The Montreal Gazette, Canada
April 27 2008

Deadly century yielded history’s worst killers

In this gallery of villains, such monsters as Goebbels and Himmler are
strictly B Team

NORMAN WEBSTER , The Gazette
Published: Sunday, April 27, 2008

What an accursed century it was, the one just past – surely the most
brutal in God’s long history. That’s a depressing way to begin any
story. But it’s hard to avoid when contemplating a list headed Killers
of the Twentieth Century, a roundup of the murderers, madmen and thugs
who so marked those ignoble years.

This grisly hit parade is the work of an Aussie named Bruce Harris,
working independently in Sydney. On his website
(), he describes himself as "a white,
middle-class university graduate with a BA in communications and an
interest in history and politics." His research is extensive, he says
he has no ideological axe to grind – and it should be noted, before we
label him a terminal gloomster, that he also has a list of Twentieth
Century Heroes for our contemplation.

But that’s for another day. The killers are more interesting.

Harris offers a rogues’ gallery ranging alphabetically from Uganda’s
dangerous buffoon Idi Amin, who awarded himself the Victoria Cross and
fed his opponents to the crocodiles, to Yahya Khan of Pakistan, the
man who lost Bangladesh in a bloody civil war. There are 24 major
entries of the infamous, plus 13 more labelled "other killers" – if
such monsters as Goebbels, Himmler and Mengele can ever be considered
a B team.

Here are some highlights.

Every man on the list (there are no women) has a "kill tally,"
estimating the number of human beings he hastened to their deaths. Not
surprisingly, the leaders are those household names Hitler, Stalin and
Mao. Adolf Hitler, responsible for the death of 46 million Europeans
in the Second World War, takes the prize as "the undisputed, all-time,
world champion of killers."

Hitler was Time magazine’s man of the year for 1938. In 1942, Time’s
choice was Joseph Stalin ("man of steel," killer of 20 million), for
opposing German aggression. One savage element of that struggle: In
1945, Soviet troops fighting in Germany raped at least 2 million
women, the largest case of mass rape in history.

Mao Zedong? Ruthless and amoral, he sent China down a blind alley with
his infantile Great Leap Forward of 1958-61. Estimates of the toll
range from 14 million to a monstrous 40 million deaths from
starvation, while Mao thundered around the land in his private train.

Those are the Big 3. Not that no one tried to emulate them. Francisco
Franco in Spain, Nicolae (Genius of the Carpathians) Ceausescu in
Romania, Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Kim Il Sung, the "iron-willed,
ever-victorious commander" of North Korea, were dictators who revelled
in cults of personality. Saddam also murdered his own sons-in-law.

Kim’s invasion of the south provoked the violence and suffering of the
Korean War. At 7 every morning, loudspeakers still broadcast the jolly
song 10 Million Human Bombs for Kim Il Sung to malnourished North
Koreans.

Ethnic cleansing and genocide were sorry features of the century, from
Cambodia to Rwanda to the former Yugoslavia and Turkey, which still
refuses to admit the sweeping away of its Armenians. In 1994 in
Rwanda, more than 500,000 Tutsis were slaughtered with the
encouragement of Hutu leader Théoneste Bagosora, aka Colonel Death,
while UN troops under Canada’s General Roméo Dallaire were forbidden
to intervene. Most of the killing was done close-up and bloody, with
machetes.

In cold figures, Cambodia was even worse. Execution, starvation and
simply working people to death eliminated about one-quarter of the
country’s population of 7 million during the demented rule of Pol Pot
and his Khmer Rouge.

Some lesser-known monsters of the century are revisited. For example,
Ante Pavelic, aka Butcher of the Balkans, leader of the Croatian
terrorist group Ustase during the Second World War. His men set out to
cleanse their land of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies with the slogan: "Kill a
third, expel a third, convert a third." Victims were shot, knifed,
bludgeoned and thrown live from cliffs.

Suharto of Indonesia, who died in January, racked up an impressive
death tally of 500,000 of his countrymen following a failed coup
attempt (rivers were literally clogged with bodies, creating serious
sanitation problems), plus another 250,000 East Timorese following
invasion of that territory in 1975.

To wind up, the royal touch of Belgium’s King Léopold II. His record
of cruelty and greed leaves one almost breathless. The king, you see,
personally controlled the Congo at the turn of the century, exploiting
its rubber and ivory riches with terror and atrocities. His army,
fighting rebel tribes, was ordered to cut off a victim’s right hand
for every bullet fired. When there weren’t enough dead victims, the
soldiers cut hands from the living to make sure things tallied.

Under Léopold’s rule, the population of the Congo fell from an
estimated 20 to 30 million to less than 9 million. Truly, the heart of
darkness.

Norman Webster is a former editor of The Gazette.

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