That the Wehrmacht participated fully in a racial war of extermination on 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ³ Jews suffered the consequences of revolution and resurgent nationalism in the borderlands between Germany and Russia after World War I, but it was inside Germany that the construct 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 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 constructed and set to work, without the experience and memory of the Great War.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵ The November Revolution of 1918 was a perfect storm in which preexisting 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 bolshevism, 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 dizzying 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 particular set of ideas and a preference for specific social, political and moral norms.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷ German 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.Footnote 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 ideology into the mass politics of the imperial era. Initially an umbrella group for disgruntled 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.”Footnote 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 hierarchy. 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 worldview.Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹¹

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.Footnote 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 internationalism, Jewry, Social Democracy, and the left-radical parties.” Weimar authorities investigating Organization Consul “murder commandos” discovered their orders to “rid the German government of socialists and Jews.”Footnote 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 government and all that it came to symbolize.Footnote ¹⁴

The associative merger between Jews and bolshevism derived from the widespread 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.Footnote 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” values.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 considered a prelude to “overthrowing the state.”Footnote ²⁰ The Reichstag witnessed a parade of military officials denouncing Social Democracy and its Jewish supporters, 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 organizations outlining the danger the movement posed to the empire. The memo first outlined how Social Democracy infiltrated Germany's economic sector and university system. Next, the author declared a metaphorical war against Jewish influence: “[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 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.”Footnote ²¹ The memo contained few concrete recommendations 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.Footnote 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 conditions 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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 dismissal 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!”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 revolution to transform them into the more insidious Bolshevik menace.

Most German Jews celebrated the August 1914 declaration of war and welcomed 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.Footnote ²⁷ 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!”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 quarterly 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.”Footnote 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 compulsory labor harmed what had begun as a productive relationship between the German military and eastern Jewish populations.Footnote 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 preventing an epidemic among the comingled populations. Even before the occupation, Germans living in eastern Prussia attributed outbreaks of typhus to peddlers, seasonal workers, and “wild transmigrants,” many of whom happened to be Jews.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ³⁴ Gottfried Frey, the medical officer in charge of Poland, dispatched 165 mobile delousing machines, 127 steam disinfection machines, and 320 formalin chambers throughout the countryside. He eventually blamed the disease on Jewish indolence and antiquated religious customs. Not surprisingly, German authorities expressed greater animosity for Jews as conditions 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.”Footnote 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 subjected 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.Footnote 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' obsession 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 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 comments on Jews to underscore what they believed was the military's natural inclination 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.Footnote 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 disgusted 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 hardworking 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!”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 “international-socialist tendencies.” German officials noted that the prospect of equal rights for minorities explained eastern Jews' initial enthusiasm for the revolution.Footnote ⁴⁰ Another report dated shortly before the Bolshevik phase of the revolution noted that the local Jewish press “welcomed the Russian Revolution in hopes that it would end restrictions on Jews” and alleviate an atmosphere conducive to pogroms.Footnote 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 countermeasures against the “harmful side effects of the Russian Revolution on our current conditions.”Footnote ⁴² That the military connected revolution abroad to deteriorating 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 outwardly kind mask—our most serious enemy. For our soldiers the continuing attempts of bribery and revolutionary machinations are an increasing danger.”Footnote 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 they spread about themselves, but only a few saw further and sensed the danger that began to appear for our people.”Footnote 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 thinking about Judeo-bolshevism.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 revolutions.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵² The military blamed soldiers' close proximity to Jews for the rapid formation of soldiers' councils 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.Footnote ⁵³ Another report accused “Warsaw Jews” of crossing the border and spreading propaganda and corrupting soldiers.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Fears of bolshevism abroad merged with 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.Footnote 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 soldiers who readily absorbed them.”Footnote 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?”Footnote 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 infection. 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.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The March 1919 law concerning the creation of a provisional Reichswehr warned against admitting soldiers with leftist sympathies, 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.”Footnote ⁶⁰ The Reichswehr would be even more “selective” than its predecessor.

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.Footnote 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 murderers 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 defendants 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.Footnote 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 salvation of the nation threatened by the socialist abyss.”Footnote 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' 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁶⁶ Another Free Corps report from Upper Silesia accused Jews of running messages between German communists and the Poles and recommended that the municipal buildings be secured by the military in response.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 population was synonymous with treason and Germany's destruction.Footnote ⁶⁹ This propaganda fueled the rage of those elements of the Free Corps already predisposed 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷²

The pogrom was significant, but it was the murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, the prominent Jewish industrialist and proud nationalist, that demonstrated the power of the Judeo-Bolshevik charge. Members of the Organization Consul assassinated Rathenau on June 24, 1922. His assassins saw him as the personification of the Judeo-Bolshevik world conspiracy and proof that the November Revolution that ushered in the SPD government was, in fact, a “Jew Revolution.”Footnote 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 appointment 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.Footnote 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, cosmopolitanism, and modernity), bolshevism threatened to engulf the nation between 1918 and 1923.

The concept of Judeo-bolshevism was already familiar to Germans independent 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 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 eventually 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 military 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.