Hitler and Stalin
The Tyrants and the Second World War
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
"Laurence Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account of how two terrible dictators led their countries in the most destructive and inhumane war in history."―Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis
Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed.
Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious magnetism of their leadership.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Rees (The Holocaust) draws on eyewitness testimony to identify "key differences" between Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler in this informative yet somewhat skewed account. Stodgy bureaucrat Stalin was deeply committed to the Communist Party, according to Rees, while Hitler was a charismatic leader who regarded the National Socialist German Workers' Party as "disposable." Both leaders tried to build utopian societies (racist ideology shaped Hitler's vision; Stalin's was influenced by Marxism), yet Hitler's tendency to self-deceive blinded him to crippling military losses, and Stalin's growing paranoia sabotaged the Red Army, forcing 400,000 Russian soldiers into penal units and another 160,000 to their deaths as enemies of the state. Rees decisively interprets the thinking behind Hitler's actions, including the decision to invade the Soviet Union, yet tends to speculate when it comes to Stalin's strategies, concluding that it is "hard, if not impossible" to understand why Stalin proposed a military alliance with Britain and France, and offering "likely" reasons for why he miscalculated the 1939 invasion of Finland, which resulted in a humiliating loss for the Red Army. Despite the lack of balance, this richly detailed history powerfully documents "the destruction that tyrants with utopian visions can inflict upon the world."
