He was a human -- even likable when you get to know him they say (he sure made millions of Germans like him). What was "evil", if you want, was his ideals and more especially them put in practice (the war, the holocaust, the S.S. etc).

To say he was evil implies he was something different than the next person. But ordinary people, the kind that would have been a friendly librarian or baker, when caught up in some historical dynamics can end up doing monstrous acts (e.g. in Nazi Germany, in Cambodia, in Nigeria, etc). Hanna Arendt wrote compellingly about how the most "evil" man in the camps was in fact a banal bureucrat.

I also dislike how we selectively call some people evil. How many call Truman, the guy who gave the OK to bomb to oblivion two civilian towns, evil? Or maybe if Hitler had only killed 200.000 civilians in the course of the war it would have been OK?