I'm not apologising for fascism, I'm saying that this isn't international politics in a vacuum. There's knock on effects for everything. Yes Hitler was pure evil, but we're only talking about Germany 80 years ago, the worrying thing looking back was that the whole of Germany wasn't pure evil. It's easy to think so, but it's not, it was a perfectly normal country filled with normal people who somehow became the perpetrators of one of this planet's greatest crimes. I find the very thought terrifying, and refusing to acknowledge that the German's weren't just some cheesy two dimensional film villain with no real motivation other than being evil and wanting to dominate the world. That just is refusing to own up to the fact that something similar could happen again.

Is it? The only people I see who claim Hitler was not the principal cause of World War Two are fascist catholics (like Pat Buchanan) and others, and forgive me if I don't take them too seriously.

Personally, I do not believe that if there was some alternative reality where Hitler didn't exist, everything would have turned out rosy. The situation really was dire, it wasn't like Hitler suddenly appeared and warped a perfectly happy German people into committing such atrocities. Trouble was brewing, and lets not forget the Axis powers who Hitler had no direct power over who happily allied with them. Nations like Finland and Japan. It wasn't the World Versus Hitler.

Well yes. If X didn't happen then Y might not have, but what is your point? We still were allied with Stalin.

My point was Hitler and Stalin had an agreement, they wouldn't fight each other and in turn they'd share Poland among other things. Hitler reneged on that agreement and betrayed Stalin, and due to the enemy of my enemy being my friend, Stalin allied with us. This wasn't Stalin standing up for what's right or being a hero, circumstance just happens to have put him on the winning side.

The numbers of Stalin's genocide are heavily contested, if you're interested in the subject you can follow the work of the academics Milne mentions. If you're not, fine, but that is your problem.

Secondly, there is a moral (as well as factual) difference between the mechanized and industrialised destruction of human life which was the Holocaust, and the mixture of famine, poor state policy, criminality and criminal stupidity that is Stalin's crimes.

Funny you fail to mention Gulags, which are not too dissimilar from the Nazi concentration camps before the implementation of the "Final Solution" and even conservative estimates of people worked to death in Stalin's camps are in the millions. This wasn't even with the intention of extermination, so add to this the gross human tragedy that is many many millions of people imprisoned and forced to labour in such camps. This wasn't Stalin being a bumbling buffoon who accidentally punishes tens of millions of people, it was evil.