Please join us for a lecture by Dr. Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University)

World Enemy No.1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews

"World Enemy No. 1” illuminates Nazism’s rise to power, and Nazi Germany’s trajectory of imperial conquest, racial annihilation, and self-immolation through the lenses of a Soviet specialist. It reveals the Soviet communist state that had formed as a consequence of the October revolution of 1917 as a defining target in this trajectory. The Nazi fixation on the Soviet enemy is not centrally present in historical writings about the Second War, and putting it at the center changes received stories about where, how, and why the war assumed its greatest violence. The war’s decisive break happened on June 22, 1941, when a German army of three million attacked the Soviet Union to exterminate “Judeo-Bolshevism.” While the Nazis at the time were tormenting and persecuting Jews throughout Europe, they slated for immediate destruction all Soviet Jews, presuming them to be carriers of the Bolshevik system. The Soviet lands thus became “ground zero” for a policy of systematic extermination which was only later extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.

Jochen Hellbeck is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, specializing in modern Russia, the Soviet Union, and the history of World War II. He is the acclaimed author of Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich, and the online project Facing Stalingrad.

This event is in-person and also available via Zoom. Please use this link to register.