World Enemy: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews (1) - Hardcover

Hellbeck, Jochen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593657381 ISBN 13: 9780593657386

Verlag: Penguin Press, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A major new history that transforms our understanding of World War II—tracing the conflict and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust, to Germany’s implacable hostility toward Soviet Russia

In the West, World War II is commonly understood as the Allies’ struggle against Nazism. Often elided, if not simply forgotten, is the Soviet Union’s crucial role in that fight. With this book, acclaimed historian Jochen Hellbeck rectifies this omission by relocating the ideological core of the conflict. It was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as an existential threat—in fact, “World Enemy No. 1.” Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in 1917 and were preparing the Soviet state to destroy Germany and the world. And so, on June 22, 1941, a German army of three million attacked the Soviet Union to exterminate “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Hitler’s cardinal obsession. While Europe’s Jews were expelled, exiled, and persecuted by the Nazis, Soviet Jews were immediately slated for elimination. The Soviet lands thus became ground zero for systematic extermination, which was only later extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.

Hellbeck plumbs newly declassified archives and previously undiscovered sources—testimonies, diaries, and dispatches from soldiers and civilians, Soviet and German—to offer a unique history that takes account of both sides. He reconstructs the years leading up to the war when “Europe against Bolshevism” was the Nazis’ most fervid rallying cry, and documents their annihilatory ambitions on the battlegrounds in the East. Widely disseminated accounts of German atrocities mobilized millions of Soviet citizens to join a people’s war against the hated invaders. Hellbeck tracks the desire for revenge that drove the Red Army on its path of reconquest, an advance that further inflamed the belief in a murderous “Bolshevik Jew,” stirring the Germans to fight to the bitter end. Recounted here in vivid detail are the events at Babi Yar, the Battle of Stalingrad, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the arrival of the Red Army in the Nazi capital. Finally, Hellbeck reckons with the West’s persistent disregard of the Soviet Union’s incalculable contribution to winning the war—and its sacrifice of twenty-six million citizens—as anti-communism and the Cold War turned erstwhile allies into mortal enemies.

Hellbeck’s eye-opening work is an astonishing new reading of both the Second World War and how its history has been told.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jochen Hellbeck is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, specializing in modem Russia, the Soviet Union, and the history of World War II. The recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin, among others, he is the acclaimed author of Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, and the online project Facing Stalingrad. He lives in Brooklyn.

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CONTENTS

Note on Historical Place Names xxiii

Introduction 1

Chapter 1. A FRONT AGAINST BOLSHEVISM 21

Chapter 2. SWASTIKA AND SOVIET STAR 61

Chapter 3. CROSSING THE RUBICON 104

Chapter 4. A VIOLENCE SHAKING EUROPE 144

Chapter 5. JEWS AND BOLSHEVIKS, STEP FORWARD! 177

Chapter 6. MOSCOW STRIKES BACK 211

Chapter 7. ENSLAVEMENT 253

Chapter 8. LIBERATION 292

Chapter 9. “HERE SHE IS, ACCURSED GERMANY!” 329

Chapter 10. ERASURE 381


Chapter 1
A Front Against
Bolshevism
Five months after Hitler's party rose to power, Theodore Abel, a thirty-six-year-old sociologist teaching at Columbia University, arrived in Germany. Together with his wife and three children, he disembarked from a transatlantic steamer in Bremen, intending to pass through Berlin to visit his parents in Poznan, as the family did every summer. But for Abel, the trip across Germany proved more absorbing than the destination. "Nazi propaganda everywhere-radio, buses cruising with speeches and music, big placards on corners, flags and uniforms everywhere," he noted in his diary on June 30, 1933, while in Berlin. Abel spoke fluent German and struck up conversations with people on the street, and in cafés and restaurants. A few confided to him with horror how the Nazis were abusing Jews and persecuting their political opposition. Most others spoke about the new regime very differently. Ardently patriotic, they credited the government with unifying and strengthening their crisis-ridden country. Hitler had restored their hope for a better future. Abel chronicled what he saw as a historic moment: Germans' enthusiastic rejection of "liberalism, democracy, tolerance, and international cooperation," and their regression to a primitive state of "national egotism and intolerance." By the time Abel returned to the United States in early September, he knew he had to write about Nazism.

He devised an ingenious way to gather the sources necessary for his study: He planned a writing contest. Anyone, regardless of sex or age, who had identified with the Nazi movement prior to January 1933 would be invited to participate. Cash prizes, which would go as high as 125 marks-about half a month's salary at the time-would be awarded to essays that provided "the most detailed and trustworthy accounts" of individuals' personal lives, particularly during the years following the Great War, which saw the founding and rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). When Abel returned to Germany the following summer, he presented his project to officials in the Reich Propaganda Ministry as a large-scale sociological study, conducted by Columbia University to inform the American public about the history of National Socialism. Impressed, the officials sent bulletins to all local headquarters of the Nazi Party with instructions to announce the contest in the party press.

By fall 1934, 683 Nazis had submitted essays, offering Abel a unique view from within the movement. The group was composed mostly of men, along with several dozen women, and included respondents from a wide variety of different regions and occupations. The contestants displayed a wide array of styles and levels of sophistication as well, with some limiting themselves to a few paragraphs and others presenting their autobiography over many pages. But all authors merged their life stories with the Nazi movement. The moment they first saw Hitler, or joined his party, suffused them with renewed purpose to fight for the restoration of a great nation that had been diminished by foreign powers and internal strife.

Germany, according to most accounts, had been brought down by sinister enemy forces that had concealed their conspiratorial designs by posing as disinterested parties. Many authors began by blaming "the Jews" for bringing Germany to its knees: Jews had pushed Germany into the Great War in order to hijack its wartime economy, then orchestrated its defeat in 1918 in search of further profits. But Jews did not act out in in the open, some of the writers stressed. Globally dispersed and operating behind the scenes, they were the puppet masters who controlled millions of unwitting Germans. Their most effective weapon was the Marxist rhetoric of class struggle, which pitted Germans against Germans, sapping their national strength. Multiple writers-including one Grete Kircher, who had been born to wealthy parents and was converted to Nazism by her driving instructor-claimed that "international Marxism and the Jewish problem" had combined to destroy Germany. Of these two, the Marxist political parties posed the greatest threat, given their popular support and power to command uprisings and revolutions: "Our struggle was directed mainly against Marxism, which is supported by the Jews, since it was willing to defend its power to the utmost with brutal violence."

More pointedly, several writers identified their principal enemy as "extreme Marxism" or "Bolshevism"-the Communist faith that was preached in Moscow and had captivated countless German Communists. Nazi autobiographers who served in the paramilitary storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA) described their bloody street fights against a "red subhumanity" that was determined to devastate Germany. One of them cast their effort to defend the fatherland against the "murderous red mob" as a matter of existential survival for its sixty million inhabitants. In the view of some, there was no sacrifice too extreme in the struggle against Bolshevism, which represented the antithesis of everything Germany stood for. "I shuddered at the thought of Germany in the grip of Bolshevism," one respondent wrote. "The slogan 'Workers of the world unite!' made no sense to me. But National Socialism, with its promise of a community of blood, barring all class struggle, attracted me profoundly." Hans Schönherr, a schoolteacher from Wiesbaden, prefaced his eight-page autobiography with a succinct summary. He wanted to explain to "the great American people (1) that the horror stories about my fatherland . . . are nothing but nasty lies, and (2) that Germany and Europe can be saved from Bolshevism only by National Socialism."

Much has been written about what turned Germans into Nazis. Among the contributing factors that historians have identified are militant nationalism, national humiliation, economic upheaval, Hitler's charisma, and anti-Semitism. Understood as distinct forces, these concepts reflect scholars' need for analytical clarity, but they often contribute to a misunderstanding of how ordinary Germans viewed themselves and their political project. One scholar who studied the Nazi autobiographies written at Abel's behest dismissed their descriptions of "Germany's mortal enemy" as "rantings" that "made little sense then and now." The anti-Bolshevism invoked by Hitler and his followers was certainly conceptually diffuse, often conflating Marxists, Communists, and Jews. But this very imprecision proved advantageous for the Nazis, as it gave them license to strike out hard and wide. Their task, as one street fighter put it, was to "wipe the wanton grin off the Bolshevist's murderous face" and "save Germany from the bloody terror of unrestrained hordes." Though fantastical and misguided, the Nazi conception of an entwined Jewish-Bolshevik enemy was an important catalyst for violent political action, and there is every reason to take it seriously.

Anti-Bolshevism had energized and shaped the Nazi Party ever since its founding in 1919. From then until January 1933, a fourteen-year stretch that came to be called the "period of struggle" (Kampfzeit), the Nazis consistently attacked the German Communist Party (KPD), which they saw as their most organized and potent political foe. In countless clashes with the KPD, Nazi street fighters discovered their movement's...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593657381
• ISBN 13: 9780593657386
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 544
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland