Countess Elizabeth Báthory
According to all testimony, Báthory's initial victims were the adolescentdaughters of local peasants, many of whom were lured to her castle by offers of well-paid work as maidservants. Later, she is said to have begun to kill daughters of the lesser gentry, who were sent to her private quarters by their parents to learn courtly etiquette. Abductions were said to have occurred as well. The atrocities described most consistently included torture, severe beatings, burning or mutilation of hands, biting the flesh off the faces, arms and other body parts, freezing or starving to death. The use of needles was also mentioned by the her collaborators in court.
The stories of her serial murders and brutality are verified by the testimony of more than 300 witnesses and survivors as well as physical evidence and the presence of horribly mutilated dead, dying and imprisoned girls found at the time of her arrest. Stories which ascribe to her vampire-like tendencies (most famously the tale that she bathed in the blood of virgins to retain her youth) were generally recorded years after her death but are considered unreliable. Her story quickly became part of Hungarian folklore.
She was kept bricked in a set of rooms, with only small slits left open for ventilation and the passing of food. She remained there for four years, until her death. On August 21, 1614, in the evening, she complained to her bodyguard that her hands were cold. He replied, "It's nothing Mistress. Just go lie down." She went to sleep and was found dead the following morning. She was buried in a church but according to some sources because of the villagers' uproar over having her buried in the local cemetery, her body was moved to her birth home at Ecsed, where it was interred at the Báthory family crypt. Today, the location of her body is unknown.
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Reinhard Heydrich
Reinhard Heydrich was born in Halle an der Saale to a cultured family of social standing and financial means. His father was composer and opera singer Richard Bruno Heydrich and his mother was Elisabeth Anna Maria Amalia Krantz. His two forenames Reinhard and Tristan) were patriotic musical tributes: "Reinhard" referred to the tragic hero from Amen(an opera his father wrote), and "Tristan" stems from Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. Heydrich's third name, "Eugen", was his late maternal grandfather's forename (Professor Eugen Krantz had been the director of the Dresden Royal Conservatory).
His father was a German nationalist who instilled patriotic ideas in his three children, but was not affiliated with any political party until after World War I. The Heydrich household was strict. As a youth, Reinhard engaged his younger brother, Heinz, in mock fencing duels. Heydrich was very intelligent and excelled in his schoolwork especially in science at his school. He was also a skilled athlete, and he became an expert swimmer and fencer. He was shy, insecure, and was frequently bullied for his high-pitched voice and rumors about his Jewish ancestry. The rumors earned him the nickname "Moses Handel".
In 1918, World War I ended with Germany's defeat. In late February 1919, civil unrest including strikes and clashes between communist and anti-communist groups took place in Heydrich's home town of Halle. Under Defence Minister Gustav Noske's directives, a right-wing paramilitary unit was formed and ordered to "recapture" Halle. Heydrich, then 15-years old, joined Maercker's Volunteer Rifles. When the skirmishes ended, Heydrich was part of the force assigned to protect private property. These events left a strong impression on him and he said that it was a "political awakening" for him. So, he joined the Deutschvölkischer Schutz und Trutzbund(National German Protection and Shelter League), an anti-Semiticorganization.
Many historians regard him as the darkest figure within the Nazi elite. Adolf Hitlerdescribed him as "the man with the iron heart".He was the founding head of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), an intelligence organization charged with seeking out and neutralizing resistance to the Nazi Party by using arrests, deportations and murders. He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of co-ordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9th and 10th,1938. The attacks, carried out by SA Stormtroopersand civilians. Upon his arrival in Prague, Czechoslovakia, Heydrich sought to eliminate opposition to the Nazi occupation by suppressing Czech cultureand deporting and executing members of the Czech resistance. He was directly responsible for the Einsatzgruppen, the special task forces which travelled in the wake of the German armies and murdered over one million people, including Jews, by mass shooting.
Heydrich was attacked in Prague on May 27,1942, by a British-trained team of Czech and Slovak soldiers who had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exileto kill him. He died from his injuries a week later. Intelligence falsely linked the assassins to the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. Lidice was razed to the ground, all men and boys over the age of 16 were shot, and all but a handful of its women and children were deported and killed in Nazi concentration camps.
Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich was responsible for over sixty thousand deaths while he was alive and over five million deaths because he was the architect of the Holocaust.
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King Leopold II of Belgium
Leopold was the founder and sole owner of the Congo Free State, a private project undertaken on his own behalf. He used explorer Henry Morton Stanley to help him lay claim to the Congo, an area now known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo. At the Berlin Conferenceof 1884 - 1885, the colonial nations of Europe authorized his claim by committing the Congo Free State to improving the lives of the native inhabitants. From the beginning, however, Leopold essentially ignored these conditions. He ran the Congo using the mercenary Force Publiquefor his personal enrichment. He used great sums of the money from this exploitation for public and private construction projects in Belgium during this period. He donated the private buildings to the state before his death, to preserve them for Belgium.
Leopold extracted a fortune from the Congo, initially by the collection of ivory, and after a rise in the price of rubber in the 1890s, by forced labor from the natives to harvest and process rubber. Under his regime there were between 2 and 15 million deaths among the Congolese people. The exact number of deaths is unknown because accurate records were not kept and because smallpoxepidemics and sleeping sickness also devastated the population. Leopold took steps to limit word of the atrocities reaching the outside world. Missionarieswere allowed only on sufferance, and Leopold was able to silence the Belgian Catholics. Rumors circulated but Leopold attempted to discredit them, Also, publishers were bribed, critics were accused of running secret campaigns to further other nations' colonial ambitions, and eyewitness reports from missionaries such as William Henry Sheppard dismissed as attempts by Protestants to smear Catholic priests. As a result, for at least a decade, criticism was largely contained.
Inspired by works such as Joseph Conrad’sHeart of Darkness (1902) which was based on Conrad's experience as a steamer captain on the Congo twelve years earlier, organized international criticism of Leopold’s rule mobilized. Reports of outrageous exploitation and widespread human rightsabuses led the British Crown to appoint their consul Roger Casementto investigate conditions there. His extensive travels and interviews in the region resulted in the Casement Report, which detailed the murders and abuses of natives under Leopold's regime.A widespread war of words ensued. In Britain, former shipping clerk E. D. Morelwith Casement's support founded the Congo Reform Association, the first mass human rightsmovement in history. Supporters included American writer Mark Twain, who wrote a stinging political satire entitled King Leopold's Soliloquy, which portrays the King arguing that bringing Christianity to the country outweighs a little starvation, and uses many of Leopold's own words against him. And, writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also criticized the "rubber regime" in his 1908 work TheCrime of the Congo, written to aid the work of the Congo Reform Association. Doyle contrasted Leopold's rule to the British rule of Nigeria, arguing that decency required those who ruled primitive peoples to be concerned first with their uplift, not how much could be extracted from them. Many of Leopold's policies were adopted from Dutch practices in the East Indies. Similar methods of forced labor were employed to some degree by Germany, France, and Portugal where natural rubber occurred in their own colonies. Reports of the deaths and abuse led to a major international scandal in the early 20th century. In 1908, Leopold was by the Belgian government to relinquish control of the colony to a civil administration.
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Tomas de Torquemada
The existence of many superficial converts among the Moriscos and Marranos (aka: Crypto-Jews), who had found it more socially, politically and economically expedient to join the Catholic Church, were perceived by the Spanish monarchs of that time (King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella) as a threat to the religious and social life of Spain. This led Torquemada, who himself had conversoancestors, to be one of the chief supporters of the Alhambra Decreethat expelled the Jews from Spain in 1492.
Torquemada was born either in Valladolid, Spain, or in the nearby small village of Torquemada. He entered the local San Pablo Dominican monastery at a very young age. As a zealous advocate of church orthodoxy, he earned a reputation for learning, piety and austerity. As a result, he was promoted to prior of the monastery of Santa Cruz at Segovia. Around this time, he met the young Princess Isabella I and the two immediately established religious and ideological rapport. For a number of years, Torquemada served as her regular confessor and personal advisor. He was present at Isabella’s coronation in 1474 and remained her closest ally and supporter. He had even advised her to marry King Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 in order to consolidate their kingdoms and form a power base he could draw on for his own purposes.
Torquemada deeply feared the Marranos and Moriscos as a menace to Spain's welfare by their increasing religious influence on, and economic domination of Spain. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella concurred, and soon after their accession to power petitioned Pope Sixtus IVto grant their request for a Holy Office to administer an inquisition in Spain. The Pope granted their request and established the Holy Office for the Propagation of the Faith in late 1478. It still exists today.
The Pope went on to appoint a number of inquisitors for the Spanish Kingdoms in early 1482, including Torquemada. A year later he was named Grand Inquisitor of Spain which he remained until his death. In the fifteen years under his direction, the Spanish Inquisition grew from the single tribunal at Seville to a network of two dozen so-called Holy Offices. As Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada reorganized the Spanish Inquisition, establishing tribunals in Sevilla, Jaén, Córdoba, Ciudad Real and Saragossa. His quest was to rid Spain of all heresy. The Spanish chronicler Sebastián de Olmedo called him "the hammer of heretics, the light of Spain, the savior of his country, the honor of his order".
Under the edict of March 31, 1492, known as the Alhambra Decree, approximately 200,000 Jews left Spain. Following the Alhambra decree of 1492, approximately 50,000 Jews took baptism so as to remain in Spain; however, many of these were "crypto-Jews" and secretly kept some of their Jewish traditions. Torquemada made the procedures of prior inquisitions somewhat less brutal by moderating the use of torture, limiting its use to suspects denounced by two or more "persons of good nature" and by cleaning up the Inquisitorial prisons. The condemned were made to wear a sanbenito, a penitential garment worn over clothes and of a design that specified the type of penitence. One type, worn by those sentenced to death, had designs of hell’s flames or sometimes demons, dragons and/or snakes engraved on it. Another type had a cross, and was worn instead of imprisonment, then hung in the parish church.
There is some disagreement as to the number of victims of the Spanish Inquisition during Torquemada's reign as Grand Inquisitor. Some scholars] believe that he was responsible for the death of 2,000 people. And, Hernando del Pulgar, Queen Isabella’s secretary, wrote that 2,000 executions took place throughout the entirety of her reign, which extended well beyond Torquemada's death.
During his final years, Torquemáda's failing health, coupled with widespread complaints, caused Pope Alexander VI to appoint four assistant inquisitors in June 1494 to restrain the Spanish Inquisition. After fifteen years as Spain's Grand Inquisitor, Torquemáda died in the monastery of St. Thomas Aquinas in Ávila in 1498 and was interred there. His tomb was ransacked in 1832 — two years before the Inquisition was disbanded. His bones were allegedly stolen and ritually incinerated.
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Pol Pot
Pol Pot (born: Saloth Sar; 1925 -1998) was a Cambodian revolutionary who led the Communist Khmer Rouge from 1963 until 1997. From 1963 to 1981, he served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Kampuchea. He became the leader of Cambodia on April 17th, 1975, when his forces captured the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh. From 1976 to 1979, he also served as the prime minister of Democratic Kampuchea. He presided over a totalitarian dictatorship in which his government made urban dwellers move to the countryside to work in collective farms and on forced labor projects.
In 1976, Pol Pot's régime reclassified Kampucheans into three groupings: as full-rights (base) people, as candidates and as depositees, so-called because they included most of the new people who had been deposited from the cities into the communes. Depositees were marked for destruction. Their rations were reduced to two bowls of rice soup or p'baw per day leading to widespread starvation. "New people" were allegedly given no place in the elections taking place on March 20, 1976, despite the fact that the constitution established universal suffrage for all Cambodians over the age of 18. Hundreds of thousands of the new people, and later the depositees, were taken out in shackles to dig their own mass graves. Then, the Khmer Rouge soldiers buried them alive. A Khmer Rouge extermination prison directive ordered, "Bullets are not to be wasted." Such mass graves are often referred to as "the Killing Fields".
The Khmer Rouge also classified people by religious and ethnic background. They banned all religion and dispersed minority groups, forbidding them to speak their languages or to practice their customs. They especially targeted Buddhist monks, Muslims, Christians, Western-educated intellectuals, educated people in general, people who had contact with Western countries or with Vietnam, disabled people, and the ethnic Chinese, Laotians, and Vietnamese.
Some were put in the S-21 camp for interrogation involving torture in cases where a confession was useful to the government. Many others were summarily executed.The combined effects of executions, strenuous working conditions, malnutrition and poor medical care caused the deaths of approximately 25 percent of the Cambodian population. An estimated about 3 million people out of a population of slightly over 8 million died due to the policies of his four-year premiership.
Skulls of Some of Pol Pot's Victims
In 1979, after the Cambodian–Vietnamese War, Pol Pot relocated to the jungles of southwest Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge government collapsed. From 1979 to 1997, he and a remnant of the old Khmer Rouge operated near the border of Cambodia and Thailand where they clung to power with nominal United Nations recognition as the rightful government of Cambodia. Pol Pot died in 1998, while under house arrest by the Ta Mok faction of the Khmer Rouge. Since his death, rumors that he committed suicide or was poisoned have persisted
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