February 16, 1941 - Kim Jong-il
His seventeen-year rule over North Korea was defined by the consolidation of near-absolute personal power within a single family dynasty, presided over a famine that killed hundreds of thousands of his own citizens, and accelerated the country's nuclear weapons program as a guarantor of regime survival. The apparatus he inherited from his father — a surveillance state, a gulag system, enforced ideological conformity — he maintained and deepened, while projecting an elaborately managed public image at odds with conditions inside the country.
From Wikipedia
Kim Jong Il (16 February 1941 or 1942 – 17 December 2011) was a North Korean politician and dictator who was the second supreme leader of North Korea from the death of his father Kim Il Sung in 1994 until his own death in 2011. Posthumously, Kim Jong Il was declared an eternal leader of the Workers' Party of Korea (WPK).
Kim was born in 1941 in the far eastern region of the Soviet Union and moved to Pyongyang in 1945 following the end of Japanese rule. He joined the WPK in 1961 and rose through its ranks, joining the Propaganda and Agitation Department (PAD) in 1966. He was responsible for investigations following the Kapsan faction incident in 1967, and played a key role in the development of the North Korean cult of personality and the Monolithic Ideological System. He became PAD director in 1973, and was formally designated as Kim Il Sung's successor in 1980. Kim succeeded his father following his death in 1994. Kim was the General Secretary of the WPK, Member of WPK Presidium, Chairman of the WPK Central Military Commission, Chairman of the National Defence Commission (NDC) of North Korea and the Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army (KPA), the fourth-largest standing army in the world.
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