Ominously, officials also confiscated seed grain to meet their targets. So, while storehouses bulged with grain, farmers had nothing to eat and nothing to plant the next spring. The result was that farmers had no grain, no seeds, and no tools. Famine set in. When, in , Mao was challenged about these events at a Party conference, he purged his enemies. Tens of millions died. No independent historian doubts that tens of millions died during the Great Leap Forward, but the exact numbers, and how one reconciles them, have remained matters of debate.
The overall trend, though, has been to raise the figure, despite pushback from Communist Party revisionists and a few Western sympathizers. A wall showing the damage caused by an earthquake that occurred on May 12, in Sichuan province is decorated with portraits of former Chinese leader Mao Zedong, in Beichuan County, Sichuan province, May 31, More than 68, people died in the quake and around 4.
On the Chinese side, this involves a cottage industry of Mao apologists willing to do whatever it takes to keep the Mao name sacred: historians working at Chinese institutions who argue that the numbers have been inflated by bad statistical work. His conclusion: famine killed only 3. The first reliable scholarly estimates derived from the pioneering work of the demographer Judith Banister, who in used Chinese demographic statistics to come up with the remarkably durable estimate of 30 million, and the journalist Jasper Becker, who in his work Hungry Ghosts gave these numbers a human dimension and offered a clear, historical analysis of the events.
Later scholars refined this methodology by looking at local histories compiled by government offices that gave very detailed accounts of famine conditions.
Triangulating these two sources of information results in estimates that start in the mid millions and go up to 45 million. Two more recent accounts give what are widely regarded as the most credible numbers. One, in , is by the Chinese journalist Yang Jisheng , who estimates that 35 million died. Communist Party officials beat to death anyone suspected of hoarding grain, or people who tried to escape the death farms by traveling to cities. Regardless of how one views these revisions, the Great Leap Famine was by far the largest famine in history.
It was also man-made—and not because of war or disease, but by government policies that were flawed and recognized as such at the time by reasonable people in the Chinese government. Can all this be blamed on Mao? Hitler vs. Join Our Mailing List Stay up to date on conference news and updates.
They are meant to assist with questions frequently asked by students when learning about the Holocaust. The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored, persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between and across Europe and North Africa. The height of the persecution and murder occurred during the context of the Second World War. By the end of the war in , the Germans and their collaborators had killed nearly two out of every three European Jews.
While Jews were the primary victims, this genocide occurred in the context of Nazi persecution and murder of other groups for their perceived racial or biological inferiority: Roma ; people with disabilities ; some of the Slavic peoples especially Poles and Russians , and Black people. As early as , writers occasionally employed the term holocaust with regard to the Nazi crimes against the Jews, but it was not the only term they used.
The Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored, persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators between and The Nazi Party quickly turned Germany from a weak new democracy into a one-party dictatorship.
The German government began persecuting German Jews almost immediately after Hitler became chancellor. By , Jews were stripped of their German citizenship, and in , Jewish men began to be arrested and sent to concentration camps just for being Jewish. Nazi Germany also annexed, invaded, and occupied neighboring countries to obtain Lebensraum living space. German authorities rounded up Jews and forced many of them into ghettos.
The Holocaust was caused by many factors, including millions of individual decisions made by ordinary people who chose to actively participate in—or at least tolerate—the persecution and murder of their neighbors. Antisemitism , the fear or hatred of Jews had existed in Europe for centuries. In the late 19th century, the pseudoscience of eugenics became popular. The Nazis promoted racial antisemitism. The Nazi regime economically, politically, and socially marginalized the Jewish community over a period of years, attempting to force Jews to emigrate out of German territory.
In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles , Germany remilitarized and readied itself for war. The United States and other countries, still suffering under the Great Depression and remembering the needless destruction of World War I, did not meaningfully intervene to protest Nazi militarization or Nazi antisemitic policies until Germany invaded Poland in Nazi policy moved from forced emigration to mass murder.
The Holocaust could not have happened without the active or passive participation of millions of people, each of whom acted for their own reasons. Some people recognized that they could personally benefit from the persecution and murder of Jews.
Sometimes that meant acquiring the property or homes of Jews who were deported or murdered, or the businesses of Jews forced to immigrate or sent to concentration camps. Other people found jobs in the Nazi regime, which gave them newfound financial or political power and influence. In countries that Germany invaded, many collaborators saw the benefit of assisting their new leaders and took advantage of the opportunity to take revenge on their Jewish neighbors by denouncing them.
There was also a great deal of pressure to conform. Even if people were not antisemitic to begin with, Nazi leaders and propaganda provided ample reasons to help them, with time, to come around to this point of view. Few people were brave enough to publicly speak out or to help Jews, especially when they could be arrested or executed for doing so. The Nazi Party was founded in It sought to lure German workers away from socialism and communism and commit them to its antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology.
It attracted support from influential people in the military, big business, and society. The Party also absorbed other radical right-wing groups. Hitler emphasized propaganda to attract attention and interest. He used press and posters to create stirring slogans. He displayed eye-catching emblems and uniforms. The Party staged many meetings, parades, and rallies.
In addition, it created auxiliary organizations to appeal to specific groups. For example, there were groups for youth, women, teachers, and doctors. The Party became particularly popular with German youth and university students. Other politicians thought they could control Hitler and his followers, but the Nazis used emergency decrees, violence, and intimidation to quickly seize control.
The Nazis abolished all other political parties and ruled the country as a one-party, totalitarian dictatorship from to The Party used its power to persecute Jews. It controlled all aspects of German life and waged a war of territorial conquest in Europe from World War II , during which it also carried out a genocide now known as the Holocaust.
Antisemitism , the specific hatred of Jews, had existed in Europe for centuries. It was a war that Hitler wanted, and so German responsibility must predominate; but in the event it began with a German-Soviet alliance and a cooperative invasion of Poland in The pool of evil simply grows deeper.
The most fundamental proximity of the two regimes, in my view, is not ideological but geographical. Given that the Nazis and the Stalinists tended to kill in the same places, in the lands between Berlin and Moscow, and given that they were, at different times, rivals, allies, and enemies, we must take seriously the possibility that some of the death and destruction wrought in the lands between was their mutual responsibility.
What can we make of the fact, for example, that the lands that suffered most during the war were those occupied not once or twice but three times: by the Soviets in , the Germans in , and the Soviets again in ? The Holocaust began when the Germans provoked pogroms in June and July , in which some 24, Jews were killed, on territories in Poland annexed by the Soviets less than two years before. The Nazis planned to eliminate the Jews in any case, but the prior killings by the NKVD certainly made it easier for local gentiles to justify their own participation in such campaigns.
As I have written in Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin , where all of the major Nazi and Soviet atrocities are discussed, we see, even during the German-Soviet war, episodes of belligerent complicity in which one side killed more because provoked or in some sense aided by the other. Germans took so many Soviet prisoners of war in part because Stalin ordered his generals not to retreat.
The Germans shot so many civilians in part because Soviet partisans deliberately provoked reprisals. The Germans shot more than a hundred thousand civilians in Warsaw in after the Soviets urged the locals to rise up and then declined to help them.
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