Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are the unholy trinity of names that first comes to the minds of most when thinking about history’s most monstrous rulers. Unfortunately, in the sad sweep of history, there has been no shortage of horrible rulers of the same ilk. Most of them did not run up as high a body count of victims as the twentieth century’s most notorious tyrants. However, some on this list actually competed with or, and in some ways even exceeded, the victim count of the modern era’s ruling monsters. Following are forty things about some of history’s deadliest rulers.
40. The Hitlerian Marxist
Equatorial Guinea is a small African country with a population of about a million people. It had significantly fewer during the events described here. For such a tiny country, it has endured more than its share of national suffering, inflicted by a megalomaniacal and batty tyrant, Francisco Macias Nguema (1924 – 1979).
As nutty a ruler as ever existed, Nguema practiced his crazy on the relatively small stage of a small country. For sheer murderous craziness, however, he had few equals. An admirer of both Hitler and Marx, which led him to describe himself and his governance as “Hitlerian Marxist”, Nguema visited upon his people a genocide that killed or exiled up to 60% of the population. To put that in perspective, the better-known Cambodian Genocide claimed more total victims, but Pol Pot had a bigger population base to victimize. He also “only” ended up killing about 25% of his people.