Books that compare Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin/Hitlerism and Stalinism

[George L Gregory]

I fancy reading a book that is about the similarities between Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin or Hitlerism and Stalinism.

The following books I already own and I have read:

Alan Bullock, Hitler And Stalin: Parallel Lives
Richard Overy, The Dictators
Laurence Rees, Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War
Ian Kershaw, Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison
Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Robert Gellately, Lenin, Stalin and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe
Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History Communism, Fascism, and Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century

Have I missed out any books?

[Boby]

Two more

https://books.google.es/books?id=CIt7fM ... tcover&dq=

https://books.google.es/books?id=IcB3oA ... tcover&dq=

[historygeek2021]

Books that can't tell the difference between genocidal anti-Semitism and communism. Hmmm ....

[Cantankerous]

Books that can't tell the difference between genocidal anti-Semitism and communism. Hmmm ....

Some of the people who compare Stalin to the Führer are also the same people who consider Fidel Castro the far-left version of Adolf Hitler, saying that Fidel injected painful memories of his human rights atrocities into the psyche and minds of affected people, like Hitler, while wreaking mayhem in his respective region. It may be true that communism regarded religion, as Karl Marx put it, "opium of the masses", but Stalin and other communist leaders stood strong against racism and war (Stalin warned party faithful at the 17th Party Congress in 1934 that the prospects of Germany and Japan waging war with the USSR were on the rise due to Hitler's rise to power and Japanese aggression in Asia), even though Stalin sent some ethnic minorities like Chechens to the GULAG in Siberia partly on false charges of being pro-Nazi.

[PunctuationHorror]

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism

[Cantankerous]

Hannah Arendt: The Origins of Totalitarianism

People should remember that Karl Marx, when writing the Communist Manifesto, never expected his new communist ideology to become a totalitarian one, yet his oxymoronic phrase "dictatorship of the proletariat" implied that once the proletariat overthrew the bourgeoise, whatever proletarian state they set up would have to silence anyone who might question the interests of the proletariat or allow the bourgeoise to make a comeback, and hence when Lenin installed the Soviet state, the proletarian state ended up putting the government instead of workers in charge of the means of production, and the Cheka and later NKVD got to make sure that the interests of proletarians were being protected. It's funny that Hitler and Mussolini claimed to honor traditionally family values based on their recognition of the fact that Stalin was attacking traditional family values by arresting family members who dared to speak out against communism, yet the Nazi government ended up arresting family members who had mental and physical disabilities or were sick and sent them to concentration camps to be euthanized.

[J. Duncan]

What of the book by Gelately? (Lenin Stalin Hitler Social Catastrophe) mentioned in list above? I’ve heard it’s a decent book as an intro.

[Hans1906]

The book Hitler, jointly edited by Henrik Eberle and Matthias Uhl, is the translation, with a foreword by Horst Möller, of a secret dossier for Josef Stalin about Hitler and his entourage, which has also become known as file number 462a. The book is based on a transcript made during the Khrushchev era and found by the two editors in the Moscow State Archives of Contemporary History in 2004. The original is said to be locked away in the archives of Russian President Putin.

Das Buch Hitler https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Buch_Hitler


Hans

[George L Gregory]

Books that can't tell the difference between genocidal anti-Semitism and communism. Hmmm ....

Some of the people who compare Stalin to the Führer are also the same people who consider Fidel Castro the far-left version of Adolf Hitler, saying that Fidel injected painful memories of his human rights atrocities into the psyche and minds of affected people, like Hitler, while wreaking mayhem in his respective region. It may be true that communism regarded religion, as Karl Marx put it, "opium of the masses", but Stalin and other communist leaders stood strong against racism and war (Stalin warned party faithful at the 17th Party Congress in 1934 that the prospects of Germany and Japan waging war with the USSR were on the rise due to Hitler's rise to power and Japanese aggression in Asia), even though Stalin sent some ethnic minorities like Chechens to the GULAG in Siberia partly on false charges of being pro-Nazi.

Are you having a laugh?

Stalin was a racist. He was an anti-Semite.

On 12 August 1952, Stalin's antisemitism became more visible as he ordered the execution of the most prominent Yiddish authors in the Soviet Union, in an event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. Stalin organized an antisemitic campaign, known as the "Doctors' plot" in 1953. Stalin accused predominantly Jewish doctors of plotting against the state and planned show trials, dying before the campaign continued.[67] According to Patai and Patai, the Doctors' plot was "clearly aimed at the total liquidation of Jewish cultural life."[61] Historian Louis Rapoport wrote on this subject, emphasizing the increasingly paranoid antisemitism of Stalin before Stalin's sudden death.[68][69] Communist antisemitism under Stalin shared a common characteristic with Nazi and fascist antisemitism in its belief in "Jewish world conspiracy".[70]

Racism was rife in the Soviet Union. The Soviets may have preached an anti-racist stance but in practice it was a racist state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in ... viet_Union

The Soviets consistently wanted “war” with the capitalists and others whom they deemed to be in the way of their communist revolution. What about the Soviets pact with the Nazis and then they invaded Poland? What about the Soviet war with Finland? What about the Soviet expansion in Eurasia?

Chairman Mao was hardly a pacifist, was he?

Ditto for Fidel Castro and many other Marxists/communists.

You have got to be having a laugh if you think the internationalist Marxists in the 20th century didn’t want war with their enemies.

[George L Gregory]

Books that can't tell the difference between genocidal anti-Semitism and communism. Hmmm ....

Soviet communism was also anti-Semitic during Joseph Stalin’s rule.

[Cantankerous]

Books that can't tell the difference between genocidal anti-Semitism and communism. Hmmm ....

Some of the people who compare Stalin to the Führer are also the same people who consider Fidel Castro the far-left version of Adolf Hitler, saying that Fidel injected painful memories of his human rights atrocities into the psyche and minds of affected people, like Hitler, while wreaking mayhem in his respective region. It may be true that communism regarded religion, as Karl Marx put it, "opium of the masses", but Stalin and other communist leaders stood strong against racism and war (Stalin warned party faithful at the 17th Party Congress in 1934 that the prospects of Germany and Japan waging war with the USSR were on the rise due to Hitler's rise to power and Japanese aggression in Asia), even though Stalin sent some ethnic minorities like Chechens to the GULAG in Siberia partly on false charges of being pro-Nazi.

Are you having a laugh?

Stalin was a racist. He was an anti-Semite.

On 12 August 1952, Stalin's antisemitism became more visible as he ordered the execution of the most prominent Yiddish authors in the Soviet Union, in an event known as the Night of the Murdered Poets. Stalin organized an antisemitic campaign, known as the "Doctors' plot" in 1953. Stalin accused predominantly Jewish doctors of plotting against the state and planned show trials, dying before the campaign continued.[67] According to Patai and Patai, the Doctors' plot was "clearly aimed at the total liquidation of Jewish cultural life."[61] Historian Louis Rapoport wrote on this subject, emphasizing the increasingly paranoid antisemitism of Stalin before Stalin's sudden death.[68][69] Communist antisemitism under Stalin shared a common characteristic with Nazi and fascist antisemitism in its belief in "Jewish world conspiracy".[70]

Racism was rife in the Soviet Union. The Soviets may have preached an anti-racist stance but in practice it was a racist state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racism_in ... viet_Union

You've got to be kidding. The founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, was of Jewish ancestry, and another Old Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev, had a father of Jewish ancestry who converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Since Kamenev's father was Jewish, Stalin was in no way anti-Semitic, although his agreement with Marx and Lenin that Christianity, Judaism, and other religions were "opium of the masses" was reminds me of Hitler distorting Christianity by rejecting all Jewish-written parts of the Bible, eliminating Catholicism, and unifying all Protestant Christian denominations into a unitary Positive Christian church. When Joseph Stalin consolidated power in the late 1920s, he ordered all mosques in Central Asia shuttered or turned into warehouses, Muslim clerics in Central Asia persecuted, religious schools closed down, and Waqfs outlawed. On the other hand, Hitler was endorsed in Iran by pro-Nazi Iranian nationalists in the 1930s who felt nostalgic about the past and pre-Islamic glories of the Persia and blamed the Arabs and Turks for the backwardness of Iran. Hence, whereas Hitler regarded Jews as an ethnic/racial rather than a religious group while calling for Christianity to be remade in the Nazi mold, Stalin seemed obsessed with agreeing with Marx that religion was "opium of the masses" in spite of the fact some Trotsky, Kamenev, and a few other members of Lenin and Stalin's cabinets were of Jewish ancestry.

[George L Gregory]

You've got to be kidding. The founder of the Red Army, Leon Trotsky, was of Jewish ancestry, and another Old Bolshevik, Lev Kamenev, had a father of Jewish ancestry who converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. Since Kamenev's father was Jewish, Stalin was in no way anti-Semitic, although his agreement with Marx and Lenin that Christianity, Judaism, and other religions were "opium of the masses" was reminds me of Hitler distorting Christianity by rejecting all Jewish-written parts of the Bible, eliminating Catholicism, and unifying all Protestant Christian denominations into a unitary Positive Christian church. When Joseph Stalin consolidated power in the late 1920s, he ordered all mosques in Central Asia shuttered or turned into warehouses, Muslim clerics in Central Asia persecuted, religious schools closed down, and Waqfs outlawed. On the other hand, Hitler was endorsed in Iran by pro-Nazi Iranian nationalists in the 1930s who felt nostalgic about the past and pre-Islamic glories of the Persia and blamed the Arabs and Turks for the backwardness of Iran. Hence, whereas Hitler regarded Jews as an ethnic/racial rather than a religious group while calling for Christianity to be remade in the Nazi mold, Stalin seemed obsessed with agreeing with Marx that religion was "opium of the masses" in spite of the fact some Trotsky, Kamenev, and a few other members of Lenin and Stalin's cabinets were of Jewish ancestry.

The fact that Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin and other Soviets had Jewish ancestry meant nothing to Joseph Stalin. Similarly just because the Soviets claimed to be anti-racists meant nothing too.

Whether Joseph Stalin was antisemitic or not, and to which extent, is widely discussed by historians. Although part of a movement that included Jews and rejected antisemitism, he privately displayed a contemptuous attitude toward Jews on various occasions that were witnessed by his contemporaries, and are documented by historical sources. As the leader of the Soviet Union, he promoted repressive policies that conspicuously impacted Jews such as the anti-cosmopolitan campaign. According to his successor Nikita Khrushchev and others, he fomented the doctors' plot as a pretext for further anti-Jewish repressions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_St ... tisemitism

Why did Stalin tell Joachim von Ribbentrop that he would get rid of “Jewish domination”? To appease Adolf Hitler, Stalin purged his ministry of Jews.

During WW2, Stalin ordered Jews to be deported to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, why did he do that?

After WW2 Stalin began a new purge with repressing his wartime allies, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. In January 1948, Solomon Mikhoels was assassinated on Stalin's personal orders in Minsk.

In November 1948, Soviet authorities launched a campaign to liquidate what was left of Jewish culture. The leading members of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee were arrested. They were charged with treason, bourgeois nationalism and planning to set up a Jewish republic in Crimea to serve American interests. The Museum of Environmental Knowledge of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast (established in November 1944) and The Jewish Museum in Vilnius (established at the end of the war) were closed down in 1948. The Historical-Ethnographic Museum of Georgian Jewry, established in 1933, was shut down at the end of 1951.

Are you aware of the Doctors’ Plot? So-called “pure Jews” and then “half-Jews” were going to be sent to camps.

There are lots of examples of Stalin expressing and carrying out anti-Semitic ideas and policies.

[Trilisser, M. A.]

Timothy Snyder's books are worthless as they are neither objective, neutral nor written for any scientific purpose. They are filled with emotional bursts and language totally unsuitable for serious history. I compared a few cases in his Bloodlands to Raul Hilberg's book and the latter not only had more details, the reference notation was more thorough and Hilberg wrote in s dispassionate professional style while Snyder wrote like a Hollywood hack.

[J. Duncan]

Totally agree Mr. Trilisser. His media appearances on CNN that I saw in 2020 (called an “expert on Fascism and the far-right”) show him not to be a historian or scholar but an activist of the sort that a thinking person can’t take seriously at all. Do these people live in reality (?) because in their world there is a Fascist hiding under every bed.
I’m reading an interesting book right now that is pertinent to the subject. A fun book that makes some interesting points. It’s titled “The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and other Catastrophes of Literature” by Daniel Kalder. There are chapters on Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, and even Gaddafi (he wrote a book called “The Green Book”). Each dictators’ writings are held up to scrutiny and analysis and often compared. The author is critical of utopian ideals which have really caused a lot of problems in history. Of Lenin he writes: “His mental powers were undeniable but that was the problem: highly intelligent people are wrong all the time and are especially good at being wrong because they have the cognitive ability to construct elaborate counterfactual that appear to be backed up by judiciously selected and cleverly interpreted evidence …a cautionary tale regarding the capacity of highly intelligent people to deceive themselves about the most fundamental things…Marx’s laws of history were imaginary and Lenin’s post revolutionary vision was an absurdity, but Lenin had invested decades of his life chasing his utopia. He believed in it with all his will. Was he going to abandon it? Hardly.”

[George L Gregory]

I can't believe that I forgot John Mosier's Hitler vs. Stalin: The Eastern Front, 1941-1945.