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Comment by nikanj | Hacker News Reader

Nazi Germany never put up fences to stop their people from leaving. The Soviet Union did. That’s my metric for the standard of living in them

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So you're saying people in death camps could have just walked away but didn't because being in a death camp in germany was better than the alternative?

I find that really hard to believe. Do you have a source?

Every country has some version of a prison system. That does not equal the general population being hold hostage the way the soviet union did

Not entirely true. Jews willing to leave had to pay an exit tax so high that it basically meant leaving all your wealth behind. Later, they weren't permitted to emigrate at all.

Except for the ones around the concentration camps.

I'm virulently opposed to communism and the Soviet Union, as well as Nazism, and it is tempting to say that the Soviet Union was worse than Nazi Germany.

In some ways that's true if you look at the number of their own citizens that were killed by Stalin vs Hitler. On the other hand, Stalin had a longer period of time for his mass murder than Hitler did. But Hitler caused the almost complete destruction of Germany with the war he started.

In terms of living conditions, you are probably correct; although again, Hitler's starting point in terms of economy, civilization, and living conditions was much better than Stalin's, and we didn't see Nazism play out over decades.

Nazi Germany's soldiers on the advance engaged in systematic killing and regarded most of the population of the conquered territories as vermin; Soviet soldiers merely raped most of the women and did not engage in systematic killing campaigns, with some exceptions (e.g. Katyn massacre)

I'd say it's difficult to say which is more deplorable: Hitler killing millions just because of their ancestry, or Stalin killing millions in the Gulag because of paranoia and because it was a convenient source of labor.

If we're just looking at the success of the economic systems, leaving aside the mass murder and the devastating war, then what you're saying is correct.

IMO, when thinking about this question it's useful to look at the full scope of their objectives. We don't know much about what else Stalin planned, but given the time he had it probably would not fundamentally change the order of magnitude. On the other hand, we do know some of what the Nazis planned to do if they had won, and it was on a scale far beyond even the millions they did murder.

Millions did not die in gulags. Gulags were not death camps and while deaths did happen, it was not the goal and if you go and check the numbers, USRR's numbers are very very different than nazi death camps.

Stalin's repressions toll, whether in Gulag camps, forced labor or mass executions, was in the millions; though not tens of millions, as americans and their mercenaries from ex Soviet republics like to tell. The conditions in Gulag camps in Stalin's time, and also quite a bit after, were horrible.

"raped most of the women.."

Told that way, this is libel, one which the german revanchism very fond of. Not that people like you would care.

In Germany it's punishable libel to say anything bad about any identifiable person, whether it's true or not. Even saying "Adolf Hitler was pure evil" is technically again the law.

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