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the solcliers. You feel too much pity for them. You should stand back more.
Believe me, things appear clearer when examined at longer range." Another
general observed of Hitler: "Losses, as far as he was concerned, were merely
figures which reduced fighting power." This was an outlook undoubtedly
congenial to Stalin's. Burleigh concludes that "whatever temperamental
dissimilarities, the two clictators shared...a total indifference to casualties or
other losses, including in Stalin's case the capture and death of his son
Yakov, an event shrugged off and never recalled in conversation."
The comparison and comparability of Hitler and Stalin is of further
relevance in light of the tendency of some contemporary Western intel–
lectuals to vehemently deny it: "people who balk at comparisons between
Stalin and Hitler seem to have little difference in trotting out...analogies
between Hitler and Baroness Thatcher." The reluctance to consider Stalin
a moral equal of Hitler is significant as part of a more general unwilling–
ness to confront the moral evils of communist systems.
Notwithstanding the uniqueness of the Holocaust, Nazi and commu–
nist mass murders shared the prior dehumanization of "the enemy." Soviet
propaganda excelled in this during the Purge Trials and the associated hate
campaigns, and the same basic principle was also relied upon during World
War II. Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet writer made fantous during the Stalin
era, produced some memorable lines on this theme (quoted by Burleigh);
for example, "We are fighting not men but automata in human likeness,"
who "outwardly...appear to be men," and whom he also described as "vile
monsters, savages." This brings us to the question of the complicity of
people who might be regarded as intellectuals and who, like Ehrenburg,
assisted in the dehumanization of the enemy. In the preface, Burleigh
writes of Albert Brackman (a German historian and archivist who per–
formed various services for the Nazi regime and dedicated some of his
works to Hitler): "His case illustrates how, given the 'right' conditions of
a totalitarian regime, a sort of unreflective professional amorality can be
translated into the capaci ty to do other people serious harm. The chapter
[on Brackman] could be read as a description of an activist academic 'type,'
one moreover whose enveloping political rhetoric could nowadays just as
easily be ethnic, feminist or socialist."
It is in the chapters on euthanasia that the most clear-cut involvement
of highly trained people can be located. They ran a bureaucracy devoted
to organizing and preparing the killing of the mentally ill: "a group of
economists, agronomists, lawyers and business men with an expanded pool
of academics and psychiatrists... this odd assortment of highly educated,
morally dulled, humanity set about registering and selecting victims, find–
ing asylums to serve as extermination centers...and last but not least a staff
of people willing and able to commit mass murder."
