Was life in the third reich nice?

[George L Gregory]

There were numerous laws (and actions - including dekulakization, the Holodomor, mass disenfranchisement, purges) that made the life of almost all Soviets citizens sheer hell.

It's not about the Jews, the question is "Was life in the Third Reich nice?" for its citizens.

Yes, it may be argued that the Soviet Jews lived better lives because they were massively overrepresented in all organs of Soviet power, including the organs of mass terror - you may deploy this argument if you wish.
See Walter Krivitsky (a Soviet Jew) and the Marino Sanatorium above.

Since you admit that this thread is specifically about the Third Reich, why have you been so insistent on comparing the Third Reich and the Soviet Union?

[George L Gregory]

Life in Germany was objectively better.

I want you to answer how that is a fact (hint - you won't be able to because it would always be subjective since it would be based entirely on one's opinions about the matter). It entirely depends on whom you ask whether or not he/she would describe the Third Reich as a better place.

If one were considered to be racially German enough and an advocate of Nazi ideology and blindly followed the dictatorship then sure life may have been a pleasant time. For other Germans who were considered racially pure enough but were Catholics, socialists, communists, or any other enemy then not so. For other people living in Germany at the time who were considered to be racially inferior and excluded from every thing such as German Jews, German Gypsies, mixed-race Germans, etc, then not so.

[wm]

You post, "The kulaks only developed in the last years of the Czars after they finally got round to ending serfdom. You can't "dekulak" if you have barely allowed kulaks to evolve.

An absurd argument (and immoral) argument that the Czarist Russia didn't commit genocides because the kulaks didn't exist, or they lacked people worth killing.
No, they didn't do it because their common Russian culture and their Christian believes wouldn't allow that.
The late 19th-century Russian culture was among the finest on this planet, as attested by contemporary Russian writers, poets, painters.

Another absurd is that religion is an opium for the masses. The idea of G-d is the best thing we the humans have. It gave purpose and peace of mind the Russian people badly needed.
All the Polish (and Russian peasant) uprisings were in the name of G-d. It was "in the name of G-d, for our freedom and yours" in Poland.

Your thinking is exactly the thing that enabled the Soviet genocides committed by people without culture, without G-d.

Which country was so superior?
The US with Jim Crow laws and lynches?
The European colonial empires?
Which country in the 19th century didn't try to force its culture on its minorities?
Which one?

[Martin_from_Valhalla]

The kulaks only developed in the last years of the Czars after they finally got round to ending serfdom. You can't "dekulak" if you have barely allowed kulaks to evolve. There was no Holodomor under Czarist Russia, but there were centuries of cultural assault on Ukrainian identity, which is part of the definition of genocide in international law today. It is difficult to have "mass disenfranchisements" when most of the population didn't have the franchise in the first place! Purges there were aplenty. The Gulags were a massive extension of a system already used under the Czars - Katorga. The Caucasus was rife with banditry, to the point it was a running sore. No "hooliganism"? Then why is there an article entitled, "Rural Crime in Czarist Russia: The Question of Hooliganism, 1905-1914"?

Have you ever wondered why the words "pogrom" and "knout" exist in the English language?

Czarist Russia was improving, but it was very far from being an earthly paradise. In contrast, pre-Nazi Germany looks like the land of milk and honey, by comparison! The Nazis inherited a highly cultured, highly educated and highly industrialized society and reduced it to rubble without ever having had a golden period at all!

Serfdom was abolished in 1861 and monarchy kept on till 1917. Half a century. What's more, serfdom wasn't introduced eveywhere in Russian Empire, there were no serfdom in Northern parts of Russia, in Southern parts, closer to Ural and Siberia was always free from serfdom. Some parts of Ukraine and so on including Caucasus.

The notion of kulaks is intriguing. Who are they? Hard-working guys who had some five horses? When communists had robbed kulaks, they invented a new notion - serednyaks - guys who were less lucky and had one or two horses because they started gaining their prosperity since the very beginning having zero at the start. Serednyaks were also eliminated and when everyone became equally poor - collectivisation and 'kolhoz' came.

There surely were assaults on Ukrainian identity but where were not? Bretons in France were prohibited speaking their language from 1905 to 1975. Welsh, Flemish, Basques could complain about the same issue. Communists, by the way, were handing out alphabets and national self-identities to everyone.

Katorga was less cruel than gulags and less 'populated' by prisoners. Gulags are more like nazi death camps. Didn't Lenin take his wife to katorga? Had he a servant at katorga and a library to read? What about Stalin? Prisoners usually do not go fishing and make 12-years old girls from nearby villages pregnant. Didn't Europian countries send their prisoners to tropical countries? Hitler was also doing fine while being in prison. Later these guys looked back at their imprisonment and decided that life in prisons should be harder than it was in their times.

Caucasus was undeniably swarmed with bandits but it is just mentality. If you fail in doing something, if you mess things up, in Russia we say 'your hands are growing out of your ar$e' and in Caucasus they say 'you can't steal a goat'. Just mentality.

I skimmed that article on hooliganism but same was in Gangs of New York with Leo Di Caprio and some years ago there were TV series about hooligangs in Britain in the beginning of the 20th century 'Piky caps' or what. Basically, all that was portrayed in Dostoevsky novels. Or novels by Dickens decades earlier in Britain. Crime often goes hand to hand with poverty.

Russian Empire had a lot of problems, indeed and problems were piling for decades, if not centuries. The power was in the hands of one man but there were a lot of young educated people who had no saying in governing their own country. Decembrist's uprising was clamped down, reactionist government of Nicholas I was suppressing any freedom and these young people had to migrate abroad. There they were writing articles in progressive journals depicting life in Russia in dark colors and they were right. But the country slowely evaluated and political migrants belonged to different parties: pochvenniki, narodniki, zapadniki and so on. One can't know the difference in their views but they differed having only one aim - to overthrow monarchy. Lenin led the same way of life.

Surely, life was miserable in Russia but the country was slowly developing, its economy, the raise in it, is often compared to China in the beginning of 21st century. It's just communists degraded the country.

[wm]

In comparison with the contemporary world Russia was a good enough country for its citizens. Of course, it wasn't in comparison with philosophers' utopias. But philosophers' utopias and the fanatical conviction that good enough wasn't good enough gave us Gulags, Holodomors, genocide.

Serfdom was abolished earlier than slavery in the US. The Czarist Katorga was a paradise on Earth in comparison with the Soviet Katorga.

The katorzhane in the jail at Aleksandrovskaya (Sakhalin) could not only go out into the yard or to the latrine at all hours of the day and night (latrine buckets were not in use there at all), but at any time during the day could go into the town!

Stalin, then, was the first to understand the word katorga in its original sense - a galley in which the rowers are shackled to their oars.

The first alphabet at Vorkuta — twenty-eight letters,* with numbers from 1 to 1000 attached to each of them — the first 28,000 prisoners in Vorkuta all passed under the earth within a year.
We can only be surprised that it was not in a single month.

A train was sent to Cobalt Mine No. 25 at Norilsk to pick up ore, and some katorzhane lay down in front of the locomotive to end it all quickly. A couple of dozen prisoners fled into the tundra in desperation. They were located by planes, shot, and their bodies stacked where the men lined up for work assignment would see them.
At No. 2 Mine, Vorkuta, there was a Women’s Camp Division. The women wore numbers on their backs and on their headscarves.
The Gulag Archipelago

[wm]

Serfdom was abolished in 1861 and monarchy kept on till 1917.

That's really not that important. There was nothing to be ashamed of that Russia was a monarchy.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi are kingdoms (with censorship and political prisoners, i.e., people who rocked the boat too much), not that different politically from Czarist Russia. But still, both are the best places on this planet to live.
China is a totalitarian country, politically almost in every aspect worse than pre-war Nazi Germany but still delivers an ok quality of life to its citizens.

Murderous Stalinist Russia didn't deliver anything to its citizens, the quality of life was awful, (pointless) poverty widespread, its common culture in shambles. Russian culture never recovered till modern Russia has emerged.

And anyway the thread is about quality of life not about compatibility with someone's pet ideology, with philosophers' utopias.

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi M-f-V,

I would reply to your string of whataboutist points, but I see we are straying further and further from the thread title.

Cheers,

Sid

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

You post, "Murderous Stalinist Russia didn't deliver anything to its citizens, the quality of life was awful, (pointless) poverty widespread, its common culture in shambles." How about universal education and literacy? They didn't exist under Czarist Russia, but came to under the USSR. It was partly because "the quality of life was awful, (pointless) poverty widespread" in Czarist Russia that it underwent a series of revolutions. And what "common culture"? Czarist Russia was a multicultural Empire.

Nazi Germany inherited none of these problems.

Cheers,

Sid

[eliteknight]

Serfdom was abolished in 1861 and monarchy kept on till 1917.

That's really not that important. There was nothing to be ashamed of that Russia was a monarchy.
Dubai, Abu Dhabi are kingdoms (with censorship and political prisoners, i.e., people who rocked the boat
too much), not that different politically from Czarist Russia. But still, both are the best places on this planet to live.
China is a totalitarian country, politically almost in every aspect worse than pre-war Nazi Germany but still delivers an ok quality of life to its citizens.

Murderous Stalinist Russia didn't deliver anything to its citizens, the quality of life was awful, (pointless) poverty widespread, its common culture in shambles. Russian culture never recovered till modern Russia has emerged.

And anyway the thread is about quality of life not about compatibility with someone's pet ideology, with philosophers' utopias.

You talked about the quality of life my friend China provides to its people. This is a complete lie. The welfare of the people living in the coastal areas of China is high. I guess you haven't seen the misery of the people living in the interior.

[wm]

That's an unfair argument.
Yes, the USSR had better education but that arrived 20+ years later. A quarter of a century later everything was better almost everywhere.

Czarist Russia had the mandatory elementary education and:

Overall, the educational efforts of Tsarist Russia were impressive.
The number of students being educated by the early twentieth century was large by Russian standards, as is documented in the excellent tables at the end of Johnson's book.
The quality of this education was uneven, but one can obtain a rough measure of Russia's accomplishments by looking at her scientific advances. Before Peter the Great's time, there existed no science in the country, and no mathematical-rationalistic intellectual tradition. Everything had to be assimilated from the Western tradition. The process took about 15o years.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Russians were appearing whose creative abilities in the natural sciences and mathematics put them on a par with the best European scholars (witness Lobachevsky in mathematics and Mendeleev in chemistry). On grounds such as these, the Tsarist state had good reason to feel that its educational reforms had proven successful.
Review: Reformers and Rebels: Education in Tsarist Russia by Daniel R. Brower

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

Have a look at: https://web.archive.org/web/20120313183 ... m=&ucat=22&

It says, "At the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, 37.9 percent of the male population above seven years old was literate and only 12.5 percent of the female population was literate."

and

"By the 1939 census, 81.1 percent of Soviet citizens (age ten and above) were literate....."

As the above link seems dodgy, the source is; Foley, Kerry. "Literacy and Education in the Early Soviet Union".

Cheers,

Sid

[wm]

It's the same truth as the one that the Nazis gave full employment to the Germans. Actually, in the case of the Nazis, it's true.
They did it at the expense of German's budget deficit (and without killing anyone) - that's mainstream today but then it was considered a bad thing, a horror.

The Soviets robbed Russian elites, the middle class, the peasants from their wealth to finance their fantasies. And then eliminated them physically or at least culturally.
The USSR initially wasn't any richer than Czarist Russia. The devasting Russian Civil War (triggered by the communists for their benefit, ten million victims mostly civilians) made sure of that.

The eradication of illiteracy was achieved with blood money. It was like a rapist buying his victim a nice dress with her own money.

[George L Gregory]

Let's get back on topic and stop effing trying to compare the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. Create a thread comparing the two regimes if you wish, but this thread is specifically about the daily life of someone living in the Third Reich.

May I remind readers that when I mentioned the discrimination against the Jews during the Third Reich, according to wm:

And that the Jews weren't forced to serve in the Army (like the ordinary Germans) wasn't especially onerous I suppose.
Anyway, at the end of the thirties, a Jew per thousand citizens lived in Germany. The inconveniences they suffered had nothing to do with the question "was life there nice."
You prioritizing well being of a small group over well being of an entire nation.

viewtopic.php?f=46&t=245976&start=60#p2324115

So wm, why does it not matter how a German Jew felt during the Third Reich 1933-39? After 1935 they weren't citizens of Germany anymore, but many German Jews were very patriotic and couldn't believe what was happening to them. But, German Jews weren't the only group of people the Nazis targeted during the peace years - what about Catholics, homosexuals, alcoholics, disabled people, Gypsies, mixed-race people, communists, socialists, anti-Nazis, etc?

You argued that life was "objectively" better in Germany, but there are two questions that need to be answered:

According to whom?

For whom?

I don't understand how you can argue that it was "objectively" better when it depends on whom you ask so it is always going to be subjective not objective!

[Sid Guttridge]

Hi wm,

The Nazis achieved full employment? Perhaps if one deducts the 1,500,000 or so men that went into the Army and RAD service, or the couple of hundred thousand Jews who were forced to leave, or the hundreds of thousands of women who initially had to give up their jobs to men.

Yup, the Soviets did all the things you claim, though they are only partly responsible for the Civil War - by definition, it takes two to conduct one!

Of course, "the USSR initially wasn't any richer than Czarist Russia." It inherited a country ruined by the First World War and Czarist Russia's defeat in it.

However, whether you like it or not, the Soviets did have some achievements in the interwar years, such as the massive reduction in illiteracy. The problem was that having taught people to read and write, they then prescribed what they could read.

Life expectancy in Czarist Russia in 1913 was apparently 32! By 1926 it was reportedly 44. By 1950 it was reported as 64. (I presume this is without the intervention of civil wars, Hlodomors or Second World Wars.)

So the USSR was building from a Czarist base where life often wasn't very nice.

By contrast, Nazi Germany was building from a much more solid and "nicer" base inherited from Imperial Germany via Weimar.

Cheers,

Sid

[gebhk]

Hi

Niceness is inherently subjective. So the question 'nice for whom' is a very relevant one. However it is fairly clear that while life in Nazi Germany became very unpleasant for a few, for the majority there was great economic short term improvement. To what extent this was the result of Nazi management and the result of events completely outside the control of politicians for which the Nazis claimed credit is an altogether different debate. There is also the issue of intangibles such as national pride and self-worth which are also essential components of 'niceness' of life and which the Nazis stoked for all it was worth. On the other hand, not everyone thrives in an environment of forced socialisation and mind control.

The other very relevant question is one of time. Clearly, while there was peace things remained nice for the majority. However, due to its very core, Nazism made war inevitable. At which point life started to become very un-nice for everyone, if it continued at all.