SCHOOL IS OUT!! FOREVER!!

SCHOOL IS OUT!! I AM FREE!! I AM FREE!! YIPPEE!! I have a vive voce for history on Tuesday. A marketing oral on Wednesday for textiles. And then a Religion exam on Thursday!!
I AM FREE!! FREE OF SCHOOL!! MUCK UP DAY WAS FUN! I GOT EVEN WITH MOST OF THE JUNIORS WHO DRIVE ME NUTS!!! WHOOOOO!!

History Essay

COMPARE AND CONTRAST HITLER'S GERMANY TO STALIN'S RUSSIA:

Stalin was a brute, an ambitious, scheming brute whose endeavors to build a socialist paradise led to the deaths from starvation of millions of peasant farmers, but who set out to make Russia a great industrial nation and succeeded.

Hitler was a psychopath pursuing unscientific goals of racial purity through deliberate murder, who set out to conquer Europe and did so until he made Napoleon’s mistake of 100 years earlier: he marched on Moscow.

They were born within 10 years of each other, Hitler in Austria in 1989 and Stalin in Georgia in 1879. They were both dreamers. Both, Hitler an artist who failed to get into art school, and Stalin who studied at a Russian Orthodox seminary, nourished romantic and heroic fantasies that they made come true. Their fathers died when they were young and doting mothers raised them.

Stalin spent the war years in exile in Siberia, returning when Lenin arrived in Russia to withdraw his country from the war. He was a commissar in the civil war when Whites sought to overthrow the Reds, and secretary of the Communist Party.

Hitler served in the German Army. He was a good soldier, courageous and cool under fire, and was awarded the Iron Cross, First Class. Germany’s defeat and surrender was a shock that determined him, he wrote, to reverse Germany’s defeat.

Hitler was elected to power in 1932 at the head of the National Socialist Party that he had founded in Bavaria, at the age of 43.. He set about establishing an apparatus of terror. The SA, the Brownshirts who had controlled the streets in the early days, were sacrificed to the German Army and to the SS, a militarized police force that acquired a fighting wing, the Waffen SS, that held annual reunions for decades after the war, but which also staffed the concentration camps.

Stalin who inherited Lenin’s leadership when Lenin died in 1924, also inherited Lenin’s apparatus of terror. In five years the Cheka executed 200,000 people, compared with 14,000 executed under the Tzars in their last half-century.

Alan Bullock argues that the series of failed communist uprising in Germany in this immediate post-war period led to the rise of the fascist parties. The Left argued, because they wished to impress supporters that they almost succeeded. So did the Right, because they wished to emphasise the dangers from uprising.

Hitler attained power, and maintained it, through his oratory, through his understanding of mass psychology and his ability to arouse popular support. Seventy years on, his rallies are still spoken of as pinnacles of political showmanship.

Stalin was a bureaucrat who worked within the system, building his power-base, forming his alliances, out maneuvering his rivals, most notably Leon Trotsky, and being in position to succeed Lenin when ill health carried him off, as it did in 1924, when Stalin was 44 years old.

The 1930’s were marked in both Germany and Russia by purges of party colleague. Hitler had 80 SA leaders killed in 1934 during the night of the long knives. Stalin’s terror was the model for the Cultural Revolution. Stalin had the Old Bolshevik’s of Lenin’s era killed. Alan Bullock estimates that altogether 18 million were arrested during the purges, and seven million were shot. When war came in 1941, Stalin’s administration had been seriously weakened, and so had its army.

In both Germany and Russia the dislocation left by the Great War was the overwhelming event shaping policy.

Hitler needed economic recovery if he were to rearm Germany, which was achieved partly through rearmament. Between January 1933 and July 1935 the number of employed persons rose from 11.7 million to 16.9 million, and the number of unemployed fell accordingly from six million to 1.8 million. By 1936 the worst unemployment figures in Europe had become a labour shortage.

Apart from rearmament, large sums of money went into construction projects and into freeways, the autobahnen.

To achieve this, wages and prices were controlled. Collective bargaining was abolished. Hitler appointed the banker Hjalmar Schach president of the Reichsbank, the German Reserve Bank, and then Minister of Economics.

The first cause of the stability of our currency, Hitler told Schacht, is the concentration camp. If there were trouble over wages, the Gestapo was called in. As for prices, he had the Brownshirts. Woe to the man who puts up prices, he said.

Wages as a proportion of the national income fell from 56 per cent in 1933 53.3 per cent in 1936 and to 51.8 per cent in 1939. Wage rates hardly moved from 1932 onwards. Fiscal policy – government budgetary policy – remained stable, tax reform was postponed, and tax rates hardly changed.

Schacht dealt with a crisis in the balance of payments through a system of 25 bilateral trade agreements, bringing more than half Germany’s foreign tgrade under regulation. Different rates of exchange were introduced for the mark, to overcome the fact that Hitler’s refusal to countenance devaluation left it overvalued against sterling.

From 1936 onwards, a Four-Year plan began to undo the Schacht reforms. Business became more and more regulated in the cause of rearmament. Companies were directed as to what they could produce, how much new investment they could make, where new plants should be sited, what raw materials they could obtain, what wages they could pay, what prices they could charge, how much profit they could make, how they should use it after paying higher taxes, how much was to go to compulsory reinvestment and how much to government bonds, all this under the direction of Hermann Goering. Schacht retired to private life.

Stalin. ‘s first five-year plan was launched in 1928 with the declared prime aim as transforming a backward country with technology that was partly mediaeval into one which was new and modern.

Stalin wanted a powerful industrial country, fully self-reliant and independent of the caprices of world capitalism. Small scale farming was to be replaced by large-scale collective farming.

The plan was to create the technical and economic capacity to enable Russia to resist military invasion. The starting point should be heavy industry without which there could not be reconstruction of industry as a whole, of transport and agriculture.

At huge cost in lives, he succeeded, but with social, economic and political strains such that it could not be sustained. That crunch was not, however, to be reached until after the Second Worl War.

Hitler’s plan was to invade conquer and enslave the people of Eastern Europe. He now began to test the mettle of Britain and France. He began to make public his rearmament. The Germans now had an air force. Construction began of warships.

Germany marched troops into the Rhineland, which was supposed to be demilitarized. Britain and France did nothing.

Germany seized Austria and Czechoslovakia. Britain and France did nothing.

Through all this, Hitler showed himself to be both skilful and bold. He was not in a position to resist France, had France sent troops into the Rhineland. The German Army was not yet ready.

The incorporation of Austria was achieved through threats. So was the occupation and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. It was the last time that Hitler would achieve his goal by bluff and bullying.

Stalin remain wary of Britain and France, rebuffing British overtures in early 1939. Britain and France gave a guarantee that they would come to Poland’s aid.

Stalin and Hitler agreed on a pact that divided Poland between their two countries. Hitler had made two miscalculations: that Britain would not go to Poland’s aid, and that Italy would come to his. Mussolini said he would not, if the war escalated to involve Britain.

The Germans invaded on September 1. The British delivered their ultimatum on September. Hitler, Ribbentrop and Goering sat stunned. “If we lose this war, God help us.” Goering said.

The Germans over-ran Western Europe but did not succeed in mounting an invasion of Britain. Both Germany and the Soviet Union operated in Poland with great brutality, murdering or deporting the intellectuals, the officers, and government officials.

The Geerman tanks raced through France. The British Expeditionary Force withdrew and France sought an armistice in June. It was the high point of Hitler’s war of conquest.

Hitler’s plans always included invading the Soviet Union in 1941. In November 1940 he invited Molotov to Berlin for discussions at which the Foreign Minister Ribbentrop proposed the division of the Empire between Germany, Japan, Italy and Russia. Britain, he said, was finished. If that were so, said Molotov, why were they in an air raid shelter and whose were the bombs that were falling.

The Soviet Union invaded Russia in June 1941 with more than three million men. Stalin refused to believe allied warnings that an attack was imminent and the Germans made a rapid initial advance

It was a reckless decision, doomed to fail, by one man, aided by the fact that another man refused to heed the warnings.

The Germans, as ever, were brutal and the Russians, who had suffered from the brutality of their own government for 25 years, rallied behind Stalin.

Throughout the war, with a march on Moscow that was inevitably disastrous, Hitler pursued his psychopathic programme of extermination, diverting men, resources and transport, to the task of killing men, women and children because they were Jews.

The Russians fought for their country under a leader who put his country first, while the Germans followed the orders of an obsessed man.

Some 40 to 50 million people are estimated to have died in the European theatre, more than 20 million of them Soviet citizens. Military losses totaled 13.6 million, including prisoners of war and 6.4 million civilians.

German losses came to 3.9 million, most of them on the Russian front, plus another three million civilians.

Poland lost six million people, of whom three million were Jews (out of total Jewish deaths of six million). It was 17 per cent of their population.

It is hard to see how any of this could have happened were it not for the fact that Germany was ruled by one man with absolute and untrammeled power, which he maintained by the use of terror.

Stalin could be described in the same way, but his commitment was to building socialism in one country, not to conquest.