Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia

882 Pages·2013·42.26 MB·English

by  Richard Overy

RICHARD OVERY
The Dictators
Germany and Russia
Hitler~s Stalin~s
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
List of Illustrations IX
List of Tables and Maps Xlll
Maps XIV
Abbreviations xxv
Preface XXVII
Introduction: Comparing Dictatorships xxx
I Stalin and Hitler: Paths to Dictatorship I
2 The Art of Ruling 54
3 Cults of Personality 98
4 The Party State 132
5 States of Terror 176
6 Constructing Utopia 218
7 The Moral Universe of Dictatorship 265
8 Friend and Foe: Popular Responses
to Dictatorship 304
9 Cultural Revolutions 349
10 Commanding the Economy 392
II Military Superpowers 441
12 Total War 483
13 Nations and Races 540
14 Empire of the Camps 593
Vll
CONTENTS
Conclusion: Two Dictatorships
Bibliography
Notes
Index
Vlll
List of Illustrations
FIRST SECTION
I Josef Stalin at the height of his powers.
2 Stalin at a meeting of the Praesidium of the Supreme Soviet, with
President Kalinin on his left.
3 Stalin applauding his audience after a speech on the new
constitution in 1936.
4 A poster of the two leaders Lenin and Stalin, c. 1936.
5 A propaganda session in the Soviet countryside, c. 1930.
6 A march past of athletes in Red Square in Moscow in 1937.
7 Andrei Vyshinsky in 1938 as Chief Procurator of the Soviet Union.
8 A diploma awarded in 1931 for denouncing rich peasants to the
authorities.
9 The Praesidium building of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukraine in
Kiev.
10 Building the fourth section of the Moscow metro in the I940s.
II The Unforgettable Meeting by V. Yefanov, 1936.
12 A party member subjecting a group of Russian prostitutes to a
course of political re-education.
13 Troflm Lysenko, the Soviet 'people's scientist'.
14 The giant statue Worker and Collective Farm Woman by Vera
Mukhina, on top of the Soviet pavilion in Paris in 1937.
15 An anti-religious demonstration in Moscow in the I920S.
16 A painting of the young Stalin talking to peasants in 1902 by
A. Kutateladze.
17 A group of Stakhanovite coal-miners pose after winning the
national mineworkers competition.
IX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
18 A couple playing draughts in the Gorky Park of Culture and Rest
In 1937.
19 The writer Maxim Gorky after his return to the Soviet Union in
1932.
20 The writer Mikhail Bulgakov.
21 A Georgian woman learning to write using the new alphabet
imposed in the late 1920S.
22 The painting At an Old Urals Works by Johanson, winner of the
all-Soviet art exhibition of 1929.
23 Tractors lined up at the Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory in 1935.
24 Dividing up the landlords' land in the new Latvian socialist
republic.
25 The woman tractor driver who became a Stakhanovite model for
other women workers on collective farms.
26 Architects and town-planners work on the reconstruction of
Moscow in 1946.
27 A 1936 poster on 'Fascism Means War'.
28 A poster on the threat of war: 'Accursed be the Warmongers!
Mothers of the World Fight for Peace'.
29 A former student checks shells in an arms factory.
30 A group of women volunteers in 1941 fighting with partisans
against the German invasion.
3 I Women building barricades and preparing Leningrad's defences.
32 Soldiers of General GUfyev's units kneel at the presentation of
the Lenin Banner before departing for the Stalingrad front.
33 German soldiers pose with executed partisans.
34 A train filled with Soviet Jews from Belorussia in 1932.
35 A bas-relief of Stalin at Taganskaya station in Moscow.
36 Stalin and Lenin's mausoleum.
SECOND SECTION
I Adolf Hitler on the path to power.
2 Hitler voting in the general election of March 1936.
3 Hitler welcoming a group of Hitler Youth in 1936.
4 Hitler in 1935 with Rudolf Hess and Joseph Goebbels.
x
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
5 Young girls from the Bund deutscher Madel are addressed by
Hitler Youth officials and leaders.
6 Adolf Hitler with Heinrich Himmler.
7 The National Socialist lawyer Roland Freisler.
8 Hitler examining a model of an Autobahn bridge with the
engineer Fritz Todt and his deputy Albert Speer.
9 Model for the great Congress Hall.
10 Poster idealizing mother and child in the Third Reich.
II Chart from a book on genetics published in 1936.
12 The ideal National Socialist family.
13 A member of the Russian National Socialist Party poses in Berlin.
14 The expressionist poet Gottfried Benn.
15 Hitler visits the Exhibition of Degenerate Art in Munich in 1937.
16 Still from the film of the 193 5 ceremony honouring the martyrs
of the National Socialist movement in Munich.
17 German girls from the Sudetenland.
18 A labour battalion returning home at the end of the day.
19 Women at the Ravensbruck concentration camp stand ready to
begin work in the camp factory.
20 Gathering including Hermann Goring and the SA leader Ernst
Rohm.
21 Hitler Youth.
22 Hitler a few months after assuming supreme command of the
armed forces in February 1938.
23 A woodcut from 1942 based on a drawing by the Soviet artist
Mikhail Pikov which shows German forces routed in front of
Moscow.
24 The bombed ruins of the Guinsburg House in Kiev after German
attacks in the summer of 1941.
25 An army order published in German and Belorussian in August
1941 requiring the population of the village of Zizicha to leave
or be shot.
26 A Red Army soldier murdered on the eastern front.
27 A young Jewish child is assessed racially by German officials.
28 A gypsy baby at Auschwitz, with the camp tattoo on its forearm.
29 A camp drawing from the Buchenwald concentration camp in
1944·
Xl
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
30 A group of European Jews waiting after arrival at
Auschwitz-Birkenau.
3 I Two women liberated by the Red Army from a camp in
Pomerania at the end of the war.
32 Three women truck drivers for the German air force, captured by
the American 7th Army at the end of the war.
ILLUSTRATION ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author would like to thank John Cunningham at the Society for
Co-Operation in Russian and Soviet Studies (SCRSS) and Marek Jaros
at the Wiener Library (WL), the Institute of Contemporary History,
for their help with the pictures in this book.
Copyright for the following pictures is held by the S CRSS: first section,
pictures 1-12, 14, 16-21, 23-36; second section, pictures 23-26, 31.
Copyright for the following pictures is held by the WL: second section,
pictures 12, 13,20,27. The following images were supplied by the WL,
copyright unknown: second section, pictures 1-10, 15-22,28-3°,32.
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders but this has not
been possible in all cases. If notified, the publishers will be pleased to
rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.
Xli
List of Tables and Maps
TABLES
Table 4.1 Membership of the Communist Party of the
Soviet Union 1917-1953 138
Table 4.2 Membership of the National Socialist Party
1919-1945 140
Table 5.1 Sentences of Cases brought to Trial by State
Security 1930-I 9 53 195
Table II.I Defence Expenditure in Germany and the Soviet
Union 1928-1939 453
Table 12.1 Resources and Military Output of the Soviet
Union and Germany 1941-1945 498
Table 14.1 German Concentration Camp Population
1933-1945 612
Table 14.2 Number of Prisoners in ITLs and ITKs 1930-1953 613
Table 14.3 Admissions, Escapes, Deaths and Releases in the
GUlag Camps 1934-1947 615
MAPS
I Germany in 1933 XIV
2 The Soviet Union in the 193 os XVI
3 The Party organization in Germany XV111
4 The camp system in central Russia and Siberia XX
5 The camp system in Greater Germany XXll
6 The camp system in the Western Soviet Union XXIV
Xlll
o 100 2~0 km
I Germany in I933