I think it's an extreme stretch to say they were "pawns".
Agreed.
They were different animals, Hitler was able to raise money via industrialists in Germany and dragged germany out of the great depression years before most other countries where Stalin was a communist party machine man who climbed up through the ranks and eventually became the head honcho.
Its probably fair to say that neither were nice guys. 
Agreed. Stalin's case is a bit different ("party machine"), but Hitler and Mussolini were never pawns. They first mobilised great masses of people, and
because of that became interesting for Big Money. "Pawn" is simply the wrong word. They were leaders, the exact opposite of a pawn. Today we have Salvini and Meloni, but that's yet another story.
One could debate whether "pawn" is the right term for Sleepy Joe. Without a Billion dollars of donations for his election campaign, he would never have become POTUS. Roosevelt's MIC has its hands on all recent American presidents, of course. Some tried to be somewhat independent (Carter, Obama, Trump?), but with a "debt" of one Billion US$, no POTUS is free to decide anything.
