> yet at the end of the war Eastern Europe was in the hands of a worse totalitarian dictatorship, the USSR.
I was born in Hungary and I lived under the USSR occupation of Hungary. I am also the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor so I strenuously object to you painting the USSR as worse as Nazi Germany.
> I strenuously object to you painting the USSR as worse as Nazi Germany.
"Worse" based on the total number of their own people killed. I don't think there's any dispute that that number is much higher for the USSR than for Nazi Germany.
Since you mention Auschwitz, you might also consider the fact that the USSR had plenty of concentration camps in which people suffered just as badly. I have no doubt your grandparent's experience at Auschwitz was horrible, far, far worse than your experience in Hungary, but your experience in Hungary was also far, far better than what the USSR showed itself to be capable of. Alexander Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago described one of the USSR's camps as a "polar Auschwitz".
I was born in Hungary and I lived under the USSR occupation of Hungary. I am also the grandson of an Auschwitz survivor so I strenuously object to you painting the USSR as worse as Nazi Germany.