10 Most Cruel Rulers Ever in History

Throughout the history of mankind there have been many cruel rulers that use terror to gain control of public. They rule with an iron fist and an unrelenting thirst for power and recognition.

10. Idi Amin Dada

One of the most cruel rulers ever, Idi Amin Dada was the military dictator and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979. Amin joined the British colonial regiment, the King’s African Rifles in 1946, Amin held the rank of Major General in the post-colonial Ugandan Army and became its Commander before seizing power in the military coup of January 1971, deposing Milton Obote. He later promoted himself to Field Marshal while he was the head of state. His rule was characterized by human rights abuses, political repression, ethnic persecution, extra judicial killings and the expulsion of Indians from Uganda. The estimates range of people killed from 80,000 to 500,000.

He hate Europeans “We Africans used to carry Europeans, but now Europeans are carrying us. We are now the masters … They came from Britian and wanted to show that I really have power in my country.” Amin was eventually overthrown, but until his death, he held that Uganda needed him and he never expressed remorse for the abuses of his regime. On 20 July 2003, died at King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Jeddah, 

Saudi Arabia, from kidney failure.

9. Attila The Hun

Attila (Attila the Hun), was the ruler of the Huns from 434 to 453. He was leader of the Hunnic Empire, which stretched from the Ural River to the Rhine River and from the Danube River to the Baltic Sea. 

He was considered as one of the history`s greatest villains. In much of Western Europe, he is remembered as the epitome of cruelty and rapacity. He crossed the Danube twice and plundered the Balkans, but was unable to take Constantinople. 

He also attempted to conquer Roman Gaul (France), crossing the Rhine in 451 and marching as far as Aurelianum (Orleans) before being defeated at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains.

Subsequently he invaded Italy, devastating the northern provinces, but was unable to take Rome. He planned for further campaigns against the Romans. He returned in 452 to claim his marriage to Honoria anew, invading and ravaging Italy along the way. Attila drowned in his own blood on his wedding night. He died in the early months of 453.

8. Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan was the founder and Great Khan (emperor) of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his demise. He came to power by uniting many of the nomadic tribes of northeast Asia. After founding the Mongol Empire and being proclaimed “Genghis Khan”, he started the Mongol invasions that resulted in the conquest of most of Eurasia.

 He was a warrior and ruler. starting from obscure and insignificant beginnings, brought all the nomadic tribes of Mongolia under the rule of himself and his family in a rigidly disciplined military state.

7. Pol Pot

Pol Pot was the leader of the Khmer Rouge and the Prime Minister of Cambodia from 1976 to 1979. Pol Pot became leader of Cambodia on April 17, 1975. During his time in power, his radical communist government forced the mass evacuations of cities, killed or displaced millions of people, and left a legacy of disease and starvation. 

Under his leadership, his government caused the deaths of at least one million people from forced labor, starvation, disease, torture, or execution.

6. Vlad Tepes

Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia (Vlad the Impaler) known for executing his enemies by impalement, and was a three-time Voivode of Wallachia, ruling mainly from 1456 to 1462, the period of the incipient Ottoman conquest of the Balkans.

 Vlad is best known for the legends of the exceedingly cruel punishments he imposed during his reign and for serving as the primary inspiration for the vampire. He was a fan of various forms of torture including disemboweling and rectal and facial impalement. He tortured thousands while he ate and drunk among the corpses.

 He impaled every person in the city of Amlas nearly 20,000 men, women and children. Vlad tortured the people ordering him to be skinned, boiled, decapitated, blinded, strangled, hanged, burned, roasted, hacked, nailed, buried alive, stabbed, etc. He also liked to cut off noses, ears, sexual organs and limbs.

5. Ivan IV of Russia

Ivan IV of Russia (Ivan IV Vasilyevich), also know as Ivan the Terrible, was the Grand Duke of Muscovy from 1533 to 1547 and was the first ruler of Russia and the first to be proclaimed tsar of Russia (from 1547). 

Historic sources present disparate accounts of Ivan’s complex personality: he was described as intelligent and devout, yet given to rages and prone to episodic outbreaks of mental illness. He enjoyed burning 1000s of people in frying pans, and was fond of impaling people. 

Ivan’s soldiers built walls around the perimeter of the city in order to prevent the people of the city escaping. Between 500 and 1000 people were gathered every day by the troops, then tortured and killed in front of Ivan and his son. He is also remembered for his paranoiac suspiciousness and cruel persecution of nobility. Ivan died from a stroke while playing chess with Bogdan Belsky on 28 March.

4. Adolph Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann was born in March 19, 1906, in Solingen, a small industrial city in the Rhineland. He was a German and one of the major organizers of the Holocaust. He was hanged by the state of Israel for his part in the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II. “The death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction.”

3. Leopold II of Belgium

Leopold II was the King of the Belgians, and is chiefly remembered for the founding and brutal exploitation of the Congo Free State. Born in Brussels the second son of Leopold I and Louise-Marie of Orléans, he succeeded his father to the throne on 17 December 1865 and remained king until his death. 

Leopold created the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken to extract rubber and ivory in the Congo region of central Africa, which relied on forced labour and resulted in the deaths of approximately 3 million Congolese.

    

2. Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party. He was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945 and dictator of Nazi Germany from 1934 to 1945. Hitler was at the centre of the founding of Nazism, the start of World War II, and the Holocaust. 

By the end of the second world war, Hitler’s policies of territorial conquest and racial subjugation had brought death and destruction to tens of millions of people, including the genocide of some six million Jews in what is now known as the Holocaust. On 30 April 1945, Hitler committed suicide, shooting himself while simultaneously biting into a cyanide capsule.

     1. Josef Stalin

Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 6 May 1941 until his death in 5 March 1953. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who brought about the Russian Revolution in 1917. Stalin probably exercised greater political power than any other figure in history.

 In the 1930s, by his orders, millions of peasants were either killed or permitted to starve to death. Stalin brought about the deaths of more than 20 million of his own people while holding the Soviet Union in an iron grip for 29 years.