World Enemy No. 1

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 towards 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—“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 destruction. 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, both Soviet and German—to offer a unique double perspective. He reconstructs the years leading up to the war when “Europe against Bolshevism” was the Nazis’ most fervid rallying cry, a threat that mobilized Soviet citizens, even those opposed to their regime, to join a people’s war against the invading Germans. He tracks the hatred and 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 stunned Germans to fight to the 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 26 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.