Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews
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Book Talk
Admission: Free Registration is required. |
In the West, World War II is commonly understood as the Allies’ struggle against Nazism. Often elided, if not simply forgotten, is the Soviet Union’s crucial role in that fight. With World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews, Jochen Hellbeck rectifies this omission by relocating the ideological core of the conflict. It was not the Western powers but Communist Russia that Nazi Germany viewed as an existential threat. Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in 1917 and were preparing the Soviet state to destroy Germany and the world. And so, on June 22, 1941, a German army of three million attacked the Soviet Union to exterminate “Judeo-Bolshevism,” Hitler’s cardinal obsession. While Europe’s Jews were expelled, exiled, and persecuted by the Nazis, Soviet Jews were immediately slated for elimination. The Soviet lands thus became ground zero for systematic extermination, which was only later extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.
Join YIVO for a discussion with Hellbeck about this book, led by historian Jeffrey Veidlinger.
About the Speakers
Jochen Hellbeck is Distinguished Professor of History at Rutgers University, specializing in modern Russia, the Soviet Union, and the history of World War II. The recipient of fellowships from the New York Public Library’s Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the American Academy in Berlin, among others, he is the acclaimed author of Stalingrad: The City That Defeated the Third Reich, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin, and the online project “Facing Stalingrad.”
Jeffrey Veidlinger is the Joseph Brodsky Collegiate Professor of History and Judaic Studies and Inaugural Director of the Raoul Wallenberg Institute at the University of Michigan. His most recent book, In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918–1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust, won the Stan Vine Book Award and a Canadian Jewish Literary Award. He is also the author of The Moscow State Yiddish Theater: Jewish Culture on the Soviet Stage, Jewish Public Culture in the Late Russian Empire, and In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine.