act would have shortened the war by almost a full year. Instead, he remained in power and insisted that Germany fight to the death. Hitler by now resided in a bunker he called the fuhrerbunker. In this underground bunker in Berlin, while the Russians approached the city, he married his longtime mistress, Eva Braun, on April 29, 1945. On April 30, they both committed suicide. Hitler shot himself in the mouth after taking poison. She simply died by poison injestion.4 He left Germany a devastated nation.The death toll staggers the mind. The toll is estimated to possibly be in excess of 61million lives. A list of the casualty numbers from some of the countries involved: The Soviet union, a total of 25,568,000 soldiers and civillians. Germany, 7,060,000. Poland, 6,850,000. Italy, 410,000. France 810,000. Great Britain, 388,000. The United States, 295,000.5 With the doctrines that he had earlier established in Mein Kampf, he also put to death millions of so called inferior peoples in his concentration camps. Millions of Jews, Gypsies, Slavic peoples were killed. Even people that were mentally retarded or handicapped were not spared. Hitlers final legacy to the world has to be the memory of the most dreadful tyrant of modern times.The Rape of Nanking:Perhaps no other event in modern history shows a more precise picture of human evil in an institutional form than the Japanese sacking of Nanking. Author Iris Chang, summarizes the horror that the civilian population must have experienced in the introduction of her book The Rape of Nanking by stating: The chronicle of humankinds cruelty is a long and sorry tale. But if its true that even in such horror tales there are degrees of ruthlessness, then few atrocities in world history compare in intensity and scale to the Rape of Nanking during World War II.6 One historian tried to put The Rape of Nanking in quantitative terms. He stated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they...
