Eastern front

Cognac

Omer Bartov in NYRB: ‘[Michael] Howard explained that for much of the Italian campaign his battalion had fought against the same German unit. When they captured one of the German officers, they invited him to the mess and shared a glass of cognac before sending him to a POW camp. They expected the same treatment from the Germans.
I was taken aback that Howard, one of the preeminent military historians of his time, was surprised to learn of the atrocities on the Eastern Front.’

And: ‘Western historians (…) tended to downplay how thoroughly entangled antisemitism was [with] the regime’s anticommunism.’

As well: ‘Early in World Enemy No. 1 he [Jochen Hellbeck] points out just how often our memory of Nazi violence obscures the anti-Soviet animus that drove it.’

The specter of Judeo-Bolshevism drove the Nazis. But even without Bolshevism they would have annihilated European Jewry.