Judeo-Bolshevism was the Nazi claim that Communism was a Jewish invention, that the Soviet Union was controlled by Jews, and that the war against the Soviet Union was therefore simultaneously a racial war and an ideological war against the Jewish enemy. It was historically false and empirically unsupported. It provided the ideological framing for the mass murder of Soviet Jews by the Einsatzgruppen from June 1941, in which at least 1.5 million Jews were killed in open-air shootings before the death camp programme was fully operational.
The historical basis for the claim
The claim had a narrow factual foundation that was then wildly extrapolated. Several prominent early Bolshevik leaders were of Jewish origin: Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, and Yakov Sverdlov among others. Antisemites seized on these individuals to claim that the revolution was fundamentally Jewish. This ignored the overwhelmingly non-Jewish composition of the Bolshevik party, the fact that the vast majority of Russian Jews were impoverished workers or craftsmen with no political connection to Bolshevism, and the fact that the revolutionary movements that concerned European conservatives most acutely, the mass parties of the Second International, were largely led by non-Jews. It also ignored the fact that Jewish figures in the Bolshevik leadership were subsequently purged by Stalin, several of them executed.
The conflation of Jewishness with Communism also ran directly against another strand of Nazi antisemitism that conflated Jewishness with capitalism. The Nazis held both positions simultaneously without apparent discomfort, which reveals that the claims were not empirical arguments but ideological instruments: Jews were the hidden power behind whatever the audience most feared.
The role in the invasion of the Soviet Union
Operation Barbarossa, launched on 22 June 1941, was framed by the Nazi leadership explicitly as a war of racial and ideological annihilation rather than a conventional military campaign. Hitler’s Commissar Order of 6 June 1941 instructed the Wehrmacht to execute Soviet political commissars captured in the field, on the grounds that they were the carriers of the Judeo-Bolshevist enemy ideology. The Einsatzgruppen, mobile killing units operating behind the front lines, were given orders that included the killing of Jewish men of military age. Within weeks the killing had been extended to women, children, and the elderly.
The Judeo-Bolshevist framing made this expansion ideologically coherent within the Nazi worldview. If the war was against the Jewish-Bolshevist threat, then every Jew in the Soviet Union was, by definition, part of that threat, and the distinction between combatant and civilian was dissolved. The mass graves at Babi Yar outside Kyiv, at Rumbula outside Riga, at Ponary outside Vilnius, and at hundreds of other sites across the Soviet Union were the practical consequence of this ideological construct.
Postwar uses
The Judeo-Bolshevist trope did not disappear with the Nazi regime. Soviet antisemitism in the late Stalin period deployed a variant of it in reverse, presenting Zionism as a form of imperialism and Jewish identity as incompatible with Soviet loyalty. The “rootless cosmopolitan” campaigns of 1948 to 1953 targeted Jewish intellectuals, doctors, and party members in purges that drew on antisemitic traditions the Nazi movement had made explicit. The trope of Jewish power behind threatening political movements remains a feature of contemporary far-right politics in Europe and North America.
See also
Sources
- Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, Harvard University Press, 2018
- Richard Evans, The Third Reich at War, Allen Lane, 2008
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press, 2004
- Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press, 2009
- Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, Basic Books, 2010