5. Hitler came to see suicide as the only way out, and he wasn’t the only one to take his own life in the Berlin Bunker
It’s estimated that as many as 7,000 people killed themselves in Berlin alone in 1945. The figure could be much higher, however, as many suicides were simply not reported. One suicide report remains certain: Adolf Hitler himself. The Fuhrer famously shot himself in the Bunker, dying alongside his new wife, just hours after getting married. But Hitler wasn’t the only person to die in the Bunker. Even when the outcome of the war wasn’t certain, both Hitler and Goebbels made it clear to the German people that suicide was preferable to being captured. And lots of people heeded their advice.
Goebbels and his wife committed suicide, right after killing their children. As with Hitler, they ordered that their bodies be burned immediately so that they would not become trophies of the Red Army. Similarly, Germany Army generals Wilhelm Burgdorf and Hans Kreb both shot themselves in the head with their service pistols in the Bunker. While there is no exact figure on the number who died by their own hands in the Bunker, many eyewitness accounts allude to a dozen, maybe more, such deaths in the closing days of April 1945, many out of desperation as well as fanaticism.