Free KILLERS IN COLD BLOOD (True Crime) by Gordon Kerr, Ray Black, Rodney Castleden, Ian Welch, Clare Welch Page B

and bad were not especially godly.
    In 1972, Kim became president of North Korea rather than just ‘leader’ or ‘prime minister’. This allowed him to add nepotism to his list of wrongdoings, by designating his son Kim Jong-il as his successor in waiting. State duties were gradually shifted onto his son’s shoulders over the next two decades, while Kim enjoyed the high life. His personality cult reached a point where he was purported to have supernatural powers and he took full advantage of the myth. Anyone who so much as voiced their disapproval of his behaviour was either executed or sent to a GULAG-like labour camp.
    By the time Kim Il-Sung died, in 1994 at the age of eighty-two, he had left North Korea in economic ruin. He had spent so much money on military defence that the infrastructure had collapsed, causing poverty and starvation for millions. Despite this legacy a three-year period of mourning was declared after his death so that people might still be punished if they failed to express sufficient grief for the loss of the Great Leader. Kim Il-Sung turned out to be another one of those leaders who had set out with good intentions but evolved into a tyrant to compensate for his inadequacies in office.

Adolf Hitler

     
    Some people are turned, by circumstance, away from the path prepared for them. Adolf Hitler is a good case in point. He had a rather unhappy childhood that led him to leave school with no qualifications, despite his evident intelligence. He happened to possess a raw talent at drawing and painting, so he decided that he would become an artist. To achieve his ambition he relocated from his home town in Austria to the capital city, Vienna, where he attempted to win a place at the Academy of Fine Arts. However, his lack of formal training and entry requirements meant that he was twice turned away, in 1907 and 1908.
    He produced as many as 2,000 workmanlike drawings and paintings to sell on the streets but ended up destitute and living in a homeless shelter. During this period of hardship, the impressionable young Hitler began to germinate anti-Semitic ideas in his mind, because he saw wealthy Jews around him who showed little empathy for him and others like him. In marked contrast, he was shown compassion by people of his own stock, so that he began to view society in a very black and white manner.
    Hitler readily volunteered to join the German army when World War I broke out in 1914. He had always admired the Germans, so it gave him a chance to become Teutonic by proxy. During the war he performed duties as a messenger, which was dangerous work as it involved leaving the relative safety of the trenches and racing across exposed terrain. Over the course of the war he was shot in the leg and suffered a poison gas attack, but was noted for never complaining. His bravery won him the Iron Cross, second and first class, which was highly unusual for a private. He wasn’t promoted to officer, apparently because he lacked German citizenship.
    Hitler was shocked and angered by Germany’s capitulation to the enemy in 1918, especially as the Germans weren’t in retreat and still held foreign territory. To him it was a sign of cowardice and it marked a radical change in his thinking. He decided that his purpose in life was to avenge and save the German people. He also decided that communist ideology was to blame for the surrender, so communists joined his list of hate figures. In addition, he decided that to fight until the last man is standing was a better approach to warfare. All of those notions propagated in his mind, and so began his road into politics.
    Following the war Hitler remained in the army, not least to earn a wage. Within a year he had become a military police spy and was assigned duties involving the procurement of evidence against Jews and communists in the government, whom the National Defence Force wanted to blame, as scapegoats, for the way the war had ended. Hitler’s espionage led him