Stalin And Hitler

Francois De La Rochefoucauld once said, "We always love those who admire us; we do not always love those whom we admire". These words could not be more true of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, who held a great respect and admiration for each other, and also held a great amount of fear and hatred. In the case of the two most dominant leaders of the twentieth century, personality overrules ideology.

Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, although 10 years apart, had very similar lives from birth to the age of 20. Joseph Stalin was born December 21, 1879 as Josif Djugashvili to a cobbler and washer woman. Stalin grew up in a fairly poor environment. His houses usually consisted of only one or two rooms. At the age of five he contracted smallpox, which took the life of two of his siblings before Stalin was born. He also nearly died of the disease, but was left only badly scarred. As the result of an accident in his younger years, Stalin's left arm was left permanently damaged. Stalin's father was an alcoholic who was constantly and severely beating Stalin and his mother. When his father left in 1883, his mother moved them into the house of an Orthodox priest where she took a job as his housekeeper and servant. The priest enrolled Stalin into the Orthodox Church School. While growing up Stalin spoke only the Georgian language, and while at the Orthodox Church School he learned to speak Russian; he was a very gifted student. Stalin's mother wanted her son to grow up and be a priest; little did she know that her son would grow up to be the dictator of "the world's first atheist state".

Adolf Hitler was born April 20, 1889 out of wed-lock. His mother, Klara Hitler, was twenty-two years younger then his father, Alois Hitler; she had been his mistress and was pregnant when Alois' first wife passed away. Hitler was his mother's only child for five years, until she gave birth to his brother. The following year he moved the city of Passau, Germany where he began his education. Hitler was a bright student in elementary school, but dropped out of highschool. In 1903, Hitler's father passed away. Two years later, in the summer of 1905 Hitler used a lung infection from which he suffered to convince his mother he should drop out of high school and apply for the Vienna Academy of Arts. Hitler put off his admission's essay to the Vienna Academy of Arts for two years. During that two-year period Hitler really began to develop his ideologies and turned into the man that ruled Germany for so many years.

Adolf Hitler's ideology "Nazism" was used to rule the government in Germany from 1933-1945. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as the Chancellor of Germany and the beginning of a mass genocide and ethnic cleansing began. Nazism was the ideology of Hitler's "National Socialist German Workers Party". It maintained that the "Aryan race" was superior to all other races and it supported and promoted German racial domination. The Nazi's blamed the Jews for all of the problems of the German people, and Germany. They used different military groups to enforce their ideals and rid of anyone not believing in Nazism (mainly Jews and Gypsies). Those groups were: " the S.A. (Sturmabteilung), S.D. (Sicherheitsdiest), S.S. (Schutzstaffel), and the Gestapo (Geheime Staatpolizeil)". Hitler also established the "Hitler Youth"; a group of children aged 10 to 18 who trained and were taught about Nazism and how it would benefit them and their families, giving Hitler the confidence that he would be a constant leader. Hitler convinced Germany that it was an up and coming super-power in Europe and that it should have a significant permanent rule in not only Eastern Europe, but the Soviet Union also. Not everything went to plan for Adolf Hitler, not all of the German's were convinced that his plan would work and there were some cases of a revolt. On July 20, 1944, the German opposition to the Nazi party attempted to assassinate Hitler while he was in his "East Prussian headquarters at Rastenburg".

Joseph Stalin's political theory of "Stalinism" was used by the government in the USSR before and after his death. Stalinism can be viewed as both a political and economic ideology. When he first came into power, Stalin adopted the slogan "Socialism in one country" which was one of the key contributions to Stalinist theories and contrasted from Trotsky's theory of the "Permanent Revolution". Stalin's aim was to industrialize the Soviet Union within a short amount of time. After the industrialization began, Russia