Stalin killed anywhere from million of his own citizens. Either way you slice it, not nice guys, but Stalin was worse. A while back I'd have picked Hitler, but in history we're doing Communism and Fascism, and Hitler and Stalin and Mussolini were all mentioned. According to my history teacher, Hitler killed 6 million people- but 20 million people "disappeared" in Russia whilst Stalin was in charge.
I think people believe that because Stalin was with the Allies in WW2, it makes him better than Hitler.
Not necessarily. Stalin was worse in my opinion because of how idiotic he was and how many people he killed. He killed a little more than 60 million people and Hilter killed 6 million Jews. Only 6 million. Nothing compared. Hitler lead Germany out of the depression, many got paid, everyone loved him for it, except for the holocaust etc Stalin killed his own people, any man who he thought was a threat was soon to be killed.
He killed more than Hitler as well. Stalin killed all his own people in the purges, he massacred his own high ranking officers, absolutely wiped them all out, Hitler did not kill his own officers, at least not to the extant Stalin did. Stalin is not talked about in history its all about the holocaust, but Stalin was far worst. The fact that groups like Anti-Fa are still around today are despicable.
Neo Nazi's are just as bad, but are percieved as society as the devil's group unlike Anti-fa who they don't percieve as bad. Anti-fa is communist. Hitler killed less people than Stalin. Stalin made everyone lived in fear. Whereas Hitler only made Jews and a couple other races lived in fear. I go with stalin because 1. Stalin had a much higher body count. Not even his own family was safe from his reign of terror. When people cheered as the Germans came through happy to be free of Russia, That was an extremely powerful statement.
Both Hitler and Stalin were brutal dictators. Stalin killed primarily his own people though which ethically makes him even worse than Hitler. Stalin was much worse. USSR is worse than Germany.
You never hear about the holodomor or the katyn massacre that they blamed the germans for. Portions of this page are reproduced from or are modifications based on work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3. By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Google Search. Post Your Opinion. Create New Poll. Sign In Sign Up. Who was worse: Hitler or Stalin? Posted by: Jakeross6. Add a New Poll.
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Posted by: 78s. Posted by: nootnewt Report Post. Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions.
Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million. Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died. Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities.
Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history. It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government.
Can all this be blamed on Mao? Traditionally, Mao apologists blame any deaths that did occur on natural disasters. We can discard natural causes; yes, there were some problems with drought and flooding, but China is a huge country regularly beset by droughts and floods. Chinese governments through the centuries have been adept at famine relief; a normal government, especially a modern bureaucratic state with a vast army and unified political party at its disposal, should have been able to handle the floods and droughts that farmers encountered at the end of the s.
What of the explanation that Mao meant well but that his policies were misguided, or carried out too zealously by subordinates? But Mao knew early enough that his policies were resulting in famine. He could have changed course, but he stubbornly stuck to his guns in order to retain power.
In addition, his purging of senior leaders set the tone at the grass-roots level; if he had pursued a less radical policy and listened to advice, and encouraged his underlings to do so as well, their actions would surely have been different. The Cultural Revolution—the year period of government-instigated chaos and violence against imagined enemies—resulted in probably 2 to 3 million deaths, according to historians such as Song Yongyi of California State University Los Angeles, who has compiled extensive databases on these sensitive periods of history.
He estimates 32 million in the Great Leap Forward, 1. It is probably fair to say, then, that Mao was responsible for about 1. At this point, I must digress briefly to deal with two specters that diligent researchers will find on the Internet and even on the shelves of otherwise reputable bookstores.
One is the political scientist Rudolph Rummel , a non-China specialist who made wildly higher estimates than any other historian—that Mao was responsible for 77 million deaths. His work is disregarded as polemical, but has a strange life online, where it is cited regularly by anyone who wants to score a quick victory for Mao.
Most Holocaust victims had been Polish or Soviet citizens before the war 3. The Germans also killed more than a hundred thousand Roma. All in all, the Germans deliberately killed about 11 million noncombatants, a figure that rises to more than 12 million if foreseeable deaths from deportation, hunger, and sentences in concentration camps are included. For the Soviets during the Stalin period, the analogous figures are approximately six million and nine million. These figures are of course subject to revision, but it is very unlikely that the consensus will change again as radically as it has since the opening of Eastern European archives in the s.
Since the Germans killed chiefly in lands that later fell behind the Iron Curtain, access to Eastern European sources has been almost as important to our new understanding of Nazi Germany as it has been to research on the Soviet Union itself. The Nazi regime killed approximately , German Jews.
Apart from the inacessibilty of archives, why were our earlier assumptions so wrong? One explanation is the cold war. Our wartime and postwar European alliances, after all, required a certain amount of moral and thus historical flexibility.
In Germany and the Soviet Union were military allies. During the cold war, it was sometimes hard for Americans to see clearly the particular evils of Nazis and Soviets.
Hitler had brought about a Holocaust: but Germans were now our allies. Stalin too had killed millions of people: but the some of the worst episodes, taking place as they had before the war, had already been downplayed in wartime US propaganda, when we were on the same side. We formed an alliance with Stalin right at the end of the most murderous years of Stalinism, and then allied with a West German state a few years after the Holocaust.
It was perhaps not surprising that in this intellectual environment a certain compromise position about the evils of Hitler and Stalin—that both, in effect, were worse—emerged and became the conventional wisdom.
New understandings of numbers, of course, are only a part of any comparison, and in themselves pose new questions of both quantity and quality. It was a war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of Poland in The pool of evil simply grows deeper.
The most fundamental proximity of the two regimes, in my view, is not ideological but geographical. Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.
What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in , the Germans in , and the Soviets again in ? The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July , in which some 24, Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before.
The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns. As I have written in Bloodlands , where all of the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other.
Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes—quality versus quantity—has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.
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