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Comment by robertlagrant | Hacker News Reader

There's a difference between "young men killed on the battlefield" and "everyone else also being killed" - while (sadly) the latter did happen, e.g. Hiroshima, or as Russian troops swept through Germany, or Dresden, it wasn't par for the course or expected as what happens after the losing side lost.

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The Soviets* pretty clearly did not kill all of the civilians in Germany, nor did they attempt to. Unlike the Germans themselves, who exterminated whole towns and had a plan that involved total genocide of their conquered peoples. Pretty wild to miss such an obvious example.

*really neither the sins nor the wins in WWII belong exclusively to the Russians. Another subtlety misleading aspect of this post.

> really neither the sins nor the wins in WWII belong exclusively to the Russians. Another subtlety misleading aspect of this post

I didn't mention any wins. As for the sins: did you get that despite my listing something the British did and something the Americans did?

Note the context: I corrected your use of “Russians” in favor of “Soviets.”

You did that, but that didn't seem to be the context at all. You were implying I was misleading people into thinking all the sins and wins were Russian, which I obviously wasn't doing.

The Germans attempted to exterminate entire races of people, the Soviets attempted to exterminate entire classes of people. The Soviets killed far more people if only because Stalin ruled for longer than Hitler.

As one of the first leaders of the Cheka said, "We are not waging war against individual persons. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class".

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