In his typed notes to his editors in New York, Vandivert described in detail what he saw. Taken together, they illuminate the surreal, disturbing universe Vandivert encountered in the bunker itself, and in the streets of the vanquished city beyond the bunkerвЂ™s walls. A few of those images are republished here most of the pictures in this gallery, however, never appeared in LIFE.

Vandivert was the first Western photographer to gain access to HitlerвЂ™s FГјhrerbunker, or вЂњshelter for the leader,вЂќ after the fall of Berlin, and a handful of his pictures of the bunker and the ruined city were published in LIFE magazine in July 1945. But it was two particular deaths, those of Hitler, 56, and Eva Braun, 33, in that sordid underground bunker on April 30, 1945, that signaled the true, final fall of the Third Reich. Hundreds of thousands perished in the Battle of Berlin-including untold numbers of civilian men, women and children-while countless more were left homeless amid the ruins. In the center of town GIs could walk for blocks and see no living thing, hear nothing but the stillness of death, smell nothing but the stench of death.вЂќ Vandivert, LIFE reported, вЂњfound almost every famous building a shambles. Not long after the two-week battle for Berlin ended, 33-year-old LIFE photographer William Vandivert was on the scene, photographing the cityвЂ™s devastated landscape and the eerie scene inside the bunker where Adolf Hitler spent the last months of his life where he and Eva Braun were married and where, just before warвЂ™s end, the two killed themselves on April 30.Д«etween August 1940 and March 1945 American, Royal Air Force and Soviet bombers launched more than 350 air strikes on Berlin tens of thousands of civilians were killed, and countless buildings apartment buildings, government offices, military installations were obliterated. In the spring of 1945, as Russian and German troops fought savagely, street by street for control of the German capital, it became increasingly clear that the Allies would win the war in Europe.

Life after death zip