Although they are dead, in a sense they are being kept alive on television documentaries and in books. Some might believe they were encouraged by their accomplices, the seen and unseen people standing behind them, to commit their abominable crimes. Others are convinced they had no help at all, were just plain evil to start with and shudder to think how history would have turned out if they actually succeeded in carrying out their plans to the end. The following three men left destruction in their wake.
Adolf Hitler
Although he was born in Austria, he led an economically depressed Germany through the early 1930s and became the leader of the Nazi Party. Who would have thought this frustrated artist would turn out to be one of the most diabolical madmen of the 20th century?
By the outbreak of World War II, the Nazi Party and Germany were in essence a single entity. Hitler's leadership consisted of a mixture of extreme nationalism, fanatical militarism and anti-Semitism. On January 30, 1939, while addressing the Reichstag (the Nazi Parliament) he made the following statement:
".....If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the Earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"
With that remark came one of the most nightmarish chapters in 20th century history. Jews were crammed into freight trains and shipped to the death camps, where it was pretty much guaranteed they would meet death by gas, exposure, starvation or execution squads. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, Hitler's final solution had claimed the lives of roughly six million Jews.
Joseph Stalin
This man will be remembered for his aggressive collectivist policies, which were designed to turn the Soviet Union into an industrial and agricultural juggernaut. Specifically targeting the Ukraine which was the breadbasket of Russia, Stalin raised the grain quota to astronomical levels which then had to be turned over by the peasants to the state.
The resulting famine claimed the lives of between six and seven million people. The rich farmers, called kulaks, resisted his policies and this prompted Stalin to initiate a purge of his opponents. Untold numbers of people were sent to gulags in the most remote corners of Siberia and Central Asia, and it wasn't long before Stalin was seeing enemies everywhere, real and imagined.
In 1997, Russian excavators unearthed 9,000 bodies near Sandermakh in the republic of Karelia. 130 trenches were found, and each of the victims were bound by their hands and feet and shot in the back of the head. As per Stalin's orders, they were executed by the NKVD (the secret police), which was later known as the KGB. Mass murder was completely normal to Stalin who once said, "The death of one man is a tragedy, but the death of millions is a statistic."
Mao Zedong
In academic circles in China and elsewhere, scholars would point out that Chairman Mao had many fine qualities — poet, able military strategist, philosopher and triumphant revolutionary. Despite all of that, no one can deny he was the instigator of at least two political and economic disasters, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. The former was an attempt in 1958 to catapult China into the industrial age, in much the same way as Stalin had done more than two decades before.
However, the only thing China had to sell was food, so in exchange for arms from the Soviet Union he put the peasants to work to increase production. Mao's half baked fantasy literally squeezed the life out of twenty million people. They all starved and dropped dead of exhaustion. Unfazed by this he calmly stated, "Half of China may well have to die."
Later in the '60s when he tried to purge his opponents in and out of the Communist Party, he started the Cultural Revolution. Anyone who was educated or suspected of being educated was exiled to the countryside. Schools were shut down, museums were stripped of their cultural artifacts, and legions of young Red Guards inflamed with revolutionary fervor chanted slogans from his little red book and attacked the educated citizens.
References:
- bbc.co.uk
- gendercide.org
- discoverthenetworks.org
- International Herald Tribune News Article, A Bleak Anniversary, Mao the Mass Murderer. Jonathan Mirsky, January 9, 2004.
- The New York Times, China's Monster, Second to None. Michiko Kakutani, October 21, 2005.
Scott Hayden - Since joining Suite101 in early 2007, I've contributed articles about travel, history and health. My speciality is writing about workplace ...
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