STATE SPONSORSED MASS MURDER.   Term Paper ID:30820 Click to get this paper

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Paper Abstract: Compares and contrasts two cases. The Holocaust of the Nazi regime, and the Stalinist purge in the USSR. Compares extreme form of fascism under Hitler, and extreme form of Bolshevism under Stalin. Similar objectives of both leaders to redraw the map of Europe. Contends the political extremism of both countries resulted from the personalities of Hitler and Stalin. Paper Introduction: This research compares and contrasts two cases of state-sponsored mass murder in the 20th century: the Holocaust, which refers to the state-sponsored murder in Europe of some 12 million people, 6 million of whom were Jews, during the Nazi regime; and the Stalinist purge of some 20 million people undertaken in the USSR state during the regime headed by Josef Stalin. In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, in which an apparently stateless military attack accomplished a spectacle of mass murder and raised questions about how such an event could have happened, it may be instructive to consider that in the 20th century there were numerous examples of state-sponsored mass murder. The two most notorious--certainly the two that appear to have achieved the highest body count in the 20th century--can be found in Germany's Third Reich (1932-1945) and in the Stalinist perio Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. He drove more moderate revolutionaries suchas Trotsky out of the party and out of the country while accusing them ofpolitical factionalism (Bullock 182ff). It potentially exposed Hitler to criticismof shirking anticommunism and Stalin to charges of collaborating withfascism, but the personal power of both was such that they were opaque tocriticism. . Works CitedBroszat, Martin. The two mostnotorious--certainly the two that appear to have achieved the highest bodycount in the 2 th century--can be found in Germany's Third Reich (1932-1945) and in the Stalinist period (1924-1953) of the Soviet state. Whereas Lenin prepared,in Germany, to assume power, Stalin He rose through the revolutionary ranksbecause of a definite plan and built an effective political machine in theBolshevik state. All told, between 193 and 1937, some11 million had died prematurely (Bullock 273). The fact that ordinary Germans involved in killing Jews could form arange of attitudes about Jews as a group tells Browning that anti-Semitismwas not "'pre-existing, pent-up,'" or something "that Hitler had merely to'unleash' and 'unshackle'" (Browning 222) in order to accomplish theproject of a Jew-free Europe. Thus they were legitimatetargets of genocide, or "eliminationist" anti-Semitism. Industrial collectivization occurred under Stalin's Five Year Plan inthe late 192 s and early 193 s. It should be noted that Nazi genocide was not confined to six millionJews. . The Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact is surely one of the most viciousand cynical ironies of history. 'dirty,' 'unkempt,' and 'lessclean'" than Poles, while others characterized them as "dressed in rags andhalf starved." Jewish behavior was described variously as passive andoffering no resistance, hence "complicit in their own deaths," oralternatively as having "astonishing" dignity when facing certain death(Browning 152, passim). The prospect ofpersonal benefit at others' expense is put forward as a powerful motiveforce for rationalizing murder and for spreading guilt out from Hitler andStalin, who to different degrees also spread responsibility for deathorders throughout their respective bureaucracies (Bullock 971). New York: Harper & Row, 1973. . Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. After the war,Stalin engineered the creation of soviet satellite states in EasternEurope, repeating the pattern established in Russia earlier. As Bullock puts it: [R]esponsibility Hitler and Stalin bore for conceiving of deportation, imprisonment, torture, and killing on such a scale . Goldhagen cites a Hitler speech that portrayed Jews as"plundering traveling caravans, and . He cites the "mutually intensifyingeffects of war and racism," which comes down to an argument that thekilling project, coupled with "years of anti-Semitic propaganda (and priorto the Nazi dictatorship, decades of shrill German nationalism) dovetailedwith the polarizing effects of war" (Browning 186). Enemies must die. New York: Walker and Company, 1965. One object in view, according to Bullock(966) was to "redraw the map of Europe in the twentieth century." Ideologyhad claims of its own, and Bullock suggests that Nazism under Hitler wasthe extreme form of ideological fascism, just as Stalinism was the extremeform of ideological Bolshevism. Harper Torchbooks. 397-5 4.Browning, Christopher R. Six million other undesirables, distributed among multipleconstituencies, were also murdered--the insane and infirm, homosexuals,socialists, gypsies, Russian POWs, Poles, Czechs, resistance fighters,Ukranians, the European intelligentsia (Bullock 648-55, 8 5 et passim).Further, arrests, deportations, forced labor, concentration camps, andextralegal executions were a feature of the Nazi state from its beginning.The first concentration camps appeared in April 1933, three months afterHitler came to power. The Nazi propaganda apparatus, effective in its own right, hadlittle motivational work to do in order to get the ordinary Germans to killJews, characterized by Nazi propaganda as "powerfully evil" (Goldhagen 279)and "axiomatically identified with 'bandits' and their anti-Germanactivities" (28 ). . That evaluation does not account for thetradition of nondemocratic rule in both Germany and Russia, between-the-wars Weimar Germany notwithstanding. New York: Vintage Books, 1993.Goldhagen, Daniel Jonah. . The_Destruction_of_the_European_Jews. Browning cites postwarinterrogations of the "ordinary men" of Battalion 1 1 that he says revealedwide differences of opinion about their victims. By the time he succeeded Lenin, who appears to have beensuspicious of his thirst for power, Stalin had become a master of politicalintrigue and intraparty politics (Bullock 173) while cultivating the imageof the plain-spoken common man. Bureaucratic wrangling, not about whether but how tolegally implement anti-Jewish sentiment characterized the earlier years ofthe Reich. Schacht never opposed anti-Jewish decrees; to the contrary, he welcomed them and was impatient whenthey were not issued quickly enough" (Hilberg 22). is different in kind from that born by anyone else (Bullock 971) Under these two heads of state in the first half of the 2 th century,Europe was bequeathed two political and social legacies that "combined toweigh heavily on Europe in the succeeding decades" (Bullock 966). An immediate effect of agriculture collectivization, an ongoingproject of the late 192 s and early 193 s promulgated by Stalin as a class-war imperative (Bullock 253ff), entailed state expropriation of crops andlivestock and purging all noncommunist cultural and social organizations ascounterrevolutionary, was famine, compounded by many arrests and executionsof peasants supposedly complicit in resisting the Soviet agriculturalprogram (Bullock 255-69 passim). Religious people,intellectuals, rival socialists, former business owners--all of these wereroutinely arrested, deported, executed (Solzhenitsyn 49ff). For his part, Stalin never relinquished Soviet hegemonyover Poland but rather presaged the extension of postwar Soviet reach; thePact bought him time to prepare for the inevitable war with Germany. The Gulag Archipelago. Some members describedJews according to "Nazi stereotype . He preferred the "legal" way--that is, certainty instead of uncertainty. Goldhagen's view is that anti-Semitism was the primary factor of theHolocaust. Anatomy of the SS State. His view is that anti-Semitism supportedkilling Jewish civilians but was not the driving force for murder. Political prisoners and social undesirables, as wellas Jews, were being transported to camps and forced into labor before thesystematic, mechanized murders began (Broszat 397-48 passim). The shape of mass murder in the Third Reich has been attributed to theoriginal design of Nazism under Hitler. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1961.Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. It also involved recruitment of urban proletariat "shocktroops": Stalin's ideological justification ofh is "socialist offensive" in terms of class war[] enabled the militants to see those whom they hounded out of jobs and homes, informed against, an condemned to death, not as fellow human beings but as "class enemies," guilty of an irredeemable crime simply by virtue of having been born into a bourgeois or kulak family (Bullock 277).Industrial failures, such as making industrial quotas, became capitaloffenses subject to myriad show trials, deportations, torture, andexecutions. In the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2 1, inwhich an apparently stateless military attack accomplished a spectacle ofmass murder and raised questions about how such an event could havehappened, it may be instructive to consider that in the 2 th century therewere numerous examples of state-sponsored mass murder. By 193 Stalinhad eliminated intraparty political rivals in the USSR and had issueddirectives to communists around the world to engage in revolution, "in theface of the rise of Nazism and Fascism, to make the Social Democrats theirprincipal enemy as 'social Fascists,' . This research compares and contrasts two cases of state-sponsored massmurder in the 2 th century: the Holocaust, which refers to the state-sponsored murder in Europe of some 12 million people, 6 million of whomwere Jews, during the Nazi regime; and the Stalinist purge of some 2 million people undertaken in the USSR state during the regime headed byJosef Stalin. Lack of qualitymilitary leadership can be said to have contributed to the loss of 21million (Bullock 983) in the USSR during World War II. Bullock puts the body count for the famine at 7million. . But murder was forboth an instrument of state policy on a massive scale. Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives. By the late 193 s, inside the USSR,Stalin had begun purging the Soviet military ranks of hundreds of generalsand thousands of other officers of whom he was politically suspicious, andduring World War II military failures were punished by herding the"offending" troops to the front lines (Solzhenitsyn 77-81). into the 'image of the enemy,' or Feindbild"(Browning 186). and deliberately split theEuropean labor movement" (Bullock 212). What remains to be explained is how thattranslated into widespread cooperation with state terror. His intrapartypurges (e.g., of Rohm in 1934, of Rommel and the Valkyrie militaryconspirators in 1945) can be compared to Stalin's but occurred on a muchsmaller scale. Murders that occurred at the behest of Hitler in Germany and Stalin inRussia were on a continuum of positive programs of state-mandatedsuppression. "The Concentration Camps, 1933-45." Trans. Goldhagen cites German priests' advocacy for overwhelmingly CatholicPoles but not for Jews, though the Jews' "condition and fate [were] farworse" (117). . In this manner were theJews "subsume[d] . What Bullock (969) describes as the 4 -5 million prematuredeaths attributable to either one regime or the other that occurred inEurope between 193 and 1953 occurred in a continental Europe that for thefirst half of the 2 th century was marked by political instability andfierce ideological competition. Elizabeth Wiskemann. Stalin's murderous regime was installed a few years before Hitler'sand survived a few years after it. . . It was marked by Stalin's politicalambition from his earliest days as a revolutionary. Ed. More general oppression was occurring all the time. The Jewsas Jews became "an anonymous collective" rather than persons who had"personal identity" (Browning 153) or humanity. Although the entire state apparatus and many functionariestherein were enlisted in overseeing and carrying out state-sponsoredmurders in Germany and Russia, the main guilt has been laid at the door ofStalin and Hitler as individuals. New York: Vintage, 1997.Hilberg, Raul. Like its countryside counterpart, it wasdriven by ideology--enforced as a state priority and demagogued as a class-war imperative. Only complete defeat in 1945 stopped the Nazi murder machine.Indeed, in the last weeks of the war, the SS went to great lengths to bothconceal and exact slave labor from nearly a million dying prisoners(Broszat 497ff). Deportations of kulaks, who like Jews in Germany werecharacterized as subhuman and numbered among the famine victims, areestimated to have been 1 -12 million. To besure, they differed: Hitler was defeated and Stalin triumphant. It may be claiming too much cause-and-effect to suggest that the decisive revolutionary break from the monarchictradition in both countries, fed as it was by competing ideologies,resulted in political extremism in Europe, but it is undoubtedly true thatthe murderous leadership of both Hitler and Stalin was exemplary of suchextremism. . . Solzhenitsyn refers to the "famineorganizers," Stalin's operatives who coopted the peasant population intoblaming bourgeois kulaks for their starvation and calling, en masse, fortheir deaths (48-9). The extremism can be identified as a feature of the personalities ofStalin and Hitler, who were exact contemporaries (Hitler was born in 1889,Stalin in 1879). Hitler's rise in party politics wasless Byzantine than Stalin's inasmuch as he exerted a charismatic effect onfellow Nazis, although he manipulated a multiparty coalition against theWeimar Republic in order to be appointed chancellor and probably startedthe Reichstag fire to cement his position (Bullock 229-31). The fact thatGermany "had given itself to Nazism" (Goldhagen 118) and that anti-Semitismdrove Nazi murder is unanswerable in Goldhagen's view. As Hilberg comments, the president of the Reichbank (Schacht)"did not oppose anti-Jewish action. New York: Harper Perennial, 1998.Bullock, Alan. Although their arguments do not agree on all points, Goldhagen andBrowning each develop the view that the intent of the Nazis can be seen asmurderous from the beginning of their regime and that their primary targetwas European Jewry. Bullock suggests venal as well as racist motives for genocide in boththe Reich and the USSR: sadism, money, perks (971). Marian Jackson. Neither manhas been placed at the scene of even one actual murder. On the other hand, Browning acknowledges thesignificant institutionalization of race-based anti-Semitism, "an integralpart of the conservative political platform [that had] penetrated deeplyinto the universities" (Browning 196). . Brutality and murderousness were more amplified in the caseof Jews than non-Jews, who were treated more in line with "calculations ofmaterial rationality" (Goldhagen 315), i.e., war production. Bullock explains that for Hitler the Pact was always pragmaticand instrumental, aimed at delaying confrontation with Stalin over Poland(635). Once installed as head of state(general party secretary), he made a project of consolidating power inhimself, cloaking it in an effort to recruit the largely illiterate Russianmasses that had benefited from the revolution and civil war into thecommunist party. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 1 1 and the Final Solution in Poland. . plundering indebted farmers,industrialists, middle-class people, etc." (281). . He argues that the shape and priorities of Germanculture more generally, complicated by battlefield conditions ad thefortunes of war, including the energetic anti-Jewish Nazi propagandaapparatus, enabled the members of at least one battalion and to considerthat "Jews stood outside [the battalion's] circle of human obligation andresponsibility," (Browning 73). . Where mass murder was concerned, whatever the similaritiesof approach, Hitler's regime tended to be more systematic whereas Stalin'stended to be more opportunistic. Thus, the thoughtprocesses of the "ordinary" citizens of Germany "willing to volunteer todestroy this cognitively created enemy" (Goldhagen 396). . These so-called "local party workers" (Bullock 176)identified with Stalin as the common man and appear to have been only toowilling to acquiesce in Stalin's class-warfare rhetoric, which entaileddenouncing one's neighbor and collaborating in implementation ofcollectivization of all industry and agriculture in the service of thecommunist state. Browning sees antisemitism as a factor of the processes that led tothe murderous behavior. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.

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