On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide, leaving his associates to face the music for World War II.

From the rich mine of Soviet wartime propaganda posters at Davno.ru (also see its Victory Day cards).

The days preceding Hitler’s demise had seen a fascist state that once stretched from the Atlantic to Moscow (almost to Moscow) hemmed into vanishing pockets, spiraling towards certain capitulation.

Resistance really was futile.

Nevertheless, resistance was as ferocious as Nazi Germany’s remaining resources could permit, and as cruel in its way as anything in those cruel years. Each dwindling day brought among its privations fresh executions, deaths without meaning or grandeur, vindictive and cynically apportioned deaths mopping up old enemies and settling old scores, most every one without the slightest effect upon the the war’s resolution.

• Apr. 20: The children of Bullenhuser Damm (an ex post facto prepend to this series)
• Apr. 21: The women of the Endphaseverbrechen at Neuengamme
• Apr. 22: Wilhelm Cauer, but not Helmuth Weidling
• Apr. 23: Massacres of Treuenbrietzen
• Apr. 24: A day in the death penalty around the Reich
• Apr. 25: Ewald Ehlers lynched
• Apr. 26: Sigmund Rascher
• Apr. 27: Deserting German soldiers
• Apr. 28: Hermann Fegelein
• Apr. 29: Dachau massacre

On this day..

• 1976: Bayere Moussa, Niger putschist
• 1831: Gesche Margarethe Gottfried, the Angel of Bremen
• 1533: The witch of Schiltach
• 1857: The mutineer Jemadar Issuree Pandy
• 1895: A quintuple lynching in Greenville, Alabama
• 1897: William Haas and William Wiley
• 1975: Sisowath Sirik Matak, Cambodian prince
• 1913: Bonnot Gang members, anarchist illegalists
• 1945: The women of the Endphaseverbrechen at Neuengamme
• 1988: Stanislaw Czabanski, the last in Poland
• 1597: Severyn Nalyvaiko
• 1868: Henry James O'Farrell, would-be assassin
• 1792: Tiradentes, for a Brazilian republic