You've said the Nazi extermination camps (specifically designed and built for the mass murder of targeted ethnic groups) and the labour camp and colony system under the administration of Gulag had similar intents. Really? No gut feelings, please. Some serious thinking about how and why you think that. And if someone disagrees with your views don't then try and dismiss them as if they're making an argument in support of Stalinism.
Both systems were abhorrent, and both systems were different in their purposes. And why can't we widen the scope and look at what powers other less authoritarian/non-totalitarian states have had (and do have) to deal with people who oppose them or are seen as enemies? Not just Nazism and Stalinised Marxism-Leninism. The Nazis believed in the coming of a new order based on racial hierarchy, the Stalinists believed in the coming of a new unified world based on a centralised, planned economy being able to deliver eventual full communism (as they understood it).
The only other example you could give earlier was Democratic Kampuchea, in which its ruling Communist Party did, in its own way, strive for what the earlier Stalinists had done; the changes that would've occurred under capitalism anyway were to be forced through under revolutionary control at an even more accelerated pace than had been attempted elsewhere, while also telescoping the crude, mechanistic 'stages' of M-L doctrine in the development of socialism and eventual communism (but that's for another thread). DK prisons weren't the same as Nazi concentration camps. Their misnamed 'cooperative' system operated along different lines to the Soviet Gulag system. It isn't apologism to point that out. It is, among other things, about not being arrogant and lazy.
