Draft:Suicide by electrocution

Suicide by electrocution is the deliberate use of electrical current of sufficient voltage to cause self-harm resulting in death. While the victim often suffers burns and internal injuries resulting from the electricity, death results from the disruption of the heart rhythm. It is not a common suicide method. However in the Nazi concentration camps it became the most frequent means of suicide due to the high-voltage electrical fences surrounding the camps; the Nazis even openly encouraged it on some occasions.

Electrocution is considered a violent method of suicide, and like other violent methods is predominantly employed by men. Most who choose this method have experience working with electrical appliances or infrastructure and use that in their suicides, since it requires some preparation. Suicides by electrocution are evenly split between those who use high-voltage utility current and those that use lower-voltage household current. Among the latter group are the women who employ this method, almost all of whom choose to die in a bathtub in which they deliberately drop a plugged-in hair dryer.

History

While deaths from electrical injury have long occurred from lightning strikes, that was their only cause until the use of electricity became technologically feasible and widespread after the Industrial Revolution. The first death from electrocution was recorded in Lyons, France, in 1879. Two years later an American physician proposed the idea of using electrocution in executions, and in 1890 the electric chair went into use for that purpose in the U.S. The use of electric current as a suicide method was raised in an 1896 inventor's proposal of a coffin that would pass current through the body of someone lying in a specially designed coffin once they rested their head on a switch. The device was intended to allow the suicide to be formally buried immediately afterwards.

Suicides by electrocution are reported as early as 1901, when a man in the Italian city of Turin climbed a ladder and grabbed two conduits in either hand, killing him instantly as he fell with "bluish flames" from his hands. The British newspaper that reported this event described it as "a new departure in suicide". The following year, in the U.S., an Omaha, Nebraska, electrician was reported as having taken his own life by electrocuting himself. It was reported that he entered the power plant where he worked early one morning, removed the insulation from two thousand-volt wires, and then touched them both with wires he held in his hands.

In 1907 a coroner's jury convened in Kingston upon Thames heard what was reported as the first case of suicide by electrocution on record. The victim, William Brown, visiting a power plant where he occasionally did carpentry work, asked the foreman to show him the most dangerous parts of the electrical equipment. These turned out to be the terminals of a switch on one of the alternators, which Brown was told would send 2,000 volts through the body of anyone touching both of them while the circuit was active. Brown asked if that would result in a near instantaneous death; the foreman assured him that it would. A few minutes later, the foreman's work was interrupted by shouts from the vicinity of the switch. Seeing Brown resting his head against the switch as well as clutching the two terminals, he switched off the current but Brown was already dead. A note confirming his suicidal intent was found on the body.

The use of electricity in a suicide is reported in a 1926 issue of Science and Invention, edited by Hugo Gernsback. A electrician and his girlfriend in Trieste, Italy, went into a local powerhouse and wrapped a cable around themselves, after which the electrician attached a stone to one end and threw it over a live cable to bring it in contact with the current. A citywide blackout ensued, leading to the discovery of the bodies in the powerhouse. It was described as the first suicide by electrocution in Italy. Four years later an Austrian butcher sought for a killing took his own life the same way when he was unable to further elude police.

In Nazi concentration camps

In the early 1940s the Nazi Germany regime began placing political prisoners from countries it had conquered early in World War II in concentration camps where inhumane living conditions and harsh and often capricious discipline made death among those so imprisoned frequent. Later camps such Auschwitz had gas chambers added to exterminate many, primarily Jews, that the Nazis found undesirable and unfit for labour. Other camps, like Treblinka, were devoted solely to that purpose. Many prisoners, seeing minimal prospect for survival, turned to suicide to have some control over their fate. A later history that reviewed accounts by survivors in addition to camp medical records kept at Auschwitz by the Nazis suggests the true number of suicides in the camps was far higher than previously believed. It is difficult to determine exact numbers since many killings and suicides were often reported as the other manner of death.

The electric fence around Auschwitz I, with warning sign from camp era, in 2009

Since any knives and other sharp objects were confiscated upon intake to the camps for security reasons, prisoners seeking to take their own lives found other methods. The most common was to deliberately touch the 5,000-volt electrified fence around the camp perimeter, referred to as "flinging oneself into the wires" (Polish: rzucenie się na druty). This usually caused death instantaneously and led the body to burn. Most commonly those suicides chose dawn or dusk; some took place during the camp's daily assembly where thousands of prisoners and staff could see. Suicides were observed to either run directly at the fence or walk slowly, "as if with ostentation and ecstasy."

Bodies of prisoners on the electric fence at the Mauthausen camp in Austria

The bodies of completed suicides were often left in place. One Auschwitz survivor described the fences as "covered with bodies ... they would burn as it was described that there was never a time in the camp when there weren't a dozen people who had gone out and committed suicide on these fences and their bodies were burnt brown and crisp and the smell was throughout the camp."

Eight instances of mass or group suicide were recorded in the camps, many using electrocution. In the earliest, a group of Soviet prisoners of war, after being denied food following evening roll call, ran en masse into the nearby fence. Survivors of Birkenau, the women's camp at the Auschwitz complex, recalled one case of a Slovak woman who, no longer able to protect her teenage daughters, donned Soviet POW uniforms one night in October 1942 and walked towards the fence. She told a guard that she could no longer abide her daughters' suffering. The older one went willingly into the fence; after pushing the younger daughter to her death the woman knelt in front and clasped the wire.

The Nazis themselves were aware of suicide by this method from the early days of the camps, and did not discourage it. Upon the arrival of the first large group of prisoners at Auschwitz in June 1940, deputy commandant Karl Fritzsch addressed the 728 prisoners, mostly Polish resistance fighters and intellectuals swept up in the A-B Aktion, disillusioning them about their chances for long-term survival at the camp. "The only way out is through the chimney," he advised them. "If someone doesn't like it, they can go straight to the wires."

References

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Categories:

• Suicide methods
• Electrical safety