World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews

Nazi hatred of the Soviet Union played a larger role in precipitating the Holocaust than is generally understood, according to this riveting revisionist study. Historian Hellbeck (Stalingrad) recaps how Hitler rose to prominence in the 1920s by exploiting Germans’ fear of communism. After the Nazis came to power and sent more than one hundred thousand German communists to concentration camps specifically created for that purpose, Germany’s preparations for the war against the “global menace” of Bolshevism began in earnest, Hellbeck writes. Even mere days before signing the 1939 nonaggression pact with Stalin, “Hitler openly remarked: ‘Everything I undertake is directed against Russia.’ ” Hellbeck further explains that, in the Nazi imagination, “the USSR was the most powerful Jewish organization in the world.” Thus, the author posits, once Germany went to war with the Soviet Union in 1941, Jews were subtly “redefined”: “They were no longer racial aliens who could simply be expelled” but “political enemies who needed to be destroyed.” This is why, in Hellbeck’s view, mass killings of Jews were first undertaken during the Nazi invasion of Soviet territory, and from there “seamlessly extended into the oppression, and then annihilation of Jews elsewhere.” Hellbeck elegantly brings to bear a vast array of German and Soviet sources to make his case. The result is a kaleidoscopic, thought-provoking reframing of the ideological underpinnings of Nazi atrocities and the war itself. (Oct.)