Agreed. None of them were considered to be proper parts of the Master
Race.
Maybe the Jehovah's witnesses and the communists could have been if they
made the right choices. What I was getting at was that the risk to the
average Catholic or Lutheran was very minimal. Those who were in the
government and, more or less, went with the program were not treated the
way
Stalin treated folks in his government. IIRC, one of Stalin's problems was
that he purged many/most of his competent generals.
Dan M.
Actually, even if you counted the Jews, it's probable that proportionately
the number of Soviet citizens killed by Stalin was higher than the number
of Germans killed directly by Hitler (as opposed to casualties during the
war). Stalin is usually estimated at around 20 million - the Shoah took 12
million, 6 million of them Jews, but many of those were not German
citizens. Relatively few of them were from Western Europe, where almost
everyone killed was a Jew, homosexual, or Communist. Poland was the
hardest hit, overall, as between Hitler and Stalin _one-third_ of the
population of Poland was killed. Note, however, that despite this fact,
the Polish resistance was far more effective than _any_ resistance movement
in Western Europe. Hitler probably killed 20 million people in the Soviet
Union, of course, but he never conquered the Soviet Union the way he did
Western Europe.
As for the generals problem - there's no doubt about it. My exact figures
are at home - John Keegan gives a good sample - but at least 50% of the
flag-rank officers in the Red Army were killed off by Stalin. Zhukov
probably only survived because he was off in Siberia handing the Japanese
their heads.
Gautam
