I"ve long wondered why Hitler stands so far above the Communists in the popular consciousness. These are my amateur historian theories:
1. Hitler and the Nazis left us tons of film and photographs. The raw footage creates a visceral reaction to the atrocities. By contrast, I've never seen a single image of Stalin's or Mao's atrocities. (L…
I"ve long wondered why Hitler stands so far above the Communists in the popular consciousness. These are my amateur historian theories:
1. Hitler and the Nazis left us tons of film and photographs. The raw footage creates a visceral reaction to the atrocities. By contrast, I've never seen a single image of Stalin's or Mao's atrocities. (Lenin was too early). I am willing to stand corrected.
2. Hitler exhibited brutal efficiency and purpose in his killing. The other butchers mixed in neglect (famine) along with various other methods.
3. Hitler announced what that he was going to murder people ("Final Solution"). The other butchers initially claimed to engage in some kind of political/social revolution and murder later became a byproduct that wasn't expressly announced.
I’d add on to #3 that, among left-leaning people, communism is often viewed as a noble (if impractical) idea that unfortunately resulted in state atrocities when put into practice by the Soviets. So the principle of communism is seen as defensible, just poorly executed. Whereas the goal of eliminating minorities and creating a pure Aryan race is indefensible in both theory and practice
To wit, I recently watched "Succession" with my mom, and there's a presidential candidate who describes himself with verbiage like, "The spirit of the people has produced a leader."
I said, "Whoa, fashy!" and my mom (who considers herself politically educated) did not understand why my fash needle went to 11 on that statement.
I dunno if this is a worldwide problem, but at least in the US, there's this idea that teaching people what fascism is (or communism, or eugenics, or safe sex, or...) means somehow advocating for that position.
Agreed. People generally just treat it as a synonym for “anything I can vaguely tie to Hitler”, but that’s not really any more correct than assuming “Communism” and “Stalinism” are identical.
I've struggled for decades on how to handle this in a honest manner without unilaterally disarming myself in a debate. We need smaller terms that can describe ongoing government policy in historical terms that don't park themselves in popular notions of true evil. I should be seeing references to revanchism than fascism since the former is more specific and less parked on a popular notion of evil.
Excellent point. It's hard to believe but there are still hard-liners who believe that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Castros, the Kims etc are rogues who perverted an otherwise wonderful concept/ideology. "It hasn't been implemented properly".
There’s plenty of people on the reasonably mainstream right who’d defend forms of authoritarian ethno nationalism. They’d reject the label ‘Fascist’ as a pejorative but embrace much of the underlying ethos.
Is it a wonderful concept? I’ve always been of the belief that those leaders did exactly what they had to do. Communism is a house of cards. It requires society to agree on a singular goal and work towards it. Unlike capitalism, which can allow for a certain amount of graft and still work even if janky- communism as a societal engine needs every part of it to be humming. All parts of its economy need to be tightly controlled. Which means you have to crack the skulls of the people who don’t want to tow the line. Full stop. There’s literally no option left in these regimes. Because communism doesn’t account for people just wanting things they don’t need. Which means yeah. Black markets. And if you don’t have a special police that can go in and shut down those black markets the whole thing unravels. Communism requires, by definition, an awful lot of prohibition. Prohibition leads to black markets. Black markets lead to crime since they end up being self policed plus they have to hide their dealings from the government. So they have to snuff out snitches.
So. No those leaders didn’t pervert a good idea. Communism was never a good idea. It’s a lazy ideology that doesn’t want to wrestle with human desire in any kind of adult way. So yeah. Of course those leaders were brutal. They had to be. Peoples wants kept getting in the way of their beautiful, boring, sandbox. I’d argue they didn’t do anything wrong. In order to safeguard communism from dissent, black markets, immigration, poverty, free riders, bootleggers, etc you literally HAVE to have a pretty strong authoritative police state.
Otherwise it doesn’t work. And that’s the problem. Communism doesn’t work without brutally crushing the people who don’t want to be communist.
see my comments above but soviet and chinese communism wasn't impractical. they rebuild collapsing societies sufficiently to resist their foreign domination and invasions. without the soviet reindustrialization the nazis would have dismembered russia and ukrain, and been much worse. so do you imagine russians had mo right to exist? ok, if so the nazis were ok right to siberia? it's a harsh world and europeans and americans comstanly invaded those countries.
I mean the biggest is simply that Hitler *lost*. Nazi Germany didn’t just collapse under its own weight after several decades, it fought a huge war, was defeated, and was occupied. Its conquerors dug up their excellent records, literally put the leadership on trial, and generally did everything they could to ensure the Nazi system was brutally exposed, denounced, and demolished.
Lenin, of course *won* and then had the decency to die still a hero, and the Communist hagiography of him never really went away. Mao and Stalin’s legacies are more complex within their own systems, but still, their Parties carried on after them.
The Soviets had several decades to bury or at least recontextualize the worst atrocities of Stalin in particular before their fall (at which point there had been enough detente for long enough that the “winners” in particular were not in the mood for a repeat of Versailles or Nuremberg).
The Nazis were horrendously brutal and violent in a way that sticks with you, and as you mentioned, we have ample photo and video evidence of many of those atrocities in part because Nazis were quite showy. You can’t unsee photos of Mengele’s “experiments” or piles of hundreds of emaciated dead bodies.
Dictators like Stalin and Mao inflicted terrible violence as well, but they tried to keep it hidden away and were protected by decades of strict censorship and party control. That made a huge difference. Much of the documentary evidence we have of the Holocaust comes from allied forces who liberated concentration camps. There are numerous Holocaust museums around the world and Holocaust victims have been able to publicly share their testimonies and have a significant cultural impact in the West. Concentration camps were preserved as learning experiences for the public.
On a governmental level, unlike Russia and China, contemporary Germany does not attempt to deny or conceal its past atrocities, to the extent that Holocaust denial is illegal.
The layman simply doesn’t have the same understanding of the horrors of the Soviet Union or Maoist China because the information isn’t as easily accessible or visceral as what we have about the Holocaust.
I swear that if Nazi Germany had not happened and some author came up with the idea for it in a piece of historical fiction people would dismiss it for being too over-the-top and unrealistic. The Nazis were just so flagrantly, on-the-nose evil in a way you don't usually see in history. Most evil regimes try to be more covert and diplomatic about their ideology and actions. It reminds me of the famous British comedy sketch, "Are We the Baddies?":
"Have you noticed that our caps have actually got skulls on them?"
I think Moynihan mentioned it relatively recently, I remember being surprised I actually have seen one of the movies he referenced. Before watching that I didn't realize how much of a hand the NYT had in keeping the Soviet secrets away from American eyes. I have always heard that the news has only gotten worse and used to be better. This made me realize it's always been like this, we only just started noticing.
Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands contains horrific descriptions of people being shot en masse, often for being Jewish and other ethnic minorities, by official Soviet order. I think those among us who give Stalin (et al.) a pass tend to be either ignorant or willing to minimize what self-avowed communists did because the communists persecuted and killed so many people *in addition to* Jews.
I.e., I agree with the journalist whose piece started the controversy, and I wish I didn't understand exactly why he got run out of his job for stating the historically obvious.
IIRC Snyder also explains how/why Soviet atrocities & even Holocaust events were hidden for so long--no free press, locked archives not opened until after 1991, not to mention terror state. Soviet policy was to deny Holocaust on its territory. Or maybe I read that in an amazing memoir about how the Soviets literally paved over a mass grave site in Kiev.
So not only do we have tankies today, but I can testify to the soft soap treatment of “existing socialism” in academic circles throughout 1980s--my ex was an avowed Leninist then (Lenin’s heroic legacy was tarnished by Stalinism but that didn’t undermine Lenin’s brilliance). Vague anti capitalism will always be with us!
I've been meaning to read that for a while, especially given the war, but have kept glossing over it whenever I pick up a new book. Your other reply gave me even more reason to pick it up. I've been trying to figure out a way to frame this without whataboutisming, so that might help.
P. S. The conclusion of Snyder's book is a really admirable example of how to make the case for the evils of Soviet deeds without seeming to gloss over the evils of Hitler's regime.
Truth. Another poster pointed out that thousands of American soldiers actually set foot in Germany and the occupied countries to get a firsthand view of the Nazi atrocities. They were able to walk around and take photos. No American soliders have ever set foot in the former USSR or Red China to witness the butchery of Stalin and Mao.
All of those theories seem correct to me. I think having Auschwitz as a monument to this great evil helps bolster the standing of the Nazis above the Soviets. There aren't any monuments, at least no large ones to my knowledge, in Ukraine that show the extent of the calamity.
Also, the Soviets actively made sure that there was no mention of any of these mass murders (with some help from western journalists, unfortunately) so the numbers are much more shrouded in mystery.
I think the last point also has also lead to the "no true communist" argument (tankies are a different breed, obviously) since there are so many different brands of communism. Somehow though, all them end up in the same dark place. Strange.
Isn’t it obvious it’s just that none of them really hurt the people who write the most popular history books? If Stalin had invaded France and bombed England he would stand in the same stead.
Isolationist authoritarians are never going to achieve the same international hatred as expansionist authoritarians. Like... duh?
You’ve managed to pack in four falsehoods in a pretty small number of words.
Firstly, there’s always been people highly critical of Churchill, if anything the valorisation of one part of his long career over is a relatively recent thing. By ‘modern historians’ you at best mean a pretty small sub set of historians and even then the number of those who’d get even vaguely close to ‘histories greatest monsters’ is minuscule. Churchill did some appalling things, leading Britain during WW2 shouldn’t mean those things are erased. Good luck finding any historian who said the Blitz as ‘redeemed Hitler’. The one thing the world will never be short of is left over straw.
You might want to remember that the first thing Brits did after the war was boot Churchill out of office in a landslide.
For starters it was the British people who stood alone against Hitler not merely Churchill.
At no point did I or indeed do I think any credible historian play down Churchill’s leadership, but it’s truly bizarre to think that should make everything else he did go away or excuse any other appalling things he did, which he has always been criticised for.
I see you’re not even going to try and defend the ridiculous idea that ‘modern historians’ see him as ‘histories greatest monster’.
If you want to see things in childishly simplistic terms I guess that’s your business, but serious should and will look to give account to all aspects of someone’s life and present a nuanced picture.
So we’ve moved on from ‘Modern Historians’ to debate between internet randoms, interesting backtracking. This may be shocking to learn, but I don’t really care what internet randoms think of Churchill.
No body should be ‘dog piled’ but with any particular circumstance it would depend on what either side arguing. What you seem to be presenting is a fight between two unuanced and simplistic grade school level portrayals of of Churchill’s life. The phrase bald men fight over a comb comes to mind.
It’s seems bizarre to me that people want to get outraged that others won’t accept a biography of Churchill that’s basically a hagiography, when at the time most people had a far more mature view of Churchill’s achievements and faults.
Maybe go back and read your original comment and you’ll see it was simply untrue in multiple ways and just stop...
Millions of refugees poured across Europe fleeing Germany. And Europe (and US) were actively engaged in a very much not Cold War resulting in millions of deaths.
I think it just comes down to the society we live in being more impacted directly. So there's a more salient living memory.
Also. Millions of westerners because they were in the army saw the results of Hitlers policies. The average westerners would have a much harder time actually seeing what Hitler did. Also. Hitler killed in the name of superiority. Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed to create equity
I do tend to think it's a team thing. The left has a weird habit of giving leaders passes if they claim to represent left wing politics, such as Chavez or Castro, and the institutions of higher learning tend to lean left. It's so weird, like if Pioget had done exactly the same things but claimed to be socialist, many would see him as a hero.
I"ve long wondered why Hitler stands so far above the Communists in the popular consciousness. These are my amateur historian theories:
1. Hitler and the Nazis left us tons of film and photographs. The raw footage creates a visceral reaction to the atrocities. By contrast, I've never seen a single image of Stalin's or Mao's atrocities. (Lenin was too early). I am willing to stand corrected.
2. Hitler exhibited brutal efficiency and purpose in his killing. The other butchers mixed in neglect (famine) along with various other methods.
3. Hitler announced what that he was going to murder people ("Final Solution"). The other butchers initially claimed to engage in some kind of political/social revolution and murder later became a byproduct that wasn't expressly announced.
I’d add on to #3 that, among left-leaning people, communism is often viewed as a noble (if impractical) idea that unfortunately resulted in state atrocities when put into practice by the Soviets. So the principle of communism is seen as defensible, just poorly executed. Whereas the goal of eliminating minorities and creating a pure Aryan race is indefensible in both theory and practice
Imagine the pearl clutching if someone argued that fascism was just poorly executed, and that real fascism has never been tried.
People in the US don't even know what fascism is.
To wit, I recently watched "Succession" with my mom, and there's a presidential candidate who describes himself with verbiage like, "The spirit of the people has produced a leader."
I said, "Whoa, fashy!" and my mom (who considers herself politically educated) did not understand why my fash needle went to 11 on that statement.
I dunno if this is a worldwide problem, but at least in the US, there's this idea that teaching people what fascism is (or communism, or eugenics, or safe sex, or...) means somehow advocating for that position.
Agreed. People generally just treat it as a synonym for “anything I can vaguely tie to Hitler”, but that’s not really any more correct than assuming “Communism” and “Stalinism” are identical.
I've struggled for decades on how to handle this in a honest manner without unilaterally disarming myself in a debate. We need smaller terms that can describe ongoing government policy in historical terms that don't park themselves in popular notions of true evil. I should be seeing references to revanchism than fascism since the former is more specific and less parked on a popular notion of evil.
well there are people that argue that, Francoists and the like
Now there's a dude who made it out of the 20th century relatively unscathed, historically speaking.
Neo-nazis do argue this to be clear! And yes pearls are clutched.
Excellent point. It's hard to believe but there are still hard-liners who believe that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the Castros, the Kims etc are rogues who perverted an otherwise wonderful concept/ideology. "It hasn't been implemented properly".
I’m still waiting for someone to say “real fascism has never been tried.”
It's more that the people missing Mussolini think he did a great job: https://unherd.com/2022/11/italy-still-mourns-mussolini/
Nostalgia about Nazism and fascism is also a thing in parts of Latin America for obvious reasons.
There’s plenty of people on the reasonably mainstream right who’d defend forms of authoritarian ethno nationalism. They’d reject the label ‘Fascist’ as a pejorative but embrace much of the underlying ethos.
I think that arguably is what Julius Evola (self-described "superfascist") was going for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola
Is it a wonderful concept? I’ve always been of the belief that those leaders did exactly what they had to do. Communism is a house of cards. It requires society to agree on a singular goal and work towards it. Unlike capitalism, which can allow for a certain amount of graft and still work even if janky- communism as a societal engine needs every part of it to be humming. All parts of its economy need to be tightly controlled. Which means you have to crack the skulls of the people who don’t want to tow the line. Full stop. There’s literally no option left in these regimes. Because communism doesn’t account for people just wanting things they don’t need. Which means yeah. Black markets. And if you don’t have a special police that can go in and shut down those black markets the whole thing unravels. Communism requires, by definition, an awful lot of prohibition. Prohibition leads to black markets. Black markets lead to crime since they end up being self policed plus they have to hide their dealings from the government. So they have to snuff out snitches.
So. No those leaders didn’t pervert a good idea. Communism was never a good idea. It’s a lazy ideology that doesn’t want to wrestle with human desire in any kind of adult way. So yeah. Of course those leaders were brutal. They had to be. Peoples wants kept getting in the way of their beautiful, boring, sandbox. I’d argue they didn’t do anything wrong. In order to safeguard communism from dissent, black markets, immigration, poverty, free riders, bootleggers, etc you literally HAVE to have a pretty strong authoritative police state.
Otherwise it doesn’t work. And that’s the problem. Communism doesn’t work without brutally crushing the people who don’t want to be communist.
see my comments above but soviet and chinese communism wasn't impractical. they rebuild collapsing societies sufficiently to resist their foreign domination and invasions. without the soviet reindustrialization the nazis would have dismembered russia and ukrain, and been much worse. so do you imagine russians had mo right to exist? ok, if so the nazis were ok right to siberia? it's a harsh world and europeans and americans comstanly invaded those countries.
I mean the biggest is simply that Hitler *lost*. Nazi Germany didn’t just collapse under its own weight after several decades, it fought a huge war, was defeated, and was occupied. Its conquerors dug up their excellent records, literally put the leadership on trial, and generally did everything they could to ensure the Nazi system was brutally exposed, denounced, and demolished.
Lenin, of course *won* and then had the decency to die still a hero, and the Communist hagiography of him never really went away. Mao and Stalin’s legacies are more complex within their own systems, but still, their Parties carried on after them.
The Soviets had several decades to bury or at least recontextualize the worst atrocities of Stalin in particular before their fall (at which point there had been enough detente for long enough that the “winners” in particular were not in the mood for a repeat of Versailles or Nuremberg).
And the ChiComs of course are still in power.
Makes a lot of sense. Hitler has no ongoing legacy being protected since the Nazi's have no political power, unlike the Communist countries.
And there was no equivalent to Nuremberg for the Communist butchers. If anything, the Chicomms have tightened their grip on power.
The Nazis were horrendously brutal and violent in a way that sticks with you, and as you mentioned, we have ample photo and video evidence of many of those atrocities in part because Nazis were quite showy. You can’t unsee photos of Mengele’s “experiments” or piles of hundreds of emaciated dead bodies.
Dictators like Stalin and Mao inflicted terrible violence as well, but they tried to keep it hidden away and were protected by decades of strict censorship and party control. That made a huge difference. Much of the documentary evidence we have of the Holocaust comes from allied forces who liberated concentration camps. There are numerous Holocaust museums around the world and Holocaust victims have been able to publicly share their testimonies and have a significant cultural impact in the West. Concentration camps were preserved as learning experiences for the public.
On a governmental level, unlike Russia and China, contemporary Germany does not attempt to deny or conceal its past atrocities, to the extent that Holocaust denial is illegal.
The layman simply doesn’t have the same understanding of the horrors of the Soviet Union or Maoist China because the information isn’t as easily accessible or visceral as what we have about the Holocaust.
I swear that if Nazi Germany had not happened and some author came up with the idea for it in a piece of historical fiction people would dismiss it for being too over-the-top and unrealistic. The Nazis were just so flagrantly, on-the-nose evil in a way you don't usually see in history. Most evil regimes try to be more covert and diplomatic about their ideology and actions. It reminds me of the famous British comedy sketch, "Are We the Baddies?":
"Have you noticed that our caps have actually got skulls on them?"
The Anti-Humans episode of Martyrmade was horrifying. There needs to be a movie about the Holodomor.
There is a pretty good film called Mr. Jones about the Welsh journalist who tried to expose the Holodomor--and the pushback he faced from the NYT et. al. I don't know if it would live up to Moynihan's accuracy test, but it's worth a watch! https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/29/mr-jones-remembers-when-stalin-weaponized-famine
I think Moynihan mentioned it relatively recently, I remember being surprised I actually have seen one of the movies he referenced. Before watching that I didn't realize how much of a hand the NYT had in keeping the Soviet secrets away from American eyes. I have always heard that the news has only gotten worse and used to be better. This made me realize it's always been like this, we only just started noticing.
Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands contains horrific descriptions of people being shot en masse, often for being Jewish and other ethnic minorities, by official Soviet order. I think those among us who give Stalin (et al.) a pass tend to be either ignorant or willing to minimize what self-avowed communists did because the communists persecuted and killed so many people *in addition to* Jews.
I.e., I agree with the journalist whose piece started the controversy, and I wish I didn't understand exactly why he got run out of his job for stating the historically obvious.
IIRC Snyder also explains how/why Soviet atrocities & even Holocaust events were hidden for so long--no free press, locked archives not opened until after 1991, not to mention terror state. Soviet policy was to deny Holocaust on its territory. Or maybe I read that in an amazing memoir about how the Soviets literally paved over a mass grave site in Kiev.
So not only do we have tankies today, but I can testify to the soft soap treatment of “existing socialism” in academic circles throughout 1980s--my ex was an avowed Leninist then (Lenin’s heroic legacy was tarnished by Stalinism but that didn’t undermine Lenin’s brilliance). Vague anti capitalism will always be with us!
I've been meaning to read that for a while, especially given the war, but have kept glossing over it whenever I pick up a new book. Your other reply gave me even more reason to pick it up. I've been trying to figure out a way to frame this without whataboutisming, so that might help.
P. S. The conclusion of Snyder's book is a really admirable example of how to make the case for the evils of Soviet deeds without seeming to gloss over the evils of Hitler's regime.
You are missing the biggest one in that we fought a war with hitler.
Truth. Another poster pointed out that thousands of American soldiers actually set foot in Germany and the occupied countries to get a firsthand view of the Nazi atrocities. They were able to walk around and take photos. No American soliders have ever set foot in the former USSR or Red China to witness the butchery of Stalin and Mao.
And Stalin was "on our side." People tend to forget that, but I wonder if it subliminally feeds into our views of them both even now.
All of those theories seem correct to me. I think having Auschwitz as a monument to this great evil helps bolster the standing of the Nazis above the Soviets. There aren't any monuments, at least no large ones to my knowledge, in Ukraine that show the extent of the calamity.
Also, the Soviets actively made sure that there was no mention of any of these mass murders (with some help from western journalists, unfortunately) so the numbers are much more shrouded in mystery.
I think the last point also has also lead to the "no true communist" argument (tankies are a different breed, obviously) since there are so many different brands of communism. Somehow though, all them end up in the same dark place. Strange.
Isn’t it obvious it’s just that none of them really hurt the people who write the most popular history books? If Stalin had invaded France and bombed England he would stand in the same stead.
Isolationist authoritarians are never going to achieve the same international hatred as expansionist authoritarians. Like... duh?
Drew Magary unironically said that the Oppenheimer movie should have had more Japanese people in it.
If we had nuked Germany, would there be people arguing that the dead German citizens should have been given airtime?
The Japanese were the enemy in WWII. They were every bit as bad as the Nazis and they have never apologized.
Americans view "good" countries and "bad" countries through a very distorted lens.
“ the Oppenheimer movie should have had more Japanese people in it”
They were in the prequel.
Yeah an opening with the rape of Nanking would have been interesting if we are just taking about making a political piece instead of a movie.
Wait. Why should there have been more Japanese people? They were part of the Axis.
Well they weren’t exactly isolationists. Their neighbors just didn’t happen to be the history book-writers of the Western world
Of those mentioned who was really an expansionist? They were all more broadly interested in internal control than external conquest.
*Raises hand from a country formerly behind the Iron Curtain occupied by the Soviets for 40+ years*
Oh yeah I forgot about you guys for some reason. You should write more history books of the kind they sell in airports.
Well Timothy Snyder did write this book called "Blooodlands" that's sold pretty well in the last couple years.
I’ll read it!
You’ve managed to pack in four falsehoods in a pretty small number of words.
Firstly, there’s always been people highly critical of Churchill, if anything the valorisation of one part of his long career over is a relatively recent thing. By ‘modern historians’ you at best mean a pretty small sub set of historians and even then the number of those who’d get even vaguely close to ‘histories greatest monsters’ is minuscule. Churchill did some appalling things, leading Britain during WW2 shouldn’t mean those things are erased. Good luck finding any historian who said the Blitz as ‘redeemed Hitler’. The one thing the world will never be short of is left over straw.
You might want to remember that the first thing Brits did after the war was boot Churchill out of office in a landslide.
More left over straw I see.
For starters it was the British people who stood alone against Hitler not merely Churchill.
At no point did I or indeed do I think any credible historian play down Churchill’s leadership, but it’s truly bizarre to think that should make everything else he did go away or excuse any other appalling things he did, which he has always been criticised for.
I see you’re not even going to try and defend the ridiculous idea that ‘modern historians’ see him as ‘histories greatest monster’.
If you want to see things in childishly simplistic terms I guess that’s your business, but serious should and will look to give account to all aspects of someone’s life and present a nuanced picture.
So we’ve moved on from ‘Modern Historians’ to debate between internet randoms, interesting backtracking. This may be shocking to learn, but I don’t really care what internet randoms think of Churchill.
No body should be ‘dog piled’ but with any particular circumstance it would depend on what either side arguing. What you seem to be presenting is a fight between two unuanced and simplistic grade school level portrayals of of Churchill’s life. The phrase bald men fight over a comb comes to mind.
It’s seems bizarre to me that people want to get outraged that others won’t accept a biography of Churchill that’s basically a hagiography, when at the time most people had a far more mature view of Churchill’s achievements and faults.
Maybe go back and read your original comment and you’ll see it was simply untrue in multiple ways and just stop...
Winston Churchill valuing the lives of the British over their colonial possessions. Monster!
By colonial possessions do you mean like... the people of Bengal???
I just want to add that there is proof Holodomor was intentional, in that when the famine started they purposefully did nothing to fix it.
I think it's simpler than that.
Millions of refugees poured across Europe fleeing Germany. And Europe (and US) were actively engaged in a very much not Cold War resulting in millions of deaths.
I think it just comes down to the society we live in being more impacted directly. So there's a more salient living memory.
Also. Millions of westerners because they were in the army saw the results of Hitlers policies. The average westerners would have a much harder time actually seeing what Hitler did. Also. Hitler killed in the name of superiority. Stalin and Mao and Pol Pot killed to create equity
I do tend to think it's a team thing. The left has a weird habit of giving leaders passes if they claim to represent left wing politics, such as Chavez or Castro, and the institutions of higher learning tend to lean left. It's so weird, like if Pioget had done exactly the same things but claimed to be socialist, many would see him as a hero.
Hitler was also stupid enough to declare war on basically everyone.