Adolf Hitler
Legacy

According to historian Joachim Fest, Hitler's suicide was likened by numerous contemporaries to a "spell" being broken. Similarly, Speer commented in Inside the Third Reich on his emotions the day after Hitler's suicide: "Only now was the spell broken, the magic extinguished." Public support for Hitler had collapsed by the time of his death, which few Germans mourned; Kershaw argues that most civilians and military personnel were too busy adjusting to the collapse of the country or fleeing from the fighting to take any interest. According to historian John Toland, Nazism "burst like a bubble" without its leader.

Kershaw describes Hitler as "the embodiment of modern political evil". "Never in history has such ruination—physical and moral—been associated with the name of one man", he adds. Hitler's political programme brought about a world war, leaving behind a devastated and impoverished Eastern and Central Europe. Germany suffered wholesale destruction, characterised as Stunde Null (Zero Hour). Hitler's policies inflicted human suffering on an unprecedented scale; according to R. J. Rummel, the Nazi regime was responsible for the democidal killing of an estimated 19.3 million civilians and prisoners of war. In addition, 28.7 million soldiers and civilians died as a result of military action in the European theatre of World War II. The number of civilians killed during the Second World War was unprecedented in the history of warfare. Historians, philosophers, and politicians often use the word "evil" to describe the Nazi regime. Many European countries have criminalised both the promotion of Nazism and Holocaust denial.

Historian Friedrich Meinecke described Hitler as "one of the great examples of the singular and incalculable power of personality in historical life". English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper saw him as "among the 'terrible simplifiers' of history, the most systematic, the most historical, the most philosophical, and yet the coarsest, cruelest, least magnanimous conqueror the world has ever known". For the historian John M. Roberts, Hitler's defeat marked the end of a phase of European history dominated by Germany. In its place emerged the Cold War, a global confrontation between the Western Bloc, dominated by the United States and other NATO nations, and the Eastern Bloc, dominated by the Soviet Union. Historian Sebastian Haffner asserted that without Hitler and the displacement of the Jews, the modern nation state of Israel would not exist. He contends that without Hitler, the de-colonisation of former European spheres of influence would have been postponed. Further, Haffner claimed that other than Alexander the Great, Hitler had a more significant impact than any other comparable historical figure, in that he too caused a wide range of worldwide changes in a relatively short time span.
punctuation:no_comma