BOOK REVIEW WORLD ENEMY
World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews
Jochen Hellbeck, Penguin Press, New York, 2025
This is a sweeping history of the German crusade against “Judeo-Bolshevism” that drove the Nazis’ extreme violence and turned Eastern Europe, its borderlands, and Soviet territories into a laboratory for the German politics of mass murder. Ultimately, it was the Soviet Union that contributed the lion’s share to the Nazi defeat. It was a world-historic clash of titans.
Under Adolf Hitler’s personal authorship, anti-Bolshevism energized and shaped the Nazii party from its founding in 1919 and obsessively drove its fanaticism up to and through the final climatic battle for Berlin in late Aprill 1945. Nazi Germany was not defeated; it was eradicated.
- Introduction
Adolf Hitler had two obsessions, the twinned hatreds of Bolshevism and the Jews. Hitler wove these two obsessions into one intertwined ideology, Judeo-Bolshevism, which was the engine driving a conspiracy theory that became the over-arching foundational policy of the German state during the 1930s and 40s. Hatred was mobilized to an unprecedented industrial scale with the war in the East waged against the Russian Communist state with exceptional ferocity and savagery while the ethnic cleansing of the Jews was undertaken by processes of industrialized extermination.
The Nazis conceived of the USSR as the largest and most powerful Jewish organization in the world, not as a leftist political movement but as a Jewish conspiracy for domination. It was the Germans themselves who gave the Judeo-Bolshevik state of the USSR the all-encompassing label “World Enemy No. 1.” With such a label, war was inevitable. The stakes of the conflict were posed as either “annihilation, or victory.” World War II on the Eastern Front represented much more than just a conflict between two competing nationalisms.
When hostilities against the Soviet Union started in 1941, the definition of the adversary was expanded to encompass a Judeo-Bolshevik terror regime. It was a short step to further widen the concept of fear of Judeo-Bolshevism in Russia to cover all European Jews since they were all part of the same conspiracy. A European-wide Holocaust was set in motion.
Jochen Hellbeck puts the German-Russia war of 1941-45 and the related Holocaust into the overall cultural-political context created by Hitller’s fusion of his dual obsessive hatreds in this compelling and readable narrative history. He writes: “To properly understand the war, the German crusade against Judeo-Bolshevism must be seen as the conflict’s driving force.”
It was in the aftermath of World War I that Hitler fused antisemitism with anti-Bolshevik antipathy into one ideology with hatred of Jews as the driving emotional force. With this view, the Communist Soviet Union was the product of Jewish created Marxism, and the goal of the Jews was to use Soviet Communism to invade Germany and all of Europe. Additional substance and intensity to this ideological construct was reinforced by the widespread belief that the Jewish-led Communists had masterminded the 1918 military defeat of Germany. Thus, the neologism Judeo-Bolshevism was created and its product, the Marxist state of the USSR, was deemed the world’s most powerful Jewish organization.
During the 1920s, Hitler and the Nazis in their propaganda exploited the German public’s fear of a civil war, a fear made worrisome by the presence of a large German Communist party ostensibly under the direction of Moscow, which had been the directing force of the society-destroying Russian civil war.
Speaking in 1936, Hitler defined Bolshevism as an extreme variant of the Enlightenment faith which had malignantly led to the virulence and violence of the French Revolution and that now the rulers in Moscow were unleashing similar revolutionary forces towards a global confrontation with the West. Hitler coded this revolutionary variant as Jewish while further attributing to Communism a creed of universalism and interracial solidarity against the more nationally specific German master race. This twin-pronged Communist creed directly conflicted with Hitler’s vision of Germany as a nation fulfilling its historical destiny as the home of a dominant German master race, a people realizing their imperial racial destiny. The coming conflict was viewed as existential; either Germany defeated the Soviet Union, or it would suffer its own demise.
As the Nazis prepared Germany for war, their leaders continuously denounced Communism as a “world-devouring Jewish plot.” Hundreds of thousands of Germans and German youths saw the anti-Bolshevik propaganda exhibitions before the war, part of the preparatory program promoting the “punitive campaign” to be waged in the East against Bolshevism.
In May 1939, the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer wrote prophetically that the coming war would “provide the same fate for [the Jews in Russia] that every murderer and criminal must expect. Death sentence and execution. The Jews in Russia must be killed. They must be exterminated root and branch. Then the world will see that the end of the Jews is also the end of Bolshevism.”
In August 1939, just before commencing negotiations with Soviet Russia for the infamous nonaggression pact, Hitler made the astoundingly revelatory statement: “Everything I undertake is directed against Russia. If the West is too stupid and blind to grasp this, then I shall be compelled to come to an agreement with the Russians, beat the West, and after its defeat, turn against the Soviet Union with all my forces.”
Hellbeck summarizes the German invasion of Russia in 1941: “Germany launched Operation Barbarossa in an attempt to destroy Soviet civilization, which Hitler identified as a Jewish enterprise and the most radical political experiment of the modern Enlightenment.”
Nazi pre-war propaganda on the German public was effective. Invading German troops accepted the view that the Soviet Union was a Judeo-Bolshevik terror regime and German soldiers resorted to the very cruelty and ruthlessness that had been ascribed to the enemy by German propaganda. Ultimately the Germans planned to establish a postwar colonial suzerainty over European Russia as far as the Ural Mountains where tens of millions of Soviet citizens would be extinguished, mostly by starvation. Starvations was going to be a major tool of repression for the Germans. In actual practice, millions of Soviet prisoners of war were killed during the war by starvation under ghastly conditions.
- A Front Against Bolshevism
Upon assuming power, Hitler was credited by ardent German patriots with unifying and strengthening their crisis-ridden country. A better future loomed in this narrative, and Hitler’s vision and Nazi propaganda were very much about narrative. An American researcher noted that Germans had enthusiastically rejected “liberalism, democracy, tolerance, and international cooperation.” A reversion to a primitive state of “national egotism and intolerance” prevailed.
The American researcher worked with the German propaganda ministry to organize the writing of essays by early Nazi party adherents on what had attracted them to National Socialism. The propaganda ministry bought onto this exercise in self-explanation. Nearly 700 man-in-the-street essays were received, written by a cross section of average Germans. The result was a written explication showing the mechanics of how movement devotion works.
A central finding was that the persona of Hitler had personally connected with respondents; the lesson being that a broad-based movement is galvanized by a singular charismatic personality. Hitler filled the respondents with a renewed sense of purpose about restoring the greatness of Germany, a country that had been diminished by foreign powers and internal dissent and strife and about whose fate that the respondents cared greatly.
After the charismatic personality, the next core ingredient common to most accounts was a belief in a central conspiracy which asserted that Germany had been brought down by sinister foreign forces who had concealed their conspiratorial designs. Conspiracy demands that there be an identifiable “other” that perpetuates the conspiracy. Who were these sinister forces? They were the Jews, long an established “other” in European conspiracy thinking. The Jews were depicted as a globally dispersed conspiracy who acted as puppet masters behind the scenes.
In this telling, the Jews had manipulated Germany into the war in order to hijack the economy and then orchestrated the 1918 defeat to increase their profits, a rather fantastical construction. The Jews’ most effective tool was Marxist rhetoric of class struggle, which pitted German against German and sapped national unity. It is the sinister outside agent that undermines and destroys national unity, a staple of conspiracy thinking. The result is to conflate International Marxism with the Jewish Problem into one single unified threat to destroy Germany. The threat of the Jews and Marxism is existential to preserving Germany. Further proof is provided by the Communists’ ability to garner popular support from the discontented and to command uprisings and revolutions. One respondent’s account assigns to the Jewish Marxist threat what was eventually to be characteristic of the Nazi treatment of both Jews and Russians: “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.” The rhetoric of 1933-34 foretold the ferocious violence of the 1941-45 war on the Eastern Front.
In the Nazi lexicon extreme Marxism was characterized as “Bolshevism,” the catchall word covering Marxism. It was the ultra-enemy and only National Socialism could save Europe and Germany from Bolshevism. The intertwining of Bolshevism and antisemitism proved to be a toxic cocktail that fueled violent political action. Upon coming to power in 1933, the Nazis commenced a brutal reckoning with the Communist party, a campaign that masked the more fundamental assault against what was left of German parliamentary democracy.
Overall, what turned Germans into Nazis was a mélange of factors that combined into a powerful, unified conspiracy theory: militant nationalism, national humiliation, economic upheaval, Hitler’s personal charisma, and antisemitism. Hitler provides a how-to manual for assembling a politically potent radical street populism that can seize power in a modern democratic state. He was not an aberration but rather a template of whom democratic leaders should be highly cognizant.
Red Fear
The Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 shook and divided the world. For some, it was at long last full power to the people, the people’s will in action. To others, the revolution triggered memories of the Jacobin terror of the French revolution, a brutal coup unleashing the frenzied mob. Civil war broke out between the revolutionary Reds and the counterrevolutionary Whites. Bolshevism supposedly subjected innocent Russians too horrific violence at the hands of frenzied alien groups: German agents, Chinese hooligans, and Jews, especially Jews of no nationality whose only goal is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things. Hatred of Jews was a cornerstone of White propaganda. Soviet leaders were branded as mass murderers. During this period across the spectrum of radical right politics, unmasking Bolshevism as a Jewish conspiracy was a principal propaganda goal. The seeds for future vicious antisemitism were planted early; the Nazis built upon what was often already there. Various warring parties in the many and varied civil wars across the borderlands committed pogroms against Jews as part of their overall struggles.
This tumultuous period surfaced the antisemitic classic The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Fatefully, a copy of the book was found in the bedroom of the murdered empress after the execution of the czar and his family in 1918, a macabre fact that strengthened the sense that the book was sinisterly prophetic. The book describes a plot by a secret assembly of Jewish notables a conspiracy to subvert the morals of the non-Jewish world and assume control over the world’s banks and press in preparation for a bloody coup. The book later served as propaganda to license the killing of Jews as Communists. Starting in 1917 and extending into the 1920s across Russia and the eastern European borderlands were civils wars of intense national strife with the warring parties casting the Jews as Communist agents, a taint that lasted into the 1940s. During this period the Whites, the worst of the offenders, murdered a hundred thousand Jews in two thousand pogroms.
Imperial Germany fostered revolution in Russia by smuggling Vladimir Lenin into Russia in 1917. The gambit paid off and the Russians submitted to an advantageous peace with the Germans with the Brest-Litovsk treaty of May 1918 which reshaped eastern Europe’s borders and gave Germany dominion over Ukraine in what the author terms “long-held imperial fantasies in the East.” But what was settled in the east didn’t stay in the east. One German paper described revolutionary Russia as a “source of revolutionary pestilence for the Prusso-German monarchy.” This was a loaded metaphor as the flu pandemic swept Europe in the spring and summer of 1918 adding a public health crisis on top of a gathering political crisis. Germans and other east Europeans started to refer to the “Russian plague” and “Bolshevik disease.” The epidemic disease also introduced the word “revolution” to the speech of hundreds of thousands discouraged by defeat and privation.
The Germans had won in the east in the spring and summer of 1918, but fresh American troops fueled Allied victories on the western front. The kaiser announced his abdication and a German republic was proclaimed from the balcony of the Reichstag on November 9. An armistice was agreed for November 11. For Germans, it was an hour of both defeat and revolution. For the Allies there was no unconditional victory or surrender; they needed the German military to forestall Bolshevik revolution from flowing into Central Europe from the east. Post-armistice Germany was a nation in flux. Hastily organized German border militia, christened the Freikorps, marched into the borderlands and ruthlessly eliminated Communists, both real and imagined. The Freikorps called the Bolsheviks “bandits” and labeled them as “Asiatic” rather than Jewish. The Freikorps leaders claimed they were defending “the culture of the entire world” and others later claimed they were forestalling “the downfall of the West.” The fantasies of colonial conquest in the east were given a universalist appeal, an appeal that was resuscitated and reused by the Nazis. A young Heinrich Himmler wrote that “The East is what is most important to us … We must fight and settle in the East.”
At the time of the armistice, no Allied soldier had set foot on Germany. That fostered the later rise of the belief in the “stab in the back” conspiracy theory that took hold explaining the German defeat at the hands of Jews, Marxists, and Bolshevists who had undermined the home front. Domestic subversion is a staple of this type of conspiracy thinking; Hitler later took it to a high level. Left-wing uprisings in Berlin and Munich were brutally put down in 1919 by government and Freikorps troops. In the summer of 1919, Hitler cultivated his political message of unrelenting antisemitism, making his first documented rant against the Jews in August 1919, the month after the signing of the Versailles Peace Treaty. The Jews had brought down Germany from the inside. He railed against the “dictate” of the treaty and global financiers ruling from London, Paris, and Wall Street who were conspiring to keep Germany in “servitude to interest rates” in perpetuity. The charismatic demagogue had met his theme.
The book continues with fascinating and revealing detail to chronicle the rise of Nazism to power, consolidation over the government, and then the rendezvous with its Bolshevik nemesis in the Eastern Front war of 1941-45, a war that destroyed and sundered the Germany of the several Reichs and drove more than twelve to fourteen million Germans west beyond the Oder-Neisse line in 1944-50 with two million dying along the way in one of the greatest forced migrations in history.
Helllbeack’s book is a compelling narrative.
Review by Paul A. Myers
Myersbooks History 