The End of Adolf Hitler

 

After Adolf Hitler survived the July 1944 plot Eva Braun, the young woman who had spent most of her life waiting for Hitler, wrote Hitler an emotional letter, ending: 'From our first meeting I swore to follow you anywhere - even unto death - I live only for your love.'  Eva Braun would now be with him forever. She had agreed to share Adolf Hitler's fate.

With Germany lying in ruins after six devastating years of war, and with defeat imminent, the Nazi dictator decided to take his own life. But before doing so, he wanted to thank the one who'd remained completely loyal to him until the very end. Early on the morning on April 29, 1945, in a civil ceremony in his bunker, Hitler married his mistress of many years, Eva Braun.

The next day at a little after 3:30 p.m., they bit into thin glass vials of cyanide. As he did so, Hitler also shot himself in the head with a 7.65 mm Walther pistol.

The last photo

So History saw Hitler's prophecy fulfilled, as the handful of remaining Nazis trooped uneasily into his underground study on April 30, 1945, surveyed his still-warm remains slouched on a couch, with blood trickling from the sagging lower jaw, and a gunshot wound in the right temple and sniffed the bitter-almonds smell hanging in the air. Wrapped in a gray army blanket, he was carried up to the shell-blasted Chancellery garden. Gasoline was slopped over him in a reeking crater and ignited while his staff hurriedly saluted and backed down into the shelter.

There is footage from May 1945 of Soviet troops searching for Adolf Hitler in the ruins of the Reich chancellery in Berlin. In an adjacent garden, near the emergency exit to Hitler's bunker, lie the charred bodies of the propaganda minister, Dr Joseph Goebbels, and his wife, Magda. The bodies of their six children were in the bunker, their poisoning ordered by their mother.

The Soviet troops were led to the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun and took the bodies with them as they moved west with the Soviet's Third Army. Each night the remains were buried, often in the woods, and then dug up when it was time to move on. Finally, Hitler and Braun were buried behind Smersh's East German headquarters in Magdeburg, and remained for 25 years under a yard later owned by a waste-disposal firm.

It was not until 1970 that the remains of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun were dug up from Magdeburg and destroyed.

Adolf Hitler had founded the Third Reich 12 years and three months before. His goals - the mass murder of the Jews, the establishment of a German Empire based on the conquest of the Soviet Union, the murder of the original inhabitants or their reduction to slaves of the Third Reich. His Nazi Regime led to the annihilation of more than six million Jews in Europe.

The Third Reich would survive him for one week - the nightmare he had unleashed was over..