As anyone who has lost a loved one knows, the difference between zero and one is an infinity. Even historians of the Holocaust generally take for granted that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, thus placing themselves under greater pressure to stress the special character of the Holocaust, since this is what made the Nazi regime worse than the Stalinist one.ĭiscussion of numbers can blunt our sense of the horrific personal character of each killing and the irreducible tragedy of each death. For decades, and even today, this confidence about the difference between the two regimes-quality versus quantity-has set the ground rules for the politics of memory. Yet Stalin was also worse, because his regime killed far, far more people-tens of millions, it was often claimed-in the endless wastes of the Gulag. Hitler was worse, because his regime propagated the unprecedented horror of the Holocaust, the attempt to eradicate an entire people on racial grounds. ![]() In the second half of the twentieth century, Americans were taught to see both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as the greatest of evils. ![]() ![]() Auschwitz, Poland, after January 27, 1945Īs we recall the Red Army’s liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, sixty-six years ago today, we might ask: who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? Soon after liberation, an emaciated child survivor is carried out of camp barracks by Soviet first-aid workers.
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