Who Killed More: Hitler, Stalin, or Mao?

[lordsummerisle]

Lengthy article that some will find controversial I'm sure...

http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/02/05/who-killed-more-hitler-stalin-or-mao/

[sfwriter]

1. Stalin wanted to kill more Hitler, but ultimately Hitler killed more Hitler.

In my head I heard, "Who killed more Hitler, Stalin or Mao?"

So my answer to that unasked question is, Stalin wanted to kill more Hitler, but ultimately Hitler killed all the Hitler.

[Dr. Strange]

2. The lack of Oxford comma strikes again!

[SCantiGOP]

8. Wow

One of the options here is literally a literal case of a grammar Nazi.

[John Fante]

3. Mao by far.

Even the lowest estimates I've seen (49 million) place him way above Stalin and Hitler.

[First Speaker]

5. Hitler is close, if some of the recent Russian casualty estimates for the War are accurate...

...I've seen numbers for Soviet war dead as high as 40,000,000 million! Even if you subtract the military casualties, that's still 30,000,000 or so civilian deaths. Add the Poles, the other deaths in Occupied Europe, and of course the Jews, and Adolf is competitive. And there is something about the *quality* of Nazi murder that just makes it seem worse. Even Robert Conquest, the famous historian of Communism and its crimes, thought that he just "felt" that Hitler was more evil than the others...

[Dan]

4. So much there

- I would have qualified it with questions like... who killed more of their own people via their actions using the tools of the government; which person actions resulted in the most deaths during their reign; which of the three leaders impacted the world more;

But Hitler does deserve his special place in history - hard to beat 50 - 60 million dead.

[Snackshack]

6. Mao.

[Beakybird]

7. No cat killed more mice than Chairman Meow

[FactyDude]

9. Long time DU-Surfer, signed up for just this thread.

A topic of interest of mine for many years.

Between Stalin and Hitler, it's Stalin and it's not even close.

The author of the piece looks at the early purges and the Ukraine "famine" and the multiple Polish massacres but little is written about the post-ww2 period.

Germans are (in)famous for their record keeping and the 1,000,000 number of POW's dying in Soviet custody is certainly correct compared to the Soviets ludicrous estimate of 360,000.

But we're just getting started.

Near the end of the world, Stalin and the Allies executed the largest Ethnic cleansing in World History. Between 12-14 Million civilians were forcibly uprooted from the Sudatenland and Eastern Europe and scattered in the wind, into concentration camps and work camps.

As an example, MANY enemy combatants and civilians from German-allied countries and/or German occupied countries were sent East to Soviet work camps and farms. These people lost their citizenship and became people without a nation. MILLIONS died in Soviet farms and camps in the 1940's and 1950's... Finally in the 1960's Pressure from the West established lists of survivors and countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech, Hungary and Poland worked to supply citizenship documents to bring them home. Many simply died in the Soviet Union because they had no way of proving citizenship to return home.

The Soviet RAPE of Central and Eastern Europe was both literal and figurative...

[Rhiannon12866]

10. Thank you for this detailed look at the history and welcome to DU!

I visited the USSR in the late '80s - I went with my grandmother who was part of a peace group and we visited historic sites and met up with other peace groups and our "sister town," Krasnaya Polyana - 2 1/2 hours up into the Caucasus Mountains.

We also had the unique opportunity to visit what was then Soviet Georgia and I was baffled by all the statues of Stalin that we saw. Anti USSR rhetoric was palpable there since they were actually an occupied country. So I asked why there were so many Stalin statues since he was out of favor in the USSR proper. But we forget that Stalin was a Georgian by birth - and I was told that he remained popular there because he killed so many Russians.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

12. For a good yet harrowing read on Hitler and Stalin, I highly recommend Timothy Snyders Bloodlands

Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 40s was literally hell on earth. The bloody carnage those two men did to that region was absolutely incredible.