56 Years Ago in TIME

By Melissa August, Harriet Barovick, Elizabeth L. Bland, Victoria Rainert, Sora Song

The hunt for another evildoer, ADOLF HITLER, ended on April 30, 1945, when the increasingly unstable Nazi leader took his own life in Berlin:

Fate knocked at the door last week for Europe's two fascist dictators. Mussolini, shot in the back and through the head by his partisan executioners, lay dead in Milan. Adolf Hitler had been buried, dead or alive, in the rubble of his collapsing Third Reich...If he were indeed dead, the hope of most of mankind had been realized. For seldom had so many millions of people hoped so implacably for the death of one man.

If they had been as malign as he in their vengefulness, they might better have hoped that he would live on yet a little while. For no death they could devise for him could be as cruel as must have been Hitler's eleventh-hour thoughts on the completeness of his failure. His total war against non-German mankind was ending in total defeat...Seldom in human history, never in modern times, had a man so insignificantly monstrous become the absolute head of a great nation. The suffering and desolation that he wrought were beyond human power or fortitude to compute. The bodies of his victims were heaped across Europe from Stalingrad to London. The ruin in terms of human life was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy the power his political inspiration had contrived.

--TIME, May 7, 1945