On This Day: Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun kill themselves after a day of marriage

APRIL 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler and his short-lived wife Eva Braun killed themselves on this day in 1945 as Soviet troops laid siege to the Nazi dictator’s Berlin bunker.

The architect of World War II and the Holocaust, fearing a public execution, shot himself after Braun bit into a cyanide capsule less than 24 hours after their marriage.

SS men burned their bodies in gardens where Hitler made his last public appearance ten days earlier on his 56th birthday when he awarded boy soldiers the Iron Cross.

Soviet soldiers, who were only yards from the bunker when the secret lovers killed themselves, also found the scorched remains of his two dogs Blondi and Wulf.

And they discovered the charred bodies of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, his wife Magda and their six children, who were all killed by cyanide in their sleep.

But the Soviets did not reveal this information until decades later and for many years accused the Western Allies of harbouring the former dictator.

So it was that many people in Britain and America were initially sceptical of Germany’s announcement, made on May 1, 1945.

The Führer’s appointed successor Admiral Karl Doenitz – filmed in a British Pathe newsreel - told compatriots on radio that Hitler had ‘fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancellery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany’.

Six weeks later, one of Hitler's bodyguards told the British that he had seen the partly burned bodies of Braun, 33, and the Führer lying near the entrance of his bunker.

It also emerged that many senior Nazis and German military chiefs had disobeyed Hitler’s fight-to-the death policy as his evil empire was blasted to bits.

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Doenitz moved 1.5million troops west, so that they could not be captured by the Soviets, and then ordered Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Americans.

And Albert Speer, the armaments minister charged with carrying out Hitler’s Nero Decree to destroy all remaining industry and infrastructure, was appalled by the idea.  

Hitler described his generals as ‘contemptible, disloyal cowards’ in a final meeting when he learned that attack orders were not being followed.

By then he believed Germans should utterly forfeit their nation if they could not fight for it, telling Speer: ‘If they fail this test I will not shed one tear for them’.

This road to ruin, which cost the lives of six million Germans among 44million others worldwide, began when the Nazis won the November 1932 election.

Hitler used his power as Chancellor to dismantle democracy by fostering fears of a communist revolution and then installed himself as dictator.

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The Austrian-born former artist, who served in the German Army during World War I, blamed the Jews for Germany’s defeat and declared them enemies of the people.

He moved to isolate Jews from German society and establish a new order that would advance the ‘superior’ Aryan race and promote the ‘survival of the fittest’ idea.

He gained popularity by rapidly expanding the country’s reparation-damage economy and annexing land populated by ethnic Germans.

But he did not stop at seizing Austria and Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland – and while Britain and France initially appeased him, they eventually resolved to fight Germany.

The final straw came when Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.

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It was here that the Holocaust began in 1942 with the Nazis beginning their systematic murder of all but 300,000 of country’s 3.3million Jews.

As the war continued, another three million of Europe’s Jews would be killed in the ‘Final Solution’, partly to gain ‘lebensraum’ – living room – for Germans.

Germany’s dominance in the early stages of the war – including defeating France in just six weeks in the summer of 1940 – left many believing she was invincible.

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But most historians believe Hitler made a grave mistake by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941 rather than continuing attempts to invade Britain.

American entry to the war in December that year also ensured that Allies had greater might than Germany and her Axis partners, Italy and Japan.