Allies liberated the Nazi death camps, they found thousands of human skeletons barely alive awaiting what they knew to be inevitable execution." Historian Ronald Grigor Suny remarked that Courtois' comparison of 100 million victims of Communism to 25 million victims of Nazism leaves out "most of the 40-60,000,000 lives lost in the Second World War, for which arguably Hitler and not Stalin was principally responsible." Alongside philosopher Scott Sehon, anthropologist and postsocialist gender studies scholar Kristen Ghodsee commented that Courtois' death toll estimate for Nazism "conveniently" excludes those killed in World War II. At least one scholar in Le Monde denounced the introduction, the main source of controversy, as antisemitic, and other critics also denounced it as antisemitic, a charge Malia disagreed with. In the Nature, Society, and Thought academic journal, Marxist philosopher Robert Steigerwald wrote: "The book's main thesis reads thus: our century's fundamental crime was not the Holocaust, but rather the existence of Communism. Through the manipulation of numbers—only twenty-five million human lives fell victim to Hitler, one hundred million to Communism worldwide—the impression is created that Communism is four times worse than fascism and that the Holocaust was not a uniquely evil crime." Jacques Sémelin writes that Courtois and Margolin "view class genocide as the equivalent to racial genocide." Alongside Michael Mann, they contributed to "the debates on comparisons between Nazism and communism", with Sémelin describing this as a theory also developed in The Black Book of Communism. Margolin, along with Werth, addressed this comparison in a response printed in Le Monde; rather than "indistinguishable evils", they emphasized a marked distinction in ideology. Courtois responded in the same newspaper with an essay in 1997. Werth compared the idea to ascribe all crimes committed by Communist states to communism with the idea to "throw in the face of a liberal the crimes committed in all the countries that claimed to be liberal." According to historian Andrzej Paczkowski, only Courtois made the comparison between Communism and Nazism, while the other sections of the book "are, in effect, narrowly focused monographs, which do not pretend to offer overarching explanations." Paczkowski wonders whether it can be applied "the same standard of judgment to, on the one hand, an ideology that was destructive at its core, that openly planned genocide, and that had an agenda of aggression against all neighboring (and not just neighboring) states, and, on the other hand, an ideology