World Enemy No. 1 - by Jochen Hellbeck (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"World Ene­my No. 1 is a brac­ing, nec­es­sary cor­rec­tive, chal­leng­ing us to look beyond Allied tri­umphs in the lat­ter stages of the war and the Cold War pol­i­tics that down­played the Sovi­et Union's role in defeat­ing Nazism. It shifts our gaze instead to the bat­tle grounds and killing fields of the west­ern Sovi­et Union, where the events of eighty years ago con­tin­ue to men­ace Europe." --Jewish Book Council

"A history of World War II closely focused on its true epicenter: the Russian front . . . An essential contribution to the modern literature of what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War." --Kirkus (starred review)

"The Nazi crusade against 'Judeo-Bolshevism' was directed against Bolsheviks, as well as Jews, and it was the Soviets, Jews among them, who did the most to defeat Nazism. It takes courage, as well as tremendous talent and dedication, to tell this story with so much empathy, eloquence, and insight. World Enemy No. 1 is a magnificent memorial to both the victims and the victors." --Yuri Slezkine, author of The Jewish Century and The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

"In World Enemy No. 1, Jochen Hellbeck, a pioneering historian of Stalinism, has turned his attention to the German-Soviet genesis of the Holocaust. The book breaks new ground by shifting the focus from some primordial German hatred of Jews to the fierce political competition between Hitler's fascism and Soviet Communism, which Hitler re-coded as 'Jewish Bolshevism.' Hellbeck reminds us of the original wording of Martin Niemöller's warning, 'first they came for the Communists'--for the people they deemed most threatening to their political project--and then they came for everybody else." --Keith Gessen, author of A Terrible Country

"In this passionate, original history, Jochen Hellbeck explores how Adolf Hitler fused his twin obsessions against Jews and Communists into a global battle to the death. A vivid, sometimes terrifying account of the Nazi crusade on the Eastern front--a war like no other." --Victoria de Grazia, historian, Columbia University

"Essential reading. Jochen Hellbeck brilliantly demonstrates how German brutality, recorded and retold by Soviet journalists and historians in the field, shattered Soviet citizens, enraged them, and mobilized them to fight back with bitter intensity. Hellbeck masterfully explains what made World War II on the Eastern front so destructive and why this matters today. A tour de force of historical writing." --Paul Hanebrink, author of A Specter Haunting Europe

"Historical amnesia is a treacherous condition: it betrays memory and distorts the future. In a time in which anti-Communism is being resurrected as a cudgel against liberal values, Jochen Hellbeck courageously sets out to restore the Soviet role in the defeat of Nazism. Soviet suffering, the colossal loss of more than 26 million Soviet citizens in their four-year war against Hitler, has been largely erased from public memory. Without excusing the pathologies and atrocities of the Stalinist system, Hellbeck unfolds the tragic tale of how a despotic regime saved the democratic world." --Ron Suny, author of Stalin: Passage to Revolution

About the Author

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.