Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler
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7. Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager (Hamburg, 1999), 25; also Klaus Drobisch and Günther Wieland, System der NS-Konzentrationslager, 1933-1939 (Berlin, 1993), 131.
8. Steven G. Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (Princeton, N. J., 2003), 300.
9. Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris (London, 1998), 460.
10. For the background, see Robert Gellately, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany (Oxford, 2001), 85-87.
11. The studies are cited in John Erickson, “Soviet War Losses: Calculations and Controversies,” in John Erickson and David Dilks, eds., Barbarossa: The Axis and the Allies (Edinburgh, 1994), 259-60.
12. Dietmar Petzina, Werner Abelshauser, and Anselm Faust, eds., Sozialgeschichtliches Arbeitsbuch III: Materialien zur Statistik des Deutschen Reiches, 1914-1945 (Munich, 1978), vol. 3, 27.
13. Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 894, puts the figure at sixty million worldwide and admits the total is tentative.
14. Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York, 2005), 17.
15. Orth, Konzentrationslager, 343.
16. Ibid., 105.
17. Milovan Djilas, Conversations with Stalin (Orlando, Fla., 1990), 114.
18. Ibid., 106-7.
19. G. K. Zhukov, Vospominaniya i razmyshleniya (Moscow, 1969), 663-64.
20. McNeal, Stalin sochineniia, vol. 2 (vol. 15), 197-99.
21. Cited in Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), 217, also for what follows.
22. Cited in Jeffrey Brooks, “Thank You, Comrade Stalin!” Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, N.J., 1999), 196.
23. Hosking, Rulers and Victims, 239-40.
24. Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (Oxford, 2003), 43.
25. Applebaum, Gulag, 579-83.
26. U.S. Department of State, Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington, D.C., 1955), 720.
27. Zhukov, Vospominaniya, 675.
28. Cited in David McCullough, Truman (New York, 1992), 442-44.
29. Norman M. Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 126.
30. See Jan T. Gross, Fear: Anti-Semitism in Poland After Auschwitz (New York, 2006), 245-61.
31. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York, 2004), 622. See also Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, N.J., 2004), 308-10.
32. The documents can be found in Jonathan Brent and Vladimir P. Naumov, Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (New York, 2003), 254-55.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Research for the book was fostered by various institutions. I am sincerely pleased to record my gratitude to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which has facilitated my work since the beginning of my career. Florida State University has generously provided me with financial assistance and an extremely congenial research environment. I am thankful for the encouragement offered by Don Foss, Joe Travis, Joe McElrath, and Neil Jumonville.
I had a unique opportunity to present my ideas at Oxford University, where I was the Bertelsmann Visiting Professor of Twentieth-Century Jewish History and Politics. The exchanges with students and faculty opened my eyes to many important issues and challenged me to think through my conclusions.
Special thanks are owed to Karen Colvard of the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, who helped put together a conference I co-organized with Ben Kiernan on comparative genocide. The gathering came at a crucial time, when this book was germinating, and I gained enormously from the experience.
I am most grateful to Professors Sheila Fitzpatrick, Michael Geyer, Terry Martin, Guenther Heydemann, and Steven Miner for inviting me to various conferences where we explored the comparative study of dictatorships.
Friends and colleagues have come to my aid in countless ways. Some have provided key pieces of information or documents, and others have answered questions, encouraged me, or written letters on my behalf. I want to make particular mention of Omer Bartov, Gerhard Bassler, Christopher Browning, Jeffrey Burds, Michael Burleigh, Timothy Colton, Susan Gardos, David Godwin, Paul Hagenloh, Jochen Hellbeck, Susannah Heschel, Norbert Juraschitz, Peter Krafft, Luba Ostashevsky, Janice Pilch, Sven Reichardt, Heike Schlatterer, Detlef Schmiechen-Ackermann, David Shearer, Peter Steinbach, Sybille Steinbacher, Gerhard Weinberg, and Eric Weitz.
I am particularly indebted to my publishers Ash Green and Will Sulkin, who read the manuscript with care and made useful suggestions to improve it. Above all, I want to thank Marie Fleming, to whom I dedicate the book. Her intellectual challenges and steadfast encouragement made writing it possible. Without her it would not have been half as much fun watching the inexhaustible store of fascinating Soviet and Russian films.
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
All photos not listed here are from the Ullstein bild/Granger Collection.
Granger Collection: Lenin and Stalin at Lenin’s dacha in Gorky in 1922.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum: Hitler and Goebbels with local Party officials in Hattingen; Hitler with members of his new government soon after his appointment; A crowd in front of a Jewish-owned store in Berlin; Visitors at the opening of the Great Anti-Bolshevism exhibition; Officials at the opening ceremonies of the 1938 Party rally in Nuremberg; Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov signs the German-USSR non-aggression pact; Soviet POWs captured near Wisznice; Jews rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto; The suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising; Preparing the liquidation of the Cracow Ghetto; Arrival of Hungarian Jews at Auschwitz-Birkenau; Hungarian Jewish women selected to work; Young Jewish children selected for death; Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta; American and Soviet soldiers in front of a portrait of Stalin; Lt. William Robertson and Lt. Alexander Sylasko; Soviet civilians on a repatriation convoy; Funeral procession in Poland for the victims of the Kielce pogrom.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Gellately is the Earl Ray Beck Professor of History at Florida State University and was the Bertelsmann Visiting Professor of Twentieth-Century Jewish History and Politics at Oxford University in 2004-5. His work has appeared in fifteen foreign languages. He is the author of The Gestapo and German Society: Enforcing Racial Policy, 1933-1945 and Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.
Vladimir Lenin’s mug shot kept in Moscow by the Russian Secret Police (Okhrana) in 1895. He was arrested at the end of the year in St. Petersburg.
Red Guards in front of the Smolny Institute at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution. (1917)
Vladimir Lenin (front row, middle) with Joseph Stalin to his right and Mikhail Kalinin on his left. (1919)
The Red Army marching in primitively bound shoes during the Russian Civil War. (1919-20)
White Guard Cossacks posing with their victims. (1919)
Lenin and Stalin at Lenin’s dacha in Gorky in 1922. Suspicions that Stalin had himself super-iniposed in the picture have been disproved since the opening of the archives.
Lenin at the second world congress of the Comintern. Directly behind him stands Maxim Gorky. Grigory Zinoviev is on the right, and Karl Radek on the far left, next to whom is Nikolai Bukharin.
Stalin at the funeral of Feliks Dzerzhinsky, first head of the Cheka. Left to right: Aleksei Rykov, Genrikh Yagoda, Mikhail Kalinin, Leon Trotsky, Lev Kamenev, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Tomsky, and Nikolai Bukharin. (1926)
Stalin and some of his competitors before their fall. Left to right: Stalin, Aleksei Rykov, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinoviev. (early 1920s)
Soviet leaders in 1935 reviewing the annual celebration of the October Revolution. Left to right: Anastas Mikoyan, Andrei Andreyev, Nikita Khrushchev, Lazar Kaganovitch, Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin, Yan Rudzutak, and
Mikhail Kalinin.
A Russian kulak who was deported to the forests of Karelia for compulsory labor in 1932.
Compulsory collectivization in 1929 in the Soviet countryside. The banner reads: Peasants, read books! The Book is the best friend of those on the land. It teaches how to carry out agriculture properly.
Gulag labor and the construction of the Fergana Canal in Uzbekistan in summer 1939.
Gulag prisoners work on the Belomor Canal in 1933.
The accused and their lawyers at the Hitler Trial. Left to right in uniform: Friedrich Weber, Hermann Kriebel, Erich Ludendorff, Hitler, Wilhelm Brückner, Ernest Röhm, Heinz Pernet (in civilian clothes, later Minister of the Interior), Wilhelm Frick, and later Gauleiter Robert Wagner. (1924)
Hitler and Goebbels pose with local Party officials in Hattingen. (1926)
Adolf Hitler with SA-leader Pfeffer von Salomon at an event in Munich in 1927. Between the two, partly hidden, is Rudolf Hess. On the left in a hat facing the camera is Alfred Rosenberg.
Chancellor Adolf Hitler greets President Paul von Hindenburg on the occasion of the opening of the Reichstag in Potsdam on March 21, 1933.
Adolf Hitler poses with members of his new government soon after his appointment; Left to right: Walther Funk, Hans Heinrich Lammers, Walther Darré, Franz Seldte, Franz Gürtner, Joseph Goebbels, unidentified, Hitler Hermann Goering, unidentified, Werner von Blomberg, Wilhelm Frick, Constantin Freiherr von Neurath, Hjalmar Schacht, Liitz; Graf Schwerin von Krosigk, Johannes Popitz, Franz von Papen, and Otto Meissner (February 1933)
A crowd gathers in front of a Jewish-owned store in Berlin on the first day of the boycott on April 1, 1933.
Himmler and police colleagues. Left to right: Franz Josef Huber, Arthur Nebe, Heinrich Himmler, Reinhardt Heydrich, and Heinrich Müller.
Visitors line up to attend the opening of the Great Anti-Bolshevism Exhibition of 1937.
Officials at the opening ceremonies of the 1938 Party rally in Nuremberg. Left to right: Joseph Goebbels, Robert Ley, Heinrich Himmler, Victor Lutze, Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler, and Julius Streicher.
Leaders at the Munich Peace Conference in September 1938. Left to right: Neville Chamberlain (Britain), Edouard Daladier (France), Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini (Italy), and Count Galleazzo Ciano (Italy).
Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag in which he first mentioned his “prophesy” of what would happen to the Jews should “they” bring about another world war. (January 30, 1939)
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov signs the German-USSR non-aggression pact in Moscow. Standing directly behind him is Joachim von Ribbentrop and Joseph Stalin. (August 23, 1939)
At the headquarters of the German army in East Prussia, June 30, 1941. Left to right: Walther von Brauchitsch, unknown, Wilhelm Keitel, Adolf Hitler, and Franz Halder. In the background is Walter Warlimont.
Soviet prisoners of war surrendered in the millions in autumn 1941.
Soviet POWs captured near Wisznice in autumn 1941 and later executed.
Jews rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto awaiting deportation. (July-September 1942)
The suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. (April-May 1943) Here SS Major General Jürgen Stroop (center) surveys the scene.
Preparing for the liquidation of the Cracow Ghetto (1943). The Jews march down the main street with the little they can carry.
Arrival and selection of Jews from Hungary (May 1944) at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Young Jewish children and others from the same transport who were selected for death await the inevitable.
Jewish women from the same transport who were selected to work.
Wehrmacht prisoners on the bank of the Volga River, captured in the northern area of Stalingrad in February 1942.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin pose during the Yalta Conference in February 1945.
American and Soviet soldiers in front of a portrait of Stalin in bomb-damaged Berlin in 1945.
The victorious leaders meet. Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Marshal Gregory K. Zhukov visit Eisenhower’s headquarters at Frankfurt am Main. (June 1O, 1945)
The great victory parade in Moscow’s Red Square. Here the standards of the fallen German armies are presented in front of the Lenin mausoleum and then symbolically cast in the dust. (June 24, 1945)
Lt. William Robertson of the U.S. and Lt. Alexander Sylasko of the USSR celebrate the meeting of the American and Soviet armies near Torgau in April 1945.
Soviet civilians crowded onto a repatriation convoy for return to the USSR at war’s end.
Funeral procession in Poland for the victims of the Kielce pogrom of July 1946.
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2007 by Robert Gellately
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks
of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gellately, Robert [date]
Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler : the age of social catastrophe / by Robert Gellately.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-53712-6
I. Dictatorship—History—21st century. 2. Dictatorship—Case studies.
3. Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich, 1870–1924. 4. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953.
5. Hitler, Adolf, 1889–1945. 6. Soviet Union—Politics and government—
1917–1936. 7. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1936–1953. 8. Germany—Politics and government—1933–1945. I. Title.
JC495.G45 2007
947.084—dc22 2007005272
v3.0