Top 20 Most Evil Humans

Top 20 Most Evil Humans

This list looks at the last three years of lists of evil men and women, and combines and ranks the worst of the worst. Children are excluded as the evil children don’t rank anywhere near the evil of adults seen in the past. I have also added one entry who has not appeared on other lists, but is definitely worthy of inclusion. If you disagree with my ranking (as no doubt many will) be sure to tell us in the comments – perhaps include your own ranking, too. Also, tell us if you think someone else should be on the list.

1.Delphine LaLaurie

 LaLaurie was a sadistic socialite who lived in New Orleans. Her home was a chamber of horrors. On April 10, 1834, a fire broke out in the mansion’s kitchen, and firefighters found two slaves chained to the stove. They appeared to have started the fire themselves, in order to attract attention. The firefighters were lead by other slaves to the attic, where the real surprise was. Over a dozen disfigured and maimed slaves were manacled to the walls or floors. Several had been the subjects of gruesome medical experiments. One man appeared to be part of some bizarre sex change, a woman was trapped in a small cage with her limbs broken and reset to look like a crab, and another woman with arms and legs removed, and patches of her flesh sliced off in a circular motion to resemble a caterpillar. Some had had their mouths sewn shut, and had subsequently starved to death, whilst others had their hands sewn to different parts of their bodies. Most were found dead, but some were alive and begging to be killed, to release them from the pain. LaLaurie fled before she could be bought to justice - she was never caught. You can read a more indepth article on Delphine LaLaurie here.

2.Ilse Koch

Known as The “Bitch of Buchenwald” because of her sadistic cruelty towards prisoners, Ilse Koch was married to another evil Nazi, who served in the SS, Karl Otto Koch, but outshone him in the depraved, inhumane disregard for life which was her trademark. She used her sexual prowess by wandering around the camps naked, with a whip, and if any man so much as glanced at her she would have them shot on the spot. The most infamous accusation against Ilse Koch was that she had selected inmates with interesting tattoos to be killed, so that their skins could be made into lampshades for her home (though, unfortunately, no evidence of these lampshades has been found). After the war she was arrested and spent time in prison on different charges, eventually hanging herself in her cell in 1967, apparently consumed by guilt.

3.Shirō Ishii

 Ishii was a microbiologist and the lieutenant general of Unit 731, a biological warfare unit of the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He was born in the former Shibayama Village of Sanbu District in Chiba Prefecture, and studied medicine at Kyoto Imperial University. In 1932, he began his preliminary experiments in biological warfare as a secret project for the Japanese military. In 1936, Unit 731 was formed. Ishii built a huge compound - more than 150 buildings over six square kilometers - outside the city of Harbin, China.

Some of the numerous atrocities committed by Ishii, and others under his command in Unit 731, include: vivisection of living people (including pregnant women who were impregnated by the doctors), prisoners had limbs amputated and reattached to other parts of their body, some prisoners had parts of their bodies frozen and thawed to study the resulting untreated gangrene. Humans were also used as living test cases for grenades and flame throwers. Prisoners were injected with inoculations of disease, disguised as vaccinations, to study their effects. To study the effects of untreated venereal diseases, male and female prisoners were deliberately infected with syphilis and gonorrhea via rape, then studied. A complete list of these horrors can be found here.

Having been granted immunity by the American Occupation Authorities at the end of the war, Ishii never spent any time in jail for his crimes and died at the age of 67, of throat cancer.

4.Ivan IV of Russia

 Ivan IV of Russia, also know as Ivan the Terrible, was the Grand Duke of Muscovy, from 1533 to 1547, and was the first ruler of Russia to assume the title of Tsar. In 1570, Ivan was under the belief that the elite of the city of Novgorod planned to defect to Poland, and led an army to stop them, on January 2. Ivan’s soldiers built walls around the perimeter of the city in order to prevent the people of the city escaping. Between 500 and 1000 people were gathered every day by the troops, then tortured and killed in front of Ivan and his son. In 1581, Ivan beat his pregnant daughter-in-law for wearing immodest clothing, causing a miscarriage. His son, also named Ivan, upon learning of this, engaged in a heated argument with his father, which resulted in Ivan striking his son in the head with his pointed staff, causing his son’s (accidental) death.

5.Oliver Cromwell

 The Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649-53) refers to the re-conquest of Ireland by the forces of the English Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The consequence of this conquest (in order to displace Catholic authority) was 200,000 civilian deaths from war-related famine and disease, and 50 thousand Irish being taken as slaves. Cromwell considered Catholics to be heretics so the Irish conquest was a modern day Crusade for him. The bitterness caused by the Cromwellian settlement was a powerful source of Irish nationalism from the 17th century onwards. He died in 1658, and was so hated that, in 1661, he was exhumed from the grave and given a posthumous execution - his corpse was hung in chains at Tyburn, and he was later dismembered and his remains thrown into a pit, with his head being displayed on a pole outside Westminster Hall for the next twenty-four years.

6.Jiang Qing

 Jiang Qing was the wife of Mao Tse-tung, the Communist dictator of China. Through clever maneuvering, she managed to reach the highest position of power within the communist party (short of being President). It is believed that she was the main driving force behind China’s Cultural Revolution (of which she was the deputy director). During the Cultural Revolution, much economic activity was halted, and countless ancient buildings, artifacts, antiques, books and paintings were destroyed by Red Guards. The 10 years of the Cultural Revolution also brought the education system to a virtual halt, and many intellectuals were sent to prison camps. Millions of people in China, reportedly, had their human rights annulled during the Cultural Revolution. Millions more were also forcibly displaced. Estimates of the death toll - civilians and Red Guards -from various Western and Eastern sources are about 500,000 in the true years of chaos of 1966-1969, but some estimates are as high as 3 million deaths, with 36 million being persecuted.

7.Pol Pot

 Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia, from 1976 to 1979, having been de facto leader since mid-1975. During his time in power, Pol Pot imposed an extreme version of agrarian communism where all city dwellers were relocated to the countryside to work in collective farms and forced labour projects. The combined effect of slave labour, malnutrition, poor medical care and executions is estimated to have killed around 2 million Cambodians (approximately one third of the population). His regime achieved special notoriety for singling out all intellectuals and other “bourgeois enemies” for murder. The Khmer Rouge committed mass executions in sites known as the Killing Fields. The executed were buried in mass graves. In order to save ammunition, executions were often carried out using hammers, axe handles, spades or sharpened bamboo sticks.

8.Heinrich Himmler

 Heinrich Himmler, the architect of the holocaust and final solution, and considered to be the biggest mass murderer ever, by some (although it’s really Josef Stalin). The holocaust would not have happened if not for this man. He tried to breed a master race of Nordic appearance, the Aryan race. His plans for racial purity were ended by Hitler’s vanity in making rash military decisions rather than letting his generals make them, thus ending the war prematurely. Himmler was captured after the war. He unsuccessfully tried to negotiate with the west, and was genuinely shocked to be treated as a criminal upon capture. He committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule he had bit upon.

9.Adolf Hitler

 Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, becoming “Führer” in 1934 until his suicide in 1945. By the end of the second world war, Hitler’s policies of territorial conquest and racial subjugation had brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people, including the genocide of some six million Jews, in what is now known as the Holocaust. On 30 April, 1945, after intense street-to-street combat, when Soviet troops were spotted within a block or two of the Reich Chancellory, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule. Hitler ranks over Himmler merely for the fact that it was in his power to prevent Himmler’s policies being implemented

10.Josef Stalin

 Stalin was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, in 1953. Under Stalin’s leadership, the Ukraine suffered from a famine (Holodomor) so great it is considered by many to be an act of genocide on the part of Stalin’s government. Estimates of the number of deaths range from 2.5 million to 10 million. The famine was caused by direct political and administrative decisions. In addition to the famine, Stalin ordered purges within the Soviet Union of any person deemed to be an enemy of the state. In total, estimates of the number murdered under Stalins reign, range from 10 million to 60 million.

11. Attila The Hun

 Attila was Khan of the Huns from 434 until his death in 453. He was leader of the Hunnic Empire which stretched from Germany to the Ural River and from the Danube River to the Baltic Sea. In much of Western Europe, he is remembered as the epitome of cruelty and rapacity. An unsuccessful campaign in Persia was followed in 441 by an invasion of the Eastern Roman Empire, the success of which emboldened Attila to invade the West. He passed unhindered through Austria and Germany, across the Rhine into Gaul, plundering and devastating all in his path with a ferocity unparalleled in the records of barbarian invasions and compelling those he overcame to augment his mighty army. Attila drowned in his own blood on his wedding night.

12. Maximilien Robespierre

 Maximilien Robespierre was a leader of the French revolution and it was his arguments that caused the revolutionary government to murder the king without a trial. In addition, Robespierre was one of the main driving forces behind the reign of terror, a 10 month post-revolutionary period in which mass executions were carried out. The Terror took the lives of between 18,500 to 40,000 people, with 1,900 being killed in the last month. Among people who were condemned by the revolutionary tribunals, about 8 percent were aristocrats, 6 percent clergy, 14 percent middle class, and 70 percent were workers or peasants accused of hoarding, evading the draft, desertion, rebellion, and other purported crimes.

13. Ruhollah Khomeini

 Ayatollah was the religious leader of Iran from 1979 to 1989. In that time he implemented Sharia Law (Islamic religious law) with the Islamic dress code enforced for both men and women by Islamic Revolutionary Guards and other Islamic groups. Opposition to the religious rule of the clergy or Islam in general was often met with harsh punishments. In a talk at the Fayzieah School in Qom, August 30, 1979, Khomeini said:

    “Those who are trying to bring corruption and destruction to our country in the name of democracy will be oppressed. They are worse than Bani-Ghorizeh Jews, and they must be hanged. We will oppress them by God’s order and God’s call to prayer.”In the 1988 massacre of Iranian prisoners, following the People’s Mujahedin of Iran operation Forough-e Javidan against the Islamic Republic, Khomeini issued an order to judicial officials to judge every Iranian political prisoner and kill those who would not repent anti-regime activities. Many say that thousands were swiftly put to death inside the prisons. The suppressed memoirs of Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri reportedly detail the execution of 30,000 political activists.

After eleven days in a hospital for an operation to stop internal bleeding, Khomeini died of cancer on Saturday, June 04, 1989, at the age of 86.

14. Idi Amin Dada

 Idi Amin was an army officer and president of Uganda. He took power in a military coup in January 1971, deposing Milton Obote. His rule was characterized by human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extra judicial killings and the expulsion of Indians from Uganda. The number of people killed as a result of his regime is unknown; estimates range from 80,000 to 500,000. On August 4, 1972, Amin issued a decree ordering the expulsion of the 60,000 Asians who were not Ugandan citizens (most of them held British passports). This was later amended to include all 80,000 Asians, with the exception of professionals, such as doctors, lawyers and teachers. Amin was eventually overthrown, but until his death, he held that Uganda needed him and he never expressed remorse for the abuses of his regime.

15. Leopold II of Belgium

 Leopold II was King of Belgium from 1865-1909. With financial support from the government, Leopold created the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken to extract rubber and ivory in the Congo region of central Africa, which relied on forced labour and resulted in the deaths of approximately 3 million Congolese. The regime of the Congo Free State became one of the more infamous international scandals of the turn of the century. The area of land privately owned by the King was an area 76 times larger than Belgium, which he was free to rule as a personal domain through his private army, the Force Publique. Leopold’s rubber gatherers tortured, maimed and slaughtered until at the turn of the century, the conscience of the Western world forced Brussels to call a halt.

16.Elizabeth Bathory

 She was a Transylvanian princess of the late 16th and early 17th Century. Her brother was Price of Transylvania, and basically an Ottoman puppet, since the Ottoman conquest of Hungary in 1543. The Turks allowed a shadow independence in Transylvania and promoted Protestantism to divide the Christians.In order to improve her complexion and also to maintain her failing grasp on her youth and vitality, she slaughtered six hundred innocent young women from her tiny mountain principality...

17.VladIII the Impaler

 Most people are familiar with Bram Stoker's infamous book - Dracula.  What you may not know is that Stoker's famous writing was based upon a real-life character.  Although Bram's Dracula was indeed quite forbidding, the real life Dracula is the epitaph of evil.

Vlad's Banquet (16043 bytes)Impalement was Dracula's favorite method of punishment.  Not only was this method of punishment extremely painful, but Dracula seemed to derive sick pleasure from watching his people being tortured.  In fact, wood cuttings from this time period indicate that Dracula often dined surrounded by the decaying bodies of the dead.

Impalement was initiated by by taking a oiled stake about as wide as a burly man's arm, and inserting it through the victims buttocks, often until it protruded from their mouths.   The stake was purposefully kept dull to keep the victims from dying too soon from shock.  The victims legs were tied to two horses while the stake was placed in position.  Upon command the horses slowly pulled the victim's legs until the stake was impaled into the victims body.  Mother's often had additional stakes driven through their chests with their children and infants impaled on the extended portion of the stake.  After the stakes were in place, they were driven into the ground and placed around the outside perimeter of Vlad's castle.  Bodies were left in these positions for months, the stench of rotting bodies permeating throughout the kingdom.

18. Hirohito

Hirohito was the Emporer of Japan from 1926 to 1989. In 1937, Japanese troops committed the war crime that is now known as the Rape of Nanking (the then Capital of China, now known as Nanjing). The duration of the massacre is not clearly defined, although the violence lasted well into the next six weeks, until early February 1938. During the occupation of Nanjing, the Japanese army committed numerous atrocities, such as rape, looting, arson and the execution of prisoners of war and civilians. A large number of women and children were also killed, as rape and murder became more widespread. The death toll is generally considered to be between 150,000 and 300,000. The Wikipedia article contains images and descriptions of the atrocities committed.

19. Talat Pasha

He was the Grand Vizier of the Sultan in the Ottoman empire from 1917 to 1918.  In 1915, Talat declared an order to wipe out the Armenian race.  People were whipped, tortured, robbed, raped and killed.  All of the Armenians were forced into concentration camps.  People were overloaded with supplies and forced to trudge miles with no food and they were killed if they couldn’t continue.  People were naked when they marched.  The whole male population of Angora was exterminated.  Many were forced to rape family members.  People were killed by bayonets, clubs, axes, hammers, spades, scythes, and saws.  Many had their private parts and sexual organs cut off.  Tens of thousands were burned, drowned, poisoned, dismembered, crucified, boiled and beaten to death.  Out of the population of 2.5 million Armenians, 1 to 1.5 million people were killed.  Talat was assonated in 1921 by a Armenian assassination squad.


20  .Genghis Khan

He was Khan of the Mongolian Empire from 1206 to 1227.  In that time he conquered most of China and all the land through the Caspian Sea.  He was ruthless, vengeful, cruel, and bloodthirsty.  He and his army destroyed countless numbers of cities, solders, civilians and children.  People were killed  by having molten metal and silver poured into their eyes and ears. In one massacre alone, 700,000 people were killed. At another place, the poor were decapitated and the rich were tortured to find out where their treasure was.  Women were sometimes raped in front of their families.  Hundreds of thousands had their lives ruined.  It is said that if his army of men had no water they would cut a horse’s vein and drink its blood.  He would use people as human shields.  Tens of thousands became slaves.  He would order you to be killed immediately if you were an enemy, if you betrayed him or if you were disloyal to him.  Genghis and his army killed  20 to 60 million people (or 10% to 30% of the known world’s population).  He killed three-fourths of the population of the Iranian Plateau which was 10 to 15 million.  He also killed his brother at age 13 just because his brother had stolen a fish from him.  Genghis Khan once said “The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy to drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather into your bosom his wives and daughters.” Genghis Khan died of natural causes in 1227.