In fact, some of history's most face-blastingly savage regimes came up with some shockingly progressive innovations in health, human rights and, well, everything else.

If history teaches us anything, it's that it's way harder to pick out the good guys from the bad guys than the movies would lead us to believe.

6 The Nazis Get the Anti-Tobacco Ball Rolling

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We put this on the list at great risk to our future political careers. You really can't say anything good about the Nazis without it getting taken out of context in a campaign ad, and obviously pointing out that, say, Hitler's soldiers were well-groomed doesn't excuse their many, many, many atrocities.

So nothing we're about to say about the Nazis makes us feel even the slightest bit bad about slaughtering them in one video game after another.

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Your dapper Mechsuit won't save you this time, Hitler.

And Yet...

They were the first to point out that, hey, tobacco kills people.

Although Adolf Hitler had a 25-cigarettes-a-day habit early in life, he eventually came to find the addiction disgusting. Especially once German scientists discovered the link between tobacco and lung cancer, at which point the Fuhrer initiated the first anti-smoking campaign in modern history, and the most successful one throughout WWII.

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And yeah, of course the motivation for the campaign was bizarrely linked to racial purity, because they were, after all, the Nazis. But what really mattered was that they were the first to link smoking during pregnancy with stillbirths and miscarriages, and went so far as to ban tobacco ration cards for pregnant women and Nazi ladies under the age of 25, just in case they got knocked up with Aryan spawn.

The Nazis were also the ones who coined the phrase "passive smoking" and outlawed smoking in Nazi offices, schools, buses and trains. And they actually restricted tobacco advertisements in 1941, almost 30 whole years before America bothered to do the same.