You cannot choose your parents, and you cannot change the past. This is most evident in the children who were unfortunate enough to have tyrants as parents. Fro, Mao to Manson, dictators, mass murderers, and even deranged cult leaders always found time to have children, and these children have either tried to distance themselves from the atrocities of their relatives or instead have defended their actions. Here are 28 children of some of the evilest people on the planet.
Edda Mussolini
Edda Mussolini was the daughter of Rachel Guidi and Benito Mussolini, a man who would become Italy's fascist leader and a tyrannical dictator. In the press, she was perceived as the perfect fascist, and yet on the side, she was drinking and partying with all the wrong men. Eventually, she married Count Galeazzo Ciano, which pleased her father.
However, Ciano advised Mussolini not to associate himself with Nazi Germany. Mussolini wasn't happy with this betrayal and had Ciano executed. After that, Edda denounced her father, moved to Switzerland, embedded herself in the fashion industry, and wrote her memoirs until her death in 1995.
Charles Manson Jr.
The infamous cult leader and mass murderer Charles Manson fathered Charles Manson Jr. with his first wife Rosalie Jean Willis in 1956. After the 1969 murders, and when his father was sent to prison Manson Jr changed his name to Jay White. Jay White's step-brothers would both die tragically, one from a gunshot wound, and the other from an accidental drug overdose.
Jay White committed suicide in 1993, and it's said that he took his own life because he couldn't come to terms with who his father was. White's son, Jason Freeman, who is a kickboxing cage fighter, has in an interview expressed the wish that his father had just hung in there, and stuck around longer to meet his own grandchildren. The body of Charles Manson was handed over to his grandson Jason Freeman, and he hopes to sell Manson's estate to raise money for charity.
Katrin Himmler
Katrin Himmler is the granddaughter of Ernst Himmler, and her great-uncle was Heinrich Himmler, one of the leading members of the Nazi regime, who was partially responsible for the advent of the Holocaust. Katrin chose to keep her name and to face her atrocious family history head-on.
Himmler researched and wrote the bestselling book The Himmler Brothers, A German Family History, and has stated that she wants her own son to know as much as he can about his family history. She married an Israeli man and has chosen to remain honest regarding her Nazi past, rather than keep it hidden.
Emperor Akihito
Emperor Akihito is the eldest son of Japan's Emperor Showa, who was responsible for a number of war crimes during World War II. The emperor was never tried for his involvement. When his son took over in 1990, he studied politics rather than warfare and changed the regime of his country.
Akihito made sure that his family became more acquainted with his people, and he went against tradition by marrying a commoner. He also made sure to travel more extensively than any emperor before him and met many world leaders. He also chose to step down in 2019, which would make him the first Japanese emperor to abdicate the throne. In many ways, Akihito attempted to not be the tyrant his father had once been.
Kim Jong II
This is a case in which the child becomes even worse than the parent. Kim Jong II's regime on North Korea was catastrophic from the moment he came into power. Over the years, he was accused of countless human rights violations and even starved his people to boost the military.
He came into power in 1994 and overshadowed his father in terms of ruthlessness. He even expanded his father's concentration camps that were used during the Korean War. When he died, his death was kept a secret, and his own son Kim Jong-un has clearly inherited the family's evil streak.
Li Na
Li Na is the daughter of Mao Zedong and his fourth wife Jiang Qing. She was born in 1940 and received a political education, and was brought up in communist China. Though her dictator father insisted on a "one-child policy" for the people of China, he himself had three children (officially). However, as a known womanizer, it is believed he fathered many more children.
Li Na was clearly indoctrinated by her father's regime and has always maintained her support for Chairman Mao, referring to him as a kind man rather than the tyrant he is said to be. Li Na and her sister Li Min live in Beijing and prefer to keep a low profile.
Yakov Dzhugashvili
Yakov Dzhugashvili did not have a good relationship with his father, and their story would end in absolute tragedy. After his mother died when he was very young, he went to live with relatives, and then attended university in Moscow. He then fell in love with a Jewish girl and attempted suicide after Stalin made him end the relationship.
In 1941, he was made prisoner while serving in the Red Army. The Nazis offered to trade his son back, but Stalin flat-out refused. Dzhugashvili ended up dying in a prisoner camp in 1943 after it is said he committed suicide. Yakov's own children managed to survive WWII and spent years defending their father's honor and discounting their grandfather's account of history.
Marko Milosevic
Marko Milosevic is the son of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. His father was accused of being involved in war crimes during the Bosnian War, the Croatian War of Independence, and the Kosovo War. Milosevic would, unfortunately, inherit his father's penchant for crime.
He was a tyrant at school, and after dropping out of school, he became heavily involved in the Serbian underworld of organized crime. He became a smuggler by using his father's name. When his father was ousted as president in 2000, Milosevic was forced to flee to Russia. Though he has since been given refugee status in Serbia, he is still banned from several countries around the world.
Monika Hertwig Goeth
Monika Goeth's father was the infamous Austrian war criminal Amon Goeth. All her life, she had been taught to believe that not only was her father involved in WWII but that he had been a hero. This all changed when she watched the movie Schindler's List, a film that exposed her father for what he truly was.
Monika's own mother, Ruth Kadler, killed herself after being shown evidence as to what her lover had been capable of. After Monika saw the Spielberg film, she was angry, but she proceeded to visit survivors in Poland and realized the truth. Her own daughter, whose father was Nigerian, would write a book many years later highlighting how her own existence as a person of color would have appalled her grandfather.
Fidelito Castro
Fidelito Castro was the eldest son of Fidel Castro, the Cuban revolutionary who brought communism down on the people of Cuba. His son would eventually move from Cuba to Miami with his mother. His mother and her family were opposed to Castro's dictatorship.
He studied nuclear physics in Russia and received a doctorate. After setting up a nuclear program in Cuba, his father had him removed from his position, and so Fidelito left for Moscow. In his later years, he would return to Cuba and welcome American delegations to his homeland. In 2018, Fidelito committed suicide after many years of battling depression.
Rolf Mengele
Rolf Mengele's father was Josef Mengele, a man who was nicknamed the "Angel of Death". Working in the concentration camps, most notably in Auschwitz, Mengele was a medical doctor who conducted countless experiments on women and children living in the death camps.
Though Rolf was abandoned, he still received letters from his evil father for years. He never did give up his father's location to the authorities after he went into hiding, but he did denounce his father and his name. It is said that he is now a retired lawyer living in Germany.
Nicu Ceausescu
Nicu Ceausescu was the youngest son of communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu, who ruled over Romania. The entire family lived a very lavish life while the rest of their country lived in poverty. Nicu used his father's name to get into university despite being a terrible student. It is there that he lived out a playboy lifestyle of drinking and gambling.
He was a member of the Communist Party and would have succeeded his father had the dictatorship not been overthrown in 1989. Both his parents were executed, and Nicu was sent to prison for 20 years, where he only served two years and subsequently died from complications from his addiction to alcohol.
Niklas Frank
Unlike a lot of children of Nazi leaders, the son of Hans Frank, Niklas Frank, has no problem admitting that, every year without fail, he celebrates the fact that his father is dead - Hans Frank worked as a lawyer for the Nazis and was hanged as a war criminal in 1946.
Niklas Frank is a journalist, and often gives talks about his dark family history, and talks about his emotionally distant parents. His father, he reveals, was responsible for the deaths of many Polish Jews, and his mother knew all about her husband's crimes.
Martin Adolf Bormann
Martin Adolf Bormann's father was Adolf Hitler's private secretary, Martin Bormann. He bore both his father and his godfather's names. Bormann was cold and cruel towards his son and eventually committed suicide in 1945. His son fled to Austria where he joined the priesthood. He never publicly condemned his father and his family's involvement in the Third Reich.
Though he kept his name, Bormann moved as far away from Nazism as he could. Eventually, he fell in love with a nurse, had to leave the priesthood, and spent the rest of his days as a teacher of religious studies. He died of old age in 2013.
Edda Goering
Edda Goering, daughter of Hermann Goering, was the poster child of Nazi Germany - literally. Though she saw very little of her father, as she was born a year before the Third Reich took over, she would defend his character all her life.
Hermann Goering committed suicide by taking a cyanide pill to avoid execution, and Edda and her mother were forced to flee to Bavaria. She would spend her adult years in legal battles with people whose valuables had been stolen during the war and had been gifted to the Goering family. Edda died at the age of 80 and was buried in an undisclosed location.
Jaffar Amin
Jaffar Amin is the tenth official child of the tyrannical dictator of Uganda that governed during the 70s, Idi Amin Jaffar. Idi Amin is said to have fathered more than 40 children, and most of his offspring have chosen to live quiet lives away from the horrific history of their family name.
Jaffar Amin has instead chosen to defend his father's ruling of Uganda and his tainted reputation as a dictator who economically mismanaged Uganda in the eight years he ruled and committed several human rights cases of abuse. He plans to write a book that will give an account of the man he believed his father to be.
Jean Claude Duvalier
Jean Claude Duvalier was the son of Haiti's 34th president, Francois Duvalier. He inherited the presidency at the age of 20 and was more authoritarian than his father had been. Over the 16 years during which he ruled, he lived a playboy lifestyle by embezzling money from his own people.
During his time in office, and before the revolt of 1979 that had him thrown out, Duvalier banned the opposition and made sure that the press was heavily censored. He spent his exile in France, and in 2011 attempted a political comeback, which ended in a house arrest. Duvalier died of a heart attack before he could be prosecuted for his crimes against the people of Haiti.
Bettina Goering
Bettina Goering is the great-niece of Nazi leader Hermann Goering. She grew up listening to a father who refused to speak of the war and a mother who honored the memory of Adolf Hitler and her uncle Hermann while insisting that the Holocaust was a complete fabrication.
Goering eventually ran away from home in Germany and ended up joining a cult in the United States. She would later travel to Mexico to have herself sterilized so that the Goering bloodline could be discontinued.
Wolf Rudiger Hess
Wolf Hess was the son of Rudolf Hess, a man who was Deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich and who was a prominent member of the Nazi Party. His son was his most avid supporter and would spend his whole life defending his father's honor, and also attempting to get Hess seen as a hero rather than as a war criminal.
Rudolf Hess is also famous for traveling to Scotland in order to have peace talks with Britain. Instead, he was arrested and sent to prison, and to this day no one has been able to confirm whether these 'peace talks' were ever meant to happen.
Gudrun Burwitz
Gudrun Margarete Elfriede Emma Anna Burwitz was the daughter of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Nazi SS. Burwitz adored her father whom she claimed sent her letters when he was away in Berlin, and even took her to visit a concentration camp when she was a little girl.
At the time of visiting the camp, Burwitz appeared to show very little sympathy for the prisoners she described as "unshaven and poorly clothed". Into her adult years, she would continue to be an active pro-Nazi who even married a fellow Nazi-sympathizer.
Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mbasogo
Teodorin is the son of Equatorial Guinea's long-running president Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo. He made his favorite son the Minister of Agriculture and Forestry, a position of power he abused, and which he used as a gateway to a lifestyle of fast cars and expensive mansions, while the majority of the population lived below the poverty line.
Much like his father Teodoro has been linked to countless cases of corruption, and after studying in the US, he returned to Equatorial Guinea to take over his father's place. He owns some of the most expensive cars in the world and has been under several investigations for corruption and fraud.
Sar Patchata
Sar Patchata is the daughter of Communist dictator Pol Pot. When her father died in 1998 Patchata was adopted by Tep Khunnal, Khmer Rouge's UN ambassador. She then moved to Malaysia and obtained a Master's degree in English Literature.
In 2014, she got married to Sy Vicheka at the former Khmer Rouge's stronghold. Her father committed suicide when she was only 12, and before that Patchaka had spent most of her life on the run from authorities who wished to imprison her father for crimes against the revolution. She has since been able to live a normal life.
Uday Hussein
Uday Hussein was the first son of Saddam Hussein and was the first in line to inherit his father's empire. However, that all ended abruptly when Hussein killed his father's personal valet, Kamel Hana Gegeo at a party in 1988.
Hussein was as much of an extremist as his father. He was in charge of the Iraq Football Association and the Iraqi Olympic Committee but treated his athletes badly, and often punished them physically. He was eventually killed in 2003 in Mosul by US Forces.
Lana Peters
Lana Peters, once Svetlana Alliluyeva, was Josef Stalin's youngest daughter. She was cared for by her father and her brother, who was infamously captured and left to die in a concentration camp when Stalin refused to do an exchange. Stalin was known to have called his daughter his 'Little Sparrow', though his relationship with her was once described as "the tenderness of a cat for a mouse."
Her mother had committed suicide when she was only 6 out of her desperation from her relationship with Stalin, but young Svetlana was told that death was due to appendicitis. Peters changed her name and defected from the Soviet Union in 1967, after discovering the real circumstances of her mother's death. She wrote four books, had three children, and was married three times. At the age of 85, Peters developed cancer and passed away.
Mutassim Gaddafi
Mutassim Gadaffi was the son of Muammar Gaddafi, the politician, and revolutionary who led Libya from 1969 to 2011. Gaddafi's son became his national security advisor, was well known for his hedonistic ways and would invite celebrities such as Mariah Carey, Jay Z, Beyonce, and Lindsey Lohan to his wild parties.
He died alongside his father in 2011 after anti-Gadaffi forces captured him during the Battle of Sirte, and had them executed by firing squad. His dead body along with his father's body was put on display and was denied burial within a day of passing in accordance with Islamic law. His father was posthumously accused of violating human rights, global terrorism, and several accounts of sexual abuse.
Princess Stephanie of Belgium
Prince Stephanie of Belgium was the daughter of King Leopold II. King Leopold was responsible for the deaths of between two and 15 million Congolese, whom he used as forced labor to harvest and process rubber on plantations in the Congo.
Stephanie married the heir of the Habsburg dynasty, Archduke Rudolph, in 1881, and the couple had one daughter in 1883. In 1889 her husband absconded from their marriage with a mistress, after which they took their own lives at a hunting lodge.
Omar Bin Laden
Omar Bin Laden is the son of Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian terrorist responsible for founding the militant organization al-Qaeda. He was linked to the September 11 attacks in 2001 and went on the run for years before he was finally located in Pakistan and killed by the US military special operations unit.
Omar is one of 20 children fathered by bin Laden and cut ties with his father in 2001. He also practices a moderate form of Islam, and in his memoir Growing Up Bin Laden published in 2009, he recalls his father never allowing any of the family members to laugh or express any kind of joy whatsoever.