Among those accused of being similar to, or even worse than Hitler by Western leaders and corporate media at a time the US was either attempting to oust them for build a demonization campaign against them include: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez; Iraqi President Saddam Hussein; Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi; North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un; Syrian President Bashar al-Assad; Chinese President Xi Jinping; and Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Putin’s attack on Ukraine echoes Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia,” wrote the Washington Post on the morning the special military operation began, which aims at eliminating fanatically anti-Russian neo-Nazi elements in the country. An op-ed by infamous anti-Russian history writer Timothy Snyder published by the Boston Globe the same day was titled “Putin’s Hitler-like tricks and tactics in Ukraine.” An article in US state-funded media outlet Voice of America simply asked: “Is Putin the New Hitler?”
Michael McFaul, the former US ambassador to Russia who is also a professor of International Studies at Stanford University, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that Putin was actually worse than Hitler because “there’s one difference between Hitler when he was coming in, and Putin. Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans. He didn’t kill German-speaking people.” The outlandish statement won a rebuttal from no less august a Holocaust authority than the Auschwitz Memorial and forced the Maddow Blog Twitter account to delete the tweet and apologize.
The latest offender was Lloyd Blankfein, a former CEO of Goldman Sachs who says on his Twitter account that he’s “on a gap year.” On Thursday, Blankfein retweeted a Wall Street Journal story in which US President Joe Biden was quoted as saying that the US would respond if Russia used chemical weapons in Ukraine.
“Worth noting even Hitler didn’t permit his military to use chemical weapons, though he had them,” Blankfein said.
Hitler may not have used chemical weapons on the battlefield in the west, where the Nazis regarded their foes as honorable, but on the Eastern Front, where the Nazi regime’s genocidal machine was unbridled in all its fury, no atrocity was off the table, including deploying poison gas. Here are a few examples to correct the historical record.
Invasion of Poland
The first use of poison gas came just three days into the war, when a flight of German bombers was attacking the outskirts of the Polish capital of Warsaw. One of the aircraft dropped several mustard gas bombs, reportedly by mistake. Several days later, the Poles reciprocated, defending a railway bridge over the River Jasiołka near Jasło with mustard gas landmines that killed two German soldiers.
Odessa Catacombs
In June 1941, Hitler ordered an all-out attack on the Soviet Union - the largest land invasion in history. The Soviet Ukrainian city of Odessa, known for its large Jewish population, was captured in October 1941. However, partisans continued to resist the fascist occupation, including by hiding out in the extensive network of stone mines beneath the city, which were dubbed catacombs. The Germans regularly used gas and smoke bombs in an attempt to flush the partisans out, with limited success.
Invasion of Crimea
The Nazis used poison gas in several battles in Soviet Crimea, including in the caverns beneath Sevastopol, where Soviet partisans hid out much like in Odessa; in the battle on the eastern Kerch Peninsula, and especially in the fight for the Adzhimushkay Quarry.
As many as 10,000 Red Army troops took shelter in the massive limestone mine’s labyrinth of tunnels in eastern Crimea, joined by refugees from nearby towns. In October 1942, the Nazis decided to simply gas the entire population to death, dropping gas bombs into the tunnels. Only 48 people survived.
The Kuban
Across the Kerch Strait from Crimea is the Kuban Peninsula and Krasondar Krai. After being pushed out of the Caucasus and away from Stalingrad by the Red Army’s vast Operation Uranus, German forces held onto a small bridgehead west of Novorossiysk. In February 1943, German troops are purported to have used poison gas against Soviet troops in the mountains, although only circumstantial evidence of the accusation exists.
All this is to say nothing, of course, of the vast and infamous use of poison gas in the Holocaust to execute prisoners, most of whom were Jews or other minorities, such as Romani.