Berdella had detailed torture logs and large numbers of Polaroid pictures he had taken of his victims,injected Drano in their throats and hooked up jumper cables to a car battery and attached them to their testicles and nipples.Sodomized his victims with fruits and vegetables.He only killed six, but was pretty brutal.
It’s possible there is no metric at all for this question. I think a distinction should be made between ruthless and evil. One serial killer can be more evil than a warlord. We also need to rule out psychopaths, a person cannot be evil if they don’t know what they did was wrong and why. Kill count also don’t mean much when we’re talking about what lurks in the hearts of men.
I’d argue someone who molests one child can be more evil than Genghis Khan.
Zhang Xianzhong-Warlord of Sichuan in the 1640s. Reduced the province’s population by ninety-nine percent
Vasili Blokhin-Soviet general. Personally shot 7,000 people over twenty-eight days
Nikolai Yezhov-Soviet NKVD head
Amon Goeth-Concentration camp guard featured in Schindler’s List. Had to tone down his character in the movie
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has that rare combination of long distance mass murderer and up close and personal, hands-on slaughterer. He’s widely known as a principal architect of 9/11, but he’s also confessed to personally beheading Daniel Pearl, and FBI analysis of the video shows that he may be telling the truth.
While it’s erally important until we sort through them, I would suggest we keep this to people who demonstrated unbelievable cruelty in whatever they were doing. To me, it’s not enough to be a big killer. You have to really work at doing something so horrific it removes you from the human moral community.
I’ll slash off Blokhin and give you: Oskar Dirlewanger, who murdered tens of thousands of civilians commanding an SS unit and horrified his fellow SS officers.
Ivan IV Vasilyevich (aka Ivan the Terrible) (1530-1584) Russian Tsar
Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) North Korean dictator
Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) Led Reign of Terror following French Revolution
Adolf Hitler - Started WWII which resulted in much death and misery.
Adolf Eichmann – ‘Banality of evil’ remains evil
Amon Goeth - Concentration camp guard featured in Schindler’s List. Had to tone down his character in the movie
Attila the Hun - Led rapacious, murderous hordes
Caligula – Psychotic Roman emperor
Carl Panzram - murderer and all-around brutal guy. Others have killed more, or more gruesomely, but Panzram was something else…
Delphine LaLaurie - sadistic slave-owning socialite fond of torture and mutilation
Elizabeth Báthory - Vlad, not the only player in town
Empress Wu - the single cruellest ruler China ever had, no loyalty whatsoever, and coldly using everyone and everything
Francisco Solano Lopez: Almost destroyed his “beloved” Paraguay
Genghis Khan – Possibly tops in numbers killed (40 million)
Gilles de Rais - Child murdering satanist
Heinrich Himmler: Ran Hitler’s death camps
Ibn Taymiyyah - intellectual founder of radical Islam.
Idi Amin - killed 100,000-500,000 countrymen in 8 years
Ilse Koch, Bitch of Buchenwald - wife of commandant at concentration camps; took money from inmates; made lampshades etc. from their tattooed skin
Irma Grese, Bitch of Belsen - Sr Supervisor at Auschwitz; tortured women prisoners with attack dogs, whippings
Isabella of Castile - helped create and oversee the Spanish Inquisition
Ivan the Terrible - had thousands tortured and killed in The Massacre of Novgorod; beat his pregnant DIL, causing a miscarriage
Jean-Bedel Bokassa – Cannibalistic African dictator
Jeffrey Dahmer: Odious, cannibalistic serial killer
John Chrysostom - influential early exponent of Christian antisemitism
Josef Mengele - for the win, good luck topping him
Joseph Stalin - Killed millions of his own people and terrorized the rest
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - has that rare combination of long distance mass murderer and up close and personal, hands-on slaughterer.
Kim Il Sung (1912-1994) North Korean dictator
Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria - Stalin’s butcher
Leopold the second of Belgium - cut out the heart of africa and left a 150 years of civil war and genocide
Mao Zedong- capricious, heartless megalomaniac
Maximilien Robespierre (1758-1794) Led Reign of Terror following French Revolution
Mehmed Talat – Initiated the Armenian genocide
Nikolai Yezhov-Soviet NKVD head
Pol Pot - killed 21% of his people
Oskar Dirlewanger, who murdered tens of thousands of civilians commanding an SS unit and horrified his fellow SS officers
Robert Berdella-Carrot Fucker
Sargon of Akkade - The first imperial conqueror; established the state as an aggressor.
Tamerlane - Truely evil SD poster…or truly pointless butcher; made ruins of cities and towers of skulls
Torquemada – greatly expanded the Inquisition; his name became a byword for torture and fanaticism
Trofim Lysenko - Scientific crackpot used Stalin to strongarm opponents
Vasili Blokhin: Personally killed thousands for Stalin
Vlad the Impaler - Estimates are he killed 30 percent of his own people. He was a nasty.
Zhang Xianzhong-Warlord of Sichuan in the 1640s. Reduced the province’s population by ninety-nine percent
Bah to you all! Especially for taking all the good evil people! Err…as it were. The only name that hasn’t mentioned that comes immediately too mind, is…
Arnaud-Amalric of Citeaux - Papal legate/inquisitor during the Albigensian crusade, egged on the massacre of Beziers.
Most famous for his charming catchphrase: Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.*
I’ve used up my five, but someone should nominate one of the bigshot Spanish conquistadors. Cortes (conquered the Aztecs) and Pizarro (the Incas) were mean mofos and happily killed tens of thousands.
Hernán Cortés – will this thread embody Montezuma’s revenge?
and add:
Alfredo Stroessner – Paraguayan dictator, enslaved a tribe (in 1959)
Rafael Trujillo – bloody Dominican strongman and personality cult center
François Duvalier – Haitian dictator and “voodoo despot”
Luigi Cadorna – Worst Military Leader (dis)honoree who literally decimated his forces when they lost