The Nazi War on
International Communism

A central part of Nazi dogma was that the Jews had created the hateful ideal of equality under the law. To Hitler’s mind, any political society not founded upon a distinct pecking order — with a superman like himself at the top — was the unnatural outcome of Jewish manipulation.

If all Western democracies were therefore suspect, communism — which claimed that all working people were comrades who deserved equal rewards — was doubly damned. The Nazis made much of the fact that Karl Marx was born a Jew, though they neglected to mention that his family had embraced Lutheranism, and that Marx himself often denounced his own race.

Of course Lenin was accused of being a secret Jew who was in on the conspiracy, and the main aim of Judeo-Marxism-Leninism was to unleash the robotic hordes of brainwashed communist warriors against the noble Nordic elite.

This theme played well for Hitler in Germany. Fear of communism helped create support for the Nazi party and its huge corps of professional thugs, who engaged in public brawls with German Marxists whenever they could get the upper hand.

In the 1920s, Hitler said that the Leninists had murdered millions upon millions of their own countrymen, "partly on the scaffold, partly by machine guns and similar means, partly in veritable slaughterhouses." Reaching a hair-raising climax, Hitler bellowed that "we all know that this scourge is approaching, that it is also coming upon Germany."

Speaking in hypnotic rhythms that overwhelmed the rational mind, Hitler left his audiences in a fury of righteous indignation coupled with a terrifying sense of impending disaster.

Devastated by their defeat in World War I and the terms of the Versailles treaty, crushed by the astonishing hyperinflation that destroyed their economy in 1923, and daunted by the international catastrophe of the Great Depression after 1929, many Germans found it natural to adopt Hitler’s belief that they were the victims of a hugely wicked conspiracy. Thank God that they had the Fuhrer to save them from the fearful evils of the world!

Most believers in Nazi propaganda were easy converts when Hitler claimed that the most dangerous of the conspirators who aimed to destroy Germany could be found in Moscow.

Moscow, the Communist Capital, in Winter

Hitler preached that there was one big reason why the Russians had fallen so completely under the spell of Jewish communism: they were Slavs, a subhuman race that was barely worthy of being slaughtered by Nazi bullets and bayonets. Hitler expected that there would be little resistance from such creatures when it came time to attack them. "We’ll kick the front door in," he bragged, "and the whole rotten structure will come crashing down."

One of Hitler’s constant refrains was that Germans all over Europe had been crammed into cruelly divided and reduced territories for centuries, and that their defeat in World War I had allowed their enemies to hedge them in with "artificial" nations like Poland and Czechoslovakia. This was an intolerable situation, for all Germans deserved to live together as one great family.

But the reunion of all Germans in one German superstate would only be a beginning. In the 1930s the world heard endless demands from Hitler for more Lebensraum ("living space"), and the obvious targets for seizure and colonization were the vast spaces of the Ukraine and Russia.

Hitler did his best to convince himself that the Soviet empire of the early 1940s represented an easy prey. After all, hadn’t the thin population of Finland nearly beaten off the forces of the communist colossus when Stalin ordered its invasion in 1939?

The German dictator was not alone in badly underestimating the USSR. In London, the British foreign ministry suggested to Winston Churchill that Nazi lightning war would defeat the Soviets in six weeks. In Washington, FDR heard from the American intelligence community that the USSR could resist Hitler’s aggression for no more than three months.

After the Nazi attack against Russia (code-named Operation Barbarossa) was launched on 23 June 1941, Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, revealed that the war would target civilians just as much as soldiers, and that Hitler wanted 30 million Russians, Ukrainians, Jews, and other Soviet nationalities to die during the course of the German conquest.

Nazi Troops Invade Russia, 22 June 1941

Thus Hitler’s forces stormed into the Soviet Union with the intention of killing as many of Stalin’s people as possible. Whole armies of Soviet prisoners of war were herded behind the barbed wire of hastily constructed German camps and left there to perish of starvation. Millions of Slavic villagers were closed up in barns and burned alive. Firing squads and mobile units using poison gas killed civilians by the hundreds of thousands throughout the long campaign on Soviet soil.

Germans were not alone in furthering this war of extermination. In October of 1941, Hitler himself described the forces that he was hurling against the Soviets: "In the ranks of our German soldiers, making common cause with them, march Italians, Finns, Hungarians, Romanians, Slovaks, and Croats." He added that soldiers from Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Norway, and France had joined the crusade against Jewish communism.

Before the Red Army had driven the forces of fascism back into central Europe, over 20 million of the USSR’s people had perished.

© 1998 by Larry Hedrick. All rights reserved.

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