Oct 20 2014
I Don’t Like You, but I Like What You Do
For a long time, the Russians viewed Germans and the Slavic minorities in their country as an issue, especially during World War II. However, this enmity towards the Germans always existed, Stalin just used the war as an excuse to “cleanse” Russia of the perceived filth, claiming that the Germans had infiltrated Russia with spies. In fact, the only thing that the Russian Germans and the Nazi Germans shared was a language and heritage. In just three months at the ned of 1941, Stalin forced almost 800,00 Germans into “areas of internal exile called special settlements.” Many of these settlements hardly provided the Germans with enough to live even at the most squalid levels. In 1942, the Germans were forced into labor battalions and made to work with Gulag prisoners. Tens of thousands died as a direct result of this forced labor. Even after the end of the war, the displaced population was not allowed to return to their homes (Pohl 1-4)
This is very similar to how the Germans treated the Jews, gays, gypsies, and political prisoners. They also forcibly removed them from their homes, forced them into labor camps, starved and mistreated them, and sometimes killed them outright.
For example, this:
Is eerily similar to this:
I find it interesting that despite all the hatred that existed between the Germans and the Russians, that they both employed similar means of dealing with the xenophobia that ran rampant in the years leading up to, during, and after World War II.
Information Pulled from:
Pohl, J. Otto. The Deportation and Destruction of the German Minority in the USSR. 2001. 1-4. Print.
October 20, 2014 @ 7:12 pm
The comparison of the two photos strengthens your argument of the similarities between the two countries tactics.
October 20, 2014 @ 9:26 pm
The act of displacing unwanted groups was also not something completely between the Russians and Nazi Germany. The US had displaced thousands of Japanese Americans who had been living on the west coast as a means to protect from spies and saboteurs. When Japan invaded mainland China, countless people were sent to labor and death camps for being ethnic Chinese or other Asian minorities.
October 21, 2014 @ 12:57 am
Though this post is interesting more in depth information would have been better. I like this topic but i think that you would have added more in comparing the similarities of the two regimes. For example, you could have compared the economic problems that both countries had before World War II and the leaders Hitler and Stalin.
October 21, 2014 @ 6:38 am
It is quite sad that all of the attention is put on the Holocaust at this time even though genocide was rampant in many areas. I also find it nerve racking that these people had nothing to do with the war other than they simply had heritage relating them to the enemy nation. As a consequence these innocent lives were torn from their homes and forced to work potentially to their deaths.
October 21, 2014 @ 3:05 pm
I would be careful of how closely you compare Stalin and Hitler. Yes, they were both considered “bad guys” so it seems easy to compare the two, but they had very different motivations for cleansing the population. Hitler wanted to basically eradicate any ethnicity he didn’t like. On the other hand, Stalin was cleansing the german population in Russia because Russia was in at war with Germany. The German’s goal was to wipe out all Russians. In hindsight, Stalin probably overreacted a bit, but other allies such as the U.S. did the same thing. The United States, although on a smaller scale and less brutally, placed a large portion of the Japanese population in camps after Pearl Harbor until the end of the war.