4 Dictators with Infamous Sweet Tooths

After a busy day of oppressing your own people, murdering your enemies, and conquering foreign lands, sometimes a workaholic dictator just needs to treat himself to a little pick-me-up. These were four guys happy to do just that.

1. Napoleon: Keeping It Short and Sweet

Though he was originally from Corsica, Napoleon seemed to share the French obsession with pastries. In fact, his cook, Antonin Carême, who eventually became a globe-trotting celebrity famous for his sugary confections, first made his reputation with an enormous wedding cake for Napoleon, celebrating his marriage to the empress Josephine. Of course, cakes were just the tip of the icing for the squirrelly French commander. Napoleon's favorite dessert was supposedly a pastry that resembled profiterole, made with chocolate and cream, and he was also said to favor Turkish delight with pistachio filling. Later, when he was in exile on Elba, the sweet-toothed sovereign consoled himself with copious amounts of a sweet dessert wine from Klein Constantia in South Africa.

2. Hitler: Getting His Cake, and Definitely Eating It Too

Adolf probably had the most famous sweet tooth on record. Despite being a vegetarian who also abstained from hard alcohol, Hitler's weakness for candy and pastries was well known, and admirers always made sure to bring a box of chocolates or cake or pastries when they came to see the Führer. So, just how sweet were his teeth? Hitler was reputed to put seven teaspoons of sugar in each cup of tea.

He also supposedly added sugar to wine because he found it too bitter otherwise, and plied all his guests with ice cream and candy. In fact, Hitler's favorite dessert chef, Gerhardt Shtammer, claims that Hitler asked him to make delectable desserts right up to the very end, when they were trapped in Hitler's bunker with hard-core Nazi holdouts. According to Shtammer, Hitler's favorite desserts were éclairs decorated with little swastikas and strudel.

3. Saddam Hussein and His Spider-Hole Snack Attacks

The bizarre contents of Saddam Hussein's residences—velvet paintings of Elvis and all—have provided endless fodder for cocktail conversations. Amid the revelations of Saddam's incredibly bad taste, it was also revealed that Saddam was a bit of a sugar fiend. In his last residence—the "spider hole" where he was finally apprehended in Ad Dawr in December 2003—American soldiers found a refrigerator filled with Mars and Bounty candy bars and 7-Up. Thank God! No longer relegated to the realm of middle school sleepovers, and Little League pizza parties, these snack foods finally broke through to a new demographic: dictators on the run.

4. Fidel Castro: Near-Death by Chocolate

In a country known for its sugar production, the Cuban strongman's well-known fondness for a particular type of chocolate milkshake might very well have led to his demise had the CIA been a little more on top of its game. Among the approximately 600 assassination attempts the CIA is believed to have set in motion against Castro, one infamous failure called for covert agents to sneak poisoned aspirin into El Presidente's daily chocolate shake. And while they succeeded in getting the poison into the beverage, an overeager servant inadvertently foiled the plan by putting the shake in a freezer to keep it cold. It froze and Cuba's temperamental dictator dictated a new one.

This list was pulled from our book Forbidden Knowledge.