“Americans are taught to see both, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evil” (Snyder). Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin are known to be two of the worst humans of all time, although many believed Hitler was as callous as Stalin at his worst about Russian deaths. Adolf Hitler’s crimes were committed against the Jewish, while Joseph Stalin’s crimes were committed on behalf of the Jewish. Looking back 67 years later, we might ask, who was worse? Hitler or Stalin?
Jewish people spread the extraordinary horror of the holocaust, and Hitler’s attempts to eradicate an entire race due to their background. WWII, Germany rounded up millions of civilians thought to be potential traitors, spies and informants of the enemy, and put them in camps while the war was going on. These civilians consisted of people of Jewish and non- Jewish backgrounds. Hitler then planned to move them elsewhere after the war ended. As it turned out a majority of the subversives were Jewish. Jewish people were incredibly communist and were naturally sympathetic to the USRR, similar to the homosexuals who were not captured because of their sexuality but their subversive politics (Miller). Auschwitz was first opened in 1940, and initially served as a detention center for political prisoners. This camp evolved into a network of camps where Jews and other enemies of the Nazi state were exterminated either in gas chambers or used in slave labor. These camps were the death place of millions of people.
The prisoners, most being of the Jewish race, would arrive in Auschwitz on trains and be told by the army that they needed to stop the spread of typhus by sending everyone to a shower. They were then led to a building where they were instructed to strip their clothes off and go into a shower room, which conveniently had no shower heads because it was where the gas chambers were. After the people were gassed to death, the bodies were transferred to a crematorium where the bodies were cremated little remains. The Nazis had young Jewish men who were responsible for removing the corpses from the death chambers.”
In October, 1944, such men staged a revolt. They assaulted their guards, using tools and makeshift explosives, and demolished a crematorium. All were apprehended and killed” (History). “However, not all those arriving at Auschwitz were immediately exterminated. Those deemed fitters to work were employed as slave labor in the production of munitions, synthetic rubber and other products considered essential to Germany’s efforts in World War II”(history). Millions of people went in and none came out. I believe that this was why Hitler was the most evil dictator.
Meanwhile, in Soviet Russia, Stalin had created the Gulags. These were forced-labor concentration camps, which accumulated during the course of Stalin’s campaign to turn the Soviet Union into a modern industrial power and to collectivize agriculture. The largest camps were spread in extreme climatic and geographical regions, such as, the Arrtic North, the Siberian East and the Central Asian South. “The combination of widespread violence, extreme climate, hard labor, meager food rations and unsanitary conditions led to extremely high death rates in the camps” (Gulag: 2006-2013).
Most Gulag inmates were not political prisoners, although significant numbers of political prisoners could be found in the camps at any one time. Petty crimes and jokes about the Soviet government and officials were punishable by imprisonment. About half of political prisoners in the Gulag camps were imprisoned without trial; official data suggest that there were over 2.6 million sentences of imprisonment in cases investigated by the secret police throughout 1921-1953.
In the early weeks of the war Hitler had the chance to capture Petersburg, but used it instead, for experiments in mass starvation. An estimated two million deaths occurred. This, being comparable to the Soviet famine of 1930–1933, in which more than five million people starved. Making this the largest human catastrophe of Stalinism. The Nazi pre-war camps did not contain more than 20 to 30 thousand people and out of that only 10 to 15 percent of them were Jewish. Throughout, Stalin murdered far more people in the Gulag than Hitler had in a while. Nevertheless, some would argue, it’s the quality, not the quantity of their killings that sets them apart as dictators.
Stalin was considered an angel in Western Europe. When he took over the West and Eastern countries the people just looked the other way. Being the Czar of Russia, Stalin appointed one Jew after another to high soviet positions to keep himself in their favor. He produced decent education systems and widespread job opportunities. He also provided secondary education to all. When Stalin became the undisputed leader of Russia in 1929, he realized that Russia was far behind the west and that she would have to modernize its economy very quickly if they was to survive. Also a strong economy would lead to a strong military needed if Russia was going to survive threats from external forces. A modernized Russia would also provide the farmers with the machinery, like tractors, they needed if they were going to modernize their farms. Hitler was the known as the Devil. The west was enraged when he took over Czechoslovakia, and Poland. He closed all education above the fourth grade in the occupied Soviet territory
