In this volume Europe’s leading modern historians offer new insights into two totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century that have profoundly affected world history—Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Until now historians have paid more attention to the similarities between these two regimes than to their differences. Stalinism and Nazism explores the difficult relationship between the history and memory of the traumas inflicted by Nazi and Soviet occupation in several Eastern European countries in the twentieth century.

The first part of the volume explores the origins, nature, and organization of Hitler’s and Stalin’s dictatorial power, the manipulation of violence by the state systems, and the comparative power of the dictator’s personal will and the encompassing totalitarian system. The second part examines the legacies of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes in Eastern European countries that experienced both. Stalinism and Nazism features the latest critical perspectives on two of the most influential and deadly political regimes in modern history.