How Accurate is the Claim That Putin is a Second Hitler?
Executive Summary
- Many claims, including from Zelensky, have been that Putin is a second Hitler.
- We analyze the accuracy of this claim.
Introduction
This article uses math to verify the accuracy of this claim that Putin is the new Hitler.
The Claims
This video claims that Putin has surpassed the war crimes of Hitler. The reference is continually made to WW2 throughout the video.
Many assertions are made in the video, but no supporting math of evidence is presented to support the assertions. Hitler produced specific statistics; they are estimates, but they can be checked against Putin’s statistics.
In this video, Hillary Clinton makes a comparison between Russia’s annexation of Crimea to the Nazis claiming they needed to invade Poland to protect the German population in Poland. However, she also says she is not making a comparison but just discussing historical context. So which is it? Is a comparison being made, or isn’t it? Clinton repeatedly does this when making statements, which is a form of hedging. However, if one were confident in the claim, such hedging would not be necessary.
A Highly Oversimplified Comparison
The problem with this analysis is that these situations have little to do with each other. The Crimean population was allowed to vote and voted by over 90% to join Russia. Such a vote was not held in Poland. Furthermore, Germany split Poland with Russia and then attacked many other countries. Nothing like this happened after the Crimeans voted to join Russia. Yes, the claim of one’s countrymen being in another country is correct, but that entirely leaves out other contexts.
This lack of accuracy is a common feature of those making this comparison. It also should be noted that Hillary Clinton has a historically low accuracy when speaking on virtually any topic and is now in hot water for hiring firms to falsify Russiagate.
There are very few politicians who have enough depth or background in history or research to make any claims of historical similarities. No politician comes to mind as a reliable source for historical education.
The Claim of Putin as a Second Hitler Claimed Through Social Media
This claim about Putin being a second Hitler is all over different social media platforms, one being LinkedIn.
Here is one such claim.
Comment #1
At the end of WWII, the declared “never again”. We are now experiencing a modern day Hitler who is far more dangerous than his predecessor. What will it take before the EU responds with military support to stop this carnage? Putin is betting on the world standing aside for threat of WWIII with the possible use of a nuclear response. It’s time for the EU to Approve the Formal Request for Admission to the EU by Ukraine. That would then authorize a military response under the article that states “any action against One is an action against all”. If left unchallenged, Ukraine will be but the first of many countries to be destroyed and occupied. When will someone or some group do what is necessary and cut the head if the snake off? Prayers go only so far. At some point, action must be taken.
There are a lot of claims being made in this quote; not only is Putin a second Hitler, but also, this commenter is claiming future knowledge, actually specific knowledge, that Russia will invade other countries after Invading Ukraine.
I found this comment unsupported by evidence, and I made the following comment as a reply.
It is amazing for me to learn that Hitler was not that bad. Here is the most updated civilian casualty count from the UN.
From 4 a.m. on 24 February 2022, when the Russian Federation’s armed attack against Ukraine started, to 24:00 midnight on 2 April 2022 (local time), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for
Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 3,455 civilian casualties in the country: 1,417 killed and 2,038 injured.” – UN
So, 1,417 Ukrainians have been killed by Russian forces. Is this more or less than Hitler? I can’t tell.
Also, why is Hitler always invoked? How about the Imperial Japanese, Mao, or Idi Amin? Putin does not even rise to the level of Idi Amin and is far, far lower than the US’s civilian casualties in wars. How about invoking Mohammed, or is that not PC? Why wasn’t George Bush called another Hitler? He is now dancing with Ellen Degeneres and is rehabilitated. Maybe Ellen can bring Putin on her show to dance. Does a comparison to Hitler make any sense if there is such a massive discrepancy in numbers?
Does Bush’s dancing on Ellen compensate for his invasion of two countries based on concocted evidence leading to $4 trillion in expense and enormous loss of life and injuries and the ruination of Iraq? Perhaps. Look how personable he is. No one makes comparisons between George W Bush and Hitler. However, Bush’s body count is far higher than Putin’s.
Another commenter did not seem to understand my point by calling Hitler “not that bad.” Here is his comment.
Comment #2
Anytime someone takes a person who ordered the murder of 11 million Jewish civilians and starts their post claiming that person “wasn’t so bad” I truly wonder, and with no small sense of bewilderment, what on EARTH you’re trying to say? I normally let disjointed posts go, but this one was too much. You learned “Hitler wasn’t that bad???” 11 MILLION INNOCENT PEOPLE Shaun! What are you talking about??
Here is my response.
I think Hitler was bad. But (the previous commenter) does not appear to because he stated that Putin is in Hitler’s category. You saw where I provided the estimated number of Ukrainian civilians killed above?
You seem to know some of the statistical magnitudes. But where did you get the 11 million number? The generally agreed-upon number is 6 million. (My Source) There were another 5.5 million civilians, but they were not a focus as they were not Jewish. So few people seem to know about them. So if we just take the civilian casualty estimate from the above statistics, that is 1,417 civilians as of the current estimate.
Let us double it to 2,834 because the UN states it is underestimated. Now 2,834/11.5 million = .00024. That is a minimal number. Let us take Idi Amin; the midrange estimate is 300k civilian casualties (My Source) 2,834/300,000 = .0094. That is, again, a very small number. Using this metric, Putin is not even close to Idi Amin.
It feels good to place Putin in Hitler’s category, but does the math support this comparison? So by extension, either Hitler was not that bad, or Putin is nothing like Hitler.
What is Democide?
When governments kill civilians, they are not always killed in wars. This intentional government killing of one’s own civilian population is called democide and is defined below.
“the intentional killing of an unarmed or disarmed person by government agents acting in their authoritative capacity and pursuant to government policy or high command.” – RJ Rummel
According to Rummel, in the 20th century, around 6x as many have been killed by democide than from war. This brings up the interesting observation that one’s own government is far more of a threat to people’s safety than the governments of other nations.
Idi Amin was not fighting a war, but it was just state rape and murder of Ugandans he did not like. This is democide.
How the Numbers Make it Illogical to Draw Comparisons Between Putin and Hitler
The problem with comparisons to Hitler is that he not only killed so many civilians in Germany but so many civilians outside of Germany. Furthermore, Germany killed many millions of Russian who were in the military. But if we stop at just civilians, the 11.5 figure I used in my response is not accurate. While researching this article, I found that around 21 million people were killed in the camps. This is shocking and unexpected because Jewish groups, the leading promoters of information about the Holocaust, promote the impression that just the Jews and then promote the 6 million figure. Actually, this 6 million figure appears to have been exaggerated, with Rummel estimating 5.2 million. Jews were only 5.2/21, or 24.7% of those killed in concentration camps.
This is the problem when bias and politics are included in estimating and obtaining historical information from those using it for political ends. I call this “history as a tool,” and it is performed by people who are not interested in accuracy. If I took this same approach, I would simply selectively include and exclude relevant data points to fit a conclusion rather than the other way around.
The Total Number of Europeans Killed In WW2, Not Killed by Their Own Governments
The war killed 28.7 million Europeans, in addition to the 21 million in the German concentration camps. Stalin killed roughly 13 million through democide, in addition to the 28.7 million figure.
But many of these people were civilians killed by the German military. I could not find a solid figure for just the civilians killed by Germany outside of Germany during the war. According to RJ Rummel, around 5.2 million Germans were killed during WW2. If we took 1/2 of that for civilian casualties, that would be 2.6 million. But then there are non-German civilians killed by the Nazis. Let us see this quotation.
As high as this human cost of the Nazis was for the Germans, it was higher for the countries they invaded and occupied, particularly in the East. Not only did the Nazis eliminate actual critics and opponents as a matter of course, but they also prevented any serious potential opposition by simply exterminating the top leadership, intellectuals, and professionals. Besides Jews, the Germans murdered near 2,400,000 Poles, 3,000,000 Ukrainians, 1,593,000 Russians, and 1,400,000 Byelorussians, many of these among the best and the brightest men and women.
Moreover, the Nazis murdered as an administrative device. They used terror and mass reprisals to maintain their control, prevent sabotage, and safeguard their soldiers. For the partisans or underground to kill a German soldier could mean that the Nazis would round up and execute all the men in a nearby village, burn the village to the ground, and send all the women and children off to concentration camps. In retaliation for sabotage, they would shoot dozens and even hundreds of hostages.
But many other regimes have also killed opponents and critics, or used reprisals to maintain power. What distinguished the Nazis above virtually all others was their staggering genocide: people were machine gunned in batches, shot in the head at the edge of trenches, burned alive while crowded into churches, gassed in vans or fake shower rooms, starved or frozen to death, worked to death in camps, or beaten or tortured to death simply because of their race, religion, handicap, or sexual preference. – RJ Rummel
I had not heard of 3 million Ukrainians killed before, nor the Polish number. That is also shocking. However, many of those were transported to concentration camps, so I mustn’t count them twice.
I feel more comfortable taking a percentage of those Europeans killed in WW2 not killed by democide. That would be a percentage of the total of 28.7 million. If I take 25% of 28.7 million as the number of civilians only killed by Nazis, that comes to 7.175 million.
That would mean adding 7.175 million to 21 million to arrive at 28.17 million.
So 2,834/28,170,000 = .0001. This means Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has produced around 1/9,940th as many civilian casualties as Hitler and the Nazis.
The Point of Excluding All Non-Jewish Concentration Camp Victims from the Estimation
It seems quite apparent that what Jewish authors (and Jews who quote this figure) are saying by only promoting the 6 million figure is that the only victims worth discussing from the concentration camps were the Jews. This also allows Jewish authors to make it seem like the Jews were more particularly victimized than they were when they were just one of a number of categories of victims.
This is explained in the following quotation.
By genocide, the murder of hostages, reprisal raids, forced labor, “euthanasia,” starvation, exposure, medical experiments, and terror bombing, and in the concentration and death camps, the Nazis murdered from 15,003,000 to 31,595,000 people, most likely 20,946,000 men, women, handicapped, aged, sick, prisoners of war, forced laborers, camp inmates, critics, homosexuals, Jews, Slavs, Serbs, Germans, Czechs, Italians, Poles, French, Ukrainians, and many others. Among them 1,000,000 were children under eighteen years of age.1 And none of these monstrous figures even include civilian and military combat or war-deaths.
This shows that even the 21 million number is not that solid. It could be much more or much less.
Yes, critics, homosexuals, Slavs, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, etc.. were sent to German concentration camps.
Comparing Putin to Emperor Hirohito and The Imperial Japanese Military
Considering how much material there is about Germany in WW2, it is shocking how sparse the information is on the civilian casualty numbers of the Imperial Japanese Military. A very small number of people have ever attempted to estimate the numbers. The numbers I found have a large range of between 3 million to 10 million civilian casualties. Given the broad scope of the Japanese invasion of Asia and its brutality, it is difficult to consider this number as anything but an underestimate.
However, let us take the middle figure of 7 million and then do the same math as before. (My Source) So 2,834/7,000,000 = .0004. This means Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has produced around 1/2,470th as many civilian casualties as the Imperial Japanese Military in WW2.
Comparing Putin to Pol Pot and The Khmer Rouge
Because the US supported Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, the US establishment media were instructed by the DOD and US State Department not to cover the civilian casualties. Reported as a civil war, Cambodia was another proxy war fought between the US on the side of the Khmer Rouge and Russia and China on the side of the opposition. (My Source)
The Cambodian Civil War in 1975 was an outgrowth of the bombing and dislocation caused by the US during the Vietnam War. This is explained in the following quotation.
The Khmer Rouge, the communist party led by Pol Pot, came to power in 1975 during the Cambodian Civil War, which was linked to the Vietnam War. They defeated the Khmer Republic, who were heavily supported by the U.S., including a massive bombing campaign against the Khmer Rouge until 1973. North Vietnam, who had many soldiers in Cambodia, and China were the primary backers of the Khmer Rouge during the civil war. – Wikipedia
The total civilian casualty estimate is also a bit muddled, but reading the material, I am using 3 million (My Source)
So 2,834/3,000,000 = .0009. This means Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has produced around 1/1058th as many civilian casualties as the Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.
Comparing Putin to LBJ and the US War in Vietnam
The number of civilian casualties in Vietnam is difficult to break out from the overall casualties. And there are several estimates that are significantly different from one another. Furthermore, the US is not responsible for all civilian casualties; the Viet Cong killed many. The US left many land mines in multiple countries that killed and maimed people in the region for decades. The US also used chemical weapons in multiple countries around Vietnam, leading to deaths and large-scale birth defects, as explained in the following quotation.
18.2 million gallons of Agent Orange, some of which was contaminated with Dioxin, was sprayed by the U.S. military over more than 10% of Southern Vietnam[32] as part of the U.S. herbicidal warfare program Operation Ranch Hand during the Vietnam War, from 1961 to 1971. Vietnam’s government claimed that 400,000 people were killed or maimed as a result of after effects, and that 500,000 children were born with birth defects. – Wikipedia
Any estimate that uses just civilian casualties leaves hundreds of thousands of birth defects, an untold number of lost limbs, and lost lives from stepping on land mines. I have been using a single civilian casualty number for comparison, which is not the more complicated way to calculate associated damage to civilians.
Reading the various estimates, I have settled on 1.65 million civilian casualties in the Vietnam War. This includes civilian casualties for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. This is because the war spread out to multiple countries.
If we take 2,834/1.65 million, we end up with .0017. That means that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has resulted in 1/582th as many civilian casualties as the Vietnam War.
Now let us go to the reply to my comment.
Comment #3
You are correct, it was 11 million total Jewish and non-Jewish. I appreciate your accurate statistics and yet, regardless of Higgins reason for the comparison, the number of civilians killed is the least of the reasons to compare Putin to Hitler. (I agree it’s not really a reason at all). Why the comparison still should stand: His tactics and strategies along with his aspirations have interesting similarities. He continued following the pattern by casting Trump in the role of Mussolini and manipulating him similarly. The manipulations, the dreams of a greater Empire, the careful control of the narrative, the appeal to insular nationalism all seem to follow rather closely. Hitler spent more effort to militarize his elites and demanded more absolute loyalty, but wealthy elites were still rewarded within the Reich. Left unchecked, I believe we’d see even more parallels.
One can see that this commenter agrees that the civilian casualties cannot be used to compare Putin and Hitler. But he provides other reasons for why he thinks they are comparable, and part of this is what he forecasts what Putin will do in the future, where he is proposing that Putin will eventually reach Hitler’s overall impact.
Putin’s Other Civilian Casualties
I used the estimates from the 2022 invasion of Ukraine because this is really what caused Putin to begin to be compared to Hitler. However, Putin’s civilian casualty count is far higher of other wars.
Russia prosecuted two Chechen wars in the past few decades. The combined estimated civilian casualties were 250,000 Chechens. However, Putin is only responsible for the second Chechen war. When the first Chechen war was waged, Putin was not in power. Assigning part of the 250k figure to a specific war (1 or 2) is very difficult. So let us take 250,000 and divide by 2 to get a figure of 125,000 and give that to Putin.
US establishment media sources want to allocate civilian deaths in Syria to Putin. However, they leave out that Putin kept Syria from being taken over by US-supported ISIS as part of a regime change war to depose Assad. Therefore, it’s difficult to allocate these deaths to Russia. The US instigated the war and armed ISIS. No war would have occurred without this US instigation. These civilian deaths should be placed on the US’s docket.
In 2008, Russia had a small war with Georgia and South Ossetia. The reason for this invasion by Russia was the same as their invasion of Ukraine: the Georgian government wanted to join NATO. The combined number of civilian casualties was around 400. (My Source). However, for so few casualties, it created an enormous number of refugees. This was not very well reported by apparently 230,000 Georgians and South Ossetians were displaced.
In 2014, Russia became involved in supporting Russians in the Donbas region and in doing their own fighting. This is an invasion by the Western establishment media, but it was more of a proxy war. The total Russian military casualty numbers were low at around 450. (My Source). This means that Russians did less direct fighting and more support of these breakaway Russian republics. There are civilian casualties from this war, but the problem is that many of the civilian casualties were due to Ukrainian forces. This war is complicated to assign a specific number of casualties to Putin. These regions do not want to be part of Ukraine and are fighting for independence. So, one can support Russia’s involvement in the Donbas.
Putin has killed Russian civilians or performed democide on a small scale. That is killing journalists and other critics in a way that can’t be traced back to him. It is only the prominent ones who are known and written about. (My Source) It would make sense to add another 500 people to Putin’s docket.
If we take the total of what was just covered, we end up with.
- Number killed in 2nd Chechen War: 125,000
- Number killed in the 2008 Georgian War: 400
- Others killed in Russia: 500
- Our estimate of the 2022 Ukraine-Russia war doubled the US’s estimate to 2,834
This combines to be 128,258 civilian casualties. This would still put Putin at a fraction of Idi Amin’s numbers. If a comparison is going to be made, it should be made between Putin and someone like Idi Amin, not to Hitler.
Where Were These Accusations and International Condemnation When Putin Was Killing The Most People?
What is curious is that the most negative thing Putin has ever done was his prosecution of the 2nd Chechen War, which he prosecuted primarily to win an election to bring him to power. Putin had an apartment bombed to blame it on Chechnia. Several people who investigated this and learned the truth of Putin’s involvement promptly ended up dead. Yet, none of the people currently calling Putin the 2nd coming of Hitler did so back in 1999. The combat phase of the 2nd Chechen War ended in 2020. It is now 22 years later. Why the lag between his worst offense and Putin being called the 2nd Hitler? Are those who make this claim even aware of the civilian casualties of the 2nd Chechen War? I ask because I was not before I did this research.
Conclusion
Any mathematical comparison cannot support the claim that Putin is a second Hitler I was able to find. People who make this claim of equivalence between Putin and Hitler do not appreciate how high the civilian casualties were for the Nazis. I also underestimated this number by a factor of roughly 3x before researching to write this article.
I could not find any major known mass murder or mass-murdering regime where Putin is equivalent. Even political figures like Ida Amin, who are low on the scale of body counts versus the better-known political figures have far larger numbers than the civilian casualties produced by the invasion of Ukraine. So, the comparison is to even Idi Amin would be a stretch. Putin must be making an effort to minimize civilian casualties. However, the same cannot be said for the property damage caused by the invasion.
Update on Civilian Casualties as of April 27, 2022
As the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been ongoing, the casualties have mounted. The previous casualties were used when Putin was being compared to Hitler, so the civilian casualties at that time were relevant. However, just to update the article, we have the April 27 civilian casualty estimates.
From 4 a.m. on 24 February 2022, when the Russian Federation’s armed attack against Ukraine started, to 24:00 midnight on 26 April 2022 (local time), the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) recorded 5,939 civilian casualties in the country: 2,787 killed and 3,152 injured. – UN
Obviously, this number of civilian casualties from a warzone shows that Russia’s military has been making efforts to minimize civilian casualties. Yet, these numbers are never mentioned, as US media continues to accuse the Russian military of war crimes.
Interesting Note: Stalin and Mao
Both Stalin and Mao exceeded Hitler in terms of their total death count. Stalin caused the 1932 to 1933 famine that caused between 5.7 and 7 million deaths during collectivization. And that was just him getting started. Mao and the PRC combined for 76 million civilian deaths. (My Source)
Curiously, Stalin and Mao are rarely invoked when it comes to comparisons. It is nearly always a comparison to Hitler.
Manufacturing Consent: Is The Establishment Media Pushing Exaggeration
There is a desire in society by elites to stamp out critical thinking skills. The focus is on building compliant robots. The media system expresses what the elites want the populace to think. All of this presentation around Putin being Hitler is called manufacturing consent. It will then allow the US to respond in ways consistent with the interests of defense contractors over the interests of the US public. I introduce as evidence just the last several US wars that did zero for the security of the US public but did everything for the revenues of the defense contractors and defense industry careers. However, we were told, “We did not want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.” So many commenters are not getting the paradoxical thing that Putin has an infinitesimal chance of ever reaching the US atrocities from these two wars. They can’t seem to see this hypocrisy. Many people commenting here are not thinking about these things themselves; they are being led what to think by these elites. If you present the same story through enough major media sources, a sizable percentage of the public soon begins to restate the status quo view. The coverage of Ukraine has been “brought to you by Lockheed Martin” in the same way the coverage of covid was “brought to you by Pfizer.” Now that the information provided about covid by financially interested parties has proven almost entirely false, the majority will not go back and ask for accountability.