The call for ‘historical truth’ in our narrative of Nazi defeat

Written by Max Larkin | Harvard Staff Writer | Harvard Gazette

On this side of the Atlantic, World War II may appear in the popular imagination as a contest between liberal democracies and totalitarian empires.

This narrative tends to be shaped by the Cold War animosity between Washington and Moscow To ignore the unimaginable sacrifices of the Soviet Union and its people, of whom nearly one in seven died in the conflict.

So, although it covered familiar names and dates, Jochen Hellbeck’s speech on campus last Thursday carried an unusual charge.

HellbeckA German-born historian who now teaches at Rutgers University, he has spent his career using archives to shift the focus of the European war east of Normandy — specifically, the conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

By the numbers, this shouldn’t be controversial. When they invaded the USSR in the summer of 1941, Germany and its European Axis allies opened the theater of the bloodiest war in human history.

All told, the Soviets lost about 26 million dead—more than half of them civilians—to starvation, sieges, and years of atrocities. Three out of four of the Third Reich’s own 5.3 million military casualties came in the East. And at defeat Stalingrad February 1943 marked a turning point in German war strategy.

Hellbeck’s latest book, “World Enemy No. 1” goes further, arguing for the central role of anti-Soviet sentiment in what he calls the “Nazi design for genocide”.

To be clear, Hellbeck does not dispute the Nazis’ virulent anti-Semitism. But he notes that from Hitler’s earliest days as a political figure, that hostility was often mixed with a violent hatred of the Soviets, most succinctly captured in the party’s stock phrase: “Judeo-Bolshevism.”

“World Enemy No. 1” has proven controversial, Helbeck admits — mostly in his homeland.

When the first edition of the book was published in German, the reception was frosty. Hellbeck was told that “the established history of the Holocaust, as Germans understand it, should not be overturned.”

He is of two minds about this response. As a historian, “there’s always excitement to see that you’ve touched a nerve,” he said. “But not having the opportunity to discuss that in that room is disappointing.”

In any case, his revisions aim not to overturn a narrative, he said, but to widen the frame around the hellish final years of that war.

“Traditionally, we’ve understood the Holocaust as stemming entirely from the venom of anti-Semitism — and of course, that was a very central element,” Helbeck told his audience at the Center for Middle East Studies.

“I am simply adding a political dimension to it—that is, the Nazis’ anti-communism—and arguing that the extermination campaign came in conflict with a communist enemy coded as Jews.”

Hellbeck came to Harvard to deliver the 11th Annual Lecture in Commemoration Hilda B. Silverman (Radcliffe ’60), a longtime peace activist and university alumnus, who died in 2008.

The lectures touch on topics close to Silverman’s heart, including the Holocaust and how it still shapes our politics and culture.

Sara Roy, CMES affiliate and lecture committee chair, said Hellbeck clearly fits the mold. By giving voice to the people who lived under Stalin and helped defeat Hitler, he “contributes enormously to a more capable and humane understanding,” even of geopolitical adversaries.

Hellbeck spent much of his speech resurrecting the Nazi regime’s enduring obsession with defeating Communism.

As early as 1921, Hitler, still a regional figure, accused that “400 Soviet commissars of Jewish nationality” lived well while millions of citizens suffered in poverty.

After the Nazis took power 12 years later, German citizens were treated to a battery of anti-Soviet propaganda and touring shows, including the 1936 exhibition that gave Hellbeck’s book its title.

With lurid posters and slogans, “they taught the Germans that Bolshevism was evil and animalistic … that it was the work of the Jews who were most horrible and horrible in their Soviet Communist incarnation,” Hellbeck told his audience. “And these shows attracted millions of German viewers, including young boys who would later fight as soldiers on the Eastern Front.”

It was on that front that the mass extermination of the Nazis began in earnest. Mass shootings carried out by the so-called Einsatzgruppen in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, before the “extermination by shootings” in the death camps.

The goals of that campaign were described as “politically and racially unacceptable elements” in a context. This would leave millions of Jews, but also Communist Party officials and Soviet intellectuals, dead in mass graves across Eastern Europe.

Pictures and stories — some real, some exaggerated — of Soviet brutality circulated in the Nazi press. And Hellbeck argues that the acts of resistance by European communists during the Nazi occupation allowed the German regime to gain consent for its genocide: redefining Jews not simply as ethnic “others” but as “Stalin’s accomplices”—the enemy within.

While it may not be surprising that anti-Nazi Bolshevism was downplayed as Western countries began their own long anti-Soviet struggles, Hellbeck noted that his work is a historical “lacuna” that persists to the present day.

“In 2019, the European Union Pass a resolution … basically to accuse Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union of being equal totalitarian powers,” he said.

He argued that the measure dishonored the memory of millions of Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians who, during the Nazi occupation, saw even the brutal Stalinist regime as the lesser of two evils.

It even made this provocative book worth writing, says Helbeck.

He concluded his speech with “a plea for an honest reckoning with the past”. His argument “may run against the desire of Western leaders to portray their country as a leading victor … (or) appear to play into the hands of the Russian president, who has invoked Soviet contributions to victory over Nazism as justification for his current war against Ukraine.”

“That the Soviet Union played a central role in the Nazis’ deadly plans is an inconvenient fact of today’s world,” Hellbeck said. “But historical truth is not negotiable, and historians must not succumb to the political pressures of the present. Only then can the writing of history become the basis for meaningful discussion and dialogue in the world of tomorrow.”

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This is the story is reprinted with permission From the Harvard Gazette.

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