Roots of the Holocaust: Fascist barbarism and vicious 1920s anti-Bolshevik propaganda - book review

The Nazis’ rabid and murderous antisemitism is, of course, well documented.

Twelve years later, after identifying the progenitor of Bolshevism as “Karl Mordechai, alias Marx, the son of a rabbi in Treves,” Joseph Goebbels, the Reich's propaganda minister, explained that “only in the brain of a nomad who is without nation, race, and country could this satanism have been hatched.”

In 1937, an exhibition in Munich and other major cities featured “The Unleashing of Bolshevism by the Jews.”

In 1941, he argues, the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries became laboratories “for the German politics of mass murder” of Jews, and, in turn, generated a moral and ideological narrative of “fascist barbarism” that was “instrumental in achieving Allied victory over Nazi Germany.”

Hellbeck acknowledges that following the non-aggression pact between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939, the terms “Bolshevism” and “fascism” disappeared from government-controlled publications in the two countries. But only temporarily. The agreement, Hitler indicated, allowed him to avoid a two-front war and then turn against the Soviet Union “with all my concentrated forces” when the West was defeated.

Plans for the surprise attack on the USSR in 1941 included justifications for committing what would constitute war crimes in other theaters. An information leaflet to German troops proclaimed, “It would be an insult to animals to call the traits of these slave drivers [Bolshevik political officers], a high percentage of whom are Jewish, animal-like.”

No single top-down order, Hellbeck indicates, “explains how the Shoah [Holocaust] came to be.” It emerged, he suggests, out of vicious anti-Bolshevik propaganda dating from the 1920s; reports of Soviet Jews as perpetrators of terror; and the failure of the German offensive.

By the summer and fall of 1941, Nazi leaders identified Jews everywhere as demonic, “the logic shifted to genocide,” and German Jews were sent to concentration camps in the East that, Goebbels noted, had been “created by the Bolsheviks.”

Meanwhile, Heinrich Himmler told SS leaders that the war had become a racial conflict, pitting the German-led citadel of culture not only against Jews but against Slavic and Asiatic Russians as well. All of them had to be eliminated to make room for German colonists to settle in the broad expanses of Eastern Europe.

While the extermination of Western European Jews had to be hidden lest public opinion be aroused, the destruction of the latter two groups, who were “not fully human,” did not have to remain a secret.

Following the Soviet victory at Stalingrad, Hellbeck reminds us, the Nazis stepped up the murder of Jews, and then frantically tried to cover up their crimes when the Soviet Army began to liberate Eastern European countries.

Russian soldiers, he acknowledges, committed atrocious acts of violence against their enemies. But, with some notable exceptions, such as the mass murders at Katyn, their crimes were not authorized nor led by their government.

During the final deliberations of the Nuremberg trials, we learn, Soviet delegates changed a British-produced draft description of Auschwitz and Treblinka as “slave labor camps” to sites of “mass extermination,” placing more emphasis on Nazi racist theories as essential to their “overall policy,” and insisted that this hatred was systemic rather than the product of “Hitler’s confused brain.”

The delegates were not successful, however, in persuading their American, British, and French counterparts to indict the German government, the Sturmabteilung (SA) storm troopers, and the Armed Forces High Command as criminal organizations. Post-war German courts, it’s worth noting, rarely meted out sentences commensurate with the crimes committed by Nazi officials.

Back home, the Soviets’ treatment of Jews was less praiseworthy. To be sure, anyone referring to Jews as “Zhids” [“Yids”] rather than “Hebrews” was subject to a mandatory prison sentence. The Soviet emphasis on multi-ethnic unity, however, militated against singling out Jews - who died in much greater numbers than other civilians during the war - as the principal targets of the Nazis.

Stalin supported the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine but denounced as a subversive Zionist anyone who self-identified as a Jew.

In 1948, amid a new wave of antisemitism, the secret police destroyed all manuscript copies and printing plates of a “black book,” assembled by acclaimed writer Ilya Ehrenburg, documenting the suffering and resistance of Jews in the USSR. In the ensuing decades, refuseniks were those prohibited from immigrating to Israel.

Penguin Press

560 pages; $35