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- There are photos/footage of Eisenhower's death camps. Let's remember these are the same individuals that set Dresden on fire. Link to thread on this message board? Haha ok
The thread I linked contained all of the relevant information and sources on refuting the claim. There were no "Eisenhower Death Camps".
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- If you question the accuracy of deaths at the hands of Stalin then surely you question Hitler and the Holocaust in the same regard, correct? The notion that he "gassed and killed 6 million jews". Ex: Should we credit him for deaths that occurred from illness/old age?
I did not question the accuracy of the claims merely stated where the numbers come from. No one else, yourself included, even attempted to substantiate anything beyond 20+ million killed and some threw out numbers of 40+ million. I simply stated where the numbers came from and how they were determined from the latest studies. We know how many people Hitler killed in the concentration/death camps. I was not "splitting hairs" over whether Stalin or Hitler's victims died from a gunshot, starvation, gassing or disease. You are attempting to ascribe a position to me, I did not take.
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Same argument you made bout Stalin can be made on Hitler's concentration camps: If his intention was extermination then why did he wait over two years before sending Jews to concentration camps (where he already had gentile Poles?) and furthermore house and feed them? Weird treatment for individuals you're trying to exterminate, wouldn't you say?
Hitler was quite clear in his intent with regard to Jew's:
“If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it.”
The first concentration camp, Dacahu, was opened in 1933 and was originally designed to hold political prisoners. In 1938, following Kristallnacht, the first Jews began arriving in Dachau. The first of the six death camps, Chelmno, was opened in late 1941 and utilized carbon monoxide. It's first victims were Jews and over 150,000 died at the camp between 1941 and 1944. The deaths in the camps are of course, only a small portion of the killings, upwards of half of the victims of the Holocaust were killed by Einsatzgruppen units. The killing did not begin in earnest until 1942 with the adoption of the "Final Solution". As for why they didn't simply kill them to start, they had a passing use as slave labor for the Reich.
I will standby the point though that Stalin and Hitler, while both have rivers of blood on their hands, often operated with different intent. Hitler preached and attempted to achieve the destruction of races deemed inferior. Stalin, while just as brutal in many ways, often had more pragmatic reasoning.
Excuse me for attempting to inject logic, objectivity and facts into a debate more concerned with conspiracy theories.
Just a comment on Roosevelt's public works programs; I had a grandfather who worked in the WPA and he remembered it as being a very good thing. There are so many useful things that were built and created, some were in swampy places, but there was a need for them, as in the TVA. Even here in the "desert" there are still many buildings, courthouses in small towns, and all sorts of active reminders of those projects. Prices were alot less then and wages were appropriate due to the sheer amount of people that had to be paid and the costs of the actual projects. These were not labor gulags, no one was forced to participate, but most welcomed the chance. My grandfather also remembered that time as a great expierence, many people who had no skills or no abilities got both. All those workers put alot of their pay back into the economy one way or another and things started to get moving again.... unfortunately Stalin did not have the same concern for most of Russia's citizens, and most remember him a little differently....
The thread I linked contained all of the relevant information and sources on refuting the claim. There were no "Eisenhower Death Camps".
I did not question the accuracy of the claims merely stated where the numbers come from. No one else, yourself included, even attempted to substantiate anything beyond 20+ million killed and some threw out numbers of 40+ million. I simply stated where the numbers came from and how they were determined from the latest studies. We know how many people Hitler killed in the concentration/death camps. I was not "splitting hairs" over whether Stalin or Hitler's victims died from a gunshot, starvation, gassing or disease. You are attempting to ascribe a position to me, I did not take.
Hitler was quite clear in his intent with regard to Jew's:
“If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it.”
The first concentration camp, Dacahu, was opened in 1933 and was originally designed to hold political prisoners. In 1938, following Kristallnacht, the first Jews began arriving in Dachau. The first of the six death camps, Chelmno, was opened in late 1941 and utilized carbon monoxide. It's first victims were Jews and over 150,000 died at the camp between 1941 and 1944. The deaths in the camps are of course, only a small portion of the killings, upwards of half of the victims of the Holocaust were killed by Einsatzgruppen units. The killing did not begin in earnest until 1942 with the adoption of the "Final Solution". As for why they didn't simply kill them to start, they had a passing use as slave labor for the Reich.
I will standby the point though that Stalin and Hitler, while both have rivers of blood on their hands, often operated with different intent. Hitler preached and attempted to achieve the destruction of races deemed inferior. Stalin, while just as brutal in many ways, often had more pragmatic reasoning.
Excuse me for attempting to inject logic, objectivity and facts into a debate more concerned with conspiracy theories.
Why do we know how many people perished in Nazi work camps and not Soviet?
Seems like the only difference is Jews have a stronger voice and outlet than Slavs
Why do we know how many people perished in Nazi work camps and not Soviet?
Seems like the only difference is Jews have a stronger voice and outlet than Slavs
We know because the Nazi's took impeccable records and we siezed those records, as well as most of the administration following the war. Hundreds of independent researchers and studies have zeroed in on an academically valid range of victims for the Holocaust.
Soviet numbers are harder to come by, simply because of the Cold War and issues with Soviet propaganda itself. As the archives have been opened, a more balanced view of Stalin has come out as well as more accurate numbers related to the death tolls. As far as "people who died in work camps", I posted the number, it was 1.75-2.75 million people over the course of the entire Stalinist period.
I tried to break the numbers down by where they were coming from to get to 20 million. The point seems lost on your that 20 million people didn't die in gulags. Around half of the number is generally substantiated between the Holodomor, purges and the gulags. The other half is a "guess" based on the impact of collectivization. Not that these people were rounded up and shipped off to Siberia, but that they died to the imposition of Stalin's policies for various reasons.
As for the Jews part, I already know what you are trying to say between the lines of your posts. If you hope to maintain even a shred of credibility, all I can say is "don't go there".
I also felt it important to further explain why I think Hitler was the "worst". Let's take it from the position of their respective victims...
If I was a "kulak" under Stalin's system, I had a choice. I could agree to embrace communism, give up my land and move to a collective. If I made myself a good little communist, I had a very good chance of avoiding Stalin's wrath.
If I was a Jew in Hitler's Germany, I had no choice. No matter what I did I would still be a Jew and would be persecuted solely on that basis. I could have been a Knight's Cross holder from WW1 and a prominent member of my community, it wouldn't have mattered. Being a Jew meant that I was going to pesecuted and would most likely end up in a camp.
To me, that's the difference in the "whose worse" debate. Stalin's victims generally got to choose their fate by deciding to resist his policies or disagree with him. Hitler's victims were killed merely because they existed. That in no way means that one is morally better than the other and they were both "evil". It simply recognizes that there was a degree of pragmatism in what Stalin did.
We know because the Nazi's took impeccable records and we siezed those records, as well as most of the administration following the war. Hundreds of independent researchers and studies have zeroed in on an academically valid range of victims for the Holocaust.
Soviet numbers are harder to come by, simply because of the Cold War and issues with Soviet propaganda itself. As the archives have been opened, a more balanced view of Stalin has come out as well as more accurate numbers related to the death tolls. As far as "people who died in work camps", I posted the number, it was 1.75-2.75 million people over the course of the entire Stalinist period.
I tried to break the numbers down by where they were coming from to get to 20 million. The point seems lost on your that 20 million people didn't die in gulags. Around half of the number is generally substantiated between the Holodomor, purges and the gulags. The other half is a "guess" based on the impact of collectivization. Not that these people were rounded up and shipped off to Siberia, but that they died to the imposition of Stalin's policies for various reasons.
As for the Jews part, I already know what you are trying to say between the lines of your posts. If you hope to maintain even a shred of credibility, all I can say is "don't go there".
I also felt it important to further explain why I think Hitler was the "worst". Let's take it from the position of their respective victims...
If I was a "kulak" under Stalin's system, I had a choice. I could agree to embrace communism, give up my land and move to a collective. If I made myself a good little communist, I had a very good chance of avoiding Stalin's wrath.
If I was a Jew in Hitler's Germany, I had no choice. No matter what I did I would still be a Jew and would be persecuted solely on that basis. I could have been a Knight's Cross holder from WW1 and a prominent member of my community, it wouldn't have mattered. Being a Jew meant that I was going to pesecuted and would most likely end up in a camp.
To me, that's the difference in the "whose worse" debate. Stalin's victims generally got to choose their fate by deciding to resist his policies or disagree with him. Hitler's victims were killed merely because they existed. That in no way means that one is morally better than the other and they were both "evil". It simply recognizes that there was a degree of pragmatism in what Stalin did.
So we should base our entire perspective of WW2 based on one single group of people (Jews)? Aren't you realizing the mistake your reasoning is making. Stalin killed everyone, Hitler zeroed in on specific groups. Wouldn't that by definition make Stalin worse?
Jews weren't the only people that perished in WW2. Far from it. This point seems to be lost in American WW2 history books.
Seriously, this has to be one of the most conoluted threads in this forum right now. Instead of quoting, I'm just going to do my best to address some of the things that were said. Feel free to ignore them if you want to continue to babble conspiracy theories at each other.
1. Eisenhower did not starve 1.5 million German POW's. That claim is based on a thoroughly discredited book that was discussed and the claim thoroughly debunked in this thread:
2. That essay linked from Pat Buchanan was posted before. The essay can be summed up by simply saying, Pat Buchanan is an idiot. See this thread, if you want the blow-by-blow critique and deconstruction of Pat's thesis:
3. Boris Borisov did not write a research piece. He wrote a satire piece whose intent was to call into question the methodologies western researchers were employing to calculate the number of victims of the Holodomor. Borisov himself has repeatedly stated that the piece was satire, but that doesn't change the fact that some people continually insist on pulling out his article as some sort of "fact based research". Quoting that piece by Borisov is like quoting the Onion as a news source or Monty Python's "History of the World" as a source on revolutionary France. This thread dealt with the article when it was posted:
4. The Holodomor has been a raging topic of discussion several times. Did people starve to death in the Ukraine at that time? Yes. Was the starvation created/worsened by Soviet policies under Stalin? Yes. Were people intentionally starved? Not so easy to answer. I personally believe that Stalin could have cared less about the people who died, but I am not overwhelmingly convinced that there was a clear intent on his part to starve the people. However, he certainly capitalized on the situation to eliminate national and class enemies among the Ukrainian "kulaks". This thread had a long running debate between a poster "Alma1", erasure and myself. It covered the topic in detail:
5. How many people did Stalin kill? This is not an easy one to answer and the truth of the matter is no one really knows for sure. There are four main events/policies that compose the deaths attributed to Stalin. These do not count anything that happened during WW2:
a. Holodmor: 2.4 - 7.5 million people.
b. Gulags: 1.75 - 2.75 million people.
c. Purges: 700k directly, but many of the gulag deaths were the end result of purges as well.
That gives us anywhere from around 5 - 11 million deaths for those three categories, obviously wide ranging. The remainder of the deaths are from the final topic, collectivization. No one really knows how many people died as a result of the collectivization policies of Stalin. The estimate is that around 10 million died during the process of collectivization. This is based primarily on census data that shows that there were 21 million less people living on farms post-collectivization, but that the urban population had only increased by around 12 million. The missing people are considered "deaths". This is the central part of Borisvo's critique and is valid. The census numbers show that there may be a "missing 10 million", but that does not mean that 10 million actually died or that if they did that the deaths were caused by Stalin and/or his policies.
Overall, most modern research based on Soviet archives settles on a number of around 6-8 million civilians killed by Stalin in the pre-war years. This pales compared to the 11 million killed by the Nazi's during the Holocaust alone. There is also a difference in intent. The Nazi intent was to eliminate people based on racial ideology. The Soviet intent was that these people were "casualties" in the race for modernization and achieving communism and/or protecting Stalin's hold on power. A Jew could have been an ardent Nazi and still be killed for being a Jew. People who were ardent Stalinists, feared nothing. I understand, that is splitting hairs and both were brutal, but there is a difference there in terms of intent.
Finally, once we start introducing WW2 into the factors, everything goes out the window. Who do we blame for the deaths of tens of thousands of Soviet civilians killed in reprisal for actions of Soviet partisans? Is it the Nazi's or the Soviets? Who do we blame for POW gulag deaths in 1941-1943? The Soviets let the prisoners starve, but the food shortage was caused by the German invasion.
Ultimately, both were brutal dictators and I would not like to live in a nation run by either. As to which one was "worse" I would personally have to say Hitler based on the ideology behind why he did what he did.
Small clarification here;
Since GULAG is acronym that stands for "Chief Administration of Corrective Labor Camps and Colonies," and we are talking about the wide range of those camps and colonies; (the village-like settlements including,) a lot of those who resisted collectivization ended up in those camps-colonies-settlements, so the death rate in camps and death rate from collectivization can't be really separated. ( Meaning part of it is included in the other count.)
Why do we know how many people perished in Nazi work camps and not Soviet?
Seems like the only difference is Jews have a stronger voice and outlet than Slavs
It has got little to do with "stronger voice" and everything to do with census.
Even in the western part of Russia during the WWII Germans learned the hard way that there was practically no roads between villages/settlements through the whole fall-spring time - and that's western part of Russia, but once you get behind the Ural mountains, with all those scattered villages and settlements, you'll really have very vague idea how many people live here or there, particularly when people always weary and suspicious of authorities do not necessarily report correct figures.
Plus Russians overseers working in those camps would probably not always report the exact figures of how many people in their care died or were released. They too never knew for sure whether they'd be awarded a medal or executed depending on the number of deceased.
I mean look at this article that was discussed on this forum earlier;
See? People managed to live there without knowing about the war; try to imagine something like that in any European country. Russia is a huge place, sparsely populated in its Eastern part, with little communication between different villages and with no reliable roads for the most part. So if people were say arrested in the Western part of the country and shipped to work in Siberian camps, you could never say for sure how many of them died, and how many simply didn't return to the Western part of the country because they resettled in Siberia. That's why the estimates can vary so widely from 2 million to 7 million and so on.
Germans on another hand have tendency to count anything and everything. It's in their national character, plus they have all the opportunities in practical sense of it.
Kind of likie pcikig between two serial killers really.But I think still germnay a modern western country at the time was more shocking and still is. It broguht a shock as to what can happen in a civil sociliety with well eduated people.The recent bombings i Boston broguht that fact back to many.
Just a comment on Roosevelt's public works programs; I had a grandfather who worked in the WPA and he remembered it as being a very good thing. There are so many useful things that were built and created, some were in swampy places, but there was a need for them, as in the TVA. Even here in the "desert" there are still many buildings, courthouses in small towns, and all sorts of active reminders of those projects. Prices were alot less then and wages were appropriate due to the sheer amount of people that had to be paid and the costs of the actual projects. These were not labor gulags, no one was forced to participate, but most welcomed the chance. My grandfather also remembered that time as a great expierence, many people who had no skills or no abilities got both. All those workers put alot of their pay back into the economy one way or another and things started to get moving again.... unfortunately Stalin did not have the same concern for most of Russia's citizens, and most remember him a little differently....
You do realize the difference between the US of Roosevelt's times and Stalin's post-civil war Russia?
Because this was the country that Stalin inherited;
"At the end of the Civil War, the Russian SFSR was exhausted and near ruin. The droughts of 1920 and 1921, as well as the 1921 famine, worsened the disaster still further. Disease had reached pandemic proportions, with 3,000,000 dying of typhus alone in 1920. Millions more were also killed by widespread starvation, wholesale massacres by both sides, and pogroms against Jews in Ukraine and southern Russia. By 1922, there were at least 7,000,000 street children in Russia as a result of nearly 10 years of devastation from the Great War and the civil war.[59]
So what "appropriate wages" you are talking about in this situation?
I suppose that when during his last exile Stalin was shipped in the middle of nowhere in Siberia for four years, he probably decided that if he could make it, anyone could and should.
That's when he probably got his ideas - I don't know...
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