World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews

by Jochen Hellbeck

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 towards 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—“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 destruction. 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, both Russian and German—to offer a unique double perspective. He reconstructs the years leading up to the war when “Europe against Bolshevism” was the Nazis’ most fervid rallying cry, a threat that mobilized Soviet citizens, even those opposed to their regime, to join a people’s war against the invading Germans. He tracks the hatred and 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 stunned Germans to fight to the 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 26 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.

Genres: History, World War II, War, Russia, European History, Soviet Union, Holocaust

560 pages, Hardcover

First published October 21, 2025

About the author

Jochen Hellbeck is Associate Professor of History at Rutgers University, specializing in the history of Eastern Europe.

Reviews

[Logan Kedzie · Rating 2 out of 5]

For its primary sources, stellar; for its conclusions, soon to be on a banned books list near you.

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.

[Evan Murphy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really struggled to get through this book. Great sources accessed but I can't get behind the conclusion at all. I think you'd do better reading something else.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly Explosive Soviet-Side History Of WWII. The central tenet of Hellbeck's narrative here is rather simplistic: Yes, Hitler hated Jews. But he *really* hated *Communist* Jews, and believed that the Soviets were just dumb rubes being controlled by said Communist Jews. This, according to Hellbeck, explains everything from the infamous (and disastrous, for both Germany and the Soviet Union) Operation Barbarossa to why, where, and when the most infamous of the death camps - all located in former Soviet controlled territory after Barbarossa pushed so far into Russia - all came to be, and much more.

Admittedly, as an American and an American who happens to be a grandson of two different men who both fought in the Ardennes Offensive/ Battle Of The Bulge, I've been fascinated by WWII all my life. I grew up hearing that one grandfather had been there - I found out at his death that he actually had earned the most medals of anyone in his small exurban (at the time) Atlanta town. The other died weeks after my birth, and I learned decades later - when I finally got his service records - that his Division had been the first on the American side to liberate a concentration camp.

Thus, WWII is as much a part of me and my blood as it is for Hellbeck, simply on opposite sides of the fight against Germany. Well, maybe more for Hellbeck, a Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers specializing in Soviet history, as he both chose and found a way to make studying WWII his occupation, while I remain a professional software engineer and "hobbyist" prolific book reviewer.

Beyond his central premise above, Hellbeck does as good a job as any - and better than many - of presenting both his case and his evidence. Clocking in at roughly 26% bibliography (as measured from where the Acknowledgement section begins, at least in my Advance Review Copy), this is both a fairly hefty tome at over 550 pages and a well researched one, with over 150 of those pages being source documentation.

By shifting the focus from Jews generally to specifically *Soviet* Jews, this narrative could become explosive, potentially even nuclear level explosive. And yet, even while focusing on Soviet Jews and Soviet citizenry more generally, Hellbeck actually presents a more balanced approach to the history than those who focus exclusively on Jews generally (and erase the extra hatred Hitler directed at Soviet Jews specifically) or those who focus on Soviets generally (and whitewash the Jewish nature of Hitler's specific targets, as Hellbeck brings the case that the Soviet Union did throughout their existence).

WWII as a whole and even the history of the Holocaust specifically is such a large topic that I fail to see how anyone can truly grasp *all* that happened and why, and thus I appreciate histories such as this one that bring a side of the discussion that we often miss, particularly in the West. While others with more specific knowledge about specific events may have more harsh criticism of particular points or perhaps even the entire narrative here, it fits in enough with my own existing knowledge that the text here provides a lot of information I didn't previously know, yet seems plausible given what I did know prior to encountering this book.

And yes, utterly, absolutely, horrific - no matter who was doing the killing or why. (As you'll see here, Hellbeck doesn't excuse Soviet actions against the Jews either.)

Overall truly a fascinating look at the war from an angle I hadn't often considered, and for that reason alone it would be a worthy read. That it was so well documented and read so easily was a bonus.

Very much recommended.

[Maine Colonial · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a free advance digital review copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley.

One of Hellbeck’s premises is that the accepted history of Germany and the USSR in World War II is misguided and misleading because it doesn’t give enough attention to the huge losses borne by the USSR and its citizens, and because it mischaracterizes the Nazis’ view of the existential threat to Germany.

Hellbeck seems to argue that historians and readers of history are unaware—or ignore—that the USSR lost 26 million people in the war, and many more civilians than military combatants. Hellbeck also sets up a straw man argument, claiming that other historians’ position is that the Nazis viewed their biggest threat as the west. Ludicrous. It’s common knowledge that Hitler and the Nazis viewed the Soviets as their biggest threat, never intended the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as anything more than a ruse and delaying tactic, and they were consumed with a desire to wipe out the country; otherwise (among other things), why start Operation Barbarossa at such a strategically unwise point?

Hellbeck’s oddest point is his insistence that history has failed to parse Nazi antisemitism precisely correctly. No, we mustn’t fall into the trap of seeing it as something that was always a “racial” hatred. Instead, it was anti-Bolshevik, because Hitler and the Nazi powers viewed communism in the USSR as being brought about and maintained by Jews. Hellbeck claims that the desire to obliterate their prime enemy of Jewish Bolshevism is what started the war on the Jews, that Nazi antisemitism hadn’t been exterminationist before the attack on the USSR, and that the destruction of Jews outside the USSR was really a secondary development. I am not a professional historian, but I have read hundreds of books about the Nazi era and the Holocaust, and I have never felt that historians give short shrift to the Nazis’ view of Bolshevism as a movement dominated by Jews, and one that was an existential threat. I have never read historians characterize the Holocaust as being entirely motivated by so-called “racial” hatred. This whole argument of Hellbeck’s seems to be little more than quibbling over whether his fellow historians have characterized Nazi motivations precisely as he wishes. Very small beer, it seems to me, considering the enormity of the war.

I have no problem with Hellbeck’s reminding readers of Hitler’s obsession with the USSR and his belief that the Bolshevik system was dominated by Jews; no problem with reminding readers that the Nazis killed tens of millions of Soviet citizens and planned to kill many more millions; no problem with his argument that it was the war in the east more than the second Allied front after the Normandy landings that was the principal cause of Germany’s defeat. These are worthy topics for a history and his presentation is well-substantiated. I wish he hadn’t felt the need to showcase what I think is an arguable and ultimately minor fine distinction between motivations for the Nazis’ genocide of Jews.

[Starstabbedmoon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely gripping book and a noble attempt to reverse the complete erasure from history that is the Communist role in the fight against the Nazis. Judging from other reviews, this attempt is only partially successful, and a work in progress.

The book does very little to make its own conclusions for the reader. It is largely documentation of a vast array of primary sources, presenting the perspectives of countless people who lived through Nazi atrocities, those who fought them, and the clear intent of the perpetrators. These accounts can be graphic and difficult to stomach at times, but they do not present an agenda or message beyond those intended by the original sources (whether they be Soviets, Jews, Nazis, or etc.).

Other negative reviews make it sound as though the author is trying to present a Soviet perspective at the expense of Jews. Far from it, the evidence presented suggest that the struggles of Soviet nationals, Jewish people, Poles, Slavs, and others are all one in the same, in direct contrast to the efforts of modern mainstream history that attempts to divide these groups, if not erase them entirely. If the documented evidence provides an inconvenient truth or "illiberal thinking", that is not the fault of the author, but of the history that has undeniably occurred.

Early in the book, the author makes clear through documentation that Hitler's prejudice against Jewish people predates his tirades against communism, and late in the book presents evidence that is extremely critical of efforts by both the west and east to minimize the role race played in Nazi atrocities (the Soviets are not let off easy here either). Those who would condemn this book as contrarian, suggesting that leaving out context would erase entire swathes of history, would do well to re-examine the cookie-cutter history textbooks on their own shelves.

[Book Club of One · Rating 4 out of 5]

A deep exploration of World War II focused on the Eastern front between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany and the Pale of Jewish Settlement caught in between. Scholar Jochen Hellbeck draws from extensive research, including oral histories from the front lines from survivors and soldiers. From pre war tensions through the Nuremberg trials.

Hellbeck’s narrative begins with Hitler’s establishment of power in 1933 and the swift centralizing of power and arrest or politically motivated killings of Communists and other Nazi un-desireables. Through 10 chapters, the book moves between periods of time or specific aspects of the war. Much of the focus is on what happened to the civilians, particularly those of European Jewry. They had the misfortune to be both identified as enemies of the Nazi’s by being conflated with Communism and being seen as not always loyal to the Soviet state. Hellbeck delineates the Nazi strategy of first expulsion before the switch to focused extermination. The Nazi strategy also sought to destroy the Russian people to create land and space for a new German empire.

The latter is a particularly important focus due to it being truly a different war then that experienced by Allied forces on Western front. The Nazi’s ignored or outright refused to follow the more traditional respectful treatment of prisoners of war, frequently executing or simply corralling POWs behind barbed wire and leaving them to starve. For Russians it became the Great Patriotic War that shifted to a brutal way of revenge once German territory of war was reached.

An expansive history of a dark time in humanity.

Recommended to readers of World War II, the Holocaust and the conflict between Facisim and Communism.

I received a free digital version of this book via NetGalley thanks to the publisher.

[Philip Kuhn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could give it 3.75 stars. It's good but not spectacular. The first part of the book is very good. The author discussed Nazi philosophy and propaganda. Of course he placed special emphasis on Nazi theories of Jewish Bolshevism. Most people don't know how much the Nazis linked the two together.
The rest of the book devolved into a general discussion of WWII and the Holocaust. Nothing new here. Hellbeck does wrap the book up with a discussion of the Nuremberg Trials. He gets points for that because most books skip over that.
Overall not bad.
Phillip Kuhn

[Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hellbeck argues that the western focus on Nazi antisemitism has led to a neglect of the Nazi obsession with the dangers of Communism, subsumed in the neologism "Judeo-Bolshevism." The work abounds with wrenching examples of Nazi hatred of and cruelty towards Communists, especially the despised commissars, leading to unspeaking suffering.

[Ilya · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hellbeck’s book should attract anyone with an interest in World War II and the Holocaust. In bringing to the foreground the Soviet experience of the “Great Patriotic War,” Hellbeck provides a perpsective that, if not altogether unique or original, remains a rare one. The losses, the suffering, and the sacrifice of the Soviet Union and its people still baffle imagination, and yet they are often absent from the Western historiography—a likely victim of the spurious and commonplace equivalence of Hitler’s and Stalin’s regimes. Hellbeck seeks to remedy this injustice: his book includes a chorus of Soviet voices, of different walks life, some Jewish, and some not, who recount the horrors they witnessed or endured in unflinching and unsparing detail.

Where Hellbeck falters, however, is in what appears to be his principal thesis—that Hitler’s and Nazis’ hate for the Bolsheviks was the cause of their hatred of the Jews; in other words, their murderous obsession with the Jews was a consequences of their hatred of the Bolsheviks, whom they saw as their true existential threat. For Hellbeck, this explains why the Holocaust really began in earnest only with the Barbarossa and why non-Jewish Soviet POWs were treated so much worse—subjected to mass murder and starvation—than the POWs from the Western front. It is very important to note here that none of this is offered in exculpation of the Nazis’ crimes, nor to downplay the Holocaust in the slightest. Unfortunately, this argument fails to persuade: one question that kept recurring in my mind was whether the Nazi’s obsession with the Bolshevism was not, in fact, window dressing for what was, in the end, pure racial hatred. On the whole, then, Hellbeck’s book leaves a mixed impression: gratitude for shining the light on the sources and perspectives that, all too often, are shunted aside; disappointment for making too ambitious an argument that he cannot quite support.

— with gratitude to Penguin Press for an ARC via NetGalley

[heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Total War by Jochen Hellbeck is a commanding and deeply researched account that examines the human experience of warfare in all its complexity. With a historian’s precision and a storyteller’s sensitivity, Hellbeck explores how ideology, endurance, and personal conviction intertwine in times of conflict. His narrative moves seamlessly between large-scale historical forces and the intimate realities of those who lived through them. The result is a compelling and thought-provoking work that both informs and challenges readers to reflect on the meaning of total war in modern history.