Eastern European archives opened and studied after the collapse of the Soviet Union prove that Hitler was the 20th century’s vilest killer.
Until the Soviet archives were discovered and studied, it was generally assumed that Stalin’s regime murdered at least 20 million civilians, making him history’s greatest mass murderer. This writer recently composed an article about which man represented the lesser evil, Stalin or Hitler. It elicited a surprising number of responses from Suite 101 readers who live in the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, and Poland, where the greatest number of civilians were murdered. Most agreed with pre-1990 Holocaust historians, insisting that Stalin killed 20 million versus Hitler’s 11 million.
Inconceivable Numbers of Murder Victims
Anyone who has suffered the murder of a loved one deeply feels the agony of that loss. Numbers like 20 and 11 million murdered individuals are too abstract to even imagine. The fact that Stalin actually murdered five million fewer human beings provides small relief. And the fact that he was the lesser evil of the two does not diminish his monstrosity.
How to turn such abstract numbers into some sort of reality? By trying to visualize these millions of lost people in a crowd so you can see their faces? But no stadium could possibly contain so many people. The murdered must always remain an impossible abstraction.
Why the World Believed that Stalin Killed 5 Million More
The assumption that Stalin murdered 20 million, not the actual 15 million that are his responsibility, was based on a cold war guess. Eastern European archives were inaccessible to the world at large until the 1990s. During the cold war, America was allied with Germany. The Soviets, America’s ally during the war, had become the enemy.
Everyone in the world recognized German responsibility for the Holocaust; but Stalin had also killed millions, many of them well before Germany caused the war. U.S. propaganda played down those murderous episodes when the Soviet Union was on the same side. As soon as the war ended and the Soviets became the cold war enemy, U.S. propaganda declared Stalin was the greatest evil.
The Numbers of Civilians Purposely Murdered by Germans and Soviets
Analysis of the archives reveals that Germans -- with enthusiastic local assistance from Romanians, Poles, Bulgarians, Finns, Hungarians, Soviets, Italians, and Vichy French -- deliberately murdered more than 11 million civilian noncombatants. Another million perished from starvation, during deportation, and disease in concentration camps. During Stalin’s dictatorship, 6 million were murdered outright and another 9 million were intentionally starved to death.
Both villains killed out of nationalist and ethnic motivations. Until Germany caused the war, Stalin’s regime was the most murderous. He freely announced his decision to “liquidate” the kulaks, a class of wealthier peasants. With their elimination, the state would control agriculture, using the proceeds to build Soviet industry.
Stalin’s Famine and Great Terror
Stalin, not Hitler, initiated the first European interwar ethnic murder campaigns. His greatest slaughter was his nationalist famine of 1930 through 1933, when at least five million starved to death. The first victims were nomads in Kazakhstan. When Stalin's modernization policy failed, he blamed Ukraine and sealed its borders, thus ensuring the mass death of at least 3.3 million Soviet Ukrainians.
Stalin also bears at least some responsibility for the world’s worst man-made catastrophe, when Mao doomed more than 30 million Chinese to death by starvation during his imitation of Soviet collectivization, something he absurdly named The Great Leap Forward.
With the end of the Soviet Union, the world discovered Stalin’s death quotas for his Great Terror and other Soviet ethnic shooting actions that killed a little less than one million kulaks and citizens who belonged to national minorities living in border states. The largest of these operations began in Poland in August 1937, when 111,091 Poles were shot as spies.
German Responsibility for Racist Murder is Undiminished by Stalin’s Ethnic Motives
Nazi Germany began killing on the Soviet scale as soon as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in place in the summer of 1939 and once both Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland that September. German soldiers immediately began shooting Polish citizens. The following spring, the Soviet NKVD carried out the Katyn massacre.
Most of the Soviet killing was done during the brief time of peace under cover of its so-called “modernization.” Germans murdered in the name of racial imperialism. Hitler soon betrayed Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union in his failed dream to colonize it, starving 30 million Soviet citizens and murdering tens of millions in the bloodiest occupation in world history.
After the war ended, Stalin’s Soviets killed tens of thousands of its own citizens in reprisals in the Baltic states, Belarus, and Ukraine. Countless numbers of returned Soviet prisoners of war were also slaughtered in Stalin's payback for their surrender to the Germans. About 363,000 captured German soldiers died in Soviet captivity. At the ugly end, almost 40 million innocent citizens had been destroyed. Every one of these murdered men, women, and children had a name, a face, a personality; and each one had been loved and was painfully missed by someone. Hitler and Stalin are both responsible for their horrific deaths.
References:
Bullock, Alan, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives, Vintage Books, a Division of Random House, Inc., New York, NY, 1993
Snyder, Timothy, “Hitler vs. Stalin: Who Killed More?”, The New York Review of Books, March 10, 2011, Vol. LVIII, Number 4, New York, NY
John Anderson - John Anderson has worked as a journalist, editor, advertising executive, Internet pioneer, and he has authored four books.
Join the Conversation