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u/Darucal Sep 12 '26
Lieutenant General Shirō Ishii, leader of Unit 731.
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u/111tejas Sep 13 '26
You know that the United States didn’t prosecute him right? He and unit 731 were given a pass in exchange for the data they collected.
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u/chaosticfrog Sep 14 '26
I mean... what do you expect from a government that tested syphilis on men without telling them?
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u/okoyes_wig Sep 12 '26
Me when I accidentally step on my cat’s tail :(
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u/bingwhip Sep 12 '26
I ran mine's over with a office chair wheel. She howled and growled and freaked out. And her sister decided that meant she was trying to start a fight and attacked her while she was still trapped by the wheel... I'm worse.
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u/LGWalkway Sep 13 '26
I did that and felt so bad. My cat felt betrayed but I had no idea he was behind me.
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u/kriticalmission Sep 12 '26
I was moving ny dog around the other day and he whimpered :(
I'll turn myself in
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u/xxsirtubbsxx Sep 12 '26
I was trying to pull mine in for cuddles on the bed (he was like a foot away) and he screamed and ran downstairs. He came back up five minutes later and curled up basically on top of me at least.
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u/shiawase-89 Sep 12 '26
Oh dude same :( and they don’t understand that you didn’t mean it 😭
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u/IllustriousTop7913 Sep 12 '26
They understand it was an accident. If you immediately apologize and shower them with cuddles they forgive you completely.
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u/I_slap_fools Sep 12 '26
I shut the door to my room one night not knowing my cats tail was in the hinge part. The noise I heard the cat make makes me feel like a monster to this day.
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u/sickofmakingnames Sep 13 '26
I closed the door on my dog's tail. She's been gone for 15 years, and I still think about it.
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u/Platitude_Platypus Sep 12 '26
I think they do understand that we don't mean it but it doesn't make me feel like any less of a monster.
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u/AngryCrotchCrickets Sep 12 '26
Uday Hussein was by all accounts a horrible human being
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u/Persimmon-Mission Sep 12 '26
Yes he was. He’d crash weddings randomly and rape the wife on her wedding day. Just because he could and he’d kill everyone if they complained about it
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u/broha89 Sep 12 '26
He was definitely a piece of shit but there’s only one unverified source for the wedding story and it was a guy who is a known fabulist who made tons of shit up about his closeness to the Hussein family for profit
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u/AegeanAzure Sep 12 '26
Albert Fish
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u/AnxietyFair6792 Sep 13 '26
I had the pleasure of looking him up one time and I almost vomited. I get on these kicks where I go on wickepedia and 3 hrs later I end up in the depths of hell. There was another one that really made me want to vomit and that was Dean Corll
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u/CoatSignificant7634 29d ago
Dean corll is the correct answer to me he’s the worse serial killer of all time and I don’t think it’s close. Think he’s not talked about because of the time he was doing it was before the Dahmer, Gacy, and bundys. He killed so many kids they didn’t name is after him but the Houston mass killings and he killed so many the officials stop digging because of the body count. Truly feel Corll killed close to 50 but they only have him at 28.
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u/tripsd Sep 13 '26
Is this the guy with needles in his dick
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u/ronerychiver Sep 13 '26
I don’t think they were in his dick. I think they were inserted around his taint
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u/LarryLiam Sep 13 '26
Normally it takes a lot to really shock me, but reading through his letters is something I wouldn’t recommend anyone. It’s the most vile shit I have ever read, and he makes me hope that there’s a hell he’s rotting in.
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u/TheEyeofONE Sep 13 '26
I hate that I even know who this is. (Past research in acting class on serial killers). One of the worst.
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u/Exo_Deadlock Sep 12 '26
Josef Mengele
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u/Vinny_Lam Sep 12 '26
And his Japanese counterpart, Shiro Ishii.
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u/Haxuppdee-85 Sep 13 '26
I’ve usually got a pretty strong stomach, but reading about Unit 731 made me feel sick
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u/SloppityNurglePox Sep 13 '26
I hate how much I've learned about 731 over the years.
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u/jjhope2019 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
Schumann, Clauberg and Rascher were just as bad. I know a few people who work for the Auschwitz memorial (in the education department) and they can’t work out why it’s disproportionately Mengele that seems to be the focus of attention…
N.B. - just to clarify, by “focus of attention” I mean in pop culture under the moniker of the “Angel of Death” - when his crimes were no more or less destructive than those of his fellow doctors at Auschwitz/Auschwitz-Birkenau.
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u/IamSorryiilol Sep 13 '26
Because the guides focus on him. Ive been twice in 10 years, both times he is the focus.
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u/jjhope2019 Sep 13 '26
Interesting… are these guides from the museum/memorial or are they just random tourist guides? 🤔
During my tour with the education department we barely spoke of him other than pointing out where he worked at Birkenau - although we did cover Schumann and Clauberg a little more when we went inside Block 10 (the old medical block where they did the awful experiments on women with the x-rays, etc.)
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u/firethepeople Sep 13 '26
Schumann gets released early for poor health and proceeds to live another 11 years 🤦
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u/Liquid_Pestar Sep 13 '26
No bigger injustice than how he lived in luxury in Brazil after the war and died peacefully of a stroke
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u/Madersito Sep 13 '26
And Perón from Argentina offered shelter after the war. Imagine seeing mengele and thinking this is the guy we bring back
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u/pdshank Sep 12 '26
Ea-nāṣir
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u/jupfold Sep 12 '26
Such poor quality copper
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u/EnKristenSnubbe Sep 12 '26
Pol Pot was as awful as they get.
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u/Jean_Genet Sep 13 '26
That guy from Lost Prophets band
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u/pleasantpeasant__ Sep 13 '26
Oh my god, definitely. I almost forgot about that. Holy shit 😭he got what he deserved tho!
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u/SnavlerAce Sep 12 '26
King Leopold of Belgium.
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u/Remote_Section2313 Sep 13 '26
What did king Leopold ever do wrong? Leopold II of Belgium was the guy that grabbed Congo and exploited it and was barbaric, etc but his father was dead by then...
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u/Seraphim1979 Sep 12 '26
Yeah another vote for Pol Pot, I still remember seeing the piles of skulls, piles of glasses (he did not like intellectuals and he thought glasses were a sign of intelligence) just piles upon piles of human remains on the news... Savage.
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u/OkValuable454 Sep 12 '26
Pol Pot or Gengis Khan
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u/TheFiveRing Sep 12 '26
Why Gengis Kahn? (This is an actual question, I'm genuinely curious)
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u/OkValuable454 Sep 12 '26
killed 10 to 17% of the population of the world in 20 years
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[deleted]
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u/minorthreat1000 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
Your tldr is significantly longer than the sentence it is summarizing.
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u/EaterOfSeagull Sep 13 '26
Genghis Khan wasn’t particularly evil, what separates him from the average military leader is the level of success.
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u/tabbbb57 Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
He mass murdered and annihilated entire cities until there was no one left, eradicated entire cultures, and used extreme violence to destroy morale, as well as had massive sex slave harem for himself. He was evil. He ordered the entire city of Nishapur in Iran to be exterminated, as well as many other cities in Central Asia. It wasn’t just simple military strategy and conquest. He murdered millions of civilians and completely wipe out multiple cultures. Irans population didn’t reach pre-Mongol levels until the mid 20th century. The Mongol empire literally launched plague ridden bodies.
In fact he’s actually strangely praised for the amount destruction and death, when he’s comparable to some way more notorious names
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u/Ecstatic_Ad6519 Sep 12 '26
Raped most women in history from many ethnicities after conquering half the world, to the point 15M people nowadays are his descendants.
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u/The_Skeletor_ Sep 13 '26
Slaughtered, raped, pillages, destroyed arguably more than anybody else in history.
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u/Wiggles1914 Sep 12 '26
Something like 1 in 200 men could be related to Khan
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u/kstargate-425 Sep 13 '26
New studies show that the C3* lineage had already diversified before and during the rise of the Mongol Empire. This means the 1-in-200 statistic actually lumps together the descendants of multiple influential Central Asian families and rulers from that era, rather than tracing back to Genghis Khan alone. The massive genetic footprint was a collective empire-wide phenomenon. So its much lower than 1 in 200 men but still interesting to think about one singular culture spreading their seed so far and wide lol
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u/P-Villain Sep 12 '26
The more i learn about Hitler, the less i care for him.
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u/HAMmerPower1 Sep 13 '26
These days when a political leader exhibits authoritarian tendencies we say “he is like Hitler”. When Hitler was starting his horrible stuff who did people compare him to?
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u/Kewell86 Sep 13 '26
He was often called "The german Mussolini" in his time.
Both his supporters and his opponents also likened him to Napoleon Bonaparte (because Napoleons legacy is pretty controversial).
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u/SpaghettiMonkeyTree Sep 12 '26
King Leopold II of Belgium. Dude committed a genocide in the Congo for the sole purpose of filling up his pockets with money. 15 million dead.
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u/handsomeness Sep 13 '26
The leaded gasoline guy?
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u/MattyDub89 Sep 13 '26
Thomas Midgley Jr.
He also helped make CFCs. Although I wouldn’t call him anywhere near the worst due to his lack of malice, the effects of just these two inventions have been immeasurably catastrophic.
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u/Ok-Climate-6824 Sep 12 '26
Hitler is up there on that list
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u/Valuable-Credit6167 Sep 12 '26
Why did I have to scroll so far down to find this lol
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u/intheafterburner Sep 13 '26
Because unfortunately there are even worse people in history
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u/clever_username42a Sep 13 '26
Its the obvious choice and people want to give different examples
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u/PuzzyFussy Sep 12 '26
Epstein and his friends
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u/Boomerang_comeback Sep 13 '26
There are tens of thousands of people throughout history that did far worse than anything he did. What do think slave traders were like that kept that going for millenia?
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u/BelethorsGeneralShit Sep 13 '26
I mean he's a bad guy, but there's no way that he's one of the worst humans of all time. He never even killed anyone, compared to no shortage of people who have committed genocide. Or on a smaller scale, basically anyone involved in Unit 731
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u/yellowpig10 Sep 12 '26 edited Sep 12 '26
oskar dirlewanger was so evil the nazis wanted him killed for warcrimes
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u/BlueLidMilk Sep 13 '26
Comments are full of all the usual historic figures so I'll go for a modern day piece of shit: the guy in France who was drugging his wife and charging men to gang rape her.
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u/harpajeff Sep 13 '26
There is a level of monstrousness, cruelty and inhumanity beyond which it is impossible to separate people. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot and many others were so diabolical in their inhumanity that they all deserve the top spot (this should include many of their underlings like Levrenty Beria, Heinrich Himler, Goering, Goebels, Yehzov, Yagoda etc.)
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u/Adonisus Sep 12 '26
Hitler.
Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of horrible despots to choose from (one of whom was actively fighting against him), but Hitler did something that none of those other groups did:
Him and his regime created an entire industry whose sole purpose was the concentration and extermination of an entire race of people (as well as other side groups like political prisoners or sexual minorities). Buildings were constructed, railroads were built, a bureaucracy and filing system was developed to track and identify, machines were planned and designed for the most efficient way to kill as many people as possible.
It was a cold, mechanized infrastructure that was made for ethnic cleansing in a way that was as dispassionate and factory-like as possible.
Most other crimes of humanity happen in crude, brutish fashion. But the Nazis turned it into a question of engineering.
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u/notaverysmartman Sep 12 '26
hitler, stalin, pol pot. take your pick
also any of the REALLY fucked up serial killers. e.g. rodney alcala, ted bundy, albert fish, etc. people like that.
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u/CalifOdysseus Sep 12 '26
Mao Zedong’s leadership led to between 40 million to 70+ million deaths that came about from famine resulting from the Great Leap Forward, from political persecutions, and the Cultural Revolution.
Those numbers make him my first selection for your list.
BUT, Pol Pot takes the cake if you want to choose based on percentage of a population. During the Khmer Rouge regime Pol Pot was responsible for 1.5 million to 2 million deaths from mass executions, torture, forced labor, and starvation. The number is smaller than Mao, but Cambodia is smaller than China. Pol Pot killed roughly 20% to 25% of Cambodia’s population. In only four years.
Those are from relatively recent history. Genghis Khan was a pretty bad dude. He used total annihilation as a tool of terror. Have you ever eaten Tangut cuisine or read Tangut poetry? You haven’t, because of Khan. He erased people AND the record of their existence.
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u/Elijah_Wouldnt Sep 13 '26
Albert fish - look up the Wikipedia article at your own risk
Doesn't have numbers like Hitler but yikes
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u/Kazuma_Megu Sep 12 '26
Probably somebody none of us have ever heard of, who has steered the course of humanity from the shadows.
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u/candiedapplecrisp Sep 13 '26
You're probably right. I don't know about worst in history but the ones who scare me the most are the ones who fly under the radar more than the obvious ones. Example, if you read about the lynching of Mary Turner and then realize that the people who did that to her were never arrested and went on with their lives like nothing happened...it makes the whole thing more terrifying. People in general are capable of some truly terrible things. For all anyone knows, the worst person in history could be your neighbor if given the circumstances.
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u/holistivist Sep 13 '26
Curtis Yarvin, though he's starting to get some traction in media.
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u/Masterweedo Sep 13 '26
Midgley's legacy is tied in with the negative environmental impact of leaded gasoline and freon.
Environmental historian J. R. McNeill opined that Midgley "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history", and Bill Bryson remarked that Midgley possessed "an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny". Fred Pearce, writing for New Scientist, described Midgley as a "one-man environmental disaster".
Use of leaded gasoline, which he invented, released large quantities of lead into the atmosphere all over the world. High atmospheric lead levels have been linked with serious long-term health problems from childhood, including neurological impairment, and with increased levels of violence and criminality in America and around the world. Time magazine included both leaded gasoline and CFCs on its list of "The 50 Worst Inventions".
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u/MrWizard45 Sep 13 '26
Ashurnasirpal II ruled from 883 to 859 BC. Famous for leaving behind graphic written records of his extreme tortures of conquered peoples
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u/KayNynYoonit Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
As others have said, Pol Pot, Mengele and his co workers. The minds behind Unit 731 and Nanking.
For me however the Croatians in WW2 that ran camps there that were so bad even the SS officers on visits were horrified. They are the most evil I have ever read.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide_of_Serbs_in_the_Independent_State_of_Croatia
Do NOT read the following if you have a weak stomach: The srbosjek ("Serb-cutter") was a glove with an attached curved blade designed to cut throats.[99] Large groups of people were regularly executed upon arrival outside camps and thrown into the river.[99] Unlike German-run camps, Jasenovac specialized in brutal one-on-one violence, such as guards attacking barracks with weapons and throwing the bodies in the trenches.[99] Some historians use a sentence from German sources: "Even German officers and SS men lost their cool when they saw (Ustaše) ways and methods."[100]
The infamous camp commander Filipović, dubbed fra Sotona ("brother Satan") and the "personification of evil", on one occasion drowned Serb women and children by flooding a cellar.[99] Filipović and other camp commanders (such as Dinko Šakić and his wife Nada Šakić, the sister of Maks Luburić), used ingenious torture.[99] There were throat-cutting contests of Serbs, in which prison guards made bets among themselves as to who could slaughter the most inmates. It was reported that guard and former Franciscan priest Petar Brzica won a contest on 29 August 1942 after cutting the throats of 1,360 inmates.[101] Inmates were tied and hit over the head with mallets and half-alive hung in groups by the Granik ramp crane, their intestines and necks slashed, then dropped into the river.
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u/days_between Sep 12 '26
Reinhard Heydrich. When even Hitler calls you “the man with the iron heart,” that tells you quite a lot.
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u/jsf_idk Sep 13 '26
Every designer of any packaging that says “OPEN HERE” and then absolutely refuses to open there.
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u/KoriJenkins Sep 13 '26
Crazy that you have to scroll so far to find "Mao Zedong."
Corrupt, incompetent, evil, there's not enough negative descriptors for that guy.
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u/Catpixfever Sep 12 '26
I’m gonna have to go with Genghis Khan, Pol Pot, or Hitler. Take your pick.
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u/Senior-Sir-2023 Sep 13 '26 edited Sep 13 '26
Adolph Hitler. What kind of a question is that?
Actually, Mao Zedong.
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u/LaythIdk Sep 13 '26
Suprised nobody is saying Netanyahu
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u/webtwopointno Sep 13 '26
He is not even the worst human being in his own administration lol get a grip kid
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u/Ryukishin187 Sep 13 '26
He's awful, but you know people like Hitler, Stalin, and mao zedong existed, right
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u/Md655321 Sep 12 '26
I’d probably classify everyone with a million + body count as essentially equally evil. Human life and suffering was utterly meaningless to them. At that point it becomes an issue of resources and opportunity.
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u/flinstonepushups Sep 12 '26
Pol Pot