Before dawn on Sunday, April 29, 1945, Soviet tanks rumbled near Hitler’s bunker. Soviet shells made the ceiling tremble. Inside the catacomb, the Führer perfunctorily married his mistress, Eva Braun. Then he called in a secretary to dictate his last political testament: “I will not fall into the hands of an enemy that requires a new spectacle, exhibited by the Jews, to divert its hysterical masses. My wife and I choose to die in order to escape the shame of overthrow or capitulation.”
The next day, the Führer of the thousand-year Reich shot himself in the head and his new wife swallowed poison. By Hitler’s orders, the two bodies were taken upstairs into the garden, doused with gasoline and set afire, with the Führer’s shinbones suddenly visible through the flames.
At the White House, Truman was surprised to learn that Hitler had killed himself. He had expected “many high German officers” to “take this way out,” but Hitler, “in his fanaticism,” to “resist to the very end.”
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “I was Never in Favor of That Crazy Plan.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 226. Print.
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