The Götterdämmerung

1. a collapse (as of a socity or regime) marked by catastphic violence and disorder

2. the last in Richard Wagner's cycle of four music dramas titled Der  Ring des Nibelungen

For both when the end came, it wasn't pretty:

On the evening of 28 April, the BBC broadcast a Reuters news report about Himmler's attempted negotiations with the western Allies. Hitler had long considered Himmler to be second only to Joseph Goebbels in loyalty; he called Himmler "the loyal Heinrich" (German: der treue Heinrich). Hitler flew into a rage at this apparent betrayal and told those still with him in the bunker complex that Himmler's secret negotiations were the worst treachery he had ever known. Hitler ordered Himmler's arrest.

By this time, the Soviets had advanced to the Potsdamer Platz, only 300 m. from the Reich Chancellery, and were preparing to storm the Chancellery. This report, combined with Himmler's treachery, prompted Hitler to write his last will and testament. In the testament, completed on 29 April—one day prior to his suicide—Hitler declared both Himmler and Göring to be traitors. He stripped Himmler of all of his party and state offices and expelled him from the Nazi Party.

8. They both witnessed violence and death at the end of their regimes:


"After the last notes of Götterdämmerung², I felt as though I had been let out of prison."

-Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky


The above painting is Vallhala on fire by Max Brückner, which was created as scenography for Act III of Twilight of the Gods from The Ring des Nibelungen performed in Bayreuth, Germany in 1896. 

The last known photos of The Leader as The Leader

¹ The stab-in-the-back myth was an antisemitic conspiracy theory, widely believed and promulgated in alt right-wing circles in Germany after 1918. The belief was that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but was instead betrayed by the civilians on the home front, especially Jews, revolutionary socialists who fomented strikes and labor unrest, and other republican politicians who had overthrown the Hohenzollern monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–1919. Advocates of the myth denounced the German government leaders who had signed the Armistice on 11 November 1918 as the "November criminals". 

When Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, they made the legend an integral part of their official history of the 1920s, portraying the Weimar Republic as the work of the "November criminals" who had "stabbed the nation in the back" in order to seize power. The Nazi propaganda depicted Weimar as "a morass of corruption, degeneracy, national humiliation, ruthless persecution of the honest 'national opposition'—fourteen years of rule by Jews, Marxists, and 'cultural Bolsheviks', who had at last been swept away by the National Socialist movement under Hitler and the victory of the 'national revolution' of 1933".[2]

Historians inside and outside Germany unanimously reject the myth, pointing out the German Army was out of reserves, was being overwhelmed by the entrance of the United States into the war, and by late 1918 had lost the war militarily.

² Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), WWV 86D, was composed by Richard Wagner, Hitler's favorite composer. It is a cycle of four music dramas titled Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung, or The Ring for short) and received its premiere at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 17 August 1876, as part of the first complete performance of the Ring.

Götterdämmerung is a translation into German of the Old Norse phrase Ragnarök, which in Norse mythology refers to a prophesied war among various beings and gods that ultimately results in the burning, immersion in water, and renewal of the world. However, as with the rest of the Ring, Wagner's account diverges significantly from his Old Norse sources.