Since he became the dictator of the Soviet Union and the glorified leader of world communism, Stalin had a significant influence on German affairs. German and Russian specialists highlight the complexity of the relationship that connected Stalin and the Germans. They address Stalin's policies towards Germany from the late 1920s until his death in 1953, the history of German communism during the Weimar Republic and in Moscow exile, the fate of the surviving Soviet victims of the Nazi extermination war and that of German prisoners of war, as well as the processing of the Stalinist past. Furthermore, the comparison of dictatorships between Stalinism and National Socialism is discussed in terms of power logic and power systems, utopia, and mass crimes.