A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism by Paul Hanebrink Eric Kurlander A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism. Paul Hanebrink. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 368. Cloth $29.95. ISBN 978-0674047686. The myth of Judeo-Bolshevism is a recurring theme in the historiography on antisemitism and the Holocaust. But until now, to my knowledge, there have been no academic monographs dedicated to examining the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism in its own right, which makes Paul Hanebrink's new book particularly valuable. [End Page 607] The first chapter begins with an April 1919 letter, in which Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII, characterizes the postwar German revolution as the plot of "pale, dirty … sinister and repulsive" Russian Jews. Pacelli's concerns were shared by nationalists and conservatives across continental Europe—from Hungary, Poland, and Romania to Germany, Austria, and France. Jewish intellectuals, socialist and liberal alike, made efforts to reject such prejudices, noting the relatively modest number of Jews in communist movements. But "against the backdrop of the long association of Jews with political misrule and subversion" (29), exacerbated by war and revolution, fears of Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy proliferated, becoming embedded in the party programs and state propaganda of many postwar regimes. Nowhere was this institutionalized hatred of "Jewish-Bolshevism" stronger than in postwar Eastern Europe, as Hanebrink argues in chapter 2. Caught in a vicious civil war with Bolshevik revolutionaries, Ukrainian nationalists and Russian White Army leaders murdered tens of thousands of Jews––easy scapegoats in the fight for national sovereignty over contested spaces. Similar fears of Jewish Bolshevist party activists and saboteurs flourished across Hungary, Romania, and Poland with similarly murderous results. In light of these outbreaks of violence, Jewish diplomats and intellectuals carried out a public relations campaign aimed at making Jewish rights and the protection of Jewish communities a central feature of postwar peace negotiations. Some progress was made, including a Polish Minority Treaty granting rights to Jews and other ethnic minorities. And, yet, efforts by Western states to protect Jewish minorities also fueled fears of Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy in Central and Eastern Europe. As Hanebrink states with only modest hyperbole at the outset of chapter 3, "Judeo-Bolshevism made Adolf Hitler" (83). Spurred on by German émigrés from the Soviet Union, Hitler came increasingly to view Judeo-Bolshevism as responsible for all of Germany's ills––the lost war, the Versailles Treaty, left-wing revolution, democracy, internationalism, "cultural bolshevism," and so on. In campaigning for middle-class votes, the NSDAP increasingly highlighted the dangers of Judeo-Bolshevist violence. In formulating a coherent foreign policy after 1933, Nazi propagandists envisioned a global coalition of anticommunist states and peoples, from Imperial Japan and Fascist Italy to the Spanish Falangists. To be sure, Polish and Hungarian nationalists, wary of Nazi intentions, refused to sign the ensuing anti-Comintern Pact (1936). But few European nationalists were willing, as we learn in chapter 4, to stand in the way of the Third Reich's military campaign against Judeo-Bolshevism, Operation Barbarossa, which, of course, culminated in the "Final Solution" to the "Jewish Question." Indeed, it didn't take much convincing by the Nazis for French, Romanian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Latvian, and Hungarian nationalist regimes, preoccupied as they were by the myth of Judeo-Bolshevism, to participate in expropriating, deporting, and murdering European Jewry. Real Soviet atrocities, such as the murder of thousands of Polish officers at Katyn, only reinforced Goebbels's apocalyptic calls to "defend the West [End Page 608] from what he described as hordes of Asiatic barbarians driven relentlessly by Judeo-Bolshevik slave masters" (162). The collapse of the Third Reich and emergence of communist regimes across Central and Eastern Europe did not dispel the myth, we learn in chapter 5, so much as transmogrify it. Due to "the brutality of Soviet occupation forces; the sudden visibility of [returning] Jews; and the new power exercised by Eastern Europe's Communist parties" (171), many Eastern and Central European peoples feared a return of Judeo-Bolshevism. Hence, instead of receiving postwar restitution, Jews continued to experience persecution and pogroms from nationalist antisemites and communist party members alike, who portrayed the...