World Enemy No. 1

[An] arresting and deeply researched new bookThe New Yorker

Essential reading . . . Hellbeck masterfully explains what made World War II on the Eastern front so destructive and why this matters today. A tour de force Paul Hanebrink, author of A Specter Haunting Europe

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.