If you rate your bloodshed by proportion of national population eliminated, the worst offenses will tend to be concentrated in the smallest countries. Matthew White, author of the agreeably morbid Great Big Book of Horrible Things, ranked the bloodlettings of the twentieth century in this order, and found that the top three were the massacre of the Herero of Namibia by their German colonists, the slaughter of Cambodians by Pol Pot, and King Leopold’s war in the Congo. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the big populations they decimated don’t make the list.
