If you’re a firm believer in karma, you probably don’t worry too much about getting revenge on the person who cut in line at the grocery store or who refused to make space for you to sit on the bus. They’ll get what’s coming to them! But unfortunately, life isn’t fair. And sometimes, even the most terrible people don’t get what they deserve while they’re still alive.

Redditors have recently been discussing evil historical figures who somehow managed to leave the Earth without ever having to answer for their crimes. Whether they were let off way too easily or avoided any punishment at all, below, you can read all about these awful people who somehow “won.” And be sure to upvote the ones that you wish had seen justice!

#1

Shirō Ishii The commander of Unit 731 and other facilities that performed medical experiments on human beings during WW2 in Japan Surgeons would cut open someone without anesthesia, ripping off limbs, or tearing out body parts. They’d sometimes tie a person to a pole outside in the freezing winter and then pour cold water on them to speed up the process of freezing their limbs. Once completely frozen they’d then smash the limbs off with a metal rod. Some of the most sickest, heinous s**t imaginable. The part that angers me the most is that he, along with several others were granted immunity in exchange for information and research. Got away free and never was punished.

Image credits: lonely-position162

#2

Josef Mengele. The head physician at Auschwitz who performed experimental surgeries. Nick named the angel of death and was never held accountable. In fact, he was mostly unknown to the public until the 80s when one of his survivors brought his crimes to light. He's one of the many examples of why I don't believe in Karma.

BarryCheckTheFuseBox:

The Nazi ‘Doctor of Death’ who escaped Germany to South America, started a family and despite being hunted by the US, German and Israeli governments for decades, didn’t even hide his identity by the end of his life. He drowned after having a stroke in 1979.

Image credits: ComprehensiveBread65

#3

Mother Teresa.

Lived in luxury, and died with dignity, while the people she was supposed to help suffered, dying in agony, because she believed pain in death brought you closer to god.

A belief she didn’t have the courage to test.

Image credits: Cpt_Riker

#4

Pol Pot got to die in his sleep in 1998. He deserved far worse.

Baboshinu:

Also important to note that he was interviewed a few times prior to his death. Whenever he was asked about any of his atrocities, he would play dumb about it and skirt the questions. He would say things like the classic denial technique of “oh come on it wasn’t that many people” and “okay but I didn’t kill babies. Just adults. I’m not a monster, you know”. He openly stated he had a clear conscience and had no remorse for the millions he killed all the way through to the end. He was a genuine monster.

Image credits: bguzewicz

#5

In Germany we have Aribert Heim, the butcher of Mauthausen who was on a level with Mengele but never got prosecuted by the allies. Worked as a gynecologist after the war till 1962 when he got tipped off about police at his home so he fled to Egypt.

Image credits: Hoskuld

#6

Jimmy Saville. One of his victims once escaped him, ran into the lobby and shouted that Saville was attempting to assault her. The people there simply laughed and mocked her.

Kleptorgazt:

Definitely one if the most sickening travesties and injustices in my opinion. So, so many people for decades knew, they just had to, yet the was allowed to continue being left alone with and abusing countless children because of his celebrity. F**king disgusting that he died happy, beloved, and without facing any repercussions for his abhorrent actions.

Image credits: Fiddlesticklin

#7

Genghis Khan.

asterboy:

Was waiting for this. Few people in history, let alone this list, come close to the level of civilisational and cultural death and destruction this man caused. Not only did he get away with it, he died an emperor and spawned a dynasty.

Workin_Ostrich:

He would starve out entire cities because his army was so big, they would enslave or kill everyone and he would marry his daughters off to kings and whatnot then his daughters would kill them and take over the ruled lands to give to Kahns armies. Throughout his reign Kahn and his armies killed over 40 million people and enslaved twice that many.

Nearly 8 percent of the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire today carry y-chromosomes that are nearly identical to that of Genghis Kahn.

Image credits: rmvandink

#8

Kim Jong Il. He lived in the lap of luxury while the vast majority of his country lived in abject poverty. He got steak and lobster every night, expensive alcohol imported from all over the world, had a film collection of 20,000 movies including Western films that were illegal for anyone else to own, f****d any woman he wanted, was infallible and worshiped by the very people he was oppressing.

That slimy little f**k enjoyed all of the luxuries imported from capitalist nations which were illegal for everybody else in the country.

Image credits: dropofred

#9

The Marcos family.

This family plundered almost the entire Philippine treasury during Ferdinand Marcos’ two decade rule.

They were exiled to Hawaii for a few years, but they were able to go back to the Philippines nevertheless. They (Imelda (the wife of Ferdinand Marcos), Imee (the daughter of FM), and Bongbong (the son) were also able to run for politics again.

Despite the records being unequivocally clear that the Marcoses plundered the Philippine government, (Imelda was actually convicted, but was never jailed for “humanitarian reasons”) the Marcoses are now back.

Imee is a senator, and Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. is now the president of the Philippines.

Imelda is also still convicted but has still not, and it looks like will never in her life, taste jail time.

Trillions of pesos and tens of thousands of lives lost.

Image credits: CardoDalisay69

#10

The answer is the Sacklers.

n0ahhhhh:

Did you read Empire of Pain too? That book was insane. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in why the pharmaceutical industry is the way it is. The Sackler family essentially created the opioid crisis in America. It's honestly a pretty wild story.

Image credits: Procure

#11

Leopold the 2nd.

Reasonable-You8654:

He is one of the few people who truly make my blood boil with seething rage when I read and think about what he did, and that’s only to start with the fact that they held conferences preying on African countries with permission of absolutely nobody to go and treat human beings like animals.

He is one of the few people that I would’ve genuinely wished to dig out of his grave only to spit on him and throw him to some vultures. He will never have been able to suffer enough for the disgusting acts of horror he ordered and committed towards Congo, to this day in 2024 they haven’t recovered.

Image credits: rextremendae2007

#12

Stalin. Terrorised his way to controlling one of the largest empires of all time and wielded absolute, despotic power.

Sure, nature eventually got him but she gets us all. So I think he got away with it.

Image credits: sistemfishah

#13

The guys that tortured Junko Furuta.

n0ahhhhh:

It’s terrible that just reading reading the name Junko Furuta immediately conjures the most gruesome upsetting and imagery in my mind. That poor girl, I can’t believe her killers are all walking free.

Image credits: Weekly-Rest1033

#14

The House of Saud.

Mtfdurian:

They destroyed an entire religion from the inside out with their extremist views. Now, almost a quarter of the world is lured into believing the more extreme views that they represent, destroying vernacular adaptations of Islam, that had more room for matriarchy, for gender diversity, and a lot of other concepts that salafism does barely leave any room for, if any.

Image credits: NoHopeOnlyDeath

#15

Augusto Pinochet. Died in 2006 under house arrest, in the lap of luxury, without being tried for multiple charges of human rights violations (including wrongful detention, physical torture, sexual abuse, psychological repression, and just plain murder) and illegal enrichment.

Image credits: Daggertooth71

#16

Kissinger.

proscriptus:

The blood of countless millions is on his hands, and he remained an accepted and welcomed part of American politics until his death.

Image credits: callitarmageddon

#17

Iranian theocrats. Almost half a century later still in power and causing a lot of trouble in the region, in addition to oppressing their own people.

Image credits: Isosceles_Kramer79

#18

A lot of these comments aren't people who won, but people who lost and just didn't get the punishment people thought they deserved. But a real evil winner? Try the Dole company and what they did with Hawaii.

ScreamingVoid14:

Pretty much any company found on the tropical fruits aisle or sugar aisle of your local supermarket.

Image credits: rowrowfightthepandas

#19

Any politician that walked out of office with billions more than they had when they took office.

#20

Mobutu Sese Seko, president of then-Zaire. He died in a luxurious exile in Morocco at age 79.

He would have meals flown in from Michelin-rated restaurants in Paris on chartered flights of the supersonic Concorde, because regular airliners weren't fast enough to deliver it fresh enough to his liking. He even spent millions to build a new airport, as none of the existing airports had the 3-kilometer long runway to handle the Concorde.

The average citizen under his rule had an annual salary of less than $150, roughly 50 cents a day.

A single passenger ticket on the Concorde is about $20,000 in today's dolars.

Image credits: Wandering_Scout

#21

Augustus.

He was actually a pretty good emperor. He wasnt evil in the sense that he killed tens of thousands for his enjoyment but if it was advantages for him to kill thousands he wasnt thinking for a second.

So once he was on top and everyone did whatever he wanted anyway he became a good leader.

His way to the top however was covered in blood. The only reasons he is remembered as a good leader is because he outlived almost everyone who was already adult when he made his way up the roman ladder. If he had died after 10 years or something he would be hated.

Image credits: derkuhlekurt

#22

Goebbels, his propaganda still runs strong today, 90 years later.

#23

General Francisco Franco, after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Through him, the country endured all manner of brutal unchallenged fascism (and over a decade of near total isolation from the rest of the world) until his peaceful death in 1975.

Image credits: SteelShroom

#24

Wernher von Braun, engineer of the v2, opportunistic nazi, denied his involvement, awarded by Hitler twice in person, used Jewish slave labour denied he knew about it, however there were many accounts of him visiting and encouraging violence to slaves, feared execution at the end of the war, surrendered to the USA and then after the war was lauded and celebrated for getting America to the moon even meeting the president and later being awarded a medal.

#25

The man who killed Renée Hartevelt.

#26

The Catholic Church during the Inquisition, The Spaniards in Central and South America, destroying everything in their path through blood and disease, courtesy of the church, the Europeans that destroyed Indigenous culture in North and South America because of "God's will" , the Roman's, Marco Polo, etc.

#27

Mao Zedong. Killed as many as 80 million people as a direct result of his policies. The communists still enshrine him as a great leader and national hero and idiots in the Western left take his writings seriously.

#28

Dr. John Money's theory behind gender has reached mainstream acceptance in much of the civilized world, despite the unconscionable experiments he performed on innocent children. A truly evil man whom history does not vilify anywhere near enough.

#29

Joseph Smith. Died a "martyr" but that led to the creation of one of the largest and wealthiest cults in modern history that's filled with abuse of women and children, a long history of racism, and continues to profit off the poor and needy.

#30

Reagan. Had the CIA sell crack to black neighborhoods to raise secret funds to give to Iran. Destroyed black neighborhoods and families, gave rise to the projects and has overshadowed U.S. black culture for decades to come. Also, helped get rid of insane asylum funding which flooded the streets with mentally ill homeless. Economic depression causing stock buy backs legal again, which is why we have a short term investor driven economy resulting in massive layoffs without any real notice.

Image credits: Johnny5isalive38

#31

Casey Anthony.

BostonFigPudding:

Casey Anthony's crime says more about the American legal system than it does about her.

Image credits: eightdollarbeer

#32

Andrew Jackson basically orchestrated a genocide and a lot of folks sing his praises to this day.

MyHamburgerLovesMe:

Andrew Jackson - The Indian Removal Act

>The Removal Act paved the way for the forced expulsion of tens of thousands of American Indians from their land into the West in an event widely known as the "Trail of Tears,...
>
>In the 21st century, scholars have cited the act and subsequent removals as an early example of state sanctioned ethnic cleansing or genocide or settler colonialism

Image credits: NoWorth2591

#33

Daughters of the Confederacy… they pushed a revisionist view of the Civil War in the south and this idea that it was about states rights and not slavery… also took part in building statues of confederate soldiers and glorifying them. It’s why so many conservatives and people from the south have a positive outlook of the confederacy and that it’s a part of “southern heritage”.

#34

Oliver Cromwell.

#35

Nobusuke Kishi, r*pist of Manchuria and twice Prime Minister of Japan.

You mean the Nobusuke Kishi who served in Tojo's cabinet and who was the grandfather of Shinzo Abe, who often openly stated that he admired his grandfather and hoped to rule in similar ways as him?

KWilt:

Still blows my mind that people don't know one of the founders of the Liberal Democrats, still one of the largest parties who effectively controlled the government for half a century in Japan, was literally a fascist.

#36

Idi amin of Uganda.

#37

William of Orange. Still a hero in the Netherlands but he was a ruthless power hungry backstabber. He used religious extremists to gather his army, first the lutherians, but later the radical calvinists. They were comparable to IS nowadays. Brutal attacks on churches followed by mass killings of catholics in Belgium and the Netherlands.

It changed the Netherlands into a state of anarchy and later a puritanical state.

#38

The terrorists definitely won when you realize they got our entire society to change because of what they did.

#39

Issei Sagawa.



A small, frail, and loner of a Japanese guy, with some demonic mind. Was obsessed with cannibalism, had a failed attempt at doing so, when he stalked a German woman in university and broke into her place with the intention of killing her to eat her buttocks.




Later he unfortunately succeeds during his stay in Sorbonne, France, when he murdered a Dutch woman whom he befriended (the only one who befriended him I might add) in his apartment after having invited her, performed necrophilia and cannibalism over the span of a few days.




He came from a wealthy family that afforded him an expensive lawyer and got off essentially scot-free on insanity plea. He returned home back to Japan where then he became a superstar. He wrote a bestselling book that detailed the murder and his experience, guest starred in many TV shows to further talk about it. Later died at 73, in 2022.

#40

Koch Brothers.

#41

Fidel Castro.

yojifer680:

It's glorious to see them undoing his life's work as soon as he died. Died in 2016, changed the constitution in 2019 to roll back socialism, de facto abandoned socialism in 2021.

#42

I've haven't seen Nestlé.

Image credits: VincentcODy

#43

Yasser Arafat.

Sabotaged the peace process in the Middle East, died a billionaire after stealing unfathomable amounts of money from his people.

#44

Winston Churchill, starved millions in Bengal. Sent the black and Tans to terrorise and murder Irish civilians. An evil man who is widely regarded as a good guy because of the evil of those he fought in WW2.

#45

Christopher Columbus. He’s absolutely evil.

#46

Rupert Murdoch.

fractiousrhubarb:

No person has done more damage to Australia, the UK and the US than this despicable man… he’s done nothing but manufacture so hatred and division for 70 years.

Image credits: TheLaughingPhoenix

#47

Mitch McConnell. He is one of the most corrupt, partisan politicians who ever held office. He's retiring at the end of this year and he will never be held to account for all of the harm his policies and actions have caused.

#48

General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the German Army (Wehrmacht) from 1938-1942 reporting directly to Adolf Hitler. Halder oversaw the planning for the invasions of Poland, France and Russia (Operation Barbarossa). Among other abominations, he added language into the Barbarossa battle order giving German officers the right to destroy Russian villages and massacre their civilian inhabitants. Thus Halder sanctioned some of the most heinous atrocities committed in all of human history.

Despite Halder’s complicity in war crimes of the greatest magnitude, he wasn’t tried at Nuremberg and was instead allowed to join the U.S. Army as a historian. Recognizing an opportunity to rewrite history, he manipulated the official Army account of the war to elevate the Wehrmacht into a force fighting for a noble cause.

In 1961, the Army, on behalf of President Kennedy, awarded him the Meritorious Civilian Service Award. Halder died in his bed in 1972 at age 87.

#49

Steve Bannon and Roger Stone were both sentenced to prison for their federal crimes, but had their convictions pardoned by fellow criminal buddy Donnie Jon.