Hitler and Stalin: The Tyrants and the Second World War

by Laurence Rees

Overview

"Laurence Rees brilliantly combines powerful eye-witness testimony, vivid narrative and compelling analysis in this superb account of how two terrible dictators led their countries in the most destructive and inhumane war in history."―Professor Sir Ian Kershaw, author of Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis

Two 20th century tyrants stand apart from all the rest in terms of their ruthlessness and the degree to which they changed the world around them. Briefly allies during World War II, Adolph Hitler and Josef Stalin then tried to exterminate each other in sweeping campaigns unlike anything the modern world had ever seen, affecting soldiers and civilians alike. Millions of miles of Eastern Europe were ruined in their fight to the death, millions of lives sacrificed.

Laurence Rees has met more people who had direct experience of working for Hitler and Stalin than any other historian. Using their evidence he has pieced together a compelling comparative portrait of evil, in which idealism is polluted by bloody pragmatism, and human suffering is used casually as a political tool. It's a jaw-dropping description of two regimes stripped of moral anchors and doomed to destroy each other, and those caught up in the vicious magnetism of their leadership.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610399647
Publisher:	PublicAffairs
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	9.30(w) x 6.00(h) x 1.90(d)

About the Author

Laurence Rees is an award-winning historian and documentary filmmaker. He has authored several books including The Holocaust, the bestselling, Auschwitz: A New History, and his forthcoming title, The Nazi Mind: Twelve Warnings from History. He lives in London.

Table of Contents

List of Map ix

List of Illustrations xi

Preface xv

Introduction xix

1 The Pact 1

2 Eliminating Poland 22

3 Opposite Fortunes 47

4 Dreams and Nightmares 74

5 Hitler's War of Annihilation 91

6 Invasion 107

7 Desperate Days 131

8 A World War 150

9 Hunger 176

10 Stalin's Overreach 194

11 Across the Steppe 214

12 Struggle on the Volga 234

13 Fighting On 255

14 Fiction and Reality 283

15 Mass Killing 305

16 Collapse of the Centre 324

17 Dying Days 350

18 Victory and Defeat 379

Afterword 395

Acknowledgements 403

Notes 405

Index 465

Editorial Reviews

★ 2020-09-10
A dual biography of two of history’s most notorious dictators from a master historian who has “spent the last thirty years making documentaries and writing books about the Third Reich, Stalinism and the Second World War.”

Referencing and updating Alan Bullock’s Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (1992), British historian Rees uses “millions of words of original eyewitness testimony,” much of it never published before, to create this rich biographical and historical study. “Hitler and Stalin were catapulted into prominence only in the wake of an epoch-shattering event over which they had no control,” World War I, and both believed they had the perfect vision for building and maintaining power for their nations. After the incisive, context-setting preface and introduction, the author proceeds in largely chronological fashion, beginning with the 1939 nonaggression pact that divided Poland, an agreement so cynical between the two former ideological enemies, the Communists and the Nazis, that even Stalin did not believe the global community would accept it. "The Soviet and Nazi governments may have been far apart in their ideological and political goals,” writes Rees, “but in the practical mechanics of oppression they were closely linked." Both dictators presided over unprecedented programs of mass deportations and launched ambitious military plans to opposite effect—e.g., Stalin's obliteration of the elite officer corps left his army weakened while Hitler was able to invade Western Europe. As the invasion of Russia became imminent, Hitler professed overweening confidence and Stalin dithered; the Russian leader was incompetent as a military commander, but he had to project a fatherly air to keep up morale. Each leader demonstrated "monumental disdain for the suffering of his troops,” and each understood the power of hunger as a method of control. Ultimately, they shared an idea that Stalin articulated: “War is pitiless…there must be no mercy.” Rees concludes with an appalling comparison of their respective numbers killed and how “of the two tyrants…it is Hitler who is more broadly seen as a symbol of evil today.”

Via meticulous research and mesmerizing testimonies, Rees expertly reveals the "malleability of the human mind."

Kirkus Reviews