MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · April 30 · 1945
ON THIS DAY · 30 APRIL 1945
As Soviet troops storm the Reichstag two streets away, Hitler shoots…
As Soviet troops storm the Reichstag two streets away, Hitler shoots himself in the bunker. The Thousand-Year Reich outlives him by eight days.
THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT
One last German gamble: in December 1944, scraped-together panzer armies burst through the snowbound Ardennes — the same forest as 1940 — aiming to split the Western Allies and retake Antwerp. The Battle of the Bulge dents the line forty miles, kills nineteen thousand Americans, and fails within a month, consuming the reserves that might have defended the Reich. In January the Red Army’s Vistula–Oder offensive covers 500 km in three weeks; by February Zhukov is 70 km from Berlin.
From Chapter 13 — Closing the Ring of The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945 (FEB 1945).
OPEN THE INTERACTIVE MAP →TEACH THIS IN 5 MINUTES
- Why it happened — Why fight to annihilation?. No 1918-style armistice was possible: the Allies demanded unconditional surrender (Casablanca, 1943), the regime’s crimes left its leaders nothing…
- The turn — Berlin, 16 April–2 May. Stalin sets his two marshals racing each other into the capital — 2.5 million men against a garrison of old men, boys and broken divisions. It costs…
- What it changed — The Holocaust enters the world’s conscience. The camps’ liberation makes the crime undeniable and demands new words and new law: “genocide” (coined 1944), the Nuremberg trials’ “crimes against…
Then ask the room: Could the Western Allies have taken Berlin first — and should they have? The argued answer is on the chapter page →
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