This Day in History: April 30

"Hitler Dead" was the short but succinct headline of the London News Chronicle April 2, when Berlin finally surrendered as Soviet troops stormed through the German capitol. According to eyewitness accounts from personal aides of the fallen Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler shot himself and his mistress Eva Braun while also digesting a potent cyanide capsule.

The disgraced dictator spent the final months of the war sinking into an ever-deepening well of paranoia and mistrust, finally turning away all but his most trusted confidantes and barricading himself behind the walls of a fortified bunker buried deep beneath the Chancellory building of his failed Third Reich.

Voted TIME Magazine's 1938 Man of the Year, Hitler's life was defined by misfortune. Born in Austria, he moved to Vienna to pursue his dreams of being a painter. He served in a Bavarian regiment during the Great War, and developed such respect for the Germans that he became a citizen and joined the Socialist Worker's Party.

Working his way up party ranks, the passionate anti-Semite suffered through several failed coups attempts before finally achieving his goal, thanks to the fall of the Weimar Republic. Employing the Hebrew minority and other perceived social undesirables as scapegoats, the fresh-faced Fuhrer ignited German nationalism and ultimately led the world to one of the foremost conflicts in human history.

The influence of Germany's most notorious painter cannot be disputed; prior to WWII, the New York phonebook held 22 Hitlers; after 1945, there were none.