Who was worse,Hitler or Stalin?

[Retro Lyra]

I am undecided; Stalin never tried to wipe out an entire race of people with a certain mindset. Then again, Stalin killed more people.

[Noobubersland]

Answer; Stalin,

Reason;

20+ million casualties in WWII,

Explanation;

Code 227, Not one step backwards.

Summary;

Hitler was never insane to enforce a retreating clause on his own men. He did try to kill Jews, and several other types, but he is just a mere stain on the large carpet of genocidal leaders.

Stalin left a river, hitler left a stain

No, 20 million CIVILIANS died in the USSR due to Nazi extermination units

[Retro Lyra]

You can't measure someone's evil by body count alone. You need to look at the reasons for that body count too. This is why I consider Hitler to be far worse than Stalin- because, unlike Stalin, who created his body count through paranoia, Hitler knowingly and deliberately made it his goal to exterminate an entire race simply for existing. In essence, even if a hypothetical Jew followed every single law of Nazi Germany to the letter, singing Hitler's praises 20 times a day, gleefully hunting down anti-Nazis with a bloodthirstiness that would scare the Gestapo, etc etc, he would still get thrown in a concentration camp just because he was Jewish. Obviously this hypothetical Jew never existed, but in any case, he certainly would have survived in Stalin's USSR if he was a model Stalinist, singing Stalin's praises 20 times a day, and gleefully hunting down anti-Stalinists with a bloodthirstiness that would scare the NKVD.

Agreed.

[Retro Lyra]

Shouldn't there be an "undecided" vote on the poll?

[Nazi Flower Power]

Stalin never tried to exterminate an entire race.

However,Hitler never starved his own citizens to death or send his own soldiers to death camps in fear that they'd picked up "dangerous ideas."

The Nazis purposely allowed people to starve to death in their prison camps. It wasn't something that happened accidentally because of food shortages. It was a deliberate part of Himmler's plan to dispose of Jews, other minorities, homosexuals, and political opposition; and Hitler supported it.

[Syrakhstan]

Stalin never tried to exterminate an entire race.

However, Hitler never starved his own citizens to death or send his own soldiers to death camps in fear that they'd picked up "dangerous ideas."

Do you know anything of Adolf Hitler or WWII Germany. Nazi Germany had a ministry of Propaganda to keep people from getting any ideas. Along with the Gestapo and the SS to deal with anyone that got any funny ideas if you think Hitler was afraid to take out one of his own your sadly mistaken

[Noobubersland]

I am undecided; Stalin never tried to wipe out an entire race of people with a certain mindset. Then again, Stalin killed more people.

Stalin killed more people for the sole fact that we never let Hitler:
1; Have peace to start exterminating everyone who wasn't Germanic or Aryan
2: Because Stalin had death through the collectivization famine added to his score

[Camicon]

Stalin never tried to exterminate an entire race.

Are you kidding? Look up the Holodomor.

[Noobubersland]

Stalin never tried to exterminate an entire race.

Are you kidding? Look up the Holodomor.

I didn't realize that Stalin had complete control over weather and crop yields

[Nazi Flower Power]

Are you kidding? Look up the Holodomor.

I didn't realize that Stalin had complete control over weather and crop yields

Dictators control everything, donchaknow.

[Kohlastan]

Hitler because his actions killed more people.

Actually Stalin killed more people he just did so over a long period of time. But Hitler manage to kill more people durring the time frame of his rule. So in basicly Hitler killed less just because he was in power for a shorter time.
My vote is Hitler

[North Franklin]

Are you kidding? Look up the Holodomor.

I didn't realize that Stalin had complete control over weather and crop yields

Not to mention the Soviet Union had some serious problems with focusing entirely on industrialization and neglecting agriculture.

[Typhlochactas]

Hitler because his actions killed more people.

Actually Stalin killed more people he just did so over a long period of time. But Hitler manage to kill more people durring the time frame of his rule. So in basicly Hitler killed less just because he was in power for a shorter time.
My vote is Hitler

Which war did Stalin start that killed 2.5% of the worlds population?

[Typhlochactas]

Are you kidding? Look up the Holodomor.

I didn't realize that Stalin had complete control over weather and crop yields

Kim Jong-il can control the weather!

[Kohlastan]

I am undecided; Stalin never tried to wipe out an entire race of people with a certain mindset. Then again, Stalin killed more people.

But he only killed more people because he ruled longer

[Camicon]

Are you kidding? Look up the Holodomor.

I didn't realize that Stalin had complete control over weather and crop yields

Yes, because you need to control the weather in order to purposefully take away all of the food that the Ukrainians grew, and not give them enough to live on, purely because they were Ukrainian.

[Kohlastan]

Actually Stalin killed more people he just did so over a long period of time. But Hitler manage to kill more people durring the time frame of his rule. So in basicly Hitler killed less just because he was in power for a shorter time.
My vote is Hitler

Which war did Stalin start that killed 2.5% of the worlds population?

Hitler didn't kill everyone in ww2, technically. Stalin ruled till 56' giving him ample time to kill more people. Also your comparison include the Pacific theater which Hitler had little if anything to do with those deaths

[Noobubersland]

I didn't realize that Stalin had complete control over weather and crop yields

Yes, because you need to control the weather in order to purposefully take away all of the food that the Ukrainians grew, and not give them enough to live on, purely because they were Ukrainian.

Bullshit, show me the orders to take it away specifically so that they couldn't live, you're also forgetting that this happened in every SSR. Was Stalin trying to kill every group in the USSR? (including Georgians, his own ethnic group?)

[Crogach]

On the one hand, Stalin ran up a higher body count than Hitler (I believe that something like 12 million people of all stripes, including ordinary political prisoners, died in the camps, while once you add the Holodomor to the generalized ugliness that went on under Stalin's regime you'd be looking at 20 or so million dead, with another couple of million who would have died if the Doctors' Plot had ever gotten off the ground), and that counts for a great deal.

However, when you look at the legacies they left behind and the reasons they did what they did, Hitler was far more evil than Stalin. I agree with Trot; Stalin did what he did because he was power-hungry and paranoid, and ordinary people lived hard and ugly lives that got uglier if they stepped out of line, but unless you were reasonably high up the food chain you weren't quite walking on eggshells 24/7, and at any rate it is entirely conceivable that ideological purity would be enough to protect you from disappearance, torture, reeducation, or execution. Furthermore, Stalin came to power in a state that was mostly agrarian and fairly backward and impoverished, and left it an industrial superpower (although in many ways just as impoverished).

By contrast, Hitler was so incredibly racist that it colored nearly every element of state policy; as Trot said, if you were Jewish or Roma or just not a white Saxon then you were a dead man walking regardless of your skill level, your ideological orthodoxy, or any other factor no matter how valuable that factor might make you to the regime. That kind of an irrational fixation with race on the part of the leadership, combined with a willingness to push everything else aside to satisfy that fixation, made Nazi Germany scarier than Stalinist Russia. Furthermore, Hitler inherited a Germany that had been beaten down but was slowly rebounding, fired the economists under him who had half a clue what they were doing, and left Germany a bombed-out ruin once more.

Hitler was undoubtedly more deranged as a man and worse for his nation than Stalin, and thus I'd say Hitler was much more evil.

[Trotskylvania]

I didn't realize that Stalin had complete control over weather and crop yields

Yes, because you need to control the weather in order to purposefully take away all of the food that the Ukrainians grew, and not give them enough to live on, purely because they were Ukrainian.

The death of millions of Ukrainians during the collectivization wasn't genocide. Famine affected all of the agricultural regions, some worse than Ukraine. The whole project of Ukrainian national identity was one started and sponsored by the Bolsheviks, for one: most Ukrainians in that period, if asked what language they spoke or their nationality, would answer in thickly accented Russian that they themselves were Russian.

Modern Ukrainian nationalists, with their talk of the "Holodmor", are basically trying to deal with the fact that their ancestors were all willing executioners to the Bolshevik regime. Hence, the insistence that the collectivization were somehow an act of genocide against Ukrainians, when they weren't even a plurality of its victims.

Ukraine was also the place with the most peasants, regardless of whether they were Ukrainian, White Russian, Russian or Polish. The vast majority of the victims of the famine were peasants.

The policy was not targeted at Ukrainians as a people, it was targeted at the peasantry as a class. Peasants, especially freeholding kulaks were targeted because they were not an organic constitutency to the Bolshevik party. They needed to be proletarianized to serve the interests of the party-state.

Voluntarist methods were tried in the NEP, and they failed. Thus the party continued with forced collectivization, to destroy the peasantry as an independent class once and for all. This is a monstrous crime, but not all monstrous crimes are genocide. Suppressing people for their class, resulting often in death is not killing them for their race.

[Typhlochactas]

Which war did Stalin start that killed 2.5% of the worlds population?

Hitler didn't kill everyone in ww2, technically. Stalin ruled till 56' giving him ample time to kill more people. Also your comparison include the Pacific theater which Hitler had little if anything to do with those deaths

The Pacific War was half of the casualties of WW2. Even if I gave you the point of Hitler not causing it, he still killed more people.

[Aquophia]

Stalin has far more deaths to his name than hitler does. Not to mention communism. Should be pretty easy to figure out.

Of course, neither even come close to Mao.

[Typhlochactas]

Stalin has far more deaths to his name than hitler does. Not to mention communism. Should be pretty easy to figure out.

Of course, neither even come close to Mao.

Why do people keep forgetting WW2?

[The Republic of Kentucky]

Hitler because atleast Stalins policys ended up improving his country and didn't cause the deadliest war in human history

[Noobubersland]

Yes, because you need to control the weather in order to purposefully take away all of the food that the Ukrainians grew, and not give them enough to live on, purely because they were Ukrainian.

The death of millions of Ukrainians during the collectivization wasn't genocide. Famine affected all of the agricultural regions, some worse than Ukraine. The whole project of Ukrainian national identity was one started and sponsored by the Bolsheviks, for one: most Ukrainians in that period, if asked what language they spoke or their nationality, would answer in thickly accented Russian that they themselves were Russian.

Modern Ukrainian nationalists, with their talk of the "Holodmor", are basically trying to deal with the fact that their ancestors were all willing executioners to the Bolshevik regime. Hence, the insistence that the collectivization were somehow an act of genocide against Ukrainians, when they weren't even a plurality of its victims.

Ukraine was also the place with the most peasants, regardless of whether they were Ukrainian, White Russian, Russian or Polish. The vast majority of the victims of the famine were peasants.

The policy was not targeted at Ukrainians as a people, it was targeted at the peasantry as a class. Peasants, especially freeholding kulaks were targeted because they were not an organic constitutency to the Bolshevik party. They needed to be proletarianized to serve the interests of the party-state.

Voluntarist methods were tried in the NEP, and they failed. Thus the party continued with forced collectivization, to destroy the peasantry as an independent class once and for all. This is a monstrous crime, but not all monstrous crimes are genocide. Suppressing people for their class, resulting often in death is not killing them for their race.

I was looking for that, I knew you had written something on the subject before