As the Red Army advanced relentlessly toward Berlin, [Axis] propagandists often depicted the Soviet enemy as Asiatic invaders or attacking barbarians who resembled the Huns or the Mongols, without any specific mention of the Jewish plot that the [Third Reich] had long insisted lay behind them. References to Judeo-Bolshevik perfidy receded from prominence in the pages of [Axis] newspapers and the proclamations of the weekly newsreels.¹⁰ What remained was the devastating barbarism of a subhuman enemy.
The [Axis] had justified the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 by calling it a preventive war that would destroy the Judeo-Bolshevik system before the enemy—a racial-ideological composite of Jews, Communists, and subhuman Slavs always labeled Asiatic and un-European—could impose a cruel reign of terror on Germany and all of Europe. After Stalingrad, Joseph Goebbels had used the idea of Jewish Bolshevik slavery to whip up support for total war.
As the Third Reich collapsed, however, this ideological image of the enemy began to dissolve into discrete parts. To the end, Hitler raged in his bunker against the Jews and belief in an international Jewish conspiracy bent on Germany’s destruction remained a core principle of [his] ideology.¹¹ But when it looked East in the last phase of the war, [Axis] propaganda focused ever more single-mindedly on the so-called Asiatic hordes who had come from the “steppes” to rape, pillage, and plunder in the heart of Germany.
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