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

Jochen Hellbeck's first major foray into the Second World War was his book on Stalingrad. "World Enemy No. 1" marks a more definitive entrenchment into WWII with a specific focus on the Eastern Front. Hellbeck is a well-known historian who specializes in the Soviet Union but has the added benefit of knowing German and Russian, giving him an advantage that most experts lack. Additionally, he is a talented writer and researcher who with extreme diligence has taken the time to comb through a significant amount of primary and secondary source material to bring together a new, rather timely synthesis of the war on the Eastern Front.

Hellbeck's major argument is that the first and foremost threat to Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich was communism in all of its forms. The first victims of the Nazi regime, after Hitler took power, were communist party members, whether they were continually targeted in the streets by SA thugs or suffered in the first concentration camp, Dachau. While Jews were caught in the mix, as many were members of the Communist Party in Germany, they were not yet the main focus. Simultaneously, during the interwar period, the Western Allies viewed the Soviet Union as the larger threat when compared to Nazi Germany and such views sabotaged the various attempts at security guarantees that Stalin sought after Hitler came to power. The continued emphasis on Judeo-Bolshevism intermixed the threat from the East and while Jews were a regular and ever-increasing target of Hitler's venomous threats in his numerous speeches, their association with Communism was consistent.

Thus the war on the Eastern Front assumed a deadly toll that no other German campaign ever came close to, as tens of millions died on the Eastern Front (both civilian and military). Soviet POWs were routinely singled out for extreme treatment, outright executions, starvation, medical and gas experimentation, etc. When the tide of the war began to turn, forgetting why the war started in the first place, the Germans routinely propagated the idea that they were the last defense against the Asiatic hordes from the east, bringing death and destruction in their wake under the banner of Judeo-Bolshevism.

Even in the postwar period, during the Nuremberg Trials, there was a consistently cautious and at times hostile attitude toward the Soviet delegation and soon enough another Red Scare gripped the United States as the Cold War was ushered in throughout Europe and the world. Even after the end of the Cold War, memory wars about what happened on the Eastern Front and why continue throughout Eastern and Central Europe. Today, in part, the result is another tragic war. The war and its history are still a fresh wound in the minds of many and the rise of new, right-wing populist regimes who are keen to twist history for their needs means we will continue to have to struggle with these types of memory wars.