[immoceefe]

An interesting sidebar to the Nazi invasion of Russia is that HItler could easily have gotten millions of volunteers from occupied territories to fight the Soviets. As it was, he got General Vlasov and about 400,000 volunteers, but not until 1943, and he never trusted them, using them largely for labor on the Atlantic Wall, and fighting in Yugoslavia. But Hitler did indeed consider the Slavs as inferior and treated them very badly, to the dismay of the regular army generals who could have used the help. Most of them would have been in Ukraine of course, but many of them would have been ethnic Russians who despised Stalin and the Soviet system. It's not hard to understand why, when you consider that Stalin deliberately starved many farmers to death, and ruled by terrorizing everyone down to the family level.

Also, it is not clear at all that Nazi occupation of Russia would have been worse for the Russians. Stalin sent more to the Gulag during and after the War than before. He probably shot about a million Russians who had had the misfortune of becoming POW's. Stalin had spies on every block in Russia. Hitler's totalitarianism toward his own people was extremely mild by comparison. In Cologne during the war there were only about five gestapo agents in the whole city. Also, Stalin's military methods were to use troops as canon fodder. I could go on and on.

Arguing who was worse, Hitler or Stalin is a fool's errand, of course. But the Soviets have always gotten a pass from Western historians and media types. Churchill famously said that he would make a pact with the Devil to defeat Hitler, which he proceeded to do. He also repatriated many Russians, many of whom committed suicide rather than go back. They knew exactly what they were facing...

These are just a few of the moral ambiguities involved in war.