"World War II on the Eastern Front: Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and the Fate of the Jews"
Jochen Hellbeck, Distinguished Professor, Department of History, Rutgers University
The seminar brings together scholarship on the Eastern Front and on the Holocaust in new ways. In acknowledgment of the intricate dynamic between ethnic prejudice and war, historians of the Holocaust have in recent years shifted the weight of their studies toward the Second World War. But their focus remains on events in Germany and Poland, obscuring the centrality of Soviet Jews in the German imagination. While the Nazis depicted Jews as part of a global conspiracy and railed against “Jewish banks in New York, the Jewish-plutocratic establishment in London, and the Jews of the Kremlin in Moscow,” they considered the Jews who hailed from the Soviet Union to be the greatest threat to Germany. Jewish revolutionaries, the Nazis believed, had seized power in Russia 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 with the goal 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 destruction. The Soviet lands thus became “ground zero” for systematic extermination, which was only later extended to all Jews, igniting the Holocaust.