68 years ago today, the largest war in history began

[Josquin des Prez]

Except of course for those members of their own nation who happened to disagree with Nazism.

How many Germans did the Nazi kill?

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

How many Germans did the Nazi killed?

I don't know precisely, but the first victims of the Nazis were their political opponents, plenty of whom were ethnically German. In fact the first concentration camp, Dachau, was specifically set up to deal with political opponents and anti-Nazi dissidents.

[Florestan]

Here I will be lazy, and link to a short article I wrote several years ago, dealing with these particular issues:

http://www.nypress.com/article-8535-lessons-from-around-the-bloc.html

I agree. In the same vein of comparing dictatorships I draw your attention to the outrage Solzhenitsyn caused among Leftists in 1974: when visiting Francoist Spain, he said something to the effect that had the Soviet citizens enjoyed the freedom the Spaniards did enjoy, they would have been much better off. He was blasted for being a fascist --- yet he was just honest and plain right.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

The Franco analogy is interesting, because as I understand it there is still a significant amount of "Franco nostalgia" in Spain, analogous to the situation in Eastern Europe. One of my favorite books is My Last Sigh, the autobiography of the film director Luis Buñuel. In it he recounts how he saw a group of left-wing demonstrators walking through Madrid (this was about 1980) carrying signs that said "Contra Franco estábamos mejor!" ("We were better off against Franco!"). I particularly like the use of "against," implying that opposition to Franco gave their lives some meaning.

[Wendell_E]

How many Germans did the Nazi killed?

165,000 (or more) German Jews, just for a start.

[DFO]

165,000 (or more) German Jews, just for a start.

Only the "euthanasia" killings are estimated in between 65 and 90.000.
That includes wounded and crippled soldiers.

[Josquin des Prez]

I don't know precisely, but the first victims of the Nazis were their political opponents, plenty of whom were ethnically German. In fact the first concentration camp, Dachau, was specifically set up to deal with political opponents and anti-Nazi dissidents.

Yes, but they were doing it for the benefit of Germany. This is the difference between the far right and the far left spectrum. The first brings order and strength for the group using any means necessary (including mass murder), the latter seeks the dissolution of oder by any means necessary (including mass murder). We already know that morality in either case is not a factor (that's the very definition of an "extremist" ideology after all), but both Nazism and Communism offer interesting psychological insights into the nature of those who ascribe to right or left ideologies. It also explains why conservatism is becoming stronger in Europe just as the EU is attempting to dismantle all European nations and cultures in favor of a globalist, multicultural "free for all". Fellini did an interesting study of the events that led to the wars of the 20th century in Prova d'Orchestra, and i have a feeling history is about to repeat itself. Right wing extremism is a response to left wing extremism.

[bwv 1080]

I don't know precisely, but the first victims of the Nazis were their political opponents, plenty of whom were ethnically German. In fact the first concentration camp, Dachau, was specifically set up to deal with political opponents and anti-Nazi dissidents.

don't forget the euthanasia programs - the nazis began by murdering disabled children

[bwv 1080]

How many Germans did the Nazi kill?

you can start with about 250,000 German Jews

[Coopmv]

You forgot:

3) The Chinese Communists themselves recognized the system wasn't working, and decided to liberalize the economy without liberalizing the political structure. (Had they done it the other way around, they would be where the Soviet Communists are now.)

Sure.  But Gorbachev recognized that too.  Without Hong Kong or Taiwan, China would NEVER reach the position it is in today.  There is no such thing as free capital.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Sure.  But Gorbachev recognized that too. 

Gorbachev recognized that too, but followed a completely different policy. From early on, he liberalized the political environment, while only making a few half-baked adjustments to economic policy. The result was economic decline and political collapse.

Deng Xiaoping did the opposite. He liberalized the economy, while retaining tight controls on politics and allowing no challenges to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. The result was economic growth and something that looks like political stability, at least from where I sit.

[Fëanor]

Excellent book --
http://www.amazon.com/Churchill-Hitler-Unnecessary-War-Britain/dp/030740515X

...

Hummm ... I don't generally look to Pat Buchanan for helpful insights.

As juveniles I think most of us have wondered, 'Would it not have been a good idea to let the Nazi and Soviet Communists fight it out?'  I believe the answer is 'No' because one or the other brutal dictatorship would have totally dominated all of Europe, (not just half of it which was the actual result), and that would not have boded well for the rest of the world.

[Josquin des Prez]

Hummm ... I don't generally look to Pat Buchanan for helpful insights.

As juveniles I think most of us have wondered, 'Would it not have been a good idea to let the Nazi and Soviet Communists fight it out?'  I believe the answer is 'No' because one or the other brutal dictatorship would have totally dominated all of Europe, (not just half of it which was the actual result), and that would not have boded well for the rest of the world.

Yeah, i suppose the rest of the world is boding fairly well now that Europe is dying.

[Fëanor]

Yeah, i suppose the rest of the world is boding fairly well now that Europe is dying.

Major parts of it not so badly.  Read, for example, Farid Zakaria's book, The Post American World.

On the other hand Europe is far from dead.  I'm actually more concerned about the United States than Europe where the rest of the world is concern, but then the U.S. isn't dead yet either.

The biggest problems of the world today are climate change and the accelerating scarcity of exploitable natural resources.

[Coopmv]

Gorbachev recognized that too, but followed a completely different policy. From early on, he liberalized the political environment, while only making a few half-baked adjustments to economic policy. The result was economic decline and political collapse.

Deng Xiaoping did the opposite. He liberalized the economy, while retaining tight controls on politics and allowing no challenges to the Communist Party's monopoly on power. The result was economic growth and something that looks like political stability, at least from where I sit.

You overlooked the importance of the overseas wealthy Chinese businessmen who were instrumental in starting China down the capitalist road.  Russia had nothing comparable - St Petersburg was not exactly Hong Kong.  Deng Xiaoping was only successful in liberalizing the economy because he convinced the overseas Chinese businessmen to invest in China.  Those businessmen struck deals with American companies to provide cheap labor and inexpensive goods.  Before long, WalMart followed and many multi-national American corporations started to set up shops in China as well and the rest is history.

[Coopmv]

Yeah, i suppose the rest of the world is boding fairly well now that Europe is dying.

Where is the evidence?  I would not go that far though Europe does have its shares of problems.

[Sarastro]

there are plenty of people in various countries who lived under the system itself who find things to praise about it.

The director of Wiener Staatsoper, Ian Hollender, who grew up in Timisoara (Romania), says he would prefer Stalin to Bush. But overall he seems to have pro-Soviet views and is not particularly thrilled with the American values. So, he is clearly biased, and we wouldn't trust him.

[MishaK]

Globalization is a very brutal game.  Most western industrilaized nations are now feeling the effect of job losses and decline in living standard ...

That has nothing to do with globalization. It has everything to do with the sudden collapse of a repressive empire that left a kleptocracy and virtually no civil society in its wake. For the avoidance of doubt: note that I am not saying that globalization is uniformly great, I am just correcting the warped causality you ascribe in your statement.

True. However, I didn't imply that Nazism was somehow more humane than Communism, but just that, history being as it was, bottom line the death toll of Communism is heavier than that of Nazism.

You still can't compare the two because Nazism at its root was a suicidally military expansionist system that was unsustainable even in the short term, whereas Soviet communism was a new brutal face for an old empire and its main objective was to keep the elites in power for as long as possible. The death toll numbers are meaningless in any case. The number of killed says nothing about the level of daily suffering of the individual, says nothing about the loss of dignity. That sort of ranking only invites the sort of revisionism that seeks to reduce those numbers as if that makes any difference either.

Poland or Hungary or Czechoslovakia or Yugoslavia were, economically speaking, better off than Romania, Bulgaria or Albania and the cult of the party and its leader never attained the delirious and megalomaniac level attained in the latter countries. I am not sure about repression, though --- I suspect it was just as tough.

Well, Yugoslavia was completely different as it wasn't part of the Warsaw Pact. Repression was very brutal in the early years of the regime when the interior ministry forces systematically tried to eliminate anyone who was associated with either the Serbian royalist Četniks or the Croatian fascist Ustaše who both fought the Communist Partizans (and each other) during the brutal civil war that raged mostly in Bosnia during the war. There were dispossessions of industrialists and large landowners and the like and repression continued against anyone who voiced any secessionist, nationalist, royalist etc. sentiment. In the early years of the regime public religious worship was restricted, if not outright forbidden. But that became quite loose very quickly. E.g. my mom recalls that in the early 50s when she was a kid she could not tell anyone in school that her family celebrated its patron saint day (the biggest Serbian orthodox holiday) for fear of reprisals against her family. But a few years later, it had become common practice that you would announce at work in advance that you would be 'out sick' on a particular date, and that meant that that person would be celebrating patron saint's day on that date and that everyone was invited to the party. Tito broke with Stalin in 1948 (and the reason he could do so was that he had such an effective secret police that they managed to corner the KGB!) and Yugoslavia was no longer part of the Cominform and never became part of the Warsaw Pact. It was open to trade and tourism with the West, while curiously also being open to tourism and trade with much of the neighboring Warsaw Pact countries. So in sum, while there was very heavy repression in the early years, from the 50s onwards life in Yugoslavia was several notches above that in most Warsaw Pact countries. It was still run by incompetent, inefficient, abusive idiots who set the country up for violent disintegration and you still had to watch what you were saying. But it wasn't Soviet Russia by a long shot.

The real point is that by acknowledging the fact that the USSR is almost entirely responsible for destroying Germany's military, the whole narrative of WW2 changes.  No longer can it be spun as a triumph of "citizen-soldiers" mustered from freedom-loving liberal democracies over totalitarian oppression. Rather it is a sordid struggle between two more or less equally brutal totalitarian systems, one of which we allied ourselves with for self-defense and then engaged in a permanent war footing for 45 years, which created (at least in the US) a bloated military-industrial complex that now has to continually find new threats to justify its existence.  

I largely agree with this. The contributions of Soviet (i.e. not exclusively Russian) soldiers is very much under-emphasized in Western historiography. But it would be going a little too far to say that the USSR is 'almost entirely responsible' for the destruction of the Nazi regime. The main credit goes to the Nazis themselves for a patently idiotic war strategy. Their rational objective always the fertile plains of the Ukraine. But in their megalomania they lost sight of that objective very quickly. Had they just occupied and held onto the Ukraine for a few years, they could have starved Russia into submission. The attacks on England and France were just an invitation to be defeated by otherwise uninvolved Western powers who probably wouldn't have lifted a finger to save Eastern Europe otherwise; Nobody needed to waste men and materiel over a bit of useless desert in North Africa; and the idea of marching to Moscow... well, let's just say Napoleon sends his greetings; finally: which moron bothers to invade the Balkans? What was that good for? Nobody with half a brain and with all the technological superiority of Nazi Germany would have fought a war that stupid.

Secondly, while the USSR certainly exacted the heaviest toll on the Wehrmacht, the ultimate invasion of Germany proper would not have succeeded at least at that pace had Germany not already been bombed to bits by the RAF and USAF and had Hitler not wasted a whole bunch of units on the Western, Italian, Balkan and African fronts.

You forgot:

3) The Chinese Communists themselves recognized the system wasn't working, and decided to liberalize the economy without liberalizing the political structure. (Had they done it the other way around, they would be where the Soviet Communists are now.)

Bingo!

[MishaK]

Yes, but they were doing it for the benefit of Germany.

OK, this post is so fecally plenary that it requires more patient dissection. You know, if you delimit so narrowly the group for whose benefit you are supposed ruling, then any repressive regime is beneficial, for it always benefits at least the clique in charge and their friends. Sure, the Nazis benefited Germany... that is, if you don't include in your definition of 'Germany' anyone with physical or mental handicaps, Jews (who had fought for Germany in WWI!), anyone with a different political opinion, anyone who doesn't want to submit to 'Gleichschaltung', anyone who disagrees with the Nazis' boneheaded war strategy, all the young Germans the Nazis sent to the front as pure cannon fodder who were forced to fight pointless and unwinnable battles to the last man in the final months of war at the threat of a death penalty for desertion, etc. Sure, they benefited Germany by starting a multi front war that inevitably resulted in a loss of traditional German homelands in both the east and the west and the total destruction of a vast percentage of Germany's architectural, sculptural and artistic heritage. My, what a benefit it was, indeed!

This is the difference between the far right and the far left spectrum. The first brings order and strength for the group using any means necessary (including mass murder), the latter seeks the dissolution of oder by any means necessary (including mass murder).

This is nonsense. Both rely on violence to suppress dissent and achieve a redistribution of wealth, either from minorities and neighbors to the elite, or from the wealthy elites of the previous regime to the new elites. Both bring order in a limited sense, as long as the regime is capable of enforcing order by violent means. It is incorrect to say that Communism seeks the dissolution of order. Both fascism and communism seek to dissolve the existing order and replace it with their own. While utopian communism dreams of a final stage of ultimate equality without much of a state-enforced order, that is not what communist regimes that actually existed ever were about. As the late Goerge Kennan said, "the thing about the historical inevitability of the final stage of Communism is that there is no hurry about it". In other words, while the Socialist elites were in power, they had no incentive whatsoever to hasten their demise by actually creating the kind of communism envisioned by Marx. Thus, the sort of historic communist dictatorships of the USSR, Maoist China and their satellites was never systemically geared toward an actual achievement of ultimate communism, but was instead always geared towards the preservation of their empire and the preservation of power of the existing elites. In that sense it is no different at all from fascism. The true difference between Nazism (not generic fascism) and communism is that Nazism was from the outset an explicitly expansionist militaristic beast that had its eyes on the resources of its neighbors. This is not to say that the Soviet Union did not have appetite for control of its neighbors, but the Nazi regime was uniquely geared towards war and indeed started a world war within less than a decade of assuming power.

We already know that morality in either case is not a factor (that's the very definition of an "extremist" ideology after all), but both Nazism and Communism offer interesting psychological insights into the nature of those who ascribe to right or left ideologies.

Pray tell, what could you possibly mean by that?

It also explains why conservatism is becoming stronger in Europe just as the EU is attempting to dismantle all European nations and cultures in favor of a globalist, multicultural "free for all".

Except that it isn't and that the EU is not doing any such thing. Your ideological blinders are blocking your view once more. You have to be exceptionally myopic to imagine the EU to be such an animal. All the EU is is an attempt to level the economic playing field, standardize laws and give a group of relatively small countries better political and economic bargaining power, while joining them in a common cause which keeps them at peace with each other. The EU subsidizes so many efforts to preserve cultural heritage that your statement is beyond absurd.

Fellini did an interesting study of the events that led to the wars of the 20th century in Prova d'Orchestra, and i have a feeling history is about to repeat itself. Right wing extremism is a response to left wing extremism.

Except that there is no actual left wing extremism worth speaking of in Europe today. You make it seem that leftist extremism is the cause and right-wing extremism the Pavlovian reaction to it. That is utter nonsense. Firstly, there hasn't been any serious left-wing extremism in Europe for the past thirty years or so. It disappeared once the last RAF and Red Brigades were locked up or disappeared never to be heard from again. Secondly, the rise of Hitler was no reaction to left wing extremism, but a reaction to the humiliation of WWI and the subsequent French occupation of the Rhine and Alsace and the economic crisis caused by the reparations payments. Yes, the Nazis were also anticommunist, but this was done in order to co-opt the industrial elites into siding with their cause. In many other parts of the world, leftist extremism was a reaction to brutal colonialism and a method for obtaining foreign sponsorship for a war of liberation, yet contrary to your hypothesis it did not necessarily provoke a fascist backlash.

The right wing extremism we see today is a reaction to structural economic change. It is mainly centered in rural regions that have suffered from what the French call the éxode rural, the movement of populations from declining rural areas to the cities. Often women leave small towns in greater numbers, leaving disproportionately more frustrated young males behind. In Germany it is exacerbated by a lack of education among those who grew up under Communism and never really properly studied the rise of Hitler. This social stratum provides a hotbed of dissatisfied youth with little opportunity. I did a study of right-wing extremism in Europe a few years ago and the paradoxical result was that the neo-fascists are particularly strong in rural areas that actually have very few foreigners. Most skinheads have had far too little interaction with foreigners to justify their hatred. Goes to show that scapegoats are all the better, the less you actually know about them.

[Sarastro]

The UK went to war because Germany invaded Poland and in the end, Poland was traded away into a slavery they possibly could not easily distinguish from the Nazi one in terms of the lack of freedom and misery caused.

It is called Western Betrayal

Western betrayal or Yalta betrayal are terms often used in many Eastern and Central European countries but especially in Poland and the Czech Republic which refers to the foreign policy of several Western countries, which violated allied pacts and agreements during the period from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 through World War II and to the Cold War, as rooted in hypocrisy and betrayal.

The "betrayal" refers to the fact that the western Allies—in spite of having promoted democracy and self-determination, signing pacts and forming military alliances prior and during World War II—nonetheless betrayed their Central European allies by abandoning these pacts, for example by not preventing Nazi Germany from invading and occupying Czechoslovakia (Munich Betrayal) or abandoning its Polish ally during the Invasion of Poland (1939) and 1944 Warsaw Uprising. Western powers also signed the Yalta agreement and after the World War II did nothing or very little to prevent these states from falling under the influence and control of Soviet communism. In addition, during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, Hungary received neither military nor moral support from the Western powers during the uprising, which was eventually suppressed by the Soviet Army. The same scenario was repeated in 1968 when communist armies of Warsaw Pact nations led by the Soviet Army invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring changes in the governing Communist system.

Though I wouldn't blame Churchill or FDR for their "cowardice" in Yalta, I am surprised to know that none of the Western countries intervened with the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. It was plain violation of the country's sovereignty and the human rights. From very recently Stalinism is officially recognized as a crime against the humanity (it was on BBC news a month ago), though sometimes it seems to me that he was the only one to confront Hitler. Thankfully, they are both dead. What we can do now is to respect the victims of the war and those who died fighting for freedom. It is all over, and now I am more concerned about current events, such as the war in Iraq.

And again I see Florestan confusing socialism and communism with Stalinism. Ugh, let me write something on it.