NOMINEE: Adolf Hitler
NOMINATED BY: Richard Holbrooke, U.S. Ambassador-designate to the United Nations
It would be awful to see his face on TIME's last cover of the millennium, but I must conclude, with the greatest sadness and reluctance, that the person who had the most profound impact on the events of the 20th century was also the century's most evil person: Adolf Hitler. The century was filled with inspirational leaders who advanced its most powerful idea, freedom of the individual--people like the two Roosevelts, Churchill, Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. But the poison unleashed by Hitler and his terrible contemporary Joseph Stalin survives. Not only must we still mourn, at century's end, the tens of millions who died as a result of their actions, but we can still see in many parts of the world, from Kosovo to Rwanda, murderous echoes of Hitler's theories and policies, promoted through methods of mass communication and propaganda invented by Joseph Goebbels. The essence of Hitlerism--racism, ethnic hatred, extreme nationalism, state-organized murder--is still alive, still causing millions of deaths. Freedom is the century's most powerful idea, but the struggle is far from over. -- Richard Holbrooke
Read the TIME 100 profile of Adolf Hitler
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