Separated at Death
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By June 1934, after a year and a half as Germany’s chancellor, Hitler had succeeded in destroying almost every source of opposition to the National Socialist regime. His only remaining rival was within the Nazi party itself: Ernst Rohm, head of the SA, the paramilitary movement that had helped bring Hitler to power. Although Rohm was one of Hitler’s earliest comrades – they had stood trial together for the failed Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 – the Fuhrer did not hesitate: On the night of June 30, he took Rohm into custody personally, bursting into his room with a revolver and shouting, “You are under arrest, you pig!” By morning, Rohm and 85 other SA leaders were dead, and Hitler’s dictatorship was secure. Hermann Goring, then president of the Reichstag, told the assembled deputies, “We all approve, always, whatever our Fuhrer does.”
Goring’s approval of Hitler’s tactics is hardly surprising. More unexpected, perhaps, is the reaction of Josef Stalin, chronicled by Richard Overy in his new book “The Dictators” (W.W. Norton, 849 pages, $29.95).When he heard the news of the Rohm purge, Stalin exclaimed to a meeting of the Politburo: “Hitler, what a great man! This is the way to deal with your political opponents.” The lesson was not forgotten: Four years later, Stalin purged the Communist Party on a much larger scale.
Mr. Overy’s dual study of the Hitler and Stalin dictatorships is never more illuminating than at such moments of ironic convergence. From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were locked in an ideological and geopolitical death struggle. Hitler’s hatred of communism – or “Judeo-Bolshevism,” as he preferred to call it – was psychopathic. The central goal of his foreign policy was the annexation of huge swathes of Soviet territory, to provide Lebensraum for the master race. Stalin, meanwhile, prided himself on being the world’s chief foe of capitalism, of which fascism was said to be the most extreme and dangerous form. Throughout the 1930s, Germany and Russia were feverishly arming for the massive war they knew must come; when it finally arrived, it proved to be the deadliest ever fought, leaving 12 million dead on the Russian side and 6 million on the German.
Yet despite all this, Hitler and Stalin bore a deep inner kinship, and the dictatorships they created were virtually isomorphic. While this truth was long avoided by Western sympathizers with communism, it was always clear to the unblinkered eye. In 1940, Valentin Berezhkov, a Soviet interpreter visiting Berlin, recognized “the same idolization of the ‘leader,’ the same mass rallies and parades. … Very similar, ostentatious architecture … massive ideological brainwashing.”
In studying the two dictatorships side by side, then, Mr. Overy is not making a novel point. (And despite his title, it is the dictatorships, not the dictators themselves, he is interested in.) When he concludes that the “two systems [were] sustained by remarkably similar political and social strategies and patterns of authority, participation and popular response,” he will not surprise anyone moderately familiar with the history of Nazism and communism. The value of “The Dictators” lies, rather, in its encyclopedic thoroughness.
In 650 densely footnoted pages, Mr. Overy proceeds methodically through every major area of similarity between the two dictatorships. He shows how Hitler and Stalin seized power, built cults of personality, and used terror to silence their opponents; how they managed the economy and transformed the law; how they prepared for and fought World War II; and how they turned the concentration camp into the essential, representative institution of ideological tyranny. Mr. Overy’s continual turning from Germany to Russia and back again can grow wearisome, and his prose is often clumsy. But the cumulative effect of his scholarship is overwhelming.
The ideologies of the two regimes were obviously opposed: Stalin claimed to stand for the universal liberation of the poor and oppressed; Hitler promised the enslavement and annihilation of everyone who stood in the way of Germany’s historic destiny. (Whether this rhetorical difference actually makes a moral difference is a question Mr. Overy never satisfactorily addresses.) Yet the two dictatorships had far more in common with each other than either had with any other government in the world, and they were uneasily aware of this fact. When the Nazis established their secret state police, they chose to call it Gestapo because the obvious acronym, GPA, gave away all too clearly its resemblance to the Soviet secret police, the GPU. Likewise, after the war, the Soviet writer Vasily Grossman was forbidden to publish his memoir of the German camps because their resemblance to Soviet camps would have been unmistakable.
Where Mr. Overy finds differences between the systems, they are usually a matter of intention rather than effect. The Nazi concentration camps were designed to kill their inmates – communists, “asocials,” partisans – through overwork; the economic benefit of their labor was just a side effect. The Soviet Gulag, on the other hand, was primarily intended to make use of inmates’ labor, while doing nothing to stop them from dying of overwork. Thus the death rate in Nazi camps (not including the extermination camps) was around 40%, while in the Soviet camps it was only 14%.
But as Mr. Overy shows, the nature of the two regimes, their economic strategies, and the exigencies of wartime, meant that their camp systems became more alike: By 1945, both regimes were relying on camp labor as a vital part of their war efforts. Life inside the two systems was also demonically similar: The unfortunates the Germans called mussulmanner – the walking dead, who had lost all will to live – were known by the Russians as dokhodyaga, “the concluded.” The signal difference was that only the Nazis also had death camps designed solely to murder Jews.
“The Dictators” does little to change our understanding of Stalinism and Nazism; half a century ago, their psychological and ideological twinship was illustrated by George Orwell and analyzed by Hannah Arendt in terms Mr. Overy essentially endorses. His achievement has been to make clear the complete, monstrous dimensions of that twinship. He leaves the reader feeling grateful that the dictators never came to admit their resemblance and follow it to its logical conclusion. “Together with the Germans,” Stalin once remarked, “we would have been invincible.”