On this day in 1945, after the Soviet Union lost 27 million people in the fight against Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker as Joseph Stalin’s Red Army advanced deeper into central Berlin.

In 1941 when Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa and invaded the USSR, Hitler declared in a broadcast to the German people that Russia “is already broken and will never rise again”.

The Waffen SS and Einsatzgruppen death squads had been responsible for carrying out Hitler’s genocidal plans of ethnic cleansing against Slavs and Jews, and had carried out unspeakable horrors in lands occupied by Germany.

Hitler had envisaged that the western part of Russia and neighbouring lands would be conquered and then colonised by German people. A project formulated by the Waffen SS in 1941 foresaw over 30 million Slavs being deported to the eastern part of Russia. The rest were to be exterminated or used for slave labour.

Hitler would live to regret his words as Joseph Stalin’s government would avoid capitulation, halting the Nazi hordes at the gates of Moscow and not allowing the Soviet capital to fall.

The USSR staged an incredible comeback from the brink, and did the bulk of fighting to defeat Hitler’s fascist hordes. Roughly 3 in 4 German soldiers that died in all off WW2 died at the hands of Red Army. 11 million Red Army soldiers died to liberate Europe from fascism.

Photo: What is believed to be the last photograph of Adolf Hitler alive, standing over the ruins of his ‘1000-Year Reich’, which only lasted 12 years.