Publish Date: May 7, 1945
Cover Story: The Betrayer
How TIME Covered the News: Death finally came for the executioner himself, and that was cause for a grim act of triumph. TIME rolled out a plain cover, featuring Adolf Hitler’s face with a bright red X across it, starkly capturing the villain’s fall from power. That was perhaps the easiest part: rounding up all of Hitler’s evil deeds would prove a far different story.
“The ruin in terms of human lives was forever incalculable. It had required a coalition of the whole world to destroy the power his political inspiration had contrived. How had it happened? If it was necessary to exterminate Hitler and his works, it was equally necessary to try to understand him. Clearly so absurd a character, so warped and inadequate a mind, despite its coldblooded political discernment, could not in so short a time have worked such universal havoc if it had not embodied forces of evil in the world far greater than itself.”