https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Genrikh-Ya ... ly-unknown
Why is Genrikh Yagoda, the genocidal murderer who murdered double the number of people than are alleged against Hitler, completely unknown?
Bill Hanson
, lives in The United Kingdom
Answered July 13, 2018
Nice answers but all incorrect.
Truth is… its not how many you kill but WHO you kill.
if you look historically there are a lot of cases of genocide and mass murder.
there is an argument (and before people start calling me racist and anti semetic and the rest of the crap) to be made that it was NOTHING TO DO WITH HITLER.
In fact there is an argument that Like Pontius Pilate Hitler wiped his hands of the whole affair and that the real masterminds of the Holocaust were Goering and Heydrich.
Of course Hitler as the head of state gets the blame, but that was the case back then, it’s not now. For instance if it were true than David Cameron and Teresa May would both be on trial for killing 120,000 people in the benefit reforms due to austerity!
The survivors of the holocaust made sure that the demonisation (and rightly so in some cases) of Hitler was taken to an extreme and that it is screamed out at every opportunity…..
of course the community conveniently “forgets” that they have been kicked out of EVERY COUNTRY IN EUROPE at one time or another and hounded through the ages by every country…. Famously the Jews have been expelled from England 11 times in history!
I’m not stating that the Jewish community is by any means evil or has faults……
However….
to receive that sort of attention across Europe for CENTURIES speaks of a deep problem….. and don’t you think if you’ve been kicked for years and then you get an excuse for revenge, you’re going to take it with both hands and run with it?
Think about it.
Harold
, Reader. He/Him
Answered February 15, 2016
Genrikh Yagoda was a Soviet official responsible for the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal using slave labor. He was also the first head of the People's Commisariat for Internal Affairs (abbreviated NKVD), and was thus responsible for taking the actions that directly sparked the Great Purge as well as for the Ukrainian famine of 1932 to 1933. Clearly, he has much blood on his hands.
However, the thing to keep in mind is that Yagoda wasn't where the buck stopped. While he was responsible for the implementation of various policies, he wasn't responsible for those policies being chosen in the first place. He could have been less murderous in his methods, but that probably simply would have gotten him replaced by someone else altogether. In fact, that's what happened: when Yagoda sent a memo outlining foreign response to the Great Purge, Stalin took it as a sign of weakness, replaced Yagoda with Nikolai Yezhov, then had Yagoda and his wife executed.
This isn't to let Yagoda off the hook. He actively made decisions in his life that put him in a place where he could only be ruthless and murderous, and sympathy for the devil isn't required here. However, it does explain why Yagoda is much less well-known than, for example, Adolf Hitler. Without Yagoda, the Ukrainians still would have starved, the zeks still would have been worked to death and the show trials still would have been performed because, fundamentally, that's what Josef Stalin, the unquestioned ruler of the Soviet Union at the time, wanted to happen. To use a metaphor, Stalin was the engine, Yagoda was at most a tire.
So comparing Yagoda to Hitler is a bit of a case of apples to oranges. Both were evil men, but Hitler ran his show while Yagoda played a highly replaceable supporting role in his. A more analogous man in Nazi Germany would be Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, who is generally better known in the West than is Yagoda. However, it's also worth pointing out that Himmler was higher profile in the Third Reich than Yagoda was in the Soviet Union, which was kind of the point in both cases. Yagoda achieved much of his success by not being particularly threatening to the people higher up the food chain, making him fairly easy to promote without worrying about blowback. Himmler, on the other hand, demanded power and exercised it at every opportunity, striking fear into the hearts of pretty much everyone in the Third Reich. It's probably for this reason that the better remembered NKVD head is not Yagoda, but rather, Lavrentiy Beria, who himself had quite the body count.
Additionally, western historiography tends to be kind of crappy in terms of looking into Soviet history. Some of this is simply due to access issues - it's tough to write history if you can't research it and parts of the Soviet archives remain classified. It's also due to intentional inaccuracies in the Soviet record, where things such as death tolls can never be safely taken at face value. And some of it is just down to simple indifference: the internal politics of the Soviet Union is going to be interesting to fewer people than the combined internal and external politics of Nazi Germany simply because the latter affected a more diverse group of people directly.