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.