The most unfortunate aspect to researching this list was the
realization that that I could do a top 100 most evil men and still have a
multitude of people for a second list! The selection of this list is
based not upon death tolls, but upon the general actions, and impact, or
brutality of the people. From bad to worst, here are the top 10 evil
men in history.
 
10. 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.
 
9. 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.
 
In an act of coincidental justice, Robespierre was guillotined without a trial in 1794.
 
8. Ruhollah Khomeini
 

 
Ayatollah Khomeini 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.
 
7. 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.


6. 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.


5. 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.


4. Vlad Ţepeş





Vlad III of Romania (also known as Vlad the Impaler) was Prince of
Wallachia three times between 1448 and 1476. Vlad is best known for the
legends of the exceedingly cruel punishments he imposed during his
reign and for serving as the primary inspiration for the vampire main
character in Bram Stoker’s popular Dracula novel. In Romania he is
viewed by many as a prince with a deep sense of justice. His method of
torture was a horse attached to each of the victim’s legs as a sharpened
stake was gradually forced into the body. The end of the stake was
usually oiled, and care was taken that the stake not be too sharp; else
the victim might die too rapidly from shock. Wikipedia has an article that describes, in great details, the methods of Vlad’s
cruelty. The list of tortures he is alleged to have employed is
extensive: nails in heads, cutting off of limbs, blinding,
strangulation, burning, cutting off of noses and ears, mutilation of
sexual organs (especially in the case of women), scalping, skinning,
exposure to the elements or to animals, and boiling alive. There are
claims that on some occasions ten thousand people were impaled in 1460
alone.


3. 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.


2. 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.


1. 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 total number murdered under
Stalins reign, range from 10 million to 60 million.


Bonus: Emperor Hirohito of Japan





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.


Notable Omissions: Oliver Cromwell, Mao Tse-tung, Kim Il-sung, Caligula


https://listverse.com/2007/09/05/top-10-most-evil-men/