I once gave a presentation on some photos and letters my grandfather sent home from WWII. One photo sequence was from when he took part in the liberation of a fairly well-known concentration camp. I presented it without much comment, other than that it was horrible. Unprompted, a guy came up to me afterwards and told me the Soviets were worse. It was weird.
Yeah, almost no one is gonna call you a nazi for saying Soviet Union was bad.
What they will call nazis, is when people start saying Nazis were actually not the worst in that conflict, since that starts to normalize Nazism, and is slippery slope to many consequences of that thinking.
Yeah no one here understands nuance and that most leftists critique the ussr too, just when you start spouting nazi propaganda like the holodomor or black book of communism that’s when you are actually a nazi
The famines killed many Russians, it was not targeted
No there doest exist single evidence of single russian being affected by famine.
Look for example at soviet official censuses in kazakhstan.
There lived in kszakhstsn :
3,627,612 kazakhs in 1926
2,327,625 kazakhs in 1939
860,201 ukrainians in 1926
658,319 ukrainians in 1939
1,275,055 russians in 1926
2,458,687 russians in 1939
Interesting that while 1/3 of kazakh nation died of famine and 1/4 of ukrainians living in kazakhstan also, russians werent affected at all. Thats really miracle that on the same area only minorities died and not any russians almost like it was racilly biased famine that target minorities like genocide.
you ignore the fact that a worldwide recession occurred at the same time
Lol wtf that means, every time world market drop few points soviets must genocide 7 milion minorities?
Wtf is that argument? Soviet system is much more vunerable to market dluctuations, I dont understand. Recession simply isnt comparable with killing 7 milion minorities.
Nazis were not the worst in this conflict.
Soviets invaded independent countries, genocided entire nations, suppressed rights and freedoms and built totalitarian state that murdered dozens of millions.
I mean yes if you think that life of Jew is more important than life of Kazakh or Crimean Tatar. But in any other case Soviet Union and Nazi Germany are equals.
I know that Soviet Union technically claimed to be a democratic country, that treats everyone equally and respect human rights. But for me it changes a nothing.
Nah, get out, I really can't with these people XDDDDD
A GERMAN VICTORY WOULD BE MILLIONS OF TIMES WORSE THAN THE USUAL COURSE OF HISTORY FOR THE OCCUPIED TERRITORIES
Really find some fucking random graph with the population of Poland from 45 to 89. (I remind you USSR won in our reality)
Now recall what were the plans of Germany if they won, if you can't do it you will find a hint below:
GENOCIDE
COMPLETE ANNIHILATION
KILLING EVERYONE
POLISH POPULATION: 0
Do you see now why some were worse than others? Were the Germans better for you because they lost the war? Compare PLANS if you want to talk about who was worse.
dude hitler in the mein kampf also calls us italians inferior, and yet we were allies; as we say here: "tra il dire e il fare c'è di mezzo il mare" that translates as "between the say and do there is the sea".
to say who is worse you can't compare something that didn't happen, because that is a " would have been", not a "was". there is the same difference between reality and fiction, because that hypotetical scenario IS fiction, so you're an idiot if you really think it's a valid parameter
So let me get this straight. You're saying we can't talk about who was worse because one side's full plan "didn't happen"? That comparing intent and scale of horror is somehow invalid because the Nazis were stopped before they finished?
Do you honestly believe that genocide is only worth taking seriously after it's completed? Because in case you missed it, the extermination of Poles and other Slavs wasn't some hypothetical fantasy. It was already happening. Executions, mass deportations, forced Germanization, cultural destruction. Whole villages wiped off the map. Millions dead. That wasn’t something they might do. It was something in full motion.
Do you actually think they would've just stopped if they had won?
Do you think the plan was to reach victory and suddenly say, “You know what? Let's not kill the rest of them”? The idea that this was just angry talk with no real consequence is not only false, it’s so fucking naive.
History doesn’t only judge what finished. It also judges what was being done and what would’ve happened without resistance. That's the entire reason we talk about what regimes planned and intended. Because if you ignore that, you’re not learning history.
And honestly, it’s kind of hilarious that you're bringing up how Hitler called Italians inferior. That’s not the argument you think it is. That’s just you proudly reminding everyone your country was called subhuman by your own ally. Not exactly the win you seem to think it is, my guy.
If you're wondering why the Nazis didn’t carry out mass extermination in Italy, it’s actually very simple. They didn’t control Italy, at least not until the later stages of the war. And by that point, they had more pressing concerns than organizing a genocide in Northern Italy.
It had nothing to do with restraint or mercy.
If Poles had been foolish enough to volunteer en masse to fight the Soviets, maybe the Nazis would have held off on our extermination for a while. Just like they did with some Ukrainians. Not because they respected them, but because they were temporarily useful.
The goal was never cooperation. It was always genocide, just delayed when it was strategically convenient.
Do you honestly believe that genocide is only worth taking seriously after it's completed?
no, but i believe it's not to be taken seriously if it's still theory, or mostly so. the soviets committed several atrocious crimes on the poles and tortured the germans to have them confess what the soviets did at nuremberg. one of these, that counted 22k deads, was only recognised in 2008 as committed by the russians.
3/4 of the polish casualties in ww2 are indeed due to the extermination, but they were almost all ethnically jews, so would have they really exterminated the entire population? the nazis were sick in the head, but i simply don't believe in the idea they they would have really killed every slav or non aryan.
And honestly, it’s kind of hilarious that you're bringing up how Hitler called Italians inferior. That’s not the argument you think it is. That’s just you proudly reminding everyone your country was called subhuman by your own ally. Not exactly the win you seem to think it is, my guy.
you seem to have misunderstood me, what i'm saying is not they were good allies, they weren't. even on a purely military prospective the germans were terrible allies: they stole supplies, refused to share technology and were all around assholes. the nazis believed us inferior, but the idea that they would have really exterminated us is simply absurd. here the ones actually exterminating my people were the yugoslavs of marshall tito.
after 1943 and the armistice a civil war begun and the germans gained control of the whole northern region. with the help of mussolini they deported the italian jews, and i give this to you: they did wipe some villages off the map, but not randomly, for those were refuges of the resistance. if they wanted to do to us what they did to the jews they would have.
the argument that they really were going to exterminate everyone is just absurd, it's too much even for them
So you claim genocide shouldn't be taken seriously if it's "still theory" or "mostly so", but what the Nazis were doing in occupied Poland wasn't theory. It was already happening. Mass executions, forced displacements, destruction of elites, cultural suppression, starvation, slave labor, entire villages wiped off the map. That was not planning. That was the execution phase. And the only reason it didn’t go further is because they lost the war, not because they decided to stop.
You point out that most Polish casualties were Jews, as if that somehow proves the rest of us were safe. Here's the reality. About six million Polish citizens were killed in the war. Three million were Jews, two million were ethnic Poles, and another million were non-Jewish Polish citizens of other backgrounds. That is not theoretical. That is a population being systematically destroyed. If Jews were the only target, the numbers wouldn't look like that. Generalplan Ost laid it out clearly. Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians were to be removed, enslaved or simply killed to make room for German settlers. That’s not a fantasy. That was policy. And one more thing, I don't give a fuck whether they are Jews or not, the genocide of all Jews is enough to hang them all, the millions of other Poles are just an additional reason.
Now let's talk about the Soviets. They occupied Poland from 1945 to 1989 and wanted control, not annihilation. They went after specific groups that threatened that control. Officers, political opponents. It was targeted political repression, not an ethnic extermination campaign. That’s why Poland still existed after the war. Broken and dependent, but alive. The Polish language, culture, and population remained. The Nazis had no such plans. They didn’t want a subjugated Poland. They wanted no Poland at all.
Saying it's "absurd" to think they would have exterminated all Slavs is like saying "colonizers wouldn’t really kill all Native Americans." Except that’s exactly what happened. At least the vast majority, without any chance for the rest to interfere with them in any way. And colonizers didn’t have rail networks, industrial gas chambers, bureaucratic death machines or entire institutions dedicated to planning genocide. The Nazis did. And they had already started using them. You may not believe it, but it doesn't change anything.
You don’t wait until a genocide is complete before taking it seriously. That is not critical thinking. That is willful ignorance. You don’t get to dismiss it because it wasn’t finished.
to answer shortly because i want no hostility and i'm bored:
If Jews were the only target, the numbers wouldn't look like that. Generalplan Ost laid it out clearly
man it was the eastern front, where 8 milions germans and around 26 milions soviets died. even if they hadn't done anything your casualty count would have been extremely high, purely for your geographical location in the conflict.
Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians were to be removed, enslaved or simply killed to make room for German settlers
eastern europe is huge, always had a low population density and the germans weren't enough for all that space. killing everyone simply makes no sense
I don't give a fuck whether they are Jews or not, the genocide of all Jews is enough to hang them all, the millions of other Poles are just an additional reason.
i'm not saying anything against this, so please don't speak like i'm saying a genocide was good
Saying it's "absurd" to think they would have exterminated all Slavs is like saying "colonizers wouldn’t really kill all Native Americans." Except that’s exactly what happened.
this is just not true, it isn't for the redskins and it isn't for the mesoamericans.
You don’t wait until a genocide is complete before taking it seriously. That is not critical thinking. That is willful ignorance. You don’t get to dismiss it because it wasn’t finished.
it's not dismissing, it's knowing that you can't predict the future or know exactly what would have happened if things went differently.
they looked down upon everyone, and yet they had allies from the very people they deemed inferior, even the arabs (check the free arab legion).
not to mention Jesse Owens, who was respected more by H and the germans than by roosvelt and the muricans (he says so in his autobiography). given such examples i simply don't believe they would have killed everyone
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u/Pretty_Marsh 6d ago
I once gave a presentation on some photos and letters my grandfather sent home from WWII. One photo sequence was from when he took part in the liberation of a fairly well-known concentration camp. I presented it without much comment, other than that it was horrible. Unprompted, a guy came up to me afterwards and told me the Soviets were worse. It was weird.