Two new books explore the circumstances surrounding the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. In his monumental research, Hellbeck emphasizes that Adolf Hitler understood the German-Soviet war as a fundamentally ideological conflict. To Hitler, he argues, Jews and the Bolsheviks were inseparable evils—the “world enemy no. 1”—to be exterminated. The murder of Jews in the Soviet territories occupied by Nazi forces in 1941 preceded the genocide of European Jews. During the first year of the