When the guns finally fell silent in Europe—less than a day into what was supposed to be peace—hundreds of middle-aged women were found slumped on park benches in German and Austrian cities, very much dead by their own hand. They had waited, and hoped, for the Reich to pull one last miracle out of its blood-soaked hat. They had believed the slogans, inhaled the posters, swallowed the speeches whole. They had lived the dream—if only in their heads.
These weren’t Goebbels’ inner circle or the pampered wives of high-ranking profiteers. They were standard-issue housewives, indistinguishable from the women you’d nod to at the bakery. They’d been riding high on the fumes of a fantasy that had never been real, but they had feasted on it like starving things.
And when it ended—when even the most committed propaganda-drunk could no longer pretend the Reich was anything but a rotting corpse—they ended too. They couldn’t imagine life in a Germany not draped in swastikas.
Narratives, once rooted, do not dissolve under the acid of mere suffering. They cling. They fester. They outlast regimes, and this one would leak its poison for years, decades. We may toast small victories, but we’re still at the opening bars of the long, discordant symphony of taking our lives back.