War and destruction have led the human psyche to its limits. There are men who often face these terrors in great courage and honor while others cower away to seek shelter for themselves and become ghastly and morbid. These men have been proven to be evil in ways that only beings that are not human are capable of understanding. These are the top 5 evil men in history.
1. Genghis Khan
Genghis Khan was the founder and the leader of the vast empire known as the Mongol Empire. This said empire was so large that it stretched across Asia up to Europe even to the shores of England. Genghis Khan’s empire was the largest empire in history after his death. He came to power after uniting all the nomadic tribes of his own country and proclaimed himself as Genghis Khan. He set off invading a lot of Asian countries first including the northern areas of China. What made him the most terrible man in history is that he often accompanied his invasions with massive massacres of the civilian population. He would set their cities on fire and watch as men, women, and children burn to death.
After gathering his forces in Persia and Armenia, he then went on to conquer Hungary and Europe. Once he was able to conquer most of western Europe, he concluded his campaign in 1240. But, his carnage did not stop there. Genghis Khan will be remembered as a feared leader and a conqueror of nations. At one point he had gathered 70,000 men, women, and children from a captured nation and shot them all with arrows.
He even ordered an entire imperial family known as the Tangut to be executed and ended their lineage. Truly a horrific feat for such an alone powerful being, he later met his demise when one of the last remaining Tangut princess, who wanted to avenge her family’s fate and the treatment of the Tangut, castrated him using a hidden knife that ended his life. Genghis Khan will forever be remembered as a diabolical conqueror who sought nothing but bloodshed.
2. Talaat Pasha
Talaat Pasha was born Mehmed Talaat and was one of the leaders of the Committee of Union and Progress of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Although he was in charge of the union and progress of his country, his efforts were different. His career began when he became Deputy in 1908 and Minister of the Interior, later on, he became the Grand Vizier which prompted even more destruction in his wake. On April 24, 1915, he ordered the massive arrest of all Armenian political and social leaders including priests and teachers as they were incited as an organization that would cause upheavals within the Ottoman Empire and were in cahoots with the Russians. Several weeks later, an issue was ordered called the Tehcir Law which prompted the mass deportation of all Armenians. This would be the primary vehicle for what was to be called one of the massive genocide in human history – the Armenian Genocide.
Talaat Pasha ordered the death of more than one million Armenians even those who are not of Armenian descent were killed as well. It was on March 15, 1921, that a single bullet silenced this menacing human being forever. He was assassinated by a member of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation named Soghomon Tehlirian. He was buried in a Turkish cemetery in Berlin.
3. Saddam Hussein
Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti was the fifth president of Iraq serving from July 1979 to April 2003. He played a key role in the 1968 coup and rose to power soon after. His claim to fame was when he was able to suppress several movements from the Shi’a and Kurdish movements that seek to overthrow his government and replace it with their own or gain independence outside of their governance. He maintained power even when his country was under war during the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988. He also ordered the invasion of Kuwait in 1990 which led to the Gulf War in 1991. He was widely condemned in the West for his brutal ways. He has killed more than 200,000 Kurdish people but also targeted other tribes such as the Shabaks, Yazidis, Assyrians, Turkoman, and Mandeans.
During the Gulf War, Hussein was able to seize Kuwait but once the war was over, rebellion struck within his nation. The US kept on urging the Iraqis to stand up against Hussein but did nothing to assist in the rebellions. He was left to control Iraq in the subsequent years.
Over the next decade, Iraq and Hussein would once again come into the spotlight as his regime began a series of terrorist threats to the United States citing the development of anthrax, nerve gas, and nuclear weapons. Iraq continued its threats towards America but it was not until March 20, 2003, when the US invaded Iraq and captured their leader. Three years later, after a series of trials, he was hanged on the first day of Eid ul-Adha on December 30, 2006, ending his cold and brutal clutch in Iraq.
4. Gilles de Rais
Rais was often seen fighting alongside Joan of Arc. When Joan was hanged, he went into retirement and spent most of his time in his castle at a village named Machecoul. Rais gained notoriety when he would kidnap young children preferable boys to rape, torture, and murder them. He would disembowel these children that range from 8 to 18 years old. He finds joy and delight in seeing the children suffer from being raped and murdered.
He would even make trophies of the bodies of his victims and enjoy the sight of them. Rais would not be convicted of such heinous crimes since he was at a point of power. Later on, the village was able to arrest him. He confessed his murders under the threat of torture. He was found guilty of his crimes and was burned on October 16, 1440.
5. Josef Mengele
Josef Mengele was a German officer and a physician at the Nazi Concentration Camp Auschwitz. He gained notoriety when he gained control over who was to be executed and who would be a forced laborer.
But, he was far more famous for his human experiments on the inmates at the concentration camps. He was dubbed as the Angel of Death. He would experiment on children’s eyes and try to change their color by injecting chemicals into them. He would also experiment on twins and were usually killed and dissected. He sewed two Roman children to make them conjoined twins. These twins soon died of infection.
He also experimented on connecting a girl’s urinary tract to her colon which was very dangerous to a human. The girl died. Other heinous acts include the vivisection of pregnant women before they were forced to the gas chambers. He would make a record of experimenting on more than 1,500 pairs of twins and several other thousand children and women.