1945:Germany announces Hitler is dead 1 may
Adolf Hitler has been killed at the Reich Chancery in Berlin, according to Hamburg radio.
At 2230 local time a newsreader announced that reports from the Fuhrer's headquarters said Hitler had "fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany".
It said he had appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz as his successor.
There followed an announcement by Admiral Doenitz in which he called on the German people to mourn their Fuhrer who, he said, died the death of a hero in the capital of the Reich.
Reports from Washington say US officials are suspicious of the announcement and are certainly not celebrating as yet.
The news and the rumours now started to mount up - Hitler is dead, Mussolini has been hanged...
They fear the timing of Doenitz's appointment may mean that Hitler is not dead but trying to escape or go underground.
In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill would not make a statement to the Commons about the war situation in Europe except to say it was "definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago".
Admiral Doenitz, famous for his U-boat victories in the first three years of the war, vowed to continue the battle against the Soviets and their western Allies.
"The British and the Americans do not fight for the interests of their own people but for the spreading of Bolshevism," he said.
As new head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht - the German armed forces - he demanded discipline and obedience and urged German soldiers, "Do your duty. The life of our people is at stake."
There is now speculation in the British press as to whether the weakened German forces will follow Doenitz or Heinrich Himmler, head of the home army, the Volkssturm, the SS and the Gestapo.
He has made peace overtures to the Allies in recent days in meetings with Count Folke Bernadotte, a nephew of the King of Sweden, but so far these have come to nothing.
The day after Hitler took his own life, Joseph Goebbels, one of his closest lieutenants and the notorious propaganda chief of the Third Reich, organises an elaborate murder-suicide.
At 8pm, Goebbels arranges for an SS dentist to kill his six children by injecting them with morphine and then, when they are unconscious, crushing an ampoule of cyanide into each of their mouths. Shortly afterwards, Goebbels and his wife Magda go up to the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where they killed themselves.
Nine hundred inhabitants of the German town of Demmin die in a spate of mass suicides as panic sets in after the Wehrmacht fled ahead of the Soviet advance.
The retreating German troops had blown up bridges over the Peene and Tollense rivers that enclosed the town on three sides trapping civilians in the town.
As word spreads of rape and executions, many inhabitants and refugees resort to suicide by drowning, hanging, shooting themselves or slashing their wrists.
Adolf Hitler has been killed at the Reich Chancery in Berlin, according to Hamburg radio.
At 2230 local time a newsreader announced that reports from the Fuhrer's headquarters said Hitler had "fallen at his command post in the Reich Chancery fighting to the last breath against Bolshevism and for Germany".
It said he had appointed Grand Admiral Doenitz as his successor.
There followed an announcement by Admiral Doenitz in which he called on the German people to mourn their Fuhrer who, he said, died the death of a hero in the capital of the Reich.
Reports from Washington say US officials are suspicious of the announcement and are certainly not celebrating as yet.
The news and the rumours now started to mount up - Hitler is dead, Mussolini has been hanged...
They fear the timing of Doenitz's appointment may mean that Hitler is not dead but trying to escape or go underground.
In London, Prime Minister Winston Churchill would not make a statement to the Commons about the war situation in Europe except to say it was "definitely more satisfactory than it was this time five years ago".
Admiral Doenitz, famous for his U-boat victories in the first three years of the war, vowed to continue the battle against the Soviets and their western Allies.
"The British and the Americans do not fight for the interests of their own people but for the spreading of Bolshevism," he said.
As new head of state and supreme commander of the Wehrmacht - the German armed forces - he demanded discipline and obedience and urged German soldiers, "Do your duty. The life of our people is at stake."
There is now speculation in the British press as to whether the weakened German forces will follow Doenitz or Heinrich Himmler, head of the home army, the Volkssturm, the SS and the Gestapo.
He has made peace overtures to the Allies in recent days in meetings with Count Folke Bernadotte, a nephew of the King of Sweden, but so far these have come to nothing.
The day after Hitler took his own life, Joseph Goebbels, one of his closest lieutenants and the notorious propaganda chief of the Third Reich, organises an elaborate murder-suicide.
At 8pm, Goebbels arranges for an SS dentist to kill his six children by injecting them with morphine and then, when they are unconscious, crushing an ampoule of cyanide into each of their mouths. Shortly afterwards, Goebbels and his wife Magda go up to the garden of the Reich Chancellery, where they killed themselves.
Nine hundred inhabitants of the German town of Demmin die in a spate of mass suicides as panic sets in after the Wehrmacht fled ahead of the Soviet advance.
The retreating German troops had blown up bridges over the Peene and Tollense rivers that enclosed the town on three sides trapping civilians in the town.
As word spreads of rape and executions, many inhabitants and refugees resort to suicide by drowning, hanging, shooting themselves or slashing their wrists.
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