The Evolution of Evil

For over 40 years the Libyan despot terrified, tortured and tricked the world with one horrific act after another. This is the story of Colonel Gaddafi, the Middle East's longest serving dictator from his roots as an idealistic young revolutionary in 1969, to becoming one of the world's most deadly terrorists.

Adolf Hitler is the very personification of evil. Yet somehow, he managed to convince a nation of sophisticated, civilized people to be complicit in his horrific crimes. What made him this way? What terrible forces turns a man born like any other into the most terrifying dictator the world has ever seen?

He's a man born into power. He tortures and executes hundreds of thousands of his own people with his finger held closely to the button. It's North Korea's Kim Jong-il. A man with an insatiable desire for power and fame. A man raised to be a dictator. A man who let his people suffer while he lives the high life with imported women, booze and the world's finest foods.

Supreme Leader of China for almost 3 decades, his merciless policies made him one of the most ruthless tyrants of the 20th Century. A communist leader obsessed by power and violence; a sadist intoxicated by others' pain; and a dictator convinced that politics had to be violent. He presided over the deaths of more people than Hitler and Stalin combined. The Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong.

His speeches left Italy bewitched, but behind all Benito Mussolini's bluster and posturing lies a dark heart of violence and brutality. He would order his fascist black shirts to beat and kill his political opponents, yet he was loved at home and admired abroad. This is the story of Il Duce, the Boss and how his love of Italy inspired an epic rise to power.

This episode charts Osama Bin Laden's chilling journey from a privileged young Saudi boy in the 1950s, to becoming the leader of al-Qaeda and his commitment to extreme violence against the West. His father Mohammed is a self-made billionaire whose great wealth helped Bin Laden become one of the world's largest sponsors of international terrorism. His hatred evolves to change the world forever.

The vicious tyrant Francois 'Papa Doc" Duvalier ruthlessly dominated Haiti using violence and Voodoo. Rising from a humble country doctor, he made himself into a figure so terrifying to his people that many believed he had links with the Voodoo deity Baron Samedi, guardian of the graveyard. So complete was his control that people feared even to think about resisting him.

This is the story Saddam Hussein, a man thought to be more sadistic than Hitler, and how he rules Iraq with an utter contempt for humanity for 23 years. This historical documentary looks at how the extreme pleasure he derives from limitless cruelty plays a significant part in his transformation from a violent young street thug to one of the most notorious dictators in the Middle East.

For 30 years Joseph Stalin "the man of steel" ruthlessly dominated the Soviet Union. Born into poverty on the fringes of the Czarist Russian Empire, he became a gangster and then a revolutionary. He was part of the original Bolshevik leadership team, but when Vladimir Lenin died he took his chance to grab the top spot. His quest for absolute power transformed his nation, but at a brutal cost.

Hideki Tojo was made Prime Minister of Japan in 1941, he gave the order to bomb Pearl Harbor, followed by a swift invasion of South East Asia. Tojo approved many further extreme acts of brutality, with no battlefield experience he ran a disastrous campaign in which he lost nearly a third of his men. With the fall of the island of Saipan in 1944, his career was finished.