I am not really sure how to phrase this. By killing I don’t mean like Hitler ordering the Jews killed in the concentration camps, etc. I mean a person physically beat, stabbed, shot, strangled, etc. the person. For the sake of this thread, I would kind of like to leave poisonings out, unless individuals were poisoned at a single time, i.e, not a mass poisoning. I am also not talking about suicide pacts like Heaven’s Gate. Bombings and fires don’t count either unless a single person was bombed/killed at a time.
Does this make any sense?
The first one that comes to mind for me is Harold Shipman with estimates ranging from 250 to 400.
How about Richard Kuklinski “The Iceman”. Estimates vary, but Kuklinski claims that he may have killed as many as 200 people. I’ve read the recent book written about him and seen the HBO documentaries which examined Kuklinski. I believe that the most cold blooded murders that he was credited with, were those of 4 college students who were involved in a road rage incident. Those kids really didn’t know what they were getting into when they picked a beef with Kuklinski.
Harold Shipman? An amateur. My vote goes for Vlad Ţepeş](Vlad the Impaler - Wikipedia), a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler. While the stories of his brutalities are almost certainly exaggerated, it seems likely that he was an immediate party to the torture and murder of thousands.
Well, if you want to include military types (although the spirit of your OP would seem to exclude people dropping bombs), I would mention the Finnish sniper Simo Häyhä. He had 542 confirmed kills against the Soviets, although his unconfirmed kill total is over 700. And these were people he shot himself, one at a time. So he seems to qualify.
I wanted to thank everyone for providing the links. Vlad was a brutal guy. After reading the article about him here I saw the History Channel had a little thing about him the other night. Talks of skinning people and then impaling them, boiling them. Wow. Sick, sick stuff. I also had no idea that you could survive for days after impaling. I figured you would be dead fairly quickly.
Anyways, it seems as if our buddy Simo Häyhä is the winner.
I remember reading an article about Vlad and his link to vampires in one of the Straight Dope books…could have been the first one,don’t know if it’s on-line here or not, but the line I remember from that article is(to quote Cecil) “Vlad wasn’t a vampire,but that’s about the only nice thing you can say about him.”
From the article of 21-Feb-1986, Did Dracula really exist? (which also mentions Elisabeth Bathory’s death count of 610 and alludes to Gilles de Rais’s count of over 800 (although more conservative historians put his number closer to 200).
I would argue that the “winner” here is probably some anonymous WWII or WWI grunt. Maybe somebody manning a machine-gun during a WWI charge. A sniper in WWII would also be a candidate, as has been mentioned.
Either that or some medieval knight? Though, I suspect without the advantage of modern killing methods, even the best knight would find themselves caught by the odds. Killing 600 with a sword before one of your enemy got a lucky hit, nah.
I would highly doubt that. In fact I would say impossible. You just don’t gun down hundreds of enemy troops and remain anonymous. The total would have to be over 600 to “win”. No way anyone did that and remained anonymous. The most famous machine gunner in the Pacific, John Basilone is credited with 38 kills. Probably more than that due to battlefield confusion but that is all that could be confirmed. He won the Medal of Honor for that and became one of the Marine Corps greatest heroes. No way someone gunned down over 600 enemy troops single handedly and was not recoginzed for it. It is not like the movies.
There was an obituary in the newspapers about a year ago of a former German machine-gunner who helped defend the beaches of Normandy and is reliably credited with killing several hundred American soldiers. I forget the exact total and unfortunately I do not have cite.
I agree that no body probably gunned down 600 in any one single encounter; but somebody may have fought in different campaigns, at different battles, on different fronts in the first, or second, World War and may have accumulated more than 600 kills. If we’re looking for official kills, ok, no deal. But unofficial kills, I have to suspect somebody who fought on the front lines from 1914-1918 or 1939-1945 would have racked up a frightening number of kills.
From Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August, quoting a Belgian officer: “[the Germans] came on line after line, almost shoulder to shoulder, until as we shot them down, the fallen were heaped on top of each other in an awful barricade of dead and wounded that threatened to mask our guns… So high did the barricade become that we did not know whether to fire through it or to go out and clear openeing with our hands… But would you believe it? - this vertiable wall of dead and dying enabled those wonderful German to creep closer, and actually to charge up the glacis.”
I’m certain a few people in the wars racked up more than 38 kills, regardless of any confirmation.
That would be a very large percentage of kills attributed to one person. There were about 10,000 killed and wounded on all the beaches. About 4500 were Ameican. A third of them were fatalities. I’ve seen 1465 thrown around as a total number but other cites say it can only be estimated due to bad record keeping. Are you trying to say that one guy realistically was responsible for killing 25% (depends on what you mean by several, 300, 400?) or so of the Americans that died at Normandy?
WWI I find more likely due to what the “tactics” were at the time. I still think it is unlikely but possible that one guy racked up enough kills to win this contest. Many more soldiers died by artillery than machinegun fire in WWI.
Possibly some official executioner holds the record. Albert Pierrepoint, UK Hangman personally killed 450 people. William Calcraft at least the same number, possibly more. I’d bet that there are others with a larger bodycount.
Darshan Singh, executioner for Singapore, 1959 to 2005 (or present, if he has or hasn’t been fired – this is somewhat unclear), has hanged over 850 persons.