Central European History 44 (2011), 624–641.

© Conference Group for Central European History of the American

Historical Association, 2011
doi:10.1017/S0008938911000665

“Our Most Serious Enemy”: The Specter of

Judeo-Bolshevism in the German Military
Community, 1914–1923
Brian E. Crim

The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a

complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic
influence from the European culture. In this connection the troops are
facing tasks that exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering. The soldier
in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules
of the art of war, but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the
avenger of bestialities that have been inflicted upon German and racially
related nations.
— Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, October 10, 19411
the Wehrmacht participated fully in a racial war of extermination on

T
HAT
behalf of the National Socialist regime is indisputable. Officers and
enlisted men alike accepted the logic that the elimination of the Soviet
Union was necessary for Germany’s survival. The Wehrmacht’s atrocities on
the Eastern Front are a testament to the success of National Socialist propaganda
and ideological training, but the construct of “Judeo-bolshevism” originated
during World War I and its immediate aftermath.2 Between 1918 and 1923,
central Europe witnessed a surge in right-wing paramilitary violence and anti-
Semitic activity resulting from fears of bolshevism and a widely held belief that
Jews were largely responsible for spreading revolution.3 Jews suffered the conse-
quences of revolution and resurgent nationalism in the borderlands between
Germany and Russia after World War I, but it was inside Germany that the con-
struct of Judeo-bolshevism evolved into a powerful rhetorical tool for the
growing völkisch movement and eventually a justification for genocide.
The specter of Judeo-bolshevism invoked during the Third Reich was the
product of anti-Semitism in the imperial army prior to World War I, the military’s

1
Rathenau quoted in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).
2
See Bartov, Hitler’s Army; and Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, trans.
Deborah Lucas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
3
See Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in
Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Great War,” Past & Present 1 (2008): 175–209, 200.

624
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 625
prolonged exposure to eastern European Jews (the so-called Ostjuden) during the
war itself, and the resulting association of Jews with revolution at home and
abroad. No longer a grisly apparition from the east, many German veterans and
right-wing activists considered the tumultuous events of 1918–1923 as the
prelude to a more momentous confrontation with Judeo-bolshevism.
“Auschwitz,” Omer Bartov writes, “could neither have been imagined, nor con-
structed and set to work, without the experience and memory of the Great
War.”4 While Bartov referred to the process of industrialized killing, the same
argument about the centrality of World War I applies to the Judeo-Bolshevik
enemy.5 The November Revolution of 1918 was a perfect storm in which pre-
existing fear and loathing of Jews and leftist ideology merged with a very real fear
of national disintegration. The military community, including the imperial army;
its successor, the Reichswehr; and a myriad of “combat leagues” (Wehrverbände)
active during the interwar period, internalized this fear and contributed to the
anti-Semitic environment in the Weimar period.
World War I gave birth to new and destructive ideologies such as fascism and bol-
shevism, but it also breathed new life into the ancient hatreds of anti-Semitism.
Germany may not have been the most anti-Semitic country in Europe before or
even after World War I, but the presence of Judeo-bolshevism loomed large over
postwar German political and military cultures and helped to give form to the diz-
zying array of socioeconomic problems and external threats tormenting the fledgling
republic. In an attempt to gauge the degree of continuity between anti-Semitism
during the Second Reich through the Third Reich, as well as to explain the relative
weakness of anti-Semitic political parties in imperial Germany, Shulamit Volkov
posited the notion of anti-Semitism as a “cultural code.” Volkov notes that
“[p]rofessing antisemitism became a sign of cultural identity, of one’s belonging
to a specific cultural camp. It was a way of communicating an acceptance of a par-
ticular set of ideas and a preference for specific social, political and moral norms.”6
Volkov applied Kenneth Burke’s “associative merger” to explain the ease with
which any critique of modernity, economic hardship, or fears of national dissolution
resulted in anti-Semitism. Jews became synonymous with forces of disintegration at
the very moment the German Volk-identity was being formed.7 German

4
Omer Bartov, Murder in Our Midst: The Holocaust, Industrial Killing, and Representation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996), 7.
5
Arno Mayer argued that the collapse of the Hapsburg, Russian, and German empires after World
War I endangered the Jewish populations of central and eastern Europe. Additionally, he noted that
anti-bolshevism was a surrogate for anti-Semitism in multiple national contexts. See Arno J. Mayer,
Why Did the Heavens not Darken? The Final Solution in History (New York: Pantheon, 1990).
6
Shulamit Volkov, “Antisemitism as a Cultural Code: Reflections on the History and
Historiography of Antisemitism in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 23 (1978): 35–39.
7
Shulamit Volkov delineated the power of the “associative merger” model in Shulamit Volkov,
Germans, Jews, and Antisemites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 88–90. Volkov
argued that German nationalists considered Jews diametrically opposed to what constituted a
626 BRIAN E. CRIM

anti-Semitism underwent a period of transition during the fateful years of

1916–1918 when the euphoria of victory that characterized the first months of
World War I devolved into grim determination and finally, collapse.8 Older anti-
Semitic cultural codes survived World War I, but the persistent argument that
Jews promoted bolshevism inside and outside Russia signaled a new and more
aggressive brand of anti-Semitism.
The arbiter of the postwar cultural code, more ferocious and unfettered in the
wake of military defeat, was the revitalized völkisch movement. Völkisch ideas,
some of which were integrated into conservative parties, included eugenics,
social and racial hygiene, a return to agrarian social structures, colonization of the
east, and a rejection of all forms of internationalism. The völkisch movement
began in the late nineteenth century as a constellation of organizations ranging
from paramilitary organizations and splinter parties to special interest groups.
Organizations such as the Pan-German League adeptly introduced völkisch ideol-
ogy into the mass politics of the imperial era. Initially an umbrella group for dis-
gruntled conservatives, the Pan-German League eventually coalesced around
imperialism and ethnicity. The program agreed to in 1891 called for “combating
all tendencies opposed to national [völkisch] development” and the “fostering
and support of German ethnic [deutsch-völkisch] aspirations.”9 Scholars are
quick to distinguish völkisch ideology from racial anti-Semitism, but the movement
was informed by a racial worldview that elevated Aryans to the top of a racial hier-
archy. Anti-Semitism became an important component of the movement by the
eve of World War I thanks to the backlash against the SPD’s landmark electoral
gains in 1912. Anti-Semitic parties in the imperial era were too fragmented to be
effective until they merged with the völkisch groups interested in a broader world-
view.10 George Mosse notes that Jews were easily branded as agents of modernity by
a völkisch movement that sought comfort in a romantic past. The more politically
adept völkisch activists portrayed Jews as an “ever-present enemy who had to be
defeated in order to enter the Volkish utopia.”11

healthy Volk. See Shulamit Volkov, “Talking of Jews, Thinking of Germans—The Ethnic Discourse
in 19th Century Germany,” Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 30 (2002): 37–49.
8
Shulamit Volkov, “Kontinuität und Diskontinuität im Deutschen Antisemitismus, 1878–1945,”
Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 33, no. 2 (1985): 224, 229, 239. Ian Kershaw also argued that anti-
Semitism changed during the years 1916–1923 in Ian Kershaw, “Antisemitismus in der NS-
Bewegung vor 1933,” in Vorurteil und Rassenhass. Antisemitismus in der faschistischen Bewegung
Europas, ed. Hermann Graml, Angelika Königseder, and Juliane Wetzel (Berlin: Metropol, 2001),
29–32.
9
Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League,
1886–1914 (Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), 49.
10
Werner Bergmann, “Völkischer Antisemitismus im Kaiserreich,” in Handbuch zur Völkischen
Bewegung 1871–1918, ed. Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus H. Ulbricht (Munich:
K. G. Saur, 1996), 461.
11
George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York:
Howard Fertig, 1998), vi.
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 627
The völkisch movement hardly lamented the passing of the empire and its
wizened conservatism after 1918. The war, specifically the “myth of the war
experience” as Mosse describes it, revived the movement and gave völkisch
ideas the space they needed to flourish and captivate a younger generation.12
The “ever-present enemy” was equipped with its own dynamic ideology,
and völkisch activists believed that only a true counterrevolution could match
the ideological fervor of bolshevism. The fringe of the völkisch movement
was now the vanguard of the Right’s bloody response to the November
Revolution and the intolerable Weimar government. One of the more violent
völkisch organizations, Organization Consul, used Judeo-bolshevism to justify
a terrorist campaign in which it assassinated several high-profile Weimar political
figures. Its constitution declared its “spiritual” struggle against “all forms of inter-
nationalism, Jewry, Social Democracy, and the left-radical parties.” Weimar au-
thorities investigating Organization Consul “murder commandos” discovered
their orders to “rid the German government of socialists and Jews.”13 Groups
such as the Organization Consul were products of the postwar environment
that legitimized violence against bolshevism or any perceived drift toward
socialism. The völkisch movement was most effective in linking anti-Semitism
with anti-bolshevism during the immediate postwar period, tying the various
strands of the German Right into a unified front opposed to the Weimar govern-
ment and all that it came to symbolize.14
The associative merger between Jews and bolshevism derived from the wide-
spread perception in conservative circles that German Jews supported the Social
Democratic Party (SPD) since its inception. The German Right determined
that alienating the burgeoning working class, which identified itself primarily
with the SPD, was counterproductive if conservatives were to survive the rapid
changes wrought by industrialization. Rather than abandon a population of
Germans who might be convinced to support the conservative agenda, the
Right determined that attacking the statistically insignificant Jewish population,
which hovered around one percent of the total population, was an effective
method of undermining Social Democracy without alienating German
workers.15 Radical anti-Semites such as Adolf Stoecker siphoned supporters
from the SPD by attacking the movement for its atheism, materialism, and
internationalism. In short, it was a Jewish organization with “un-German”

12
Ibid., viii.
13
Trial against Organisation C and Wiking Bund 1924, Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (hereafter BA-
MA) Freiburg, PH26/4.
14
Uwe Puschner, “Völkisch Plädoyer für einen ‘engen’ Begriff,” in “Die Erziehung zum deutschen
Menschen.” Völkische und nationalkonservative Erwachsenbilding in der Weimarer Republik, ed. Paul
Ciupke, Klaus Hener, Franz Josef Jelich, and Justus H. Ulbricht (Essen: Klartext, 2007), 61–66.
15
Omer Bartov, “Defining Enemies, Making Victims: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust,”
American Historical Review 103, no. 3 (June 1998): 777.
628 BRIAN E. CRIM

values.16 The SPD, for its part, recognized that it had to counter anti-Semitic
charges even when most of its members and leaders were not Jewish.17
The imperial army was one of the many institutions threatened by the advent
of Social Democracy and the increasing visibility of Germany’s Jewish population
in the state. The military is an example of a community that expressed anti-
Semitism as a cultural code, particularly because its staunch opposition to
Social Democracy and persistent refusal to accept Jewish officer candidates were
directly related. The military and its constellation of interest groups labeled the
SPD and its leadership “internal enemies” and accused Jews of aligning their
interests with this international movement in opposition to the empire. Retired
general Eduard von Liebert founded the Imperial League against Social
Democracy in 1904. The League argued that Social Democracy threatened
Germany’s war preparations and spread disunity under the “flag of class
hatred.”18 The League corresponded regularly with the War Ministry, and the
two coordinated an anti-SPD platform that was focused on accusations of
treason for failing to support unlimited military budgets, colonial adventures,
and the government’s increasingly aggressive foreign policy.19 War Minister
Karl von Einem frequently lashed out against SPD deputies during Reichstag
debates. In one instance, von Einem attacked August Bebel because he advocated
that SPD members seek entry into the officer corps, a move von Einem con-
sidered a prelude to “overthrowing the state.”20 The Reichstag witnessed a
parade of military officials denouncing Social Democracy and its Jewish support-
ers, but internally the military was more explicit about its distrust of Jews and
their socialist inclination.
Clearly alarmed at the SPD’s growing influence and electoral success, the War
Ministry circulated a lengthy memo to a host of senior officers and private organi-
zations outlining the danger the movement posed to the empire. The memo first
outlined how Social Democracy infiltrated Germany’s economic sector and uni-
versity system. Next, the author declared a metaphorical war against Jewish influ-
ence: “[S]ocial Democracy is truthfully nothing more than the brainchild
[Geistesarbeit] of the Jews, who have had the luck in recent decades to expand
their doctrine and transform Germany from an agrarian state to an industrial
state. Should it not be possible to destroy this Jewish creation by peaceful

16
Robert S. Wistrich, “The SPD and Antisemitism in the 1890s,” European Studies Review 7 (1977):
177–197.
17
Peter G. Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848–1933 (Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 2003), 154.
18
Heer und Sozialdemokratie (1908), BA-MA Freiburg, PH2/365.
19
Report, February 1912, BA-MA Freiburg, PH2/368.
20
Reichstag Verhandlungen, March 13, 1909, in BA-MA Freiburg, PH2/365. More radical SPD
leaders such as Karl Liebknecht supported spreading pacifist ideas among army recruits on the eve of
World War I. See Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics,
1866–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 629
means with an equivalent brainchild?” The memo noted that the “Jewish race
dominated the German press” and was systematically causing the deterioration
of national sentiment. “Coolly, and with an iron fist, this foreign race must be
removed from German newspapers.”21 The memo contained few concrete rec-
ommendations about combating Jewish influence, but the author’s effortless
union of Jews with Social Democracy resounded especially in military circles.
Eventually, the Prussian War Ministry developed contingency plans for civil
war against the SPD and other leftist forces that might “endanger the state.”
Ironically, these contingency plans, which included provisions for using veterans’
organizations against the SPD, were enacted by the SPD government in the
months after World War I.22
The officer corps dreaded the “reddening” of the German military in the age of
conscription. Jews rarely penetrated the exclusive officer corps under the best con-
ditions and the taint of Social Democracy further damaged relations between the
military and Jews, many of whom had begun organizing themselves to defend
their civil rights and counter increasing anti-Semitism within the public and
private spheres. Although Jews were entitled to serve in the Prussian military
under the provisions of the 1812 Emancipation Edict, they were barred from
becoming officers because Jews were not allowed to have authority over
Christians. The officer corps guarded its homogeneity during the imperial era,
despite the emperor’s 1890 decree allowing bourgeois elements into the reserve
officer corps.23 Jewish organizations such as the Central Association of German
Citizens of Jewish Faith (CV) and the Association of German Jews (VdJ) pressured
the military to accept Jewish officer candidates and normalize the presence of Jews in
the most sacred of German institutions. Ludwig Haas of the CV stated, “[w]hat is at
stake is much more than any individual case. We are concerned about justice . . . the
German army must finally acknowledge the constitution. We want nothing but our
just rights!” While it was impossible to prevent Jews from serving the required one-
year volunteer term of service before being considered fit for reserve officer status,
Werner Angress notes that not a single Jewish volunteer was commissioned as a
reserve officer in the Prussian Army since 1885, although by 1910 an estimated
20,000 to 30,000 had completed their year of service.24
The reserve officer controversy was an explosive issue in the Reichstag, where
some of the more vocal anti-Semites rushed to defend the War Ministry and
brand any argument for inclusion as subversive. Not surprisingly, fears of Social

21
War Ministry Memo, May 10, 1912, BA-MA Freiburg, PH2/368.
22
Manfred Messerschmidt, “The Wehrmacht and the Volksgemeinschaft,” Journal of Contemporary
History 18, no. 4 (Oct. 1983): 720.
23
Werner T. Angress, “Prussia’s Army and the Jewish Reserve Officer Controversy before World
War I,” Militärgeschichte Mitteilungen 19 (1976): 96.
24
Werner T. Angress, “Prussia’s Army and the Jewish Reserve Officer Controversy before World
War I,” in Imperial Germany, ed. James J. Sheehan (New York: Viewpoints, 1976), 103–105.
630 BRIAN E. CRIM

Democracy fueled the most heated tirades. Friedrich Raab was a member of the
Hamburg Anti-Semitic Electoral League and the German Reform Party. As a
Reichstag deputy, he consistently defended military interests by attacking Jews.
Speaking in the wake of a major electoral victory for the SPD in 1912, Raab
launched into a harangue against Jewish influence in Germany and the notion
of Jewish officers in particular. His speech covered the major anti-Semitic
themes comprising the cultural code model. Raab clumsily used racial language
while consistently linking Germany’s social ills to excessive Jewish influence in
public life. Raab declared that allowing a Social Democratic officer, who in his
mind could only be a Jew, “is simply an impossibility.” He then called for the dis-
missal of the few Jews who managed to enter the regular officer corps. Fluent in
the pseudoscience of race, Raab divided humanity between the “warlike” and
“un-warlike” races and found that Jews were decidedly in the latter category.
Raab questioned the motivation of Jews who sought entry into the officer
corps by implying that they only sought an enhanced social status and the right
to wear the uniform, which he attributed to “the Oriental love of dark colors.”
After detailing supposed Jewish crimes throughout history and arguing that the
military be organized around racial principles, Raab concluded his speech with
a sharp warning: “Let the Jews be happy with their success in other fields!
They have our spiritual life, they have our press, they have the largest portion
of our money in their hands: now they want our sword as well. I hope
Germany says to you: Get away! Our sword is shiny and sharp. So should it
stay!”25 Ironically, after decades of preventing Jews from serving the military,
the anti-Semitic mantra during and after World War I was that Jews shirked
their duty.26 Jews were among the military’s perceived internal enemies
because of the taint of Social Democracy, but it took the chaos of war and revo-
lution to transform them into the more insidious Bolshevik menace.
Most German Jews celebrated the August 1914 declaration of war and wel-
comed the emperor’s famous declaration of an internal peace (Burgfrieden) as an
opportunity to demonstrate their patriotism. German Jews were especially
invested in the war in the east, where a steady stream of reports depicted
violent anti-Semitic acts perpetrated by barbaric Poles and Russians.27

25
Reichstag Verhandlungen, February 25, 1911, BA-MA Freiburg, PH2/367.
26
In November 1916, the War Ministry undertook a now infamous statistical survey called the “Jew
count” ( Judenzählung) in an effort to determine the number of Jewish soldiers serving in frontline
units. The official memorandum stated that in order to address the accusations from various sources
that Jews were disproportionately excused from military service or poorly represented at the front,
the War Ministry would conduct a census of Jews serving in the military and the breakdown of
their duties. The order is reproduced in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt, Deutsch-Jüdische
Soldaten von der Epoche der Emanzipation bis zum Zeitalter der Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Verlag
E. S. Mittler & Son, 1996), 52.
27
See Stephen Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The Eastern European Jew in German and German
Jewish Consciousness (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983).
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 631
Consequently, the imperial army swept into eastern Europe expecting the Jewish
population to welcome German troops as liberators. The Austrian ambassador in
Berlin issued a statement directed at Russian Jews, “Freedom comes from Europe!
Organize! And send trustworthy men to the German and Austro-Hungarian
commanders!”28 Imperial army officials recognized that the besieged Jewish
populations in the occupied territories were likely allies and useful translators.
Even General Erich Ludendorff, who played a leading role in the postwar
völkisch movement, admitted that Jews in the east served a purpose. “The Jew
did not yet know which face he should show,” Ludendorff quipped, “but he
made no difficulties for us. We could make ourselves mutually understood . . .
while with Poles, Lithuanians, and Latvians this was almost nowhere the
case.”29 The various German authorities operating in Poland, the Ukraine,
Romania, and the Baltic territories of Lithuania and Latvia identified the Jews
living there as distinct and separate from the rest of the population. A 1915 quar-
terly report from the Generalgouvernment in Warsaw recognized that the
“Jewish Question” was the key to determining the political future in Poland
and noted that Polish Jews formed “not only a community in a religious sense,
but they also have their own moral and, above all, business principles.”30 The
German occupation may have revitalized Jewish political life in the east, but as
the war progressed, so, too, did the economic demands on the Jews. Anti-
Semitic officers responsible for exacting taxes and marshaling demands for com-
pulsory labor harmed what had begun as a productive relationship between the
German military and eastern Jewish populations.31
Germans were horrified by the eastern Jews’ living conditions, especially since
the military occupied territory containing most of the Jewish population of
eastern Europe. The overriding concern was stemming the tide of typhus and pre-
venting an epidemic among the comingled populations. Even before the occu-
pation, Germans living in eastern Prussia attributed outbreaks of typhus to
peddlers, seasonal workers, and “wild transmigrants,” many of whom happened
to be Jews.32 Part of the Oberkommando Ost (Ober Ost) mission in the east was to
cleanse the region, literally, and transform the territory into acceptable areas for
German settlements. Significant German resources, including contributions

28
Graf Szoegyney quoted in Egmont Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik und die Juden im Ersten Weltkrieg
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969), 121.
29
Erich Ludendorff quoted in Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture,
National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000), 119–120.
30
Bericht der Verwaltung des Generalgouvernments Warschau, October 23, 1915, BA-MA
Freiburg, PH30/II/5.
31
James Joll, “Walther Rathenau—Intellectual or Industrialist?,” in Germany in the Age of Total War,
ed. Volker Berghahn and Martin Kitchen (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 68.
32
Paul Weindling, “Purity and Epidemic Danger in German Occupied Poland during the First
World War,” Paedagogica Historica 33, no. 3 (1997): 825.
632 BRIAN E. CRIM

from German-Jewish charities working with the civil and military authorities,
were devoted to eradicating disease and promoting hygiene in eastern Jewish
communities. The German Civil Administration for Russian-Poland blamed
the outbreaks on the impoverished and filthy Jewish neighborhoods in major
urban areas. By 1916, the administration estimated that ninety-five percent of
the Jews were carriers of typhus, or the “Jew fever” as the local populace referred
to it.33 The Generalgouvernment in Warsaw announced plans in late 1916 to
seize “all itinerant and dirty people, especially the Jewish beggars and peddlers,”
and send them to delousing stations.34 Gottfried Frey, the medical officer in
charge of Poland, dispatched 165 mobile delousing machines, 127 steam disinfec-
tion machines, and 320 formalin chambers throughout the countryside. He even-
tually blamed the disease on Jewish indolence and antiquated religious customs.
Not surprisingly, German authorities expressed greater animosity for Jews as con-
ditions worsened. Martin Kirchner, the director of the Prussian Medical
Department, joined several other medical personnel in accusing Jews of being
lazy and dirty, but also possessing “a special number of morally degenerate
characteristics.”35
In Ober Ost, “Typhus Commissars” and “Epidemic Commissars” wielded
extensive powers over the population. German authorities were brutally efficient
in Poland, treating the delousing effort as a military operation. The fact that ten
of fifty German medical officers died from typhus contributed to the demonization
of the Jewish population for spreading the disease. What began as an education
campaign devolved into increasingly more coercive measures to cleanse Jewish
urban areas. German authorities kept lists of those to be forcibly deloused and sub-
jected the populations of entire towns to humiliating and often brutal measures,
including stripping naked in public and quarantine. Jewish resistance ranged from
eluding the dragnet to burning down delousing installations in protest.36 Typhus
became inextricably linked with the eastern Jews, and both were obstacles to
German occupation of the east. Whatever sympathies German authorities harbored
for the Jewish population in occupied territory had begun to deteriorate even
before the Bolshevik Revolution. One could argue, based on the Germans’ obses-
sion with monitoring the Jewish population in occupied territory and defending the
frontier in the final months of war, that the image of Jews as carriers of disease easily
morphed into Jews as carriers of bolshevism.
The German military’s growing aversion to Jews was not just implied in official
correspondence, but explicitly revealed by soldiers and officers in the field. The

33
Viertelsjahrsbericht der Zivilverwaltung für Russisch-Polen, April 1, 1916–June 30, 1916,
BA-MA Freiburg, PH30/II/12.
34
Halbjahresbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem Generalgouvernment Warschau, October 1,
1916–March 31, 1917, BA-MA Freiburg, PH30/II/15.
35
Weindling, “Purity and Epidemic Danger,” 831.
36
Ibid., 830.
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 633
journal Der Frontsoldat erzählt featured a section begun during the Third Reich
entitled “German Regimental Histories about the Jews.” The National
Socialist editors scoured the regimental histories of World War I units for com-
ments on Jews to underscore what they believed was the military’s natural incli-
nation to support National Socialist ideology. It is difficult to determine whether
the excerpts in the journal were truly written before the Third Reich, but the
anonymous excerpts are dated from the war. The editors insisted that the
German soldiers were not inherently anti-Semitic, but grew to hate Jews once
confronted with them. The Wehrmacht journal sought to portray eastern
European Jews as a historic and existential threat. The use of selected World
War I testimony merely confirmed the established National Socialist narrative.
One noncommissioned officer judged the Jews to be inherently criminal for
selling items such as tobacco and beer at usurious prices. “Wherever there is
war, there is also the appearance of Jewish domination,” the soldier wrote.37
Another soldier wrote about experiencing painful memories after seeing
Orthodox Jews in Galicia. He remembered the “joyless” and untrustworthy
Jews populating his native Alsace. Another German soldier in Galicia was dis-
gusted with the Jewish merchants he encountered. “Before the peace,” he
wrote, “I could not understand why there were pogroms in Russia. Since I
have seen the Jewish way of doing business, it is no longer a puzzle how a hard-
working farmer could beat one of these pests to death.” The soldier concluded
with a sentiment expressed by leading figures in the Third Reich: “Here is
further proof [the encounter with Jews] that anti-Semitism is always a healthy
reaction to seeing the Jewish masses represented. This, too, is a legacy of the
front!”38 While these excerpts traded in traditional anti-Semitic tropes, the
“masses” of Jews cited in this context soon devolved into the specter of transient
revolutionaries threatening the German frontier.
Ironically, the German government worked actively to spread chaos behind
Russian lines by funding socialist groups, including the Bolsheviks. The War
Ministry in particular funded the publication of subversive materials targeting
the czarist government. Chancellor Georg Michaelis encouraged efforts to
“further the process of disintegration inside Russia.”39 The revolution the
Germans anticipated began in March 1917; however, its leftist direction
worried a German military government slowly losing its grip over its own war-
weary population. The Generalgouvernment in Warsaw still considered the
“Jewish press” supportive of the Central Powers despite some of its

37
“Deutsche Regimentengeschichten über das Judentum,” Der Frontsoldat erzählt 8, no. 10 (1938):
281, BA-MA Freiburg.
38
“Deutsche Regimentengeschichten über das Judentum,” Der Frontsoldat erzählt 8, no. 11 (1939):
319, BA-MA Freiburg.
39
Georg Michaelis quoted in Oleh S. Fedyshyn, Germany’s Drive to the East and the Ukrainian
Revolution, 1917–1918 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 45.
634 BRIAN E. CRIM

“international-socialist tendencies.” German officials noted that the prospect of

equal rights for minorities explained eastern Jews’ initial enthusiasm for the revo-
lution.40 Another report dated shortly before the Bolshevik phase of the revolu-
tion noted that the local Jewish press “welcomed the Russian Revolution in
hopes that it would end restrictions on Jews” and alleviate an atmosphere condu-
cive to pogroms.41 By fall 1917, it did not take long for senior German officers to
connect the events in Russia to Germany’s primary internal enemy—Social
Democracy. War Minister Hermann von Stein wrote a letter shortly after the
March revolution noting that Germany’s “left-liberal and social-democratic
press” interpreted the revolutionary events in Russia as a possible outcome in
Germany if conditions continued to decline. Von Stein thought the Left was
using the revolution to undermine the relationship between the military and
the people so that it could destroy “the will to victory.” The War Minister
ordered the General Staff and field commanders alike to contrive suitable coun-
termeasures against the “harmful side effects of the Russian Revolution on our
current conditions.”42 That the military connected revolution abroad to deterio-
rating conditions at home by early 1917 did not bode well for German Jews, but
the situation for Jews anywhere in central Europe declined precipitously once the
Bolsheviks came to power and attempted to spread revolution beyond Russian
borders.
Situation reports from the Ukraine frequently identified Jews as the source of
anti-German agitation and “carriers” of bolshevism. The reports, which contrasted
sharply to German assumptions about the eastern Jews before the Bolshevik
Revolution, noted that Jewish speculators, smugglers, and traders were raising
money to wage a propaganda war against Germans. Interestingly, the reports
did not limit their discussion to the Ukraine and accused German and Austrian
Jews of contributing to anti-German agitation in the occupied territories. One
of the last communications from the Army Group Kiev, dated October 1918,
ended with this portentous statement, “The Jew is up to now—despite his out-
wardly kind mask—our most serious enemy. For our soldiers the continuing
attempts of bribery and revolutionary machinations are an increasing danger.”43
Wilhelm von Gayl, the leader of the political section of Ober Ost and a noted
anti-Semite during the Weimar era, echoed the soldiers quoted in Der
Frontsoldat erzählt when recalling his own war experience: “[O]ur soldiers saw
in everyday life mostly the comical side of the Jews’ demeanor, on whom they
liked to play tricks. They loathed them also because of ineradicable filth that

40
Halbjahresbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem Generalgouvernment Warschau, October 1,
1916–March 31, 1917, BA-MA Freiburg, PH30/II/15.
41
Halbjahresbericht des Verwaltungschefs bei dem Generalgouvernment Warschau, BA-MA
Freiburg, PH30/II/16.
42
Letter from Hermann von Stein, March 26, 1917, BA-MA Freiburg, PH2/414.
43
Bericht über innere Lage, October 31, 1918, BA-MA Freiburg, PH6/II/16.
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 635
they spread about themselves, but only a few saw further and sensed the danger
that began to appear for our people.”44 The military evacuated thousands of
Russian and Ukrainian officers who contributed their own personal and
intense hatred of Bolsheviks to numerous völkisch organizations across central
Europe. Some of these émigrés may have influenced the Nazi party’s own think-
ing about Judeo-bolshevism.45
General Wilhelm Groener, the chief of staff for Army Group Eichhorn in the
Ukraine, blamed Jews for bolshevism’s popularity in his own sector. Consider this
transcript of a discussion between Groener and other officers: “The Jews are
hostile toward us. They must be hostile toward us according to their entire past
in Russia. They fear us, the bearers of order, the bearers of reaction, and the
destroyers of the achievements of the Bolshevik Revolution. Therefore it is in
their interest to agitate against us.”46 Groener internalized his experiences in
the Ukraine and returned to the chaos of defeated Germany a staunch anti-
Bolshevik. He also continued to assume Jews were behind the Russian
Revolution and the November Revolution in Germany. Groener wrote his
wife on November 17, 1918, that the Jews were the “string-pullers” of both revo-
lutions.47 Groener’s suspicions were confirmed by personnel under his command,
including officers in the Imperial War Ministry’s press office who sent him a
report on the role the Jewish press played in fomenting revolutionary sentiment.
The memo singled out the famous Ullstein publishing house for leaning in a
“Jewish-democratic direction.” The report also discussed the situation in
Berlin, where Jews were reported to control the workers’ and soldiers’ councils
in the city.48 Groener reaffirmed his generalization of Jews as socialists and
Bolsheviks in his memoirs. He lamented his and other Germans’ underestimation
of the Bolshevik danger, which he blamed in part on the machinations of the
“crafty Jews” he encountered in the Ukraine.49 Groener was one of the most
influential figures during the November Revolution, preferring to side with
the Social Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert than risk civil war in
Germany, yet even this supposed moderate was among those who seamlessly
linked Jews of every nationality to the specter of bolshevism.
Judeo-bolshevism was a mature adaptation of the German Right’s longtime
fears of Social Democracy. The Bolshevik Revolution prompted the immigration
of tens of thousands of eastern Jews to Germany and solidified the associative

44
Wilhelm von Gayl quoted in Liulevicius, War Land, 120.
45
Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism,
1917–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 243.
46
Heeresgruppe Eichhorn, Kiew Politisches II: 1918, BA-MA Freiburg, N 46/173.
47
Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 559.
48
Report from Kriegspresseamt to Wilhelm Groener (Nov. 22, 1918), BA-MA Freiburg, N 46/
162, 2–3.
49
Wilhelm Groener, Lebenserinnerungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957), 391, 403.
636 BRIAN E. CRIM

merger of Jews with communism and other forms of internationalism. Judeo-

bolshevism also acted as a particularly harmful cultural code. Understandable
fears of bolshevism and “Red Terror” inside and outside Germany soon
equated to the fear and rejection of Jews and Jewish influence on every facet of
German life. A military report on internal political conditions in April 1919
recognized a particular legacy of the war: “Bolshevism, communism, and
Spartacisim are a sickness that would have never taken root among our order-
loving German people if four and a half years of war had not turned the nation
into a breeding ground.”50 The presence of some high-profile Jews in both the
Russian Bolshevik Revolution and the German Spartacist uprisings hardened
anti-Semitic stereotypes and prompted violence against Jewish communities.
Both official military documents and anti-Semitic propaganda repeated the
charge that eastern Jews infected German Jews with bolshevism. An April 1918
field report addressed to the War Ministry and several other offices noted that
an informant claimed, “[a] majority of Jewish citizens of the Reich who were
returning from Russia carried Bolshevik propaganda.” Leon Trotksy himself,
the source claimed, ordered one of these Jews to spread propaganda throughout
Germany.51 Another officer reported his observations on the revolution in early
1919, “The Jews are not exactly hostile to Germans, but they are strongly inclined
toward bolshevism and are trying to incite the rank and file.”52 The military
blamed soldiers’ close proximity to Jews for the rapid formation of soldiers’ coun-
cils in German cities and areas in the east still occupied by Germany. A dispatch
from late November 1918 maintained that Jewish Bolsheviks undermined the
Polish government and reported rumors that German soldiers were participating
in Bolshevik activities organized by Jews.53 Another report accused “Warsaw
Jews” of crossing the border and spreading propaganda and corrupting soldiers.54
By early 1919, bolshevism infiltrating from the east was the military’s ultimate
nightmare. A report on conditions in East Prussia noted, “[n]umerous Russian
agents are inundating the country and carrying their doctrines to the smallest
East Prussian village using accomplished Bolshevik methods, first by totally
undermining the country with propaganda and then by intervening with military
power and picking off the ripe fruit.”55 Fears of bolshevism abroad merged with

50
Grenzjäger Brigade, April 30, 1919, “Die Lehren der gegenwärtigen politischen Lage,” BA-MA
Freiburg, RH69/104.
51
Message from Stellvertretender Generalstab der Armee, Abteilung IIIb to Kriegsministerium,
Auswärtiges Amt—Politische Abteilung, Reichsamt des Innern, April 18, 1918, BA-MA Freiburg,
PH2/479.
52
Besprechung beim O.K. Nord in Bartenstein, February 11, 1919, BA-MA Freiburg, N 42/14.
53
Report from Beauftragter des Generalquartiermeisters für den Osten (Major Ritter) to Herrn
Generalquartiermeister, November 28, 1918, BA-MA Freiburg, RH61/14.
54
Report from Hauptmann Graff v. Pueckler: VI.A.K. (n.d.), BA-MA Freiburg, N 46/131.
55
Die innere Lage im Grenzschutzbezirk und die Bekämpfung des Bolschewismus, March 25, 1919,
BA-MA Freiburg, N 97/6.
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 637
revolutionary chaos in Germany, and Jews were perceived as the puppet masters
behind it all.
The November Revolution solidified the associative merger of Judeo-bolshevism
and removed the ossified imperial structure, both of which allowed the völkisch
movement to flourish. The CV reported that a “violent, anti-Semitic storm
flood” of pamphlets, newspapers, and magazines overwhelmed Germany in the
first few months after the armistice.56 The propaganda’s themes alternated
between the myth that Jews shirked their military duties and the familiar “stab in
the back” legend claiming that Jewish revolutionaries, now more Bolshevik than
socialist in orientation, brought Germany to its knees. Werner Jochman, citing a
variation of the cultural code model, noted, “[t]he simple, easily understood
[anti-Semitic] formulas corresponded with the undifferentiated thinking of the sol-
diers who readily absorbed them.”57 An example of such a formula was a pamphlet
targeting soldiers in the 19th Infantry Division in 1918. “Open your eyes!,” it stated.
“Who sat at home profiting from war industries? Who sat in the casinos and at
writing desks? The Jews. Which doctors protected their own from the trenches?
Who had us, no matter how badly we were shot, always proclaimed fit
for duty?”58 According to the military and the various Free Corps sanctioned by
the SPD government, the self-proclaimed soldiers’ and workers’ councils were the
true bearers of revolution.
The rapid demobilization of the imperial army and its return home to a chaotic
and defeated homeland alarmed an officer corps fearful of the Bolshevik infec-
tion. After returning from Russia in December 1918, the 23rd Landwehr
Division reported the need for officers to protect their troops from those
“Russian-Bolshevik” and “Jewish-International” segments of the population
capable of endangering the morale of “frail” soldiers. The report insisted that,
“Jews seek with all possible means to get close to German soldiers and influence
them with international ideas.”59 The March 1919 law concerning the creation of
a provisional Reichswehr warned against admitting soldiers with leftist sympa-
thies, providing yet another reason to exclude Jews. The text further identified
Jews as comprising a majority of the leaders of the Spartacist movement, charging
them with “playing a decisive role in the Munich and Berlin uprisings.”60 The
Reichswehr would be even more “selective” than its predecessor.

56
Zechlin, Die deutsche Politik, 565.
57
Werner Jochman, “Die Ausbreitung des Antisemitismus,” in Deutsches Judentum in Krieg und
Revolution, 1916–1923, ed. Werner Mosse (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1971), 437–43.
58
Pamphlet, December 12, 1918, BA-MA Freiburg, N 280/59a.
59
Bericht der 23. Landwehr Division über die Ursachen des Zusammenbruches des Disziplins,
Entwicklung der Zustände und Tätigkeit der Soldatenräte, December 30, 1918, BA-MA Freiburg,
PH 8/III/3.
60
Das Gesetz über die provisorische Reichswehr vom 6. März 1919, BA-MA Freiburg, W-10/
52140-15.17.
638 BRIAN E. CRIM

Violence emanating from the organized extreme Right was a constant state of
affairs in Germany beginning with the November Revolution and ending with
the failure of the Hitler Putsch in November 1923. In 1920, Alfred Roth, a
noted anti-Semite before World War I and a founder of the German
Nationalist Protection and Defiance Federation, published a pamphlet entitled
“Judaism and Bolshevism—Disclosures of Jewish Secret Documents: An
Exhortation and Warning in the Last Hour.” Roth may have been a voice in
the wilderness, but his supposition that the November Revolution involved
“Russian and German Jews working in conspiratorial harmony” was an article
of faith in rightist circles.61 Men such as Roth provided direction and purpose
for the spate of violence. The perception that bolshevism posed an imminent
threat opened the floodgates for both collective and vigilante action. The mur-
derers of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, whose trials occurred during
the height of the Spartacist Revolt, received laughable sentences. The judicial
system, a holdover from the imperial era, legitimized the notion that violence
against the Left was both understandable and tolerated. Attorneys for the defen-
dants argued that their clients were so afraid of bolshevism and the damage the
two Spartacist leaders could do to Germany that they had no choice but to kill
them. One lawyer for the defense submitted newspaper articles about the evils
of communism and revolution into the record. A defendant testified that it was
easy to identify Luxemberg’s Jewish nose and did not deny giving the order to
“beat the Jewish pig dead.” The fact that Judeo-bolshevism was invoked by
the defense with relative success in such a high-profile trial is telling.62 Robert
Gerwarth notes that “[t]he dehumanized (‘human animal’) and denationalized
(Bolshevik) enemy could be tortured and killed without remorse, because
these acts were legitimized and necessitated by the holiness of the cause: the sal-
vation of the nation threatened by the socialist abyss.”63 Luxemberg and
Liebknecht were among the first victims of the paroxysm of violence extending
across central Europe as far as the Baltics.
The Free Corps fighting in the east, like the army before them, isolated and
criminalized Jews and believed firmly that they were synonymous with the
destructive forces arrayed against Germany. The formidable mythology of the
Free Corps, the primary source of postwar violence, ensured the preservation
of Judeo-bolshevism as a ghastly construct throughout the interwar period.
Free Corps volunteers derived from numerous populations, including some
Jews, whose primary interest was to continue living a military existence. The
subject of the Free Corps is a treasure trove for literary scholars interested in
gaining insight into the postwar zeitgeist, but determining the Free Corps’

61
Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers, 233.
62
Memo, February 27, 1919, BA-MA Freiburg, PH8 V/2.
63
Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-Revolution,” 195.
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 639
motivations or even the full extent of their activity is difficult for historians forced
to wade through Nazi-era “official histories” and limited official documents. The
spotty existing files from selected Free Corps read like other military “after-
action” reports and sometimes include valuable unit diaries.64 One diary entry
from a captain stationed in Silesia recounted what happened when a Jew asked
to see him. “Although I avoid meeting Jews, I let him in to hear what he
wanted from me,” the captain wrote. “And there he stood and made a suggestion
to me as an old Prussian officer!!! I should sell him a machine gun, which he
would then give to the Poles. My answer was the only correct one. An extremely
forceful blow from my horsewhip over his crooked nose! Then my men came in
and beat him half dead and took the 1,000 marks he brought to buy the machine
gun.” The entry stated that the Jew was taken before the rest of the unit where he
received further beatings, enough “so that he would have to spend six weeks in a
hospital to recover his health.”65
In Posen, Jews were singled out for avoiding service in defense of the city and
punished by the police. Jews were also placed in a central location so that they
would not try to escape and undermine morale in the city.66 Another Free
Corps report from Upper Silesia accused Jews of running messages between
German communists and the Poles and recommended that the municipal build-
ings be secured by the military in response.67 One summer night in 1919 along
the Polish-Lithuanian border, ten to twelve drunken German soldiers ransacked
and fired shots at a local Jewish theater. After the military police arrived to restore
order, some of the soldiers threatened the police, and the soldiers had to be
subdued. The report did not mention or posit an explanation for the attack on
the theater.68
Attacking Jews was a symbolic act on the part of the extremists. Free Corps
advertisements and internal communications suggest that the Free Corps used
the fact that some well-known German communists were Jews to galvanize
public support and attract new members. Riddled with references to communists
and revolutionaries, the Free Corps papers implied that the German Jewish popu-
lation was synonymous with treason and Germany’s destruction.69 This

64
Most of the files concerning the Freikorps were destroyed during an American air raid in World
War II. The surviving records comprise a relatively small record group located in Freiburg.
65
Auzug aus meinem Tagebuch über die Grenzschutzkämpfe 1918/19 in Schlesien bei Deutsch-
Watenberg, Kempen u.s.w., BA-MA Freiburg, PH 26/34, 11.
66
Geschichte des Grenzschutzes Posen, West Abschnitt Birnbaum (1918–1919), BA-MA Freiburg,
PH 26/33, 23.
67
Stinnesbeck, Bruno Uffz., Das Oberschlesische Freiwilligen Korps (1918–1919), BA-MA
Freiburg, PH 26/22, 8.
68
Report, July 10, 1919, BA-MA Freiburg, RH 69/192, 246.
69
Das Freikorps Lichtsclag mit der Batterie Hasenclever 1919 und 1920 gegen den Bolschewismus
im Ruhrgebiet, BA-MA Freiburg, PH 26/11, 1.
640 BRIAN E. CRIM

propaganda fueled the rage of those elements of the Free Corps already predis-
posed toward regarding Jews as natural enemies of the German people.
All of central Europe was a battlefield, and German Jews were no less
threatened by right-wing violence than their besieged coreligionists in the east.
Anti-Semitic violence spiked in 1919 and 1920 despite a mostly sympathetic,
albeit helpless government.70 Violence against Jews culminated in an outright
pogrom in the Berlin Scheunenviertel Riots of November 1923. Rioters
swept through the largely Jewish neighborhood, mostly filled with eastern
Jewish refugees, shouting, “Beat the Jews to death” and “Out with the eastern
Jews.”71 The National Association of Jewish Combat Veterans (RjF) rushed to
defend the neighborhood, convinced that the violence was linked to the Hitler
Putsch in Munich. Whatever antipathy German Jews had for eastern Jews, the
RjF recognized that the looters saw all Jews as the enemy.72
The pogrom was significant, but it was the murder of Foreign Minister Walther
Rathenau, the prominent Jewish industrialist and proud nationalist, that demon-
strated the power of the Judeo-Bolshevik charge. Members of the Organization
Consul assassinated Rathenau on June 24, 1922. His assassins saw him as the per-
sonification of the Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy and proof that the
November Revolution that ushered in the SPD government was, in fact, a
“Jew Revolution.”73 German Jews interpreted the rash of assassinations of
Weimar politicians, Rathenau especially, as an attack on all Jews. To a Jewish
community suffering through the early years of the republic, Rathenau’s appoint-
ment signaled potential to build a bridge between “Germandom” and Judaism.
To the Right, he was a dangerous Judeo-Bolshevik responsible for enslaving
Germany on behalf of its enemies.74 As a cultural code, the violence directed
against Germany’s Jewish citizens was unambiguous—Judaism was synonymous
with bolshevism. While the other codes still applied (capitalism, socialism, cos-
mopolitanism, and modernity), bolshevism threatened to engulf the nation
between 1918 and 1923.
The concept of Judeo-bolshevism was already familiar to Germans indepen-
dent of the Nazi Party’s efforts or those of other fringe völkisch groups lurking
in the shadows of Weimar’s political landscape. What distinguished the Nazi
party from innumerable other right-wing paramilitary groups was its consistent
and effective propaganda linking Jews to Germany’s internal chaos and external

70
Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt. Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik
(Bonn: Dietz, 1999), 51.
71
Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of German History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 160.
72
“Die November-Pogrome vor Gericht,” Der Schild, June 1, 1924.
73
Carole Fink, “The Murder of Walter Rathenau,” Judaism 44, no. 3 (Summer 1995): 11.
74
Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 2003),
138–155.
 SPECTER OF JUDEO-BOLSHEVISM 641
enemies. Hitler may have altered his tactics after the disastrous November 1923
putsch, but his thoughts on Judeo-bolshevism were already established. Hitler’s
worldview, an unoriginal construct derived from existing racist and anti-
Semitic tropes, maintained that Jews aligned themselves with such international
forces as capitalism and communism to undermine the integrity of other races
and nations.75 In Mein Kampf, Hitler outlined his ambitious and racially defined
foreign policy. The true struggle was against “Jewish world Bolshevization,”
which he claimed, “requires a clear attitude towards Soviet Russia.”76
The essential elements of the Judeo-Bolshevik specter originated even before
World War I when the military and its supporters linked the Jewish minority to
Social Democracy. The military’s prolonged exposure to the eastern Jews and the
eastern territories in general generated frustration, disgust, resentment, and even-
tually fear. The last two years of World War I witnessed a discernible shift in the
content and intensity of anti-Semitism in central Europe. In Germany, the mili-
tary community, which included a multitude of paramilitary associations, was at
the forefront of redefining the context of the Jewish Question in the postwar
environment. Hitler’s invocation of Judeo-bolshevism as an existential threat to
German civilization provided the ideological underpinning for racial war and
eventually genocide. If industrial killing and the specter of Judeo-bolshevism
were legacies of the war, then Auschwitz was the bitter fruit of the union
between these two legacies.

LYNCHBURG COLLEGE

75
Eberhard Jäckel dissected Hitler’s writings and speeches methodically in Eberhard Jäckel, Hitlers
Weltanschauung. Entwurf einer Herrschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1969). Hitler’s influences
concerning Judeo-bolshevism are delineated in Lorna Waddington, Hitler’s Crusade: Bolshevism and the
Myth of the International Jewish Conspiracy (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007).
76
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 61.