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Hitler and Stalin: Who really killed more?

caveman1917 said:
Of course it is, it just bugs me so I point it out in an appropriately derisive tone. I agree with the rest of your post, in particular:


The unwillingness of France and Britain to commit to an anti-nazi alliance with the USSR was one of the decisive factors for the USSR to go for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, so in a way one could say that the Allies weren't just not particularly trying to be in a war with the USSR against Nazi Germany but were actually trying not to be.
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It certainly seems that many in the British establishment admired Hitler in the 30's and were sympathetic to Germany's demands. At the same time they were fearful of Soviet Communism, so it took real 'genius' on Hitler's part to wind up fighting the British and the Soviets.. After 1941 the Western Allies were more than happy to let the Soviets do the heavy lifting when it came to fighting the Wehrmacht and yes to achieve that they were willing to over look much of what Stalin had done, however odious they might have found it. As Churchill put it:

If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.
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Not that they could do much about it either way. Stalin was doing the heavy lifting there already, not to mention a Zapp Brannigan impression before it was mainstream: being willing to sacrifice wave after wave of his men, just in case the Germans reach a kill limit and stop ;)

Not sure what the Allies were supposed to do there, in Mondial's opinion. Refuse to be in the same war as the USSR? Well, Germany declaring war on the USA kinda took care of that decision for them, didn't it?
 
That said, I still maintain that, as I was saying in the other thread, the real 'genius' there was Halder. You have to give the man some recognition. That's the one WW2 general that did more to ensure Germany's defeat that Monty, Eisenhower and Zhukov put together :p
 
HansMustermann said:
I still think that even that is irrelevant, though. He makes it sound as if the western powers somehow chose to be in a fight together with the USSR against Germany. The simple fact of the matter is that it was Germany who dragged the USSR into that war, and then in the same year the USA.
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The USSR entered the war in September 1939 by invading Poland -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
Britain and France who declared war on Germany for doing the same thing did nothing. USSR also invaded Finland in 1939, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania in 1940. They were not dragged into the war by Germany.
 
in June 1941, Britain and France were at war with Germany, and Germany also declared war on the USSR. At that point all three were DE FACTO in a war against Germany, and it was Germany's doing that it ended up that way.
 
Mondial said:
The USSR entered the war in September 1939 by invading Poland -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
Britain and France who declared war on Germany for doing the same thing did nothing. USSR also invaded Finland in 1939, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania in 1940. They were not dragged into the war by Germany.
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By the time Germany dragged the SU into a war against Germany, Germany had herself invaded Austria, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Poland, Greece and Yugoslavia. She then carried out, after secret preparations, the biggest invasion ever staged, against the USSR. Not to punish Stalin for his crimes, but to murder, or to enslave and exploit, his subjects.

Your Nazi apologetics are ludicrous.
 
Mondial said:
The USSR entered the war in September 1939 by invading Poland -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Poland
Britain and France who declared war on Germany for doing the same thing did nothing. USSR also invaded Finland in 1939, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Romania in 1940. They were not dragged into the war by Germany.
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The USA entered the war in 1940 by arming a belligerent in the Sino-Japanese conflict
In 1940, Washington went a step further — Roosevelt approved credits to the Chinese government that would be used to purchase war supplies. After Japan signed its Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940, the U.S. instituted a full embargo on Japan.​
The USA was therefore not dragged into war by Japanese activities in Hawaii in December 1941.
 
Sort of. At the time, both China and Japan were maintaining that they are not, in fact, at war, precisely to continue trading with the USA. They were officially still just having the Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Japanese were just searching for their missing Private Ryan... err... Private Shimura, in case the Chinese have him captive. The fact that (A) they were by now searching for him 2000 miles from where he went missing, and more importantly (B) Private Shimura HAD ALREADY RETURNED TO HIS UNIT, was apparently just a minor detail.

You can't make up stuff like this, really. Most of the Japanese army marauding all over China to rescue a soldier, and not finding him anywhere in China because he had already returned to Japan... yeah, if you saw that in a movie, it better be a parody :p

Mind you, I don't think anyone was fooled about there totally being no war over there, but yeah, OFFICIALLY it wasn't a war :p
 
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Craig B said:
The USA entered the war in 1940 by arming a belligerent in the Sino-Japanese conflict
In 1940, Washington went a step further — Roosevelt approved credits to the Chinese government that would be used to purchase war supplies. After Japan signed its Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in September 1940, the U.S. instituted a full embargo on Japan.​
The USA was therefore not dragged into war by Japanese activities in Hawaii in December 1941.
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That said, we were talking about the war against Germany.

There were a few different wars going around. E.g., the conflict in China was the Second Sino-Japanese War, if you wanted to call it a war, or the Marco Polo Bridge Incident if you asked either China or Japan, not WW2. Even getting involved in that one didn't mean you were at war with all the other Axis or respectively Allied powers.

They wouldn't be merged into the same war until 1941, when Germany and its allies all declared war on the USA.
 
HansMustermann said:
If Germany had, say, allied with Poland and attacked the USSR in '39, everyone would have cheered for Germany.
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Hitler offered Poland an alliance against the Soviet Union several times during the 1930s and it was the Poles who refused. Piotr Zychowicz has written about this in his book Pakt Ribbentrop-Beck.
http://riowang.blogspot.com/2013/02/could-have-been-poles-allies-of-hitler.html
Jozef Beck was the Polish foreign minister and the title refers to a possible German-Polish alliance which is what Hitler wanted -
https://forum.codoh.com/viewtopic.php?f=20&t=7737
If Poland allied to Germany and still lost they wouldn't have been any worse off because they allied to Britain and ended up under Soviet occupation anyway.
 
Maybe, but that doesn't contradict anything that I was saying, nor damn the Allies for... ending up de facto in the same war against the USSR when Germany dragged the USSR into the same war, without consulting the allies first. Hitler most certainly didn't ask either London or Washington if they'd like him to add the USSR as an extra belligerent :p

All that can be said about how it all ended up in that convoluted situation, is that the Allies didn't quite honour their treaty obligations to Poland in '39. And that's true too. A lot of Poles are STILL butthurt about that, and you can't blame them much. But that has NOTHING to do with the Allies liking Stalin :p
 
Mondial said:
If Poland allied to Germany and still lost they wouldn't have been any worse off because they allied to Britain and ended up under Soviet occupation anyway.
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Not true as you doubtless know. Stalin didn't intend to annihilate the Poles as Hitler did. Hitler made a start on it during the war with relocation to land that could not support their numbers in the Central Government. That led to starvation and Poles were worked to death in large numbers as slave labour. Of course as a Nazi fanboy you deny the fate of the Polish Jews.
 
TubbaBlubba said:
The more vicious aspect of this, in my view, is the construct of the "Holodomor" ("Death by Famine"), widely promoted by Ukranian nationalists. This is a kind of modern foundation myth in the same vein as the Polish "double genocide" thesis, maintaining that the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate effort to stamp out Ukranian nationalism ("And nevertheless, we survived, look how far we have come!" etc etc). I don't recall that Conquest ever states this outright, but it's very easy to read this into his work, and countless authors have drawn upon him to support this thesis. The most significant reveal of the Soviet archives is that there is absolutely no evidence of such a deliberate policy. The Central Committee were dumbstruck and confused by the reports coming in, and Stalin's position was significantly weakened as a result of the short-term failures of his collectivization efforts.
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As it was overseen by Molotov and Kaganovich, at least initially (if I recall correctly), and I doubt the 'rerouting' of soooo much grain etc, from the proverbial bread-basket, could've possibly been done without any thought or recognition of the very probable consequences. The proportion the consequences took might've been more than was expected, though I find it hard to believe they were clueless about a very potential case of mass-famine as a consequence. Other policies, enacted quickly after the first signs of the famine appeared, were notably targeting the ukranian area, like "food theft" becoming a capital crime. All of this reeks of them (Stalin et al) knowing very well what was happening and developing there, yet ensured that the increasingly starving populus would be further restricted in partaking of their own darn crops.

So, is it a myth? Well, I usually hear that from communists of various sorts, who have a dog in this fight of course. In some version of the event, there have probably been mythical proportions (which is perhaps more or less true for most tragic events in history), though the general gist is a degree of deliberate effort to simply not give a crapola about the starvation these policies created (which experienced a boooom that may or may not have surprised some of them).
 
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Jono said:
As it was overseen by Molotov and Kaganovich, at least initially (if I recall correctly), and I doubt the 'rerouting' of soooo much grain etc, from the proverbial bread-basket, could've possibly been done without any thought or recognition of the very probable consequences.
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That's true. And that means, as you imply, that Stalin and his immediate associates are responsible for these deaths. The question is, what was the motive for these criminal acts? Was Stalin trying to kill millions of people and using an artificial famine as (so to speak) a gas chamber to achieve this purpose?

That's where the question arises. Stalin's anxiety about the population figures revealed in the 1937 census indicates that he probably had no idea how many died in the collectivisation famine, and that his primary motive was to seize grain stocks. If he could have done that without killing millions he probably would have preferred so to do - he needed millions of soldier conscripts for his army after all. But if seizing the grain had to cost millions of lives, he didn't quail before that prospect.

But he was responsible for these deaths whether he directly willed them or not, because he certainly willed the confiscation of peasants' grain and livestock which was the cause of the disaster.

So much for the famine. The deaths due to purges and executions are directly Stalin's responsibility without qualifications of any kind, as are deaths of persons held in confinement. The total in these two categories is in the millions.
 
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The figures for Stalin's direct killings appear to be

Great Purge (1936–1938): 900,000–1.2 million
Katyn massacre (1940): 22,000
NKVD prisoner massacres (1941): 100,000–500,000

This would add up to almost 2 million.
 
Jerrymander said:
The figures for Stalin's direct killings appear to be

Great Purge (1936–1938): 900,000–1.2 million
Katyn massacre (1940): 22,000
NKVD prisoner massacres (1941): 100,000–500,000

This would add up to almost 2 million.
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Yes, and I'd be inclined to add the number of deaths due to ill treatment of people unjustly detained in prisons or labour camps as a direct result of Stalin's decrees. Their number must be very large.
 
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