Adolf Hitler committed suicide on April 30, 1945, after being hunted by Soviet troops storming Berlin.
As Soviet soldiers scoured the burning streets of Berlin above his head searching for him, on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler began his normal work routine that morning deep in the bunker under the Reich Chancellery building.
Ten days before, he had emerged from the bunker into daylight on his birthday. He inspected, with a trembling hand, a group of boys sent to defend the city against the Red Army in the name of Hitler’s professed philosophy of racial superiority.
On April 29, he had completed his will and last political testament and married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun.
The word that Benito Mussolini had met his death in Italy arrived before lunchtime; Mussolini’s corpse, along with that of his mistress, Clara Petacci, had been smashed in fury by a mob and hung upside down outside a gas station—a most ignoble end for the man whom Hitler credited with having taught him that a civilization’s decline could be reversed.
The tee-totaling, vegetarian Hitler had a quiet last lunch, shook hands with the remaining staff, and that afternoon committed suicide with his wife on a couch in his private sitting room.
The bodies were burnt in the courtyard, and Hitler’s funeral pyre, with the din of the Russian guns growing ever louder, made a lurid end of the Third Reich.