History isn’t all heroes, celebrations, and groundbreaking discoveries. Behind the triumphs are moments of unimaginable pain and tragedy, events many would prefer to forget.
But as uncomfortable as they may be, staying silent only prevents us from confronting the truth and learning from it.
One Redditor brought up this heavy topic, asking others to share the worst atrocities humanity has ever committed—and plenty came forward with harrowing examples. Scroll down to read them, but fair warning: these accounts aren’t for the faint of heart.
#1
I don’t see the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone mentioned very often. Child soldiers were forced to [unalive] their families, sexually abused, d***ged, taught to drink human blood and sever limbs. And it was all basically for nothing. Most of the militias didn’t really have political loyalties or even an end goal. It was just mass insanity. Children as young as seven were literally torturing, [ending] and eating people, and now they’re adults having to live with that and reintegrate into normal life.
Image credits: DustierAndRustier
#2
The slaughter of Native Americans. The saluter 96% population drop (1492–1900) > +4 million (est. 1492-1776); 350,000 (58% population decline from 1800 to 1890);.
Image credits: Previous-Tangelo9471
#3
The near extermination of the bison population during the 1800’s. This was not only caused by Western expansion but the bison were directly targeted to weaken Native American resistance in the region and force them onto reservations. The bison population dropped to ~300-500 from ~30-60 million and next to disease probably caused the most deaths among the Native American tribes.
Image credits: WhiteCheddaMan
#4
Leopold of Belguim. Monster.
Edit: Sorry, I did not actually answer the question correctly. It should have been:
The [unaliving] of fifteen million Congolese by Leopold of Belgium. Monster.
Image credits: longleggedwader
#5
The Holodomor. Not in absolute terms the worst, but a reminder that Russia has never given up on its genocidal ambitions towards Ukraine.
Image credits: AchillesNtortus
#6
The worst atrocity in human history wasn’t a single act but the slow unraveling of our own compassion. Every time we turned a blind eye to suffering—from the known genocides to the uncountable injustices we witness daily—we allowed humanity’s darkest impulses to fester. It’s not just the big moments that haunt us; it’s the every day decisions we make to overlook the pain of others that is the true horror of our existence. Let’s not just remember history; let’s vow to change the narrative tomorrow.
Image credits: halladrigummy4
#7
So many atrocities throughout history; Mao’s Great Chinese Famine probably took the most lives in recorded history:
between 20 and 55 million [people died], with the most common estimate being 30 million.
Image credits: Trumpswells
#8
Two words: gas chambers.
They knew they were going to murder so many people that they looked for the most efficient method possible.
Image credits: ReebX1
#9
Plenty of WWII mentions already, so I will mention Argentina's "Dirty War"
Among other things, a lot of babies were stolen from political opponents, and a lot are still being discovered today having been raised by their parents' killers.
Image credits: Technicolor_Reindeer
#10
During World War II, Japan’s Unit 731 conducted horrific human experiments as part of biological and chemical warfare research. Thousands of prisoners, primarily Chinese civilians and POWs, were subjected to deadly tests, including deliberate infection with diseases like the plague, frostbite exposure, live dissections without anesthesia, and weapon testing. These experiments aimed to understand disease progression and push the limits of the human body but resulted in severe suffering and loss of life.
Image credits: No_Cow7073
#11
As someone who visited Cambodia, seeing the Killing Fields firsthand changed me. There's this tree they used to kill babies by swinging them against it. I still can't process how humans could do that to their own people.
Image credits: EroticLadyxv
#12
Comfort women. From 1932 to 1945, Japanese imperial armed forces forced women from all over the world to be sex slaves in korea and surrounding areas. Japan still denies it ever happened today.
I found out about it from watching a kdrama called Tomorrow.
Image credits: flamingo_button
#13
There are a lot of interesting answers here, and that's mainly because humans do a lot of terrible things to each other. That said, my answer is the Rwandan Genocide.
For those out of the loop, the Rwandan Genocide began on April 7, 1994 and lasted around 100 days. Tensions between ethnic groups (Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa), which had been boiling since the days of Belgian colonialism and led to several previous conflicts, finally boiled over when a Hutu leader was [unalived]. Hutu extremists, who had been whipped up with ultranationalist and racist propaganda and had been preparing this for some time, began rounding up their Tutsi neighbors, coworkers, and even friends and [unaliving] them.
There were no concentration camps. There were no mock trials. There was no war to hide these atrocities. People were simply taken from their homes, jobs, or cars and hacked to death with machetes. The Twa, primarily rural farmers, had their homes and farms burned to the ground. Tutsi women and girls (as well as Hutu women who married Tutsi men) were gang r***d by organized "r**e squads," almost all of whom were HIV positive. When the Hutu militias were stopped, almost 600,000 people were [dead]. Another 2 million people were displaced and life expectancy plummeted. In the aftermath, Rwanda's government implemented strict laws regarding the broadcasting of certain language, as much of the genocidal ideology had been spread through Hutu supremacist radio stations, and many of these laws are still in place today.
Image credits: saxophonefartmaster
#14
Slave trade, hard to choose which era.
Image credits: RolloTony97
#15
Stalin's Great Purge. God knows how many people [died] all for the paranoia of one man.
Image credits: HolyKlickerino
#16
Colonization of Africa. Probably not the worst necessarily, but one with massive and far reaching implications.
An entire continent set back for generations socially, culturally, and economically.
Image credits: Grouchy_Ad_6202
#17
*Carthago delenda est*.
Rome wiped one of the great civilizations of the Mediterreanean off the map and salted its ruins so that it could never come back. 'Total war' taken to the furthest extreme.
People citing the R**e of Nanking here reminded me of Romans spending 7 whole days to [unalive] every living thing in the city.
Image credits: afxz
#18
Ghengis khan killed so may people during his life that he is responsible for a noticeable CO2 decrease in the global ice record.
Image credits: WrensthavAviovus
#19
The atrocity of Palestine. Why is no one mentioning that?
+78 years and counting of ongoing illegal colonialism and occupation.
Within that, there's the massacre of Tantura, a little town there. There's a documentary about it if anyone's interested. The veterans were saying that they [unalived] Arab women and children with machine guns while laughing.
That, and many other horrible crimes under those 78 years.
What's happening there right now is a complete genocide aiming to decimate that place off of the face of the earth with the people in it.
Image credits: asrdo
#20
The Armenian genocide.
#21
The R**e of Nanking. Read the book on it earlier this year and I'm usually unphased by talks and videos of death, torture, and gore but that book... The kind of stuff they thought up doing to their victims was abhorrent and unbelievable.
Some of the worst things I remember were
>The [ending] of families including the women and infant children, forced incest of fathers to daughters, sons to mothers... People hung on meat hooks by their tongues...Cutting out an unborn late trimester baby from the mother and [unaliving] it in front of her.
Image credits: UniDiablo
#22
The battle of the Somme was pretty horrific.
Recent_Obligation276: Brit’s took 57k casualties on day 1. For perspective, the US, in 20 years of war in the Middle East post 9/11, only took a little over 20k casualties.
Image credits: Educational_Ratio_97
#23
The German invasion of the Soviet Union which caused 20 million civilian deaths in a few years is certainly a contender.
Image credits: MythDetector
#24
Diego de Landa burning the Mayan culture.
Image credits: LoveDistinct
#25
The German [unaliving] of Jews during WW2. Millions dead.
Image credits: CrossroadsBailiff
#26
World War 1.
I had a teacher refer to it as “the meat grinder,” and I’d say it’s pretty accurate. It basically used those young men as an experiment on how to [unalive] people more efficiently, and it’s a war we still live in the trauma of. A brutal bridge into the 20th century.
Image credits: QuickRelease10
#27
Everybody forgets about the Taiping Rebellion when the self proclaimed Chinese Jesus started a conflict that [ended] upwards of 30 million people.
custard_caramel: Chinese civil wars were full of war crimes. Soldiers would target farmers to starve out the enemy troops.
Image credits: hoosierhiver
#28
Any and all acts commited by the Ustaše or the Khmer Rouge.
If you know what the people in those two organizations did, then I think I said enough. If not, then feel free to do research on them; but let it be known that you won't feel well afterwards.
#29
Siege of Bagdad. It was said that the streets ran yellow with human fat that melted from the heat. 1 million were [unalived] over a couple of days.
Image credits: Disastrous-Net4003
#30
The Rwanda genocide. The perpetrators and the world which abandoned Rwandans to their deadly fate for 100 days are unforgivable.
Image credits: MarciaGrey254
#31
The bronze age collapse? Don't see many people discuss that. People were so horribly affected by it that even the ability to read and write were lost for centuries.
Image credits: Lily-loud
#32
The Italian colonization of Libya. Read up on their scorched earth and concentration camps stats recently. It is insane. Allegedly where [the German dictator] got his ideas from? So they said anyway.
#33
Read up on how slaves travelled from Africa to wherever. Remember reading about it, how they were made to walk chained and in ships ridden with worse diseases because of lack of sanitation.
Or Bengal famine exacerbated by british rule transferring agricultural produce to war efforts and so on.
#34
Socialism/communism death toll of about 94 million people.
Image credits: Sinz_Doe
#35
Surprised that no one mentioned The Bangladeshi independence war. Definitely wasn’t the worst but still atrocious. Basically a Pakistani man who [unalived] 3 million ethnic Bengali because they didn’t want to vote for him in the elections. He was given weapons from America and when the American president was asked why he was helping Pakistan commit a genocide, he basically said “Indians are disgusting I hate them”.
#36
They sent a dog into space to see if it would survive... but never considered bringing her home. RIP Laika.
Image credits: Professional-Box4153
#37
Caligula often gets a pass on these kind of discussions because his body count was tiny compared to other world leaders. That's because, whenever possible, Caligula liked to torture and [unalive] people himself rather than order his soldiers to do it.
#38
The Chinese Communist Revolution, more than thirty million dead.
#39
The transatlantic slave trade — not just for the sheer scale of human suffering over centuries, but for how deeply its legacy still shapes our world today. Entire cultures were erased, millions of lives brutalized, and the foundations of modern economies were built on that blood.
#40
The destruction of rome. Our species arguably never recovered from this. It caused the dark ages and created this puritanical religious fantasixim were still dealing with today.
#41
The decimation of humanity under the Mongol Empire under Gengis Kahn and Mao's administration of China have to be the top two.
