These events, combined with reports that the Soviets were only from the Reich Chancellery, prompted Hitler to write his last will and testament.

The role of the new ministry, which took over palatial accommodation in the 18th-century Leopold Palace on Wilhelmstrasse, just across from Hitler ’ s offices in the Reich Chancellery, was to centralize Nazi control of all aspects of German cultural and intellectual life, particularly the press, radio and the visual and performing arts.

Bormann exploited the disaster at Stalingrad, and his daily access to Hitler, to persuade him to create a three-man junta representing the State, the Army, and the Party, represented respectively by Hans Lammers, head of the Reich Chancellery, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the OKW ( armed forces high command ), and Bormann, who controlled the Party and access to the Führer.

Unlike many other leading Nazis at this juncture, Goebbels proved to have strong convictions, moving himself and his family into the Vorbunker, that was connected to the lower Führerbunker under the Reich Chancellery gardens in central Berlin.

On the night of 14 – 15 March 1939, Ribbentrop played a key role in the German annexation of the Czech part of Czecho-Slovakia by bullying the Czechoslovak President Hácha into transforming his country into a German protectorate at a meeting in the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

Here Albert Speer erected Hitler's enormous new Reich Chancellery building, and yet even this was little more than a dry run for an even larger structure some distance further away.

Things were not helped by the very close proximity of Hitler's Reich Chancellery, just one block away in Voßstraße, and many other Nazi government edifices nearby as well, and so Potsdamer Platz was right in a major target area.

Once the bombing and shelling had largely ceased, the ground invasion began as Soviet forces stormed the centre of Berlin street by street, building by building, aiming to capture the Reich Chancellery and other key symbols of the Nazi government.

The concert took place at Potsdamer Platz-specifically an area of the former no man's land just to the north of the Reich Chancellery site, and featured many guest superstars.

Reichskanzlei Berchtesgaden (" Reich Chancellery Berchtesgaden "), another nickname of the regime ( named after the eponymous town located in the vicinity of Hitler's mountain residence where he spent much of his time in office ) was also banned at the same time, despite the fact that a sub-section of the Chancellery was in fact installed there to serve Hitler's needs.

After an elaborate funeral in Prague, Heydrich's coffin was placed on a train to Berlin, where a second ceremony was held in the new Reich Chancellery.

It is these SS troops that are seen at the Reich Chancellery and Hitler's Obersalzberg estate in his personal 8 mm movies.

Also invited were representatives of the Reich Chancellery, the Nazi Party Chancellery, the Race and Resettlement Main Office of the RSHA and Gestapo chief Müller.

Soviet soldiers hoist the Red flag over the Reich Chancellery. Prague liberated by Red Army in May 1945.

** World War II: In the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler holds a secret meeting and states his plans for acquiring " living space " for the German people ( recorded in the Hossbach Memorandum ).

In 1955, Remarque wrote the screenplay for an Austrian film, The Last Act ( Der letzte Akt ), about Hitler's final days in the bunker of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, which was based on the book Ten Days to Die ( 1950 ) by Michael Musmanno.

As an influential opinion shaper, Toynbee was invited to have a private interview with Adolf Hitler in the Reichskanzlei ( Reich Chancellery ) in 1936.

According to the historian Doris Bergen, Adolf Hitler is reputed to have coined the definition of " Volksdeutsche " which appeared in a 1938 memorandum of the German Reich Chancellery.

Arno Breker's 1939 neoclassical sculpture Die Partei ( The Party ), which flanked one of the entrances to the Albert Speer designed Reich Chancellery # Reich Chancellery ( 1938 ) | Reich Chancellery of the Third Reich, encapsulated the National Socialist ideals of the Aryanism | Aryan master race, with Die Partei as the physical embodiment of the spirit of the Nazi Party.

The 1996 film The Empty Mirror shows Hitler in the underground bunker where he and his clan of loyal backers strive to outlast the destruction of the Third Reich.

* Vorbunker-( the upper bunker ) or " forward bunker " was located behind the large reception hall of the old Reich Chancellery, in Berlin.

That afternoon, in accordance with Hitler's prior instructions, their remains were carried up the stairs through the bunker's emergency exit, doused in petrol and set alight in the Reich Chancellery garden outside the bunker.

Once completed in 1936, it was officially called the " Reich Chancellery Air-Raid Shelter " until 1943, with the construction to expand the bunker complex with the addition of the Führerbunker, located one level below.

Soon after arriving, he traveled to the bunker complex, which was mainly overlooked by troops ( who were more interested in the Reich Chancellory ).

The infamous Wansee Conference called by Heydrich in January 1942, to organize the material and technical means to put to death the eleven million Jews spread throughout the nations of Europe, was attended by representatives of major organs of the German state, including the Reich Minister of the Interior, the State Secretary in charge of the Four Year Plan, the Reich Minister of Justice, the Under Secretary of Foreign Affairs.

Austria underwent a political coup that made it part of the Third Reich ; France had been invaded and Italy was a fascist regime.

It was forced to accept that all of its traffic must pass through the " Aachener Reich ".

Auschwitz concentration camp ( ) was a network of concentration and extermination camps built and operated by the Third Reich in Polish areas annexed by Nazi Germany during World War II.

The SS-Totenkopfverbände ( SS-TV ) was the SS organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps for the Third Reich.

First documented in the 13th century, Berlin was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia ( 1701 – 1918 ), the German Empire ( 1871 – 1918 ), the Weimar Republic ( 1919 – 1933 ) and the Third Reich ( 1933 – 1945 ).

With the dissolution of the German Confederation in 1866 and the founding of the German Empire ( Deutsches Reich ) in 1871, the Reichstag was established as the German parliament in Berlin.

Another relatively early use of the term in a German-language work was in a book by Fritz Sternberg, a Jewish Marxist political economist who was a refugee from the Third Reich.

Some historians were prepared to go even further, claiming that blitzkrieg was not merely an operational doctrine of the German armed forces but a strategic concept on which the leadership of the Third Reich based its strategic and economic planning.

The thesis that the Third Reich went to war on the basis of " blitzkrieg economics " was criticized by Richard Overy in the 1980s and Historian George Raudzens highlighted the many, somewhat conflicting, senses in which historians have used the word.

Adolf Hitler's correspondence with his economists also reveals that his intent was to wage war in 1943 – 1945 when the resources of central Europe had been absorbed into the Third Reich.

The efforts of some Esperantists to expel Jewish colleagues and align themselves with the Reich were finally helpless and Esperanto was forbidden in 1936.

In the last year of his life Austria was brought into the German Reich by the Anschluss, and Schmidt was fêted by the Nazi authorities as the greatest living composer of the so-called Ostmark.

Then from 27 September 1939 forward, it was administered by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt ( RSHA ) (" Reich Main Security Office ") and was considered a sister organization of the Sicherheitsdienst ( SD ) (" Security Service ").

In 1936, the Gestapo was moved from the Prussian Interior Ministry to the Reich Interior Ministry and combined with the Kripo ( National criminal police ) to form the SiPo, Sicherheitspolizei ( Security Police ).

After Germany was united by Otto von Bismarck into the " Second German Reich ", he determined German politics until 1890.

There he met Rudolf Höss, who was later commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp, and Walther Darré, whose book, The Peasantry as the Life Source of the Nordic Race, caught Hitler's attention, leading to his later appointment as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture.

A second goal was the elimination of those considered racially inferior, particularly the Jews and Slavs, from territories controlled by the Reich.

As Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationhood, Himmler was deeply involved in the Germanization program for the East, particularly Poland.

In the Third Reich, Hamburg was a Gau from 1934 until 1945.

After the collapse of the short-lived Third Reich, and the failure of its attempt to create a great land empire in Eurasia, Germany was split between Western and Soviet spheres of influence until Perestroika and the collapse of the Soviet Union.