5 MOST EVIL PEOPLE IN HISTORY
5. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was and Iranian religious leader for a decade beginning in 1979. He had led the Iranian Revolution during which up to sixty thousand people were killed. The doctrine of the Shia Islamic Law was incredible strict, enforcing specific dress codes and eliminating equal rights. Brutal punishments were administered for breaking the rules. People were sent to prison and tortured just for listening to music. Anyone caught sharing a kiss in public was given one hundred lashes.
Those who chose not to believe in Allah were tortured and murdered by shooting, hanging, gassing, stabbing, stoning or burning. Anyone caught stealing would have a hand amputated, people were blinded and women's faces were slashed or damaged with acid. During the Iranian Massacres of 1988, everyone who was serving time in prison was killed. Over five months more than thirty thousand people lost their lives, including children who were hung from cranes. Khomeini kept fifty two American nationals hostage. Some were imprisoned for more than four hundred days, some spent six years in captivity. The hostages were blindfolded for their entire imprisonment.
Khomeini wasn't content with just ruling Iran, he had ambitions to conquer the Middle East. Saddam Hussein decided to attack first and between one and two million people were killed during the Iran Iraq war. Children were sent to fight by Khomeini. Saddam Hussein attempted peace talks but to no avail. The economy of Iran crashed and up to a million Iranian people died during this time. Khomeini's aggression towards the US is thought to have been the beginning of terrorist thinking, inspiring groups such as Al Qaeda. He is also thought to have inspired the Islamic Holy War during which over two million people died. In 1989 Khomeini lost his own fight, with cancer.
4. Delphine LaLaurie
When Delphine LaLaurie's New Orleans house caught fire in 1834, the emergency services who attended the scene made some very disturbing discoveries.Two people who were clearly being kept as slaves were found inside the house, chained up to the stove in the kitchen. Both were found to have had terrible injuries afflicted upon them during their life. But this was just the start. Upstairs in the attic more than twelve bodies were found, all of them chained to the floor or the walls.
They bore the disfigurement of serious abuse, having suffered a range of medical experiments conducted upon them by LaLaurie. She had trialled sex change surgery, had broken limbs and reset them in odd positions, performed amputations and taken flesh samples. Some of her victims had had their mouths sewn up, resulting in them dying of starvation. There were some victims who had had their hands attached to other parts of their bodies. LaLaurie never paid for her crimes as she escaped and went into hiding.
3. Beverly Allitt Nurse
Beverley Gail Allitt is said to be amongst the top ten most evil women of all time. Dubbed the Angel of Death, she killed four children and tried to kill another three. And that's not all, she also caused grievous bodily harm to another six. These terrible deeds were committed in 1991 whilst Allit was working in a children's hospital ward in Lincolnshire. It was found that two of the children had been given massive overdoses of insulin whilst another child was found to have a big air bubble inside their body. How the other children were killed and injured remains uncertain. Allitt was sentenced to life in prison, thirteen times over, when she was put on trial in 1993. The judge emphasised that Allitt posed a serious threat to society and would probably reamin in jail for the rest of her life.
2. Adolf Hitler
The German Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler, was the leader of Germany between 1933 and 1945. As a young man he had aspirations of becoming an artist but these were not realised when he failed to gain admittance to art school. He enlisted as a solider in the German army during the First World War. He was furious when Germany surrendered. After returning to Germany at the end of the war, Hitler began considering the role of the Jews in terms of the problems Germany was facing.
He blamed the Jews for everything and his bitterness developed into a belief that Jews were not human beings at all. He began to plan for the elimination of all of Europe's Jews. Part of this plan included the fulfilment of his ambition to control the entire world. Hitler believed that the power of persuasion could achieve anything and propaganda was a fundamental strategy in his plans. Hitler took to killing anyone who stood against him. He would experiment on hospital inpatients for new methods of killing people; one thing he trialled in this way was the use of carbon dioxide gas.
More than three hundred thousand people were killed due to Hitler's experiments. Hitler rounded up all of the Jews living in Germany and put them into concentration camps. Jews living in other countries were not safe from this threat and over ninety percent of Polish Jews died during this time. Those incarcerated in these prison camps were put to work. Some died from overwork whilst others were killed in the gas chambers. This wasn't the only way that Hitler killed the people in the camps. He also used a firing squad, death marches, the lethal injection, starvation, poisoning and medical experimentation.
Many people died from disease, starvation and exposure too. The Jewish people were forced to watch their friends and family die. The lives of millions of children were lost because of Hitler's breeding programme. Children were judged against the Nazi scale of perfection and those found to be lacking were executed. He wasn't loyal to friends and allies and would betray them without a second thought. Over eleven million people were killed as a direct result of Hitler's power.
This figure includes six million Jewish people, three million Polish people and another three million Russian people, seven hundred and fifty thousand Slavs, half a million gypsies, one hundred thousand people suffering from mental illness, another hundred thousand Freemasons, five thousand Jehovah's Witnesses and fifteen thousand homosexual people. In all, more than fifty million people died due to Hitler's actions. He died in 1945 when he commit suicide after taking cyanide poisoning then shooting himself.
1. Joseph Stalin
Joseph Stalin was the dictator at the helm of the Soviet Union for thirty-one years, between 1922 and 1953. Prior to his appointment to government, he had been an assassin, a bank robber and an agitator. It took him many years to progress to his place in power and he turned into a ruthless, aggressive, vengeful dictator who was ruled by his paranoia, bringing terror, violence and murder to his country. Those who crossed him were put to death so woe betide anyone who attempted to spy on him or anger him in any way. Anyone who voted against him suffered the same fate.
His ambition was to promote the Soviet Union to an industrial superpower but in working towards this goal many, many people were killed. Soviet citizens were forced into slave labour, many literally being worked to death. Enormous industrial schemes were established and became a source of perhaps millions of people's misery. Stalin's name appears on tens of thousands of death warrants. The only way to escape Stalin's brutality was to adhere to his word entirely. Anyone who spoke against him, who displayed independence or intelligence, was subjected to torture, imprisonment or murdered.
Family made no difference to Stalin and he was as likely to murder his supporters families as he was his enemies; in fact, he murdered the parents of a girl he had made a favourite of. She believed that he extended his love for her to her family, but she was wrong. He is even said to have had wives of his friends killed. Stalin's family didn't escape his ruthlessness either. He sent his daughter's boyfriend into exile and his wife commit suicide in order to escape his horrific treatment.
When his son was captured and put into a Nazi concentration camp, Stalin would not make a trade for his release; his son died in the camp. The means of murder were varied and brutal: it's said that Stalin even had people killed with ice picks. It wasn't only by brute force that people lost their lives. During Stalin's time in power, around ten million people starved to death. He is known to have said that an individual death can be regarded as a tragedy but in high numbers deaths are merely a statistic.
Stalin showed no respect for those who were fighting for his country during the Second World War, even having Soviet soldiers killed. Prisoners were released in order to join the army; when they returned from war, even if they were injured, they were thrown back in prison. He was just as brutal to people from other countries with hundreds of thousands of foreigners raped, tortured and murdered; one and a half million women from Germany were raped by Stalin's men. Stalin regularly used mustard gas explosives to kill large numbers of people. His aim was for his country to become as strong as America, with the ultimate goal being to take on the United States. He was responsible for the deaths of up to sixty million people. He lived until 1953 when he died after having a stroke.
