Hitler Dies in Bunker: The Nazi Regime Collapses

Adolf Hitler shot himself in the right temple with a Walther PPK 7.65mm pistol on the afternoon of April 30, 1945, in his private study in the Fuhrerbunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. His wife of forty hours, Eva Braun, died simultaneously by biting into a cyanide capsule. Their bodies were carried up the bunker's emergency staircase to the Chancellery garden, placed in a shallow trench, doused with 200 liters of gasoline, and set alight. Soviet shells continued to fall as the bodies burned. Hitler was 56 years old. The final days in the bunker had been a grotesque compression of the Third Reich's entire trajectory: delusional optimism, paranoid rage, and catastrophic collapse. Hitler spent his last week alternating between fantasies of military rescue by nonexistent armies and bitter recriminations against the generals and allies he blamed for Germany's defeat. His physical condition had deteriorated severely. His left hand trembled uncontrollably. He shuffled rather than walked. His skin was gray, his eyes bloodshot, and his uniform stained with food. Whether these symptoms reflected Parkinson's disease, the effects of the dozens of medications administered by his personal physician Theodor Morell, or simply the stress of presiding over total defeat remains debated. The regime Hitler built did not survive him by a week. Grand Admiral Karl Donitz, named successor in Hitler's political testament, attempted to negotiate a partial surrender to the Western Allies while continuing to fight the Soviets, a transparent ploy that Eisenhower rejected. The unconditional surrender of all German forces was signed at Reims on May 7 and ratified in Berlin on May 8. The Thousand-Year Reich had lasted twelve years and three months. Hitler's death ended the European war but not its consequences. The Holocaust had murdered six million Jews and millions of others. The war itself killed an estimated 70 to 85 million people, roughly 3 percent of the world's population. Europe lay in ruins from the English Channel to the Volga. The geopolitical order that emerged from the wreckage, a divided Germany, a divided Europe, and a nuclear-armed standoff between superpowers, would define global politics for the next half century. The man who caused more destruction than any individual in human history died in a hole in the ground, and his body was never found by the Allies. Soviet intelligence recovered bone fragments and a jawbone, which were secretly preserved in Moscow until their existence was confirmed in 2009.