Human history is a wild ride of violence, and the list of brutal atrocities we continue to excuse reads like a grim hall of fame. From coups that birthed dictators to bombings that turned cities to ash, these ten horrors still get defended by a surprising crowd.

10 Pinochet’s Regime

Why Pinochet’s Brutal Atrocities Still Get a Pass

Augusto Pinochet was a nightmare dressed as a statesman. After toppling Chile’s elected government, he erected a regime that terrorized the nation for 15 years. His secret police ran open‑air campaigns of mass rape, torture, and forced disappearances. Deep in the Atacama Desert, special camps turned into chambers of electrocution, chain‑beatings, and sexual assault. Thousands were executed, their remains pulverized and scattered in the sand. Decades later, relatives still hunt for bone fragments.

Pinochet’s double‑whammy of ousting a socialist government while unleashing sweeping free‑market reforms earned him a strange kind of admiration. Academics and journalists in the US, eager for a convenient narrative, continue to tout his rule as a necessary step toward democracy. As Argentine writer Ariel Dorfman famously quipped, “saying Pinochet brought democracy to Chile is like saying Thatcher brought socialism to Britain.”

9 Rwanda

Everyone agrees the Rwandan genocide was a cataclysm of the late 20th century. Yet the man who ended that ethnic bloodletting—President Paul Kagame—receives hero status, while his own rights violations are brushed aside.

The Guardian reported a worrying drift toward authoritarianism: opposition parties are intimidated, journalists face attacks, and civilians are detained without trial, then tortured with beatings, suffocation, and electrocution. State‑sponsored death squads allegedly target everyone, from ordinary citizens to politicians, even attempting a near‑decapitation of an opposition deputy. Kagame is slowly morphing into a figure reminiscent of Robert Mugabe, yet leaders from Tony Blair to Bill Clinton continue to praise his governance, dragging Rwanda toward a darker future.

8 Castro’s Cuba

Fidel Castro is the far‑left’s answer to Pinochet: a violent ruler whose popularity persists despite a trail of murders. From the outside, Cuba’s defiant stance toward U.S. imperialism can seem entertaining, but inside the reality is grim.

Prison camps that resembled gulags—one even built specifically for children—dot the landscape. Over the past four decades, up to 100,000 people have been detained and tortured. The LGBTQ+ community suffered especially: until the 1970s, gay men were locked in concentration‑style camps, forced through “re‑education” programs that amounted to state‑sanctioned torture. An official apology didn’t arrive until 2010.

7 Indonesia’s Hidden Genocide

In 1965, Indonesian paramilitaries unleashed one of the bloodiest peacetime genocides ever recorded. Within a year, half a million suspected communists vanished—beaten, strangled, or knifed and dumped along roadsides. While the official narrative framed the killings as political, the reality was a cover for slaughtering ethnic Chinese families. Entire villages burned, children forced to watch parents garroted, and teenage girls brutally gang‑raped.

Shockingly, the perpetrators are celebrated as heroes. Tens of thousands march in fascist‑styled parades, high‑ranking officials flaunt their roles, and the state lauds the “humane” eradication of communists. The official story goes unchallenged, and these mass murderers roam free, a situation that may be fueling another round of ethnic cleansing today.

6 Stalin

Even in the West, it sounds absurd that anyone would champion Joseph Stalin. He out‑killed Hitler, ran the most vicious secret police ever seen, and opened the door for later tyrants like Ceausescu and Lukashenko. He also engineered the famine that killed three million Ukrainians.

Yet his most enthusiastic defenders are Ukrainian natives. In 2010, the city of Zaporizhia commissioned a brand‑new statue of Stalin for its town square. Ukrainians, a people Stalin tried to eradicate, not only refuse to burn his effigies—they erect them. The reverence goes beyond monuments; Stalin’s image even advertises utility companies. It’s a baffling love affair that defies logic.

5 The Firebombing Of Germany

By any sane measure, the Allied firebombing of German cities was deeply immoral. For three years, incendiary raids rained down on civilian targets, killing nearly six times as many people as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings combined.

Dresden, for instance, housed almost no military installations—just hundreds of thousands of refugees. When the city was set ablaze, thousands suffocated. Hamburg saw 50,000 dead in a single night, and other towns of little strategic value were razed entirely. Survivors describe climbing over mountains of corpses, bodies melted into tarmac, and mothers carrying the remains of children in suitcases. Even Winston Churchill expressed disgust, yet some still claim the attacks were a justified wartime necessity.

4 The Armenian Genocide

In 1915, the Turkish army orchestrated the systematic extermination of 1.5 million Armenians, employing methods later echoed in Auschwitz. Women and children endured death marches into the Syrian Desert without food, water, or shelter. Others were forced into labor camps until they died, while many were executed and buried in mass graves. Perhaps most chilling was the use of smoke‑filled caves as primitive gas chambers.

The Armenian population plummeted from two million in 1914 to just 400,000 by 1922. Despite the scale, the U.S. federal government has never formally recognized it as genocide. Turkey downplays it as an unfortunate side effect of World War I—akin to Germany claiming the Holocaust was a “misunderstanding.” Such denial must never be allowed.

3 The Palestinian Massacre

In 1982, the Israeli army opened the gates of a Palestinian refugee camp and let Lebanese paramilitaries storm in. The result was a massacre: troops armed with axes swept house to house, raping and dismembering at least 800 women and children while Israeli flares illuminated the horror.

Ariel Sharon, then defense minister, authorized the intrusion, calling the refugees “terrorists” who needed “mopping up.” He told an American envoy, “If you don’t want the Lebanese to kill them, we will kill them.” The Israeli Kahan Commission found Sharon responsible, and he privately admitted he could be prosecuted for genocide. Yet some still downplay his role, trying to offset the atrocity with later achievements.

2 The British Empire

The Victorian‑era British Empire boasted dazzling achievements in technology, science, literature, and engineering—but it also ran a one‑stop murder factory.

The Irish famine transformed from disaster to slaughter as British free‑market policies effectively worked the Irish to death. In India, colonial forces routinely massacred civilians, including the infamous 1,500‑person Amritsar massacre. The creation of Pakistan in 1947 sparked sectarian violence that claimed nearly half a million lives.

During Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising, colonial police beat, castrated, and burned prisoners alive. Rape with broken glass was routine. In Yemen’s Aden port, a secret torture centre operated for years, while British officials in Botswana drafted plans to test lethal toxic gas over the country. Yet many still view the empire through rose‑colored spectacles.

1 Iraq

The Iraq War stands as a textbook disaster: massive civilian casualties, no weapons of mass destruction, and a nation left in ruins. While war inevitably brings tragedy, the scale here crossed into war crimes.

Journalists were murdered, surrendering insurgents were slaughtered, and prisoners were handed over for torture. American “rape squads” stalked villages, abusing and killing teenage girls. Civilians were gunned down at checkpoints, and helicopter “gun runs” rained fire on peaceful neighborhoods, killing dozens. Few of these crimes have been accounted for, with no apologies or compensation. Yet the invasion is still billed as a “humanitarian mission,” and those who exposed the truth now face aggressive prosecution.

These ten brutal atrocities continue to be defended, glossed over, or outright denied. Recognizing them is the first step toward preventing history from repeating its darkest chapters.

The 10 japanese atrocities from World War II were not limited to the infamous Rape of Nanking or the horrific experiments of Unit 731. Fueled by racism, fanaticism, and desperation as defeat loomed, the Imperial Japanese forces committed a series of brutal acts that rivaled Nazi war crimes. Below we walk through each of these dark chapters, preserving the full, chilling details.

Understanding the 10 Japanese Atrocities

10 Laha Airfield MassacreFebruary 1942

This ghoulish event, which killed more than 300 Australian and Dutch POWs, followed the Japanese capture of the Indonesian island of Ambon. Allegedly as an act of reprisal after the Allies destroyed one of their minesweepers, the Japanese randomly selected prisoners and executed them via beheading and bayonet near the island’s airfield. They then repeated the process three more times during the month.

The magnitude of this atrocity was enough for an Australian military tribunal to prosecute more than 90 Japanese officers and soldiers after the war in one of the biggest war crime trials in history. The tribunal sentenced four of the accused to death and handed out a range of sentences for the others. Unfortunately, they never got to try the mastermind, Rear Admiral Hatakeyama. The Japanese officer died while awaiting his trial.

9 15, 1942

Just a day before the British surrendered Singapore, Japanese soldiers stormed Alexandra Military Hospital and slaughtered its occupants, including the medical staff and patients. Even those undergoing surgery were not spared.

Following the massacre, the Japanese forced those left to clean up the mess and then herded them into cramped rooms. When morning came, the Japanese rounded up the 200 survivors (some died during the night) and bayoneted them in the courtyard. Only five survived the second massacre—by hiding in a storm drain.

General Yamashita, upon learning the incident, had the offending soldiers apprehended and executed.

8 Palawan MassacreDecember 14, 1944

In another case of POW massacre, the Japanese stationed in Palawan Island, Philippines tried to kill all their American prisoners after wrongly assuming Allied forces had invaded. After driving the prisoners into makeshift air raid shelters, the Japanese burned them alive.

Those who fled the burning structures were bayoneted, shot, or bludgeoned to death. A few dozen managed to make it as far as the shoreline and hide there; the Japanese caught, tortured, and executed almost all of them. Of the 150 prisoners, less than a dozen survived to tell the tale, the lucky few somehow finding the strength to swim across a bay to safety.

News of this grisly massacre prompted Allied forces to embark on a series of raids to liberate prisons and camps held by the Japanese across the archipelago.

7 September 1945

Even the small South Pacific island of Nauru did not escape the horrors of the war. During their occupation of the island, the Japanese committed a string of atrocities, and a few stood out for their brutality.

After a raid on the island’s airfield by American bombers on March 1943, the Japanese beheaded and bayoneted five interned Australians in retaliation. That same year, the Japanese also forcibly deported more than 1,000 indigenous inhabitants as labor to other occupied islands to conserve rations.

During their occupation, the Japanese singlehandedly exterminated the island’s leper colony. Stowing the island’s 39 lepers on a boat, the Japanese led them far out to sea and out of sight. Afterward, Japanese gun boats fired at the vessel, sinking it and killing all onboard.

6 Akikaze ExecutionsMarch 18, 1943

In what could be argued as an uncharacteristic yet brutal incident, Japanese forces executed a boat of German civilians suspected of spying for the Allies.

The incident began after the Japanese destroyer Akikaze, voyaging to the Japanese stronghold in Rabaul, picked up German missionaries and Chinese civilians living in the South Pacific islands of Kairuru and Manu. En route to their destination, the captain of the ship received instructions to execute the entire group. To accomplish this quietly, the Japanese led their victims one‑by‑one to the back of the ship to a makeshift gallows.

After securing the victims’ wrists to a pulley, the Japanese shot and whipped the bodies then sent them overboard. The sounds of the ship and the wind prevented further victims from suspecting anything until the last moment. After three hours, the Japanese successfully killed all 60 of their passengers, including two children whom they threw overboard while still alive.

5 Indian Ocean Raid MassacreMarch 18, 1944

In the final raid conducted by Japanese warships in the Indian Ocean, the heavy cruiser Tone sank the British merchant vessel Behar and captured 108 survivors. Captain Haruo Mayuzumi relayed his ship’s success to his superior Rear Admiral Naomasa Sakonju, expecting praise. Instead, the admiral berated the captain for bringing along useless prisoners. He ordered their execution.

Mayuzumi appealed to his superior several times to spare the survivors. The admiral did not relent, and Mayuzumi carried out his orders. He divided the survivors into two groups composed of 36 and 72 members. The first contained the Behar’s captain and other ranking personnel, and Mayuzumi transferred them to a second ship, setting them free. The second group was not so lucky. When darkness fell, the Japanese beheaded them all and threw their bodies to the sea.

Sakonju would be later hanged. while Mayuzumi received a seven‑year imprisonment for his role in the incident.

4 March 1942

Following the Fall of Singapore, the Japanese wanted to mop up all remaining resistance, especially among the Chinese living in the region. To accomplish this, the notorious Japanese secret police Kempetai initiated Operation Sook Ching (“purge through cleansing”) in February 1942.

Singapore was the first to be purged. After interning and interrogating the city’s entire Chinese population, the Kempetai herded those they deemed as dangerous into military vehicles. They then transported them to the city’s outskirts and executed them all. This purging operation soon found its way into other parts of Malaya as well.

The manpower shortage and rush made the Kempetai especially merciless toward those in rural areas. They eliminated entire villages on mere suspicion of subversive activity. Although we have no official casualty figures, estimates range from 5,000–6,000 (Japanese sources) to a high of 30,000–100,000 (Singaporean and Chinese sources).

3 8March 26 and July 2, 1944

One of Japan’s most notorious submarines, the I-8, is best remembered for sinking two Allied ships and for the crew’s terrible conduct in the aftermath.

On March 26, 1944, the sub spotted and sank the Dutch freighter Tsijalak hundreds of miles off the coast of Colombo, Sri Lanka. The Japanese took 103 survivors onboard and massacred them with swords and sledgehammers. They then bound those still alive and left them on deck as the submarine dove below. Only five survived the ordeal.

Just a few months later, the Japanese destroyed the US cargo ship Jean Nicolet and subjected the survivors to the same brutal treatment. The Japanese tortured and killed their prisoners by making them pass through a gauntlet of swords and bayonets before throwing their bodies overboard. The Japanese later dove after spotting an Allied aircraft, with 30 prisoners still above deck. Only two dozen of the 100‑plus prisoners survived.

2 October 1943

As their cargo ships were vulnerable to Allied raids, the Japanese sought an alternative supply line to maintain their forces in Burma. This culminated in the construction of a 415‑kilometer (300 mi) railway between Burma and Thailand. The railway used 60,000 Allied POWs and 200,000 Asian conscripts for slave labor.

During the year‑long construction, thousands died from the grueling working conditions and inhumane treatment. A total of 13,000 POWs along with approximately 80,000–100,000 Asian laborers died constructing the railway. The plight of the surviving workers did not end with the railway’s completion. While the Japanese relocated some of the prisoners, they continued to keep a contingent to maintain and repair the railway in the face of Allied attacks.

1 March 1945

Early in 1945, General Yamashita planned for his men to evacuate Manila and fight in the countryside. However, two Japanese admirals ignored his order and committed their men to a final stand inside the city. When the Americans arrived, the Japanese forces realized that they faced certain death and vented their rage on the hapless civilians trapped inside their lines.

For weeks, the Japanese raped, pillaged, and murdered. Aside from the bayonets and beheadings, they machine‑gunned captives and set fire to buildings with people trapped inside. The Americans ceased artillery strikes so the Japanese could surrender, but the Japanese instead continued their rampage.

After the dust settled, all Japanese defenders of the city had died, taking with them 100,000 civilian casualties. The incident left Manila as one of the Allies’ most damaged capital cities, second only to Warsaw.

Marc V. is always open for a conversation, so do drop him a line sometime.

The United States has always had something of an uncomfortable relationship with the people that lived within its borders well before European settlers made their way across the ocean. Today, it’s a relationship that’s better than it ever has been, but there’s still a long way to go and a lot to make up for. Even in roughly the last 100 years, there’s been an incredible amount of horror visited on America’s native tribes. This article outlines the 10 atrocities committed against Native Americans in recent history.

10. Hopi Sentenced To Alcatraz

First discovered by the Portuguese and the Spanish in the 1540s, Alcatraz had already been inhabited for at least 10,000 years. By the time the Spanish came to the area, there were about 10,000 individuals settled in the Bay Area around the island. According to tradition, the island had long been used for exactly the same purposes it later was—isolating people who had broken a law.

In 1894, the Hopi were in the middle of a rebellion against government regulations, which stated that they needed to send their children away from home to attend government‑run schools. In order to force the children to go, it was first suggested that the military and law enforcement be sent in to arrest anyone who wasn’t sending their children away. When bad weather and snows made that impossible, it was decided that they’d interrupt the supply of goods and food instead. It was a completely legitimate strategy, as far as the law was concerned. According to the Rules for Indian Schools of 1892, food and other necessities could be taken away to force compliance.

When that didn’t work and the Hopi still refused to send their children to government schools, 18 tribal leaders were arrested and put on trial for their refusal. Found guilty, they were sentenced to Alcatraz. Those left behind still refused to comply with government orders, and when the original leaders were released a year later, they continued their non‑violent protests against the educational restrictions. With the resistance leaders unwilling to resort to violence, the government‑sanctioned development of schools continued.

In the 1960s and 1970s, members of the Sioux and Mohawk, along with a group going by the name “Indians of All Tribes,” occupied Alcatraz in order to demand that the island be returned to those who had been there first. They didn’t win the island, but they did succeed in bringing attention to problems that had gone unaddressed for too long.

9. Black Mesa

Black Mesa is in northern Arizona, and it’s huge. The coal fields cross both Hopi and Navajo reservations, and in 1909, an incredibly brief survey of the area would determine that there was a huge amount of potential resources that could be exploited. The area already had an operating mine, and the coal was being used on the reservation.

By the end of World War II, the country was looking for some ways to maximize use of their own resources, and that included coal. In 1943, the Navajo attempted to increase their mining operations in the area, recognizing what they were sitting on for what it was—cash. At the time, they were an extraordinarily poor nation, relying on an income from the Bureau of Indian Affairs for support, so they entered into an agreement with the Interior Department. Coal was selling for $4.40 per ton, and in a typical deal, $1.50 of that would be going to the owner of the land. That was the basic price, though it’s absolutely not what the government offered the Navajo and the Hopi; they got $0.17 per ton.

There was also no provision in the contract to renegotiate prices should the price of coal go up, and it did. By the time the country was in the middle of the 1970s oil crisis, coal was $15 a ton. The tribes whose lands were being mined were still receiving $0.17. To add insult to injury, the tribes, who had seen little choice but to agree to the contracts and allow the government to come in and start mining, had their hands tied when it came to how the mining was done. In the early 1970s, the mine was putting out about 1 million tons of coal each year, and the process was likened to tearing down St. Peter’s Basilica for the marble. It wasn’t just environmental groups that leaped on the companies for their strip‑mining processes; the tribes absolutely weren’t happy with the complete destruction of ancient sites.

8. The Termination Of The Menominee

A huge amount of US dealings with various tribes across the country has involved some absolutely audacious attempts to integrate them with what’s considered more mainstream American society. Beginning in the 1940s and continuing into the 1960s, there was a policy put in place that was ominously called Termination. In the 1930s, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs had been a man named John Collier, who had given the different tribes nothing less than the right to keep their own culture. When he left office in 1945, those that hadn’t agreed with him took the opportunity to reverse everything he’d done.

The Termination policy was touted as an emancipation process that would free tribes from the control of the government. What the policies were really doing was taking away the power for tribal governments to run themselves. Reservations were to be broken up and no longer receive any kind of government protection. In turn, groups that had previously been run by their own, generations‑old system of governance would now be answering to the same rules and institutions that European Americans did.

The process was a long one, and it required legislation to be drawn up for each individual tribe. One of the first was Wisconsin’s Menominee Tribe. In 1954, they were officially terminated, and Congress declared that they would no longer be recognized as a tribe. The council was told that they would be terminated whether they liked it or not. Several extensions were granted, but eventually, in 1961, they were terminated.

The fallout was fast. Programs that had been supported by the federal government before, like schools and hospitals, didn’t have a funding base. The small population couldn’t afford to support things like utility services on its own, and termination, bizarrely, meant the removal of government funding that small towns all over the country rely on to survive. Hospitals and clinics closed, courts were shut down, police departments dissolved, utility services were shut down, and suddenly, the people needed to pay for hunting and fishing licenses for the land that had sustained them for thousands of years.

Termination was repealed in 1973, largely due to its disastrous results with the Menominee, but the damage was already done. The tribe had been living in the same area for more than 10,000 years and were so closely tied to the land that they took their name from the Menominee River, where their origins were set. Before termination, they were one of the wealthiest tribes in the country, completely self‑sufficient with their own government, law enforcement, and schools. Fifty years later, the Menominee are reincorporated as a tribe, but they’re still picking up the pieces.

7. Lone Wolf vs. Hitchcock

By the turn of the 20th century, many tribes had been forcefully removed from their ancestral lands and forced onto reservations. An 1867 treaty called the Medicine Lodge Treaty appeared to give tribes at least some sort of say in what happened to the lands that they had been forced onto. In theory, the treaty said that in order for reservation land to be made available for other uses, a three‑fourths majority approval needed to be given by the tribe that was currently on the land.

In 1900, though, the government decided to parcel off the land that had been given to the Kiowa‑Comanche tribe. Those that accepted a specific plot of land were also given citizenship with it, and the extra land was also parceled off—to be sold to anyone, even though no approval was given. Kiowa leader Lone Wolf sued the government for breach of treaty, and he lost.

The verdict given was that Congress had the right to change absolutely any previous treaties as they saw fit, because as the government, they had complete control over everything that went on in a reservation. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, where the verdict was upheld. Members of tribes were deemed “wards of the nation,” and not long after, 50,000 settlers moved into what had been dubbed surplus reservation land. The verdict has never been overturned and is still a valid precedent.

6. The Cherokee Strip

When the Cherokee were forced to settle in an area that’s now Oklahoma, they were given about 7 million acres in three separate areas. By the 1880s, though, the country was expanding, and ranchers and settlers needed that land. The US government made an offer to the Cherokee, attempting to buy the land at $3 an acre. The offer was refused, and in 1889, Congress ordered them to sell at $1.25 an acre.

The Cherokee had been making a lot of their income from leasing their land to ranchers. In 1890, though, the president signed into effect a law that prohibited all grazing after October, cutting off a huge portion of their income. After several delays, during which the government agreed to enforce the boundaries on the land that the Cherokee had managed to keep, the Cherokee Strip was opened for land claims from settlers.

Somewhere around 135,000 people showed up to stand in line at the nine registration booths that were opened for registering land claims, and it went about as smoothly as you’d guess. Cavalry were called in to keep the peace, but it was a mass of fights (some drunken, some not), bribery, counterfeiting, and no small amount of heat stroke. Individual members of the Cherokee were allowed to make a run for a piece of the land that they’d previously called home, but an overwhelming majority of people who tried for land didn’t get it. And once the land had been handed out, those that did get it found that they were ill‑equipped to handle it. A huge number of claims were abandoned before a year passed. Towns failed, and farms folded, adding insult to injury to those that had been forced to sell their land at a pittance.

5. The Indian Child Welfare Act Of 1978

It wasn’t until the 1970s that a big problem was brought to light, and it was a problem that people didn’t even see as a problem before that. Children were being taken from their families on a huge scale. From 1969–74, 25–34 percent of all Native American children were removed from their homes on a temporary or permanent basis and passed into the system of federal schooling, foster care, or adoption. Compare that with the non‑Native American children removal rate of 5 percent.

Part of the problem was the idea of federally instituted boarding schools, and we’ll look at that more in a minute. The other problem was that laws didn’t take into account the differences in tribal conditions for raising children. Generally more communal in nature, it’s perfectly normal for extended family or even neighbors to take care of children a large amount of the time. In a system that was biased in favor of families made up of only parents and children, this was seen as a problem. In states like North Dakota, about 99 percent of children removed from families were because of cases like this, which were deemed neglect cases.

It wasn’t until 1978 that Congress established the Indian Child Welfare Act, which used a different set of guidelines for the removal of native children from their homes. It included a requirement for the tribal government to be involved in such rulings, added considerations for tribal customs, and, should a child still need to be removed from parent care, placement with a native family. For the first time, part of the guidelines definitely stated that maintaining family and cultural bonds was of the utmost importance.

4. The Burke Act And US Citizenship

For decades, the question of citizenship for Native Americans has been something of a weird dilemma, and the government used it as a sort of blackmail. The Dawes Act of 1887 automatically granted citizenship to any member of any tribe that left their lands and voluntarily moved away… except for those belonging to the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes. They weren’t included until a 1901 amendment, but it was the 1906 Burke Act that was really strange and very bizarrely worded.

According to the Burke Act, anyone who moved away from their tribe and accepted an allotment of land was granted citizenship, with a catch: That citizenship was withheld for 25 years or until they received special notice from government officials. Further notes in the law indicated that they not only needed to move away from their tribe but that they also needed to embrace the “habits of civilized life” before they were eligible for citizenship and all the benefits that went along with it. It was up to the Secretary of the Interior to decide if they had fulfilled their obligation to the so‑called “civilized life.” Government officials were also the ones deciding whether or not people who wanted to take allotments were capable of running one. Those who received allotments and either did their 25 years or received their approval for citizenship early still weren’t in the clear; once they died, it was still up to the Secretary on whether or not their descendants were capable of running the land. If they weren’t, the land would be sold.

3. The Theft Of Geronimo’s Skull

According to the story, Yale’s secretive Skull and Bones society was responsible for robbing the grave of Geronimo and stealing his skull. For a long time, it seemed like the story would never be anything more than a rumor, until an author researching a book on Yale’s World War I veterans stumbled across a letter that seemed to prove that they had indeed stolen Geronimo’s skull.

Before the leader died, he had been very specific in his wishes: He wanted to be buried in New Mexico, on Apache land. He definitely did not say he wanted his bones to be in the hands of the rich, elite members of the secret society.

Yale still officially says that they don’t have the bones, but members of the society aren’t saying anything. With more than 800 of those members still around today, that makes things even more complicated. Geronimo’s great‑grandson opened a lawsuit in 2009, suing both Skull and Bones and Yale for the return of the bones. The suit cites plenty of evidence, including the letter and testimony from Skull and Bones members, which confirms that inside their headquarters is a glass case containing bones that they were always told belonged to the Apache leader. The letter, dated 1918, also says that they have other bones, along with some of the tack from Geronimo’s horse. Why steal it? It’s something called crooking, a competition among the society members to see what important things they can steal for their “tomb.”

Still, Yale insists that they don’t have the bones and that they have no control over Skull and Bones, while the society itself isn’t saying anything. It was only in 1990 that a law was passed to protect the graves and remains of Native Americans and to give their families rights to preserve them.

In 2010, Geronimo’s family lost. According to the verdict, only thefts that occurred after 1990 are protected by the law, and the government will not force the society to return remains that had been stolen prior to that.

2. The Innocent Fun Of Grave Robbing

For the citizens of Blanding, Utah, picking up arrowheads and pieces of pottery seemed like no big deal. It was all over the place, after all, and there was so much of it that it often ended up being used for target practice. Finally, Winston Hurst, a local boy turned archaeologist, realized just what it was that people were picking up, destroying, and in some cases selling—part of the history of an entire people.

In 2009, his information led to a 150‑man FBI raid, along with a series of arrests. Jim Redd, a local doctor, was among those that were arrested for looting and selling antiquities; he killed himself the day after the raid. According to the townspeople, picking up artifacts was just a way of life, and according to Hurst, that’s the problem.

When the mayor pointed out that there was just so much of the stuff lying around that no one had seen what the big deal about collecting—and destroying—it was, the implications were horrifying. Archaeologists like Hurst were seeing the historical record of an entire culture wiped out, and as the relic‑hunting operations got larger and larger, so did the destruction. Sites around town, which were roughly 12,000 years old, were badly, amateurishly excavated. By the time Hurst had assembled a case, a staggering amount of artifacts had been looted and sold, which were later seized by the FBI. Once home to the Anasazi, the area around the town has yielded incredible treasures, jewelry, pottery, baskets, feather blankets, and other items, once left in graves as tributes to the dead.

The fallout was incredible, with other suicides following the arrests, and the people who had once been his neighbors cursed Hurst as a traitor. Meanwhile, graffiti is scrawled across pueblo walls and ancient cave paintings, and offerings once left along burial sites are sold on the black market. The town, founded in 1900, was also the site of a recent sting operation in which a single agent spent $335,000 purchasing illegal artifacts over the course of two and a half years. Meanwhile, the locals whose ancestors are buried in the caves won’t even enter them, simply out of respect for the dead.

1. Assimilation Via Boarding Schools

It started in the 1870s, and in 2015, there are still people who remember being sent away from their families to attend Native American boarding schools. The programs and the idea was based on a prison program, and statements made by the man who developed that program are horrific: “All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

That was from a speech given in 1892 by Richard Pratt. Decades later, the practice was still in place and, in 2015, there are still people who remember their mothers crying as they were taken away, being beaten for speaking in their native language, being forced to cut their hair, and being given new, Americanized names. There were around 100 boarding schools operating in the United States, and even into the 1960s, teachers there were told that their first responsibility wasn’t to educate students but to “civilize” them.

The goal of the boarding schools was to take away everything that gave the students their identity. Schedules were so strict that in some cases, they were planned out in increments of five minutes, time that was precisely used for things like making beds and brushing teeth. From hairstyles and clothing to learning a new religion, they were taught everything they needed to know to not be Native American anymore.

Ironically, among those that have spoken out about their experiences in boarding schools, where they were discouraged from embracing their native culture, are the Navajo Code Talkers, whose language was of unprecedented importance throughout World War II—quite a difference from their experiences in school.

There are still a handful of these boarding schools in existence, but now, they have a different mission: to educate and to preserve culture. For those that still remember being torn from their families and forced to become something they absolutely weren’t, though, there’s still a lot that needs to be mended.

10 horrible atrocities: The SS’s Darkest Crimes Revealed

The Schutzstaffel, better known as the SS, was the black soul of the Nazi regime. The group, whose name means “Protection Squadron,” was founded in 1925 to guard Adolf Hitler and his inner circle. When Heinrich Himmler seized control of the SS in 1929, he reshaped it into an elite force that embodied the Nazi party’s twisted master‑race doctrine. He filtered recruits by ancestry and unwavering political loyalty, turning the SS into the self‑styled guardians of “racial purity.” This article walks you through the ten most chilling atrocities they committed, each a stark reminder of how far cruelty can be systematized.

10. Horrible Atrocities Overview

Below you’ll find a countdown of the ten most grotesque crimes carried out by the SS, from the early days of political repression to the industrialized murder of millions. Each entry includes vivid details, dates, and the horrifying scale of the violence, accompanied by original photographs that bring the history into sharper focus.

10. Torturing Political Prisoners

The first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, opened its gates in March 1933, not as a death factory for Jews but as a holding site for German political dissidents. Roughly 4,800 inmates—mostly communists, socialists, and democrats—were crammed into the SS‑guarded facility after Hitler’s rise to the chancellorship made open opposition a capital offense. Without a trial, these prisoners faced either brutal incarceration or outright execution.

The murder of a detainee named Sebastian Nefzger sparked a public investigation by a Munich prosecutor, but the inquiry quickly hit a wall. Hitler responded by stripping Dachau of any judicial oversight, granting the SS unilateral authority over its affairs. This move eliminated any external checks, allowing the SS to kill at will.

New SS regulations mandated that any inmate who disobeyed rules would be beaten, and anyone attempting escape would be shot on the spot. These draconian rules set the template for every subsequent concentration camp, cementing a regime of terror that would expand across Europe.

9. The Night Of The Long Knives

Shortly after its formation, the SS earned a reputation as the ruthless enforcers of Nazi policy. By the early 1920s, Adolf Hitler had already encouraged his followers to use violence against political opponents. By April 1934, Himmler, now head of the SS, also commanded the Gestapo, the secret state police, giving him a powerful tool to hunt down dissent.

Himmler turned his attention inward, targeting the Sturmabteilung (SA), the original paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party. The SA had grown too independent and powerful for Hitler’s liking. To consolidate power, the SS orchestrated a purge from June 30 to July 2, 1934, aimed at eliminating SA leaders and other perceived threats.

More than 85 murders—likely hundreds—were carried out, most by SS members, in what became known as the Night of the Long Knives, a name evoking the ancient Saxon surprise attack on the Britons. This three‑day bloodletting cemented the SS’s dominance within the Nazi hierarchy.

8. The SS Einsatzgruppen’s Destructive Polish Campaign

The SS’s top priority was to eliminate any perceived threat to Nazi rule, and the Einsatzgruppen—mobile killing squads—were a key instrument of that policy. Formed in 1938 as Germany annexed Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia, the Einsatzgruppen initially served as a military support unit. Their role exploded with the invasion of Poland in September 1939.

About 3,000 men were organized into six units, tasked with eradicating Jews and crushing Polish political resistance after German troops seized control of an area. From September 1 to October 25, 1939, the Einsatzgruppen were responsible for more than 16,000 deaths and the razing of over 500 Polish towns. In the first weeks alone, they made 10,000 arrests.

Although early on the Einsatzgruppen conducted brief trials, SS intelligence chief Reinhard Heydrich ordered that all prisoners be shot or hanged without legal process, claiming the killings were not happening quickly enough. Their methods grew so barbaric that even Wehrmacht commanders lodged complaints, especially after reports of hundreds being burned alive inside synagogues.

7. Establishing The Generalgouvernement

When Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland ignited World War II, the conquered territory was split into three zones. The central region became known as the Generalgouvernement, a pseudo‑administrative area designed from the outset to serve as a laboratory for SS atrocities against Jews.

Although the official governor was Hans Frank, real power rested with SS‑Obergruppenführer Friedrich Kruger and his cadre of SS officers and police. They imposed the Nazi racial agenda, exploiting the region’s 12 million inhabitants as forced labor. Any act of Polish resistance that resulted in a German death prompted public executions of 50‑100 Poles.

The SS also carried out mass arrests and killings to intimidate the population, plundered cultural institutions, seized artworks, and commandeered financial assets. Food supplies were deliberately restricted, leaving civilians with barely enough to survive. For Jewish Poles, the situation was even more dire: their property was confiscated, they were forced into slave labor, and by 1942 many were deported to nearby extermination camps where the majority perished.

6. The Night Of Crystal

Kristallnacht, literally “the Night of Crystal,” unfolded on November 9‑10, 1938, when Nazi officials orchestrated a coordinated pogrom across Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland. Local Nazi offices received orders to launch a “spontaneous” outburst of violence against Jewish communities.

Instructions explicitly forbade harm to non‑Jewish Germans or foreigners, required the removal of synagogue archives before demolition, and directed firefighters to stand by while synagogues and Jewish businesses burned. Police were told to arrest as many healthy, young Jewish men as possible.

During the two‑day frenzy, 267 synagogues were destroyed, hundreds more damaged, over 7,500 Jewish businesses vandalized, at least 91 Jews murdered, and countless rapes recorded. The SS and Gestapo rounded up more than 30,000 Jewish men and shipped them to concentration camps, where hundreds died. Kristallnacht marked the first large‑scale, state‑sponsored mass incarceration based on ethnicity and paved the way for the Nazis’ systematic expropriation of Jewish property, including a punitive fine of roughly $400 million levied on the community.

5. Kidnapping And Germanization Of Aryan Children

The SS’s obsession with “racial purity” extended beyond murder to a grotesque program of child abduction and forced Germanization. Himmler publicly declared that the war in Poland offered an opportunity to “sift” young people of “good racial stock” from the conquered populations.

In 1939, SS officials began systematically evaluating Polish children aged two to twelve. Those deemed “racially valuable” were ripped from their families and placed with childless SS officers or families deemed of “good race.” The children underwent intensive indoctrination in institutions designed to erase their native identities. Those judged “worthless” were often sent to forced‑labor farms in Germany.

Estimates suggest that roughly 200,000 Polish children were seized, with another 200,000 taken from other Eastern‑European nations. While a handful were eventually reunited with surviving relatives, many grew up never recalling their true origins, their lives forever altered by the SS’s twisted social engineering.

4. Using Rape And Sterilization To Degrade Women

Testimonies, diaries, and eyewitness accounts reveal that thousands of Jewish women suffered sexual violence at the hands of SS personnel during pogroms and within concentration camps. The SS sanctioned a network of at least ten brothels inside camps, where women were forced into prostitution to serve as a perverse incentive for male prisoners and as a source of perverse gratification for guards.

Although Nazi law forbade “Aryan” SS members from having sexual relations with Jewish women, countless violations occurred. Victims endured brutal assaults, often used as a method of torture intended to break their spirits. In addition, the SS implemented a campaign of forced sterilization and coerced abortions, rendering tens of thousands of women infertile. Many survivors also suffered permanent reproductive damage due to the repeated violence.

3. Biological Warfare

The SS, as the so‑called “Protection Squadron,” was tasked with internal security and also with seeking new ways to wage war. Among their more macabre projects was an investigation into biological warfare. In 1942, an entomological research institute was set up at Dachau, despite Adolf Hitler’s explicit ban on such weapons.

Himmler enlisted the expertise of Eduard May, who examined insects—especially mosquitoes, fleas, and rats—to determine whether they could be used to spread diseases like malaria among enemy populations. May’s work focused on identifying the most efficient vectors, though he personally refused to conduct experiments on human subjects and never handled infectious agents directly.

Ultimately, the SS never progressed beyond theoretical studies, as the war’s shifting tides and resource constraints prevented the development of a functional bioweapon program.

2. Mobile Gas Chambers

As the German war machine pushed eastward into the Soviet Union, the SS’s Einsatzgruppen—literally “mobile killing units”—expanded their murderous repertoire. One of their most chilling inventions was the mobile gas van, a vehicle whose exhaust system was altered to pump carbon monoxide into a sealed compartment, effectively turning the back of the truck into a moving death chamber.

These vans were first deployed at the Chelmno killing site in late 1941. Victims were rounded up at their homes, forced into the vans, and driven to nearby mass graves where the bodies were dumped after suffocation. By 1943, the gas vans had claimed at least 152,000 lives, and many historians view this method as a grim precursor to the industrialized genocide of the Final Solution.

1. The Final Solution’s Killing Centers

The “Final Solution” was the Nazi euphemism for the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. After years of escalating hatred and discriminatory legislation, the SS leadership formalized a plan to annihilate European Jewry. On July 31, 1941, following Hitler’s delegation of all security responsibilities to Himmler, SS General Reinhard Heydrich received orders to begin preparations for the mass murder.

The operation, initially trialed in the Generalgouvernement under the code name “Operation Reinhard,” established three extermination camps—Sobibor, Belzec, and Treblinka—each equipped with gas chambers designed for rapid killing. Soon after, Auschwitz‑Birkenau was expanded to function as the largest killing center, where roughly one million Jews perished.

In total, the SS oversaw the murder of approximately 2.7 million Jews across these death factories, a horrific testament to the industrial scale of genocide orchestrated by the Nazi regime.

The 10 horrific atrocities carried out by Japan’s secret police, the Kempeitai, during World War II reveal a terrifying chapter of history that rivals even the most infamous Nazi crimes. From gruesome mass drownings to secret medical experiments, each episode showcases the ruthless efficiency and brutal imagination of this shadowy force.

10 Pig Basket Massacre

After the Japanese occupied the Dutch East Indies, roughly 200 British servicemen found themselves stranded in Java. They resorted to guerrilla warfare from the hills, only to be captured and subjected to cruel torture by the Kempeitai. According to over 60 eyewitnesses who testified at the Hague after the war, the men were forced into one‑meter‑long bamboo cages—normally used for transporting pigs. The cages were loaded onto trucks and open rail cars, steaming under a scorching 38 °C (100 °F) sun. Dehydrated and desperate, the prisoners were then crammed onto waiting boats, taken out to sea off Surabaya, and the cages were tossed into the ocean. The men drowned or were devoured by sharks.

One Dutch witness, just 11 years old at the time, recounted the horror to a magazine: “One day around noon, the hottest time of day, a convoy of four or five army trucks passed the street where we were playing, loaded with so‑called ‘pig baskets.’ These were usually used to stack pigs for slaughter. In Indonesia, a Muslim country, pigs were only for European and Chinese customers; Muslims considered them filthy. To our astonishment the pig baskets were crammed with Australian soldiers, some still in uniform, some even with their distinctive hats. They were tied in pairs, facing each other, stacked like pigs, lying down. Some were in a terrible state, crying for water; I saw a Japanese guard urinate on them. The trucks drove through town as a show of humiliation for the white race, finally dumping the cages into the harbor to drown.”

Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura, commander‑in‑chief of Japanese forces in Java, was acquitted of war crimes by a Dutch court due to insufficient evidence, but later convicted by an Australian military court and sentenced to ten years in prison, which he served from 1946‑54 in Sugamo, Japan.

9 Operation Sook Ching

Following the Japanese capture of Singapore, the city was renamed Syonan (“Light of the South”) and its clocks were set to Tokyo time. The Japanese launched a sweeping program to eliminate Chinese residents deemed dangerous or undesirable. Every Chinese male aged 15‑50 was ordered to report to registration points across the island for intensive interrogation to assess loyalty. Those who passed were stamped with the word “examined” on their faces, arms, or clothing. Those who failed—communists, nationalists, secret society members, English speakers, civil servants, teachers, veterans, and criminals—were taken to holding areas. A simple decorative tattoo could be enough to brand a man as a member of an anti‑Japanese secret society.

For two weeks after the screenings, the “undesirables” were executed at plantations or coastal sites such as Changi Beach, Ponggol Foreshore, and Tanah Merah Besar Beach, where their bodies were washed out to sea. Execution methods varied with the whims of four section commanders: some victims were marched into the sea and machine‑gunned, others were tied together before being shot, bayoneted, or decapitated. Japanese authorities claimed about 5,000 victims, but local estimates range from 20,000 to 50,000.

After the massacre, the Kempeitai instituted a reign of terror and torture, including a punishment where victims were forced to ingest water from a fire hose and then kicked in the stomach. One administrator, Shinozaki Mamoru, was so appalled by the cruelty that he issued thousands of “good citizen” and safe‑passage certificates—normally reserved for collaborators—to protect Chinese civilians. He issued nearly 30,000 such passes, saving many lives, and earned the moniker “Singapore’s Schindler.”

8 Sandakan Death Marches

The Japanese occupation of Borneo gave them access to valuable offshore oil fields, which they guarded by constructing a military airfield at Sandakan using slave labor supplied by prisoners of war. Approximately 1,500 POWs—mostly Australians captured after the fall of Singapore—were sent to Sandakan, where they endured appalling conditions, meager rations of vegetables and dirty rice, and forced labor on an airstrip. British POWs joined them in early 1943.

Early escape attempts triggered a brutal crackdown. Prisoners were beaten or locked in open‑air cages under the scorching sun for offenses such as collecting coconuts or failing to bow deeply enough to a passing guard. Those suspected of operating radios or smuggling medicine were tortured by the Kempeitai, who burned flesh with cigarette lighters or drove metal tacks into their nails. One victim described the torture: “The interrogator produced a small piece of wood like a meat skewer, pushed it into my left ear, and hammered it in. I fainted, was revived with a bucket of water, and the pain was excruciating. I never heard again.”

Despite the crackdown, Australian Captain L.C. Matthews organized an underground intelligence ring, smuggling medical supplies, food, and money to prisoners while maintaining radio contact with the Allies. Arrested and tortured, Matthews never revealed his collaborators and was executed by the Kempeitai in 1944.

In January 1945, Allied bombing forced the Japanese to abandon Sandakan, prompting three death marches between January and May. The first wave, composed of the fittest prisoners, was loaded with Japanese equipment and forced to march through jungle for nine days with only four days’ rations of rice, dried fish, and salt. Those who fell were shot or beaten to death. Survivors were forced to build a new camp. The remaining prisoners were later marched south in two additional waves, while those left behind at Sandakan perished as the camp was torched. Only six Australians survived the entire ordeal.

7 Kikosaku

During the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies, controlling the Eurasian (mixed Dutch‑Indonesian) population proved difficult. These individuals often occupied influential positions and resisted the Japanese version of Pan‑Asianism. In response, the Kempeitai introduced a policy called kikosaku, a neologism fusing “kosen” (a Buddhist reference to the land of the dead, “yellow spring”) and “saku” (engineering or maneuvering). It has been translated as “Operation Hades” or “Hellcraft.” In practice, it denoted extrajudicial executions and punishments leading to death.

The Japanese labeled mixed‑blood Indonesians as “kontetsu,” suspecting them of loyalty to the Netherlands, espionage, and sabotage. They also feared communist or Islamic insurgency. Believing judicial processes inefficient, the Kempeitai adopted kikosaku to imprison suspects indefinitely without charge or to execute them summarily.

When the Kempeitai believed only the most extreme interrogation methods would elicit a confession—even at the cost of life—they employed kikosaku. A former Kempeitai member later told the New York Times, “Even crying babies would shut up at the mention of the Kempeitai. Everybody was afraid of us. Prisoners entered by the front gate but left by the back gate—as corpses.”

6 Jesselton Revolt

The city now known as Kota Kinabalu was founded as Jesselton in 1899 by the British North Borneo Company, serving as a rubber hub until the Japanese captured it in January 1942 and renamed it Api. On 9 October 1943, an uprising of ethnic Chinese and native Suluks assaulted the Japanese Military Administration, attacking offices, police stations, military hotels, warehouses, and the main wharf. Armed only with a few hunting rifles, spears, and long parang knives, the rebels managed to kill 60‑90 Japanese and Taiwanese soldiers before retreating into the hills.

In retaliation, two Japanese army companies and the Kempeitai were dispatched to unleash vicious reprisals aimed not only at the rebels but at the civilian population at large. Hundreds of ethnic Chinese were executed merely for suspected support of the revolt. The Japanese also targeted Suluk natives on offshore islands such as Sulug, Udar, Dinawan, Mantanani, and Mengalum. The entire male population of Dinawan was annihilated, while women and children were forcibly relocated. Similar massacres occurred on Suluk and Udar. Japanese estimates claimed only 500 deaths, but other sources suggest closer to 3,000, with the treatment of the Suluks described by some historians as genocidal.

5 Double Tenth Incident

In October 1943, a group of Anglo‑Australian commandos known as Special Z infiltrated Singapore harbor aboard an old fishing boat and folding canoes. They placed limpet mines that sank or disabled seven Japanese vessels, including an oil tanker. The operation went unnoticed, prompting the Japanese to believe the attack had been orchestrated by British guerrillas from Malaya, with intel allegedly supplied by civilians and Changi prison inmates.

On 10 October, the Kempeitai raided the prison, conducting a day‑long search for evidence and arresting suspects. A total of 57 internees were detained for alleged involvement, including an Anglican bishop and a former British colonial secretary. The detainees endured five months of confinement in brightly lit cells without bedding, forced to stand or kneel for interrogation, and subjected to starvation and brutal torture. One suspect was executed for alleged sabotage, while fifteen others died as a direct result of Kempeitai torture.

During the 1946 trial of those involved, British prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel Colin Sleeman described the Japanese mindset: “It is with no little diffidence and misgiving that I approach my description of the facts and events in this case… The keynote of the whole of this case can be epitomized by two words—unspeakable horror. Horror stark and naked permeates every corner and angle of this case from beginning to end, devoid of relief or palliation. I have searched, I have searched diligently amongst a vast mass of evidence to discover some redeeming feature… I confess I have failed.”

4 Bridge House

The Kempeitai maintained a presence in Shanghai since the Imperial Japanese Army occupied the city in 1937, with their headquarters located in a building known as Bridge House. Shanghai’s foreign presence and intellectual culture gave rise to resistance publications opposing the Japanese. The Kempeitai, together with the collaborationist Reformed Government, employed a paramilitary group of Chinese criminals called the Huangdao hui (Yellow Way Organization) to commit murders and terrorist actions against anti‑Japanese elements in foreign settlements. In a notable incident, Cai Diaotu, editor of an anti‑Japanese tabloid, was beheaded and his head was displayed on a lamppost in the French Concession with a placard that read, “Look! Look! The result of anti‑Japanese elements.”

After Japan’s entry into World II, the Kempeitai turned loose on Shanghai’s foreign population, arresting individuals on charges of anti‑Japanese activity or espionage and imprisoning them in Bridge House. Detainees were confined in steel cages and subjected to beatings and torture. Conditions were horrendous: “Rats and disease‑infested lice were everywhere, and no‑one was allowed to bathe or shower, so diseases from dysentery to typhus and leprosy ran rampant.”

The Kempeitai paid particular attention to British and American journalists who reported Japanese atrocities. John B. Powell, editor of the China Weekly Review, recounted his ordeal: “When the questioning began, we had to strip and kneel before our captors. When our answers failed to satisfy them, we were beaten on the back and legs with four‑foot bamboo sticks until blood flowed.” Powell was repatriated but later died after an amputation of a gangrenous leg; many other reporters were permanently injured or driven insane.

In 1942, a group of Allied civilians tortured at Bridge House were released as part of a repatriation deal brokered through the Swiss embassy. The journey was deliberately unpleasant: internees were packed below decks in overcrowded, sweltering conditions as the ship collected more prisoners from Yokohama and Hong Kong before making a slow, grueling voyage to the neutral Portuguese port of Lourenço Marques in Mozambique.

3 Occupation Of Guam

Along with the Alaskan islands of Attu and Kiska in the Aleutians (whose populations were evacuated before invasion), Guam was the only populated United States territory occupied by the Japanese during World II. Seized in 1941, the island was renamed Omiya Jime (Great Shrine Island), while the capital Agana became Akashi (Red City). Initially, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Keibitai supervised the island, but in 1944 the Kempeitai assumed control as the war turned against Japan.

The Japanese employed brutal methods to eradicate American influence and force the native Chamorro people into compliance with the Greater East Asia Co‑Prosperity Sphere. Forced labor, initially imposed on Chamorro men in 1943, was expanded to include women, children, and elders. The Kempeitai, convinced that pro‑American Chamorros were engaged in espionage and sabotage, cracked down harshly. Civilians were raped, shot, or beheaded as discipline collapsed. One survivor, Jose Lizama Charfauros, encountered a Japanese patrol while foraging for food, was forced to kneel, and then had his neck chopped with a sword. He was later found by friends; maggots had entered his wounds, keeping him alive by clearing infection. He survived the war with a massive scar on his neck.

2 Comfort Women

The issue of “comfort women,” who were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World II, remains a source of political tension and historical revisionism in East Asia. Officially, the Kempeitai oversaw organized prostitution from 1904 onward. Initially, brothels were subcontracted to the military police, who supervised them under the belief that some prostitutes might act as spies gathering military intelligence from talkative clients.

In 1932, the Kempeitai assumed full control of military‑run brothels, constructing facilities in barracks or tents to house women forced into service. These women were imprisoned behind barbed wire and guarded by Japanese or Korean yakuza. Railway cars were also used as mobile brothels. Girls as young as 13 were coerced into prostitution, with prices varying by ethnicity and rank of the client. Japanese women fetched the highest fees, followed by Koreans, Okinawans, Chinese, and Southeast Asians; Caucasian women were also forced into service. It is estimated that up to 200,000 women were compelled to serve up to 3.5 million Japanese soldiers. Conditions were appalling, and the women received little to no compensation despite promises of 800 yen per month for their “service.”

Many questions remain about Japan’s use of comfort women, owing to a high degree of secrecy and the destruction of evidence. In 1945, British Royal Marines captured Kempeitai documents in Taiwan that outlined a chilling policy for dealing with the women in emergencies: “Whether they are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, drowning, decapitation, or what… it is the aim not to allow the escape of a single one, to annihilate them all and not to leave any traces.”

1 Epidemic Prevention Department

While Unit 731’s human experiments are widely known, the full scale of Japan’s biological warfare program is often underappreciated, with at least 17 related facilities spread across Asia. The Kempeitai was placed in charge of Unit 173, located in the Manchurian city of Pingfang. To build the complex, eight villages were razed, making way for research labs, underground bunkers, a large crematorium, and Kempeitai barracks. The facility’s euphemistic label was “Epidemic Prevention Department.”

Shiro Ishii, the program’s director, introduced his staff with a grim statement: “A doctor’s God‑given mission is to block and treat disease, but the work on which we are now to embark is the complete opposite of those principles.” Prisoners sent to Pingfang were typically labeled “incorrigible,” “die‑hard anti‑Japanese,” or “of no value or use.” The majority were Chinese, but Koreans, White Russians, and later Allied POWs from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia were also incarcerated. The Japanese staff referred to the prisoners as murata (“logs”) and described the facility as a lumber mill.

At these facilities, live human subjects were used to test biological and chemical weapons, as well as exposure to deadly diseases such as bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, tuberculosis, and typhoid. Vivisections were performed without anesthesia. One researcher recounted a gruesome procedure on a 30‑year‑old Chinese male: “The fellow knew it was over for him, so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down. When I picked up the scalpel, he began screaming. I cut him from chest to stomach, and his face twisted in agony. He screamed terribly, then finally stopped. It was a day’s work for the surgeons, but it left a lasting impression on me.”

Other Kempeitai‑supervised facilities existed throughout China and Asia. Unit 100 in Changchun developed vaccines for Japanese livestock and biological weapons to decimate Chinese and Soviet livestock, while Unit 8604 in Guangzhou bred rats designed to carry bubonic plague. Additional facilities researching malaria and plague were established in Singapore and Thailand, though many records were destroyed before Allied capture.

For further inquiries, David Tormsen can be contacted at [email protected].

When we talk about 10 forgotten atrocities of World War II, the saying goes that history is written by the victors, and that holds very true when it comes to World War II. It is often referred to as the good war, with the Allies depicted as the shining white knights who came to save the entire world from the evils of Hitler and the Japanese. However, while the history books tend to depict the Allies as almost saintly, the reality of the situation was often a lot more disturbing and a lot less flattering.

10 The Massive Bombing Campaign Against Civilian Targets In Japan

Most people know of the moment in history when the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The famous argument for their use was that the Japanese were impossible to bring to surrender and that such a shocking display was the only thing that would prevent a land war that would last decades and cost millions of lives. However, well before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US had already been bombing Japanese civilian cities on a regular basis to demoralize the enemy and had caused quite a death toll.

In fact, General Curtis LeMay, who ordered the attacks, was of the mind that the Japanese might not actually surrender until they were pretty much all wiped out. It was for this reason that he decided the bombing campaigns of regular Japanese cities were not enough and that the US needed to go for one of their most major cities and do something drastic.

On March 9, 1945, he carried out his plan and ordered an air raid on Tokyo itself, but this was no normal bombing run. The bombers were dropping napalm cylinders and petroleum jelly to firebomb the entire city. More than 40 square kilometers (15 mi²) of city was burned to ruin, with many melted people stacked on top of each other. It was a horrific sight, with at least 100,000 civilians killed. General LeMay even remarked once that the United States may have killed more people firebombing Tokyo than they did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined and admitted that he would have likely been charged with war crimes if his side had lost.

9 Russian Soldiers Raped Women After Liberating Poland From The Nazis

Russia certainly doesn’t have the best reputation among the Allies today and was always the more dangerous part of the faction, but the country was basically essential to stopping Hitler. They not only slowed his advance but came roaring back, pushing across the territory Germany had taken and eventually straight on to Berlin itself. The Russian soldiers were exhausted and demoralized after so much fighting, and with society breaking down around them in many ways, they found it fairly easy to revert to primitive behaviors. While some of this only took the form of looting, the amount of rape that went on is incredibly disturbing. To make matters worse, Stalin actually approved of his soldiers raping enemies—he believed that it was a great way to psychologically destroy them.

There wasn’t just revenge rapes against Germans in the major cities. The Red Army at the time was known for liberating camps in countries such as Poland and then raping all of the female victims. After so much horrific fighting, many of these men were only thinking about their basic instincts and also felt that they should be able to take what they want, considering how much of a favor they were doing Europe by liberating it from the Nazis.

8 Operation Paperclip Was Probably Even Worse Than You Already Thought

Not everyone knows it by name, but everyone knows the basics of what Operation Paperclip was. During World War II, the United States and many others had been eying the Germans’ technology and all the various things they were working on and desired to gain the Nazis’ scientific secrets. When the war ended, they found that the Nazis were working on many things they hadn’t even imagined, such as nerve agents and a weaponized form of bubonic plague. Instead of trying to destroy all the research on such horrible things, the US decided they needed these scientists for themselves.

The goal was to bring almost 90 German scientists into the United States, whitewash their past a bit, and get them to put their scientific knowledge to work for the US. Now, some may think this wasn’t really that bad, as they were just scientists and possibly following orders. However, these were not nice men. Some of them knew full well how the concentration camps worked and would personally handpick people to slave themselves to death on their projects—just to enjoy the cruelty of it. Others were, as we mentioned, working on chemical warfare and similarly terrible things, making it hard to simply accept the excuse of “following orders.”

Unfortunately, most of these men grew old and grey working for the US government and never saw any real consequences for their actions.

7 US Soldiers Started Collecting Japanese Skulls

The atrocities of the Japanese during World II are very well-documented, and in the United States especially, their misdeeds are very well-known. Most people have heard of Japan’s Unit 731 as well as of actions like the Bataan Death March. The Japanese were known for incredibly brutal treatment of prisoners of war and in some cases were witnessed burying captured enemies alive.

However, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and as the campaign in the Pacific dragged on, US soldiers began to perform actions that many people today would find to be shocking and horrific. They started mutilating Japanese corpses and taking trophies, even going so far as to send them back home to civilians, who were actually thankful instead of disgusted. One of the most common things to take were ears because they were easy to cut off and haul away as a trophy, but skulls were the real coup de grâce.

Unfortunately, neither process for obtaining the skull was anything short of barbaric. They would either have to boil the head to get the skin off or leave it out long enough for ants to eat all the flesh, leaving the skull underneath intact. To be clear, the United States military leadership officially was against the practice and tried to discourage it, but the soldiers kept taking skulls anyway.

6 The Americans Sent Soviet Dissidents Back To Russia To Die

The world was so excited when World II ended and just so glad to move on that many people completely forgot about some of the worst atrocities that happened directly after the war. At the famous Yalta Conference, one of the less famous things promised was repatriation of citizens trapped in another Allied country’s territory or kept as their prisoners. This seemed like a good idea at the time, and everyone was riding high on their emotions, but before long, it became clear just how brutal and awful such a generalized policy could be.

The United States had a couple million people they had to send back, and many really didn’t want to go back to Soviet Russia. The Americans initially resorted to force, but this led to some suicides, so they started going for a sneakier approach, and the British followed suit. They actually started tricking people, telling them they were taking them somewhere else and then sending them back to the Soviet Union. Many of the people sent back were executed for desertion or other crimes, and others were sent to be worked to death at labor camps.

5 The US And The UK Used German POWs As Slaves Back Home

As World II went on, the British started to end up with a bit of a problem: Storing all of the German prisoners of war and feeding them was becoming an incredible strain on the system. The United States, to help out their ally, agreed to take many German POWs themselves to ease the burden. However, this presented its own issue. The Americans had to find a safe place to put them, and they also were going to be dealing with an increasing burden to care for all these prisoners. And while the Allies did some atrocious things, actual concentration camps of the sort Germany and Japan used were completely out of the question. The Allies were also concerned with actually following the Geneva Conventions, which did not allow for captured soldiers to be used as slaves.

However, both countries quickly decided to go ahead and start using their captured Germans for mass labor, as they had a labor shortage from all their own men fighting the war and had to now take care of hundreds of thousands of prisoners. To get around the fact that they couldn’t technically treat them as slaves, they paid the POWs an incredibly tiny wage. (In England, this amounted to a single shilling a day.) The laborers were often not fed all that well, either, although the governments would claim their own people were also doing without due to war rationing. While Allied POW camps weren’t the horror shows that Axis camps were, abuse still happened, and the Allies still used enemy soldiers as slaves in all but name.

4 Millions Of Ethnic Germans Were Deported To Germany After The War

When the war ended, most people think that things quickly became sunshine and roses. However, the aftermath of World II was incredibly ugly, and the victors didn’t always make decisions that kept the sanctity of human life in mind. In fact, there was a strong desire to get revenge on anyone involved. We all know that the Nuremberg trials brought justice to many Nazi war criminals, but the Allies didn’t save their anger for only the leadership and soldiers. After the war, they approved a plan to forcibly deport 12 to 14 million ethnic Germans back to the ruins of Germany from the various surrounding countries that they had been born in, including Poland.

Most Western history books don’t talk about this because of how shameful it turned out to be. Rough estimates say that about 500,000 civilians died as part of the largest forced migration in known history. To make matters worse, many of these citizens were actually placed into the remains of concentration camps around Germany and were forced to do hard labor as “reparations in kind” for what Germany had done to other countries around them. If this wasn’t bad enough, the vast majority of the people being forced to migrate were women, elderly people, and males under 16 years of age who had been too young to fight in the war.

The sad truth is that the concentration camps didn’t cease operation when the war ended but went on for years afterward, imprisoning ethnic Germans who likely had no say or part in Germany’s initial decision to militarize. In their quest for justice, in this particular case, all the Allies did is get revenge on the wrong people—the innocent.

3 Stalin’s Scorched‑Earth Policy

Because the Allies won, when World II atrocities are talked about, Western history books mostly mention the horrible things done by the Axis. Commonly mentioned is the scorched‑earth policy put in place by Hitler. Essentially, if the enemy were going to take a territory, the Germans would burn down all crops, destroy all buildings, and ruin any railroad or other infrastructure to make it harder for the enemy to advance. Many of Hitler’s own commanders thought this was insane and got away many times with actively resisting it. Their argument was that they could always take the place back later, and they felt it would be easier to rebuild if everything wasn’t torn to pieces.

However, while most people only think of this as a Nazi thing, Stalin also put a scorched‑earth policy in place. And his was likely much more brutal than the Nazis’. Stalin had an iron grip on his military, so there would be no ignoring his orders, and he wanted it done proper. He had little care for how it would impact his own civilians or how hard it would be to feed them or move them to a safe place. Stalin had special demolition battalions whose sole job was to destroy infrastructure, crops, and entire towns that they had to leave behind to the Germans.

Stalin’s scorched‑earth policy hit Ukraine especially hard, as it was fought over by Germans and Soviets, both using a similar strategy to prevent the other side from advancing. By the end of the war, a huge portion of Ukrainian infrastructure had been destroyed.

2 The Americans And The British Turned Away Many Jewish Refugees

Whenever you mention any of the bad things the Allies did in the war, or anything that we put up with from Stalin, people will always argue that while it was bad, it was outweighed by the fact that we stopped the Holocaust from going any further. In fact, many people seem to be under the impression that the Holocaust was the main reason the United States and many other countries entered the war. The truth is that the United States officially entered the war after Japan attacked and had only been unofficially helping countries like France and England because they were allies.

While there was news filtering out of Germany about what was happening, most countries were more concerned about protecting their own borders than anything, and we didn’t know the full extent of the Holocaust until after Germany had been defeated. The world didn’t fully realize the problem, and Jewish people already had a history of being unwelcome in many parts of Europe and around the world, which made it easier for Hitler to massacre so many of them.

The United States in particular, while acting the hero today, turned away possibly as many as hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees over the course of the war, refusing to increase their quotas for those regions despite the horrific circumstances. Unfortunately, the British weren’t much better. While they did take in some refugees, they actually made it harder for the Jewish people to use an agreement that allowed them to take refuge in what was then Palestine. Many Jews who couldn’t make it to Palestine or into the US ended up being taken in by other European countries. Many of these countries then fell to Germany, putting the Jewish refugees right back in the arms of Hitler. Most died in the Holocaust.

1 Canadian Troops Burned Down An Entire Town In Revenge

Today, Canadians are known for being some of the nicest people on the entire planet. They take in loads of refugees with much less red tape than most countries, and their main national fault is apologizing too much—something they keep apologizing for and thus perpetuating the cycle. However, as previously mentioned, war brings out the brutality in all of us, and Canada was no exception. Near the end of World II, part of the Canada Corps were fighting off some of the last German resistance and ended up in a pitched battle near a town called Friesoythe—home to about 4,000 German civilians.

While they were advancing on Friesoythe to mop things up, the Canadians’ leader was killed in the midst of battle. An erroneous report went around that he was killed not by a German soldier but by a civilian sniper who had cowardly shot him in the back. The acting commander was so incensed that instead of taking the time to find out if it was true, he decided to take revenge on the entire town. Once the town was taken over and the population had fled, the Canada Corps set about burning it all to the ground.

The French Revolution reshaped the world, and it also left a trail of blood and terror that still haunts history. In this top 10 horrific countdown we’ll walk through the most chilling episodes that marked this tumultuous era, from royal executions to brutal massacres that shocked Europe. Buckle up for a wild ride through the darkest corners of liberty, equality, and fraternity.

Top 10 Horrific Atrocities Overview

10 Beheading Louis XVI

Louis XVI’s guillotining remains one of the most iconic—and unsettling—moments of the Revolution. Before his ascension, the future king was a shy scholar, more comfortable with books than politics, and his marriage to the formidable Austrian archduchess Marie Antoinette took a painfully long seven years to consummate. When he finally wore the crown, his cautious nature and indecisiveness made him ill‑suited for the storm of crisis that engulfed France.

Surrounded by opportunistic courtiers, Louis quickly became a decorative pawn rather than a real ruler. His inability to assert authority allowed radical elements to seize power, turning the monarchy into a mere symbol. The new regime, eager to erase the old order, soon voted to abolish the crown altogether.

Debates raged within the revolutionary assemblies: some urged restraint, while the mob clamored for swift justice. Ultimately, the guillotine fell on Louis in January 1793, sealing his fate amid cries of vengeance. The king faced his end with surprising composure, reportedly forgiving his executioners in his final breaths.

The world watched in disbelief as a once‑revered monarch met a grisly end. European powers, alarmed by the precedent, hastened to declare war, and the execution sent shockwaves that reverberated far beyond French borders, forever altering the political landscape of the continent.

9 Toppling Of Statues

After Louis’s head rolled, the revolutionaries weren’t satisfied with merely removing a king—they wanted to erase every physical reminder of the old regime. Their first target was the royal necropolis at Saint‑Denis, the ancient burial site of French monarchs.

Initially, the stonemasons delighted in smashing Carolingian statues and other regal symbols. Yet within weeks they were forced to pry open the vaulted chambers that housed the Bourbon coffins. The workers shattered the sarcophagi, displayed some royal remains for the crowd’s amusement, and dumped others into a massive pit while onlookers cheered, some even pocketing stray hairs and teeth as grim souvenirs.

When the Bourbon Restoration finally reclaimed the kingdom, the remains were retrieved and re‑interred in the basilica’s crypt, but the damage was irreversible—many bodies were unrecognizable, and the desecration left a scar on France’s cultural memory.

8 The Law of Suspects

The Revolution began with lofty ideals of liberty and equality, yet once the new government seized power, its paranoia spiraled into a relentless hunt for anyone deemed a threat. This period, now known as the Reign of Terror, was inaugurated by the infamous Law of Suspects, which granted authorities the power to incarcerate virtually anyone suspected of counter‑revolutionary sentiment.

Clergy found themselves outlawed, with Catholic worship briefly becoming illegal, while anyone with ties—real or imagined—to the former aristocracy faced arrest. Over two years, roughly half a million people fell under suspicion, overwhelming prisons to the point that many were forced into house arrest.

Although most detainees were eventually released, about 16,000 met the guillotine, and countless others perished in squalid jail conditions. The law’s vague language—targeting those whose “conduct, relations or language” suggested allegiance to tyranny—made it a tool for sweeping repression.

7 Lyon Erased

Lyon, a bustling hub that sided with the moderate Girondins, soon found itself in the crosshairs of the radical Montagnards. The city’s support for the royalist cause prompted a brutal siege in 1793, leaving over 2,000 dead and the town under revolutionary control.

In October, the National Convention issued a decree to obliterate Lyon’s identity: citizens were stripped of weapons, wealthy homes were demolished, and only the modest dwellings of laborers were to remain. The city’s very name was slated for erasure, to be replaced by the sterile “Ville Affranchie” (Liberated City), and a towering column was planned to proclaim, “Lyon made war on Liberty; Lyon is no more.”

Fortunately, the massive renaming project never materialized, sparing the city from total symbolic annihilation, though the scars of the siege lingered for generations.

6 Girondins Executed

The revolutionary government split into two factions: the moderate Girondins, who championed a liberal, capitalist republic, and the radical Montagnards, who demanded total upheaval. Initially co‑operating, the groups clashed over the fate of Louis XVI—Montagnards pushed for immediate execution, while the Girondins advocated a public vote.

The disagreement erupted onto the streets of Paris, where soldiers and citizens besieged the Convention and forced the Montagnards to purge the Girondins from power. While some managed to flee, the remaining members were rounded up months later and met the blade of the guillotine, sealing their tragic end.

5 Drownings at Nantes

Nantes, a revolutionary stronghold surrounded by royalist countryside, became the scene of a gruesome purge after the Battle of Nantes. The Committee of Public Safety dispatched the zealous Jean‑Baptiste Carrier to eliminate lingering monarchist sympathizers.Carrier’s method was chillingly efficient: over five months, he ordered the construction of special “lighters”—flat boats equipped with trap doors—that were used to drown thousands of prisoners. Men, women, children, and even expectant mothers were shackled together, stripped, and sunk en masse in the Loire, earning the river the grim nickname “the national bathtub.”

Even the revolutionary leadership found Carrier’s tactics excessive. He was recalled to Paris, tried for his atrocities, and ultimately met his own end beneath the guillotine.

4 Law of 22 Prairial

By mid‑1794, France’s prisons overflowed with accused “enemies of the Republic.” In response, Maximilien Robespierre and his allies hurled the Law of 22 Prairial through the Convention, drastically shortening trial procedures and expanding the list of punishable offenses.

The new statute allowed citizens to be prosecuted for seemingly trivial offenses such as “spreading false news” or “inciting discouragement.” Neighbors were encouraged—indeed, compelled—to denounce each other, and judges were given just three days to render a verdict: freedom or the guillotine.

This accelerated the so‑called Grand Terror, swelling daily execution numbers and ensnaring countless innocents. The law’s own loophole eventually turned against its creators; members of the Convention feared for their own lives and orchestrated Robespierre’s downfall, ending the blood‑soaked frenzy.

3 The Massacre in the Vendee

The Revolution promised liberty for the lower classes, yet any opposition was met with merciless repression. In the western province of the Vendée, locals rose to protect their priests and churches from the anti‑clerical policies of the new government.

The insurgents formed the Catholic and Royal Army, refusing conscription and fighting fiercely against Republican forces. After a series of bloody engagements, the government dispatched General Louis Marie Turreau with twelve columns of troops to crush the rebellion.

Turreau’s forces razed villages, torched farms, and annihilated entire families. In a chilling letter to his superiors, General François Joseph Westermann boasted, “There is no more Vendée… we crushed children under horses, massacred women… we have exterminated all.” The Vendée’s devastation stands as one of the Revolution’s most harrowing genocidal campaigns.

2 Law of the Maximum

Unlike many other brutal measures, the Law of the Maximum was introduced with ostensibly noble intentions: to curb soaring food prices that had inflamed popular unrest. By 1793, even basic staples were becoming unaffordable, prompting the “enragés,” a radical group of anti‑elite agitators, to demand price controls.

The government obliged, imposing strict ceilings on the cost of bread, wine, iron, shoes, and other essentials. Merchants were forced to display price lists, and any violation resulted in a fine payable to the citizen who reported the infraction, effectively encouraging public denunciations.

While the law temporarily lowered prices, it crippled merchants, leading many to dilute their goods—ash masquerading as pepper, starch as sugar, and diluted wine. Rural farmers hoarded produce, refusing to sell at the mandated rates, which spiraled into widespread famine. The black market flourished, allowing the wealthy to obtain goods while the poor starved, prompting the army to seize food from the countryside—a move that only deepened social unrest.

1 September Massacres

Following Louis’s execution, France descended into chaotic power struggles. The Paris Commune, backed by an armed mob, seized control, while the nascent government wrestled with internal disputes, economic turmoil, and military threats.

Paranoia over a potential royalist counter‑attack intensified, especially the fear that prisoners might join an invading force. Between September 2 and 6, 1792, revolutionary mobs stormed prisons, slaughtering over a thousand inmates in a single day. Half of Paris’s prison population was murdered, their bodies left mutilated in the streets.

The Commune broadcast letters proclaiming the elimination of “conspirators,” and similar massacres rippled across 75 of France’s 83 departments. These gruesome events underscored the Revolution’s descent into unchecked bloodshed.