In 1964, Duvalier became president for life in a quasi-monarchical regime, amending the constitution to ensure that his son, Jean-Claude, became president following his death. Baby Doc Duvalier duly took over the country in 1971 at just nineteen years of age, his ostentatious displays of wealth incurring the wrath of the impoverished nation, which remained largely illiterate while the corrupt elite siphoned off the country’s remaining assets. Baby Doc ruled until 1986, when he was overthrown by the military.
SCHINDLER
1908–1974
I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn’t stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me to do. That’s all there is to it. Really, nothing more.
Oskar Schindler
A womanizing, heavy-drinking war profiteer, Oskar Schindler was responsible for one of history’s greatest acts of selfless heroism. His decision to save over 1000 Jewish slave laborers from death at the hands of the Nazis has been immortalized in literature and film—an act of individual nobility that epitomizes the triumph of humanity over evil. Like Dickens’s sinner-hero Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, Schindler demonstrates that real heroes are often not pious and conventional but worldly rogues, eccentrics and outsiders.
Oskar Schindler was an extravagant and genial businessman from Moravia, in what is now the Czech Republic. He was born into a wealthy family, but his various enterprises were destroyed by the Great Depression that spread through Europe in the 1930s. A wheeler-dealer who excelled at bribery and manipulation, Schindler became one of the first to profit from the Aryanization of German-occupied Poland. In 1939 he took over a Kraków factory from a Jewish industrialist and filled it with Jewish slave labor.
In the late 1930s, sensing which way the political wind was blowing, Schindler had worked for German intelligence—an action that had seen him briefly imprisoned in his native country. When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Schindler, now set free, joined the Nazi Party. His boozy bonhomie earned him a swift rise. But after watching yet another Nazi raid on the Kraków Ghetto, which adjoined his factory, he decided to use his considerable influence to counteract his party’s anti-Semitic policy and to save as many Jews as he could.
The very qualities that made Schindler a successful profiteer enabled him to save his workforce of over 1000 Jews. A consummate actor, Schindler used his charm to deflect his fellow Nazis from sending his Jews to the extermination camps. Gestapo officers arriving at his factory, demanding that he hand over workers with forged papers, would reel drunkenly out of his office three hours later without either workers or their papers. He was arrested twice for procuring black-market supplies for his Jews, but his bribes and his easy manner secured his release. “Whatever it took to save a life, he did,” his lawyer later said. “He worked the system extraordinarily well.”
When 300 of his female workers were sent by administrative error to Auschwitz, Schindler secured their release with a hefty bribe. He forbade anyone, including officials, to enter his factory without his express permission. He spent every night in his office, ready to intervene in case the Gestapo came. As the Nazis retreated and the 25,000-strong population of the nearby labor camp at Plaszów was sent to Auschwitz, Schindler pulled every string to have his factory and all his workers moved to Moravia. Even though he was now himself in danger, he stayed with his Jews until the Russians arrived in May 1945 and he knew that they were safe.
Schindler rarely talked about his motivation. As a child, his best friends had been the sons of a rabbi who lived nearby. “It didn’t mean anything to me that they were Jewish,” he said later when asked why he acted against Nazi policy, “to me they were just human beings.” When pressed to explain his apparent volte-face, his reasoning was astounding in its simplicity: “I believed that the Germans were doing wrong … when they started killing innocent people … I decided I am going to work against them and I am going to save as many as I can.” “I knew the people who worked for me,” he told another. “When you know people, you have to behave toward them like human beings.”
Many are still confounded by why this unlikely hero would sacrifice everything to save these people. But for Schindler, who began saving Jews long before the tide of war had turned, it was simply a matter of conscience. In the words of another man he saved: “I don’t know what his motives were, even though I knew him very well. I asked him and I never got a clear answer … but I don’t give a damn. What’s important is that he saved our lives.”
The opportunistic Schindler ended the war penniless. He spent his vast fortune to protect lives, even selling off his wife’s jewels. His marriage to the long-suffering Emilie finally broke down in 1957. “He gave his Jews everything,” she later said. “And me nothing.” He was shunned in Germany after the war, his actions a constant challenge to the collective self-deception that nothing could have been done. His postwar business ventures flopped. The Jews whom Schindler had saved came to the support of their erstwhile benefactor. A Jewish organization funded his brief, unsuccessful stint as a farmer in Argentina and his short-lived German cement factory. From all over the world the Schindler Jews sent money. He died of liver failure in 1974. He is buried, according to his wishes, in Jerusalem, “because my children are here.”
HOXHA OF ALBANIA
1908–85
Stalin was not at all what the enemies of communism accused and accuse him of being. On the contrary, he was just and a man of principle … We Albanian communists have successfully applied the teachings of Stalin … His rich and very valuable experience has guided us on our road and in our activity.
Enver Hoxha, Memoirs
Enver Hoxha was intellectually sophisticated, handsome and charming, but a paranoid, rigidly dogmatic and murderous Stalinist tyrant of Albania who in a forty-year reign isolated and impoverished his country, tormented and murdered his own people and ran the government apparatus with sinister, sometimes tragicomic, violence, killing many of his own comrades in faked accidents, suicides and executions. By his death, he had turned his country into a failed state on the brink of collapse.
Hoxha was the son of a well-off cloth merchant, and during the 1920s and 1930s he spent several periods abroad, studying and working in France (he attended philosophy lectures at the Sorbonne) and Belgium, before returning to teach French in a school in the town of Korcë. When Fascist Italy invaded Albania in 1939, Hoxha refused to join the newly established Albanian Fascist Party, and was sacked from his job as a consequence. A year later, he opened a tobacco shop where in 1940 he helped found the Albanian Communist Party, which began an insurgent campaign against Italian occupation, drawing on the assistance of Tito’s Partisans in neighboring Yugoslavia. After liberation in 1944, Enver Hoxha became both the new prime minister and minister of foreign affairs but really ruled as first secretary of the Albanian Party of Labor. Soon after the war, Hoxha married Nexhmije, a fellow communist, who would later wield enormous power, not unlike that of Mao Zedong’s wife Jiang Qing and the Romanian tyrant Nicolae Ceaucescu’s wife, Elena.
Hoxha was a loyal and devoted Stalinist, savagely purging personal and class enemies. Stalin and Hoxha met frequently, enjoying long discussions on history and linguistics, later retold in Hoxha’s surprisingly fascinating memoirs. In 1949, after Marshal Tito’s split with the Soviet Union, Hoxha severed relations with Yugoslavia—even though Albania was much indebted to its far larger neighbor. He also executed his defense minister Koci Xoce for Titoism. Fearful lest his people be “contaminated” by exposure to the Titoist “deviance,” Hoxha ordered the construction of guard posts along the entire length of the country’s border—which became one of the most intensely monitored frontiers in the world. Later he ordered the building of 750,000 one-man concrete bunkers and 700,000 pillboxes to defend the country against invaders, an absurd and bizarre decision that still disfigures the Albanian littoral.
Behind his Balkan curtain, Hoxha embarked on a Sta
linist-style exercise in social engineering. He sought the creation of an urban working class worthy of the name (hitherto, Albania had been a clan-based peasant society) and the socialization of national life. Forced industrialization followed, while agriculture was reorganized on the Soviet collective-farm model. At the same time, all of Albania gained access to electricity for the first time, life expectancy rose, and illiteracy rates plummeted. Yet the human cost of this social revolution was enormous.
Hoxha’s secret police, the Sigurimi, were brutal and ubiquitous: hundreds of thousands were tortured and killed. Hoxha’s prime minister Mehmet Shehu spoke openly at a party congress about their methods: “Who disagrees with our leadership in some point, will get a spit into his face, a blow onto his chin, and, if necessary, a bullet into his head.” Out of three million Albanians, one million were at some point either arrested or imprisoned in his perpetual terror.
Hoxha also added his own individual and quixotic touches. Private car ownership was banned, as were beards, which were seen as a rural throwback. Xenophobia was encouraged as the Albanian communists fused their adherence to the strictures of Marxist-Leninism with a glorification of various national myths. The central focus of such propaganda was the man heralded as the greatest Albanian of all time—Hoxha himself. However, Hoxha was careful to share his cult of personality with that of Stalin, who remained an object of forced reverence in Albania for the next four decades.
After the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, Hoxha allied himself with Beijing against Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, which he believed to be abandoning the true path toward socialism laid down by Comrade Stalin. This realignment led to a precipitous decline in Albanian standards of living, as the country had been highly dependent on Soviet grain, and on the USSR as its principal export market. To quell any possible dissent, Hoxha decided to emulate his new Chinese friends and launched an Albanian Cultural Revolution. From 1967, Albania was officially declared an “atheistic” state with all mosques and churches closed and clerics arrested. All private property was confiscated by the state, and the numbers of arrests increased exponentially.
After a brief and highly constrained cultural liberalization during the early 1970s, a further wave of repression and ideological purification followed in 1973. Then, in 1978, two years after Mao’s death and following the rise of the more moderate Deng Xiaoping, Hoxha broke with China, leading his country into yet further seclusion.
Hoxha survived numerous efforts to depose him—by loyalists of the exiled King Zog, by the British government, and by Khrushchev. Awareness of these threats fueled his already considerable paranoia, which manifested itself in a series of internal purges. Those at the apex of the system found themselves under the greatest threat: members of the Politburo and central committee were regularly arrested and executed for allegedly treasonable activities, and the seven successive interior ministers responsible for carrying out his purges were all themselves purged. In 1981 Hoxha’s most trusted henchmen, the long-serving Mehmet Shehu, prime minister since 1954, challenged his plan for the succession and his isolationism. Shehu officially “committed suicide” in the prime minister’s residence after being accused of involvement with “war criminals,” the CIA and the KGB, and suffering a nervous breakdown, itself illegal. Various accounts claimed the aging Hoxha had personally murdered Shehu. In fact, it is almost certain that the sick Hoxha, now aided by his wife, ordered his assassination. Henceforth Hoxha, increasingly ailing, ruled through his terrifying wife, Nexhmije, who joined the Politburo, and their protégé Ramiz Alia.
Hoxha himself died in office in 1985. Embalmed and displayed in a mausoleum, he was later reburied in a humbler grave. Alia, and Nexhmije Hoxha, took over but they were overthrown in 1990. Albania, after a period of chaos, emerged as a democracy—but one still damaged by Hoxha’s tyranny.
KIM IL SUNG & KIM JONG IL
1912–1994 & 1941–2011
The oppressed peoples can liberate themselves only through struggle. This is a simple and clear truth confirmed by history.
Kim Il Sung
Brutal, murderous, repressive and deluded by his own propaganda, Kim Il Sung was the self-styled “Great Leader” and long-time dictator of North Korea. He led his country on a path to war, international isolation and economic collapse, and during his half-century in power North Korea became arguably the most totalitarian and surreal regime in the world. Indeed, long after his death he remains eternally the president—and the third generation of this hereditary dynasty continued to rule this bizarre and hellish state well into the 21st century.
Kim Il Sung was born Kim Sung Ju, the eldest of three sons of a Christian father. Japan had invaded Korea in 1910 and Kim grew up under Japanese rule until, in the 1920s, his family moved to Manchuria in northeast China, where he learned Chinese and became interested in communism. After the Japanese invaded first Manchuria and then the rest of China, Kim joined the anti-Japanese resistance movement. During the Second World War he fled to the Soviet Union, where he underwent further military training and political indoctrination.
After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Korea was divided into two zones of occupation, with the Soviets in the north and the Americans in the south. In 1946 the Soviets set up a satellite communist state in the north, with Kim as its head. While the south of the country proceeded with free elections, Kim immediately began imposing a repressive Stalinist totalitarian system; this included the creation of an all-powerful secret police, concentration camps, the redistribution of property, suppression of religion and killing of “class enemies.”
In June 1950—despite warnings from Stalin urging patience—Kim ordered his troops to invade South Korea in order to reunite the country, thereby triggering the Korean War. North Korea received logistical, financial and military support from China and the Soviet Union, while the South received backing from the UN, who sent an international force, mainly composed of US troops. Despite initial successes, the North Korean troops were soon beaten back. Kim was only rescued by massive Chinese intervention. After three years the conflict—which cost between 2 and 3 million lives—ended in a stalemate.
At home, Kim tightened his grip, banishing outside influence and liquidating internal enemies. An attempted coup by eleven party members in 1953—the first of a number of such attempts—ended in a Stalinist show trial of the participants, who were swiftly executed. A purge of the party followed, and tens of thousands of Koreans were sent to labor camps—still a feature in North Korea.
Kim promoted an all-pervasive cult of personality centered around the Juche (or Kim Il Sungism), a political philosophy based on his own supposedly god-like qualities. According to the state media, Kim was the flawless Eternal Leader or Supreme Leader.
Meanwhile, with military spending taking up nearly a quarter of the country’s budget, poverty became rife. In the 1990s food shortages led to famine, in which as many as 2 million people may have perished. The country maintained its utter isolation. Korea came to be seen as a rogue state and a sponsor of terrorism, particularly against its southern neighbor: North Korea was responsible for the assassination in 1983 of seventeen South Korean officials who had been on an official visit to Burma, and for the downing in 1987 of a South Korean commercial jet, resulting in the deaths of 115 people. North Korea went on to develop its own nuclear arsenal.
The ailing Kim Il Sung was already training one of his sons, Kim Jong Il to succeed him in a Marxist version of a hereditary monarchy. The younger Kim started to wield power in the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee at the end of the 1960s.
In 1980, he finally emerged as a Politburo member and his father named him as his heir apparent. By this time he had become a major influence, and had liquidated any hint of opposition, organizing terrorism abroad in the form of bombings and assassinations, as well as kidnappings. It was he who devised the South Korean jet bombing and the killings of South Korean ministers in Burma, and it was on his orders that Japanese citizens were kidnapped.
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sp; His own life was recast as a heroic story, in which he was the Son of God. His birth, in a log cabin in a revolutionary camp on holy Mount Paektu was portrayed as a sacred event foretold by a swallow, a double rainbow and a new star. In fact he had been born in 1942 in the Soviet Union. By 1991, he was already the real ruler of North Korea, having been promoted to supreme commander of the armed forces. In 1994, his father, the Great Leader, finally died at age eighty-two and Kim, hailed as Dear Father and Dear Leader, succeeded him as general secretary of the party (not the presidency, for Kim Il sung remained eternal immortal president).
Kim became the object of a preposterous cult—it was said he could change the weather, melt snow and bring sunshine. He was, it was alleged, the author of no less than 1,500 books and six operas; he was the Glorious General from Heaven, and the Guiding Star of the 20th Century.
In reality, he was just 5 foot 2 inches tall and had a paunch that was accentuated by his ever-present green zip-up Mao tunic. He wore wrap-around dark glasses and platform shoes, and sported a bouffant quiff. Kim dined extravagantly on shark’s-fin soup and sashimi sliced off living fish, drank Scotch whisky and always traveled on the armored train given to his father by Stalin. He loved movies, especially Godzilla, and wrote a book On the Art of Cinema. Kim even went so far as to kidnap a director and some actors from South Korea to star in his movies.