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USSR and Germany - two similar dictatorships

Discussion in 'WWII General' started by Karjala, Sep 17, 2012.

  1. Karjala

    Karjala Don Quijote

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    Belasar wrote:

    "Gentlemen, We are here to debate in a polite and civilized way.

    Lets keep in mind that you can point out the faults and flaws of Stalin's Russia and communism without being a Nazi or Fascist. Certainly there is enough evidence that Stalin's Russia was neither a 'Worker's Paradise' or any kind of paradise at all.

    One can also state that as bad a Stalin's Russia was, Nazi Germany was worse. One can feel this is true without being a mindwashed apologist for communism or Stalin. Gulags no not equal Concentration Camps, if for no other reason than there was no 'Doctor' at the rail sidings seperating those who would be worked and starved to death and those simply gassed in a 'delousing shower'.

    Stalin and Hitler were not allies in the true sense. They had competing goals and their armed force's never fought side by side. Compare their 'alliance' to that of say Germany-Italy or US-UK, the difference is quite obvious. Finland-Germany had a closer working relationship than Germany-Russia, yet they only saw themselves as co-belligerent's, not true allies."

    Had to open new thread, since answering is a bit difficult in a closed thread...

    I agree fully with the first part of your text. I'm sorry if got a bit carried away - after all it is a bit difficult to swallow the nazi-hinting, with the commie-flag waving...

    Of course one can state that Nazi-Germany was worse. Indeed one can state anything. Still the differencies between e.g. the Gulag and the German Concentration camp system were not big. Yes, the German system was perhaps more systematic, as all German systems were. Still the basic idea was the same: to get rid of the unwanted people(s)/groups/nationalities by exhausting them by excessive labour and/or letting them die of lack of food, shelter and medical care. No women, elderly nor babies were spared. I don't think there's much difference in principle whether being killed by gas, disease, neck-shot, excessive labour, cold, hunger or any other reason. Of course the neck-shot is faster, but still. BTW - the gas-buses were a soviet invention...

    Stalin and Hitler both got what they wanted when they allied in 1939. Of course they did not love each other, but still the alliance was mutually beneficial. German warfare in the west in 1940 would have been seriously compromised without the essencial soviet help. It was an alliance in the same sense as the alliance between the USSR and the UK/USA.

     
  2. lwd

    lwd Ace

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    Well in his defence Stalin seemed to target only those he thought might oppose him. On the other hand given his paranoid nature that exposed a pretty large population to his potential wrath and it wasn't always obvious who mgiht be the next target. Especially sense it created a mechanism for lesser officials to eliminate rivals.

    Hitler on the other hand targeted not just the above but large groups of people that he simply didn't consider human due to their ancestery or looks.

    I certainly wouldn't say Stalin was worse but when both were responsible for the deaths of millions I'm not sure I see a huge amount of difference in their criminality.
     
  3. steverodgers801

    steverodgers801 Member

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    The most important difference between the two is that Stalin was willing to learn from his mistakes Hitler never admitted he made any. Hitler was also very lazy and worked as little as possible. Stalin was a voracious reader, worked hard and liked to think he was the expert on everything and while not genius had a decent level of intelligence.
     
  4. Slipdigit

    Slipdigit Good Ol' Boy Staff Member WW2|ORG Editor

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    To me, the regimes were six of one, half a dozen of the other.

    Both governments were a gaggle of murdering thugs who had no compunction against inflicting pain, suffering and death on their fellow man.

    To me, the only difference between their murdering ways were reasons why.
     
  5. Sloniksp

    Sloniksp Ставка

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    A "Gulag" was a system of camps (Labor camps and colonies). Life in these camps was miserable. The convicted varied and numbered many but most came out alive.

    "It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive. Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more"

    Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More? by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books

    A concentration camp was created for one thing only, EXTERMINATION. The Germans managed to do something that others had not, create machines which would kill people. From 41-45, Hitler's machines were responsible for the mass murder 6 million Jews. An additional 3.5 million Soviet POW's were systematically starved to death. Countless of Roma, mentally ill along with political rivals met similar fate.


    While both brutal, one could live in a terrifying world with Stalin if he shared his views (or succumbed to them) the same could not be said about a Jew or a Slav, living in Hitlers world.

    There is no comparison. Hitler and the Nazis pushed the limits of crimes a man can commit.
     
  6. Artem

    Artem Member

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    I remember my lecturer once pointed out something seemingly obvious which I've never thought of. Difference between Stalin's and Hitler's dictatorship is that Stalin's party had total control over the whole nation, ie totalitarian. Hitler's party really didn't. Even during the war Hitler had to fight politically with businesses over production and such, this would never have happened in USSR.

    This trickles down to authority, production, politics, education etc.
     
    belasar likes this.
  7. belasar

    belasar Court Jester

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    A good point. For each similarity, and there are many, there is an equal number of dis-similarities, some of them profound. Part have to due to base culture, others to national goals.
     
  8. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    Artem is quite correct.

    The parable I always use in this particular discussion - whioch comes up time after time - is the one illustrated by Laurence Rees' Nazis: A Warning From History....

    The city of Wurzburg had ~8 Gestapo officers to tens of thousands of citizens; to "police" them, they had to cultivate an environment of informers...a system of "passive" policing...

    If you kept your head down In Hitler's Germany - and didn't come to anyone's attention - you could live a full and happy life without ANY harm coming to you!

    But in Stalin's Russia - you could find your name on an arrest list during the Purges ENTIRELY at random; one regional Party official even asked permission to increase the numbers to be arrested on Stalin's birthday...as a way of CELEBRATING the event!

    How exactly could life be better in THAT sort of environment? In a society where the so-called "Red Terror" had been planned by Lenin, the father of the new nation, post-1917 revolution as a way of ensuring control and breaking the will to resist of any potential opposition???
     
  9. steverodgers801

    steverodgers801 Member

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    But towrds the end of the war the Gestapo was also aresting families and friends of suspected traitors and the SS had squads of men going around around hanging any men who could not show orders as to why he was not on the front.
     
  10. phylo_roadking

    phylo_roadking Member

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    ;)

     
    This was after the Volksturm was created...conscripting all males betwen the ages of 16 and 60 who were not already serving in a "military unit" as part of a Home Guard.
     
  11. Sloniksp

    Sloniksp Ставка

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    Anne Frank would disagree

    Life was certainly no picnic but your chances for survival were far greater than in Hitlers "camps"....

    A tough time for anyone to live...
     
  12. Volga Boatman

    Volga Boatman Dishonorably Discharged

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    The State Security "Organs" had many 'waves' of arrests to make, with the emphasis on the type of state 'enemy' that was being targetted at the time. There was the wave of arrests associated with "Wrecking" for instance, with the arrested accused of internally sabotaging soviet industry. There were even quotas of arrests given to the 'Organs', with certain numbers of people that had to be taken for interrogation and sentencing. Stalin systematically vanquished any trace or hint of dissent.

    One theory as to why all this was necessary is that the many Gulags were more like work camps than prisons. Inmates were fed in 'gangs', and worked this way as well, with a gang leader and his offsider tallying the work quota for the day, and making sure that his 'gang' was looked after. These working gulaga were in isolated areas of Russia proper that had resources to exploit. Setting up a working camp provided a pool of labourers that were nominally under state control, exploiting areas that were too tough to open up any other way with regular settlers. This also explains why many of the sentences were arbitrarily lengthened, to keep this force of workers out in the field, opening up the undeveloped interior of this vast country.
    For a good look at what camp work and life was like, one need go no further than Alexander Slozhenitzyn's master short novel "One Day In The Life of Ivan Denisovich." The story revolves around a prisoner who is having a good day. He gets an extra slice of bread, which he sows into his matress. His work gang are not sent to the 'Socialist Community Center", really just an open field with no place to build a fire. His gang, while last in for the day, get back to camp just before the other groups, meaning they have first pick at the various camp offices for the day. He gets an extra bowl of Soup by accident at dinner time. He manages to buy a good lot of 'machorka' from the Latvian with the two roubles he's been saving, and this after bumming smokes all week. Yep, for people like Shukov, with no-one to send them food parcels and money, life in the camps was tough and exhausting. Hard work day in day out, with the routine broken only when the thermometer dropped to 35 below zero to suspend work for the day. So, his twenty five year sentence, which had been extended from ten years, went by, day after miserable day, with Shukov surviving on his wits. Lesser people, or people who wouldn't work hard for the gang could find themselves scrambling for kitchen scraps, or begging for machorka butts after roll call, or swiping food from other prisoners and getting beaten up for their trouble.

    To say that these camps were really any better than extermination facilities is to belittle the sufferings of the inmates concerned. Many of these poor retches spent the best years of their lives slaving away in these icy ****-holes, ruining their health and far way from family and friends. When they returned, their health and wellbeing spoilt forever, it was to live as strangers ina society they did not recognize.

    Both systems relied on military people to run these facilities, with prisoner 'trustees'.

    I think it's apologism to suggest that these Gulags were really any better than Nazi Camps. Thats the type of comparison we as modern people can make, of course, with a belly full of food and tucked up toes curling by the open fire.
     
  13. Sloniksp

    Sloniksp Ставка

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    Volga,

    given a choice, where would you rather go... To a "Gulag" or Auschwitz?
     
  14. Karjala

    Karjala Don Quijote

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    "A concentration camp" was NOT originally created for extermination only. It only meant that people were concentrated in them, for various reasons. There were concentration camps in many countries, e.g. the USA included.
    Even in Germany there were different types of concentration camps. Not all of them were extermination camps - and even in those some of the victims were not killed instantly but enslaved.

    In the USSR people were also starved to death in concentration camps - in addition to those who were instantly/almost instantly shot. Transporting families to the wilderness with no means to survive is, in my mind at least, equivalent to outright killing.

    Millions of German, Finnish, Hungarian etc. POWs were systematically starved to death in the soviet camps - if they ever reached them, which they often did not. E.g. out of app. 1.500 (out of app. 3.400 total) Finnish POWs killed in the soviet hands in the Continuation War app. 1.000 did not reach the POW camps...

    That's not really true. Here's a reminder of the ethnic persecutions in the USSR, which I'm sure you are familiar with - or at least should be...
    For example for these people it didn't make any diffrence, whether they shared Stalin's views or not. If you were of certain nationality ("race")
    you were an enemy of state - only because of that.

    It's only a wiki-link but you get the idea.

    Population transfer in the Soviet Union - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

    "The partial (and in many cases total (my addition)) removal of potentially trouble-making ethnic groups was a technique used consistently by Joseph Stalin during his career:[SUP][8][/SUP] Poles (1939–1941 and 1944–1945), Romanians (1941 and 1944–1953), Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians (1941 and 1945–1949), Volga Germans (1941–1945), Ingrian Finns (1929–1931 and 1935–1939), Finnish people in Karelia (1940–1941, 1944), Crimean Tatars, Crimean Greeks, Kalmyks, Balkars, Karachays, Meskhetian Turks, Karapapaks, Far East Koreans (1937), Chechens and Ingushs (1944). Shortly before, during and immediately after World War II, Stalin conducted a series of deportations on a huge scale which profoundly affected the ethnic map of the Soviet Union.[2] It is estimated that between 1941 and 1949 nearly 3.3 million were deported to Siberia and the Central Asian republics.[SUP][9][/SUP] By some estimates up to 43% of the resettled population died of diseases and malnutrition.[SUP][10][/SUP]"

    I still can't see any real basic difference in persecutions according ethnicities in those two dictatorships. Of course the Germans were more effective, as they were in everything compered to the soviets. Still the effectiveness doesn't change the point.

    Seems like you need to check the world history a bit closer. Unfortunately the Nazis did not fundamentaly push any crime limits. The fact that the numbers of victims were exceptionally high in Nazi-Germany - and even higher in the USSR (and China) - doesn't make those crimes exceptional in principle.
     
  15. Sloniksp

    Sloniksp Ставка

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    "Today, after two decades of access to Eastern European archives, and thanks to the work of German, Russian, Israeli, and other scholars, we can resolve the question of numbers. The total number of noncombatants killed by the Germans—about 11 million—is roughly what we had thought. The total number of civilians killed by the Soviets, however, is considerably less than we had believed. We know now that the Germans killed more people than the Soviets did."

    Some 363,000 German soldiers died in Soviet captivity.

    Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More? by Timothy Snyder | The New York Review of Books

    I have also read that more German POWs died in the hands of the French rather than Russian, around 800k?

    The article which I have now posted several times states that you are wrong. Can you provide us a source which states otherwise?

    In case your wondering, this was written by this guy (not Russian)


    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_D._Snyde
     
  16. Sloniksp

    Sloniksp Ставка

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    double..
     
  17. steverodgers801

    steverodgers801 Member

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    I would want proof that POW's were delibertly starved, the Soviets wanted them for labor, how ever due to the poor condition that many would have been captured in, expecially the Stalingrad ones, it would be no suprise if many died as a result.
     
  18. Karjala

    Karjala Don Quijote

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    I don't claim that there was any official "master plan" of starving the POW:s in the USSR. Not giving the POW:s food, exhausting them with hard labour, not giving them proper medication and letting them freeze was in reality the same as "deliberately starving" them. The terrifying conditions of the POW camps were not a suprise for the soviet regime, since they had years to get them right, but nothing changed - well, hadn't changed for decades in the Gulag either...

    E.g. many Finnish POW:s were not in poor condition. Still 40 % of them died in soviet hands, although the vast majority of them was in the soviet hands for only half a year!

    "Finnish historians estimate the number of prisoners was around 3,500 persons, of whom five were women. The number of deceased is estimated around 1,500 persons. Approximately 2,000 persons returned home. It is estimated that the mortality rate was even 40 percent. The result is different from the Soviet statistics, where officials mainly checked only prisoners, who survived to a prisoner camp. Finnish studies have tracked individual persons and their destinies. Most common cause of deaths were hunger, cold and oppressive transportation" (Malmi, Timo (2005). "Jatkosodan suomalaiset sotavangit". In Leskinen, Jari; Juutilainen, Antti (in Finnish). Jatkosodan pikkujättiläinen (1st ed.). Werner Söderström Osakeyhtiö. pp. 1022–1032.

    "There were shortages of food and medicine, and POWs had to work in exhausting duties in labour camps. Furthermore, medical treatment was of very low standard." (Frolov, Dmitri (2002). "Sotavankilainsäädäntö Neuvostoliitos vuosina 1939–1944". In Alava, Teuvo; Frolov, Dmitri; Nikkilä, Reijo (in Finnish). Rukiver!: Suomalaiset sotavangit Neuvostoliitossa. Edita. pp. 58–59.)
     
  19. steverodgers801

    steverodgers801 Member

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    My point is that at the end of the war, Germany was doing the same type of terror that the Soviets had.
     
  20. Volga Boatman

    Volga Boatman Dishonorably Discharged

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    Given a choice, I suppose the Russian system was a little more bearable. It was designed, at least, so that prisoners could have some sort of chance of returning home, even if it was to be many years in the future. The Russian camps reflected the society and people that had given birth to them. Many peasant values were intrinsic. Russian and other nationalities from the East are very patient people by nature; It has been said of this type of people that they will go along to a train station, and wait for an inordinate length of time, days, even weeks, in the patient way that peasants from the land have. The train will come, sooner or later, but they know it will come some day. Better to settle back and make the best of it, rather than causing a fuss at the ticket office over the poor scheduling or the inefficiencies of the rail system, as Westerners would do.

    This philosphy enabled many inmates to make the best of the camp system, patiently working their time away until someone noticed that their time was up. This maturity of approach is intrinsic to the Eastern character, so it dovetailed nicely with the situation that many found themselves in. Some had little or no idea exactly why they where arrested, let alone sentenced. So it must have been hard for those so affected to bear the strain for so long.

    I think both systems SUCKED. I wouldn't wish to be in either version, or all of the other different types of camp in both nations.

    Punishment systems like the Soviets and their German counterparts are inhumane. Putting people in these situations to exploit their labour is unjustified.
     

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