Hitler's cruelest war

Vladimir Putin repeatedly invokes the Soviet Union's "Great Patriotic War" against Nazi Germany as a patriotic model. It serves as a justification for the imperial war he is waging. In his book "A War Like No Other," Jochen Hellbeck addresses the commemoration of the war against Hitler's Germany and its instrumentalization. He aims to set it straight on one crucial point.

He criticizes the failure to acknowledge the decisive role the Soviet Union played in the victory over National Socialism. However, he fails to mention what share in this victory today's Ukraine, as part of the former Soviet Union, can claim for itself. He also fails to mention how Putin's attempt to suppress Ukraine's national independence is connected to this.

The German Eastern European historian calls for a revision of the historical narrative. In his view, historians have focused too heavily on the prehistory of antisemitism in Germany when explaining the National Socialists' drive for annihilation. The focus on the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party and the gradual radicalization of their rule, culminating in the mass murder of the Jews, obscures the central importance of Soviet Jews in the National Socialists' imagination.

Hellbeck aims to "counteract the prevailing amnesia and deliberate repression and restore the USSR to its rightful place in the historiography of the Second World War and in the fight against National Socialism." In his portrayal, it is not anti-Semitism, but rather the "crusade against 'Jewish Bolshevism'" that becomes the driving force of the National Socialist war of annihilation.

This calls into question the fundamental thesis, previously accepted in Holocaust research, that the National Socialists directed their hatred against the Jews from the very beginning. From this line of reasoning, it is not far to the conclusion that "the close connection that the Germans had established between the Jews, Russia, and Asia [. . .] was fused to the point of indistinguishability after the attack on the Soviet Union."

Hellbeck's analysis impresses with his masterful command of the sources. One of his greatest strengths is that he uncovered a multitude of previously unknown sources in Russian archives, at a time when this was still possible. He also possesses the gift of integrating these testimonies into a compelling analysis with a compelling narrative. The book is a pleasure to read for the most part. However, the author fails to fulfill his claim to revise the historical narrative.

Our knowledge of the extent of the crimes, which the Russian writer and war correspondent Ilya Ehrenburg also reported, has expanded considerably in recent years. Ehrenburg's assertion that the fascists carried in their baggage "the cult of violence, brutality, horror, and death" has been vindicated in a disturbing way.

While advancing through the devastated regions of Belarus and eastern Poland, Soviet troops encountered an extermination camp for the first time in July 1944. At Majdanek, they found thousands of completely exhausted prisoners. The camp's attics were filled with handbags and children's toys, with detailed order lists for children's clothing for the bombed-out population in Germany. The ashes of the dead were used to fertilize the fields.

Is Hellbeck correct in his view that the motive was the fight against communism? Hitler's decision to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941 was driven by several motives, all of which are documented: the acquisition of new settlement space for Germany, the "subjugation of the Slavic masses," the "industrial-agrarian safeguarding of a greater continental European region." The main motive, however, was, as Hitler put it, the "extermination of the Jewish-Bolshevik leadership."

The extermination of Jews by special SS units began immediately after June 22, 1941. Racial fanaticism was a crucial component of Hitler's foreign policy program. In "Mein Kampf," published in 1925, Hitler had already named the "removal of the Jews" as a political goal. And as early as 1919, he had hinted at future pogroms against Jews in a letter.

Hellbeck unduly shortens Hitler's path to anti-Bolshevism by allowing the history of anti-Semitism before 1933 to converge on the single political enemy, communism. Even before the war began, Hitler had also addressed the connection between the war and the extermination of the Jews, for example, in his Reichstag speech of January 30, 1939.

Hellbeck does not address the temporary alliance between Nazi Germany and the communist Soviet Union, concluded through the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939, in the fundamental significance it had for both Stalin and Hitler. It was the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the interpretation of British appeasement as an attempt to compensate Hitler at the expense of the East that motivated Stalin's foreign policy concessions.

The secret Additional Protocol to the Pact and the agreements reached between Foreign Ministers Molotov and Ribbentrop in November 1940, at the expense of the independence of the Baltic states, Poland, and Southeastern Europe, are essential to the prehistory of the war in the East. Hitler's Blitzkrieg strategy was ultimately a system of substitutions, as he would have preferred to avoid armed conflict against his preferred partner, Britain.

Hellbeck rightly quotes Hitler's "most remarkable statement" to the Danzig League of Nations High Commissioner Carl Jacob Burckhardt in August 1939: "Everything I undertake is directed against Russia," Hitler is said to have said at the time, and further: "If the West is too stupid and too blind to understand this, I will be forced to come to an understanding with the Russians, defeat the West, and then, after its defeat, turn my combined forces against the Soviet Union."

However, Hellbeck fails to place the decision to attack the Soviet Union, made in the summer of 1940, in the context of Hitler's war strategy, and Stalin's strategic calculations are also underexposed. With his fixation on "living space in the East," the Eastern War was a clear objective of Hitler from an early stage. For this reason, he rejected his Italian ally Mussolini's proposal for a Brest-Litovsk Peace in December 1942, and he left Stalin's overtures for a separate peace agreement unanswered.

However, the war between Germany and the Soviet Union cannot be completely separated from the other theaters of war. This applies both to the role of the allies of Hitler's coalition in the Eastern campaign and to the struggle within the anti-Hitler coalition for the second front to relieve the pressure on the Red Army. There, the mutual distrust of the unequal allies was so pronounced that Stalin did not even attend the Allied war conference between Roosevelt and Churchill in Casablanca in January 1943.

The instrumentalization of the "Great Patriotic War" as the founding legend of the modern Soviet state has shrouded Hitler's war against the Soviet Union in a cloud. Hellbeck's impressive research expands our knowledge of this pivotal event of the 20th century in significant ways and facilitates a better understanding of the war's historical significance. Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and Putin's attempt to erase the Ukrainian nation along with historical thinking demonstrate the importance of this task.

Jochen Hellbeck: A War Like No Other: The German War of Annihilation Against the Soviet Union. A Revision. S.-Fischer-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2025. 688 pp., CHF 45.90.