Hitler Dead: The Dictator's Bunker Suicide Ends the Reich

Adolf Hitler shot himself in his underground bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin on April 30, 1945, as Soviet troops fought their way through the streets and buildings directly above. He had been living underground for months as the military situation collapsed, issuing orders to armies that no longer existed and refusing to authorize retreats that might have saved German soldiers. He married his longtime companion Eva Braun in a brief civil ceremony the day before, and she took cyanide alongside him. Their bodies were carried to the chancellery garden and burned with gasoline, as Hitler had instructed, to prevent the kind of public desecration that had befallen Mussolini's corpse two days earlier in Milan. Soviet soldiers found partially burned remains in a shell crater. Stalin, suspicious that the deaths had been faked, ordered multiple investigations and kept the recovered fragments under Soviet control. A jawbone fragment with distinctive dental work was retained as evidence. In 2009, DNA testing revealed that a skull fragment the Russians had displayed for decades as Hitler's actually belonged to a woman, probably Eva Braun. Hitler's death ended the Third Reich; the formal German surrender followed eight days later. Twelve years of Nazi rule had left between 70 and 85 million people dead across Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, including approximately six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and millions more killed in concentration camps, forced labor, and military operations on multiple fronts.