As the Red Army closed in on Berlin in the final days of World War II, Adolf Hitler and his inner circle retreated to the Führerbunker, a network of underground rooms beneath the Reich Chancellery. The atmosphere in the bunker was tense and claustrophobic, with Hitler increasingly isolated and erratic. He spent his days poring over maps and issuing orders that were impossible to carry out, while his staff frantically tried to negotiate a surrender. On April 30, 1945, with the Soviet forces just a few hundred meters away, Hitler committed suicide by gunshot. His body, along with that of Eva Braun, who had taken cyanide, was burned in a shallow grave in the garden of the Chancellery.
