The Three Worst Dictators of the 20th Century
From Europe to Asia and the Middle East, the 20th century was plagued by ruthless dictators who unleashed terror and widespread fear upon millions of lives, in most cases, even the citizens they served. By manipulating political systems and exploiting social tensions, each of the worst dictators of the 20th century each committed mass atrocities, all in the name of consolidation of their power. In each case, power was obtained through a mix of military force, clandestine manipulation, and centralized, authoritarian rule, without the consent of the majority of citizens. While history books lack no shortage of despots, tyrants and dictators, Daily Dose Documentary arguably presents the three most brutal dictators in 20th Century History.
Title: Adolf Hitler
After his failed Beer Hall Putsch coup d’tat of 1923 and subsequent imprisonment at Landsberg Prison, Adolf Hitler published his autobiography, Mein Kampf, reminiscing about his time in Vienna, at the same time espousing that the German state was not an economic or social entity, but a racial one, affirming that the only way to revitalize Germany was an insistence on Aryan purity and the removal of non-Aryan races. He also called for Lebensraum or “living space,” which saw the need for Germany to expand eastward into Russia by pushing out or eradicating the Slavic people. Hitler went on to write that “the nationalization of our masses will succeed only when, aside from all the positive struggle for the soul of our people, their international poisoners are exterminated,” making a clear reference to his future plans for Hitler’s “Final Solution.”
Rising to power on January 20th, 1933, when he became Chancellor of Germany, he quickly consolidated his control over a now unified Germany, before transforming the nation into a totalitarian state. Passing the Enabling Act in March of that same year, the Reichstag or Germany’s equivalent to Congress, granted Hitler his dictatorial powers, where he instituted the Nuremberg Laws in September of 1935, which institutionalized racial discrimination against Jews. Despite an atmosphere of rising antisemitism among Germans at large, violence remained minimal, until November 9th of 1938, when SS troops and common citizens alike vandalized or torched hundreds of synagogues throughout Germany, including thousands of Jewish homes, schools, businesses, hospitals and cemeteries, leading to the murders of nearly 100 innocent Jewish lives.
In the aftermath of the nationwide violence, the Nazis held the Jewish community responsible for all damages, assessing fines upwards of $400 million in 1938 currency, at the same time arresting more than 30,000 Jewish men, who were sent to concentration camps throughout Germany, specifically built to house Jews, homosexuals, political prisoners and others perceived as enemies of the Nazi state. The violence of Kristallnacht served notice to Jews throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, forcing many to flee their homelands for neutral or safe countries. For many who failed to flee Germany, or landed in countries that fell to Nazi occupation during World War Two, Hitler’s Final Solution led to the murders of over six million Jews, making Kristallnacht, a prescient foreshadow of the horrors to come.
On September 1st, 1939, under the direct command of Hitler himself, Germany launched a coordinated attack on Poland from the west, south and north, in clear violation of the Post World War One Treaty of Versailles, Treaty of Locarno, and the Kellogg-Briand Pact intended to maintain peace in Europe. Employing Hitler’s blitzkrieg or “lightning war” strategy, the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe at first laid down an extensive bombing campaign that destroyed Poland’s air and rail infrastructure, along with communication lines and munitions dumps, before deploying a massive land invasion by troops, tanks and artillery, incapacitating resistance as they pushed across the country.
After the fall of Poland, Europe experienced an eight-month period of relative peace known as the “Phony War,” or Sitzkrieg to German soldiers, when no Allied land operations took place along the Western Front. While the people of Great Britain clearly enjoyed this period of calm before the storm, Hitler’s lull was not due to a change of heart over his empire building aspirations, but rather due to the fact that his main Blitzkrieg force was busy invading Norway and Denmark—a lull that allowed the British Expeditionary Force or BEF to be dispatched to the Franco-Belgian border with the goal of pushing the Germans out of Western Europe.
Instead, as 1940 progressed, Hitler’s stranglehold on Europe increased in tandem with his repeated forays into new territories, at last ending the Phony War period on May the 10th, when the Nazis invaded the neutral low countries of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. Hitler’s Blitzkrieg proved to be a vicious onslaught against civilians, as the Luftwaffe in particular rained down terror and death on European cities. Hitler then set his sights on France, sweeping through the country with relative ease, leading French Premier Paul Reynaud to phone newly minted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill on May 15th, confessing that “We are defeated. We are beaten, we have lost the battle.”
After some 400,000 British, French and Belgium troops were pushed back to Dunkirk from the Franco-Belgium border, the evacuation of Dunkirk got a boost from Hitler himself, who on May 24th ordered a halt to the advance of German panzer divisions pressing in on the French port city. Hitler’s divisions were told to “hold the line of the canal” and “make use of the period of rest for general recuperation.” While historians still hotly debate Hitler’s ultimate decision or blunder, most agree that his decision was based on his generals’ concern over an Allied counterattack, as well as Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering’s insistence that his superior air forces could easily halt any evacuation attempts at Dunkirk. Instead, British naval and civilian boat captains evacuated every last Allied fighting man in what became known as the Miracle at Dunkirk.
As Hitler’s dominance over his European neighbors began to unravel due to relentless and building Allied pressure, many Nazi leaders attempted to assassinate Hitler in what became known as the July 20 plot. Led by Generals Ludwig Beck, Friedrich Olbricht, Henning von Treskow and Lt. Col. Claus Stauffenberg, during a planned meeting at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair bunker on July 20th, 1944, Stauffenberg planted a briefcase packed with high explosives under a conference table to be used for the upcoming high-level meeting with Hitler, departing the room on a trumped-up story about taking an important phone call. Unbeknownst to Stauffenberg, another officer moved the briefcase away from Hitler’s seat, before the bomb detonated at 12:42 that afternoon. Four people were mortally wounded, while Hitler suffered only minor injuries, remaining well enough to keep an appointment with Benito Mussolini, before giving the Italian dictator a tour of the bomb site.
As the Soviet Red Army closed in on Berlin, on April 29th, 1945, Hitler married longtime girlfriend Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the map room of his bunker in downtown Berlin. Hitler then hosted a modest wedding breakfast with his new wife, before taking secretary Traudl Junge to another room to dictate his last will and testament. The following day, Hitler appeared in a bunker corridor to offer his final farewell to about twenty assembled people, shaking hands with each of them before retiring to his quarters for the final moments of his life. Hitler chose a “pistol-and-poison method,” which was suggested by his physician, while Ava Braun chose cyanide alone. Per Hitler’s orders, both their bodies were dragged into a garden outside the bunker, doused in gasoline and set on fire.
Title: Joseph Stalin
Coming to power after the death of founding Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin quickly consolidated his power over the Communist Party by eliminating rivals such as Leon Trotsky, establishing himself as the unchallenged leader of the Soviet Union by 1928. Launching his first Five-Year Plan in 1929, Stalin’s vision was the rapidly industrialization of the Soviet economy, leading to widespread famine when his policies forced millions of peasants onto collective farms.
Worst hit was the Ukraine, when wealthy peasants known as kulaks were forced from their farms, before labeling them enemies of the state. Known as the bread basket of Europe, Ukrainian farmers—a staggering 80% of the population at the time—continued their resistance to collectivism and outside governance, leading to a harvest shortfall by the close of 1932 that fell 60% below target yields established by Soviet planners. In response, Stalin ordered the Soviet Secret Police to confiscate Ukrainian food stocks before sealing off Ukraine’s borders, in an attempt to starve a once proud people to their knees.
Known as the Great Famine or Holodomor in the Ukrainian, according to a 1988 U.S. Congressional commission report, Stalin’s crop collectors used long wooden poles with metal points to plumb the dirt floors of farmers’ homes, and if they found hidden stores of grain, many of the offending peasants were never seen or heard from again. As the famine worsened, many starving Ukrainians began eating pets or consuming flowers, leaves, tree bark and roots, leading one woman to devour dried beans to stave off her hunger, which led to her death after the beans expanded in her stomach. Starving adults and children alike simply died on their feet in the streets or in fields, leading to the deaths of an estimated four million Ukrainians. By the summer of 1933, many collective farms had only a third of their workers remaining, while prisons and labor camps swelled beyond their capacities. Faced with the prospect of massive food shortages in Russia, by the fall of 1933, Stalin began easing off on Ukrainian food collections, ending one of the most brutal genocides in the history of man.
Combined with the rise of Nazi power in Germany and expanding military aggression by Japan, a paranoid Joseph Stalin set out on a course to purge his perceived Bolshevik enemies in what he professed to be a legitimate effort to unite and strengthen the USSR. The Great Purge or the Great Terror, as it was known, began in 1934 with the murder of Stalin’s closest ally, Sergei Kirov. Claiming he had uncovered a dangerous anti-Stalinist conspiracy against his rule, Stalin began the systematic murder or imprisonment of suspected party dissenters, eventually eliminating all of the original Bolsheviks who had participated in Lenin’s Russian Revolution of 1917.
During the Great Purge of 1936 to 1938, a veritable conga line of show trials known as the Moscow Trials were undertaken, which effectively purged Stalin’s political enemies and critics in what Stalin called “the fifth column” or “enemy of the people.” Most of his perceived “saboteurs” were executed after their mock trials, nearly all of them confessing to anti-Stalinist sentiment following merciless sessions of interrogation, threats and torture.
After killing off or imprisoning Bolshevik party members, political officials and members of the military, Stalin expanded his genocidal cleansing to include peasants, ethnic minorities, artists, scientists, intellectuals and ordinary citizens. He also signed a decree that made family-members liable for the treasonous crimes of husbands and fathers, leading to the mass execution of children as young as twelve.
By the end of Stalin’s purge, about one-third of all Communist Party members had been executed, leading to the death of an estimated 750,000 to 950,000 Russians, although some historians place the death toll much higher, since many accused dissidents died of exhaustion, disease or starvation in prison camps known as gulags, making Joseph Stalin one of the leading mass murderers in human history.
As war in Europe began to lean in the Allies’ favor, Stalin participated in a series of Allied conferences to discuss the post-war direction of Europe, including Tehran in 1943 and Yalta in 1945, remaining loyal to the Allies while at the same time never losing sight of his vision to expand the Soviet Union. His reign of terror continued unabated after the war, establishing Soviet satellite governments throughout Eastern Europe. Stalin’s expansionist ambitions led to the start of the Cold War in 1947, when President Harry S. Truman and Congress supported the governments of Turkey and Greece, who were then under threat from Communist rebel fighters. Cold War events came to a head in 1950, when Stalin gave North Korean leader Kim Il Sung—another top ten dictator of the 20th Century—permission to invade U.S.-supported South Korea, leading to the Korean War of 1950 to 1953.
After Stalin he died from a stroke on March the 5th, 1953, his body was preserved in Lenin’s mausoleum until 1961, when his remains were reburied near the Kremlin walls as part of the de-Stalinization era initiated by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, making Joseph Stalin one of the most feared dictators in the history of modern Russia.
Title: Mao Zedong
Born in 1893 Shaoshan China, Mao Zedong became a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, while working as a Peking University librarian, and spearheading the “Autumn Harvest Uprising” in 1927, when he led a small army of peasants against their landlords in Hunan Province. During an on again off again civil war between the reigning Chinese Nationalist Party and the reform-driven Communist Party of China, Mao rose to cult status prominence during what became known as the “Long March,” which was a series of retreats by his Red Army forces from the pursuing National Army, covering some 5,600 miles in 370 days. When China’s civil war resumed after Japan’s surrender following the Second Sino-Japanese War, Mao’s forces defeated the Nationalist government, forming the People’s Republic of China or PRC on October 1st, 1949, which began his Marxist-Leninist single party rule until his death in 1976.
Over the coming years, Mao solidified his power through his “Chinese Land Reform” initiatives against landlords, his “Campaign to Suppress Counterrevolutionaries” initiative and his “Three-anti and Five-anti Campaigns,” which were a series of reforms designed to rid Chinese cities of corruption and enemies of the state. From 1953 to 1958, Mao drafted the first Constitution of the PRC, at the same time strengthening China’s nuclear arsenal, which further drove a wedge in China’s relationships with the Soviet Union. From 1958 to early 1960, Mao launched his “Great Leap Forward” campaign, which steered China away from an agriculturally-based society towards an industrialized state, leading to the deadliest famine in recorded human history, which resulted in the deaths of 15 to 55 million people between 1958 and 1962.
After launching his “Socialist Education Movement” or “four cleanups” in 1963, intended to cleanse politics, the economy, internal organization and communist ideology, in 1966, Mao initiated China’s 10-year “Cultural Revolution,” which was marked by violent class struggles, the widespread destruction of cultural artifacts and Chinese heritage, the persecution of tens of millions of upperclass or bourgeois Chinese, with death toll estimates ranging from hundreds of thousands to many millions. Following years of declining health, Mao suffered a series of heart attacks in 1976, which ended the Cultural Revolution upon his death at age 82, making the Big Three dictators of the 20th century, some of the deadliest men in recorded world history.