Hitler and Stalin

September 14, 2020
Historian Rees (The Holocaust) draws on eyewitness testimony to identify “key differences” between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in this informative yet somewhat skewed account. Stodgy bureaucrat Stalin was deeply committed to the Communist Party, according to Rees, while Hitler was a charismatic leader who regarded the National Socialist German Workers’ Party as “disposable.” Both leaders tried to build utopian societies (racist ideology shaped Hitler’s vision; Stalin’s was influenced by Marxism), yet Hitler’s tendency to self-deceive blinded him to crippling military losses, and Stalin’s growing paranoia sabotaged the Red Army, forcing 400,000 Russian soldiers into penal units and another 160,000 to their deaths as enemies of the state. Rees decisively interprets the thinking behind Hitler’s actions, including the decision to invade the Soviet Union, yet tends to speculate when it comes to Stalin’s strategies, concluding that it is “hard, if not impossible” to understand why Stalin proposed a military alliance with Britain and France, and offering “likely” reasons for why he miscalculated the 1939 invasion of Finland, which resulted in a humiliating loss for the Red Army. Despite the lack of balance, this richly detailed history powerfully documents “the destruction that tyrants with utopian visions can inflict upon the world.”

Starred review from October 1, 2020
A dual biography of two of history's most notorious dictators from a master historian who has "spent the last thirty years making documentaries and writing books about the Third Reich, Stalinism and the Second World War." Referencing and updating Alan Bullock's Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992), British historian Rees uses "millions of words of original eyewitness testimony," much of it never published before, to create this rich biographical and historical study. "Hitler and Stalin were catapulted into prominence only in the wake of an epoch-shattering event over which they had no control," World War I, and both believed they had the perfect vision for building and maintaining power for their nations. After the incisive, context-setting preface and introduction, the author proceeds in largely chronological fashion, beginning with the 1939 nonaggression pact that divided Poland, an agreement so cynical between the two former ideological enemies, the Communists and the Nazis, that even Stalin did not believe the global community would accept it. "The Soviet and Nazi governments may have been far apart in their ideological and political goals," writes Rees, "but in the practical mechanics of oppression they were closely linked." Both dictators presided over unprecedented programs of mass deportations and launched ambitious military plans to opposite effect--e.g., Stalin's obliteration of the elite officer corps left his army weakened while Hitler was able to invade Western Europe. As the invasion of Russia became imminent, Hitler professed overweening confidence and Stalin dithered; the Russian leader was incompetent as a military commander, but he had to project a fatherly air to keep up morale. Each leader demonstrated "monumental disdain for the suffering of his troops," and each understood the power of hunger as a method of control. Ultimately, they shared an idea that Stalin articulated: "War is pitiless...there must be no mercy." Rees concludes with an appalling comparison of their respective numbers killed and how "of the two tyrants...it is Hitler who is more broadly seen as a symbol of evil today." Via meticulous research and mesmerizing testimonies, Rees expertly reveals the "malleability of the human mind."

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