April 30, 1945: Adolf Hitler commits suicide.

As the Soviet Red Army descended upon Berlin, mowing down what meager dregs  of the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS Germany had left to offer, Hitler received the news that his fellow despot Benito Mussolini had been executed - not to mention beaten, stoned, spat on, hung up, and put on display - by his own countrymen. The already-unstable Führer, having already declared his intention to remain in Berlin and commit suicide, was now even more determined not to be made “a spectacle of” once the end came.

The day before his suicide, he married Eva Braun, his longtime mistress, and dictated his last will and testament, which named Joseph Goebbels the Reich’s new Chancellor (this position Goebbels held for one day, before he and his family also committed suicide). To the end, Hitler was adamant about the “threat” he believed Jews posed to humanity, and he ended his final political testament with this statement:

Above all I charge the leaders of the nation and those under them to scrupulous observance of the laws of race and to merciless opposition to the universal poisoner of all peoples, international Jewry.

Less than 24 hours later, Hitler shot himself, and his wife poisoned herself. As requested by his personal will and testament, both of their bodies were burned and buried in the garden of the Reich Chancellery - the building where, in Hitler’s own words, he had “carried out the greatest part of [his] daily work in the course of twelve years’ service to [his] people.”