Glyn Ford on the Second World War
World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the Fate of the Jews by Jochen Hellbeck published by Picador
Britain in reality was a junior partner in victory in 1945. Both Britain and China, in their geographic isolation were vital in keeping the fight going until Moscow and Washington entered the fray. Yet it was America that did the bulk of the fighting, dying and killing in the Pacific, closed with the thunderclaps of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In Europe it was Stalin’s Soviet Union. The latter is the contentious focus of World Enemy No. 1. The sadistic savaging of Russia by Hitler’s troops made it an entirely different war.For Hellbeck, the comparisons make the conventional wisdom of the Anglo-American defeat of Hitler grotesque. Russia was fighting for three years before D-day dawned. For every British soldier to die, the Russians lost twenty-one. For every civilian death in the UK, the Soviet Union lost close to three hundred. The war in Eastern Europe had a different class and sweep from that of the West; the first was genocidal, the second imperial.
Hitler’s first enemy was “Judeo-Bolshevism” to be fought to the point where the last Marxist was converted or exterminated. Britain and France were just the reset of the inequities of the Versailles Treaty. When Moscow proved more amenable to a deal than London and Paris with August 1939’s Nazi-Soviet Pact the order of battles merely got shuffled. After Hitler came to power in 1933, he was bent on revenge for “the stab in the back” in 1918 from Germany’s Communists spawned by Jews. Thus, it was the Communists that were initially incarcerated, although from the beginning, if they were Jewish, they were double dammed to the worst treatment. Initially, the fate of the non-political Jews was to be expulsion, not extermination.
The nature of the war with Russia is painted in numbers and nature. The death rate amongst British POWs in German hands was 3.5%, for Russians 57.5%. De Gaulle – rightly – lamented the four French villages martyred by the SS, yet in the Soviet Union the number of villages razed were in the high hundreds, if not thousands. By early 1942, two million Soviet POWs had been killed, many through deliberate starvation. It was at this point that Jews started to be systematically sent to Auschwitz. The craft of artisanal murder was mechanised to become an industrial complex of death. Auschwitz could cremate 4,756 corpses a day, and Treblinka gassed 5,000 at a time. Hitler’s obsession with the elimination of Jewish political commissars in the Red Army was why it was in the Soviet Union that the systematic killing of all Jews started with its Holocaust of the bullets. Hundreds of thousands were executed with a shot in the nape of the neck, the gun oft in the enthusiastic hands of quisling collaborators from the Baltic States and Ukraine. The numbers are stark. By the end of 1941, in German-occupied Soviet territory, 100% of detained Jews were dead; in the Baltic States, 80%, and in Poland, 15-25%.
Hitler was more focused on exterminating Communists than Jews. But the two became so entwined that their fate was determined when he imported their treatment in the East to the rest of Europe and Home. So to a degree they were collateral damage. The true nature and scale of the war in the East was hidden by Stalin and written out of history by the West. In the US the bending of history was even sharper than in Britain; less denial than deception. Hellbeck singles out Washington’s Holocaust Memorial Museum as an example. On prominent display is a bowdlerised version of Martin Niemöller’s famous confessional acknowledging his moral guilt. He always opened, “First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist – so I said nothing”, before sequencing Social Democrats, Trade Unionists and the Jews. In Washington’s Museum, the Communists are erased to commence with the Socialists. Even that is too much for many American politicians who elevate the Jews from fourth to first. The Museum has 600 testimonies from the victims of Nazism from across Europe. A paltry nine are from the Soviet Union; proportionally, it should be thirty times more, at around 270.
Hellback has produced a stunning piece of work that should deservedly change our perception of the war’s endgame. I have only two complaints. First he gives the Finns a free pass for their role in the starving of between 650,000 and 1 million in the siege of Leningrad, and second repeats that tired Stalinist canard that ‘Trotskyists’ in Spain were trying to undermine the revolution rather than make it.