“It has not been formulated this way before” - Jochen Hellbeck
When Americans commemorate World War II, the observances typically recall the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 and the D-Day landing at Normandy in 1944.
Jochen HelbeckRutgers professor Jochen Hellbeck’s new book on the war shifts the focus away from those settings for a thorough re-examination of the genocidal violence unleashed by the Nazis in the East.
Hellbeck centers the story on Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union.
With his emphasis on the Eastern Front, and his ability to mine a rich array of sources, Hellbeck seeks to move beyond conventional WWII narratives and provide a new way of understanding the forces that drove Nazi mass murder.
“It has not been formulated this way before,” says Hellbeck, a Distinguished Professor of History in the School of Arts and Sciences.
The book—World Enemy No 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the Fate of the Jews— starts off by documenting how the Nazi movement fueled Germans’ fear and hatred of Soviet Russia through the ‘20s and '30s, portraying it as a Jewish-led existential threat to the West. In Hellbeck’s telling, it was this political hatred that ignited Operation Barbarossa—the Nazi’s rampage into Soviet territory—and led directly to the Holocaust, which later engulfed all of Europe.
“I'm arguing that Germany's crusade against the Soviet Union was a fundamental break in the history of the war,” he said. “The violence that then first engulfed Soviet communists and Jews came then to actually haunt Jews in the rest of Europe.”
In the interview below, Hellbeck, a scholar of Russian history, and also the author of Stalingrad: The City that Defeated the Third Reich, discusses how the book, which was a finalist in the history category of the National Jewish Book Awards, breaks new ground in understanding World War II.
Q: You write that to fully understand World War II, we need to “set its axis firmly in the East.” What does that mean and how does it differ from the way Americans were traditionally taught about the war?
A: One thing that comes to mind is the popular view of the Second World War —Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day—that very much associate the war with the landing in Normandy in 1944 and puts the Western Allied efforts front and center.
This is not to say that scholarship hasn’t long pivoted to the Eastern Front. There is a huge amount of literature about the Eastern Front, and it is recognized as the bloody epicenter of the war.
But what I’m trying to say is different. From the very inception, already in the Nazi imaginary, the East was the place where the bloodiest reckoning would take place. In my book, I am entangling the history of the Holocaust and the history of German anti-communism in new ways to argue that the worst mass crimes of Nazism, that we associate with Auschwitz and other extermination camps, had everything to do with anti-communism and with the fate that the Nazis and many Germans wanted to deal to Soviet style communists, or Bolsheviks, whom they imagined as Jewish.
Q: Why is it important to understand that perspective?
A: First of all, it is a matter of good history. We have to be very careful about chronology and interlinkages. That is what my book is trying to do, to show how the mass violence first started on Soviet occupied ground. It was totalizing from the beginning, and it sought to annihilate a state and a society.
This started in the East and then it came back to Germany, France, the Netherlands, and all the other areas the Nazis had conquered before. That chronology is very important. I call it the bolshevization of Europe’s Jews. In the wake of Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union, Jews across Europe were imagined in a new way. They were no longer seen only as racial aliens, which they always were in the Nazi imaginary, but in addition to that as political enemies.
And so, this brings us back to why it is important to make that distinction. Because in my reading, it is this political venom, the political motive, the idea that the Soviets are Jews who are trying to seize the world, that is absolutely central. It lights up very early in Hitler’s thinking, and it remains a driver all the way to the end of Nazism.
And so, I think it is too easy think that because the Nazis hated Jews, they wanted to kill them. We really have look at the complicated history of how the desire to kill them all formed, and it had to do with politics.
Q: You wrote that much of what happened on the Eastern Front and behind its lines remains unknown and hidden. Is that still true today?
A: Absolutely. First, the most sensitive military archives are, for the most part, still off limits. But it has much more to do with how we read or don’t read (available) sources. Many Western scholars, when they look at Soviet wartime documentation, are quick to read it primarily as state propaganda. They emphasize its instrumental uses, how this is supposed to generate hatred, serve Stalin and serve his power. All of that is true.
But in most cases, scholars don’t take the evidence seriously as containing an experiential core, as actually mattering deeply to the people, and as being actually true.
Q: How did you address that in your book?
A: My main protagonist on the Soviet side is the Soviet, Russian, and Jewish writer and war reporter Ilya Ehrenburg, who wrote about the German onslaught and the German Soviet war every single day during the war and published more than a thousand editorials, columns, and indictments. What I think no scholars really had seen before I wrote this book is that this is not just propaganda, but also documentation, in that his style was a documentary style.
Virtually every piece he published contains documents. And in specific cases where evidence was at hand, (I found that) these documents did exist. He didn’t make them up. I take this documentation seriously and use it to build a tableau that is absolutely shocking in its accusations, and also in its truth.
Ehrenburg cites from diaries of German policemen who are sentimental, sadistic, and methodical. And very German. Ehrenburg had lived in France for a long time, and he viewed Germans through a French lens, as pedantic and uninteresting. I take all of that seriously and bring into the book.
That, I think, is a new perspective.
Q: One of the first scenes in the book is from Kiev, and the runup to the Babi Yar Massacre, where 33,000 Jews were massacred in a ravine. How does that event exemplify your overall theme?
A: The Germans basically took Kiev without a fight. The Red Army had pulled back. The Germans established quarters and then within a few days, the hotels and the office buildings went up in flames. Soviet intelligence services had mined these places. Around 200 Germans died.
The Germans reflexively blamed Jews and took it out on them. There was a political idea at work that Bolsheviks and Jews are the same and therefore we have to kill them all, including women who are the bearers of future partisans and the children themselves who are future enemies.
You can find that in documents from the ground up. It has often not been taken seriously. Holocaust scholars will often say the Nazis make up the association with Bolshevism to justify the killings and to cover up their own sense of guilt or shame. I am asking us to read the source record.
Q: In the introduction, you write about your father, a West German diplomat. He had been drafted into the German army at the age of 17 and fought at the Eastern Front. Yet he also developed a curiosity about and an openness to Russia and the Soviet Union. How did that influence you in your calling as a scholar of Russian history?
A: I was just really struck and very much shaped by his curiosity. This was his virtue as a diplomat: to basically open your visor to see how they think on the other side. Don't project your own intellectual views onto the other. Hear them out and think about the world as potentially with several or multiple truths. That methodology was all-important even though he didn’t flag it as methodology. It made me into who I am.
Jochen Hellbeck will discuss his book, "World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews" at 7:30 p.m. March 23 at Trayes Hall in an event sponsored by the Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life.
Babi Yar memorial site in Kiev