SAM said:
He was an atheist in private. He couldn't be one in public because the nation was Christian. Is that so surprising? He called Christianity a curse and promoted and supported science [eugenics was the hot topic of the day in all major global scientific institutions, opposed strongly by the church]
He was raised Catholic and a theistic mystic in private, by most accounts and surviving documents superstitious and self anointed - a prophet type. As is common among prophets and mystics, he frequently criticized established religious institutions. Compare Muhammed, Jeremiah, Moses. He was supported by the Church, because of his espousal of family values. He had no understanding of science, and viewed it as magic, as well as politically malleable and equivalent to political or religious beliefs (he had the German legislature vote against the Theory of Relativity).
His misapprehensions of science, including the bizarre "eugenics" his government supported, are characteristic of mystical theists - common on this forum, for example, where political and moral objections to the supposed consequences of this or that theory are presented as reasons to not accept it as scientific or explanatory, and supernatural presumptions are dvanced as comparable - belonging to the same category of thought- as natural ones; by theists.
SAM said:
I think its a matter of advertising. e.g. what do you know about the Soviet gulags? How many people died there?
The Soviet Gulags were well advertised in the US. One difference is that thousands of American soldiers did not capture and open them, and return to the US with eyewitness accounts of what they found. Another is that aside from his slaughter of the Jews, all of Europe's chosen despised, Stalin mostly killed his actual political enemies - regardless of ethnicity.
Another point: the Gulags did not kill with the same ferocity, or dramatic and focused effort. Kolyna, the worst of them, killed maybe a half million people in thirty years. Aushwitz killed a bit less than triple that in three years - a much different operation, both in motive and in execution.