CONTENTS
Note on Historical Place Names xxiii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1. A FRONT AGAINST BOLSHEVISM 21
Chapter 2. SWASTIKA AND SOVIET STAR 61
Chapter 3. CROSSING THE RUBICON 104
Chapter 4. A VIOLENCE SHAKING EUROPE 144
Chapter 5. JEWS AND BOLSHEVIKS, STEP FORWARD! 177
Chapter 6. MOSCOW STRIKES BACK 211
Chapter 7. ENSLAVEMENT 253
Chapter 8. LIBERATION 292
Chapter 9. “HERE SHE IS, ACCURSED GERMANY!” 329
Chapter 10. ERASURE 381
Chapter 1
A Front Against
Bolshevism
Five months after Hitler's party rose to power, Theodore Abel, a thirty-six-year-old sociologist teaching at Columbia University, arrived in Germany. Together with his wife and three children, he disembarked from a transatlantic steamer in Bremen, intending to pass through Berlin to visit his parents in Poznan, as the family did every summer. But for Abel, the trip across Germany proved more absorbing than the destination. "Nazi propaganda everywhere-radio, buses cruising with speeches and music, big placards on corners, flags and uniforms everywhere," he noted in his diary on June 30, 1933, while in Berlin. Abel spoke fluent German and struck up conversations with people on the street, and in cafés and restaurants. A few confided to him with horror how the Nazis were abusing Jews and persecuting their political opposition. Most others spoke about the new regime very differently. Ardently patriotic, they credited the government with unifying and strengthening their crisis-ridden country. Hitler had restored their hope for a better future. Abel chronicled what he saw as a historic moment: Germans' enthusiastic rejection of "liberalism, democracy, tolerance, and international cooperation," and their regression to a primitive state of "national egotism and intolerance." By the time Abel returned to the United States in early September, he knew he had to write about Nazism.
He devised an ingenious way to gather the sources necessary for his study: He planned a writing contest. Anyone, regardless of sex or age, who had identified with the Nazi movement prior to January 1933 would be invited to participate. Cash prizes, which would go as high as 125 marks-about half a month's salary at the time-would be awarded to essays that provided "the most detailed and trustworthy accounts" of individuals' personal lives, particularly during the years following the Great War, which saw the founding and rise of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP). When Abel returned to Germany the following summer, he presented his project to officials in the Reich Propaganda Ministry as a large-scale sociological study, conducted by Columbia University to inform the American public about the history of National Socialism. Impressed, the officials sent bulletins to all local headquarters of the Nazi Party with instructions to announce the contest in the party press.
By fall 1934, 683 Nazis had submitted essays, offering Abel a unique view from within the movement. The group was composed mostly of men, along with several dozen women, and included respondents from a wide variety of different regions and occupations. The contestants displayed a wide array of styles and levels of sophistication as well, with some limiting themselves to a few paragraphs and others presenting their autobiography over many pages. But all authors merged their life stories with the Nazi movement. The moment they first saw Hitler, or joined his party, suffused them with renewed purpose to fight for the restoration of a great nation that had been diminished by foreign powers and internal strife.
Germany, according to most accounts, had been brought down by sinister enemy forces that had concealed their conspiratorial designs by posing as disinterested parties. Many authors began by blaming "the Jews" for bringing Germany to its knees: Jews had pushed Germany into the Great War in order to hijack its wartime economy, then orchestrated its defeat in 1918 in search of further profits. But Jews did not act out in in the open, some of the writers stressed. Globally dispersed and operating behind the scenes, they were the puppet masters who controlled millions of unwitting Germans. Their most effective weapon was the Marxist rhetoric of class struggle, which pitted Germans against Germans, sapping their national strength. Multiple writers-including one Grete Kircher, who had been born to wealthy parents and was converted to Nazism by her driving instructor-claimed that "international Marxism and the Jewish problem" had combined to destroy Germany. Of these two, the Marxist political parties posed the greatest threat, given their popular support and power to command uprisings and revolutions: "Our struggle was directed mainly against Marxism, which is supported by the Jews, since it was willing to defend its power to the utmost with brutal violence."
More pointedly, several writers identified their principal enemy as "extreme Marxism" or "Bolshevism"-the Communist faith that was preached in Moscow and had captivated countless German Communists. Nazi autobiographers who served in the paramilitary storm troopers (Sturmabteilung, or SA) described their bloody street fights against a "red subhumanity" that was determined to devastate Germany. One of them cast their effort to defend the fatherland against the "murderous red mob" as a matter of existential survival for its sixty million inhabitants. In the view of some, there was no sacrifice too extreme in the struggle against Bolshevism, which represented the antithesis of everything Germany stood for. "I shuddered at the thought of Germany in the grip of Bolshevism," one respondent wrote. "The slogan 'Workers of the world unite!' made no sense to me. But National Socialism, with its promise of a community of blood, barring all class struggle, attracted me profoundly." Hans Schönherr, a schoolteacher from Wiesbaden, prefaced his eight-page autobiography with a succinct summary. He wanted to explain to "the great American people (1) that the horror stories about my fatherland . . . are nothing but nasty lies, and (2) that Germany and Europe can be saved from Bolshevism only by National Socialism."
Much has been written about what turned Germans into Nazis. Among the contributing factors that historians have identified are militant nationalism, national humiliation, economic upheaval, Hitler's charisma, and anti-Semitism. Understood as distinct forces, these concepts reflect scholars' need for analytical clarity, but they often contribute to a misunderstanding of how ordinary Germans viewed themselves and their political project. One scholar who studied the Nazi autobiographies written at Abel's behest dismissed their descriptions of "Germany's mortal enemy" as "rantings" that "made little sense then and now." The anti-Bolshevism invoked by Hitler and his followers was certainly conceptually diffuse, often conflating Marxists, Communists, and Jews. But this very imprecision proved advantageous for the Nazis, as it gave them license to strike out hard and wide. Their task, as one street fighter put it, was to "wipe the wanton grin off the Bolshevist's murderous face" and "save Germany from the bloody terror of unrestrained hordes." Though fantastical and misguided, the Nazi conception of an entwined Jewish-Bolshevik enemy was an important catalyst for violent political action, and there is every reason to take it seriously.
Anti-Bolshevism had energized and shaped the Nazi Party ever since its founding in 1919. From then until January 1933, a fourteen-year stretch that came to be called the "period of struggle" (Kampfzeit), the Nazis consistently attacked the German Communist Party (KPD), which they saw as their most organized and potent political foe. In countless clashes with the KPD, Nazi street fighters discovered their movement's sense of purpose: It was the Nazi fist that would shatter Marxism's "poisonous" and "false" creed. Upon coming to power in 1933, the Nazis began a brutal reckoning with the KPD, arresting thousands of members, as well as outspoken members of the moderate Social Democratic Party (SPD), whom they also counted as Marxist "traitors." Outside Communist circles, few observers in Germany and other Western countries condemned the mistreatment of the Communist prisoners, who in 1933 constituted the vast majority of those confined in concentration camps. At the same time, the Nazis' attacks on Communists provided cover for their assault on Germany's democracy, allowing them to cast it not as a power grab but rather a last-ditch defense against Bolshevism.
Red Fear
Within months of the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, the name of Vladimir Lenin's party had become an international political buzzword. Bolshevism shook and divided the globe. Odes poured in to revolutionary Petrograd in late 1917, fervently welcoming the "party of the Bolsheviks as the sole party that is leading us, at long last, to full power for the people." Their authors were soldiers and workers, men and women, who described themselves as "worn out by bloody slaughter, starvation, and the cold of winter," while clamoring for the "total emancipation of all laborers" and "universal education for both sexes." In other accounts, Bolshevism was a source of corruption and wanton destruction. Conservative media such as London's Morning Post denounced Lenin's new government as a regime of "cranks" and "crooks," partaking in an "orgy of passion and unreason," while The New York Times referred to the Bolsheviks as "human scum." Betraying how much the Communist takeover of 1917 triggered memories of Jacobin terreur, American newspapers published fantastical reports of an electric guillotine in Petrograd that could decapitate five hundred prisoners per hour. In Moscow, the writer Ivan Bunin shuddered at the spectacle of lower-class citizens making themselves heard. "Again some kind of demonstration," he wrote in February 1919, describing "banners, posters, music-hundreds of throats shouting: 'Stand up, rise up working people.'" He continued: "The voices are visceral, primitive. The women have Chuvash, Mordvinian faces, the men all look like criminals, some could have come straight from Sakhalin." There was no single lens through which to view the Soviet Revolution. For many, it signified a people's will in action; for others, a brutal coup and the unleashing of a frenzied mob.
As Russia erupted into civil war, pitting revolutionary Reds against counterrevolutionary Whites, Western media reports invariably attributed the terrible violence engulfing the country to the Bolsheviks' alleged murderous designs, while largely ignoring acts of White terror. Many of these reports were penned by refugees whose property or land had been confiscated during the upheaval. Their experience resonated with politicians and businessmen in the West who feared Communist takeovers in their own countries. In Great Britain, Secretary of War Winston Churchill was filled with foreboding as war-weary troops formed soldier committees and strikes and mutinies cropped up in early 1919. Churchill was so concerned that, even after the Great War had come to a close, he pushed hard for the British military to continue its intervention in Russia to fight on behalf of the Whites. On his initiative, the British government published a report that assembled many of the already circulating accounts of the "horrors of Bolshevism."
In the United States, the Senate held hearings to investigate a recent wave of strikes as a Bolshevik attempt to incite the overthrow of the federal government. Dozens of witnesses spoke, among them Russian refugees, American missionaries, and the U.S. ambassador to Russia, who claimed that the Bolsheviks killed everyone "who wears a white collar or who is educated and who is not a Bolshevik." Others alleged that the Red Army used "Chinese" executioners, and that the Soviet government sought to "nationalize" women and turn them into the communal property of men. The committee concluded that Bolshevism had formed a conspiracy to control all left-wing political, industrial, and social organizations in the United States and to threaten America's system of government and free-enterprise economy.
The constant refrain of counterrevolutionary reports on Bolshevism spoke of innocent Russians enduring horrific violence at the hands of frenzied alien groups: German agents, Chinese hooligans, and especially Jews. The Bolshevik party counted many members of Jewish background, most prominently Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army, and Grigory Zinoviev, who headed the Communist International (Comintern), which was formed in early 1919 to promote revolution abroad. Anti-Semites in Russia and throughout the world referred to Trotsky and Zinoviev not by their revolutionary pseudonyms but by their birth names, Bronstein and Apfelbaum, in order to "unmask" the Bolshevik regime as a Jewish conspiracy. The allegation was untrue: While Jews joined the nascent Communist state in large numbers, what attracted them was not a supposed Jewish agenda but the experience of past stigmatization and violence under the tsars and the hopes for universal freedom and equality. Yet for many of their opponents, the fact that the Bolsheviks consistently called out acts of anti-Semitic violence only reinforced the idea that they were Jews protecting fellow Jews. Less than a year into Soviet rule, a Dutch diplomat, cabling from Petrograd, urged the immediate suppression of the Communist regime. If left unchecked, in his view, Bolshevism was bound to spread over the globe, "as it is organized and carried out by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things."
Hatred of Jews was the cornerstone of White propaganda during the civil war. For lack of positive aims of their own that could match the Red promises of bread, land, and liberation featured on Soviet proclamations and leaflets, counterrevolutionary propagandists settled on indicting Soviet leaders as Jewish mass murderers. A poster commissioned by White propagandists depicted a monstrous Trotsky straddling the Kremlin wall, observing with grim satisfaction the mountain of skulls rising below him, as a group of Chinese Red Army soldiers standing to the side execute yet another captive Russian peasant. Posted on the Kremlin wall is an order allegedly given by Trotsky: It commands Soviet commissars to commit "the most unjust" deeds, to increase the suffering of children and women, to make "villagers wail and cry." In the illustration, the murderous Trotsky, drenched in his victims' blood, is marked as both a Jew and a Communist: He wears the Soviet five-pointed star around his neck, but the star is yellow and interlaced like the Star of David.
The most incendiary piece of propaganda in the civil war, and one that would quickly fan out across Europe and the United States, was not a poster or a witness report. It was a booklet that claimed to lay bare a comprehensive Jewish plot for world domination. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as the text was titled, was originally fabricated by the tsarist secret police in the late nineteenth century for the purpose of delegitimizing political opposition to the tsar's regime. Presented as a speech by an unnamed leader held at an assembly of Jewish notables (the "Elders of Zion"), the book claims to detail a supposed conspiracy to subvert the morals of the non-Jewish world and assume control over the world's banks and the press, in preparation for a final bloody coup. When it was first published, the Protocols was quickly exposed as a hoax and soon largely forgotten. The Bolshevik revolution and the subsequent civil war made the text appear newly relevant. Shortly after the murder of the former tsar and his family in July 1918, a copy of the Protocols was found in the bedroom of the murdered empress. The discovery seemed to impart prophetic power to the booklet, which then circulated in multiple editions, including one in 1919 that adapted the title to Documented Facts Proving the Origin of Bolshevism and What Bolshevism Is Striving for in Reality.
Propaganda of this sort licensed the killing of Jews as Communists. Especially in the borderlands of the former Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, areas that counted large Jewish populations and became engulfed in nationalist strife as Lithuanians, Latvians, Poles, and Ukrainians took up arms to fight for their emerging states. The warring parties cast the Jews as Bolshevik agents and blamed them for their national misfortunes. After the Poles drove Ukrainian forces out of Lwów, Polish soldiers staged a pogrom, killing over a hundred Jewish residents. Cossacks fighting for a Ukrainian national republic carried out a pogrom in Proskurov, murdering two thousand Jews. The worst actions were committed by soldiers of General Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army-the Whites-who were encouraged to persecute every Jew as a Bolshevik. Between 1918 and 1920, more than one hundred thousand Jews were murdered in a series of at least two thousand pogroms.
Copyright © 2025 by Jochen Hellbeck. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
