A converastion with the historian Jochen Hellbeck on his recent book, World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the Fate of the Jews. This major new history transforms our understanding of World War II — tracing the conflict and its most infamous crime, the Holocaust, to Germany’s implacable hostility toward Soviet Russia. Hellbeck plumbs newly declassified archives and previously undiscovered sources—testimonies, diaries, and dispatches from soldiers and civilians, Soviet and German—to offer a unique history that takes account of both sides. He reconstructs the years leading up to the war when “Europe against Bolshevism” was the Nazis’ most fervid rallying cry, and documents their annihilatory ambitions on the battlegrounds in the East.