One of the strongest single drivers of the antisemitism that took Germany to the Holocaust was the association the Nazi movement made between Jews and revolutionary communism. The link was made repeatedly in Nazi speeches and publications throughout the 1920s and 1930s. It was the principal ideological framework within which the regime’s killing programme was sold to the German population in the 1940s. Without the fear of Bolshevism, the Nazi movement’s antisemitism would have been considerably less politically effective.
The Russian Revolution and the German trauma
The Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in November 1917 was, for the German political class, the most disturbing event of the Great War. The German army was at that point still in occupation of large parts of western Russia. Many of the German officers and politicians who would later be senior figures in the Weimar and Nazi periods had served on the eastern front and witnessed the collapse of the Russian state. The Bolshevik leadership included a number of figures of Jewish origin, of whom Trotsky was the most prominent. The right-wing German press in the immediate post-war period seized on the Jewish presence in the Bolshevik leadership as evidence that the revolution had been a Jewish project.
The German revolutions of 1918 and 1919
The German revolutions of November 1918 and the months that followed appeared to confirm the right-wing reading. The German revolution that ended the war and produced the Weimar Republic was led, in part, by the Independent Social Democratic Party. Several of the senior figures, including Kurt Eisner who briefly led the Bavarian republican government in late 1918, Hugo Haase, Rosa Luxemburg, and Eugen Leviné who led the short-lived Munich Soviet Republic of April 1919, were of Jewish origin. The Munich Soviet was suppressed by the Freikorps after a few weeks. The Freikorps men killed Eugen Leviné and several hundred other suspected Communist sympathisers. Several of the men who would later be senior figures in the SS, including Rudolf Höss, were Freikorps veterans of the period.
The Munich experience left a particular impression on Hitler, who was in the city throughout the period as a German army soldier. The association of Jewish people with revolutionary politics, with the destruction of established German institutions, with the threat to private property, and with the loss of national sovereignty became, for him, a settled position. Mein Kampf, written in 1924 and published 1925 to 1926, treats the link as obvious and central to the wider racial argument.
The Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory
The Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy theory, the proposition that international communism was a Jewish project for the destruction of the European nations, was the central rhetorical claim of the Nazi movement throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The claim drew on the older antisemitic literature, particularly the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion circulated by Russian émigré antisemites in the 1920s. It drew on the genuine prominence of figures of Jewish origin in the early Bolshevik leadership and in the German revolutionary movement. It drew on the fear of social revolution that ran through the German conservative establishment in the inter-war period. The combination produced a political language in which antisemitism could be presented as a matter of national self-defence rather than as racial persecution.
The 1941 invasion and the killing programme
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Operation Barbarossa, was the moment at which the Judeo-Bolshevik framework became operational killing policy. The Commissar Order of 6 June 1941, signed by Keitel and authorising the killing of Soviet political officers, was framed in terms that explicitly identified the Soviet political officer corps with the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy. The Einsatzgruppen instructions of May 1941, drafted by Heydrich, were framed in similar terms. The conflation of Soviet officials with Jews allowed the killing programme to be presented to the German army and to the wider German population as a war measure rather than as racial persecution.
The Einsatzgruppen reports filed in Berlin used the conflation throughout. A typical report would list killings of Jews, Communists and partisans as if the three categories were equivalent. In practice the great majority of those killed were Jewish civilians who had no connection to the Soviet state. The Judeo-Bolshevik framework was the operational cover under which the killing of European Jewry could be conducted on the eastern front in the second half of 1941 with limited internal German army resistance.
The persistence of the framework
The Judeo-Bolshevik claim has had a long post-war life. Versions of it survived in the post-war right-wing politics of West Germany, Austria, France, Italy and elsewhere. The claim that international communism was, at its origin, a Jewish project surfaced in various Holocaust-denial and far-right circles through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. It survives in some far-right circles today. The historical record on the actual relationship between Jewish communities and the Bolshevik movement is more complicated than either the Nazi claim or the post-war denial of any Jewish involvement allows. A small minority of Jewish individuals were prominent in the early Bolshevik leadership; the great majority of the Jewish populations of Russia, Germany and elsewhere were not communists, and large numbers were murdered by communist regimes in subsequent decades.
What the framework did
The Judeo-Bolshevik framework was the principal mechanism by which the Nazi movement’s antisemitism became politically effective in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s, and by which the killing programme could be conducted on the eastern front in the 1940s with limited internal German resistance. The framework was a fabrication in its strong form, in that the great majority of Jews were not communists and the Bolshevik movement was not in any meaningful sense a Jewish project. The framework was rhetorically effective in spite of the facts. Understanding how the framework operated is part of understanding how the Holocaust became politically possible.
See also
- The Einsatzgruppen
- Rudolf Höss
- The Weimar Republic
- The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
- Mein Kampf, the Blueprint Everyone Ignored
Sources
- Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, Belknap, 2018
- Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1925
- The Commissar Order, 6 June 1941
- Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, Princeton University Press, 2004
- USHMM: Judeo-Bolshevism