In World War II, a handful of soldiers earned terrifying reputations for their lethal efficiency on the battlefield. These are the men who racked up the highest kill counts and became the most feared warriors of the blood-spattered period between 1939 and 1945 20. Otto Kittel – 267 kills Throughout WWII, the German Luftwaffe were a key component in the German war machine.
Its highly-trained pilots engaged in dogfights in the skies above Europe. One of the Luftwaffe’s most outstanding pilots was Otto Kittel, Kittel took out 267 Soviet planes on the Eastern Front in 583 combat missions, gaining him the Knight's Cross on October 29, 1943, the Oak Leaves on April 11, 1944, and the Swords on November 25, 1944. He began flying missions as soon as Germany invaded Poland and later became a so-called “ace in a day” when he shot down six Soviet planes on two separate combat missions on the Eastern Front.
He holds the unfortunate position of being the most prolific killer in the Luftwaffe who didn’t get to see what Germany would look like after the war. On February 16 1945, he was shot down in Latvia, by a Soviet Il-2 ground attack aircraft. He didn’t stand a chance.
His plane’s starboard wing smashed into the ground, caught fire, and exploded, and that was the end of Herr Kittel’s formidable enemy aircraft speedrun. This next guy did better. He killed a lot of people and managed to live until old age.
19. Günther Rall - 275 kills Gunther Rall wasn’t just a natural-born killer, he was also a talented survivor, leaving this world at the ripe old age of 91 in 2009 as one of the last recipients of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords to pass away. Rall joined the war at the beginning when he was just 21, flying in the Jagdgeschwader 52, whose pilots usually flew Messerschmitt Bf 109s, the much-feared fighter planes that went up against British Spitfires and Hurricanes in the Battle of Britain.
Gunther could only boast of one kill in the Battle of France and Battle of Britain. But when it came to the Eastern Front, this is where he really shined,claiming almost all of his 275 kills on the Eastern Front. He flew 621 combat missions in all, was shot down five times, and injured three times – once quite seriously.
Rall was one of the best of the aces, but he couldn’t hold a candle to this next guy. 18. Gerhard Barkhorn - 301 kills Like Rall, Gerhard Barkhorn flew missions in the Battle of Britain for Jagdgeschwader 52, coming out with zero British scalps to his name.
But against Soviet troops, he quickly became one of the best of the best. In 1,104 combat missions, Barkhorn claimed 301 kills. On his final mission in April 1945, he was hit and was forced to make an emergency landing, this time with his 109 in flames and American P-51 Mustang fighters raining bullets down on him.
The next month, he surrendered to US forces near Salzburg in Austria. After the war, then a recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords, he did a stint at a Volkswagen dealership. The excitement must have been unbearable.
Still, he went on to hold high positions in the German Air Force of the Federal Republic of Germany and also at NATO. In 1983, he was in a serious car accident in Germany which his wife didn’t survive. When Barkhorn was told of his wife’s death, he slipped into a coma and died himself.
He was 63. Now let’s talk about a killer you might be surprised to find on the list. 17.
Lieutenant Lyudmila Pavlichenko - 309 kills Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the most prolific female sniper in WWII, maybe in human history, was a huge propaganda coup for the Soviets. She took out 309 people but her tally might have been much higher. Equipped with a rifle and a badass nickname, “The Lady of Death,” served on the Eastern Front, claiming 187 kills in the Siege of Odessa and a whole load more kills in the Siege of Sevastopol.
She was made lieutenant after her excellent record continued to impress, with many of her kills being one-on-one duels with German snipers. The Germans were terrified of her, and given it was the 1940s, they flexed their sexist muscles, shouting over to her, “Lyudmila Pavlichenko, come over to us. We will give you plenty of chocolate and make you a German officer.
” Those German snipers were some real smooth-talkers. She soon quit fighting and travelled around the world as a propaganda tool, becoming very well liked in the USA and is said to have been the very first Soviet woman invited into the White House. It was all fun and propaganda games, but behind the mask, Pavlichenko struggled with PTSD and depression.
On October 10, 1974, at just 58, she died from a stroke. Our next person is also a movie in the making. 16.
Matthäus Hetzenauer – 345 kills There are a lot of things that make Matthäus Hetzenauer stand out. One, he was a German sniper with a massive kill count, and German snipers don’t feature much in this video. Two, he was a peasant, an Austrian peasant, and three, he was young and absolutely fearless.
Serving on the Eastern Front as a 20-year-old, he became a renowned sniper on battlefronts in Romania, Eastern Hungary, and Slovakia. His 345 kills were the work of his trusty Mauser K98k carbine which was equipped with a six-fold magnification telescopic sight. Later in the video, you’ll see how some of the best snipers didn’t need telescopic sights.
Hetzenauer was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross in 1945, but his war ended when he was captured by the Soviets. He got out of the Gulag in 1950 and went back to Austria, where he lived on a farm until 2004, dying aged 79. 15.
Abukhadzhi Idrisov - 349 Abukhadzhi Idrisov was a Chechen peasant who worked on a collective farm before he was called up to serve in the Red Army. Idrisov impressed his superiors at Leningrad where he machine-gunned down 22 Germans, so was taken away for sniper training, where he excelled again. It seemed like he had a natural talent for killing Nazis.
In 1942, as part of a sniper team on the North-Western Front, he racked up 100 kills in just ten days. The next year, he took his figure up to 300. After that, the best of the German snipers went after Idrisov, where, according to Russian texts, they came out second in duels.
Idrisov took his kill count up to 349 but was hit by a mine and was left for dead. He was eventually rescued and made a Hero of the Soviet Union and called a “glorious son of the Chechen people. ” Despite all the accolades, after a long recuperation in the hospital, he was deported to Kazakhstan where he became a sheep farmer.
You’ve likely not heard of a few people we’ve talked about so far, but we’re pretty sure you’ll know this next guy. 14. Erich Hartmann - 352 kills Erich Hartmann was the ace of aces, one of the meanest mother Flieger that ever donned one of the Luftwaffe’s flying suits.
Hartmann racked up 352 kills over 1,404 missions, making him not just the best German fighter ace, but the best ace anywhere in the history of aerial warfare. He was the best of German Experten, or cream of the crop. He managed to survive a startling 825 aerial combat encounters, shooting down a total of 345 Soviet and 7 American aircraft.
In 1944, he won the most distinguished award, the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. In 1945, Hartmann was captured by the Americans and delivered to the Red Army, where his survival skills helped him through ten years in the gulag. Back in Germany, he joined the West German Air Force and later became a civilian flight instructor, dying in 1993, at age 71.
Now let’s look at some more sharp-shooters. 13. Semyon Nomokonov - 367 kills As with all the best sharpshooters, the enemy both feared and respected Semyon Nomokonov.
Living in a settlement in the wilds of Russia, Nomokonov learned to hunt from a very early age. Before he was ten, he was already taking out elk, but by the time the Germans invaded Russia, he was 40 years old… maybe a bit past it for war. He wasn’t supposed to be fighting but was drafted in to help Red Army troops live on a subsistence farm, when, one day, he saw a German sniper.
He used his own rifle to take out the sniper, and was drafted into a platoon at the age of 41. The moral of this story is it’s never too late to become a sanctioned serial killer. Dram big, kids.
All over the Eastern Front, he used his scopeless Mosin–Nagant rifle to kill 367 people. He became something of a hero, surviving eight injuries and being awarded the Order of the Red Banner. After the war, he returned to rural Russia as a hunter.
According to his family, he didn’t like to talk about what he’d done in the war. As you’ll see later, other prolific killers in the war were not proud of what they did. 12.
Vasily Ivanovich Golosov - 422 kills Coming from a completely different background was Vasilij Golosov, who left school at a young age to go and work in a factory in one of Russia’s industrial towns not far from Moscow. Once enlisted, he soon became a terror for the fascist troops. He was so good that the Red Army asked him to establish a sniper training school.
He later became commander of the sniper company of the 81st Guards Rifle Regiment. His heroics led to him being awarded the Order of the Red Banner in 1943. Soon after, he became a Hero of the Soviet Union, having killed 422 Nazis himself armed only with a sniper rifle.
He also trained 170 snipers, who in total killed 3,765 Nazis. Alas, no sooner than he was telling his buddies he was going to collect his award, he was killed in an air raid in the Kharkiv region. 11.
Stepan Petrenko - 422 kills Coming in at number 11 is Stepan Vasilyevich Petrenko, who also killed 422 Germans. Petrenko was a Ukrainian peasant, who like many in the Red Army, didn’t have much of an education to speak of. He was, however, a brilliant marksman.
In training, he never missed a target, despite having no shooting experience. He was soon sent to a sniper regiment and was taking out fascists left, right and center. 12 of his 422 kills were duels with other German snipers.
42 were machine-gunners. He would usually go in ahead of the rest of the troops and clear the way, taking out men at will, including a 1944 attack with the 59th Guards Rifle Regiment when he claimed 298 German lives. He was given the Order of the Red Star and later made a Hero of the Soviet Union.
When he died in 1984, aged 61, a street in Ukraine was named after him. 10. Fedir Dyachenko - 425 kills After a stint in prison, Fedir Dyachenko joined the army, where he was a natural sharp-shooter, even though he had zero firearms experience.
He later said he wanted to become a sniper after reading about the feats of snipers in newspapers. In 1942, after some training, he was sent to the Leningrad Front, where he became an immediate hit. As a sniper hunter specialist, known for his “persistence and endurance,” he would spend days following fascist sharpshooters around.
In a ten-day hunting period, he killed 32 German snipers. That’s how his time was spent until he was badly injured in early 1944. Not only was Dyachenko made a Hero of the Soviet Union, but the Americans took a liking to him, awarding him the American Distinguished Service Cross for “outstanding accomplishments, personal bravery, and zealous devotion to duty.
” He went on to work as an engineer, dying in 1995, aged 78. The next killer was unkillable. 9.
Fyodor Okhlopkov – 429 kills Born into a Yakut peasant family in the Siberian wilderness, killing came naturally to Fyodor Okhlopkov. He came from a line of hunter-traders, and because of his hunting skills, he was excellent at killing fascists. Like many Siberians, he was drafted into the 375th Infantry Division.
But it was when joined the 234th Infantry Regiment when his sniping skills became evident. In one battle, 80% of his unit was killed. Another time he was concussed in hand-to-hand combat, but he still came out the winner.
He was also shot through the chest, which at the time was his 12th serious injury. This was a seriously tough guy. Among the troops, it was known that he hardly ever required a second shot to make a kill.
After killing 429 men, he went back to Siberia and worked for the Yakut Meat Trust. For unclear reasons, he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union but was later downgraded. In the 1960s, he got it back, including about every other medal that was on offer in the Soviet Union.
And then in ‘68, he died, aged 60. 9. Mikhail Ivanovich Budenkov - 437 kills Mikhail Budenkov was yet another tough guy who grew up with nothing in a time of nothingness.
After a stint working on a boat on the Moscow canal and some tractor driving, he was drafted into the Red Army where he soon became a star of the 6th rifle company of the 84th Rifle Division. In 1942, he was injured in a retreat from Moscow but when he was back in action, this time as a mortar crew commander, he spent his time sniper hunting. By 1944, he’d killed 413 enemy soldiers and officers, 5 snipers, 2 observers, and 15 machine gunners.
His final tally was 437. Budenkov later admitted that he didn’t have much training, but was “born” to kill. After picking up all the usual awards, he lived as a civilian until his death in 1995, aged 76.
This next one is a bit controversial, but he’s interesting, so he’s staying on the list. We apologize in advance to WWII geeks. 8.
Nikolaevich Pchelintsev - 456 kills Nikolaevich Pchelintsev’s father was a Red Army commander. Unlike most of the others on this list, the young Pchelintsev was educated and well-off. He was a brilliant shot, becoming a marksman 1st class and just before he was drafted, working as a shooting instructor.
He went to the front line as commander of a reconnaissance platoon, where he literally made his mark, taking Germans out at will while training other snipers-to-be at the Central School of Sniper Instructors. In 1942, he was made a Hero of the Soviet Union for killing 102 people. Then, for five months, he traveled around the US with Lyudmila Pavlichenko, telling stories about killing Nazis on US radio.
We can’t say if his claim of killing 152 fascists with just 154 shots is true, nor can we say if he was telling the truth when he said he took out 456 fascists in total. But he still became one of the most famous sharpshooters in the Western world. After the war, he worked in radio engineering and electronic warfare, dying aged 77 in 1997.
6. Ivan Nikolayevich Kulbertinov - 489 kills Ivan Kulbertinov grew up in the Republic of Sakha, in one of the coldest places on earth, shunning school, while his “family wandered through the taiga all year round, hunting. ” He might not have been able to write his own name, but he could shoot, taking out 20 fascists in July 1943.
In October of that year, over the space of 12 days, he killed 59 enemies, including 3 machine-gun crews, for which he was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. His killing spree continued in November, taking out 113 soldiers and officers. For this, he was given the Order of Glory, 3rd degree.
He then sniped his way to being awarded the Order of the Patriotic War, 1st degree, after killing hundreds more, including enemy snipers, after which he became a Hero of the Soviet Union. At the end of the war, he quietly returned to the countryside where he hunted for meat and sold fur. A regional and national hero, he died in 1993 at the age of 76.
Right, we’ve reached the top five, the deadliest men on the planet for a few years in the 1940s. 5. Nikolai Ilyin - 494 kills Nikolai Ilyin was drafted into the army in 1941 when he was just 19, although he looked about 12- talk about a baby-faced assassin.
Born in Ukraine, Ilyin had finished secondary school when Adolf Hitler decided to do the dirty and send what would become almost three million troops across the border to kill the Slavs he so hated. Ilyin fought in the human meat grinder that was the Battle of Stalingrad, impressing with a 95-man body count to his name in just 11 days of fighting, after which he was made a deputy political commissar in the 50th Guards Rifle Regiment. That’s pretty much how things went on from there.
He quickly racked up 494 kills, becoming a Hero of the Soviet Union and having a personalized rifle given to him. He did all this in just a couple of years, before being shot himself and killed on August 4, 1943. 4.
Ivan Sidorenko - 500 kills Before the war, Ivan Sidorenko was a student at an art college in Moscow, not the kind of thing you expect of a top-shelf assassin. He was apparently self-taught, the only autodidact serial killer on this list. In the Battle of Moscow, he impressed so much that he was given recruits to train and the Germans sent snipers to the battlefront with the express intention of killing him.
But Sidorenko couldn’t stay away from the action, returning to the front line where he once used incendiary bullets to bring down a tank and three tractors. In 1944, he incurred a serious injury while fighting in Estonia and he never made it back to the front. His tally was 500.
He also trained 250 men to become snipers, so his knowledge led to a great big German bloodbath. This fascist exterminator left the military after the war and opted to become a foreman in a coal mine in the Republic of Dagestan. He died on February 19, 1994, aged 74.
Right, now the most lethal Nazi of the war. 3. Hans-Ulrich Rudel - 519 tank kills Let’s meet Hans-Ulrich Rudel, a fella who wouldn’t look out of place in a Quentin Tarantino movie.
He was so celebrated in Nazi Germany that he picked up the Knight's Cross with Golden Oak Leaves, Swords, and Diamonds. He flew 2,500 ground attack missions mostly on the Eastern Front, where his tank-destroying acumen made him the bete-noir of the Soviet Union- which was building tanks as fast as Rudel blew them up. It has been confirmed that he single-handedly destroyed 519 tanks, one battleship, one cruiser, 70 landing craft, and 150 artillery emplacements.
In May 1945, he flew in American-held territory and was captured. No doubt after giving the Americans some very useful intelligence, they released him from a prison camp in April 1946. Like many Nazis, Rudel got hold of a fake passport and escaped to Argentina, where he helped hide the doctor of death, Joseph Mengele, as well as the notorious Klaus Barbie.
Rudel died of a brain hemorrhage on December 18, 1982. He had remained a fascist until his dying day, and he wasn’t alone. Four men at his funeral were seen giving Nazi salutes.
Our next entry on the list narrowly missed out on the top spot… 2. Vasilij Kvachantiradze - 534 kills Vasilij Kvachantiradze grew up in rural Georgia, Joseph Stalin’s old haunt. He did a stint in the Red Army in the early 1930s, and then was called up again when the Germans invaded.
With the Soviet 650th Rifle Regiment, he made his mark at the Battle of Stalingrad, where he claimed 60 lives as a sniper. After recuperating from an injury, he teamed up with the 179th Rifle Division on the Kalinin Front, claiming another 81 Nazi scalps. By 1944, this one-man killing machine was regarded as the best sniper in the entire 43rd Army.
In the battle at Shumilino, with the Soviets completely encircled, he managed to keep the Germans at bay through ingenious ambushes, and helped him rack up an impressive total of 534 kills. He also occasionally teamed-up with our number 9 on our list, Fyodor Okhlopkov, making them the most-feared sniper team in the war. When the killing was over, Kvachantiradze returned to his quiet life in Georgia where he worked as a collective farm chairman, before dying aged just 43 in 1950.
Ok, we have arrived at the top spot, our most feared soldier… 1. Simo Häyhä - 542 kills Unlike most of the other hotshots on our list, Simo Häyhä was fighting against the Soviet Union rather than with it, during the Winter War, a brutal conflict between Finland and the Soviet Union that raged from November 30, 1939, to March 13, 1940. With his Finnish-made M/28-30 rifle and Suomi KP/-31 submachine gun, Häyhä chalked up at least 542 kills, in just 98 days, making him the deadliest sniper in any war, ever.
Drssed in white camouflage, he was able to pick men off with ease in temperatures that dropped to −40 °C (−40°F). That’s when he got the name The White Death. On March 6, 1940, he was hit badly.
His jaw was completely shattered, and the 26 subsequent operations would leave life-changing scars. After the war, he built a small house for himself and kept out of the limelight. He didn’t feel good about killing all those Soviet soldiers which he called his “sin list.
” Aged 96, 2002, he was asked if he felt bad for what he’d done in the war. He replied, “I did what I was told, as well as I could. ” He didn’t make 97, dying months earlier in a nursing home for veterans.
Now you need to watch our WWII deep-dive, “WWII - day by day” or have a look at “Real Reason Why Nazi Officers Fled to Argentina After WW2.
