‘World Enemy No. 1’ Review: The Most Fatal Front
Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union was the culmination of Hitler’s animus toward communism. But that ideological conflict was not the cause of World War II.
By Brendan Simms
German soldiers in the former Soviet Union in 1942. DeA / Biblioteca AmbrosianaIt is well known, and uncontentious, that World War II was fought between two gigantic coalitions: the Grand Alliance, consisting principally of the British Empire, the United States and the Soviet Union; and the Axis Powers of Germany, Italy and Japan.
What is disputed is which power Adolf Hitler, the war’s main aggressor, was most concerned with and which power made the biggest contribution to his defeat.
Jochen Hellbeck is under no doubt that Bolshevism was Hitler’s primary concern and the Soviet Union his principal nemesis.
In “World Enemy No. 1,” the author charts the development of Nazi anticommunism, from its origins immediately after World War I, and the way the movement systematically targeted Jews as supposed agents of international Bolshevism.
Once the Nazi regime took power, Mr. Hellbeck argues, the Soviet Union was firmly in its sights, leading ultimately to the invasion of June 1941—Operation Barbarossa.
The horrific brutality of the Nazi occupation regime there, especially the genocide of the Jews, is described by Mr. Hellbeck in harrowing detail.
Despite early successes, though, the Germans were soon bogged down, and Mr. Hellbeck, a professor of history at Rutgers University, vividly describes the way in which the Soviet Union rallied to push the Nazis back to Berlin and occupy the eastern half of Germany.
This Soviet achievement, Mr. Hellbeck argues, was subsequently “erased” by the West for political reasons during the Cold War, and indeed by collective memory and Western historians ever since.
“To this day, Western observers have struggled to recognize Soviet institutions and values as reservoirs of moral action,” Mr. Hellbeck claims.
“The primary reason the Eastern Front has not yet been revealed as the decisive arena of the war,” the author continues, “has to do with politics—specifically the anti-Communist prejudice that pervades Western scholarship.”
Mr. Hellbeck criticizes scholars such as Timothy Snyder for supposedly failing to see the “fundamental difference” between the Nazi and Soviet regimes in their treatments of the local population and especially of the Jews.
There is much to praise in Mr. Hellbeck’s book.
The author makes excellent use of Russian-language sources, in particular a “trove” of interviews.
He lands some telling blows, for instance, when he shows how, in its parting message to visitors, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., has removed the first line of Martin Niemöller’s poem “First They Came.”
(“First they came for the Communists.”)
Though more sympathetic to the Soviet viewpoint than most, Mr. Hellbeck does not conceal the brutality of the regime and its agents, especially in the mass rapes of German women by Red Army soldiers at the end of the war, or the ways in which the Soviets, too, sought to distort history—by denying, for example, the specificity of the Jewish experience.
Above all, Mr. Hellbeck shares some remarkable human stories and fascinating information.
Many Soviet civilians behaved with extraordinary courage and resisted the Nazis or helped Jews to escape.
Others regarded the well-dressed German Jewish deportees with suspicion as “capitalists.”
Mr. Hellbeck captures the drama and the sacrifice of the times extremely well.
Ilya Ehrenburg, the Soviet writer and propagandist who was considered in Germany to be an inflammatory agitator, emerges in a more nuanced light.
There are also some serious problems with this book.
The idea that the author is the first, as he claims, to reveal the Eastern Front as the “decisive arena” of the war will strike many as odd.
The Soviet contribution has been widely acknowledged, both in the scholarly literature—one thinks of David Glantz, David Stahel and many others—and in more popular accounts such as Antony Beevor’s epic “Stalingrad” (1998) and Harrison Salisbury’s vivid account of the siege of Leningrad, “The 900 Days” (1969).
Mr. Hellbeck also exaggerates the Soviet Union’s substantial role in Hitler’s defeat.
He asserts that the Eastern Front claimed 99% of German casualties, whereas the true figure, though disputed, is surely closer to 80%.
That is still a huge proportion, but what the metric disguises is the importance of Anglo-American industry, air and naval power in bringing the Third Reich to its heels, either directly or via Lend-Lease shipments to the U.S.S.R.
According to the careful research of Phillips O’Brien 10 years ago, Hitler’s war against the British Empire and then the Anglo-American alliance absorbed the lion’s share of the German war economy for every year except 1942, and the proportion increased steadily from 1943 onward.
Even if the Nazis had overrun the Soviet Union, they would have eventually been defeated once America’s atomic bombs vaporized what was left of the country after it had been smashed by the Royal Air Force.
Moreover, Mr. Hellbeck is mistaken in seeing Bolshevism and the Soviet Union as Hitler’s most serious enemies.
To be sure, the Führer was deeply concerned with both, but his main concern was the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon and plutocratic behemoths of the British Empire and the U.S., whose power threatened to strangle Germany.
Stalin was only Enemy No. 2.
As the work of Tobias Jersak, Klaus Schmider, Adam Tooze and this reviewer has shown, the struggle against the U.S. was Hitler’s primary concern even before he plunged the Reich into a disastrous war with America.
This matters because Mr. Hellbeck is therefore blind to the link between Hitler’s opposition to international capitalism—which was even more important in driving his antisemitism than anticommunism, significant though the latter was—and his antisemitism.
Hitler’s major statement against the Jews in September 1919, about two years after the Bolshevik Revolution, makes no reference to communism but inveighs instead against the international capitalists who had laid Germany low in World War I.
Later, his view that he could use Europe’s Jews as “hostages” to ensure the good behavior of Roosevelt’s America led to the full-scale implementation of the Holocaust.
And when the Führer drew up his will as the Red Army closed in on his bunker in April 1945, he made no reference to either communism or the Soviet Union but instead lashed out against “the international money and finance conspirators” who had, in his opinion, plunged Europe into war once again.
Finally, the author largely misses the Anglo-American roots of Hitler’s determination to attack the Soviet Union.
Hitler had planned his attack since the 1920s, not primarily to combat Bolshevism and the Jewry, though that was an important factor, but to secure the “living space” there necessary to balance the vast Anglo-American empires.
Likewise, the author shows little understanding of the rationale for Operation Barbarossa, which he sees as primarily a war of ideology.
In fact, the reasons that Hitler himself set out at the time overwhelmingly emphasized the quest for Lebensraum, the need to replace the raw materials and goods lost to the British blockade, and the hope of deterring the U.S.
Mr. Hellbeck makes only fleeting reference to this dimension of the story.
The result is a very lopsided view of why World War II was fought, how it was fought and who won.
Mr. Simms is the author of “Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, From 1453 to the Present.”
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