“A basic reading… Helbeck brilliantly explains what made World War II on the Eastern Front so devastating, and why this is so important today. A feat” - Paul Hannbrink, author of“ A Ghost Haunting Europe ”
The shocking number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives between 1941 and 1945 - 26 million, more than any other nation - is widely known. But the faces and voices of these Nazi victims are noticeably absent.In a groundbreaking new historical work, Yoshin Helbeck restores the Soviet Union to its rightful place in the history of World War II, arguing that to truly understand the conflict, we must place its axis firmly in Soviet territory.It was not the Western powers, but communist Russia, that Nazi Germany considered the greatest threat to its existence. The German campaign against “Bolshevik Judaism” was the impetus for the extremes of Nazi violence, and Soviet territory became a hotbed of systematic extermination. Only later was this horrific system of murder generalized to all Jews, sparking the Holocaust.Using newly declassified archives, testimonies, memoirs, and reports from Soviet and German soldiers and civilians, Helbeck reveals the enormous and unprecedented scope of the horror practiced by the Nazis. This fascinating and surprising work is a stunning new reading of World War II, and of how its history is told.
