What we see instead is how memory, self-image, and social pressure allow many perpetrators to live with what they did, often by recasting themselves as small cogs, victims of circumstance, or even heroes.

So did “average” Nazi soldiers pay a mental price?

The short answer is: many did, but not always in the way we might hope or expect.

There is good evidence that large numbers of German veterans and some camp personnel suffered from what we would now call trauma: nightmares, anxiety, depression, and heavy drinking. There is some evidence of breakdowns and suicides, both during and after the war, though not on the scale of a hidden epidemic driven by guilt.

What is much less common in the record is open, sustained remorse about crimes against Jews and other victims. Instead, we see a pattern: psychological suffering framed as personal misfortune, wartime horror remembered mainly as what “they” did to “us,” and a society that for decades was more ready to listen to stories of German suffering than to those of the people Germany had destroyed.

That is why your instinct, that such crimes must leave a mark, is both right and incomplete. The mark was often there. It just did not always look like confession or collapse. It looked like silence at the dinner table, a father who drank too much, a veteran who could not sleep, and a country that called all of that “war trauma” without asking too hard what, exactly, these men had seen and done.