Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning by Timothy Snyder Read Free Book Online

in 1919 collapsed into a complicated civil war in which some hundred thousand Jews were murdered by soldiers on all sides: Bolsheviks, the anti-Bolshevik armies known as the Whites, and above all soldiers of the independent Ukrainian state. Most of these perpetrators, regardless of their identities or loyalties, had learned violence against Jews in the Russian imperial army. Very often their Jewish victims were people who had been deported during the war by the Russian imperial policy and therefore lacked security and connections where they were.
    The vanquished adherents of the Judeobolshevik thesis were among the hundreds of thousands of defeated Russian imperial subjects who flooded defeated Germany. One of them brought a copy of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, which appeared in German translation in January 1920. Among those fleeing Lenin’s triumph were Germans from the Baltic region who could convey the Judeobolshevik idea in German without a text. These included Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter and Alfred Rosenberg, two early Nazi influences on Hitler. In 1919 and 1920, having spoken with people who knew the
Protocols
and having read the
Protocols
himself, Hitler assimilated the Judeobolshevik myth and the notion that Jews kill by starvation. These ideas were at the time a matter of intense debate. In July 1920, the representative of Soviet power in Berlin claimed that most Jews were bourgeois, had opposed the revolution, and had no future on Soviet territory. They would not rule but be “destroyed.” This perspective could not persuade Germans who were seeking a single key to the revolutionary moment, one that could be turned either way, toward revolution or counterrevolution. At this very moment, Scheubner-Richter was in Munich gathering money and men to mount an armed expedition against the Bolsheviks, with special emphasis on liberating Ukraine.
    The Judeobolshevik idea has a specific historical origin: an extension of the antisemitism of official Russia, an adaptation of Christian apocalyptic visions during a time of crisis, an explanation of the collapse of the ancient imperial order, a battle cry during a civil war, and a form of consolation after defeat. When the Nazi movement began, armed counterrevolution was under way in Russia and Ukraine, and its victory was still a real prospect in the minds of people who mattered to Hitler. For a brief moment in 1920, the Red Army seemed to be on its way to Germany. As the soldiers of Bolshevism advanced on Warsaw that August, it seemed that a final confrontation of the forces of revolution and counterrevolution would soon take place. But after a surprising and decisive Polish victory in that battle and the war, and with the consolidation of the European system that followed in 1921, the character of the problem changed.
    Scheubner-Richter’s attempt to assemble an anti-Bolshevik army collapsed in 1922. When he marched arm in arm with Hitler in Munich in 1923, the Nazi putsch was, for him, a final lurch towards the East. When Scheubner-Richter was killed and Hitler was imprisoned, some Nazis saw the failure as a triumph not so much of the young Weimar Republic in Germany as of the Judeobolshevik power they believed they were opposing. As Hitler composed
My Struggle
in prison in 1924, the Bolsheviks became less a concrete group of political rivals and more a way to connect his ideas about Jews to a piece of territory. For Hitler, who knew little about the Russian Empire, and who thought in grand abstractions, the Judeobolshevik idea was not the end of a Russian struggle but the beginning of a German crusade, not a myth arising from painful events but the glimmering light of eternal truth.
    The Judeobolshevik myth seemed to provide the missing piece of Hitler’s entire scheme, uniting the local with the planetary, the promise of victorious colonial war against Slavs with a glorious anti-colonial struggle against Jews. A single attack on a single state, the Soviet