On This Day...

On this date in 1945, the European phase of history's greatest war came to an end, when Hitler's Germany ceased to exist.
A war, which killed some 55 million world-wide, and set off the world's most immense cross-migration in Europe, with roads filled with people walking back to where their homes existed, or, where their homes once existed, was over.
Hitler, who until he decided that he was a militarist, had become, arguably, the greatest political entity of his culture since Bismarck, and could have created a new Dark Age.
Ironically, his fatal misstep of resorting to war ultimately preserved succeeding generations from that Dark Age.
We will never know what might have been had this political genius, an incarnation of pure evil, not made that fatal misstep.