Don't get carried away by overestimating what I mean when I say the word "many", Ron. I am not suggesting that a large percentage of the overall German population committed suicide, but I am suggesting that quite a significant number of ordinary soldiers and civilians did so under the stress of facing total defeat and destruction of the society they had just spent over 5 years fighting for to the best of their ability. They were in despair. It was that despair that drove most of them to suicide, not some kind of fanatic loyalty to Naziism (although that would have applied in a few cases).

I'm not talking about the bigwigs like Goebbels, Hitler, etc...I'm talking about ordinary people. Many Berliners in particular committed suicide, specially a considerable number of women who had been raped and beaten by Russian soldiers. A good many German soldiers shot themselves rather than be captured by the Russians, because they expected that being captured would lead to far worse suffering than they wished to endure...and a worse death than a self-inflicted bullet.

And they had good reason to think so. Most of the German soldiers who were taken prisoner by the Russians went east to concentration camps from which they never returned. They died in those camps.

As regards the vast number of people who fled west toward the western Allies...you are dead right about that. Any German who could find any feasible way to escape west and surrender (with the exception of Hitler and Goebbels and Mrs Goebbels) made the utmost effort to do so.

I was not suggesting that "many" Germans in the western theatre of action committed suicide at war's end. I was referring to those in the Russian-occupied areas.