History is filled with dictators of all shades of evil who were responsible for the deaths of millions of lives. Some of these cold-hearted killers are ironically even praised as heroes by some people today. Here are eight of them:
1. Adolph Hitler
The most notorious lunatic of the 20th Century, Hitler and his Third Reich could not take over the world but that didn’t stop them from carrying out their despicable goal of annihilating people they considered inferior. An estimated two million died during his reign including some six million Jews, three million Russian prisoners of war and millions of others who were somehow caught in the path of his brutal war machine.
2. Leopold II of Belgium
The term ‘to rule with an iron hand’ could very much be ascribed to the reign of King Leopold II. This brutal dictator was for many years the ruler of the Belgians. Like previous dictators and those to come after him, Leopold had a place where he dedicated to torturing, maiming and killing people.
For Leopold, this slaughterhouse was The Congo in Africa. His hunger for the wealth that could be extracted from that country’s natural resources led to the deaths of between two and 15 million people of the Congo.
3. Joseph Stalin
Stalin ruled the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until 1953 when he died in office. Stalin was equally a killing machine as a staggering number of seven million human lives were killed by him. Five million of these lives dies through starvation as a result of his brutal policies. Many more died in notorious Soviet gulags or were slaughtered because they were considered a threat to the regime.
4. Hideki Tojo
Tojo rose through the ranks to become the Prime Minister of Japan during World War II, however, his dreaded reign resulted in millions of more deaths than those he sent to war. Tojo is considered by many to be responsible for the deaths of more than eight million people in China, Korea, The Philippines and Indochina. His final hours came on December 23, 1948, when he was hanged after being convicted of war crimes.
5. Ismail Enver
As the most powerful ruler of the Ottoman Empire during the Armenian Genocide, Ismail Enver was a key player in the effort to rid their land of the Armenian minority. It is estimated that some 1.5 million Armenians were killed along with other minority groups including Greeks and Assyrians.
6. Pol Pot
Pol Pot towed a similar path as Hitler in his bid to “cleanse” the land. However, his concern was with ridding Cambodia of all forms of western capitalism, culture and religion along with anything else he considered a foreign influence. Pot and his ruthless Khmer Rouge were responsible for the deaths of between one and three million human beings, a devastating percentage of the Cambodian population of approximately eight million at the time.
7. Kim Il-Sung
If you thought present-day North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un, was crazy, you would stop in your tracks at the lunacy of his grandfather, Kim Il-Sung. As the supreme leader of North Korea during the Korean War, Kim Il-sung presided over a war that killed an estimated 1.2 million people. In addition to the war dead, it is believed that between one and three million North Koreans starved to death during his rule.
