WORLD ENEMY NO. 1

A history of World War II closely focused on its true epicenter: the Russian front.

“Everything I undertake is directed against Russia.” So said Hitler. By German historian Hellbeck’s account, Hitler’s primary bête noire was the Soviet Union, which, in his mind, was a land fit only for enslavement; the Nazi invasion was premised on a program that would reduce the Soviet population by 20–30 million, to be replaced by German settlers. Perhaps controversially, Hellbeck holds that the Jews who would soon fall victim to the Nazi extermination regime were initially secondary: The first targets were the Communists, though Hitler immediately linked them, railing against “the Jews of the Kremlin” but drawing a distinction between “Jews as ‘racial aliens’” and “those Jews whose purported Communist ideology made them additionally a formidable threat to national security.” Hitler was correct, Hellbeck ventures, in considering Soviet Communism as “the most radical political experiment of the modern Enlightenment.” He was incorrect in believing that a Marxist “enterprise” underlay it and that it would soon crumble: Instead, Communist universalists stood in fairly united opposition to the Nazi regime and its “entrenched racism.” In 1923, Hitler proclaimed, “Either Jewish-international Marxism will survive, or Germany will.” That the Third Reich was defeated, Hellbeck asserts, was because of the Soviets, who essentially fought World War II in Europe alone until 1944, when the second Allied front opened with the Normandy landings. One highlight of Hellbeck’s narrative is his extended portrait of Soviet journalist Ilya Ehrenburg, who rightly wrote that the “Germans had incomparably more blood on their hands in the East than in the West.” Hellbeck also notes, tellingly, that in the postwar Nuremberg war crimes trials, “the Soviet Union was the only power to bring Jews to the stand.”

An essential contribution to the modern literature of what Russians still call the Great Patriotic War.