Answer :
Final answer:
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin differed in ideologies, with Hitler focused on racial purification and Stalin on class-based persecution. Their methods to gain and maintain power varied, as Hitler utilized existing elites in contrast to Stalin's post-revolution consolidation of power. Despite some similarities in totalitarian control, their legacies reflect distinct approaches to mass murder and oppression.
Explanation:
Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were both notorious leaders whose regimes resulted in vast suffering and loss of life, yet they differed significantly in their ideologies, aims, and methods of governance. While Hitlerism was marked by an obsession with racial purity and the aim of establishing a master race, Stalinism purportedly sought universal equality, though it was marred by brutal enforcement and arbitrary mass murder. Hitler leveraged the support of traditional elites and Germany's established social structures to gain power, whereas Stalin's rule followed the radical restructuring of Russian society by the Bolshevik Revolution, which eliminated many pre-existing power concentrations.
Stalin, unlike Hitler, did not articulate a coherent public ideology but was rather characterized by extreme paranoia, frequently executing those he perceived as potential threats or 'class enemies.' Hitler, on the other hand, focused his genocidal policies on 'race enemies,' notably the Jewish people, with the goal of annihilation irrespective of any potential for change. Additionally, their rise to power and political maneuvers differed, as Hitler sought to expand through aggression (evidently in the case of Poland) and Stalin initially sought to protect and expand the Soviet Union through strategic accommodation, even making a non-aggression pact with Hitler in 1939.
