On this Day... April 30

• In 1945, the Nazzi messiah committed suicide. After lunch of vegetarian spaghetti, 56-year-old Adolf Hitler took his bride Eva Braun and shut the door of the sitting room in his underground bunker beneath the Chancellery in Berlin. The "official" story is that he shot himself in the mouth and she bit on a cyanide capsule. According to other versions, she shot him first, or they both took poison. On Hitler's instructions, their bodies were immediately taken outside and burned, so that no trace should be left. 100 liters of petrol were poured on the corpses in the shell hole, but though the blaze lasted two and a half hours, they were not entirely consumed, and the Russians claimed to have found them. The Führer's last order had been bungled!

• In 1803, the United States doubled in size when the deal to buy Louisiana from the French was signed and sealed. The Louisiana Purchase stretched from the Mississippi to Canada. President Thomas Jefferson had only asked to buy New Orleans and the land around it, but Napoleon, short of money and irritated by a slave revolt on the Caribbean, said it had to be all or nothing. U.S. emissary Livingston, who was slightly deaf and spoke very poor French, could hardly believe his ears. After haggling, the price for the 800,000 square miles was negotiated at just under four cents an acre. "You've made a noble bargain for yourselves," said the French foreign minister. "I suppose you'll make the most of it." Napoleon did well on it too. He got 15 million dollars for a wilderness he'd bullied Spain into giving him three years before - practically for nothing!

- from Today's the Day! By Jeremy Beadle In Christian history

• In 1944, English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in a letter: "Evil labors with vast powers and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in. So it is in general, and so it is in our own lives."

- from This Day in Christian History By William D. Blake In the Philippines

• In 1896, Emilio Jacinto, the so-called "Brains of the  KKK," the underground society-turned-revolutionary-government fighting for liberation against Spain, pays homage to the legacy and heroism of Fathers Mariano Gomez, Jose Apolonio G. Burgos, and Jacinto R. Zamora (GOMBURZA), the three patriotic Filipino priests whom the Spanish colonial authorities ordered executed . Writing under the pseudonym "DIMAS ILAW," Jacinto's ode to the fallen compatriot priests entitled "¡¡¡ Gomez, Burgos, Zamora !!!" goes in part: "Buhat sa araw na yaun, ang kanilang mga pusung bukal ng sagana't wagas na pag-ibig sa kanilang mga kalulu't kapatid, ay hindi na tumitibok; ang kanilang kaloobang karurukang mataas ng mga banal na nasa ay hindi na nagpipita; ang kanilang mga bibig ay hindi na nangungusap, hindi na tumututol sa pagsasangalang ng katuiran at ng kagalingang lahat... Ang kapusungan at ang lilong galit ng mga palamara ay nagdami't hukom, at sila'y kinitlan ng hininga nang walang makawangis na katampalasanan." - philippines-islands-lemuria.blogspot.com

• In 1937, for the first time, Filipino women were allowed to vote. The occasion was a plebiscite on women's suffrage. - from Cebuano Studies Center, University of San Carlos