People usually think of Hitler as the worst mass killer. He is close to the top, but not at the top.
1. Mao Ze-Dong – 49 million to 78 million
2. Jozef Stalin – 23 million
3. Adolf Hitler – 12 million (some estimate up to 20 million indirectly)
Here is a link to Piero Scaruffi’s site. He does an excellent job summarizing genocides. Noteworthy is how far down on the list Saddam Hussein is. Also noteworthy is how many of these killers were active while we were all alive and happily going about our lives.
Finally, the most shocking of all is that Richard Nixon is on this list for the genocide of 70,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians during the Vietnam war. We don’t think of our own commanders-in-chief as killers. Sort of like German SS soldiers in 1942 thought of their Führer.
Heck, Fidel Castro is only responsible for 30,000 deaths in his 40 year reign.
Thanks for drawing my attention to this list. I had already thought the last century was terrible, but I had never seen a list like this. You are right that Saddam Hussein is not at the top, but he is still 13th with 600,000 dead.
I am reading Vargas llosa’s _Feast of the Goat-, a novel about Trujillo. It presents that murderer as one of the worst human beings imaginable, and yet his total is a mere 50,000, a drop in the bucket compared to the top ten.
The lengthy footnote on why the use of the atomic bomb in WWII by Truman is not listed is very interesting, and worth a read.