When did Hitler die?
1 Answer
Adolf Hitler shot himself on April 30th, 1945.
Explanation:
Adolf Hitler spent the last weeks of his life in the Führerbunker in Berlin, located beside the Reich Chancellery.; and last saw daylight on April 20th (his birthday) when he decorated some Hitlerjugend in the Chancellery garden.
Increasingly frustrated and somewhat delusional in the last months of his life, he was aware that Berlin had first surrounded and in the process of being captured by Soviet troops. Early in the morning of April 29th, 1945, he married his long-time mistress Eva Braun -- it was a sign of the times that the official he performed the ceremony was killed shortly afterwards in the fighting with Soviet troops. Later that same afternoon, Hitler learned of the death of Mussolini -- presumably the treatment of Il Duce increased Hitler's determination not to be captured.
Early in the morning of April 30th, with Soviet troops within a few blocks of the Führerbunker; Eva Braun took cyanide and Hitler shot himself through the mouth with his Walther pistol. Their bodies were taken into the back garden, dropped in a shallow pit, and incinerated with gasoline. On May 2nd, the Battle of Berlin was over.
The Soviets were eager to ensure that Hitler's remains were recovered and identified (Hitler's notoriously bad teeth helped with this); but a quirk of Stalin's held that suicide with a pistol was somehow more honourable than with poison. Hitler's remains were moved several times and the Soviets denied that his death was accomplished with a gun shot.
Eventually, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Soviet records about Hitler's body were recovered. In 1970, he and Eva Braun's remains were dug-up yet again, burned once again, ground to powder and tossed into a river at an undisclosed site.
