“Our Most Serious Enemy”: The Specter of Judeo-Bolshevism in the German Military Community, 1914–1923 Brian E. Crim The most essential aim of war against the Jewish-bolshevistic system is a complete destruction of their means of power and the elimination of Asiatic influence from the European culture. In this connection the troops are facing tasks that exceed the one-sided routine of soldiering. The soldier in the Eastern territories is not merely a fighter according to the rules of the art of war, but also a bearer of ruthless national ideology and the avenger of bestialities that have been inflicted upon German and racially related nations. — Field Marshal Walter von Reichenau, October 10, 1941 1 T HAT 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. 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. 3 Jews suffered the conse- quences of revolution and resurgent nationalism in the borderlands between Germany and Russia after World War I, but it was inside Germany that the con- struct 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 1 Rathenau quoted in Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). 2 See Bartov, Hitler’s Army; and Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, trans. Deborah Lucas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 3 See Robert Gerwarth, “The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria, and Hungary after the Great War,” Past & Present 1 (2008): 175–209, 200. Central European History 44 (2011), 624–641. © Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association, 2011 doi:10.1017/S0008938911000665 624