Hitler narrowly loses 'greatest German' contest

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by Pekka
Well, ifyou take out the moral implications, surely Stalin is a great Russian.

You mean other than his murder of millions of Russians? Then you're still stuck with the fact that his paranoia decapitated the Russian Army shortly before the Nazi invasion, and the fact that he ignored the warnings of the upcoming invasion, which lead to the needless slaughter of his army. Plus, his collectivism of agriculture caused the collapse of Russian's food source, causing the starvation of (IIRC) 7 million people.

Good job, Uncle Joe.

[DaShi]

All true, but he did have a great moustache.

[Blaupanzer]

Originally posted by Unimatrix11
Close, but wrong - according to the Putzger history map-book, Corsica turned french in 1768. Napoleon was born in 1769 (wiki).

Thank you, Uni for correcting this slander on the greatest military mind in modern times. (Of course, as a child he spoke Italian, and he was an outcast at military school because of his accent and lack of familiarity with French. But who is counting?)

[Zkribbler]

Originally posted by DaShi
All true, but he did have a great moustache.

I must grant you that point.

[Heresson]

Stalin was not a Russian, though he did claim he has chosen to be one.

He DID do some good stuff for Russia: development of industry, creating teh empire (but was it russian?), adding Krolewiec / Koenigsberg / Kaliningrad to Russia, russification of enormous areas, and victory in ww2.

But, of course, many would have done it better...
and:

- he, together with Hitler, caused ww2 and all that goes with it, also when it comes to millions of dead soviet citizens

- he didn't really need the war to kill millions of soviet citizens, as well as citizens of other countries.

- his infleunce on science (Lysenko... linguistics...) and culture was devastating

- destroyed many monuments of architecture

- was a ruthless slimy mass murderer without scrupples.

really, he did so much evil that it can hardly be mesured. Lets take for once KPP. Polish communist party, with great traditions. It was recognised as 100% trockist, therefore entire party was dissolved and exterminated. That would be wrong per se, but after ww2, when communists took over Poland, it turned out there are hardly any proper men to govern it: communists were exterminated by Stalin, other intellectuals were either exterminated by nazis, or by Stalin, or on emmigration. It all had devastating and far-reaching consequences in so many aspects... Soviets had to turn to people other than communists to gain some support and simple manpower (for offices) in Poland, so they turned to crooks, to ultranationalists (indeed, even polish quasi-fascists) etc. I will not say what came out of it.