World Enemy No. 1
Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 5 Feb 2026
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- £14.99
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- Pre-Order
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- £14.99
Publisher Description
In the Nazi imagination, the USSR was the most powerful Jewish organization in the world. They called it ‘World Enemy No. 1’.
The shocking number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives between 1941 and 1945 – 26 million, more than any other country – is widely known. But the faces and the voices of these victims of Nazism are conspicuously absent. In a pathbreaking new work of history, Jochen Hellbeck restores the USSR to its proper place in the history of the Second World War, arguing that to truly understand the conflict, we must set its axis firmly in Soviet territory.
It was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as the greatest threat to its existence. The German crusade against ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’ was the driving force of the Nazis’ most extreme violence, and Soviet territory became ground zero for systematic extermination. Only later was this shocking regime of killing extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.
Using newly declassified archives, testimonies, diaries and dispatches from soldiers and civilians both Soviet and German, Hellbeck reveals the sheer, untold breadth of terror the Nazis inflicted. This eye-opening masterwork is an astonishing new reading both of the Second World War and of how its history has been told.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Nazi hatred of the Soviet Union played a larger role in precipitating the Holocaust than is generally understood, according to this riveting revisionist study. Historian Hellbeck (Stalingrad) recaps how Hitler rose to prominence in the 1920s by exploiting Germans' fear of communism. After the Nazis came to power and sent more than one hundred thousand German communists to concentration camps specifically created for that purpose, Germany's preparations for the war against the "global menace" of Bolshevism began in earnest, Hellbeck writes. Even mere days before signing the 1939 nonaggression pact with Stalin, "Hitler openly remarked: ‘Everything I undertake is directed against Russia.' " Hellbeck further explains that, in the Nazi imagination, "the USSR was the most powerful Jewish organization in the world." Thus, the author posits, once Germany went to war with the Soviet Union in 1941, Jews were subtly "redefined": "They were no longer racial aliens who could simply be expelled" but "political enemies who needed to be destroyed." This is why, in Hellbeck's view, mass killings of Jews were first undertaken during the Nazi invasion of Soviet territory, and from there "seamlessly extended into the oppression, and then annihilation of Jews elsewhere." Hellbeck elegantly brings to bear a vast array of German and Soviet sources to make his case. The result is a kaleidoscopic, thought-provoking reframing of the ideological underpinnings of Nazi atrocities and the war itself.
