Who was worse, Hitler or Stalin? It sounds like the sort of question that two teenagers might ask in a debate over comic book supervillains. And yet it is an issue that historians are forced to treat with deadly seriousness—not least because there are extremely delicate national sentiments involved.
In western Europe it is Hitler who generally wins the prize. The killing factories that were set up in his name at Auschwitz and Treblinka are today seen as the apogee of evil in the 20th century. In much of eastern Europe, by contrast, Stalin is sometimes considered the greater monster. The Poles and Ukrainians in particular point out that Stalinist repression, unlike Nazi repression, lasted not years but decades; and that Russia, unlike Germany, has never tried to atone for its sins.
Meanwhile, in the European Union, there is a tendency to try and pour oil on troubled waters by fudging the issue. In an attempt to balance the memories of the east with those of the west, Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes are now routinely lumped together under the single label of “totalitarianism”—the implication being that they were essentially the same as each other.
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