For sheer blood-drenched brutality that surpasses anything the Nazis ever did, we must examine the fruits of the Berlin West Africa Conference. It was there, in 1885, that King Leopold II of Belgium was given the vast region of Africa's Congo as his own personal fiefdom. Much of the rest of sub-Saharan Africa was carved up among the European powers at this same conference.

Leopold's case for the Congo was certainly bolstered by having no fewer than 450 tribal chiefs sign over their land to him by treaty. Leopold's agent in this affair was famed explorer, Sir Henry Morton Stanley.

In the culture and experience of these chiefs, a treaty was generally nothing more than a statement of goodwill between neighboring tribes. Giving up their land for a few trinkets to a distant foreign power was inconceivable to them. So why not sign a document in some indecipherable language?

In the beginning, ivory was the big prize, but after 1890, with the invention of the inflatable tire, rubber took over as the ultimate export from Leopold's so-called Congo Free State. How fortunate for him that Congo had one of the world's greatest deposits of wild rubber.

Harvesting the crop legitimately would be dangerous and expensive. An easier way would be to enslave the entire male population of the region, and have them do all the work under penalty of death. The only question remaining was how to enforce the slave labor, since hiring overseers to accompany the laborers WOULD add to the overhead.

Well, one way would be to kidnap family members and chiefs, holding them hostage so that the workers would return from the jungles with their rubber quota. To keep the peace, Leopold had a small private army as well as the Force Publique, made up of native conscripts, interspersed with bloodthirsty Europeans, and a goodly number of local cannibals.

OK, but how do you prevent the conscripted natives from rebelling? You watch their supply of ammunition very carefully, demanding a body part of one of the slave laborers killed, as proof that the bullet was used appropriately. Naturally, these trophies had to be cataloged and documented.

In any situation, the cream does rise to the top, and in Leopold's Congo, one Leon Rom deserves special mention. Rom was a high official in the Force Publique, and his brutality knew no bounds, shocking even his fellow thugs. Beyond the normal killing of natives for any one of dozens of trivial reasons, Rom had a flower bed rigged with human heads, and kept a gallows permanently erected in front of his office.

If this image reminds you of Kurtz in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, it should. More than likely, the Kurtz character was based on Rom, or a composite of him and his fellow cutthroats, as observed by Conrad, who was in Congo at that very time.

Leopold's scheme worked well enough, but word was bound to leak out, eventually.

The British controlled all the shipping between Congo and Europe. Edmund Morel, a shipping clerk based in Antwerp, Belgium, noticed that while ships were coming into port with ivory and rubber, the only things sent back to Africa were weapons, ammo, and soldiers. It didn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that this was not trade, but enforced slave labor.

Morel raised a fuss about this, and got fired for his trouble. Undeterred, he embarked on a newspaper campaign to expose the situation, forcing the British Foreign Office to investigate further. They sent Sir Roger Casement to the Congo, hoping that Morel's charges were unfounded.

Casement not only confirmed Morel's charges, his descriptions of sliced hands and penises were far more graphic and forceful than the British government had anticipated.

Meanwhile, Leopold engaged in a frantic effort to suppress the story, spending millions to bribe the press and diplomats, while burning tons of documents, in a vain attempt to purge all records of his atrocities.

In the end, the Belgian government was forced to intercede, and buy Congo from Leopold. Protracted negotiations for the buy-out started in 1906, and concluded in March, 1908.

The government agreed to assume 110 million francs worth of debt, even though this included nearly 32 million francs in loans it had given Leopold years earlier.

The government also agreed to pay 45.5 million francs towards completing Leopold's then unfinished pet building projects. On top of all this, Leopold got another 50 million francs as a "mark of gratitude for his great sacrifices made for the Congo."

Scholars set a conservative estimate of 10 million lives lost as a direct result of Leopold's policies.

This monarch, named by some as the most evil man who ever lived, died on December 17, 1909, NEVER HAVING SET FOOT in the Congo.