After hosting a brief middle-of-the-night wedding breakfast, Hitler shot himself the following afternoon. Braun poisoned herself.

In the hours running up to his death, an ashen-faced Hitler had made his way through the labyrinth of rooms comprising his bunker complex to bid farewell to loyal deputies and staff. He died five days after his 56th birthday.

At other times during those final grim days, Hitler would rage against his military commanders for what he saw as their failures to regain the initiative in heading off the allies' advance as the Red Army closed in on Berlin.

And as his dreams of a vast German empire crumbled, Hitler faced another battle - a power struggle within the Nazi elite over the future of the regime he had forged 12 years earlier.

While one of his deputies, Hermann Goering, demanded that Hitler step aside so he could take up the reins of power, SS chief Heinrich Himmler tried to negotiate with the Western allies. One of Hitler's final acts was to order that both Goering and Himmler be arrested.

Originally built as an air-raid shelter for the Nazi leader, the bunker remains closed off to the public today after large parts of it were destroyed by the Soviet forces and later by the communist East German state, which was formed at the end of the war.

In one of his last public appearances, a broken Hitler emerged from the destruction of the chancellery garden in Berlin to award Iron Crosses to members of the Hitler Youth who had been fighting a last-ditch battle to ward off defeat.

Only months earlier in a radio broadcast, Hitler had sought to rally the nation in the face of a series of military defeats by declaring the crisis would be "mastered by our unalterable will."

But by April 28, 1945, Hitler's Italian ally, Benito Mussolini, was dead after being shot by an Italian partisan.

The main Nazi death camps had also been liberated and there were reports of mass suicides among Nazi functionaries and German civilians as chaos took hold in parts of the nation.

Hitler then ordered the destruction of all German industrial infrastructure to stop them falling into allied hands.

In the hours before his death and with the frontline of the Battle of Berlin a little more than 400 metres from the bunker, Hitler ordered his secretary to draw up a political testament.

In the testament, he bequeathed the leadership of Germany to propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Hitler, however, failed to nominate any successor as Fuehrer.

A short time later, Goebbels also committed suicide.

The bodies of Hitler and Braun were carried outside the bunker to the garden, where they were doused with petrol and set on fire amid Red Army shelling.

However, it was not until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s that more details emerged about Hitler's death.

Soviet documents reported how the remains of Hitler, Braun and Goebbels and his family, as well as Hitler's dogs, were repeatedly buried and exhumed before being scattered in a river in northern Germany.

Australian Associated Press