The Hoover History Lab hosted a Virtual Book Talk on World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Union and the Fate of the Jews on Thursday, October 30, 2025 from 2:00 p.m. - 3:30 p.m. PT.
World Enemy No. 1 is a major new history that transforms our understanding of World War II by tracing the conflict—and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust—to Germany’s implacable hostility toward Soviet Russia.
In the West, World War II is often remembered as the Allies’ struggle against Nazism, but the Soviet Union’s crucial role is frequently overlooked. Hellbeck relocates the ideological core of the conflict to Nazi Germany’s perception of Communist Russia as its existential threat—its true “World Enemy No. 1.” Hitler and his regime believed Jewish revolutionaries had seized power in 1917 and were preparing the Soviet state to destroy Germany. This obsession drove Operation Barbarossa in 1941, setting the stage for the Holocaust, which began with the planned extermination of Soviet Jews before being extended to all European Jewry.
Drawing on newly declassified archives and previously undiscovered sources—testimonies, diaries, and dispatches from soldiers and civilians—Hellbeck presents a groundbreaking account of the war from both the Soviet and German perspectives. He explores the years leading up to the war, the Nazi call for “Europe against Bolshevism,” and the atrocities that galvanized millions of Soviet citizens into a people’s war. He recounts pivotal events including Babi Yar, the Battle of Stalingrad, the liberation of concentration camps, and the Red Army’s march into Berlin. Finally, he addresses the West’s long-standing neglect of the Soviet Union’s massive sacrifices—26 million dead—amid Cold War-era anti-communism.
SPEAKER
Jochen Hellbeck is a 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.
MODERATOR
Stephen Kotkin is the Kleinheinz Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as a senior fellow at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is also the Birkelund Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School), where he taught for 33 years. He earned his PhD at the University of California–Berkeley and has been conducting research in the Hoover Library & Archives for more than three decades. Kotkin’s research encompasses geopolitics and authoritarian regimes in history and in the present.
