Pablo Escobar is remembered as the face of the Medellin cartel, the Colombian criminal organization that flooded the world with cocaine in the 1980s.

But for all his deeds and bluster, Escobar was just one member of a clan of traffickers who helped create the Medellin cartel.

And in terms of narco eccentricities, one Medellin capo stands out: Carlos Lehder Rivas.

Born to a German father and Colombian mother in Armenia, a district in west-central Colombia, in 1949, Lehder spent most of his childhood in Colombia, but after his parents separated, he relocated to New York City when he was 15, Colombian newspaper El Espectador reported in 2012.

In the US, he got involved in petty crime, working on the US East Coast and in Canada leading a stolen-car ring and moving marijuana. He got picked up for car theft in June 1973 and was sent to federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. His brief stint in jail would forever alter the US and the world.

George Jung, the now famous drug smuggler and subject of the movie "Blow," was Lehder's cell mate and described the Colombian-American as well mannered and well dressed. As Jung told PBS, even while locked up for minor crimes, Lehder had his mind on a more ambitious criminal enterprise:

"As time wore on, we got to know each other and then he asked me if I knew anything about cocaine and I told him no. And I said, 'Why don't you tell me about it.' And he said, 'Did you know it sells for $60,000.00 a kilo in the United States?'"

"And I said, 'No. I had no idea. How much does it cost down in Colombia?' and he said, '$4,000 to $5,000.' And immediately bells started to go off and the cash register started ringing up in my head."

"It was like destiny" that Jung and Lehder ended up together at Danbury, Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration, told Business Insider.

Jung and Lehder were released in the late 1970s, but they soon hooked up again, setting up an airborne-smuggling operation that moved cocaine from Colombia to the southeastern US.

As their operation expanded in the late '70s and early '80s, Lehder grew closer to the capos back in Medellin, and in the Caribbean, they looked for a way station for their bustling trafficking business.

'It just turned into a freak show'

"They used to smuggle drugs through Nassau, Bahamas, by using corrupt officials that would open up the airport and look the other way ... But they wanted a more isolated area — an area where they could operate more freely and not have to pay a ton of Bahamian individuals," Vigil told Business Insider. "So that's when they came out to Norman's Cay."

At Norman's Cay, a small spit of land 210 miles southeast of Miami, Lehder's eccentricities — fueled by his growing cocaine habit — came to the fore.

Lehder, considered handsome by men and women, was regarded as intelligent and charming, but given to excess and probably lacking self-control, Ron Chepesiuk, author of "Crazy Charlie: Revolutionary or Neo-Nazi," told Vice.

Lehder was also an aggressive businessman, and he eventually forced Jung out of their arrangement, but not before Jung visited Norman's Cay and observed Lehder's behavior. "He wasn’t crazy… he had delusions, though. He loved John Lennon and Adolf Hitler at the same time. That should have been a sign for me," Jung told High Times.

"I mean, Walter Cronkite showed up there, and these thugs came with machine guns and told him, 'You better leave.' It just turned into a freak show," Jung said.

"There were other people that lived there, but they started to drive them out, and Carlos Lehder started to develop kind of like a neo-Nazi group there, that would protect the planeloads of coke and intimidate the people that lived there," Vigil said.

Lehder started behaving more erratically on Norman's Cay, hosting parties and orgies and running roughshod over the community on the island. Spooked by law enforcement and emboldened by the officials he had bought off, Lehder went so far as to drop leaflets over Nassau, the Bahamanian capital, saying "DEA go home."

"Eventually Carlos started to become more visible and started to be in the crosshairs of the DEA, and that's when the Bahamian government said, 'hey, you have to go. You can't be here anymore because the DEA is coming, and we don't want them meddling in our business and investigating us as well,'" Vigil told Business Insider.

Lehder retreated to Colombia after a DEA raid on Norman's Cay in 1980. His airborne-smuggling operation had accelerated Medellin's cocaine business and made Lehder a valuable member of the cartel — a status his actions in Colombia would start to erode.

He built a hacienda and started spreading money around his home turf in Armenia and around Quindio, the state where Armenia is located. He built a statue of John Lennon on his front lawn and raised eyebrows by buying the state government a modern airplane as a gift. Like Escobar, Lehder had a political awakening in the early 1980s.

Escobar went along with Colombia's democratic system and won a seat as a backup for a legislator in the National Assembly. Lehder, however, lifted the Nazi leanings he likely absorbed from his father (the younger Lehder was reportedly a Holocaust denier) and used them to undergird his political movement in Colombia.

"He wants to get into politics and his idea is to form like a Nazi-type of government in Colombia," Vigil told Business Insider. "This is how deranged he is now and delusional."

"There is plenty of evidence to support the characterization that Lehder was a neo-Nazi,"Chepesiuk told Vice."He certainly wasn't shy about giving interviews or expressing his views. He often praised Hitler and railed against the Jews."

He retreated into the jungle but still held press conferences and declared his intention to fight the government. He was also known to quote Hitler, who he admitted to admiring, according to El Espectador.

A Colombian national-police raid on a home linked to Lehder in a remote part of Colombia uncovered several million US dollars, "and the whole house is plastered with photographs and memorabilia of Adolf Hitler, who he idolized," Vigil told Business Insider.

His party, called the National Latin Movement, had a"fascist-populist program [that] called for radical changes in Colombia's political landscape." He also embraced anti-imperialism, criticizing the US for its involvement in Latin America. He saw cocaine as a means of liberation, calling it Latin America's atomic bomb, Vigil said.

Like Escobar, Lehder's political efforts also focused on defeating Colombia's extradition agreement with the US, which, after the 1984 assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, allowed for immediate extradition of Lehder and other narcos if they were caught.

'He knew that Pablo Escobar had turned him in'

Lehder's megalomania, heavily fueled by cocaine, sparked his falling out with Escobar, which would set the stage for his undoing.

At a party at Escobar's Hacienda Napoles, outside of Medellin, "Carlos is high on coke, and he gets into an argument with one of Pablo Escobar's sicarios, or hit men, and shoots and kills him," Vigil told Business Insider.

This angered Escobar, Vigil added, because it made it look like the Medellin chief, who was particularly close to his hit men, couldn't protect the people who worked for him.

Escobar, having decided that Lehder was more of a liability than an asset, "basically gives him up, gives up his location" to the Colombian government, Vigil said. Escobar later denied he rolled over on Lehder in a public letter, according to Chepesiuk.

At 6 a.m. on February 4, 1987, on a ranch near Medellin where Lehder was again embracing his hedonism, Colombian police and soldiers moved in, capturing Lehder after a brief firefight.

Eleven hours later, he was bound for Miami, becoming the first victim of the extradition agreement he had fought against.

He soon arrived at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois. With the US-Colombian campaign against Escobar reaching full throat, Lehder was a person of interest to US authorities.

Vigil, a DEA official at the time, traveled to Marion to meet Lehder upon his return to the US:

"Very short individual, fluent English. The first impression that I had of him was that he was a con artist, a manipulator. ... He really didn't want to talk about his involvement in the drug trade."

"His whole focus — and he knew that Pablo Escobar had turned him in — and he said, 'listen, I can help you capture Pablo Escobar. I'm willing to go back to Colombia. You can put me under the security of the Colombian army, and I can find Pablo Escobar for you.'"

"But we were not going to take a chance on him going back to Colombia and getting into the wind again. But he definitely, definitely wanted to do Pablo Escobar."

Lehder's split with Escobar in the mid-1980s left him without information that US authorities were interested in trading for.

He was sentenced to life without parole plus 135 years in 1988, a term the judge said was "a signal to our society that it will do everything it can to rid itself of this cancer."

Lehder's involvement in the drug trade proved valuable when he was able to testify against Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had assisted the Medellin cartel with its money-laundering activities.

Lehder got his sentence reduced, but he remains locked up in the US. His exact whereabouts aren't known, as he is probably in witness protection, though his lawyers occasionally appear on his behalf.

The nearly 30 years he has spent in prison have weighed on him. He has accused the US of violating his rights and reneging on an agreement to let him out in return for his Noriega testimony. He has written to Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, asking for help to repatriate himself so that he can die on Colombian soil— a wish he might well get upon returning.

"He's got a lot of enemies in Colombia" Vigil said. "So if he went back there, I don't think he'd survive more than a few months."

SEE ALSO: 'Nobody is ever going to tell you': 3 theories regarding who killed 'The King of Cocaine' Pablo Escobar

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NOW WATCH: Pablo Escobar: The life and death of one of the biggest cocaine kingpins in history

One man's hero is another man's tyrant, a popular aphorism goes.

But while we can argue the validity and virtue of certain political agendas, the callous methods by which some leaders attain their goals are less up to interpretation.

After all, no matter how a historian tries to spin it, ordering a tower to be constructed out of live men stacked and cemented together with bricks and mortar is pretty brutal.

Business Insider put together a list of the most ruthless leaders of all time featuring men and women who employed merciless tactics to achieve their political and military agendas.

Note: All people on the list ruled prior to 1980, and no living figures were included. People are arranged in chronological order.

Qin Shi Huang

Reign: 247-210 B.C.

Qin, also called Qin Shihuangdi, united China in 221 B.C. and ruled as the first emperor of the Qin dynasty. He was known to order the killing of scholars whose ideas he disagreed with and the burning of "critical" books.

During his reign, he ordered the construction of a great wall (roughly speaking, the prequel to the modern Great Wall of China), and an enormous mausoleum featuring more than 6,000 life-size terra-cotta soldier figures. Large numbers of conscripts working on the wall died, and those working on the mausoleum were killed to preserve the secrecy of the tomb.

"Every time he captured people from another country, he castrated them in order to mark them and made them into slaves," Hong Kong University's Xun Zhou told the BBC.

Source: British Museum, Britannica, History, BBC

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (aka Caligula)

Reign: A.D. 37-41

Caligula was quite popular at first because he freed citizens who were unjustly imprisoned and got rid of a stiff sales tax. But then he became ill, and he was never quite the same again.

He eliminated political rivals (forcing their parents to watch the execution), and declared himself a living god. According to Roman historian Suetonius, Caligula had sex with his sisters and sold their services to other men, raped and killed people, and made his horse a priest.

He was eventually attacked by a group of guardsman and stabbed 30 times.

Source: Biography.com, BBC, "Atlas of History's Greatest Heroes and Villains" by Howard Watson.

Attila the Hun

Reign: A.D. 434-453

After killing his brother, Attila became the leader of the Hunnic Empire, centered in present-day Hungary, and ended up becoming one of the most feared assailants of the Roman Empire.

He expanded the Hunnic Empire to present-day Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans. He also invaded Gaul with the intention of conquering it, though he was defeated at the Battle of Catalaunian Plains.

"There, where I have passed, the grass will never grow gain," he reportedly remarked on his reign.

Source: Britannica, Biography

"That was the greatest and finest moment of my life," one of the world's most brutal tyrants reportedly said after touring the newly Nazi-occupied French capital.

The day after Germany signed an armistice with France, Hitler and his cronies toured the Dôme des Invalides, which holds Napoleon's tomb; the Paris opera house; the Champs-Elysees; the Arc de Triomphe; Sacre-Coeur; and the Eiffel Tower on June 23, 1940.

Hitler spent just three hours in the "City of Light," but his forces occupied northern France for four years until the Allied forces liberated Paris on August 25, 1944, 72 years ago on Thursday.

"The Germans were driven from many strategic parts of the city by the combined onslaught of the French military and the fury of citizens fighting for their liberties," the Associated Press reports.

During Hitler's brief tour, he instructed friend and architect Albert Speer to take note of the city's design to recreate similar yet superior German buildings.

"Wasn't Paris beautiful?" Hitler reportedly asked Speer.

"But Berlin must be far more beautiful. When we are finished in Berlin, Paris will only be a shadow."

While sightseeing, Hitler also ordered the destruction of two French World War I monuments that reminded him of Germany's bitter defeat.

SEE ALSO: This is the last known photo of Hitler

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The World War II story of “Jumpin'” Joseph Beyrle gives a whole new meaning to the saying: “Oh yeah? You and what army?”

Actually, the Red Army, to be exact.

Beyrle was a paratrooper with the legendary 101st Airborne, 506th Infantry Regiment. A demolitions expert, he performed missions in Nazi-occupied France with the resistance there before flying into Normandy on D-Day.

Beyrle had mixed luck during the war, but he would end it as a legend.

When his C-47 came under intense enemy fire during the D-Day invasion, Beyrle had to jump at the ultra-low altitude of 120 meters. He made the drop successfully but lost contact with his unit. Not one to be deterred by being alone in Fortress Europe, he still performed sabotage missions to support the D-Day landings.

He even managed to destroy a power station but was captured by the Wehrmacht shortly after.

Over the next seven months, Sgt. Beyrle was moved around quite a bit. He managed to escape twice, but, unlucky for him, he was recaptured both times. One time, he and other fugitives tried to hop onto a train bound for Poland but ended up on the way to Berlin instead.

He was beaten and nearly shot as a spy when he was handed over to the Gestapo, but the Wehrmacht took him back after military officials stepped in, saying the Gestapo had no authority over POWs.

Once back in the hands of the German military, they sent him to Stalag III-C, a prisoner of war camp in Brandenberg. The camp was notorious for the number of Russian prisoners who were starved or otherwise killed there.

In January 1945, he escaped Stalag III-C and moved east, where he linked up with a Soviet tank brigade. He convinced them he was an American by waving a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes and persuaded the battalion’s commander (the Red Army’s only female tank officer of that rank) to let him join her unit. He spent a month in the Red Army tank corps, assisting in the liberation of his old POW camp, Stalag III-C.

Beyrle was wounded by a German Stuka dive bomber attack and evacuated to a Red Army hospital in Poland. When Soviet Marshal Georgy Zhukov learned there was a non-Soviet in the hospital, he visited Joseph Beyrle.

Amazed by his story, Zhukov gave Beyrle the papers he needed to rejoin US forces in Europe.

The now-recuperating former POW headed to Moscow on a Soviet military convoy in February 1945. When he arrived at the US embassy, he discovered he was listed as killed in action four days after the D-Day landings. His hometown of Muskegon, Michigan, held a funeral mass for him.

SEE ALSO: 9 infamous KGB assassination attempts straight out of spy novels

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Today marks the 77th anniversary of the start of World War II —when Hitler's Nazi army invaded Poland.

Hitler's engineers secretly developed some of the most ambitious projects and rapidly produced sophisticated technology decades before its time.

In the 2015 fall issue of Weapons of WWII magazine, author KM Lee detailed some of Hitler's advanced weaponry.

Here's a look at are some of the secret, lethal weapons the Nazis created during World War II:

SEE ALSO: Hitler created the largest gun ever, and it was a total disaster

Hitler's stealth 'flying wing' bomber

Referred to as "Hitler's secret weapon," the Horten Ho 229 bomber was designed to carry 2,000 pounds of armaments while flying at 49,000 feet at speeds north of 600 mph.

Equipped with twin turbojet engines, two cannons, and R4M rockets, the Horten Ho 229 was the world's first stealth aircraft and took its first flight in 1944.

Source: Weapons of WWII magazine

According to the Smithsonian, Nazi Luftwaffe chief Hermann Göring allocated half a million Reich Marks to brothers Reimar and Walter Horten to manufacture the aircraft.

Plagued with problems, the Horten didn't last long in combat. Instead, the bomber's engineering did inspire today's modern stealth aircraft — like the Northrop Gruman B-2 bomber.

Source: Weapons of WWII magazine

The Fritz X radio-guided bomb

Considered the "grandfather of smart bombs," the Fritz X was a 3,450-pound explosive equipped with a radio receiver and sophisticated tail controls that helped guide the bomb to its target.

According to the US Air Force, the Fritz X could penetrate 28 inches of armor and could be deployed from 20,000 feet,an altitude out of reach for antiaircraft equipment at the time.

Less than a month after it was developed, the Nazis sank Italian battleship Roma off Sardinia in September 1943. However, the Fritz X's combat use was limited since only a few Luftwaffe aircraft were designed to carry the bomb.

Source: Weapons of WWII magazine

On August 23, 1939, German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov signed a nonaggression pact between their two countries. Contained within the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a secret protocol for the division of Poland and the Baltic states between German and Soviet "spheres of influence."

Just eight days later, German operatives disguised as Polish saboteurs carried out a false-flag operation at the German radio station at Gleiwitz. On September 1, without a formal declaration of war, German forces invaded Poland in an operation that many historians agree was the opening battle of World War II in Europe.

Polish planning did not anticipate an attack from Germany before 1942, so the Poles were still building up and modernizing their military. Without much of a defense, Warsaw relied on its British and French allies for protection in the event of an attack.

The audacity of the Nazi invasion caught everyone by surprise, and the Poles were left to fight the Germans with anything they had at hand — including World War I-era horse cavalry.

Despite the dawn of the mechanized era of warfare, the Polish army included horse-mounted cavalry based largely on its experience during the Polish-Soviet war, where it decimated Soviet lines at the Battle of Komarów. But as technology advanced, the Poles learned that cavalry could be used as mounted infantry armed with the latest weapons and able to quickly move within the battlespace. To this end, Polish cavalry carried machine guns and antitank rifles but still retained sabers on the chance they might be useful in a typical cavalry fight.

On the first day of the Nazi invasion — 77 years ago on Thursday — the Polish cavalry met the Germans at the battle of Tuchola Forest. The Germans caught the Polish army off guard and were advancing quickly through what defenses Poland could muster. In an effort to save the main Polish force, the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans — a cavalry unit — were deployed to cover the retreat.

At the Tuchola Forest, the Polish cavalry spotted German infantry in a clearing. Polish commander Col. Mastalerz ordered a charge in hopes of taking the Nazis by surprise and dispersing the German unit. He ordered the 1st squadron commander, Eugeniusz Świeściak, to lead two squadrons in the charge.

Wielding modern weaponry along with their sabers, the cavalrymen surprised the Nazis and were soon in close combat. The Germans were quickly overwhelmed.

The Polish victory was short-lived. As the German infantry retreated, armored cars mounted with machine guns appeared from the woods and opened fire on the Uhlans. Caught in the open with no time to deploy their heavy weapons, the cavalrymen rushed for cover. Świeściak was killed and Mastalerz later fell to the German guns trying to rescue his comrade.

Despite suffering numerous casualties, the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans completed their mission and stalled the German advance in their sector. This allowed other Polish units to fall back to a secondary defensive line. The Uhlans' cavalry charge on horseback would be one of the last cavalry charges in history.

When reporters surveyed the battlefield the next day, they saw numerous dead horses and cavalrymen — with their sabers — and German armor still nearby. This led one Italian journalist to the incorrect conclusion that the Poles had charged German tanks with nothing but swords and lances. German propaganda quickly took this version of the story and used it as a means to convey the superiority of the German army and its technology.

The myth was then perpetuated further by the Soviets after the war to show the ineptitude of Polish commanders. The myth continued long after the war, with some Poles even retelling it as a story of the gallantry of the Polish military.

Ultimately, the 18th Pomeranian Uhlans would hold out for just three more days before ceasing to exist as a fighting unit. Poland would continue to resist, though once the Soviet Union joined the Nazi operation on September 17 to claim its portion of the country, it was all but over. Most Polish resistance was finished by the end of the month, but a brave few held out until October 6 before finally surrendering.

Many other units, as well as the Polish government, managed to escape the Nazis and take up the fight from abroad in other Allied nations. Polish troops would later return to help liberate Europe, taking part in such battles as Operation Market Garden. Poland would never regain most of the territory seized by the Soviet Union in 1939, greatly reducing the land area of Poland to this day.

SEE ALSO: Hitler's secret Nazi war machines of World War II

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NOW WATCH: Rare footage shows the successful testing of the most powerful weapon known to man

World War II memorabilia has always attracted a niche following, and now, the latest item going up for auction is a product that some people can find to be of use in an unexpected emergency.

On September 17, Whyte’s Fine Art Auctioneers & Valuers in Dublin, Ireland is planning to auction off an unused roll of toilet paper issued by the armed forces of Nazi Germany.

This WWII vintage item is estimated to cost between 80 ($90) and 120 euros ($135).

In a quote from the BBC, Whyte's auctioneers have stated that the toilet paper was in "remarkably unused condition." Additionally, the roll was considered to a “wartime luxury” during the period of war.

According to the Daily Mail, the toilet paper seems to be named after the Edelweiss, a European mountain plant, and also the title of a popular German marching song during WWII.

In addition to the toilet paper, other memorabilia, such as Nazi soldier helmets and backpacks, was assembled by a private Irish collector and is also being auctioned off.

"The complete collection took about 25 years to assemble and could be considered to be the best possible example of what the everyday soldier carried in World War II," explained Whyte's Head of Collectibles Stuart Purcell to Business Insider.

“In all my years of studying fine arts valuation, I never thought I’d be dealing with toilet paper.”

SEE ALSO: The most chilling details from the recently found diary of the head of the Nazi SS

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NOW WATCH: A mysterious lost Nazi train — supposedly filled with gold — may have been found

BERLIN (AP) — A leading member of the nationalist party Alternative for Germany is facing fierce criticism after calling for a racially charged term once favored by the Nazis to be rehabilitated.

Party co-chairwoman Frauke Petry said in an interview published Sunday that words such as "voelkisch" should be given "a positive connotation." Frequently used by the Nazis, the term refers to people who belong to a particular race.

Petry's remarks to weekly newspaper Welt am Sonntag prompted a swift backlash from politicians, commentators and historians.

They warned that her party is trying to legitimize ideas that once were at the core of Adolf Hitler's Nazi ideology.

In an editorial Monday, daily Neue Westfaelische called Petry's comments "disgusting," while Green Party lawmaker Volker Beck described them as "dangerous arson."

SEE ALSO: MAPPED: The growth of the far-right in Europe

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NOW WATCH: Paul Krugman: there are many, many years of misery ahead for Europe

Researchers in Poland opened a Nazi "time capsule" from 1934 in search of a documentary film that ultimately wasn't there.

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In 1939, Adolf Hitler ordered the construction of a massive 3-mile-long row of buildings, destined to be an enormous beach resort for Nazi Germany. It was abandoned three years later, when World War II broke out. It would sit empty for the next 75 years. Today, German real estate company Metropole Marketing plans to convert several blocks into luxury homes and hotels.

Produced by Rob Ludacer and Chris Weller

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Imagine Adolf Hitler’s top Nazi commando – a Waffen SS officer who helped implement Germany’s “Final Solution” – walking among the trees and photos of Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

It so happens that the same SS officer, Otto Skorzeny, was there in 1962 and was recruited to help Israel’s famed intelligence agency take out his former compatriots.

Skorzeny was an accomplished SS officer. His daring raid to rescue ousted Italian dictator Benito Mussolini earned him the Knights Cross of the Iron Cross, the highest award Nazi Germany could bestow. After D-Day, he led other commandos into Allied lines wearing American uniforms to capture U.S. weapons and attack from the rear. The Allies dubbed him the “most dangerous man in Europe” for his daring raids and wild schemes.

Though he literally escaped a trial at Nuremberg after the war, the Allies still believed he had a hand in exterminating the Jewish population of Europe.

In an exhaustively-researched March 2016 article, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz’ Dan Raviv and Yossi Melman talked to ex-Mossad agents who spoke to the paper on the condition of anonymity. They confirmed Skorzeny’s recruitment by the Jewish state’s intelligence agency, Mossad. How one of Adolph Hitler’s top Nazis became an agent of justice for the Jewish people is a story born more from self-preservation than redemption.

In the early 1960s, Mossad was attempting to prevent former Nazi rocket scientists from working on Egyptian defense projects. At the time, the two countries were mortal enemies and Egypt was still nursing its wounded pride from its defeat by Israel in 1948. The Israelis feared the technology from the program would be used to attack Israel. So they set out to stop foreign scientists from cooperating with the Arabs.

The Israelis used intimidation where possible. When that didn’t work, Mossad resorted to more extraordinary measures. Assassinations were common. But to kill these former Nazis, Israeli agents had to get close to them. They needed an inside man. That’s where Skorzeny came in.

When Mossad initially approached Skorzeny, he thought they were coming to kill him, figuring he was at the top of Israel’s assassination list. Israeli agents had just captured, tried, and hanged notorious Nazi fugitive Adolf Eichmann, violating Argentinian sovereignty to whisk the war criminal away for trial in Israel. Skorzeny agreed to help Mossad on the condition that legendary Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal remove Skorzeny from his list of war criminals – Skorzeny called the deal his “life insurance.”

He went to Israel accompanied by his Jewish handlers and met with top Mossad officials. This is where the Israelis walked him through Yad Vashem. No one trusted the Nazi, but his genuine interest in his “life insurance” meant Mossad could count on him. He immediately set to work compiling a list of German scientists, front companies, and addresses that were known to be assisting the Egyptians.

Skorzeny intimidated or killed a number of former Nazi scientists working with Egypt. He even sent mail bombs to Egyptian factories and laboratories working on the rocket program. Neither Skorzeny nor Mossad ever admitted to working together. His biography mentions none of it. Only now will Mossad agents admit to Haaretz that the deal was struck.

The Nazi commando was never assassinated and died of cancer in 1975.  At both of his funerals, one in Spain and the other in his native Austria, former Nazi soldiers and friends gave his remains and military medals the Nazi salute.

SEE ALSO: The most chilling details from the recently found diary of the head of the Nazi SS

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NOW WATCH: Researchers uncovered a Nazi 'time capsule' from 1934 — but a key artifact was missing

Amazon's "The Man in the High Castle" returns December 16, 2016, and the new trailer just premiered at New York Comic Con. New footage shows Juliana, Frank, and Joe all facing new threats and a scary glimpse at an alternate history where Marilyn Monroe is singing "Happy Birthday" to Adolf Hitler.

Footage Courtesy: Amazon Prime

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For a more than 20 years fter World War II, nearly 100 former members of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party held high-ranking positions in the West German Justice Ministry, according to a German government report.

From 1949 to 1973, 90 of the 170 leading lawyers and judges in the then-West German Justice Ministry had been members of the Nazi Party.

Of those 90 officials, 34 had been members of the Sturmabteilung (SA), Nazi Party paramilitaries who aided Hitler's rise and took part in Kristallnacht, a night of violence that is believed to have left 91 Jewish people dead.

“There was very large continuity,” former Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who commissioned the study while in office, told German broadcaster Deutschlandfunk on Monday, according to English-language news site The Local.

In 1957, 77% of the ministry's senior officials were former Nazis, which, according to the study, was a higher proportion that during Hitler's Third Reich government, which existed from 1933 to 1945.

"We didn't expect the figure to be this high," the study's coauthor, Christoph Safferling, who reviewed former ministry personnel files, told German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

The prevalence of former Nazi officials in the ministry allowed them to shield one another from post-war justice and to carry over some Nazi policies, like discrimination against gays, into the West German government.

One lawyer who helped craft discriminatory laws barring marriages between Jews and non-Jews during the Nazi regime held a top family-law position in the post-World War II Justice Ministry, according to The Local.

"The Nazi-era lawyers went on to cover up old injustice rather than to uncover it and thereby created new injustice," said Heiko Maas, Germany's justice minister who presented the report Monday, according to AFP.

The infiltration of the post-war West German government by former Nazis was not limited to the Justice Ministry. A report released late last year found that between 1949 and 1970, 54% of Interior Ministry staffers were former Nazi Party members, and that 8% of them had served in the Nazi Interior Ministry, which at one point was run by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

Among those former Nazis were officials who had participated in forced-sterilization programs and high-ranking members of the SS and SA — people who "today would have to be classified as Nazi perpetrators," the report stated.

That report also found that 14% of workers in the East German Interior Ministry were former Nazis — a surprising finding, considering the communist government's purportedly rigorous effort to rid itself of former Nazis.

So many former Nazis were able to attain influential positions in part because of West German government's logistical needs and because of the geopolitical imperatives of the Cold War.

West Germany's initial post-war leadership needed experienced civil servants and lawyers to get the Justice Ministry and other departments up and running, former Justice Minister Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger said on Monday.

Having been a member of the Nazi party "was not seen as a bad thing in 1949," Dr. Frank Bösch, lead researcher on the project that uncovered the presence of former Nazis in the West German Interior Ministry, told The Local last year. "There was a belief that they were people who had done their duty in a difficult time."

According to Bösch, the need for people with legal backgrounds and the knowledge to run a bureaucracy essentially meant the West German government had few options other than former Nazis. But, he said, the hiring of former Nazi Party members was tolerated rather than encouraged.

Moreover, the focus of the allied powers — the US, the UK, and France — on confronting the Soviet threat meant attention to finding and punishing former Nazis was a relative afterthought.

That dynamic, coupled with high burdens of proof required by judges at the time, resulted in a small fraction of ex-Nazis getting convicted for their actions during the war.

Their presence was also enabled by a sense of denial about Nazi crimes held by Germans in the post-war period, and many regarded the Nuremberg trials of 1945-1949 as a kind of "victor's justice."

Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, the former justice minister, said it was important reckon with the Nazi legacy, particularly in light of current events.

"When you look today at how the use of the concept of 'national' is developing among the public,"she said, "I believe it clearly shows how urgently important it is to show the facts of what happens when people refer to race or bloodlines as special, distinguishing features, marginalizing other people."

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A Nazi weather station, Schatzgraber ("Treasure Hunter"), was recently uncovered in the Arctic, with hundreds of items recovered by Russian scientists. 

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One man's hero is another man's tyrant, a popular aphorism goes.

But while we can argue the validity and virtue of certain political agendas, the callous methods by which some leaders attain their goals are less up to interpretation.

After all, no matter how a historian tries to spin it, ordering a tower to be constructed out of live men stacked and cemented together with bricks and mortar is pretty brutal.

Business Insider put together a list of the most ruthless leaders of all time featuring men and women who employed merciless tactics to achieve their political and military agendas.

Note: All people on the list ruled prior to 1980, and no living figures were included. People are arranged in chronological order.

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Qin Shi Huang

Reign: 247-210 B.C.

Qin, also called Qin Shihuangdi, united China in 221 B.C. and ruled as the first emperor of the Qin dynasty. He was known to order the killing of scholars whose ideas he disagreed with and the burning of "critical" books.

During his reign, he ordered the construction of a great wall (roughly speaking, the prequel to the modern Great Wall of China), and an enormous mausoleum featuring more than 6,000 life-size terra-cotta soldier figures. Large numbers of conscripts working on the wall died, and those working on the mausoleum were killed to preserve the secrecy of the tomb.

"Every time he captured people from another country, he castrated them in order to mark them and made them into slaves," Hong Kong University's Xun Zhou told the BBC.

Source: British Museum, Britannica, History, BBC

Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus (aka Caligula)

Reign: A.D. 37-41

Caligula was quite popular at first because he freed citizens who were unjustly imprisoned and got rid of a stiff sales tax. But then he became ill, and he was never quite the same again.

He eliminated political rivals (forcing their parents to watch the execution), and declared himself a living god. According to Roman historian Suetonius, Caligula had sex with his sisters and sold their services to other men, raped and killed people, and made his horse a priest.

He was eventually attacked by a group of guardsman and stabbed 30 times.

Source: Biography.com, BBC, "Atlas of History's Greatest Heroes and Villains" by Howard Watson.

Attila the Hun

Reign: A.D. 434-453

After killing his brother, Attila became the leader of the Hunnic Empire, centered in present-day Hungary, and ended up becoming one of the most feared assailants of the Roman Empire.

He expanded the Hunnic Empire to present-day Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the Balkans. He also invaded Gaul with the intention of conquering it, though he was defeated at the Battle of Catalaunian Plains.

"There, where I have passed, the grass will never grow gain," he reportedly remarked on his reign.

Source: Britannica, Biography

BERLIN (AP) — The German government says it's repulsed by Nazi-style salutes such as those performed at a recent far-right event in Washington, but has confidence the United States can tackle the issue.

Video published by The Atlantic shows participants at Saturday's event raising their arms in salute during a speech by Richard Spencer, head of the white-nationalist National Policy Institute.

Asked about the clip, government spokesman Steffen Seibert said Wednesday, "Whenever we see videos from anywhere showing people raising their hand to do Hitler salutes we are repulsed."

Seibert added Germany has "great faith in American civil society, media and politics to address such bad developments, such terrible events."

Nazi Germany was responsible for genocide and war that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions.

The salute's today illegal in Germany.

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How to report on a fascist?

How to cover the rise of a political leader who’s left a paper trail of anti-constitutionalism, racism and the encouragement of violence? Does the press take the position that its subject acts outside the norms of society? Or does it take the position that someone who wins a fair election is by definition “normal,” because his leadership reflects the will of the people?

These are the questions that confronted the U.S. press after the ascendance of fascist leaders in Italy and Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.

A leader for life

Benito Mussolini secured Italy’s premiership by marching on Rome with 30,000 blackshirts in 1922. By 1925 he had declared himself leader for life. While this hardly reflected American values, Mussolini was a darling of the American press, appearing in at least 150 articles from 1925-1932, most neutral, bemused or positive in tone.

The Saturday Evening Post even serialized Il Duce’s autobiography in 1928. Acknowledging that the new “Fascisti movement” was a bit “rough in its methods,” papers ranging from the New York Tribune to the Cleveland Plain Dealer to the Chicago Tribune credited it with saving Italy from the far left and revitalizing its economy. From their perspective, the post-WWI surge of anti-capitalism in Europe was a vastly worse threat than Fascism.

Ironically, while the media acknowledged that Fascism was a new “experiment,” papers like The New York Times commonly credited it with returning turbulent Italy to what it called “normalcy.”

Yet some journalists like Hemingway and journals like the New Yorker rejected the normalization of anti-democratic Mussolini. John Gunther of Harper’s, meanwhile, wrote a razor-sharp account of Mussolini’s masterful manipulation of a U.S. press that couldn’t resist him.

The ‘German Mussolini’

Mussolini’s success in Italy normalized Hitler’s success in the eyes of the American press who, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, routinely called him “the German Mussolini.” Given Mussolini’s positive press reception in that period, it was a good place from which to start. Hitler also had the advantage that his Nazi party enjoyed stunning leaps at the polls from the mid ‘20’s to early ‘30’s, going from a fringe party to winning a dominant share of parliamentary seats in free elections in 1932.

But the main way that the press defanged Hitler was by portraying him as something of a joke. He was a “nonsensical” screecher of “wild words” whose appearance, according to Newsweek, “suggests Charlie Chaplin.” His “countenance is a caricature.” He was as “voluble” as he was “insecure,” stated Cosmopolitan.

When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed the Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed.

In fact, The New York Times wrote after Hitler’s appointment to the chancellorship that success would only “let him expose to the German public his own futility.” Journalists wondered whether Hitler now regretted leaving the rally for the cabinet meeting, where he would have to assume some responsibility.

Yes, the American press tended to condemn Hitler’s well-documented anti-Semitism in the early 1930s. But there were plenty of exceptions. Some papers downplayed reports of violence against Germany’s Jewish citizens as propaganda like that which proliferated during the foregoing World War. Many, even those who categorically condemned the violence, repeatedly declared it to be at an end, showing a tendency to look for a return to normalcy.

Journalists were aware that they could only criticize the German regime so much and maintain their access. When a CBS broadcaster’s son was beaten up by brownshirts for not saluting the Führer, he didn’t report it. When the Chicago Daily News’ Edgar Mowrer wrote that Germany was becoming “an insane asylum” in 1933, the Germans pressured the State Department to rein in American reporters. Allen Dulles, who eventually became director of the CIA, told Mowrer he was “taking the German situation too seriously.” Mowrer’s publisher then transferred him out of Germany in fear of his life.

By the later 1930s, most U.S. journalists realized their mistake in underestimating Hitler or failing to imagine just how bad things could get. (Though there remained infamous exceptions, like Douglas Chandler, who wrote a loving paean to “Changing Berlin” for National Geographic in 1937.) Dorothy Thompson, who judged Hitler a man of “startling insignificance” in 1928, realized her mistake by mid-decade when she, like Mowrer, began raising the alarm.

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance,” she reflected in 1935. “He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship. He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will.” Applying the lesson to the U.S., she wrote, “When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.”

John Broich, Associate Professor, Case Western Reserve University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Researchers in Poland opened a Nazi "time capsule" from 1934 in search of a documentary film that ultimately wasn't there.

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One of history's most brutal tyrants was a diagnosed schizophrenic on a mission to avenge his childhood years of repressed rage, according to Henry Murray, an American psychologist and a Harvard professor.

In 1943, the US Office of Strategic Services, a precursor to the CIA, commissioned Murray to study Adolf Hitler's personality to try to predict his behavior. In his 229-page report, "Analysis of the Personality of Adolf Hitler," Murray described Hitler as a paranoid "utter wreck" who was "incapable of normal human relationships."

"It is forever impossible to hope for any mercy or humane treatment from him," Murray wrote.

SEE ALSO: 22 brutal dictators you've never heard of

After a frustrating childhood, Hitler felt obligated to exert dominance in all things.

Hitler suffered from intolerable feelings of inferiority, largely stemming from his small, frail, and sickly physical appearance during his childhood.

He refused to go to school because he was ashamed that he was a poor student compared to his classmates. 

His mother appeased him by allowing him to drop out.

"He never did any manual work, never engaged in athletics, and was turned down as forever unfit for conscription in the Austrian Army," Murray writes.

Hitler managed his insecurities by worshiping "brute strength, physical force, ruthless domination, and military conquest."

Even sexually, Hitler was described as a "full-fledged masochist," who humiliated and abused his partners.

Much of his wrath originated from a severe Oedipus complex.

As a child, Hitler experienced the Oedipus complex — love of mother and hate of father — which he developed after accidentally seeing his parents having sex, Murray's report says.

Hitler was subservient and respectful to his father but viewed him as an enemy who ruled the family "with tyrannical severity and injustice." According to the report, Hitler was envious of his father's masculine power and dreamed of humiliating him to re-establish "the lost glory of his mother."

For 16 years, Hitler did not exhibit any form of ambition or competition because his father had died and he had not yet discovered a new enemy.

Hitler frequently felt emasculated.

Another blow to Hitler's masculinity: He was "incapable of consummating in a normal fashion," old sexual partners shared with Murray.

"This infirmity we must recognize as an instigation to exorbitant cravings for superiority. Unable to demonstrate male power before a woman, he is impelled to compensate by exhibiting unsurpassed power before men in the world at large," he writes.

As mentioned, when Hitler did have sexual relations with a woman, he exhibited masochistic behaviors. Hitler was said to have multiple partners, but eventually married his long-term mistress, Eva Braun, hours before the two committed suicide together in his Berlin bunker.

On Tuesday a team in Poland began digging for a World War II-era Nazi train, rumored to be filled with stolen gold, The AP reports.

Last August, two amateur treasure hunters said they had "irrefutable proof" of the train.

Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper claimed they used ground-penetrating radar to locate the train, which is somewhere alongside a railway between the towns of Wroclaw and Walbrzych in southwestern Poland.

"The train isn't a needle in a haystack," Andrzej Gaik, a retired teacher and spokesman for the renewed effort to search for the train, told Agence France-Presse.

"If it's there, we'll find it," Gaik said.

'There may be a tunnel. There is no train.'

In December, after analyzing mining data, Polish experts said there was no evidence of the buried train.

Janusz Madej, from Krakow's Academy of Mining, said the geological survey of the site showed that there was no evidence of a train after using magnetic and gravitation methods.

"There may be a tunnel. There is no train," Madej said at a news conference in Walbrzych, according to the BBC.

Koper insists that "there is a tunnel and there is a train," and that the results are skewed because of different technology used, The Telegraph reports.

Local folklore

According to a local myth, the train is believed to have vanished in 1945 with stolen gold, gems, and weapons when the Nazis retreated from the Russia.

During the war, the Germans were building headquarters for Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in Walbrzych's medieval Ksiaz Castle, then called the Furstenstein Castle.

Below the castle, the Germans built a system of secret tunnels and bunkers, called "Project Riese."

The train is in one of these hidden passages, says Tadeusz Slowikowski, the main living source of the train legend. Slowikowski, a retired miner who searched for the train in 2001, believes the Nazis blew up the entrance to the train's tunnel.

"I have lived with this mystery for 40 years, but each time I went to the authorities they always silenced it," Slowikowski told The Associated Press. "For so many years. Unbelievable!"

Slowikowski believes it is near the 65th kilometer of railway tracks from Wroclaw to Walbrzych.

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