Historic Ends: Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler.

This past weekend marked the 66th anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler.  Then late Sunday night, the world received word that Osama bin Laden had been killed.

Adolf Hitler's Fuherbunker. ( Wikemedia Commons)

Hitler’s death came by his own hand.  As American and Russian forces were tightening the noose around Berlin, Hitler took refuge in his custom-built Fuhrerbunker.  It would turn out to be his coffin.  Perhaps only a day away from being apprehended, Hitler ended his life with a gunshot wound to the head.   Eva Braun, his wife of only 40 hours, died by his side from ingesting a cyanide capsule.

U.S. Intelligence found bin Laden in a similar, if not more elaborate and luxurious compound outside Abbottabad, Pakistan.  Though not given the advance warning that Hitler was afforded, bin Laden too refused to surrender.  Instead, he traded fire with Navy SEALs until shot in the head.  Reports also place a wife in the bunker, though unlike Braun, she did not commit suicide.

And so it ends.  Two of history’s most notorious villains, at least in these parts, die of gunshot wounds to the head, hold up in their own personal hideouts, some 66 years apart, almost to the day.