Instead we allied with a man AS BAD as Hitler, with a regime AS BAD as The Nazis
This turns out not to be the case. Hitler in twelve years killed nearly as many as Stalin did in thirty. Some other facts you may wish to consider:
Six million Poles were murdered by the Nazis in five years of occupation. Half of those, about three million, were Christian. Orly about one million were killed by the Reds in forty-five years of rule, most in 1939-40.
The Nazis closed high schools, universities, and seminaries. The Communists reopened and expanded them - even Catholic seminaries like the one Karol Wojtyla attended - later known as Pope John Paul II.
The Nazis murdered teachers, university professors (and educated Poles in general), and placed Polish industry under German management. The Communists educated more teachers and professors to more than replace those the Germans killed and placed Poles in charge of the factories and other workplaces.
The Nazis plan for Poland, the first parts of which they put into effect, was the extermination of Poles as an ethnicity. The plan for Eastern Europe as a whole was for a reduced number of inhabitant to be educated just enough, if at all, for their place as peasant serfs on estates owned by German immigrants. The Communist's plan, which they did mostly put into effect, was for a educated and industrialized nation with good social services , full employment, and a higher standard of living.
This is not to say that the Communist regime was the best of all possible worlds. Political oppression was even worse than that under the pre-war military dictatorship and economic and environmental performance would have been better under a free-market democracy. It was a great deal better than genocide, though.
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TearofLys (2641)
2 years ago
Using even conservative estimates, Stalin killed tens of millions of his own people. Far more than Hitler.
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