For many scholars, the success and rise to power of Adolf Hitler can be seen as particularly baffling. Hitler, when it comes to dictators motivated by evil, is one of the most dominant figures of our era, outshining, Mussolini and even Stalin as a villain, politician and strategist (Seligmann)
Stalin was the man who was the "mastermind" behind the Great Famine, an act which spanned between 1932 and 1933 and which was largely responsible for the deaths of around nine million people. Stalin's "Great Famine" was strategic and manmade and was designed to attack a specific class of people: the peasants (Trueman, 2013)
Bessel focuses his historical inquiry on the nature of political violence and its role in the growth and lifetime of the Nazi group, arguing that its actuality was actually the "expression of mainstream social values." (Bessel, 154) He argues that the ultimately failure of the Nazi regimen was that it was transgressed "commonly accepted social and moral code," later demanding significant demobilization
Mary Fulbrook discusses the ghettos, exportation to Madagascar, and mass-graves that were first toyed with, before the development of the sinister "final solution." (Fulbrook, 197