5 worst crimes against humanity in history

Many war crimes are not prosecuted (due to lack of political will, lack of effective procedures, or other practical and political reasons), historians and lawyers will often make a serious case that war crimes occurred, even if there was no formal investigations or prosecution of the alleged crimes or an investigation cleared the alleged perpetrators.

Whether you call them massacres, genocides or crimes against humanity, some of the most despicable crimes during war have led to countless deaths.

The Holocaust

It was the genocide of European Jews during World War II. Between 1941 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its collaborators systematically murdered around six million Jews across German-occupied Europe, around two-thirds of Europe's Jewish population.

The Holocaust was an ideological and systematic state-sponsored and mass murder of millions of European Jews and several other groups by the regime of German Nazis. This crime against humanity happened between 1933 and 1945 when Adolf Hitler ruled Germany.

The final solution of World War II Nazi Germany and its leader Adolf Hitler was to systematically eliminate Jews, gypsies, homosexuals and more. The Holocaust was just one of many despicable war crimes committed during World War II, but with the imprisonment, torture and execution of over six million Jews, the Holocaust truly stands above all others in the history of atrocities. Torture camps such as Dachau, Auschwitz and Treblinka served as homes to some of the world’s most infamous human rights violations.

Cambodian Genocide

This genocide resulted from the planned persecution and killing of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge during the Communist Party of the Kampuchea regime. Its general secretary, Pol Pot, radically led Cambodia into a self-sufficient agrarian society. In the process, about 1.5 to 2 million people were killed from 1975 to 1979, which was a quarter of Cambodia's population.

Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge sought to ethnically cleanse Cambodia into a classless society based upon the tenets of such leaders as Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin. These efforts resulted in the deaths of well over a million people due to starvation, disease, exhaustion and execution. After losing to the Vietnamese, Pol Pot fled to the Thai border with the remnants of his party. While a faction of his political group did place him under house arrest, he died in 1998 without ever facing real consequences for his actions.

Nigerian Civil War

It was a civil war between the government of Nigeria and the Republic of Biafra. The Republic of Biafra had seceded and declared its independence from Nigeria in 1967, leading to conflict. Biafra was led by Lt. Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu and was dominantly made of the Igbo people, while Nigeria, dominated by the Hausa-Fulani’s, was under General Yakubu Gowon.

This bid for independence eventually led to what has been called the Biafran War, or Nigerian Civil War, during which Biafra suffered from intense famine and disease, with the death toll reaching between a half million and 2 million. Meanwhile, numerous human rights violations were laid at the feet of Nigerian forces, which were accused of rape, murder and civilian bombing during their raids. Biafra couldn’t stand against Nigeria’s military strength by war’s end, and the state surrendered on January 15th, 1970.

Armenian Genocide

It happened during World War I in the then Ottoman Empire. Close to one million ethnic Armenians were murdered under the watch of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). The genocide was executed through mass executions, death marches towards the Syrian Desert.

Between 1915 and 1918, it is estimated that up to 1.5 million Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire were killed. Many more were forced to flee the country as a result of this systematic extermination. Historically treated as second-class citizens, in the late 19th century, between 80,000 and 300,000 Armenians were killed during the Hamidian massacres. The internal conflict within the Ottoman Empire again came to a violent boiling point with the start of WWI.

Nanjing massacre

It was a period of mass murder and rape conducted by the Imperial Japanese troops against the residents of Nanjing, which was the capital of China at the time. The massacre happened during the Sino-Japanese War that occurred between 1937 and 1945. The massacre lasted for six weeks, beginning on the 13th of December, 1937.

The Imperial Japanese army captured Nanjing and killed hundreds of thousands of disarmed combatants and unarmed Chinese civilians. The massacre was accompanied by widespread rape and looting. It is estimated that over 300,000 Chinese were killed.