World Enemy No 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the Fate of the Jews by Jochen Hellbeck
Without the Soviet Union, would the U.S. and UK have won the war in Europe? Would D-Day have failed if the Soviets hadn’t drawn off massive Nazi resources and inflicted heavy casualties on the enemy?
The question haunts the pages of Jochen Hellbeck’s massive study, World Enemy No. 1. The German-born historian (presently at Rutgers University) documents the centrality in Nazi thinking of “Judeo-Bolshevism” in the Soviet Union, deemed by them as crucial to the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. From the Nazi standpoint, the Jews were advancing through capitalism as well as communism, but the Soviet Union with its armies and industrial capacity was their spearhead. The Nazis despised nearly all the inhabitants of Eurasia, including the Slavic Russians and Ukrainians, but reserved special animus toward the Jews and were determined to eliminate them entirely.
Hellbeck accurately describes how Nazi ethnic hatred folded easily into longstanding German dreams of expansion. Not unlike the westward push of “Manifest Destiny” in the U.S., many Germans looked east to fertile farmlands, natural resources and indigenous populations dismissed as culturally inferior and exploitable. The author performs diligent and perhaps unprecedented work in sorting through the journals and personal letters of Soviet participants in Hitler’s war but appears to overlook the self-censorship and fear of reprisal from Stalin’s regime. Frankness was dangerous in a society where the wrong phrase could lead to hard labor in prison. Stalinism was so brutal that many Ukrainians and others in regions overrun by the Germans greeted the Nazis as liberators. Soon enough, Nazi violence disabused them.
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With World Enemy No. 1, Hellbeck does valuable work reminding us that many of World War II’s defining battles were fought in Eastern Europe. During the Cold War, the U.S. and UK worked to diminish Soviet accomplishments while at the same time, the Soviets tried to erase the particular victimization of the Jews. World Enemy No. 1 provides much needed balance in the historical record of World War II and the Holocaust.
Buy World Enemy No. 1 on Amazon here.
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