Today is the 60th anniversary of the death of Adolf Hitler.

The temptation to simply say good riddance to a mass murderer who threw the world into chaos is overwhelming. Hitler was defeated, driven to suicide as his empire crumbled before the combined forces of the Allies. Germany has been rebuilt into a free, democratic nation and a full member of the international community.

But we cannot let the memory of evil escape. Hitler personifies the destructive potential of humanity and the willingness of ordinary people to view others as less than human.

Sixty years after his death, Hitler’s mark on the world remains, even as the surviving victims of his tyranny and the men and women who fought against it grow small in numbers. The blight of 30 million deaths, and the horror and sorrow of the Holocaust should not be easily forgotten.

The world owes it to those who defeated Nazism and to the survivors of the Holocaust to remember Adolf Hitler. To remember his ambition, his evil and his demise. If we allow him to disappear from our collective memory – for his sins to be obscured by time and faltering memory – we risk losing sight of the face of hatred.