I would like to ask a question about the greatest cause of loss of life during and shortly after W.W.2 . I was born 1946 so know very few facts I was always told it was Stalin and not Hitler. Can anyone out there give me details Stalin or Hitler there seems little between them, yet we claimed one as freind and one as foe??? 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.
I too have always heard that it was Stalin. I believe he is credited with about 20-25 million dead, many of whom were Soviet citizens in the Ukraine who were starved to death by Stalin in 1932-33 so that he could take their food supplies for other Soviets. But I am by no means an expert on this subject. There is a great deal of information available on the web. Marc
Stalin had traditionally been opposed to Ukrainian nationalism and enacted policies to maintain the territory within the USSR. One of the continual problems was that some republics and the Ukraine was to the fore, was that its peasant farmers were reluctant to accept the principle of collective farming which was being imposed from Moscow. The result was that there was near total collapse of harvests, leading to starvation of the Ukrainian population and high death rates. Ukrainian nationalism was exploited by the Third Reich.Hitler recognised that the area would be the grain source of his Greater German Reich and although signalling his intention to grant the Ukraine, independence after a Russian defeat,had no such intentions.His primary motivation was to mobilise Ukrainian manpower in the service of the Reich.Ukrainian nationalists for their part welcomed the invader whose they saw as liberators These defectors were never able to return to the Ukraine after the war but found safe havens as DPs in Western Europe.On the other hand, Ukrainians found that their German rulers were no different and sometimes worse than Stalin's rule when the likes of Himmler discharged his particular brand of National Socialism.. Conflict still erupts from time to time between the two countries....the last being a few years ago when the gas sales from Russia to Ukraine soured when Russia insisted that the Ukraine had not paid their invoices. As regards Stalin's victims,those as a result of poor harvests/imposition of collective farming and those on account of state terror.Nikolai Tolstoy's Stalin's Secret War covers the subject well but does not return a total figure of victims. But the figure for the WW2 conflict between Russia and Germany,the Great Patriot War, are in access of 25-27 million dead....also this was revised in the late 1950s,marking it up to 35 million or thereabouts after census information was reviewed. I would think that it would be hard to differentiate Russian regime related deaths against those caused in the conflict with Germany.
good day za rodinu.yesterday,08:42pm.re:who caused the greatest loss of life.i have read your link(this)and the figures of the dead are so great it bogles the mind,but what got me when looking at your link.was people walking by in the street past dead body's from starvasion.they .the people walking by looked o.k.so it poses a question.what have been eating.or who have they been eating.not a very happy thread but real,all tha best bernard85
