This article appears in the Newsweek's special edition, 100 People Who Shaped Our World, by Issue Editor Tim Baker.
Seventy years after the Third Reich was reduced to the pile of ashes surrounding Hitler's bunker in Berlin, his is still the most powerful legacy of violence and hatred mankind has produced. The fanaticism with which his Nazi menace swept the German people still frightens and flummoxes.
It is impossible to understand how a party based in hatred, hostile toward democracy and steadfast in its eschewal of personal freedom managed to gain a stranglehold on Europe. But it did. Despite Hitler's remarkable capacity for violence and corruption, he rose legally through the German political apparatus, becoming chancellor in 1933.
Italy may have given the world the model for fascism and the word itself, but it was Germany that showed the depths to which the absolutists could sink. As the Allies liberated the remnants of Hitler's death camps and the extent of his mania became clear to the world at large, Hitler took his own life in Berlin on April 30, 1945.
Learn more:The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany,by William L. Shirer
This article appears in the Newsweek's special edition, 100 People Who Shaped Our World, by Issue Editor Tim Baker.
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