The other major emotional level of Nazis = Most Evil, is the systematic and documented way they carried out their atrocities.
It is not just the allied pictures of the victims, but also the actual records of the Nazis that condemn them to a spot below even Stalin and his Gulags. The Nazis brought a machinelike, inhuman efficiency to their mass slayings and their form of evil. Stalin was in honesty probably just as bad as Hitler was, but the Nazis methodology was more sinister. Judging evil has to be an emotional response, does it not?
Well I think the Nazis still win for overall effort.
Plus to a certain extent we see Africa and Cambodia as primitive, developing cultures. So to a certain extent we write off the evilness of their genocides as “them uncivilized natives don’t know no better”.
Germany was a modern, first world nation. Not only did they know better, they went about planning genocide and world domination to a meticulous level of detail that one generally only finds in fiction.
Not to defend Stalin as he is certainly a runner up, but at least his evil was driven by pragmatic self-interest. Hitler’s was driven by paranoid fantasy.
Plus, the Nazis dressed the part. The Rwandans don’t have the flair of the Nazi war machine - the black uniforms, the massive ralleys, the Swatztika flag everywhere. Not only did the Nazis set the standard for evil, they set the style.
To some extent, yes, judging evil is a highly subjective matter. I’m merely trying to suggest some reasons as to why many people see the Nazis as being worse than the Communists.
German documentation of Nazi atrocities was captured and published after the war, and used in highly publicized war crimes trials. Soviet documentation of Stalin’s atrocities didn’t come to light until after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and almost none of it has yet received wide publication. What’s more, very few Communists have ever actually been placed on trial for crimes against humanity, and even when they did, the trials didn’t receive nearly as much publicity as those at Nuremburg. (For that matter, many Japanese war criminals, e.g. the perpetrators of the atrocities at Unit 731, were never brought to trial primarily for political reasons.)
Stalin honestly believed he was serving the cause of communism and helping to bring about the birth of a new world. Many if not most of the people he killed were not in any way a threat to him. Shooting from the hip, I’d say he was at least as paranoid as Hitler.
Well, there was a lot of pageantry in the Soviet Union, too: massive, “spontaneous” demonstrations, parades, flag-waving, etc.
You’re right about Stalins paranoia. But Hitler still wins because he wasn’t trying to bring about the birth of a new world. He was all about making the world Germany.
An instantly recognizable leader (Hitler) who was evil, powerful, charismatic, nuts, and had that funny little mustache, making him ripe for caricature
We have film footage and other visible souvenirs of them being evil
It’s noncontroversial to say they were evil: worldwide opinion is about as close to unanimous as it can get that they were evil
Many books have been written, movies made, etc. about them
We can safely hate them without looking like we’re hating any national or ethnic group of people who are still around today (unless you count neonazis who choose to identify themselves with them)
Similarly, anybody putting up a candidate for Worse Than Hitler™ is, at least by implication, going to take it slightly easier on Hitler. And that dog, ethically speaking, don’t hunt.
Not to the victim, of course. The Nazis rounded up people for the express purpose of exterminating them, but the Soviets’ deaths were typically a result of poor living conditions in the work camps. Somehow, purposeful killing seems worse to me than secondary deaths.
Although I suppose the opposite case could be made, arguing that slow torture ending in near-certain death is worse than fast killing.
Yes. There are other people deserving some recognition on the level of depravity they have aspired to and reached.
Does anybody get taught in school about the medical experiments and torture on Chinese and other prisoners of war by the Japanese? They were as bad as or worse than what was occurring under Hitler. At the level of depravity obtained by either group, it’s impossible to declare one or the other the most depraved. I read an article yesterday, about how World War II started. Hitler became the leader of Germany, because of the fear of Socialists taking over control of the countries. The Germans were to determined to keep the Socialists from destroying the other countries of Europe. He was the head of state for a long period of time before the fighting of WW II started. The people of Germany were told that Nationalists (terrorists) from Hungary had massacred residents of a border town in Germany. The Socialists, Democrates, and Nazi parties in Hungary were in violent opposition before the story was released. The Nazi government used this untrue news release to panic the Germans into starting their campain of war. It sounds a bit like Weapons Of Mass Distruction doesn’t it? The teachers never mentioned that, when I went to school. They never mentioned all the gruesome experiments of the Japanese during WW II.
I don’t have the article I first read on the Japanese attrocities. It was a lot better in details than this one.
“Japan and Japanese citizens, mostly military forces, carried out a campaign of terror during World War II that is unsurpassed in bestiality and savagery in modern times. On top of combat losses, Asian and Allied nations lost millions of non-combatant dead to all causes: bombardment of cities, slave labor, massacres, summary executions, medical experiments, germ and gas warfare, beheading, beating and rape, stabbing, gun shot, hanging, torture, boiling alive, impaling on bayonets, burning alive, starvation, medical neglect, etc.” Original page of excerpt.
I think that in terms of successful evil, Stalin ranks above Hitler. After all while Hitler had much worse plans for the world he didn’t have the political or military means to carry them out. My Uncle Fritz can scribble a feverish plan in his mother’s basement to kill off the entire human race in woodchippers and we wouldn’t remember him as the standard of evil to be compared to.
Stalin was more successful in his evil because he had entirely unchecked power for decades, whereas until very late in the war Germany’s traditions and politics checked Hitler’s desire for absolute power.
Whereas if it were Stalin and Stalin’s political structure in Germany’s shoes (and assuming they could be militarily successful,) I’d bet it wouldn’t be just the Jews we’d be remembering but also the Holocaust of the (rest of the) Poles at the very least and maybe the French, Beneluxians, and Danish. And all ex-German-Nazis (I don’t know how many ex-Communists were killed by Hitler but I’m sure Stalin could and would have as many millions of ex-Nazis killed as he could lay his hands on.)
No, and the contrasts aren’t even that stark. Plenty of people died from working themselves to death at Nazi concentration camps. For the most part, until the part of the war where they realized the end was coming, they only gassed people who they decided wouldn’t be good workers. Like a few of us have said, there are a lot of good reasons that the Nazis are “the standard.” But there’s something irksome about the emphasis that places on ‘style.’
The term “Nazi” encompasses racial genocide, slave labor, and world conquest. It is the trifecta of organized evil. The iconic images associated with the word are too numerous to list.
Good point here, and in various other posts about why Hitler transcends Stalin as a symbol.
Speaking personally, I think it’s true that Stalin was just as crazy and evil and probably killed more people – and I don’t hesitate to use him as a negative example ocassionally. But IMHO, the crucial difference, although subtle, is that although Stalin was just as paranoid and murderous, his was a more personal, self-centered evil. He removed threats and challenges to his own reign, and seems not to have seriously considered what would follow him. Hideous, and on a large scale, but a flavor of evil we’re woefully familiar with.
Hitler removed or tried to remove all classes of potential threats, including entire ethnic groups, the Slavic East, Communism, homosexuality, the physically infirm, and so on. In some cases (the infirm for example) these people were not perceived as immediate threats because of their actions (or his fantasies about their actions) but merely defined as threats in a mental exercise of derivation from first principles. Actual evil, but backed up by an evil philosophy, not mere personal aggrandizement.
Hitler was setting up a visionary structure created, and to be sustained, by unlimited exercise of the worst abuses of power imaginable. He intended it to long outlast his own demise (the “thousand-year Reich”).
Not MORE evil than Stalin’s evil; not with a higher BODYCOUNT; but a more AMBITIOUS evil.
It feels vaguely different in quality, if not a new thing under the sun.
I agree that what the nazis did was “evil” by most standards, but basically was just genocide. That happens all the time, though not on the same scale, in Africa, and it has happened many times throughout the history of the world.
Is it just the nearness in the timeline to us, the scale at which it happened, or a combination of both which leads them to be the poster-children of evil? I dunno, but what sickens me the most, is those Americans that accept that what Hitler did was wrong, and without blinking can say “we should just kill all them A-rabs.”
There were labor camps and there were extermination camps, such as Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. See Aktion Reinhard for more information. The only purpose of the extermination camps was mass murder on an industrial scale.
Ummm… don’t you mean the faked attack on a german radio station by “Polish” (in reality, german soldiers dressed up as Poles) on Sept. 1st, used as reason to attack Poland? Hungary wasn’t used as pretense for starting WWII, but lots of false stories about atrocities from Poles against Germans living in Poland circulated in German newspapers in August and Sept. of 1939 to prepare the population.
I think there are two problems with using Hitler and the Nazis as ultimate standard of evil:
by comparing your enemies so casually (Godwin’s law, or calling people “Grammar nazis” for being strict on spelling) to the Nazis, the evilness of the actual deed gets diminshed. Also, it’s an ultimate rhetoric sledgehammer, because everybody is opposed to the Nazis. By calling somebody a second Hitler, it sounds acceptable to use every means possible to stop that person. It’s a way of demonizing your opponents.
In movies, whenever Nazis (or the second evil, Communist Russians) show up, because Nazis symbolise evil, the viewer has no problem with the hero killing the enemy by the dozens, because “all Nazis are evil”. That not every German at that time was a truly evil Nazi of the size of Himmler or Goering, that not every soldier belonged to the Gestapo, but many were just Wehrmacht soldiers, and not involved in atrocities, that (in 1945, when the “Volkssturm” was called) many of the soldiers were teenagers sincerely believing that they were only defending their home country and the womenfolk - all this is never adressed or a concern for the heroes. Nazis are evil, so they can be gunned down.
Coupled with tendency Nr. 1, to label every enemy a Nazi, I find this worrisome.
Hitler, Nazism and the like were utterly evil, but were they as evil and depraved as John Wayne Gacy ?
Even Hitler is unlikely to be accused of killing and torture merely for sexual gratification, the differance is scale only.
There are plenty more who have killed simply for pleasure such as Gilles de Rais, and Vlad Tepes must come very high up the list for mindless murder and torture.
