Similarities Between Nazi Germany And The Soviet Union

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The most important regimes of the 20th century were established in Germany and in Russia as a consequence of the First World War. Although they fought against each other during the Second World War, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union shared some common features; in fact, they both signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact in August 1939. But it is undeniable that these two totalitarian regimes were not equal. So, today I am going to compare these two dictatorships and I decided to focus mainly on the Stalinism period of the USSR, because it was the most violent. As I claimed before, they were both the result of the First World War. After this conflict, the rest of the world left both as international pariahs. The causes of this exclusion were different: Germany was humiliated by the great defeat, all the other nations blamed on it the responsibility of the war and left it in tremendous conditions; on the other hand, Soviet Russia was seen as a source of subversion by other countries,…show more content…
During the period of Great Terror of 1937-1939 in the Soviet Union, Stalin expelled the “socially harmful” people and sent them to special settlements called gulag in Siberia. He also pursued ethnic deportations from the 1930s to the early 1950s: 3 million Soviet citizens were subject to ethnic-based resettlement; whereas in Nazi Germany there was the Holocaust, which was a genocide where approximately six millions of Jews and five millions people, who belonged to other minorities, such as gypsies, homosexuals, Africans, were killed in concentration camps. But the purpose of these atrocities was different: Nazi Germany wanted to purify its territories, in order to allow the settlement of Germans into the then-cleansed regions; on the contrary, the Soviet Union removed minorities from strategically important areas; in fact, Stalin’s purges were motivated by political

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