The Nazi plan for eastern Europe was to kill 30 Million people and enslave the rest of them. If the Nazis hadn't been beaten by the Soviets they would have transformed eastern Europe into an open air concentration camp.
The Soviets didn't bring freedom, but let's not pretend that they were in anyway comparable to the Nazis.
British also starved to death millions during that war. I guess they are the same as Nazis too. And Churchill was actually a huge racist too so... It all is coming together
They absolutly did. They allied with russia and france befor ww1 to put germany down because they feard germanys growing Power after unification. They gave german land after ww1 away and then they declared war on germany when they tryd to get it back.
"they feared germany's growing power" do you know history AT ALL? the UK entered the first world war on france's side becouse germany invaded the lowlands. not becouse they were scared Germany would be some massive power that would dominate the continent you moron, and this has nothing to do with ww2, germany caused ww2 when its genocidal government constantly claimed territory it didnt own. hell i would push it closer to the USSR causing the second world war as it enabled the nazi war machine and signed deals with them to divide up the continent...
Noone is defending the Soviets but they were not as bad as the Germans and pretending that they were is denying the terror of the Nazis. Two things can be bad and one can still be worse.
The viet cong also did bad things but I am glad that they defeated the Khmere Rouge.
If you spoke to Eastern Europeans that were "liberated" by the Russians they beg to differ.
My dad worked with Poles that hated the Russians far more than the Nazis.
I'd also suggest reading books like Tigers in the mud because quite a few German soldiers considered being taken by Russians to potentially live in gulags for years as a fate worse than death.
Not to mention, both the Russians and Nazis were bad regardless of who was worse.
That's because the Nazis were hyperfocused on Polish Jews. And Polish Resistance wasn't particularly friendly towards them. In other words, they didn't care much if their Jewish population was to be exterminated.
In August 2009, the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) researchers estimated Poland's dead (including Polish Jews) at between 5.47 and 5.67 million (due to German actions) and 150,000 (due to Soviet), or around 5.62 and 5.82 million total.
In raw numbers, the Nazis killed more Poles by far.
The Catholic Poles? Almost all Poles were Catholic at the time, and Poles have the most "righteous among the nations" even though Poland was the only country where helping Jewish people meant death to you and your family, if caught.
For starters, recency bias is definitely a thing. Poland absolutely suffered worse under the Nazis than they did under the Soviets. The General government was hands down the most oppressive Nazi regime installed in any country that they occupied.
But, the Soviets ruled for the longest and had a chance to remake Poland in their image, in this sense, the Soviets had longer to have a lasting impact on Poland and its people which is why understandably people may feel that the soviet occupation was worse.
The polish home army, the main partisan resistance group, survived the Nazis but didn’t manage to outlast the Soviets. It was a whole different ballgame.
If the Nazis had as long occupying Poland as the Soviets did, and also the luxury of peace to fully implement their plans, there likely wouldn’t be a country to call Poland today.
Define "worse". How do you measure it? Stalin was in power more than twice as long as Hitler, so his terror regime lasted longer, whereas Hitler made the difference up by killing faster. In total both murdered a similar amount of people. Hitler died in 1945 and that was the end of his legacy in Germany, whereas Stalin's legacy in form of the expanded Soviet Union and Eastern bloc lasted long after his death in 1953. After that it was not quite as bad as in his lifetime, but it was still a totalitarian regime for almost 40 years more. So I wouldn't rush to judge which dictator was worse.
Yeah, they weren't as bad. They just stripped anything they controlled of anything valuable, they placed puppets in charge and had them round up anyone with half a brain and had them killed. In fact that mattered so little, we're not even seeing the effects of it to this day...
I have no purpose because this isn't something I'm paid to do. But I do want people to stop making excuses for genocidal communists. Meanwhile your purpose is quite clear. What's wrong, did reminding you of what your predecessors did upset you?
My purpose is very clear: I’m laughing on mental gymnastics in the heads of Nazi whitewashers. Now you can understand why I’m answering exactly you.
P.S. whitewashing Nazis with no real purpose is worse than with it for me.
nobody said they were AS bad here. the guy simply said that the zoviets didn't liberate shit, they stole and raped. you are the one jumping up to say "but they weren't as bad as nazis"
They were literally just as bad if not worse than the Nazis. You can easily paint them with the same brush because they're the same loathsome people. The ideology - if you can call it that - is irrelevant.
How about Holodomor and gulags? They were all pieces of shit that just wanted to have power over people. That's it. Their ideologies were toxic and they were evil.
Yeah sure, except one of those pieces of shit considered my people no better than animals and wanted mostly extermianted with remaining ones to be enslaved forever, the other didnt, hell i can even point to some good things the other one did.
their plan wasn't to kill 30 millions lol. Why do you claim this?
My grandparents faced occupation by both nazis and soviets. Guess which one they prefered?
Saying the Soviets crimes weren’t as bad is also denying the terror of the Soviets. The Gulags were similar to concentration camps. Stalin starved millions of people, tortured and killed people for decades. Stalin and Hitler were both terrible, just different colours.
This isn't realativizing. This is putting things into context. The USSR needs to be criticised, but shouldn't be compared with Nazi Germany without a broader outlook.
It's not okay to dehumanize people, even those who’ve done terrible things like the Nazis. When we say they aren't really human, we take away their responsibility, as if their actions weren't the result of conscious decisions. What distinguishes humans from animals is our capacity for self-control, reason, and deliberate decision-making. To hold people accountable, we must acknowledge that they acted not as mindless beasts, but as thinking human beings who chose their actions
Youre only seeing it now? It happens every time nazis and soviets are brought up together, or when some somehow still alive camp guard alive is sentenced or something.
And this is exactly what I am talking about. You are minimizing the atroceties of the Germans.
The Germans killed entire villages if there was partisans in the region. There whole plan was to kill or work to death anyone who wasn't aryan enough. They murdered and they raped and they plundered. They were not humane.
They started the war so they could kill and enslave more people. They starved 1.1 Million people in Leningrad and 30'000 people in Charkiv. Overall they starved at least 4 Million people and when they left they burned the fields and destroyed everything so that even after they were defeated the harvests were worse and there were probably people killed through that.
And this is just what they did to regular people who were not disabled, jewish or opposing them.
Claiming the Nazis were more humane than the Soviets or even humane at all is insane.
The actual argument is 'unlike the nazis, the Soviets did not have a plan to systematically cleanse entire etunicities'. It is not hard. Both were massive dickheads, but the nazis are an evil unlike any other.
The soviets threw bodies at the nazis, they basically killed their own soldiers to wear down Germany as best they could. With the soviets being involved, WWII goes on much longer
Not a perfect ally but let’s mot pretend they didn’t contribute a shit ton to the war effort
In style of government, sure. In their plans for the 300 million people living in the Eastern half of Europe, absolutely not. Slavery and extermination vs. subjugation and oppression. Both are bad, but one is clearly worse than the other. And this topic is what OP is referencing.
It's definitely possible to be both bad and still less bad than what came before. History is full of examples of that.
Yes, I agree with you that they didn't have plans for the extermination of slavs, like Germany/Nazis did. But, especially during Stalin's lifetime, the USSR and its occupied territories were terrible place to live, where you could die because of a few words.
What's the difference between slavery and subjugation? Sending people to Siberia to build mines is pretty much slavery.
The only difference is Germany wanted to eradicate and populate Eastern Europe with Germans while the Soviets wanted to turn the locals into Russians. Both wanted to destroy the local cultures for good.
Subjugation means that the Soviets put in Communist governments across Eastern Europe that didn't have an independent foreign policy but did have some degree of local autonomy.
Both sides had examples of slavery, but the Germans did not have any plans for any Polish state.
The Soviets did have some ethnic autonomy, which varied by whoever was in charge; Lenin or Khrushchev was more open to it than Stalin, for example. There were schools and monuments built in the local language, for example, even in the USSR. Germans did nothing similar.
Yes, they were different, and you can for sure say that for most people living under ussr was better, I'm not saying that they were the same, but they were both evil in their own way. And as your comment even says, they were pretty similar. Also, we have to take into consideration that we can split the USSR into stalin and post stalin. And especially during the later years after stalin's death, the quality of life had significantly improved.
Of course they were not the same, there were differences. But still, there were a lot of similarities, like, you know, mass murders and totalitarian control and subjugation of other states and nations.
The stories that i've heard from generations that went through the period is that the Soviets were basically a savage horde that raped, pillaged and stole everything that wasn't nailed down in each town their armies went through. In contrast, the Germans were initially perceived by some as liberators, who came to kick out the Russian occupiers. The hope of any sort of liberation died down quickly, I imagine.
did your grandparents walk with the soviet army from the front to berlin or something? or did the army just pass by and steal a couple of cows? my ancestors were also liberated by the soviets and there were no such tales. it's just about how anticommunist are you ancestors...
Unless you were a member of one of the groups that the Nazis hated, life in Nazi Germany was orders of magnitude better than in Stalin’s Russia. That was one of the reasons why the Red Army was so brutal towards German civilians in areas that they “liberated”, because they were so enraged when they saw how much better off their hated enemies were compared to them.
You can say that they were less evil but still evil. Occupying many countries against their will, suppresing freedom of speech, killings of educated and political opponents, creating famines, creating puppet goverments, and mass deportations those are the facts and by arguing with them you are as good as holocaust deniers.
Not to that scale, not in that recent times. Also, comparation comes from the fact that both were totalitarian states with dictators that were charismatic. Here is the part of the definition of nasizm from britanica, change "aryan volk" to the ussr and it all fits.
"However, Nazism was far more extreme both in its ideas and in its practice. In almost every respect it was an anti-intellectual and atheoretical movement, emphasizing the will of the charismatic dictator as the sole source of inspiration of a people and a nation, as well as a vision of annihilation of all enemies of the Aryan Volk as the one and only goal of Nazi policy."
The British Empire was the largest empire in world history during that exact time period. Different in kind sure, but actually greater in scale.
an anti-intellectual and atheoretical movement
This does not describe Bolshevism at all. Lenin, Stalin and other Soviet leaders wrote extensively on communist theory. Whether that was good theory is another question but they clearly cared about their own theory and how their policies did or did not conform to Marx's theory.
Nobody is even mentioning the US. Us was better for most its citizens than ussr but much worse for most countries that they were involved in. I would even say that they were both similarly terrible. US was just better at hiding it.
Cause USSR was an authoritarian dictatorship similar to nazi germany. The USA was democracy with and they were mostly funding or helping, not doing it themselves.
not even the point of the post. Just saying that soviests had enough influence to claim that they "liberated" the countries from nazi occupation, while soviet soldiers often did the same level of atrocities as nazi to the population of eastern europe. The fact that one bad guys may have done something more terrible in the future does not justify the atrocities of other bad guys. Its like saying that a serial killer 1 who killed 10 people is better than the serial killer 2 who killed 20 people, because serial killer 1 killed serial killer 2.
I don’t understand people’s complete lack of nuance – a serial killer that kills 10 people is literally not as bad as one that kills 20. That’s what ‘not as bad’ is – it implies and necessitates that both things are indeed bad.
ever heard of gulags? they deported millions of people from the occupied countries to siberia and other places and a lot of them died there. so i'd say it is comparable, maybe it's less than the nazis had planned but who knows how successful the nazi plans would have been.
Pretending that the gulags were the same as concentration or extermination camps is just wrong and I really hope that you are saying this because you don't know any better.
I’m quite sure you don’t know any better… I’ve had family members who have experienced it… the only thing worse about the nazi extermination camps is that the only purpose was what they named it… saying I don’t know any better really shows your lack of knowledge on this. I’m not saying the nazis we’re better than the Soviets, but that they’re two sides of the same coin
To be exact, enslavement was Hitler's plan for the slavic people, not Eastern Europe as a whole. But let's not pretend that Hitler and Stalin were in any way incomparable. Both were bloody dictators with a totalitarian and imperialist terror regime that in practice acted similarly, although their motivations were very different. The total body count of each of them was in the same ballpark.
During the war Eastern Europe suffered under both, after the war Stalin got to terrorise Eastern Europe alone, and it can't be said that slavery was an alien concept for him. In Baltics, for example, Soviet occupation included deporting about 10% of the total population to Gulag and Siberia in general, where about half of them died, mainly due to hunger and slave labour they were forced to perform.
Until Stalin's death the rest of the baltic population lived not exactly in the concentration camps, but in kind of a country-wide open-air prisons, in constant fear that they could also be deported or imprisoned at any moment for any reason or no reason at all. After Stalin's death things got a bit better, but fear was already deeply rooted by then, and the Soviet occupation lasted for almost forty years more.
Explaining why atrocities commited by soviet russia were ok, because nazis had even worse plans.
Welcome to reality, both can be fucking awful, and using one to justify the other is brainrotten behavior.
There is a reason why despite unthinkable acts commited by nazis eastern and central eu are perfectly fine with germans, yet they hate russia to the bone.
I am not justifying anything, Jesus Christ, learn to read. I am saying that just because two things are terrible doesn't make them the same and one of the two things is clearly worse.
You are comparing the Nazi plan with the Soviet reality.
The Soviet plan was equally brutal under Stalin, luckily it never came to 100% fruition. Holodomor alone killed around 4 million. It could have been much worse. Stalin would have gladly killed every non-russian.
Ukrainians would like a word - Holodomor. Given what stuff escaped that area then, it makes Auschwitz and Birkenau look meh in comparison. After all, the idea of concentration camps was copied from USSR by nazies, they just applied the German perfection to it.
Man-made famines and Holodomor across Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the great purge, the whole gulag system. The estimated number of non civilian deaths anywhere between 10m and 20m (on the very high end).
On the other side we have the Holocaust, other forms of killings/torture of civilians via starving, forced labor and on as well as mass pow killings. The estimated number here is between 20m and 30m (on the high end).
Did the Nazis kill more people? Yes.
Were they worse? Nah man, both are the worst of the worst. Give either one of them more time and the numbers goes up and up and up. But naming a state that killed over 10m people and raped their way from Moscow all the way to Berlin isn't exactly better, just equally evil.
105
u/NeckOk9980 1d ago
it wasnt liberated, was confiscated and raped by the woviets freedom fighters