@Zooey72:
Something that I think people forget about the Soviet Union under Stalin is that it was as bad, if not worse than Hitler. I can not remember his name, but there was an admiral in the British navy who said (after he found out that Germany invaded the U.S.S.R.) “It is a pity they both can’t lose”.
Many more people died in gulags than in concentration camps; but the winners write the history books.
Germany’s war caused at least 17 million civilian casualties in the east alone (Poland, Balkans, Soviet Union), which is more than for all of Stalin’s rule (12-15 million). The big difference between the gulags (where about 2 million people died) and the concentration/extermination camps was that the Soviets used prisoners mostly for labor, whereas a large part of the German effort was aimed at extermination.
Hitler was far, far worse. Churchill recognized this the very day Hitler attacked Stalin, by promising unlimited support for the Soviet Union as far as Britain was capable of.
The Cold War has caused a severe distortion in the history writing of World War II. Germany was allowed to downplay and deny many of its crimes (apart from the ‘holocaust’) and the Soviet citizens killed by Hitler’s deployment squads, SS and Wehrmacht were casually added to Stalin’s death count for propaganda purposes. The clean Wehrmacht myth is a Cold War propaganda fabrication.
You might have heard of Red Army behavior towards civilians once they crossed into German territory. What they did was bad, sure, but it was nothing compared to the mass murder and genocide Hitler’s troops practised nearly everywhere they went. The biggest difference, once German soldiers were done raping Polish or Russian women, they usually killed them right after. In the BBC documentary “War of the Century: when Hitler fought Stalin” this is addressed, this documentary clearly mentions that most Wehrmacht units are heavily implicated in the war crimes, including rapes, murders, and mass shootings.
Had the Red Army done in Germany what the Wehrmacht and SS did in Poland and the Soviet Union, Germany would have suffered at least 7 million casualties more.