Who was worse and why: Hitler or Stalin?

M.A in History & Latin (language), Ohio University (Graduated 2016)September 10
Who was worse and why: Hitler or Stalin?

Evil is evil- it just is. Stalin and Hitler were both horrible men, horrible leaders, and they did horrible things to their own people and others. That said, I think Hitler is the more evil of the 2.

Asking this question is kinda like asking “what’s worse dying of rabies or being lit on fire”. They both just really suck. I’m not a fan of historical antler measuring contests but regardless- it’s a common question so let’s address it.

Hitler took power in 1933 and reigned in Germany as dictator until 1945 when Germany fell. During this period of time

  1. He started the largest war in world history where some 60 million people would die
  2. He would spearhead and order the largest genocide in human history
  3. He would destroy his own nation and in the end, his final orders were for SS units to destroy the remaining German infrastructure because “the German people failed me”

Now Hitler really stands alone when it comes to horror.

During WW2 the Nazis would directly kill 35 million civilians. This is an insane number. Now, these are not people killed by accident when a factory was bombed nor are these indirect deaths from German actions. No- I mean Germans shot, gassed, tortured, and intentionally killed 35 million civilians.

  • 6 million Jews were either killed in camps by gas chambers, worked to death, or murdered by mobile killing squads. At Treblinka, entire trains full of children arrived and were gassed and killed on the spot.
  • 20 million Russian civilians were killed by Germans. In many (if not most) cases the Germans just slaughtered any civilians they found. In other cases, they besieged their cities and let them starve.
  • 2.5 million Poles were killed in camps, murdered by mobile killing squads, or shot to death.
  • 3 million Soviet POWs were killed inside German concentration cams
  • 300,000 disabled people were murdered by Nazis in their infamous T4 program.

These are just the primary crimes against humanity Hitler ordered and inspired.

In his 12 years in power 35 million died. This means that for every year that man ruled Germany, 3 million civilians died on average. These deaths were intentional, horrific, and make your blood run cold

Stalin was no angel either though.

He made his name in the communist party by committing various crimes to raise funds. He was known as a violent sociopath with little regard for human life.

When Lenin died though Stalin quickly found himself in power and from 1922 to 1953 Stalin would rule the USSR as its absolute dictator.

Stalin would cause famines, kill political enemies, and kill innocent civilians alike. He maintained power through fear, torture, brutality, and ruthlessness.

How many died under his rule though? Well this is hard to say.

Now, most of you will say “20 million” but that number is a bit tricky. First off there is no evidence for 20 million being valid. In order to get to 20 million you have to include every possible famine, wildly overestimate realistic death tolls, and stretch the truth.

The only historians to conclude “20 million” as the number are famously anti-socialist and this is important to note.

I conclude that 10,300,000 were killed due to Stalin.

  • 4 million in the Holodomor which was a famine in Ukraine.
    • Note that famine is different from genocide. It’s debated if Stalin intended for famine to occur or not. I think he likely did so I include it but there is a strong debate that he did not intend for this to happen. Intent matters- it’s the difference between murdering your room ate and accidentally killing someone in a car crash.
  • 300,000 in the Decossakization (arguably genocide)
    • Some estimates peg this number as low as 10,000 though
  • 1 million in The Great Purge
  • 200,000 in Operation Lentil
  • 50,000 in the deportation of Crimean Tatars
  • 500,000 killed in Kulak Deportations
  • 100,000 additional killed in Gulags (most are already included in the above events)
  • 4–5 million Germans were killed in WW2
    • 2.5 million civilians were killed due to war crimes
    • 1 million POWs killed
    • 600,000 killed after post-WW2 deportations
  • 150,000 Polish POWs killed

Now many of these were extremely brutal. After German atrocities in the USSR the Reds wanted revenge and brutalized the German civilian population.

Moreover, life in the USSR was terrifying for many. Stalin’s government was horrifyingly cruel and often killed at random simply to inspire fear.

My total of 10 million can be debated though. Famines are disasters and its hard to include them as intentional killings. Additionally, records are really incomplete here and while I am not on the high end- I am also far from the low-end estimates

Every year Hitler was in power 3 million people died on average

Every year Stalin was in power 300,000 people died on average.

Hitler is responsible for 3 times more killings than Stalin and he achieved this number in 1/3rd the time.

Also, Hitler intended to kill every single civilian that died– in fact, he wanted to kill many more but was thankfully stopped. With Stalin, it is not so clear. We can attribute many millions of deaths to him- but not all were intentional or desired.

Either way they were both horrible people.

How Trump’s State of the Union Guests Embodied His Politics of Fear and Dread

Trump is certainly not the first President to shape a story by inviting people to be lauded during his State of the Union address. Barack Obama invited twenty-three different people to his last address, in 2016; at least fifteen of them were activists, working on causes including homelessness, opioid addiction, access to education, same-sex marriage, discrimination against Muslims, and more. The stories they embodied were ones of overcoming adversity but also of working with others toward a better future. Trump’s guests, on the other hand, were all survivors.

They survived D Day.

They survived decades in American prisons and, through the study of religion, earned second chances in their late middle age.

They survived unimaginable grief.

They survived immigration.

They survived cancer. (Notably, although one of Trump’s more ambitious promises was to eliminate new H.I.V. infections within ten years, there was no guest with a story of surviving with H.I.V.)

They survived losing a child.

They survived a mass shooting.

And they survived the Holocaust.

The sole exception to this narrative was the astronaut whose achievement was fifty years old.

Living with a sense of danger so profound and so constant, a people would be unable to think of much beyond immediate survival. They could have little ambition for technological or scientific achievement. They could have no vision of organizing their society in a better, more equitable way. With fear as their only political motivator, their only goal could be a united front. If they felt constantly on the brink of extinction, that might help explain why, on the one hand, they armed themselves obsessively, and, on the other, they put people behind bars for decades at a time. And, living in this constant state of dread, they could not have the presence of mind, or the imagination, to tackle the longer-term danger of climate change—which, of course, makes it less likely that a future historian will be looking at Trump’s State of the Union address at all.

Richard Rohr Meditation: Knowledge of Good and Evil

The first step toward healing is truthfully acknowledging evil, while trusting the inherent goodness of reality. 

Knowing and naming brokenness is essential in the journey toward wholeness. We will not be well by denying the wrongs that we carry within us as nations and religions and communities. Nor will we be well by downplaying them or projecting them onto others. The path to wholeness will take us not around such awareness but through it, confronting the depths of our brokenness. . . . As Hildegard of Bingen [1098–1179] says, we need two wings with which to fly. One is the “knowledge of good,” and the other is the “knowledge of evil.” [1] If we lack one or the other, we will be like an eagle with only one wing. We will fall to the ground instead of rising to the heights of unitary vision. . . .

.. In July 1942, the same month that the Nazis began their first big street roundups of Jews in Amsterdam, Etty Hillesum wrote in her diary, “I am with the hungry, with the ill-treated and the dying, every day, but I am also with the jasmine and with that piece of sky beyond my window; . . . It is a question of living life from minute to minute and taking suffering into the bargain. And it is certainly no small bargain these days.” [3] Etty was looking at suffering straight in the face. Her friends, her family, and she herself were under the sentence of extermination. It was now beginning to be carried out. And yet Etty held within herself the “handsome mixture” of pain at the plight of her people, and of what one people can do to another people, along with a continued delight in the gift of life and its ineffable wonder. “I have looked our destruction, our miserable end, which has already begun in so many small ways in our daily life, straight in the eye . . .” she writes, “and my love of life has not been diminished.” [4] To look life straight in the eye, to see its pain and to see its beauty—this is an essential part of glimpsing the way forward.