After midnight on the night of 28–29 April, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the
Führerbunker. Later that afternoon, Hitler was informed that
Mussolini had been executed by the
Italian resistance movement on the previous day; this is believed to have increased his determination to avoid capture. On 30 April, Soviet troops were within five hundred metres of the Reich Chancellery when Hitler shot himself in the head and Braun bit into a
cyanide capsule. In accordance with Hitler's wishes, their corpses were carried outside to the garden behind the Reich Chancellery, where they were placed in a bomb crater, doused with petrol, and set on fire as the Red Army shelling continued. Grand Admiral
Karl Dönitz and Goebbels assumed Hitler's roles as head of state and chancellor respectively. On the evening of 1 May, Goebbels and his wife,
Magda, committed suicide in the Reich Chancellery garden, after having poisoned their six children with cyanide.