Regarding the method of Hitler’s demise in http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a2_128b.html - A recent article recounts an eyewitness report.
"With defeat imminent, Hitler, 56, shot himself. His mistress, Eva Braun – whom he married shortly before his death – committed suicide by taking cyanide in his underground bunker in Berlin. "
From here…
Tor
It’s worth saying that that entire column from 1987 is now looking rather dated. Cecil’s main, unnamed, source is Lev Bezymenski’s 1968 book The Death of Adolf Hitler, which certainly attracted much attention for a decade or two, mainly because - as Cecil notes - it published details of the Soviet autopsies on the bodies recovered from the Chancellery garden and at the time there was no other source for these documents.
Several things have changed in the last decade and a half. For a start, with the end of the Cold War, some western researchers have had access to the original material in the Russian archives. A few of these have taken it at more or less face value and essentially repeated Bezymenski’s version. Others, for instance Norman Stone, have looked at the Soviet material and dismissed their investigation as a botched job.
More broadly, the whole issue of the circumstances of Hitler’s death was thoroughly re-examined by Anton Joachimsthaler in his book Hitler’s Ende (1995; in English, The Last Days of Hitler, Cassell, 2000). Except on some essentially minor points, Joachimsthaler’s account agrees with that originally proposed by Trevor-Roper back in 1945, but he has had the advantage of being able to examine all the evidence that emerged in the intervening 50 years. One of his main conclusions is that there’s no good evidence that the two bodies the Soviets claimed were the Hitlers were actually them. His scenario is that the actual bodies were probably almost entirely destroyed by the petrol fire and then intense shellfire by the time the area was captured. However, the whole place was literally littered with other corpses and he believes that, under intense political pressure, the Soviet investigators probably latched onto two of those. If correct, this would mean that the entire Soviet autopsy is almost irrelevant - including the issue of the testicle.
Joachimsthaler’s version has been widely accepted by historians, notably including both Sir Ian Kershaw in his (excellent) Hitler biography and Joachim Fest in his recent Inside Hitler’s Bunker.
Erna Flegal’s account (the original Guardian article has more details; see also their interview and the original CIA interview) is interesting, but is more relevant to the circumstances of the Goebbels’s deaths than Hitler’s. She wasn’t especially physically close to the Fuehrerbunker in the last few days of his life, though the meeting she has with him on the night before the suicide is possibly of significance as to his choice of method. As portrayed in the film Downfall, a group of doctors and nurses from the field hospital in another bunker underneath the Chancellery were invited over to the Fueherbunker to meet Hitler. The film goes on to show Schenck, the doctor who features as one of its major characters, overhear Hitler consult with his colleague Dr. Haase about the most effective method of suicide. The latter suggests biting on a cyanide capsule while simultaneously shooting oneself. This scene derives from comments Schenck reportedly made in Soviet captivity after the war. While these have often been repeated, Joachimsthaler rejects this as hearsay and, overall, concludes that Hitler probably only shot himself anyway. Whether Flegal has anything to shed on the matter, I don’t know, though it wouldn’t surprise me if she doesn’t.
Hitler song I lesrnt in Australia:
Hitler, has only one brass ball!
The other, is hanging on the wall!
His mother, the dirty bugger,
Cut it of when he was very small 