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Review of
WORLD ENEMY NO. 1
NAZI GERMANY, SOVIET RUSSIA, AND THE FATE
OF THE JEWS
By Jochen Hellbeck, Penguin Press, 560 pages; $22
Nazis called the Soviet Union “the most powerful Jewish organization in the world.” Hitler viewed the Jews as the guiding force behind Bolshevism, and the preponderance of Jews in its upper echelons – Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, and many others – were deemed proof of this. Even before the outbreak of World War II, the German newspaper Der Stürmer stated that all Jews in Russia must be killed to secure the elimination of Communism.
Judeo-Bolshevism was world enemy No. 1, as the title of this highly informative book by German academic Jochen Hellbeck proclaims.
The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939 between these two totalitarian states allowed the Nazis to invade Poland from the west but also permitted the Red Army to come in from the east. Stalin subsequently ordered the mass killing of the Polish elite in the forest of Katyn in the spring of 1940 – and ensured that the Nazis were blamed instead. Hitler knew what happened and termed the massacre at Katyn “a Jewish crime.” Ironically, the chief rabbi of the Polish army, Baruch Steinberg, and several hundred Jewish officers were murdered by Stalin’s executioners.
Stalin’s appeasement of Hitler was designed to allow the USSR to build up its forces for the inevitable clash that would take place between them. Stalin also hoped that the war between Germany and the democracies of Britain and France would end in an exhausted stalemate. This would allow Stalin’s forces to glide into Western Europe and proclaim one Soviet republic after another.
When Hitler invaded the USSR in 1941, Stalin was taken by surprise. He had expected Hitler to strike but not so quickly. In mid-December 1941, Hitler announced in a secret speech to top Nazi officials that “all Soviet Jews” were to be killed by the advancing Germans – and not just Communist Jews. By the war’s end, Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the USSR, had cost 27 million lives, which included 15 million civilians and 2.6 million Jews.
Stalin’s actions against the Nazis were never guided by liberating Hitler’s victims. After all, in 1944 he ordered the Red Army to halt its advance on the banks of the Vistula River overlooking Warsaw. He wanted to give the Nazis time to regroup and crush the Polish resistance. He would then be free to import loyal Communists to govern the country. The killing of more than 15,000 resistance fighters meant that Polish Communists had no rival for power at the end of the war.
Memory, propaganda, and the soviet legacy
The author’s intention in World Enemy No. 1 is to reclaim the part played by the Soviet forces in defeating Hitler. The Cold War, to some extent, played down the Soviet contribution. For Jews, Stalin’s antisemitic paranoia, however, colored everything. The Doctors’ Plot of 1953 was supposed to set the scene for a wholesale deportation of Soviet Jews to the deserts of the USSR – so rumor in Moscow had it at the time.
The Cold War between East and West also brought with it the appeasement of fascist Spain and the rehabilitation of Hitler’s friend Francisco Franco. It brought about the early release of many Nazi war criminals and their transformation into Western warriors fighting the virus of Communism. When the last Nazi war criminals were allowed to return to West Germany from the USSR in 1955, they were not imprisoned but instead were greeted as “martyrs’” by public acclaim.
Hellbeck utilizes the writings of Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg as a yardstick to illustrate the complexity and cynicism of the times. Although assimilated, Ehrenburg saw events through Jewish eyes. As he famously proclaimed after Hitler had invaded: “My mother’s name was Hannah. I am a Jew. I say this proudly.”
As the Izvestia newspaper correspondent in Paris, Ehrenburg had diplomatic immunity and bore witness to the fall of France in 1940. Returning to the USSR, he passed through Berlin and stayed at a hotel that paraded the sign “No Jews Allowed!” He was told not to mention this when he was back in Moscow.
The Red Army courageously pushed back the Nazis amid terrible episodes in World War II, such as the siege of Leningrad and the starvation of its citizens. Indeed, in 1945 many Zionists in the Yishuv lauded the advance of the Red Army and its crushing of Nazism. Stalin’s writings were translated into Hebrew, published in Tel Aviv, and bound in red leather.
The Red Army also pillaged and raped on its way to Berlin. German civilians fled toward the Americans and the British in fear of what drunken Russians might do to them.
Hitler’s drip-drip propaganda about Judeo-Bolshevism throughout the 1930s had turned Germans into brainwashed automatons. Three million Germans enthusiastically attended The Soviet Paradise exhibition. This mindset underpinned the Nazi defense of Germany by underage children and elderly pensioners in 1945. Some 80,000 Red Army soldiers lost their lives in the storming of Berlin; such was the fanaticism of its Nazi defenders.
Hellbeck records that Ehrenburg subsequently alluded to “the low culture” of the Soviet soldiers in a speech to the Frunze Military Academy. This clashed with the pristine imagery of a disciplined Soviet fighting force. Ehrenburg’s critics queued up to denounce him. The Kremlin’s chief propagandist, Georgy Aleksandrov, rebutted Ehrenburg’s views in Pravda. The explanation from Moscow was that the Nazis had much more blood on their hands in the east than in the west.
Hellbeck also notes that when the Red Army returned to the conquered parts of the USSR, antisemitism was still present. The rumor was that foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov’s Jewish wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, had left for the United States with the Soviet gold reserves.
The author also highlights a less publicized aspect of the invasion of the USSR. Joseph Goebbels had noted in his diary that the 70,000 Jews of Berlin in September 1941 could be deported to the Soviet camps of the Gulag Archipelago. Reinhard Heydrich, one of the main architects of the ‘“Final Solution,” suggested the establishment of a network of concentration camps in the Arctic region of the USSR under the command of the SS. This would be the final destination for Europe’s Jews.
Today, Putin’s Russia has rebranded the response of the Red Army to the Nazi invasion as “the Great Patriotic War.” The difficult episode of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact is ignored. Hundreds of Jewish Communists who had escaped to the USSR were handed over by the Soviets to the Nazis at the border crossing of Brest-Litovsk. Several of the women were incarcerated in Ravensbrück. This, too, was passed over in silence by Putin’s fellow travelers.
The pact allowed the Nazis to move 75 divisions to attack the West, occupy several European countries, and eliminate their Jewish communities. The Soviet press enthusiastically praised the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain in 1940. The Kremlin supplied grain, fuel, and raw materials to the Nazis. In 2014, Putin’s Russia made it a criminal offense to claim Soviet responsibility for the outbreak of World War II.
This work by Jochen Hellbeck deserves to be read widely and by young people in particular. The author indicates the complexity surrounding both the Nazi-Soviet collaboration and the subsequent conflict – and that many prefer to avoid such complexity and see things easily in black and white without nuance.
It is also a history lesson for those who wield power internationally and practice realpolitik in 2026.
Jerusalem Post 6 February 2026