This Day In History

Apr 30 1945
Newlyweds Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun kill themselves in the charming and romantic Fuhrerbunker, ending all hope for a ten-thousand-year Reich.

Apr 30 1961
Lee Harvey Oswald, during his stay in the Soviet Union, marries hospital employee Marina Prusakova. Oswald later becomes disenchanted with Soviet life, and the couple emigrates to the United States. Even so, he never permits his wife to learn English.

This Day In History

Apr 26 1865
Discovered hiding in a farmer's tobacco shed, John Wilkes Booth is shot in the neck. Dying and paralyzed from the neck down, he whispers: "Tell my mother I did it for my country." As his hands are held up to his face, Booth mutters "useless... useless..." They are his last words.

Apr 26 1986
44 seconds into a late-night experiment at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, reactor number four sustains two large explosions. A plume of dangerous radioactivity looms three kilometers high, making it the worst catastrophe in the history of nuclear power. The Soviet news agency TASS holds off reporting the incident for almost 48 hours.