Of the twentieth century’s prominent leaders, none were more despotic than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Unquestioned in rule, extreme in method, they expressed little respect for anyone, save themselves and each other. Wary allies in the September 1939 invasion of Poland, they became malignant enemies by June 1941 and thereafter spread virulent ruination upon nearly all of Central and Eastern Europe. In the end, their respective reigns accounted for more than half the deaths administered and received during the whole of the Second World War.
For such absolute adversaries, they shared a number of fundamental traits. Brooding and temperamental, intelligent and widely read, they were also socially unskilled and physically small. Night owls with a penchant for movies, they slept with difficulty, felt ill frequently, and avoided exercise religiously. Despite their infirmities, they were eerily charismatic. People were often awed by their direct and riveting stare—Hitler’s eyes a clear and azure blue, Stalin’s a demonic yellow.
Naturally there were differences. Stalin was better traveled, having toiled as a revolutionary in Krakow, St. Petersburg, Berlin, London, Stockholm, at home in the sunny Caucasus, and in exile within the Arctic Circle. In 1913 he briefly visited Vienna, where hundreds of aspiring art students lived, including a twenty-four-year-old named Hitler, who at that time had seen little of the world beyond Austria and Bavaria.
Of the two, only Hitler had served in the military, fighting nearly four years in the First World War. A messenger for a Bavarian infantry regiment stationed in the trenches of northern France, he was twice wounded and twice awarded the Iron Cross before being temporarily blinded by mustard gas in 1918.
Later in life, Hitler proved to be the better public speaker. Clear of voice, he began his orations quietly, then built himself and his message into climactic frenzy. Stalin possessed a gravely tenor sound and spoke in a manner best described as stoic.
Despite their differences, fundamental parallels pervaded amid the two most dominant figures of the European war. Here in roughly chronological order are ten major similarities between the men who sacrificed millions in an attempt to destroy each other.42
1. HITLER WAS NOT GERMAN, AND STALIN WAS NOT RUSSIAN
Officially, Joseph Stalin’s birthday was December 21, 1879, but newly uncovered evidence indicates it was actually December 6, 1878. Biographer Edvard Radzinsky credits the discrepancy as yet another example of how Stalin habitually buried the past.43
Born in the Transcaucus country of Georgia, Josef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili was the last of four children and the only one to live past infancy. As a young man, he resorted to nearly twenty different aliases, including Koba (“Indomitable”) and Ivanovich (“son of Ivan”), before settling on Stalin (“Steel”) in 1913. His poverty-stricken and barely literate mother doted over him and sacrificed much for his happiness. His father was a cobbler and was known to be verbally and physically abusive to his son.44
Ten years later, Adolfus Hitler entered the world in the tiny Austrian village of Braunau am Inn on April 20, 1889. The fourth of six children, only he and his younger sister Paula survived childhood.
Adolf’s mother idolized him. His father, a former cobbler turned civil servant, was born Alois Schicklgruber. In 1876, Alois took the name of his stepfather, whose surname had various spellings—Hiedler, Hüttler, Hitler. Alois often denounced and occasionally beat Adolf, yet the son would later say of the father, “I really loved him.”45
As he grew up, Adolf expressed increasing animosity toward his native soil, especially against multiethnic Vienna. “The longer I lived in that city,” he wrote, “the stronger became my hatred for the promiscuous swarm of foreign peoples.”46 To his native Georgia, Josef Dzhugashvili was icily indifferent. He eventually viewed the country as simply another frontier for socialist expansion. In time, both men ruthlessly incorporated their homelands into larger adopted states.
Among other “adopted sons,” Greece’s Alexander the Great was Macedonian, Napoleon was born in Corsica, Saint Patrick was British, and the House of Windsor had German origins.
2. BOTH DESPISED SCHOOL AND INTELLECTUALS
Attending secondary school, Hitler recalled of his teachers, “Their one object was to stuff our brains and turn us into erudite apes like themselves.” Young Josef Dzhugashvili, subjected to an overtly strict seminary where he learned Russian, confessed he hated “the harsh intolerance and Jesuitical discipline that crushed me so mercilessly.”47
Both displayed above-average intelligence and superior memory, but neither cared for the structure of a scholastic environment. Both were prone to fighting—meek Hitler in the verbal arena and dwarfish Josef with his fists. Out of the classroom, both were ringleaders of playground bullies, although both were also choirboys.
Neither graduated. Despite finishing his studies at age sixteen, Hitler never secured a Leaving Certificate, for reasons unknown. Fancying himself a painter, he twice attempted and failed to gain admission into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He could draft buildings with meticulous skill but had a difficult time drawing nature, especially humans. Stalin claimed to have been kicked out of seminary at age nineteen for being a Marxist. In reality, he was expelled for skipping exams.48
In their adulthood, Stalin and Hitler showed particular contempt for intellectuals and laureates. Among their closest advisers, only Hitler’s hundred-pound propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, and none of Stalin’s lieutenants could have been considered an intellectual. In fact, the learned elite of Europe were among the first condemned to Soviet and Nazi concentration camps. An untold number of additional scholars and artists were forced into exile. Subsequently, the years of Hitlerism and Stalinism were veritable dark ages for the humanities. Perennial epicenters of the fine arts, Germany and Russia produced virtually no paintings, writing, or theater productions of merit from 1933 to 1945.49
For Joseph and Adolf, their best grades in school were in history.
3. BOTH SERVED TIME IN PRISON
Between 1902 and 1917 Stalin was arrested seven times, usually for organizing anti-czarist meetings and demonstrations. As with most detainees of the Russian Empire, he was usually banished to work colonies. These desolate camps pockmarked the empire from the Black Sea to the Pacific Ocean, the worst among them in remote and climatically brutal Siberia. The fact that he managed to escape from these nether regions nearly every time led his enemies to hypothesize that he was a czarist agent, though this “agent” spent nearly a decade of his life in jail or exile.50
Altogether, Hitler spent a little over a year in prison. His first stint was a five-week detainment in 1922 for inciting a riot against the Weimar government. An incensed Hitler equated his sentence with the crucifixion of Christ.51
Hitler’s second and last incarceration occurred as a result of his failed Munich Beerhall Putsch in 1923, in which he and nearly three thousand followers tried to overthrow the regional government of Bavaria. Sixteen of his party were killed, two more were mortally wounded. For his actions, Hitler received a sentence of five years yet would serve only thirteen months, which proved to be little more than a sabbatical. Jailed with cohorts such as Rudolf Hess, the future ruler of Germany received visits and care packages from admirers and managed to complete the first half of his autobiographical Mein Kampf.52
Hitler detested the Weimar government, which had been in power for three years. Stalin conspired against the Romanov dynasty, which had ruled for three centuries.
4. NEITHER HAD A STEADY JOB IN HIS LIFE
With the exception of dictator, a position Hitler held for twelve years and Stalin for twenty-five, gainful employment was a rare condition for the future demagogues of forced labor.
After leaving secondary school, Hitler spent more than five years nearly destitute in Vienna and Munich. He painted postcards, designed posters, and relied heavily on a small trust fund. Contrary to legend, he was never a professional house painter or paperhanger, but from 1910 to 1914, odd jobs were his unwelcome lot. Before he became a soldier in the Sixteenth Bavarian regiment in World War I, he was down to a single suit of clothes, living hand to mouth, and occasionally homeless.53
Stalin was initially a political insurgent, which brought him little pay and few benefits. To augment his activism, he worked briefly in an observatory, then as a writer for various underground newspapers including Pravda, but he was primarily an unpaid organizer of labor marches and strikes. On his many arrest forms, the space for “skill or profession” was usually left blank.54
Bouts of imprisonment did little to interrupt his calling, but unlike Hitler, who longed for attention, Josef Dzhugashvili sought anonymity.
Not until the aftermath of the First World War did each man excel at a given task, specifically agitation. Hitler’s penchant for oratory and Stalin’s faith in action gained considerable recognition from their peers. In the summer of 1917, Vladimir Lenin took notice of the ruthless Stalin and pulled him into the upper echelons of the small but growing Bolshevik Party. In the autumn of 1919 Anton Drexler invited the talented speaker Hitler to join the minuscule German Worker’s Party.
Before attaining higher-profile jobs with Hitler, Adolf Eichmann was a traveling salesman, Joseph Goebbels was unemployed, Hermann Göring was a pilot for the Danish government, and Heinrich Himmler was a fertilizer salesman.
5. BOTH LOST COMPANIONS TO SUICIDE
Stalin and Hitler were not always the cold and cruel figures remembered by history. Into early adulthood, each displayed a modest capacity for charm, humor, and charity.
Such attributes faded with the accumulation of power. Foreshadowing the public at large, many of those closest to Stalin and Hitler saw them undergo a gradual transformation from charismatic leaders into static figureheads. Workloads began to consume them, and leisure time became nonexistent. Relationships thus devolved into master and servant, and interactive social circles narrowed to static cliques. Their most devout companions started to view Stalin and Hitler as inaccessible, intolerable, and pointlessly cruel.
Geli Raubal was, by some accounts, Hitler’s one true love. She was twenty years his junior, pretty, a gifted singer, and his niece. Through the late 1920s they had grown close and shared considerable time together. Whether the relationship was ever physical is unknown. Yet Hitler was exceedingly protective, often preventing her from interacting with other people, especially men. In 1931, after falling into deep depression over her secluded life, she hid in Hitler’s Munich apartment and shot herself.55
During the great Russian famine of 1932, brought on by Stalin’s attempt to collectivize all Soviet farmland, his wife Nadia chastised him in front of party officials for the terrible suffering he had caused. After a torrid verbal exchange between the dictator and his much younger bride, she departed alone. Hours later Nadia entered her room at the Kremlin and shot herself.
Altogether, the two men eventually lost at least a score of relatives, friends, and companions to suicide, some by the insistence of the dictators themselves.
As Hitler’s new bride, Eva Braun committed suicide on April 30, 1945. As Hitler’s mistress, she had attempted suicide twice before—in 1932 and 1934.
6. BOTH FABRICATED CONSPIRACIES TO CONSOLIDATE POWER
By January 1933, Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany, but his duties were limited by the Weimar Constitution, and the National Socialists were just one of four large political parties in Germany. The following month, a fire destroyed the Reichstag building. In an emergency session, the government immediately suspended civil liberties and weeks later established Hitler as dictator of Germany.
On December 1, 1934, an assassin shot and killed Politburo member Sergei Kirov, by many accounts the second most powerful man in the Soviet Union and a vocal critic of Stalin’s rule. Stalin expressed shock and dismay over the incident and demanded an immediate investigation. Within a hundred hours, nearly one hundred people had been accused and summarily executed for the crime.56
Though there has been no conclusive evidence, the Reichstag fire and the Kirov assassination were probably sanctioned by Hitler and Stalin, respectively. More important, each event marked the beginning of absolute rule for each dictator.
Three weeks after the Reichstag incident, SS leader Heinrich Himmler declared the opening of Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. The following months witnessed the first application of anti-Jewish laws, disbanding of trade unions, dissolving of all opposition parties, and the creation of a special court with exclusive jurisdiction over cases of treason. Hours after Kirov’s assassination, Soviet law forbade appeals to sentences of death and unleashed wave after wave of mass arrests, most of which incarcerated people with no prior record and revealed no evidence of criminal activity. Within years, the number of political prisoners reached six figures in Germany and seven figures in the Soviet Union.57
The invasion of Poland in 1939 began on the pretext of a staged incident. German soldiers dressed up as Polish border guards and faked an attack on a German radio outpost. Hitler presented the event as fact and launched his blitzkrieg the following day.
7. BOTH OWNED FEW PERSONAL POSSESSIONS
Insatiable in their lust for authority and conquest, both men expressed profound disinterest in material wealth. Stalin once said to his wife, “I never loved money, because I usually never had any.” Hitler told confidant Albert Speer, “I would find a simple little house in Berlin quite sufficient. I have enough power and prestige; I don’t need such luxury to sustain me.”58
Though adamant about living simply, both functioned within a bourgeois lifestyle, with servants, drivers, cooks, and numerous residences. Stalin had several dachas (country homes) at his disposal, leftovers from dispossessed elite of the prerevolutionary era. But their private quarters, whatever the location, were humbly furnished, their wardrobes simple, and their diets basic if not rudimentary.
The state, rather than themselves, was to be the recipient and expression of wealth. Both men supported and at times directed the confiscation of art works and antiquities, but neither kept a single piece for himself. Instead they pilfered in order to amplify the holdings of national museums and galleries. Grander still were their plans to reconstruct major cities. Hitler envisioned a national stadium at Nuremberg holding four hundred thousand spectators, a national assembly hall with a central dome towering nine hundred feet in the air (nearly twice the height of the Washington Monument), and a Berlin headquarters with six million square feet of floor space. Stalin flaunted even greater aspirations, including a Palace of Soviets in Moscow designed to be the largest building on earth. Not unlike their ideologies, almost none of Stalin’s or Hitler grandiose architectural visions were completed, interrupted by the outbreak of mutual hostility.59
Upon his death, Stalin’s personal effects consisted of little more than some uniforms, a few pairs of boots, and a well-worn sheepskin peasant coat. So, too, Hitler passed with a dearth of property to his name, among them a flag and some trinkets acquired during a recent birthday party.
8. NEITHER HAD EXPERIENCE IN MILITARY LEADERSHIP
Franklin D. Roosevelt was Woodrow Wilson’s assistant secretary of the navy. From 1922 dictator Benito Mussolini served as his own navy, army, and air force minister. CHIANG KAI-SHEK studied military tactics in Japan and Russia and was commander in chief of Nationalist China since 1925. Longtime soldier Winston Churchill served as an officer, minister of munitions, secretary of war, and first lord of the admiralty before becoming prime minister. Military academy graduate Tojo Hideki worked as chief of military police, chief of staff, and minister of war. Of all the major leaders in the Second World War, only two possessed essentially no background in military authority.
Despite four long years of meritorious service in the FIRST WORLD WAR, Hitler never rose beyond the rank of corporal. Stalin served in the Red Army during the RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR, but only as a political adjutant.
At the end of the war, Hitler declared the German people unworthy of his military genius; Stalin bestowed upon himself the rank of Generalissimo, the medal “Order of Victory,” and the title “Hero of the Soviet Union.”60
9. BOTH AVOIDED THE FRONT FOR THE ENTIRE WAR
When German guns came within twenty miles of Moscow in December 1941, Stalin refused to leave the Kremlin, yet he also never visited any of his troops in the field. War or no war, seclusion was in keeping with his abstracted style of leadership. After taking power in 1928, he rarely ventured out in public, offered a decreasing number of party speeches, and avoided appearing in villages and factories altogether.
Only once, in 1943, did Stalin risk an excursion toward the fighting, an event he painted in the most gallant terms to Roosevelt and Churchill. His line commanders viewed the occasion differently. Gen. Nikolai Voronov recalled being summoned, driven mile after mile into secluded backwoods to a cottage nowhere near the front, in which a waiting Stalin requested a synopsis of how the war was progressing. “He could see nothing from there,” noted Voronov. “It was a strange unnecessary trip.”61
So, too, Hitler became increasingly detached. Biographer Ian Kershaw notes how the Führer conducted nine public speeches in 1940, two in 1943, and none in 1944. Ebbing tides in North Africa and the Soviet Union convinced Hitler to avoid the German public almost completely. He instead shuttled between his cloistered Eagle’s Nest mountain retreat at Berchtesgaden and his dreary concrete Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia. When field commanders spoke of exhausted supplies and faltering troops, Hitler dismissed their reports as defeatist, often adding, “Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range.”
A secretary of Hitler’s lamented, “We are permanently cut off from the world wherever we are…It’s always the same limited group of people, always the same routine inside the fence.” By autumn 1944 the Führer had been absent for so long that many of his countrymen began to believe their leader was either seriously ill or dead.62
In addition to military arenas, Stalin and Hitler avoided nearly everything else to do with the war. Neither ever visited a field hospital, bombed neighborhood, or concentration camp.
When traveling by train during the war, both Stalin and Hitler insisted that curtains remained drawn so they would not have to see the damage rendered on the surrounding countryside.
10. BOTH HAVE BEEN DEPICTED AS THE ANTICHRIST
Christian fears of the “Final Enemy” were propagated with the coming of the Second World War. Signs appeared profuse—a false deliverer, throngs of devout followers espousing a new order, eruption of war between many nations, and genocide.
To many then and now, the apparent embodiment of evil was Adolf Hitler, who spoke of a millennium (the thousand-year Reich), a divine mission (eradication of Jewish Bolshevism), and providential destiny (the rise of the German people). Others found greater evidence of a world dictator in Stalin, who fashioned a rule of idolatry (cult of Stalin), a new church eradicating all others (Marxism), and a promise of paradise (communism).63
Without question, both regimes were proficient at killing. Hitler’s armies traversed three continents; shot, burned, starved, hanged, and bombed millions; and swept entire towns from the face of the earth. Nazi concentration camps devoured millions more.64
Stalin’s numbers were even worse. His forced collectivization of Russian farms in the early 1930s starved as many as ten million. His Great Terror of 1936–39 purged nine of eleven of his own cabinet members, more than sixty thousand military officers, and untold millions of ordinary citizens. Between 1941 and 1945, Stalin’s Red Army killed more soldiers and civilians than any other military force in the war. Estimates of those killed directly or indirectly during Stalin’s entire reign approach sixty million.65
The term antichrist has been applied to many historical figures, including Nero, Martin Luther, Gustavus Adolphus II, Napoleon, Benito Mussolini, Mikhail Gorbachev, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan, Saddam Hussein, and a multitude of popes.