Adolf Hitler's final days

Martin Bormann

Hitler’s Death in the Führerbunker

By Flint Whitlock

His world was literally crashing down in flames around him.    Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, which he had created out of nothing but his own will—an empire that he had once boasted would last for a millennium—was on fire and being torn apart by shot and shell, besieged on all sides. Read more

Martin Bormann

A Soviet Red Army Victory at Vienna

By Major General Michael Reynolds

In mid-March 1945, the Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Red Army launched a major offensive with the aim of clearing Axis forces out of Hungary and forcing them back to the very borders of Hitler’s Greater German Reich. Read more

Martin Bormann

The Volkssturm: Last-Ditch Militia of the Third Reich

By Blaine Taylor

On October 18, 1944—the 131st anniversary of the Battle of the Nations’ victory over Napoleon in 1813—Reichsführer-SS (National Leader) Heinrich Himmler stepped up to a microphone to make a national radio address announcing the formation of the Nazi Party-controlled Volkssturm, or People’s Militia. Read more

In this photo published in Signal magazine in August 1943, Albert Speer is shown at the wheel of a prototype tank.

Martin Bormann

Albert Speer: Chief Architect of the Third Reich

By Blaine Taylor

On October 6, 1943, Dr. Albert Speer, Reich minister of armaments and war production for the Third Reich, gave a 50-minute address to the assembled top officials of Nazi Germany at Posen Castle in occupied Poland’s Reich Gau (Region) of Wartheland on the critical state of World War II at that point. Read more

The plot to kill Hitler, code-named Operation Valkyrie, of July 20, 1944 almost succeeded and helped intensify the war.

Martin Bormann

The Largest Plot to Kill Hitler? – Operation Valkyrie

by Blaine Taylor

For Nazi Party Führer (Leader) and German Reich Chancellor Adolf Hitler, July 20th, 1944 dawned as a routine working day at his principal wartime military headquarters, the Wolfsschanze (Fort Wolf) in the East Prussian forest of Rastenburg, some three hundred air miles from Berlin, in what is today Poland. Read more

Hours after their marriage in the depths of the Führer's Berlin bunker, Adolf Hitler and his longtime mistress Eva Braun took their own lives.

Martin Bormann

Eva Braun’s Final Days

by Michael Haskew

With his dream of Nazi domination of the world shattered, Adolf Hitler went underground in April 1945. Beneath the smoldering ruins of the Nazi capital city of Berlin, he lived out his last delusional days in the Führerbunker, a somber subterranean prison of steel and concrete. Read more