Did Stalin make Russians safer? Did Hitler make Germans safer?

[n2doc]

Both had unlimited "war powers". Just askin'

[Taxloss]

1. That depends - safer from what? n/t

[ChairmanAgnostic]

2. damn. these are actually great questions. assuming

that one gets past the obvious emotional crap that those names seem to evoke.

[lvx35]

3. Hitler sure as hell didn't...

..he brought his country to ruin. And Stalin? Being as the folks at the gulags, and who died as the result of various programs were under his control, and there were a lot of them, I would have to say no. It makes me curious about the numbers in USSR though, I wonder how many died as a direct result.

[Taxloss]

5. Stalin killed somewhere in the region of 20 million.

I recommend Martin Amis's "Koba the Dread" as a good primer on Stalin's own holocaust.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786868767/104-4707780-7446364?v=glance&n=283155

[lvx35]

15. So that HAD to be a big part of the population...

So what, maybe a population of 200 million over 20 years? So a 1/200 chance of getting killed by Stalin? Not very safe at all.

[everythingsxen]

4. Well....

as Devil's Advocate, let me say this...

I would say Stalin made the Soviet's safer. Crushed under his iron boot, but safer. Not safer from him of course (wasn't his body-count for his own people higher than Hitler's?), but safer from Germany. And he did transform Russia into a power to be reckoned with. At the end of the day Soviet Russia was not conquered by an enemy though. It fell, but not to any military power.

As for Hitler... yes and no. Basically Hitler was, well, an idiot when it came to strategy. If he had left the Generals in charge, Germany would have won WWII. Would that have made the German people safer? :shrug: A tough call. Assuming you forgo morality in this situation, Germany would have had a sizable slave labor force and would have conquered all of Europe. Granted that sucks for Jews, Roma, Poles and pretty much anyone who disagreed with Nazi policies. If Hitler had kept a better check on the Japanese (like getting them to attack Russia and meeting Germany in the middle instead of attacking America..) things would have been vastly different.

Germany could have also made better use of the American Nazi Party. They had Lindberg for God's sake. If Japan hadn't gotten us into WWII, I think the Nazi's could have taken over here (possibly with Lucky Lindy as Prez) and America would have either sat out the war or joined Germany.

Sorry I went off on an alternate history tangent there.

Anyway. The answer is "sort of" in both cases. If a leader is the right person, they can do things with unlimited power that will make their nation stronger and better than it was before. They can also fuck it up so bad that.....

[Taxloss]

10. I entirely disagree on Stalin.

He did nothing but imperil and terrify those unlucky enough to be under him. The apparatus of persecution worked by quota, demanding arrests as a percentage of population - no one was safe. The terror was randomised, blind, and everywhere. And he further endangered Russia by both ignoring the threat from Hitler, decapitating the Red Army by purging most of its officers, and suicidally wasteful tactics on the battlefield. Take into account the terror-famines and you have a record of evil and malicious incompetence unsurpassed in history.

And the trains didn't even run on time.

[Hubert Flottz]

6. Dresden...

[Hubert Flottz]

7. Hamburg...

[Hubert Flottz]

8. Berlin...

[Hubert Flottz]

9. German City...

[Hubert Flottz]

11. Frankfurt...

[Hubert Flottz]

14. Map showing amounts of destruction to major German cities

http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=&imgrefurl=http://www.mimosa.co.cr/newbook/images.html&h=497&w=400&sz=42&hl=en&start=1&tbnid=vCTxdgtGql_vSM:&tbnh=130&tbnw=105&prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddestruction%2Bof%2Bgerman%2Bcities%2Bww%2BII%2Bimage%26svnum%3D10%26hl%3Den%26lr%3D%26sa%3DG

[neoblues]

12. Rubble, rubble, everywhere... and not a place to sleep. nt.

[whistle]

13. Has George Bush made America safer?