[Restorer]

You bring up an excellent point.

Which is worse?

A. Killing 6 million people because they are members of a "race" you believe is inferior and inimical to yours.

B. Killing 6 million people more or less arbitrarily selected from the population and designated as "enemies of the people."

The general consensus is that A is worse than B. It gets classified as "genocide," and is considered the ultimate evil.

We don't even have a special word for B, indicating that it is, in many people's mind, not that big a deal.

[Tailgunner Joe]

It's like hate crimes laws. If you assault someone because of hatred, it carries a greater penalty than if you are just trying to rob someone, implying that theft is really not so bad.

[Xenophon450]

i say 6 million is 6 million anyway you slice it and just as bad if not worse than genocide due to the reasons the man before you Listed...But in schools today people are not taught about Stalin so theyll forget....Only how bad a man hitler was i had to bring up stalin in class some years ago to even get him some discussion, well if you want to hear something REALLY BAD i can tell you something I am 18 in Highschool on verge of graduation and was in Study hall one day and Some girl asked the teacher mind you shes a sophmore not a kindergardener "WHOS HITLER???" and STALIN???? forgetabout it no one here knows of him....BUT when go to far right like insane Nazism it resembles insane communism and if you become too much of an insane Commie then you begin to resemble a insane Nazi well thats how i look at it ...like a wheel but i maybe wrong....alot of Insanes Eh...

[GSlob]

"Which is worse?"
They could be likened to an 80-proof vodka vs, 190-proof Everclear grain alcohol. Nazism was functioning within (and superimposed upon) otherwise civilized country. Thus the rehabilitation (denazification) was both possible and pretty rapid. More or less the same could be said about [formerly]superficially communist countries like, say, Czech republic, Poland or Hungary. Now compare it with the difficulties of decommunization in Russia and even with lingering problems with (former) East Germany reincorporation into re-inified Germany. Communism runs deeper, is much more difficult to get rid of, and is therefore much more dangerous.

[bassmaner]

The general consensus is that A is worse than B. It gets classified as "genocide," and is considered the ultimate evil.

And any Jew who was at least marginally aware of what was going on in 1930's Germany got out of Dodge (Albert Einstein being a well-known example).

But who could possibly have suspected that Stalin would have his General Staff and most of the Old Bolsheviks - loyal Communists all - wiped out as "enemies of the people"? The abject terror of meeting the same fate as Bukharin, Tukachevsky, et al. permeated all levels of Soviet society, as documented by Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, and others.

The perpetration of the absolute terror of never knowing when the axe was going to fall was, IMHO, a form of genocide far worse than anything ever seen before.