World Enemy No. 1:
Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews
by Jochen Hellbeck (Penguin)
This book is retelling of World War II around the premise that the Nazis were not focused on exterminating the Jews, but on the Communists, customarily the Bolsheviks, and thus focused on the threat that the Soviet citizenry and military were to the Nazi way of life. The Jews were collateral to the purpose, in that the Nazis did not distinguish between Jew and Communist, using iconography and language that mixed the two. The primary acts of the Holocaust as we think of it today were dedicated towards the Soviets, and a sort of mass murder and enslavement of Russians generally, that would then be turned with some reluctance against non-Russian Jews.
This is relevant in that the history of different states under Nazi occupation is best described in terms of how anti-Communist they were, and much of the foreign attitudes towards Nazis are better understood as different states and organizations being willing to tolerate them as preferable to Communism in general. The story of this post-WWII is better established, but this book points out the ways that it mattered before and during the war, including the general sort of welcome that Nazis got in eastern Europe originally as a sort of necessary corrective against Communism.
The communists were the ones who wanted war crimes trials; they were the only ones who mentioned the Jews at them. But this sort of erasure of the Communist role, quite literal in the case of the Niemöller quote/poem, is a sort of anti-liberal society belief that leads to bad history and illiberal thinking, and vindicates people like Putin in letting him make historical claims that it justifies in his invasion of Ukraine.
This is a heterodox view, verging on explosive. The earliest parts are the strongest in terms of looking at the rise of Nazi power. It makes the most sense about the elision of the importance of the fears related to Communism. As a broader history it loses direction. The author likes to focus on individual stories and documentation about single people, which makes for good storytelling but bad narrative. We get to see new ways that the Nazis were terrible to people, some of the more interesting dealing with enslaved Russians and Nazi-sympathizers who turned. So as a documentation of forgotten history, it is great, but that fails to make for a great read overall.
There are a lot of Single Raised Eyebrow moments. Rephrased, I had some Gell-Mann going on. There were a lot of interesting facts, again, primarily about the Nazi approaches to the Soviets in the pre-war years and then in the later ones in their mass enslavement protocols. But then I hit something where I know a little more, like the Madagascar plan, or Stalin’s non-reaction to Operation Barbarossa, or the sequence of the declarations of war after Pearl Harbor. The takes there come off as summary to the point of deceptive, or at least intentionally downplaying the huge scope of the claims. That tends to inject skepticism into the reading in general.
The problem then is that this is polemic without polemic. There is a explosive set of claims here, maybe even too hot for usually contrarian me, but the actual history-history does do the right sort of thing in providing additional material to understand the lead into and progress of World War II in general and Nazi behavior in specific. Good stuff, but stuffed poorly into its packaging.
My thanks to the author, Jochen Hellbeck, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Penguin Press, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 