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One of Hitler's last acts was to get married. His acquiescent mistress Eva Braun (the dictator was in fact impotent) had yearned for years for the respectability of a wedding license, and now she was to achieve it. She wore a black taffeta afternoon dress with two gold clasps at the shoulders. A minor party official with the coincidentally appropriate name of Wagner (Hitler's favorite composer) was brought in from his militia post to perform the brief ceremony. As the law prescribed, both bride and groom swore that they were Aryans. Wagner signed the marriage certificate, glanced at his watch, saw that it was just after midnight and changed the date from April 28 to April 29. Then they all had champagne and liverwurst. As Wagner dutifully returned to his post half an hour later, he was killed by Soviet gunfire.
At 4 a.m. Hitler signed his will. He designated Goebbels as Chancellor and Grand Admiral Karl Doenitz as commander of the armed forces. He said he had never wanted a war. He blamed that and all his other crimes upon his victims, whom he described as "international Jewry and its helpers." Then Hitler left instructions for his body to be burned. By now the Red Army was fighting for the nearby Tiergarten and smashing westward along the Leipzigerstrasse, just one block south of the bunker.
The afternoon of the 29th was devoted to the final preparations for death. Hitler ordered that his favorite Alsatian wolf dog Blondi be poisoned; the other two dogs were shot. He gave capsules of poison to his two secretaries, presuming that they would want, as part of their jobs, to join in the imminent suicides (they did not). At 3:30 p.m. on April 30, Hitler and his new wife retired to the anteroom of his private suite and shut the door. Hitler put a cyanide pill between his teeth, then raised a Walther pistol to his temple and fired. For Eva, a cyanide pill was enough.
During a lull in the Soviet shelling, the two bodies were carried upstairs to the Chancellery garden, doused with gasoline and set afire. Even before the flames died down, renewed shelling drove the survivors underground again. Goebbels and Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann decided to try offering the Soviets a deal. On May 1 they sent a general to Soviet headquarters to propose a surrender of Berlin in exchange for their own safety in leaving the city. During the long interval before the general returned with a Soviet rejection, Goebbels decided that he too must die. He ordered one of the bunker's doctors to inject sedatives into his six children, who had taken refuge with him in the bunker, then they were given poison. Goebbels' wife Magda bit on a cyanide pill, and Goebbels shot her in the back of the head. Then, just like Hitler, he raised his pistol to his own temple and fired.
Bormann decided to attempt a breakout. Up on the street, he spotted a German tank and started to follow it. A Soviet shell scored a direct hit on the tank, and Bormann was never seen again.