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Jochen Hellbeck, "World Enemy No. 1: Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews" (Penguin Group, 2025)
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- [00:00]
Johann Helbeck
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
Marshall Po
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
- [00:59]
Joe Taska
So good, so good, so good.
- [01:02]
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- [01:27]
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- [01:57]
Johann Helbeck
Welcome.
- [01:58]
Marshall Po
To the New Books Network.
- [02:01]
Joe Taska
This is the New Books Network. My name is Joe Taska. Today I'm joined by the German historian Johann Helbeck. He's written a readable and thought provoking new history of World War II. Specifically the German Soviet War from 1941 to 1945. It's called World Enemy Number One, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia and the Fate of the Jews. Johan is a distinguished professor of history at Rutgers University specializing in modern Russia, the Soviet Union and the history of World War II. Jochen, thank you so much for taking the time today.
- [02:42]
Johann Helbeck
Oh, thank you, Joe. It's a pleasure to speak with you.
- [02:46]
Joe Taska
There is no shortage of books that have been published on Russia, the Second World War. In the past 80 years, millions of titles have been released covering every conceivable aspect of this conflict. You contributed to that literature 10 years ago with a book about Stalingrad. My question is off the bat. Why did you feel it was necessary to write this particular book?
- [03:13]
Johann Helbeck
So this book has been very long in the making, and I started conceiving of this book even before I planned to write the book on Spelengrad, which just mentioned that, in fact is a take out of this much larger project, which I started not knowing that it would actually culminate in this particular monograph. But nonetheless, the origins go at least 20 years back. And that was when I had finished work on a previous project as a Soviet specialist working on first person accounts from the Soviet Union from the Stalin period, mostly the pre war Stalin period. So I had explored, I had discovered in former Soviet archives a wealth of personal diaries from the 1930s, mostly. And I was really intrigued by these personal horizons in a revolutionary, illiberal society. And my research led me to overturn a widespread Western assumption that people living under Stalin's rule were like Winston Smith's, like in Orwell's 1984. They hated the Big Brother state and, and they just waited for opportunities to voice their hatred. This is how Winston Smith, you know, he discovers a diary, a diary book in an, in a. In an old vintage store, and then writes, I hate Big Brother as the first, the opening line of his diary. And while there's plenty of conflict with Soviet power in these diaries, the tendency really is to sort of think of themselves on the part of the authors of these texts, alongside the revolution and alongside also the regime, and to essentially cultivate a sense of self in this flow. So I, I had worked on this project for a long time as a Soviet historian establishing, you know, the contours of what we can call a Soviet subjectivity. And, and coming out of that work, I was really interested in how this aligns with and compares to German, specifically Nazi German conceptions of self. And so I had conceived of this project to essentially think about, you know, the new man, the new Soviet man, and sort of the new Nazi man, if you want, of course, including men and women, men in the generic sense. And that was in some sense the beginning of this new project. I had a short but very formative conversation with Omar Bartov on this subject. And initially, my leanings were much more intellectual. Historians, conceptions of subjectivity here and there, intellectual debates here and there. And he then just said, well, why not study Stalingrad? And I had to sort of process that first. And then it occurred to me that this is actually a perfect suggestion because it is a very prolonged battle, it is a prolonged standoff, and it is a prolonged clash of war cultures, and also probably an entangled moment that offers itself for this kind of work. And that is how I essentially came to Stalingrad per se. And in the course of my work on this new project, I was not successful in finding an equal amount of diaries on both sides of the front lines. I found a lot more German diaries and Soviet ones. And I was getting frustrated about this imbalance. I started knocking at veterans doors. I got access to these veterans, spoke with them on the former Soviet and German side. What resulted from that was an online project called Facing Stalingrad, comparing interviews and also photographs of the veterans on both sides. And then I hit on a singular trove on the Soviet side of wartime interviews with defenders of stalingrad. More than 200 interviews that were conducted by a commission of Moscow historians who very early on realized the world historical significance of the German Soviet standoff. And they sent historians and stenographers to all the flashpoints. And so, including just Stalingrad, where during and shortly after the battle, they interviewed upward of 200 participants of the battle. And this trove was just so amazing that I made it into a separate volume. But always thinking about sort of the larger stakes, the comparative stakes and the interaction. And that is how this volume, Stalingrad, then, subsequently led to this book on the German Soviet war really as a stepping stone and involving some of the same sources. So one of the most important sources that I have used in this new book are interviews. More than 200, actually close to 1,000 of them, that the same historians from Moscow, plus other historians with whom they then teamed up, also historians from Kiev, historians from Minsk, who formed commissions of their own and interviewed people who had lived under Nazi rule during the Nazi occupation. And those interviews, those voices, form an essential part of this new book.
- [09:23]
Joe Taska
Now, in World Enemy Number One, you talk about how the subject of this particular volume is very personal for you because your maternal grandfather was nearly killed by Soviet laborers at the end of the war. Tell us that story and how you came to study Russian and the Soviet Union at university.
- [09:46]
Johann Helbeck
I realized while thinking about this book and while writing it, how much my personal story matters in that. And that's why I also decided to write about this in the introduction. So I want to begin on my father's side. My father, who is still alive and now just had his 98th birthday, he actually fought in the war as a 17 year old and he fought on the Eastern front. By then the Eastern front was so close that he could actually travel from the Eastern front to Berlin using the Suburban train, the S Bahn. So he was stationed right where the Soviet forces staged their final attack on Berlin, crossing the Oder River. And he suffered a wound to his leg on April 18, 1945. And it was a wound that was grave enough for him to, you know, retreat, to be able to retreat past the SS lines that were making sure no one would retreat, but also not a life threatening wound. So it was a wound that allowed him actually to survive and actually make it to Hamburg and to safety. My father retained lifelong strong interest in the Soviet Union in all things Russian or Soviet related. He joined the foreign service and actually wanted to become a Russian specialist. And just because there was a, an overflow of like minded candidates, he was redirected toward East Asia and became a Chinese specialist. But he did amass a sizable Soviet Russian library and pass it on to me. So one of the first books I, I read from this shell was Basili Grossman's Life and Fate in his German original, the first German translation from the early 1980s. So I owe my father a great deal in sort of setting my compass East. We also lived in East Germany during the 1980s. We were, you know, a West German diplomatic family living in East Germany. That's how I became interested in, in the Soviet Union in the first place. I also came to see and really experience almost like next door to where we lived, the Soviet, there was a huge Soviet war memorial. And so I, I saw the memory culture in action. I became intrigued. I can't claim that at the time I really sympathized with it, but I saw it and much later I came to comprehend it anew as a historian working on this very complex subject. So from my father I inherited a great deal of curiosity and I think open mindedness about the Soviet Union and open mindedness that is also part of his own way of being a diplomat, of always listening to what others have to say. And I think I got a lot from my own father in that respect as well as from my advisor, Columbia Leopold Heimson, who always said, listen to what the sources say and pay that respect. My mom's story is different in that she grew up in the southwest of Germany that would eventually fall into French occupation. She grew up in a textile manufacturing town. And her dad, he was a baker, but he was associated with a wealthy family. And they appointed him manager of a bobbin producing factory in the 1930s. And that factory then became part of the war economy in the 1940s. It helped produce weapons. And as part of that conversion, more than a thousand forced laborers, predominantly Soviet ones, were brought to that family, to that factory where they worked throughout the war. And at the end of the war, the French forces came and liberated that forced labor camp. And the forced laborer came up and they asked the French soldiers whether they had permission to kill the SS guard who had abused them. And they got the permission and shot the SS guard. And then someone said we should also shoot the director of this whole thing, which was my grandfather. But then someone else or others interceded and said, no, the director was actually a kind man and my grandfather's life was spared. And so whenever the subject of Russia or the Soviet Union came up on my mother's side, on the side of her family, I felt there was quite a dark cloud hanging over it. And my mom would regularly have or tell me that she had nightmares whenever I went to Russia to work in the archives. So her associations were anything but were. Were rather mixed or dark. And so I grew up under both influences. And I felt that both of these influences did shape me for a long time.
- [15:12]
Joe Taska
Now, as you alluded to earlier in our conversation, one of the primary themes of this book is the idea that Western countries have tended to minimize or even disregard the Soviet Union's contribution to winning the war. Why do you believe that? And why do you think this neglect of the Soviet war effort has persisted over the years?
- [15:41]
Johann Helbeck
So I want to distinguish between two things. I want to make strictly historical argument and not a historiographical one. So I, even though my publisher features this book as saying it is a historiographical intervention by saying the Eastern Front is the epicenter of it all, that argument is not new. And I think it is an argument really to do with sales of the book. And it's not something that I wrote and it's not in the book. But what the book does talk about is a striking disregard throughout history toward the Soviet. The monumental Soviet contribution to this war. And this starts in the war. This starts in the very war where my central protagonist on the Soviet side, who is Ilya Ehrenberg, the. The well known writer, critic and War reporter makes this observation in, you know, he makes it in 1945, but he's. He has this soup, saw this, this, this Suspicion already in 44, if not earlier, that the Western powers and the Western correspondents are practicing some sort of double bookkeeping, that they foreground their losses, their sacrifices, and are kind of reticent to talk about the immensely greater losses on the Soviet side, on the part of their Soviet ally. And he wonders why that is. And so there is the suspicion, are they really with us or are they in some sense against us? And so that is a lingering feeling that persists on the Soviet side that you can trace throughout the post war period. And that, of course, has been manufactured again in the present era. It is true. I mean, I'm kind of jumping to the end of the story already. We do see that with some few exceptions, there is a great deal of ignorance or just an unwillingness to engage with the Soviet losses in the war. And the exception really is the Nuremberg courtroom in 1945 and 1946, where virtually all listeners in the room are just really moved and spellbound by what the Soviet prosecutors, but also Soviet witnesses who are brought into the courtroom have to say about what it is that they endured. And there is in fact, a broad solidarity that I trace among the relatively few witnesses that all the allies brought to the courtroom, a solidarity with what they call the Russians, what the Russians had endured and how the Russians had been mistreated and how the Russians had been killed. And so this is voiced by several former victims, death camp inmates of French and Spanish origin who use the time they have to talk to really express this admiration toward the Russians. Most of these speakers were Communists, so there's clearly also a political axis at work. But what I wanted to say is just that there is a great deal of admiration across the board. Even the New York Times reports with great sympathy about the Soviet documentary film on Nazi atrocities that is shown in the Nuremberg courtroom and says that what we're seeing here is just dwarfing everything that was shown before, and that includes the US documentary film Nazi concentration camps, that the American prosecution had shown a few months earlier. So all of that is there, and then suddenly it goes from view. And that is what I discuss in my final chapter.
- [19:58]
Joe Taska
So it's interesting, it would seem to me, that while the Soviet Union's war effort wasn't given its full due, certainly in the immediate aftermath of the war and perhaps for the better part of the 20th century, in many ways, a number of historians in recent years have taken Great pains to rectify that situation. And I tried to investigate this just by looking at my own bookshelf. A couple of examples that I'd like to read. The American historian Victor Davis Hansen, in his book the Second World wars, says as a result of the Cold War, the Soviet war effort was often not given full credit in the anti communist west for its near virtuoso destruction of the German army, end quote. The British historian Andrew Roberts in his book the Storm of War, says, quote, it was the Russians who provided the oceans of blood necessary to defeat Germany. And it cannot be reiterated enough that out of every five Germans killed in combat, four died on the Eastern Front. It is the central statistic of the Second World War, end quote. Now those are just two examples of books that I just pulled off my shelf that clearly acknowledge the critical nature of the Soviet war effort. Is it fair to say, Johan, that these are the exceptions to the rule in your view?
- [21:37]
Johann Helbeck
I would say it's a minority view. I completely agree with you that this claim of mine is not novel. It is also not the central claim I'm making in the book. The book central claims are elsewhere, but it is being contested and recontested time and again. So the kind of interlocutors with whom I sort of, who I have in mind as I wrote this book are people like Anthony Beaver or Catherine Merridale or Brendan Sims who have either absolutely relegated to sort of a secondary level of the German Soviet war. That's Brandon Sims argument who says that Hitler was fully focused on a confrontation in the Anglo Saxon world and sort of contrives to present that as his central arena ideologically and politically. But even those who focus on the Soviet side, they will emphasize the suffering under their regime. They will emphasize how people were forced to fight in the war in which there was no meaning for them. They will stress the suffering, but not the identification with the war effort. And that identification for me is absolutely critical. So this, I think is one of the novel interventions of the book that I take very seriously what Ilya Ehrenberg writes. Ilya Ehrenberg in my reading is the essential central person on the Soviet side. He's perhaps even more essential than Joseph Stalin. He is the voice of Russia's war. And Russia, meaning multinational state that at the time was often referred to as Russia, including by Ehrenberg, but understood really as a multinational order. This sense, this identification, the lines of Ehrenberg's reporting, that has not been taken seriously by most Western historians who have taken seriously, but solely as a war propagandist as a. As a voice of the Kremlin, but not in other regards in my reading. Ehrenberg is of course, a propagandist, but he is also a documentarist of the first order. He wrote more than 1,000 editorials over the course of the war. That is more than one editorial per day. He published them in innumerable different newspapers, from army newspapers of the most various sorts to central papers such as Red Star and Pravda, to foreign newspapers including the New York Times. So he was tireless and insomniac and on a mission. Almost all of his articles start with a document. It can be a Soviet document when he writes about the Soviet defenders, but it's more often than not a German document, a military order, an excerpt from a diary or letters, things that had been brought to his attention because people knew that he was dissecting the Germans hearts and minds and using them for his propaganda. So he had a cache of wartime documents. I went to Ilya Ehrenberg's Moscow archive to actually find confirmation of the hard evidence that, in fact, here are the snippets that you can see, black and white with some markings that you received from the political departments of various armies, sometimes from the NKVD and other sources, or directly from his readers. And I take that documentation seriously. I actually read it at face value, and I have corroborating evidence that shows that Ehrenberg did not mess with his evidence. In fact, he was so incensed that some other reporters early on in the war did mess with the evidence that they changed some lines or connected some dots that he said, look, this is going to discredit us. We cannot afford to do that. And secondly, why do you need to do that? The deeds of the Germans speak so loudly and clearly, they don't need any commentary. So there's plenty of such evidence there. But there's also the documentary trail of the NKVD finding the diary of a German field Gestapo officer, bringing it to Ehrenberg's attention in translation. And then he writes a absolutely damning article that I've reproduced almost in full in the book. And it is an utter indictment of the sadism, the absolute cruelty of the Germans in the field, who are both sentimental and barbarian at the same time. There is hard evidence backing it up. The original diary, written in German, is fully preserved in the archive. So I don't have the evidence in all these cases, but I have enough evidence to suggest that Ehrenberg was a truthful documentarist. And that dimension to Ehrenberg and connecting his writings then to what I found in the interview cache that I mentioned, what the historians had collected, connecting these different lines, essentially, to build up a dossier of the Soviet wartime experience and one that actually speaks quite strongly in distinctly Soviet ways. That I think is where I would say this is new. And this is also in line with my earlier research on subject. Subjectivity. I see it now carried over into wartime. And this is something where a lot of historians have routinely talked about, surmised. This cannot be possibly what people have really thought. This is the regime speaking. This is the news speak. These are the politics. We have to locate the experience elsewhere. I'm not saying this is the total experience, but this is an important dimension of it. Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here who picked up my son from school.
- [28:22]
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- [28:26]
Johann Helbeck
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- [28:37]
Joe Taska
I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people killing each other.
- [28:41]
Johann Helbeck
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- [29:16]
Joe Taska
Let's get to the crux of your book. A central part of your thesis is that Hitler initially saw the Jews as a racial threat that had to be forcibly expelled from Germany, which explains the persecution that Jews faced in that country throughout the 1930s. But you say that Soviet Jews posed a different kind of threat to. To Germany, a political threat, because not only were they Jewish, but they were Communists, at least in Hitler's eyes. Judeo Bolsheviks, as he called them. In other words, Soviet Jews were a racial and an existential threat to the survival of the German people. Tell us more about why and how Hitler viewed Soviet Jews in particular as more than just a racial enemy and consequently saw them as more dangerous because of it.
- [30:18]
Johann Helbeck
So indeed, my book makes a strong distinction between the hatred Nazis had and articulated toward Jews as a racial alien. As an alien race that they wanted to remove, that they wanted to expel from Germany for the sake of their racial purification agenda. This is one point. But there is, on the other hand, a strong political hatred toward Communism. That political dimension to the rise of the Nazi Party has often been relegated to sort of a backseat in analyses of the Nazi rise to power, which focuses solely on their Nazi anti Semitism, as if the racial hatred of Jews in itself sort of ipso facto led to the Holocaust. And I challenge that view. For me it's the fusion of the racial and the political that is the dynamite or that essentially is the catalyst toward the mass killings. And that fusion is a fusion that takes place in the east. As the Nazis are looking at the Soviet Union as the sort of seedbed of communism, of what they call Judeo Bolshevism, a world ideology, the sole other ideology that they grant the, that they grant a worldwide influence except for their own ideology. And they really see themselves in a life and death rivalry with, with communism for good reasons, because communism was antithetical to the Nazi faith. Hitler at one point described communism as the most radical offspring of the Enlightenment seed. And you know, the Nazis were anti Enlightenment. The book burnings are an attempt to burn the products of learning of the Enlightenment. And the communist project was one that promised an interracial international solidarity among all workers. And that solidarity immediately undermined or challenged the kind of solidarity that the Germans that the Nazis were trying to create, trying to create in Germany. It essentially took German workers away from or threatened to take German workers away from the Nazi party. So there were good reasons to actually dislike Soviet Communism. Initially the hatred and the campaigning of the Nazis was domestic. So they, they campaigned against communism and that's how they came to party. Anti Communism was, was highly popular, even if, you know, carried out by plebeian and, and unseemly politicians like Hitler. The fact that they fought Communism made them the lesser evil and got them the backing of a lot of quote unquote respectable Germans at the time. Even so, all the time Hitler had a wide advisor and was talking about Judeo Bolshevism and really this fate coming out of Moscow. He was talking about the Cominter and he was talking about the Kremlin. And he imagined the Moscow Kremlin to be basically run by Jews. And so the wider significance disclosed itself in the 1930s when the Nazis began a comprehensive propaganda campaign against the Soviet Union. And they produce one so called anti Bolshevik show, a great anti Bolshevik show after another. And millions of Germans went to see these shows and were strongly shaped by them. And these shows for some reason have not gotten the attention that they deserve. We know of a few anti Jewish shows such as the exhibit on Degenerate art or the exhibit that was called the Eternal Jew. Those exhibits were actually part and parcel of the larger anti Bolshevik campaigning that the Nazis produced during this time. Often at the Nuremberg party rallies where these shows were kind of promulgated. And then they toured through all German cities. The Soviet enemy or the Communists as such. Communism as such was imagined as being Jewish. So even in their anti communism, even in the German realm, when they railed against Communists, the underlying sentiment by the Nazis was we are actually railing against and trying to destroy Jews. Because in their imagination, Communism was Jewish. There was just no other way. Communism was invented by a Jew. Karl Marx, they said, was Jewish. This is a Jewish faith to bring down the world. Hence every Communist in some sense is a open or disguised Jew. And there's plenty of evidence that I show in the book. As early as 1928, the Nazis scored their first breakthrough in parliament. They won 12 seats in parliament. And Hermann Goering was one of the first Nazi deputies then to enter the new parliament building in the company of his Swedish born wife. And his wife, Karin writes to her mother the day after. She is a witness to this festive opening of the new parliament. And what she finds striking above all is the demeanor of the Communist deputies, of which there were many more. There were about 55, I think, or 58 deputies in the Reichstags of four to five times more than they were Nazis. And she describes them as being very provocative and all of them wearing the yellow star of David, that is the red Soviet star, that is one and the same thing on their sleeves. These are her original words. So she sees a red Soviet star and she's thinking a yellow star of David. And that identification of Communism as Jewish is immensely important in my book. And that I think is where I depart from many other scholars who have focused either on anti Bolshevism alone, scholars like Ernst Nolte or Arno Mayer, or on antisemitism alone. Think about Jeffrey Herf, who wrote a book called the Jewish Enemy that collects only references to openly anti Semitic propaganda. Only whenever it remarks Jew it collects that image. But the Bolshevik part or the anti Bolshevik part, to the extent that it is not openly marked as Jewish, gets lost from view. And it is very important to think it alongside it. It was so commonly understood among the Nazis that Bolshevism was Jewish. And so we need to understand that when it came to Communism, especially Soviet Communism, who were controlling the world Communist movement, the Nazis were thinking of this as a Jewish Bolshevik, as a racial and political creed. And it was for that racial political opponent that, that they reserved their greatest indeed lethal hatred. So I'm arguing that the lethal instincts, the urge to kill it formed with, around this specter of Soviet Communism.
- [38:37]
Joe Taska
Now, Johan, you claim that the dual Nazi fear of the Soviet Jews as a racial enemy of Germany and the orchestrators of world Communism eventually led to the Germans labeling all European Jews as Bolsheviks, which ultimately in your opinion, laid the foundation for their exterminatory policies towards the Jews of Europe. How and when did that transformation take place?
- [39:15]
Johann Helbeck
So I just traced in my last answer how the Nazis envisioned those who ran the Soviet state as Bolsheviks, meaning in their reading Jew Bolsheviks. And that this was their, this was an opponent that they were determined to root out and to kill ruthlessly. This is an intention that you can follow even in the Nazi media dating back to the 1930s. So there's absolutely no, no disguise about this, about the willingness and indeed the need to root out, really exterminate physically Bolshevism. As the Germans invade the Soviet Union, they identify, I mean various groups, the security forces identify essentially all Soviet male Jews initially as carriers of Bolshevism, as sufficient carriers of the communist faith and detain them and execute them. The same goes for the commissar. Curiously, the so called Commissar order which Hitler had instigated, which stipulated the isolation of the political officers from among the troops and their immediate execution, that order didn't mention the word Jewish at all. And it's one of these cases where it was just clear to all participants that this is a Jew and therefore has to be killed and seen also as the backbone of the Soviet war effort. So initially the campaign concentrated on leading functionaries and visible activists. It quickly came to include lots of civilians who were women, children and the elderly, who were widely described as aiding the partisans and really contributing to the resistance of the Soviet Army. So they. The fact that the Red army fought back initially in my reading immediately led to, or not immediately, but quickly led to an escalation of the violence and to Germans blaming civilian populations for these, for the violence directed against them, for killings of German soldiers, Kiev that the germans occupied in September 1941 is a case in point. It's perhaps the best that case. Shortly after the Germans take Kyiv, which they had basically conquered without much of a shot fired because the Soviet forces had retreated, they, they find lodging in the downtown center of Kyiv and the best buildings. And then these buildings are blown up one after another by remote detonated bombs that the Soviet security forces had planted before receding and the Germans are convinced this is the work of the Jews. And then they take revenge on many thousand, upward of 30,000 Jews, civilians, mostly women and children and elderly, who are all killed in Babi Yar at the end of September 1941. So that nexus of fear in a foreign land country, violence instigated. The Germans immediately blaming the Jews. That is a reflexive form that we find very pronounced and occupied Soviet lands. Now, what's quite interesting is that some Nazi administrators actually spell out very clearly the difference between Soviet Jews and non Soviet Jews. And they even clear up the sense that they even clarify that Eastern Jews, the so called Oski, the who refers to Jews from the former Pale of Settlement, that this is an imprecise appellation because it subsumes Polish as well as Soviet Jews and basically brings together two categories who should not be thought about together. Because the Jews from former Poland are not an organized political force. They don't represent a political idea, whereas Jews in the Soviet Union inherently do in the Nazi imagination, regardless of whether or not they were communists. And so any Jew in the Soviet Union is implicated in the Bolshevik project from the very beginning, and that is their death sentence. A few months after the start of Barbarossa and after multiple setbacks on the German side, the Germans introduce the yellow star as a mandated sign, as an identification sign in Germany. That happens in September 1941. And the Nazi press is providing us justification that this badge is introduced, because we have all seen the horrors in the east by that they refer to certain Soviet murders that took place in the western borderlands that the German forces had come about. Essentially, we have come to see how murder Bolshevism, meaning Jewish Bolshevism, is. And it is therefore necessary to mark all Jews as allies of Stalin in the other zones of the German Empire. They also mention that Jews in Germany were secretly listening to the BBC and wishing for a defeat of the German forces in the East. So Jews in Germany, but also in France after June 22, 1941, came to be identified in new ways as political allies of Stalin. And so they moved from a racial alien to a racial political enemy in the same way as the Nazis had conceived of the Bolsheviks or Jews in the Soviet Union in the first place. And that in my reading was the death sentence. And that then happens quite quickly that security elites, the propaganda minister Goebbels, they talk about what to do with the Jews in Germany. So immediate deportation to the east now is the order of the day. This is in September, October 1941. And there are fantasies that are openly articulated. The Jews essentially built what we as scholars today call the Gulag. So the Nazis didn't use that term, but basically the Jews built these labor camps in the East. Let the German Jews now rot in the labor camps that the Jews built for the bourgeoisie. And so that revenge fantasy takes shape. And it is this revenge that really underlies the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 that then really organizes the mass transportation toward the death of Jews from Europe and from Germany and the rest of Europe. And so in that moment I see a, what I call a Bolshevization of Germany's and Europe's Jews that they were the Nazis, began to see them in a new light as no longer just racial aliens, but actually as political allies of Stalin. And that necessitated their killing.
- [47:01]
Joe Taska
Talk a little bit more about how the German invasion of the Soviet Union laid the groundwork for the Holocaust in your mind. You mentioned Arno Mayer, who argued that the Germans began to ramp up their murderous rampage against Soviet Jews in particular when their war in the east began to stall. And you counter that by saying that's not true because the Germans were slaughtering Jews right out of the gate on June 22, 1941. So laying the groundwork for the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, you could argue that's a pretty controversial claim. I suspect that some Polish historians might contest that statement. How do you make that case in your book?
- [47:53]
Johann Helbeck
So I carefully looked at the stages of the occupation of Poland and the German occupation regime in Poland, and I trace that in the book as well, because I'm of course aware of the ways in which Holocaust scholars talk about the terror and the Holocaust kind of as an incremental step by step process that grew ever more violent, especially also as the the war grew more violent. And so a lot of scholars think the war itself, the conditions of warfare themselves somehow made extermination appear, you know, logical or possible. And I don't agree with this purely coincidental or non intentional way of seeing events, because the intention to essentially physically annihilate Bolshevism was laid out very clearly even before the war, even before 1939, even before the first truck was fired in Poland. In Poland you do see massive violence against Jews, starting from how German soldiers taunted Jews in Jewish settlements, ripped off their beards and forced them to do abominable work. But also SS and SD units performing massacres against Jews. However, when you read about these massacres, they are circumscribed in, in time and in space. And I see them as flowing from clear directives by SD chief Reinhard Heydrich, who essentially asked his people to engage in a campaign of terror to force the Jews to pack up and to leave the German occupied regions toward the east. This was at a time when the Red army had not yet entered Poland from the east. And so the German occupation authorities, especially the police force that was the racial police, was interested in basically expelling Jews forcibly with utmost force and terror from these regions. Shortly thereafter, the Germans make a number of other moves, initiatives to expel Jews from the territory. There's the very well known Madagascar plan that is promulgated sometime in 1940 after the conquest of France and after Madagascar somehow seems to become available as a space to accommodate all the Jews or to essentially be imagined as a receptacle of the Jews who might or might not die in process. But it's still an expulsion project. There's also earlier than that the so called Birobidzhan project that the, that the SS presents to their Soviet ally. We're in the time of the Hitler Flower Pact and they say, how about you accept all the circa 2 million Jews that currently live in the borders of the German Reich and you settle them either in Ukraine or in Birobidzhan. So there was a degree of knowledge about, you know, the Soviet Jewish project in Bilobidzhan. And that is not accepted by on the Soviet side. But it does show that the Germans were thinking through 1940, through 1940 still after those massacres that I had mentioned in terms of expulsion rather than mass extermination. And so I don't even see any kind of tentative or incremental tendency to kill all the Jews in Poland. This decision does not happen until July 1942. This is when Himmler gives a verbal order to kill all Jews in the General Government. This is long after the invasion of the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union you see from the very beginning an intention to kill all the leading functionaries, the commissars, the Bolshevik party leaders, the, the state leaders. They don't get many of them because the Soviet evacuation effort is very successful in as far as the elite is concerned. So they find very few of these specimens and then they, they, you know, work with others to, you know, who then are pressed into this mold, including patently, you know, not uninvolved and innocent women and children in Jewish settlements, but by being officially marked as Soviet Jews in their passports. This is ground enough for the Germans to act with absolute Cruelty and violence. And you don't see this behavior anywhere else at that time. And for me, that is very compelling evidence. And so when it comes to Mayer and others, I. I don't engage with them that much because I trace a different lineage. I work, as I mentioned, on the long fixation on communism and its hyphenated essence as a basically Jewish communist entity in the Nazi imagination. And these are things that neither Nolte or Anna Mayer actually are working with, because in their books, the opponent really is Soviet Bolshevism. And Mayer makes this very curious dissociation by saying that only after the crusade against Bolshevism, which was really a communist regime, absent the Jewish imaginary, he's right. The Bolshevik system was largely non Jewish. And so he's right about that. But he's not really following the mindset of the Nazis. He dissociates Bolshevism from Jews. He says, after the campaign against Bolshevism failed, they essentially took out the vengeance on the Jews. And that dissociation makes no sense to me. And also the timeframe, as you just mentioned, that only after the failures did they take it out of the Jews. That also makes no sense to me.
- [54:22]
Joe Taska
Now, you make a very passionate argument in your book that the German atrocities in the east had the unintended consequence of revitalizing the Soviet war effort and fostering a newly reformed sense of Soviet identity. Can you explain that for us?
- [54:44]
Johann Helbeck
Yes. And this is, in some sense the connector, the glue that links in, you know, in a very broad sense, part one and part two of my book. In my book, even though my book is not organized in that, and most of the chapters are kind of covering both sides. But overall, in the chronology of this huge clash between Germany and the Soviet Union, it is the crimes of the Germans, these unspeakable crimes that they commit on Soviet crown, that actually then become the catalyst of a true Soviet people's war. And the one person that I already mentioned and who does more than anyone else to make this linkage is Ilya Ehrenberg, who in some sense holds up the mirror to the Germans and shows who they truly are in a kind of Soviet, Russian, Jewish diagnosis. So he reads them and shows that they should be capable as products of the Enlightenment, or, you know, as former products of the Enlightenment, as people who are able to, you know, appreciate culture and high culture and are thinking individuals, how they have fallen from these ideals, how they debased themselves, and how inhuman they have become in the process. This is his diagnosis this is his intellectual diagnosis, but it is undergirded by just so much documentary evidence. And it's evidence that shakes his readers and activates them into combat. And it's not just Aaron Burke alone. This is across the board and very, very powerful, the perhaps most powerful agent are the so called meetings of vengeance. I'm indebted to the work of Brendan Schechter, who has done very important work kind of laying bare how these meetings of vengeance worked in the Red Army. So those were rituals that were implanted in the Red army as soon as the Red army began to liberate formerly German held Soviet territories. These vengeance meetings officially I think became instituted only in 1943 after the turning point of Stalingrad. But you see the very first vengeance meetings already in play at the counter offensive near Moscow or rostov in late 41, early 42. And one of them is, is actually captured on film in this very famous film that then was released in the US under the title Moscow Strikes Back. So you see in the liberated town of Volokolamsk, which for some reason in the American rendering of the film is mislabeled as Mozaysk, it's really Volokolamsk. There is a gallows with eight bodies still hanging from that gallows, an improvised gallows with like a telephone telegraph pole on the one hand and a birch tree on the other, and then just a plank of wood laid across and then eight people, including two or three women hanging there in the cold. And you see a crowd of people, these are town folks who had been summoned by the Red army that had just liberated Volokolamsk. And you see a commander standing on the turret of a tank, basically lecturing to the townspeople. He's right in front of the gallows. And so this is essentially the way, this is the Soviet liberation strip. This is how the Soviet Union would liberate one settlement after another, I should say. This is how the Soviet reconquest of these areas was underwritten as liberation. So this is exactly how the narrative Soviet liberation was produced, by bringing the townspeople who everyone understood had been under German Rome, hence had been infiltrated with Nazi propaganda. So let's bring them to the sites of German violence and talk about that German violence. It was a lecture that was supposed to convert the townspeople and basically reset their moral and political compass. But it was also a lecture that was supposed to have an effect on the Red army combatants themselves. And as soon as these meetings were instituted as vengeance meetings, they would regularly end with a ritual vow to go on to defeat, to go on with energy and hatred and to defeat the Germans until the end. And so every Red army soldier, by the end of the war had partaken in multiple of these vengeance meetings. Many of them had been to Nazi death camps, they had been to Majdanek, and they had been to Auschwitz and others. There was a great amount of knowledge about what the Germans had done through Iliope Ehrenberg's writings, but also for these personal encounters at the vengeance meetings. And there was a very strong emotional rage at work, so much so that many of those who were, you know, reconquered or liberated by the Soviet Red army, especially Jews who had been tormented by the Nazis, streamed into the Red army to offer their services. And here my book really critically engages with other scholars who surmise that these Jews were basically drafted against their wishes. And one scholar asked, why did the Soviet Union actually risk the lives of these precious Jewish witnesses who had so much to tell the world about that? No, they volunteered themselves. They wanted to actually be useful. They wanted to. To defeat and kill Germans. And so this, this powerful emotional fuse, I think it has been identified by other scholars I mentioned Brandon Schechter and others, but I think it has often been written off as just a state propagandistic move. So when you read Anthony Beaver, he talks about the clever designs of the state propagandists and their own cruelty and laying out all these corpses, these gruesome scenes, the personal dimension, how people on the ground, what they saw and how it registered with them, how they conversed with Elie Ehrenberg in their letters about that. That is all very necessary stuff that has to go into the picture to fully contextualize it.
- [61:52]
Joe Taska
You point out that many historians tend to view the Soviet German war primarily through national lenses. In other words, they make this distinction between, for example, what the war meant to Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, as opposed to what it meant to the Soviet people as a whole. Why do you think that that's a faulty interpretation that distorts the history of the war?
- [62:21]
Johann Helbeck
I think it is ahistorical to refer to Ukrainian troops as opposed to Belarusian troops as opposed to Russian troops. It's often also the result of sloppy research, such as when you see this in the labeling of army groups that in the Soviet Union were referred to as fronts. And so you have like, the first Belarusian front, the second Belarussian one, or the first Ukrainian, the second and the third Ukrainian front. These fronts were labeled according to nations, not because they deployed nationals or even predominantly nationals from These republics, it just means that these fronts had been formed in those union republics. And it's that geographic label that is important. So it's really tricky then to infer from that labeling a clear national identity, that in this faulty and the statistics exist. The Red army was very careful actually to always mix its units. You know, the Red army was in some sense the Soviet Union's melting pot. It was where a Soviet identity was forged from various national component parts. And so I think we have to be really attentive to these political practices and also everyday ways of seeing. And I am not ignorant of national descriptors and I reproduce them when I see them. But I think we really need to understand that the Soviet war effort, to the extent that it was driven by people like Ehrenberg, by Stalin or by the Red army command, was one to produce an overall war Soviet identity. And even Ehrenberg is a very interesting case. I look at him very, very carefully. He was Soviet, Russian and Jewish. He identified with the Russian language and the Russian literature and its canon. He fully identified with the Soviet political faith of internationalism and inter ethnic friendship and saw that as life insurance policy for Jews like himself. This goes back to in the Russian Civil War. This predates the Second World War. But then after the outbreak of the Second World War, he also becomes more and more cognizant of his Jewish identity. But what's so interesting about Ehrenberg is that more than many other Soviet Jews at the time who were involved with him in the same projects of the Jewish Anti Fascist Committee and the so called Black Book, that Ehrenberg is very careful to always put out his Soviet identity first. And he was very adamant about that vis a vis others. And I don't think this was opportunism. I don't think this was just a way for him to stay alive. I think this was a matter of conviction that he believed that Jews in the Soviet Union could only survive and be secure if they were fully nested and integrated into something Soviet. And therefore that Soviet larger bracket was of all importance to him. And he never veered into a documentation of Jewishness that would lose sight or that would actually cast a secondary that Soviet part. And that principal stance of his, I think is the prime reason why Ilya Ehrenberg, unlike many other activists that I just mentioned, was not put on trial after the war when many of the JSC activists were put on trial and why he, unlike many others, survived. But it was not opportunism. It was actually a matter of principle. And so it's really important to think about what is Soviet and where does it spring from, and how is also Sovietness reconstituted in places where it may not even have existed beforehand. There's this great joke that circulates in Ukraine in 1942, and it goes like that. What is it that Hitler has done in one year that Stalin couldn't do in 24? And the answer is that we learned to love Soviet power. So the experience on the ground, on the part of people who were mostly unwilling to retreat and who were curious about the Germans or at the very least thought they were not going to be as bad as the Soviets, their experience of Nazi rule disabused them of all that and made them appreciate Sovietness. Which doesn't mean that they love the GPU or the nkvd, not at all. They were very gleeful. And I'm taking this from diarists who wrote this in 1941, not from interviews. They were very happy when the prisons went up in flames. They had been tormented by the Soviet repressive apparatus. But the humiliations, the mass murder, the way the Germans treated them as subhumans, this was such an affront, this was such a provocation to them, that they came to understand that there is something about the Soviet part, the Soviet culture, that is theirs. And that had a lot to do, I think, with the Revolution of 1917. So I think we also need to see that the revolution is only 25 years past. And I want to also caution against a quick identification of Soviet with Stalin. I mean, people were able to make distinctions, and actually, by that time, maybe Stalin was even popular. But I would caution against the notification of Soviet with nkvd. So people were making distinctions about what institutions are repressive and what cultural background is actually one that they. That they identify with. And they clearly, many of them, were sizing up the Germans with a distinctly Soviet repertoire, a literary repertoire. Uncle Tom's Cabin comes up repeatedly among young survivors who had been deported to Germany as forced laborers. So Uncle Tom's Cabin is a piece of Soviet literature. Corporal punishment, the death by hanging, all of these things are residues of serfdom. And people are very aware as they're looking at what the Nazis are doing, they're aware of their own quite recent history. So it's these connectors that I'm quite attentive to. And for that reason, I don't want to come up with anachronistic names such as Ukrainian and Belarusian, when in fact, I see a lot of Soviet connectors, but also you need to look at the national descriptors and look at their meanings in the conjuncture of 1943 and 44, where actually Soviet activists from Moscow, but also from Kyiv are talking to Ukrainians as Soviet Ukrainians or they're talking about Soviet Lithuanians. And there's a new hyphenated identity that forms on top of quintessentially Soviet memorials that you could say had been planted by Moscow, that followed directors from Moscow, but that were essentially creating a narrative of liberation and re Sovietization that was inclusive of a national register. So in post war or post Nazi war, present day Lief, it is the testimony of Jews who stand in front of one of those bone crushing machines that the Nazis had brought in to basically destroy all evidence about the death camps. And so the three Jewish survivors from Wolf, who are local residents of Wolf, are essentially now witnesses who are important to forge a local Soviet, I should say West Ukrainian. Right? We're talking about Galicia identity that is fully in tune with a larger Soviet vision of liberation. And so the Soviets are very mindful of the importance of nationality in the creation of a multinational universal language about the war and liberation. And I'm tracing that effect and the engagement with this also sometimes an engagement in conflict.
- [71:34]
Joe Taska
Jochen, you note that the study of the Holocaust has recently become, quote, increasingly tied to the invocation of liberal democratic values. End quote. Now, those values, as you point out in your book, are typically understood as antithetical to Communism. What consequence does this have for how we in the west remember the Holocaust and its victims?
- [72:06]
Johann Helbeck
I think it leads to a quite truncated understanding of the dynamic of destruction in the Second World War and specifically the horrors on the Eastern Front, which were the, you know, the epicenter of violence in that war. And so even though we will, we do see in, you know, in important exhibits and other public historical realms, references to, yes, the murdered Soviet POWs are part of the Holocaust, and then they're the Sinti and the Roma and the homosexuals. They are sort of listed additively, but I think without much understanding of the intellectual and political reasons for how, for instance, the Soviet POWs became implicated in the mass murders and should be seen as absolutely integral to what we call the Holocaust. The Nazi. The deathly fixation on Bolshevism was a deathly fixation that primarily engulfed people who identified or believed to be Jewish. But the Nazis also knew that most Soviet soldiers were actually not Jewish. That much they did know. And nonetheless they called for the total extermination of soldiers to the extent that they were identified as Bolsheviks. And so Bolshevism as an inscription has to be taken very seriously and brought into our understanding of the Holocaust. And I think many component parts of Bolshevism, like what Bolshevism entailed, are lost from view. I did mention earlier that a lot of Holocaust scholars only look at the openly Jewish or anti Jewish reference and just don't engage with those markers that are not openly Semitic or anti Semitic markers. I think ultimately it also means that we have a poorer understanding of what happened at the Eastern front and how important Communism was a force that fought back, that taught many Soviet citizens that the only adequate response to the Nazi invasion was not passivity, not surviving, but actually fighting back. And so there's a chapter in my book that also deals with resistance efforts on the ground that were absolutely not controlled by any Communist functionaries, because those Communist functionaries had actually taken off. It was more on the strength of what they had been taught in Soviet schools, that young people formed impromptu underground cells and fought back with whatever means they had. And I think ultimately, if you. And I'm not talking about scholars as much as I'm talking about sort of a public view or grasp of Nazi occupation, the Nazi regime and resistance, we know a lot about Anne Frank and rightly so, but we know preciously little about people like Marsha Bruskine in Minsk who was like a 17 year old or 18 year old girl who resisted from day one and put her life on the line and lost her life tragically in October 1941. And I think recreating more of a balance and really seeing how resistance was an effort that very often flared up in Communist circles before it then took hold of other parts, that is something that is often missing from view in Western accounts. And there's this very curious disjuncture that you see. And it has a lot to do, I think, with the Cold War, that Soviet textbooks, Soviet scholars, East German textbooks, East German scholars, but you could also include Yugoslav scholars have, or Bulgarian ones have extolled really the resistance efforts. And it seems like that is often a communist effort. And it seems like there's a great deal of distrust among Western scholars that this is all propaganda and, you know, a lot of smoke without much of an essence. And I think to really engage with that in a fresh way, to think about the infusions that came from the east, that were often moral infusions or political infusions that are of the same importance as the material infusions, such as Lend Lease that went west East. To basically see that in its totality, I think is something that I'm pleading for. And it's not that my book is doing that. It's just asking for us and for others to do this.
- [77:37]
Joe Taska
Let's take a quick look at the long arc of history here. What's the risk that we incur if we in the west do not give proper recognition to the role that communism as an ideology played in Germany's war in the East? What's the risk there?
- [77:56]
Johann Helbeck
I don't want to make this claim hinge on communism as such because it does sound too much like a Communist Party undertaking. What I want to stress more is some kind of cultural idea, and for lack of a better word, let me call it Soviet. I mean, this kind of some kind of cultural essence that had formed over more than two decades of Soviet power. And that, of course, unsurprisingly, is most strongly present among younger people, but is also something that becomes infectious for members of an older generation. And I can trace that again in diaries from that period. And so it's essentially taking seriously people, Soviet citizens, who invoke ideas, including ideas that are clearly marked as communist, and working with this and really putting this into our picture. And I think so often this has been written off as scholars either say this is all propaganda and untrustworthy, and I think this is a huge argument. I mean, basically to destroy with this propaganda baton the writings of Ehrenberg, but also the interviews that. That I have been citing, or people just reduce it and talk about Stalin's war. And then again, we are like in the company of all sorts of producers of the war, but losing sight of where and how the war was fought on the ground. And here I think great work is being done by Paula Chen, who is working on the Soviet extraordinary commission that was there to sort of document the atrocities and the damages caused by the Germans, but also they died to the Germans. And she shows just what this commission, I mean, how this work of the commission was carried out by people on the ground, by people who were wounded, who had been aggrieved, who had suffered and clearly had a stake. So we're talking about Red army wives or Red army widows. We're talking about, you know, the wives of Kogos chairman who had been killed and former partisans. And it's essentially to trace at the ground level what this war meant and how it affected people. I think that is a very important work, and it's work that is filled with contradiction with people who fight for the Soviet Union, yet have to suffer again under Soviet power. I don't want to paint a conflictless story, not at all, but I want to essentially bring many people back into the picture.
- [80:49]
Joe Taska
Johan, I want to close on this note. As you know, historical revisionism is quite common. Countless historians have tried to get inside Hitler's head and explain his motivation for targeting his racial and political enemies and for embarking on territorial conquest. You'll likely recall the famous controversy surrounding the fake Hitler diaries back in 1983. I mean, students of this war are desperate to understand this man and his motivation for conducting the war as he did. The problem, as I see it, with not having any actual Hitler diaries is that we just can't know for sure. And that opens the door to various interpretations, some of them more meritorious than others. You mentioned the British historian Brendan Sims, who has made the exact opposite argument that you've made in your book. As you pointed out, he spent some 700 pages in his Hitler biography claiming that Hitler's main preoccupation was the threat of international capitalism posed by the British Empire and the United States. So my question to you is, how can we, as readers and students of World War II and of history more generally, determine which interpretation of the past is more accurate and closer to the truth?
- [82:18]
Johann Helbeck
So I don't make any claim to get into anyone's mind. I don't think that is possible. But what you can do is you can read the evidence and you can read more evidence, and there is just so much evidence. It goes back to what I had mentioned earlier in the interview. I'd mentioned my dissertation advisor, Leopold Heimson, who had asked me to always read the language of your historical actors closely and to work with the language as it is presented on the patient, not quickly read between the lines and not, you know, not rush toward a judgment to really accept the language and work with the language. That is exactly what I'm doing and that can take you very far. So the complete records, the completed document, the documentary volume of the operational reports of the so called Einsatzgruppen, the SS and SD death squads, as we call them, who operated in the Soviet Union and did their deathly work in 1941 and 42 and 43. They have been published by very scrupulous historians who have annotated all of those reports. It's a wonderful edition. And this edition is prefaced by a lengthy introduction in which the editors address readers of this volume and essentially spell out in some sense how the language in these reports should be read. And they go so far as to say whenever the SS people speak of Bolsheviks and partisans or Jews and Communists, there's all sorts of associational links that are there. So you have to think with quotation marks. Jews, Communists, Jews Communists and functionaries or Bolsheviks and partisans and Jews, whenever they talk about that, they really have in mind innocent women and children whom they're about to murder. And this is a cover up. I do not agree with this diagnosis. I think we are jumping to a conclusion here too quickly by substituting one term for another. We really need to follow the logic of that language, however difficult it may appear and however difficult it is also however painful it is to do this as you read these texts. And it is for me here that you can disclose how a worldview becomes operational politically, cruelly, implacably. And I think we need to work more with this language. We have to go back to very, very original sources. So sometimes the Soviet ascription, the Bolshevik ascription is even missing in some primary sources that historians often take as their point of departure. There's a by now classic edition of Hitler's speeches and proclamations by Max Domarus that I've also used. And it turns out that even Domarous is not fully complete in his citations. Gone from view is a signal speech that goering gives in 1935 at the Nazi party rally where he talks about the so called flag law that the Germans had just instituted. It's the same party congress where they also have the so called the other Nuremberg laws are promulgated. And so the flag law is essentially the law that replaces the Weimar flag with the new Nazi flag, the Swastika. But in his speech Goering talks about two different flags and he talks about Weimar as bearing the Soviet flag. And so again you see how the pre Nazi era the republic is being seen as a kind of communist or crypto communist undertaking as all under the star of the Soviet flag. And that this is the great organizer. And so it's often you have to go back to the Nazi newspapers to actually fully disclose the, you know, you could say the worldview or their self understanding. And a lot of truncating has happened since then. So you have to be really mindful of that. So I find the Nazi press that thankfully is fully searchable thanks to an Austrian database where you can search Volkische Bochte unfortunately only for the war years, so not yet for the 1930s. But there's a lot of such labor that you have to do. So I don't really think it amounts to, you know, one revisionism as to another. It is really about engaging with the sources in good faith.
- [87:30]
Joe Taska
I've been speaking with Johan Helbeck, Distinguished professor of History at Rutgers University. He's the author of the new book World Enemy Number One, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and the Fate of the Jews. Johan, thanks so much for this conversation. It was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it.
- [87:50]
Johann Helbeck
For me, too, Joe. Thank you so much.