re: In your opinion, who was the greatest leader in history?

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Hitler. If only he weren't about the master race thing... Ha, he'd get railed on by today's PC populace.

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I've always distinguished between "great" leaders and "effective" leaders--who are often simply master of demagoguery and manipulation. Effective leaders can get people to do what they want. Great leaders lead their people to great things.

Hitler came to the helm of a Germany with a great deal of pent up potential (had been the largest economy in the world only 50 or so years before) and brought them out of a crushing economic situation in the interwar years--in some part by flouting the overly punitive Treaty of Versailles.

He then proceeded to lead the country in a direction that damned near destroyed it, wiped out a generation of young men (Germany's population today is only a few million more than it was in 1939) and led to half a century of division from which she has yet to fully recover.

That is not great leadership. And this has nothing to do with the moral implication of the Holocaust.