When he heard of Steiner’s inability to counter-attack. Hitler flew into an uncontrollable fury; and Wenck’s defeat left him with no alternative but captivity or death. In the meantime he had dismissed Hermann Goring and Heinrich Himmler from the Party, depriving them of all their offices, the former for attempting to assume power after the blockade of Berlin, the latter for trying to negotiate a cease-fire with the Western powers through Count Folke Bernadotte. On the evening of April 28, he married Eva Braun, whose brother-in-law he had just had shot for abandoning his post, made his will on the next day with Joseph Goebbels, Martin Bormann, and Generals Burgdorf
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And Krebs as witnesses, and committed suicide a little before 1600 hours on April 30, probably by firing his revolver at his right temple.
Much has been written about Hitler’s "disappearance” and the various places of refuge that he reached outside Germany. But in fact Marshal Sokolovsky, the former chief-of-staff of the 1st Belorussian Front who was interviewed by Cornelius Ryan in Moscow on April 17,1963, admitted to him that the Fiihrer’s body had been unmistakably identified by his dentist’s assistants early in May 1945. Nevertheless on May 26 Stalin, who must have known this fact, assured Harry Hopkins that in his opinion Hitler was not dead and that he was hiding somewhere. When Hopkins put forward the suggestion that Hitler had escaped to a U-Boat Stalin added, according to the account of this meeting, that "this was done with the connivance of Switzerland.”
World History
