Good Things Evil People Have Done

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]There are some very evil people that have existed in history. But despite being some of the most [music] evil people of all time, some of them have actually done quite good things. So in today's video, we are going to be looking at seven of the most evil people in history, but some of the good things that they actually did. Adolf Hitler.

[00:00:17]Adolf Hitler is a name that everyone associates with pure evil. He ordered the Holocaust, the systematic murder of 6 million Jewish people and 11 million others. He launched World War II and left tens of millions of dead across Europe.

[00:00:32]>> Pretty evil guy, so I don't really know what good he possibly could have done, but we'll find out. Launched World War II and left tens of millions of dead across Europe. If there is one name in history that everyone agrees represents pure evil, this is it. So we'll start here because you almost certainly do not know this part. In November of 1933, the Nazi government passed the Tierschutzgesetz, one of the strictest animal protection laws in the world at that point in history. It banned vivisection of animals without anesthesia, regulated the treatment of animals in circuses and zoos, and outlawed the boiling of live crustaceans in kitchens. That's that's that's a good thing. It's a shame that he was just such a dick. It seems like he treated animals better than humans. As much as this animal cruelty law is a good thing, like you can't hurt animals, everything else he did was horrible. It was Hermann Göring who announced the end of what he called the unbearable [music] torture and suffering in animal experiments.

[00:01:30]Sorry. I'm doing this is coming to my mind. They passed a law that allowed like you're not torturing animals, which is obviously great, but they did this to humans. They like tortured humans, twins as well, in World War II to see if they would both feel the same amounts of pain. Like what?

[00:01:46]>> animal experiments. He also said that anyone who still treated animals as inanimate property would be sent to a concentration camp. Hitler supported these laws and was personally devoted to animals, especially German Shepherds.

[00:02:00]The regime even first modern government-backed anti-smoking campaign.

[00:02:04]And in 1939, German scientists under Nazi rule established the statistical link between smoking and lung cancer.

[00:02:12]Ah, well, fair enough. The scientists have done well there. But even so, it's so strange to me how they thought animals deserved better rights than humans because that's essentially what they were saying. decades before the same conclusion became widely accepted everywhere else. Hitler exterminated millions of people, but also cared about whether your lobster suffered before it died.

[00:02:33]>> That's what I was saying. Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy confessed to the murder of 30 young women between 1974 and 1978. He is one of the most documented serial killers in American history and his name has become a cultural shorthand for a specific kind of charming and calculated evil.

[00:02:49]>> Essentially, he just mugged and then because he mugged, people thought he was attractive and should be let off easier than other killers, which is crazy to me. You probably already know this part, but what almost nobody knows is that in 1971, 3 years before his first confirmed murder, Bundy worked as a volunteer at the Seattle Crisis Clinic, a suicide prevention hotline. He sat at the switchboard and talked to some people who felt like they couldn't go on, people who were considering ending their lives that night, and he helped them to choose to keep on going.

[00:03:21]>> He probably was trying to plot his next victim. That's all it was. He was probably trying to find where they lived so he can go do it for them. People who were considering ending their lives that night, and he helped them to choose to keep on going. Ann Rule was a true crime writer who worked the switchboard next to him. She described him as kind, thoughtful, and empathetic and said that he was the last person in the world you would suspect of anything.

[00:03:43]>> It just shows though, like you don't really know anyone. Like this person thought that Ted Bundy was a nice guy, really empathetic, but no, he's a mass murderer, a literal serial killer. She later wrote a book about him called The Stranger Beside Me, which became one of the most important true crime books ever published, in part because she had sat next to him for months and had absolutely no idea. Bundy had taken the hotline job in 1971 and committed his first definitively known murder in February of 1974. It was just a 3-year gap between the man who saved lives and the man who started taking them.

[00:04:19]>> That's so weird to me how like the human brain can shift that fast within 3 years. Going from a nice, empathetic, nice guy trying to help people from killing themselves and then doing it for them. Like it's a bright it's crazy. The question that has no clean answer is this. What happened in those 3 years? He saved some lives and then took 30 more.

[00:04:41]Osama bin Laden. Most likely you've been expecting this one and for me, it's genuinely surprising. Osama bin Laden was the mastermind behind the September 11th, 2001 attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania. He founded al-Qaeda, the terrorist network responsible for attacks across multiple countries over more than two decades.

[00:05:04]>> What possibly could have Osama bin Laden done that was considered good? Like come on. He also spent a decade as the most wanted man in the world before US Navy SEALs killed him in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May of 2011. In the final years of his life, audio messages widely attributed to bin Laden and reported on by major international outlets including Al Jazeera began to focus heavily on climate change. In a message from 2010, the speaker dedicated nearly the entire recording to global warming. Osama bin Laden cared about global warming? Surely not. What the hell? It was accusing the United States of destroying the planet through carbon emissions, pointing to the severe floods in Pakistan that year as evidence, and calling on people to support political leaders willing to act on climate change.

[00:05:54]>> Doesn't China have the highest emissions out of anyone by far though? Or at least they would have. When US forces raided bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad, climate change writings and materials on ecology were found among his personal documents. The audio messages could not be independently verified at the time of release and were distributed through intelligence monitoring services, but the consistent pattern across multiple messages and the physical documents found in the compound >> [music] >> point to a genuine and sustained interest in the issue. I mean, that's the strange.

[00:06:25]>> [laughter] >> That is really strange. I would have never took Osama bin Laden as a global warming activist. turned out to be a climate activist. Wernher von Braun.

[00:06:35]Wernher von Braun was an SS officer in Nazi Germany who designed the V2, the first ballistic missile in history. The V2 killed approximately 9,000 civilians in London, Antwerp, and Paris, but the more important number is this [music] one. Around 20,000 slave laborers died building the V2 at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. More people died making the weapon than were actually killed [music] by it. In 1945, von Braun surrendered to American forces because he feared what the Soviet armies would do to him if they captured him. The US government brought him to America under a classified program called Operation Paperclip, which relocated approximately 1,600 German scientists and engineers to the United States after the war. I believe Operation Paperclip is one of the most controversial operations like ever. I saw Joe Rogan talk about it.

[00:07:28]>> Von Braun became the director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. On July 16th, 1969, the Saturn V rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins towards the moon. That rocket was designed by Wernher von Braun.

[00:07:46]>> What? What? A leading Nazi scientist got America to the moon? Why did I never know that? That's crazy. What the hell?

[00:07:58]Armstrong set foot on the lunar surface 4 days later. It remains one of the most watched events in human history. This was made possible by a man who had spent the previous decade building weapons for Adolf Hitler using people who were worked to death in a concentration camp.

[00:08:14]That is crazy to me. Like I would have never have put that together.

[00:08:18]>> America almost certainly wouldn't have reached the moon in the 20th century.

[00:08:23]Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan killed an estimated 40 million people, which was roughly 10% of the entire human population alive at the time. His empire's campaigns led to the destruction of entire cities. He reportedly had the skulls of men, women, and children stacked into separate pyramids outside the cities he destroyed. By almost any measure, his conquests rank among the most devastating in human history. And yet, inside his empire, something extraordinary was happening. At a time when the standard practice across the world was to kill or enslave people of the wrong religion, Genghis Khan decreed religious freedom to everyone under his rule. Ah, that's all right then. You can be whatever religion you want, but I'm still going to kill 40 million people or 10% of the global population. One in 10 people are going to die because of me, but don't worry, you can have whatever religion you want to believe in.

[00:09:14]Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews, Taoists, and shamans lived under the same laws with equal protection. He exempted clergy of every religion from taxation. This wasn't idealism. He genuinely didn't care what you believed.

[00:09:30]>> Fair. Fair enough. I mean, he did kill 40 million people, but fair. That indifference produced the closest thing to religious tolerance the medieval world had ever seen. He also created the Yam, not the vegetable, but the first international postal system in history.

[00:09:47]Relay stations positioned every 40 km from Mongolia to Eastern Europe provided fresh horses, food, and lodging for messengers. That's kind of cool. That's kind of cool. Bro was the original Amazon. That's kind of cool. Fidel Castro. Fidel Castro ruled Cuba as a communist dictator for 49 years. He ordered mass executions of political opponents, imprisoned and persecuted gay Cubans, and forced millions of people into exile. Pretty much just a bad end, essentially. The United States spent decades trying to remove him, including funding an invasion, attempting multiple assassinations, and imposing an economic embargo that lasted over half a century, but none of it worked. However, Castro did something so surprising that almost no one outside of Latin America has ever heard about it. In 2004, Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez launched a program called Operation Miracle, an initiative that brings free eye care to people in need around the world. Cuban doctors traveled to 34 countries to provide free eye surgeries, mostly cataract operations, to poor people who had been living with preventable blindness. That's actually very nice. I think more people should be doing that sort of stuff. Just not the other stuff that Fidel Castro was doing.

[00:11:03]And by 2019, more than 4 million people's sight were restored [music] without paying a single cent.

[00:11:10]>> 4 million people could see again because of Fidel Castro. You know, fair. Fair, that's cool. Cuba had also been sending doctors abroad for decades before that.

[00:11:19]When the Ebola epidemic hit West Africa in 2014, Cuba sent more medical personnel to the affected countries than any other nation in the world, more than the United States, more than China. It was the Cuban doctors that arrived first and stayed the longest.

[00:11:35]>> They had good health care, it seems, under Fidel Castro. They made sure everyone was healthy, apart from the ones that he assassinated. But no, them two things are very respectable, so fair enough. But again, it doesn't mean any of the other things he did was right in the slightest. And doctors to heal the world's poor.

[00:11:53]Benito Mussolini. Benito Mussolini was the inventor of fascism. He allied with Hitler, passed racial laws in 1938 that stripped Jewish Italians of their citizenship and their rights, and his role in World War contributed to over a million deaths.

[00:12:09]>> Oh my god. He ended his life hanging upside down from a meat hook in a Milan gas station, and most historians would say he deserved it. But here's the part that history books tend to skip over.

[00:12:20]The Pontine Marshes were a vast stretch of malarial swampland near Rome that had been a death trap for 2,000 years.

[00:12:27]Julius Caesar himself drew up plans to drain them. Napoleon tried. Every ruler who cared about public works eventually looked at the Pontine Marshes and gave up. Between 1928 and 1935, Mussolini's government built an extensive system of canals, pumping stations, and redirected rivers that drained most of the marshes.

[00:12:47]They built a new city called Latina on land that had previously been too deadly to inhabit.

[00:12:53]>> So Mussolini, all he really did was build more houses. Come on. Come on. And because of this act, malaria was virtually eliminated from central Italy.

[00:13:03]Mussolini also launched the most effective anti-mafia campaign in Italian history.

[00:13:08]>> [music] >> He sent Cesare Mori, known as the Iron Prefect, to Palermo with nearly unlimited power, and Mori arrested thousands of mafia members and essentially broke Cosa Nostra as an operating organization. But the mafia came back in 1943 during the Allied invasion. American intelligence worked directly with mafia bosses, including Lucky Luciano. So Mussolini kind of stopped malaria in central Europe. Uh okay. He's still a [ __ ] though, ain't he? But there you have it. There's some of the things that the most evil people in the world have actually done well.

[00:13:42]Make sure to like, subscribe. I want my thing. Um bye.