Similarities Between Hitler And Joseph Stalin

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World War 1, or the “Great War,” started in 1914 and lasted for four years. There were many casualties during this period, and by 1918 the whole world had changed in one way or another. Two world leaders that emerged and became more significant after the war were Joseph Stalin of Russia/ the Soviet Union and Adolf Hitler of Germany. Their ways of leadership had both similarities and differences. These two leaders changed their nations economically by improving trade, business, and modernization, they changed their nations politically through building their military and creating new forms of governments, and they changed their nations socially by introducing new societal norms. Stalin and Hitler brought substantial growth in their countries’ …show more content…

Adding on to totalitarianism, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler believed the state was greater and more important the individual. Stalin’s Five-Year Plan had shown a huge increase in the urban population, but it also came with human cost due to the labor camp system (or the gulag). An excerpt from the document “Stalin’s Industrial Development, A View From Below” digs deeper on how harshly Soviet workers were treated, going on about having bad hygiene and starving and living in filth. Clearly, there was a class distinction between the lower-level workers and the upper-level workers and upper class. If you compare this to the communism in Russia before, there’s a major difference. For example, the Soviet Union’s flag has a hammer and sickle to show workers and peasants working together to achieve “communist victory.” Hitler did have some distinctions, but not by class. Instead, as stated in “Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler,” he was biased against Jews because he blamed them for Germany’s downfall and believed that they were “poisoning” individuals by contaminating everything. The text also states that Hitler was against Jewish Marxism and all of Marxism in general, since it is associated with having a democracy. This relates to Stalin, who claimed he was a Marxist but he actually purely supported communism with a dictatorship, like and absolute