Pure evil? You could say that. Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re counting down the most brutal, horrific, and despicable world leaders in history.
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00:00 Adolf Hitler was a fanatical leader, a megalomaniac who led his country and many others into the abyss.
00:07 Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're counting down the most brutal, horrific, and despicable world leaders in history.
00:12 Stalin remains one of the greatest villains of the 20th century.
00:17 Saddam Hussein had a certain straightforward, brutal efficiency as he propelled himself towards absolute control of Iraq.
00:29 Within a week of taking power, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein arrested and massacred all his rivals within the Ba'ath Party.
00:36 It was a horrific foreshadowing of the next two bloody decades.
00:39 Hussein invaded Iran and later Kuwait, which ultimately devastated his own economy.
00:43 The Iran-Iraq War lasted for eight years and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
00:47 The thing that has been avoided is the links that he had with the United States.
00:52 There are pictures of him in Rumsfeld, I think, aren't there?
00:55 And the Americans armed him, backed him when the Shah was overthrown.
00:59 Despite these failures, he maintained power through horrific repression and violence.
01:02 He brutalized and slaughtered Shia and Kurdish minorities, killing tens of thousands of innocent civilians.
01:08 Hussein remained in power until the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
01:11 He was executed two years later.
01:13 We never thought that Saddam would be removed. Never.
01:16 So when I saw them, I felt hope.
01:18 Idi Amin was a brutal dictator, one of the worst of the last hundred years.
01:26 Fearing arrest for corruption, Ugandan General Idi Amin took power in 1971 through a violent military coup.
01:31 His eight-year reign was marked by ethnic cleansing, corruption, and murder.
01:35 Idi Amin tried to give himself these sophisticated titles.
01:38 His Excellency, President for Life, Dr. El-Hajji Idi Amin,
01:44 King of all the Beasts on the Earth and the Fishes in the Sea.
01:47 Within a year, he purged Uganda of East Asians, expelling tens of thousands.
01:51 He purged the military of Echoli and Lango ethnic minorities, disappearing hundreds of people.
01:55 The purging spread through Ugandan society.
01:58 It was a terrible period, unprecedented in the history of Uganda.
02:02 Amin silenced all dissident voices and dumped their bodies in the Nile.
02:06 Amnesty International estimated that Amin killed upwards of half a million of his own people.
02:10 Eventually, Amin alienated enough rivals to get usurped and pushed into permanent exile.
02:15 He died in 2003 from kidney failure.
02:17 Number eight, Hideki Tojo, Japan.
02:20 He has promised Japan a mighty empire, and he means to deliver.
02:24 As Imperial Japan entered World War II, General Hideki Tojo coalesced all power behind himself.
02:29 In addition to being prime minister, Tojo represented much of his own cabinet.
02:32 He indoctrinated Japanese youth through nationalist education and suffused Japanese culture with supremacist ideology,
02:38 justifying years of atrocities against so-called lesser races.
02:42 Tojo greenlit the use of illegal chemical and biological weapons in China.
02:46 He instituted forced labor regimes, brutalizing POWs and civilians alike.
02:50 He authorized human experimentation through a secret Unit 731.
02:53 Unit 731 causes the excruciating deaths of some 12,000 innocent people in experiments that defy comprehension.
03:03 By the end of the war, Imperial Japan was responsible for the deaths of millions of civilians,
03:08 perhaps up to 30 million, across East Asia and the South Pacific.
03:12 Tojo was arrested at the end of the war and executed by a military tribunal.
03:16 The International Military Tribunal for the Far East sentences you to death by hanging.
03:22 Number 7. Mehmed Talat, Ottoman Empire
03:25 Mehmed Talat, also known as Talat Pasha, was the minister of the interior of the Ottoman Empire.
03:30 Despite his title, he all but ran the nation until he formalized his power as Grand Vizier in 1917.
03:35 Talat was the leading figure in the persecution of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks.
03:39 Fearing Armenian independence, Talat ordered the arrest of prominent Armenians in Constantinople.
03:44 Some were deported, but many were killed.
03:46 This kicked off a wholesale slaughter of Armenians so widespread that a new word eventually had to be coined.
03:51 Despite Turkey's protestations, to describe the violence, genocide.
03:55 There was only one water source, but they killed the Armenians.
03:58 The Turks shot them, and the water was being drained.
04:02 They were being killed.
04:03 The water and the land were not being used for anything.
04:06 By the time of Pasha's assassination in 1921, nearly one million Armenian lives had been taken.
04:12 Number 6. Augusto Pinochet, Chile
04:14 Even today, the atrocities of the Pinochet era haven't all been addressed.
04:19 Augusto Pinochet overthrew his predecessor in a US-backed coup in 1973.
04:24 To the world, Pinochet represented the face of a reformer.
04:26 He stabilized Chile's free-falling economy, bringing free-market capitalism to Chile.
04:30 Under his leadership, Chile had one of the best economies in Latin America.
04:34 Under the surface, however, Pinochet was a stone-cold monster.
04:37 His secret police would often arrest and disappear opposition figures in the dead of night.
04:41 Between 2,000 and 4,000 were murdered.
04:43 The police were not only in the hands of the government, but also the people.
04:47 The government was also in the hands of the people.
04:51 Upwards of 35,000 Chileans were arrested.
04:54 The horrific mistreatment Pinochet inflicted upon them is beyond description.
04:58 Since the transition to democracy, there have been minor reforms.
05:01 But the core of the Pinochet constitution has remained largely unchanged.
05:06 Number 5. Leopold II, Belgium
05:08 European countries participated in the so-called Scramble for Africa.
05:13 They colonized 90% of the continent, exploiting African resources and enriching their countries.
05:19 In Belgium, they called Leopold II the Builder King.
05:21 He enacted social and economic reforms and commissioned dozens of public works.
05:25 In Africa, King Leopold went by another name, the Butcher of the Congo.
05:29 Leopold II wanted to acquire what he called "a slice of this magnificent African cake."
05:35 His mercenary army extracted the Congo's rubber wealth, filling Leopold's personal coffers.
05:39 Leopold never visited the nation, yet he left an indelible mark.
05:43 Failure to meet his quota of rubber was paid for in blood.
05:45 His soldiers cut off the hands of the people they murdered as proof.
05:48 Around 10 million Congolese men, women, and children were killed or died from famine and disease.
05:53 After being forced to relinquish the colony, he ordered the Congolese archive burned.
05:57 Leopold said, "They have no right to know what I did there."
05:59 Yet it took the recent emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement to question why Leopold is still celebrated in Belgium.
06:07 4. Mao Zedong, China
06:09 He's sometimes called the worst mass murderer in the history of tyrants.
06:13 Mao Zedong led his communist revolutionaries against the imperial Japanese during World War II.
06:18 After the war, he consolidated power in China under communist rule.
06:21 The Red Leader's blueprint for conquest protracted guerrilla war, united front, elimination of all opposition has accomplished its aims.
06:30 He instituted land reform, seizing private land by force.
06:33 Over half a million dissenters were persecuted.
06:35 In 1958, Mao initiated the Great Leap Forward campaign to transform China's economy.
06:40 The transition from an agrarian economy to an industrial powerhouse was wildly successful.
06:45 But China paid for this success in a staggering toll of human lives.
06:48 The transition created a countrywide famine. Anywhere between 50 and 55 million Chinese died between 1958 and 1962.
06:56 He ranks alongside the Gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.
07:01 His subsequent cultural revolution, a violent class struggle, led to hundreds of thousands more deaths.
07:07 3. Pol Pot, Cambodia
07:09 The fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge was met with rejoicing in the streets of the city.
07:17 But within hours, the mood abruptly changed.
07:20 Pol Pot was a Cambodian communist revolutionary who led the ethno-nationalist Khmer Rouge.
07:25 He believed in a Cambodian resurrection of the ancient Angkorian Empire, launching attacks on Vietnam and Thailand.
07:30 The Khmer Rouge acted with brutal savagery within Cambodia.
07:33 He also launched a civil war, seizing power in 1975.
07:37 The Khmer Rouge then emptied every town and city in the country.
07:40 Nobody was excused, not even the elderly or infirm.
07:43 Anyone who refused or moved too slowly was killed.
07:45 Within weeks, only 10,000 key factory workers, soldiers, and officials remained.
07:51 The survivors were sent to forced labor farms, the infamous killing fields.
07:54 Those seen as being disloyal, not hardworking enough, or guilty of such minor offenses as hunting rats for food, could be taken away and murdered.
08:03 Intellectuals and professionals were murdered along with their families.
08:06 All told, between one and two million died during the Cambodian genocide.
08:10 2. Joseph Stalin, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, USSR
08:15 In terms of ruthlessness, bloodlust, Stalin remains one of the greatest villains of the 20th century.
08:23 Joseph Stalin's 29-year reign saw the USSR transform into one of the world's great superpowers.
08:28 That transformation cost tens of millions of Russian lives.
08:31 His land seizure campaign included the purposeful murder by starvation of millions of Ukrainian farmers and villagers.
08:37 During what many historians term Stalin's reign of terror, no one was safe from his ambition.
08:42 Stalin expanded the size and scope of the Soviet secret police.
08:46 He turned the Soviet Union into a police state where neighbors spied on neighbor.
08:49 Millions were killed or vanished into gulags.
08:52 Even conservative estimates make Stalin responsible for the death of more than 4% of his country's entire population.
08:59 Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few dishonorable mentions.
09:03 Caligula, Rome. Sadistic emperor reveled in excess and the suffering of his people.
09:07 The young Roman emperor had a fearsome reputation as a sadist, murderer and raving lunatic.
09:13 Vlad III, Wallachia. Vlad the Impaler killed many of his own people.
09:17 So one of his tactics was to capture prisoners and then impale them.
09:23 Kim Jong-il, North Korea. Instead of feeding North Korea, Kim repressed and starved it.
09:27 One of the most notorious dictators in history. A man with a passion for banquets, cognac and Bond movies.
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09:52 Number one, Adolf Hitler, Germany. Adolf Hitler was a fanatical leader, a megalomaniac who led his country and many others into the abyss.
10:01 Adolf Hitler's rule in Nazi Germany was the nadir of humanity.
10:04 His fiery rhetoric set Germany ablaze with nationalistic fervor during the Great Depression.
10:09 His speeches and beliefs spread, monstrously scapegoating Jews for Germany's problems.
10:13 After gaining power through intimidation and propaganda and then subverting democracy, Hitler brought total war to Europe and the world.
10:19 World War II was fought on six of the seven continents. 50 million people perished.
10:24 He then planned and carried out the Holocaust, the most horrifyingly systematic mass murder of humans in history.
10:30 Six million Jewish people were deliberately murdered in death camps.
10:33 Hitler persecuted, enslaved and murdered millions more gays, Poles, Slavs, people with disabilities and other victims of his insane ideology.
10:41 We'll be endlessly fascinated by what A, drove him and B, why the German people decided to follow him.
10:48 Please share your thoughts on history's most brutal and evil dictators below.
10:52 Let us reflect together on the somber lessons we can learn from their dark legacies.
10:55 People were no better or worse. They were no stronger or weaker in the past.
11:01 So how can we avoid repeating some of those same mistakes?
11:04 [MUSIC]