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History has a dark side where power often shields the guilty from justice. Join us as we explore infamous figures who committed horrific atrocities yet escaped punishment! Our countdown includes tyrants, dictators, and royals whose crimes shocked humanity, yet who lived out their lives without facing true justice for their deeds.
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00:00A titan of the Second World War, and a monster of the 20th century, who got away with it.
00:08Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at powerful historical figures who were not punished for their atrocities.
00:15He loved some, hated others. He even executed a few.
00:22Elizabeth Bathory.
00:23Elizabeth Bathory had a terrible temper, and she enjoyed torturing people. She enjoyed humiliating them.
00:30Often described as one of history's most prolific female serial killers, Elizabeth Bathory was accused of killing hundreds of young women between 1590 and 1610.
00:41According to legend, servants and peasants who worked in her castle were not safe from the Hungarian noblewoman's cruel whims.
00:48Her sadistic reputation was beginning to strike fear into the hearts of all who heard her name.
00:55You must imagine these people cowering outside the walls of her castle, never knowing what exactly is going on in there,
01:01but knowing at the same time that they are absolutely subject to this person's power, to this person's whim.
01:07Some tales even claimed she bathed in their blood to preserve her youth, though many historians now suspect that part is exaggerated.
01:15Still, many people believed Bathory was guilty at the time.
01:19More than 300 witnesses testified against her, and body parts were reportedly found when her castle was raided.
01:25While her servants were executed, with one imprisoned for life, Bathory herself escaped the noose.
01:32She was instead confined to her castle Jata until her death in 1614.
01:38She was allowed to live. She was imprisoned in her castle. That's, you know, what we've been led to believe.
01:43And that no one was allowed to talk about her or say her name for a hundred years meant that they almost just wrote it out of history.
01:49Josef Mengele. This evil doctor remains one of the clearest examples of how some Nazi perpetrators escaped justice after World War II.
01:59Josef Mengele has become the poster boy for Nazi medical experiments.
02:03What is it about Mengele that makes him so notorious?
02:07As an SS officer and a physician at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp,
02:12Josef Mengele carried out gruesome medical practices.
02:15We're talking about horrific experiments on twins, pregnant women, and people with deformities.
02:22Mengele sent thousands to the gas chamber, earning the chilling nickname, the Angel of Death.
02:27Mengele kept her from feeding her newborn child in order to see what would happen to the child,
02:37how long it could live until it starved.
02:39When the war ended, justice never came.
02:41Mengele fled Europe, living under false identities in Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil.
02:48Despite being one of Nazi's most wanted war criminals, he was never caught or tried.
02:53Rather, he reportedly drowned while swimming in Brazil, escaping the punishment many believe he deserved.
02:59Mengele was not the only Nazi doctor carrying out this kind of work, quote unquote.
03:04And the reason why we think about him is because he got away with it.
03:07He is Henry VIII, infamous even half a millennium later for his fabled charm and terrible cruelty.
03:16With Henry VIII, it didn't matter who you were, wife, advisor, friend, or rival.
03:21If you stood in his way, your head could roll.
03:24Two of his six wives, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, met the executioner's blade,
03:30as did once loyal allies like Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell.
03:33After declaring himself supreme head of the Church of England,
03:37Henry forced subjects to swear loyalty to him over the Pope.
03:42Refusal meant treason.
03:44Estimates suggest tens of thousands perished under his reign.
03:48Yet, for all his tyranny, he was never held to account.
03:51Henry actually elevates himself beyond kingship and proclaims that he is an emperor of his own empire.
04:01He was king, after all.
04:03Even though he ruled through fear and blood, some historians still portray him as a great monarch.
04:09Henry died painfully from illness in 1547.
04:12You see how you've maddened me?
04:16I hardly know myself.
04:18Jean Bidel Bocasa.
04:19In 1965, Jean Bidel Bocasa seized power and ruled the Central African Republic with terrifying cruelty.
04:28He later crowned himself Emperor Bocasa I, in a lavish coronation that cost millions.
04:34His regime was marked by executions of political rivals, rumors of cannibalism, and reports of mutilating thieves.
04:41Things worsened when school kids protested against wearing uniforms made by one of his companies.
04:47Nearly a hundred were massacred.
04:50Did Bocasa answer for these atrocities?
04:52Not really.
04:54After being overthrown in 1979, he fled into exile, but was later convicted of murder, embezzlement, and other crimes.
05:01Though sentenced to death, it was later commuted to life imprisonment.
05:05He was ultimately released under a general amnesty ordered in 1993, then posthumously pardoned by President François Bozizet in 2010.
05:16Sentenced to death, he spent a total of seven years in prison before being released in 1993 under an amnesty.
05:22He died of a heart attack three years later.
05:25Idi Amin.
05:26Isn't it deeply tragic that Idi Amin never faced any trial for all of the atrocities he committed?
05:33During his presidency, people lived in constant fear, and around 300,000 Ugandans died as a result of his cruelty.
05:41After establishing military rule in Uganda, Amin demonstrated eccentric and ruthless behavior.
05:47Mass executions, ethnic persecutions, and widespread human rights abuses became the norm, with anyone suspected of disloyalty being swiftly executed.
05:57His reputation for brutality earned him the nickname, the Butcher of Uganda, and infamous rumors of cannibalism.
06:05Amin ordered massive massacres, motivated by ethnic, political, and financial factors.
06:10Yet, like too many dictators, Amin escaped the reckoning he deserved.
06:15When he was overthrown in 1979, he fled to Libya, then settled in Saudi Arabia.
06:20There, far from the chaos he created, he lived until his death in 2003.
06:27Augusto Pinochet
06:28From 1973 to 1990, Augusto Pinochet ruled Chile after seizing power in a military coup.
06:36His regime unleashed a brutal crackdown on political rivals.
06:40Thousands were tortured, executed, or simply disappeared.
06:43Out on the streets of Santiago, leftists, protesters, artists, and intellectuals were all being rounded up and marched to the internment camps that were springing up across the city.
06:53Beyond the brutality, Pinochet was accused of embezzling millions in state funds and dabbling in illegal arms and drug deals.
07:00While visiting London in 1998, Pinochet was arrested on a Spanish warrant issued by Judge Balthazar Garzon.
07:08After 16 months of house arrest in Britain, he returned to Chile to face justice.
07:13I want to know when my father was killed, on what day, where are his remains, then I can finally say goodbye.
07:20Though courts began stripping his immunity, his lawyers argued he was too ill to stand trial.
07:26Despite multiple house arrests, he was never convicted and died at 91 without spending a day in prison.
07:32Some time ago, I would have said that the dictatorship was behind us and hadn't played such an important role in Chile.
07:38But I wasn't fully aware of what had really happened and how it had happened.
07:43Pol Pot
07:44Few people on earth have unleashed such chaos as Pol Pot.
07:49It may surprise many that a ruthless figure like Pol Pot never truly faced justice for his crimes.
07:59This was a leader whose reign saw nearly 2 million Cambodians perish.
08:04Determined to build a pure agrarian communist society, he abolished education and religion,
08:10emptied cities, and targeted anyone seen as a threat, especially intellectuals.
08:14Pol Pot believed cities were evil and planned to rebuild Cambodia as an agrarian society.
08:20Anything modern was considered impure.
08:23Cambodia became a nation of mass graves and despair.
08:26Temples, money, and property were abolished.
08:29And the purge that followed gave us the phrase, the killing fields.
08:34In 1979, Pol Pot was finally overthrown by Vietnam, but continued leading the Khmer Rouge from the jungle.
08:42His own movement eventually placed him under house arrest and sentenced him to life imprisonment in 1997.
08:48Before justice could catch up with him, Pol Pot died in 1998, still denying responsibility for one of history's worst genocides.
08:56If he had given the Vietnamese no reason to want to attack him, Pol Pot could still be in charge today.
09:04Emperor Hirohito of Japan.
09:06Though some narratives portray Emperor Hirohito as a figurehead manipulated by politicians and his generals,
09:13other evidence suggests he knew far more than he admitted.
09:16The war situation has developed, not necessarily to Japan's advantage,
09:21while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest.
09:25Under his rule, horrific atrocities occurred, from the Nanjing Massacre to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
09:31So why wasn't he tried for his crimes like other Axis leaders?
09:35Well, after Japan's surrender in 1945,
09:38General Douglas MacArthur decided that keeping the Emperor on the throne would help stabilize the nation.
09:43Many of Japan's World War II leaders, like Prime Minister Hideki Tojo,
09:47were brought to trial and executed for war crimes.
09:50But not Hirohito.
09:51Even though he was a leader of the Japanese war machine, complicit in so much of what Japan did.
09:56It was a politically convenient move that allowed the Allies to reform Japan peacefully.
10:01In exchange, Hirohito renounced his divine status, but kept his throne until his death in 1989.
10:08In the end, it appears justice was sacrificed for stability.
10:12Hirohito was the longest-serving emperor in Japanese history,
10:15a period when Japan saw itself rise and fall and rise again.
10:18In terms of ruthlessness, bloodlust, Stalin remains one of the greatest villains of the 20th century.
10:28People have been punished for far less,
10:31yet Joseph Stalin, one of history's greatest dictators, never answered for his crimes.
10:36His rule over the Soviet Union is marked by mass execution, terror, and forced labor.
10:41Millions perished through purges, famines, and brutal gulag camps, while entire ethnic groups were deported to remote wastelands.
10:50If you didn't play by his rules, you went off to a labor camp, or you were summarily executed in some fashion.
10:56Even in his final years, Stalin remained cruelly paranoid.
11:01He accused doctors of plotting to kill him, and had them tortured in what was now known as the Doctor's Plot.
11:08Despite the misery he caused, Stalin died in 1953 without ever being held accountable.
11:14Some still view him as a hero to this day, a result of decades of propaganda glorifying his reign as one of a strength and patriotism.
11:21Now, there was a time after his death when all the Stalin statues in Russia were removed, were knocked down.
11:29When Stalin's cult of personality and his crimes against the people were officially condemned.
11:36The great terror, the millions sent to the gulag, the hundreds of thousands of people executed.
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11:57King Leopold II of Belgium
11:59In the late 1800s, King Leopold II convinced European powers to let him control the Congo Free State as his personal colony.
12:08That was the beginning of an unforgettable nightmare for the Congolese people.
12:12The king had struck gold, black gold.
12:15He was determined to get as much rubber to Europe as he could, and as fast as he could.
12:24The rubber in this district has cost hundreds of lives.
12:27Once there, he turned it into a massive labor camp for ivory and rubber, both highly profitable then.
12:34Those who failed to meet quotas were beaten, mutilated, or executed.
12:39Soldiers of his Force Publique Army even severed the hands of men, women, and children to prove they hadn't wasted bullets.
12:46For Leopold, transforming his new assets into cash simply meant ratcheting up the level of force.
12:54Villagers in the rubber areas were set heavy targets and punished violently for refusal or failure to deliver.
13:01Between 10 to 15 million Congolese died of disease, starvation, and exhaustion, while Leopold grew obscenely rich.
13:08When his atrocities were finally exposed, he reluctantly surrendered Congo, but demanded compensation.
13:16He died in 1909, hated yet unpunished.
13:19The streets of Brussels are sometimes described as an open-air gallery, with street art found right across the city.
13:26But sitting often right alongside is the memorialization of Belgium's history, namely its brutal and controversial colonial king.
13:35What other historical figures went unpunished for their crimes?
13:40Drop a line in the comments section.
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