although denazification in the Soviet zone actually went further in some instances than it did in the West, it was based upon two misrepresentations of Nazism: one integral to Communist theory, the other calculatedly opportunistic. It was a Marxist commonplace and Soviet official doctrine that Nazism was merely Fascism and that Fascism, in turn, was a product of capitalist self-interest in a moment of crisis. Accordingly, the Soviet authorities paid little attention to the distinctively racist side of Nazism, and its genocidal outcome, and instead focused their arrests and expropriations on
...more
