The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

"Science," the Greek word for knowledge, when appended to the word "political," creates what seems like an oxymoron. For who could claim to know politics? More complicated than any game, most people who play it become addicts and die without understanding what they were addicted to. The rest of us suffer under their malpractice as our "leaders." A truer case of the blind leading the blind could not be found. Plumb the depths of confusion here.

The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:20 pm

The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945
by Michael Kellogg
© Michael Kellogg 2005

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Image

I dedicate this work to my father, who found the courage to accept himself as he is.

Table of Contents:

• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The far right in the German and Russian Empires
• 2. At the extreme in the Ukraine and in Germany
• 3. “Hand in hand with Germany”
• 4. The international radical right’s Aufbau (reconstruction)
• 5. “Germany-Russia above everything”
• 6. Conspiracies of fire and the sword
• 7. “In Quick March to the Abyss!”
• 8. The four writers of the apocalypse
• 9. Aufbau’s legacy to National Socialism
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index

THE RUSSIAN ROOTS OF NAZISM: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945

This groundbreaking book examines the overlooked topic of the influence of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Russian exiles on Nazism. White emigres contributed politically, financially. militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This work refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon. National Socialism arose primarily from the cooperation between volkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful "White emigres.

From 1920 to 1923. Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-White emigre organization, Aufbau (Reconstruction), Aufbau allied with Nazis to overthrow the German government and Bolshevik rule through terrorism and military/paramilitary schemes. This organization's warnings of the monstrous "Jewish Bolshevik" peril helped to inspire Hitler to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union and to initiate the mass murder of European Jews. This book uses extensive archival materials from Germany and Russia, including recently declassified documents, and it will prove invaluable reading for anyone interested in the international roots of National Socialism.

MICHAEL KELLOGG is an independent researcher and a past recipient of the prestigious Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Grant.

NEW STUDIES IN EUROPEAN HISTORY
Edited by
PETER BALDWIN, University of California, Los Angeles
CHRISTOPHER CLARE, University of Cambridge
JAMES B. COLLINS, Georgetown University
MIA RODRIGUEZ-SALGADO, London School of Economics and Political Science
LYNDAL ROPER, University of Oxford

The aim of this series in early modern and modern European history is to publish outstanding works of research, addressed to important themes across a wide geographical range, from southern and central Europe, to Scandinavia and Russia, and from the time of the Renaissance to the Second World War. As it develops the series will comprise focused works of wide contextual range and intellectual ambition.

For a full list of titles published in the series, please see the end of the book.
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:39 pm

Acknowledgments

I offer thanks first and foremost to the members of my Ph.D. Committee at the University of California, Los Angeles: Professors Saul Friedlander, David Sabean, Ivan Berend, and Rogers Brubaker, who have given me excellent advice over the years. Professor Peter Baldwin of UCLA granted me valuable advice and support. Professor Arch Getty of UCLA helped me to gain an overview of important archival materials in Moscow. Others associated with UCLA who aided me in writing this book include Julie Jenkins, who gave me editing advice, Barbara Bernstein and Kathleen Addison, who took care of administrative matters for me while I was abroad, and Julia Wallace, who helped me to revise my text.

Many non-Americans gave me valuable assistance in carrying out this project. German academics who considerably aided my research include Michael Hagemeister and Karl Schlagel of Europe University-Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Heinrich Winkler of Humboldt University in Berlin, Hermann Beyer-Thoma of the East European Institute in Munich, and Dr. Johannes Baur of Munich. In Moscow, Vasily Tsvetkov of Moscow State Pedagogical University alerted me to important archival materials, and Natasha Petina and Ludmilla Novikova helped me to translate difficult Russian texts. Joanna Grynczuk of Berlin translated Polish intelligence files for me. Dominika Plumpe of Berlin gave me helpful insights into my work. The Welsh journalist and historian Michael Joseph offered me a valuable critique.

I received generous funding that enabled me to carry out extensive research in Germany and Russia from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the International Studies Abroad Program (ISOP), the Center for German and European Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Center for European and Russian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Finally, I thank my father John and my mother Carolyn for their editing advice and emotional support.
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Tue Jan 22, 2019 9:55 pm

ARCHIVES

BAB: Bundesarchiv (Federal Archives in Berlin).

BAK: Bundesarchiv Koblenz (Federal Archives in Koblenz).

BA/MF: Bundesarchiv, Milirararchiv Freiburg (Federal Archives, Military Archives in Freiburg).

BHSAM: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munchen (Bavarian State Archives in Munich).

BHSAM/AK: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Munchen, Abteilung Kriegsarchiv (Bavarian State Archives in Munich, Military Archives Department).

BSAM: Bayerisches Staatsarchiv Munchen (Bavarian Regional Archives in Munich).

GARF: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (State Archives of the Russian Federation, Moscow).

GSAPKB: Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (Secret State Archives of Prussian Cultural Property, Berlin).

IZG: Institut fur Zeitgeschichte (Institute for Modern History, Munich).

PAAA: Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amtes (Political Archives of the Foreign Office, Berlin).

RGASPI: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (Russian State Archives of Socio-Political History, Moscow).

RGVA: Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (Russian State Military Archives, Moscow).

RGVA (TsKhIDK): Former Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumentalnych kollektsii (Center for the Preservation of Historical-Documentary Collections, now part of RGVA, Moscow).

GERMAN AGENCIES

AA: Auswartiges Amt (Foreign Office).

AGM: Amtsgericht Munchen (Munich District Court).

A9N: Amt fur den 9. November (Office for November 9th).

APA: Aussenpolitisches Amt (Foreign Policy Office, specifically for the National Socialist Party).

APA/AO: Aussenpolitisches Amt, Abteilung Osten (Foreign Policy Office, Eastern Department).

BSMA: Bayerisches Staatsministerium des Aussern (Bavarian Foreign Ministry).

BSMI: Bayerisches Staatsministerium des Innern (Bavarian Interior Ministry).

DDVL: Deutsche Diplomatische Vertretung fur Lettland (German Diplomatic Representation for Latvia).

DGBel: Deutsche Gesandtschaft in Belgrad (German Legation in Belgrade).

DGBer: Deutsche Gesandtschaft in Bern (German Legation in Bern).

DGBud: Deutsche Gesandtschaft in Budapest (German Legation in Budapest).

DGR: Deutsche Gesandtschaft in Riga (German Legation in Riga).

FA/AFK: Fremdenamt, Abteilung fur Fremdenkontrolle (Alien Office, Department for Alien Supervision).

FZO: Fluchtlingszentrale Ost (Refugee Head Office East). Heeresgruppe Eichhorn, Ia (Army Group Eichhorn, Ia).

HGE/Ia: Hauptstelle Kulturpolitisches Archiv (Main Office of the Politico-Cultural Archives).

JM: Justizministerium (Department of Justice).

KR: Kanzlei Rosenberg (Rosenberg Chancellery).

LGMI: Landgericht Munchen I (Munich District Court I).

LGPO: Landesgrenzpolizei Ost (National Border Police East).

LGPOP: Landesgrenzpolizei Ostpreussen (National Border Police East Prussia).

MR: Ministerialrat ([Bavarian] Assistant Head of Government Department).

NSDAPHA: NSDAP Hauptarchiv (NSDAP Main Archives).

OHLHGE: Oberste Heeresleitung Heeresgruppe Eichhorn (Army High Command Army Group Eichhorn).

OKO: Oberkommando Ost (Army High Command East).

PBH/AIII: Polizeibehirde Hamburg, Abteilung II (Hamburg Police Authorities, Department II).

PDB: Polizeidirektion Bremen (Bremen Police Headquarters).

PDM: Polizeidirektion Munchen (Munich Police Headquarters).

PKAH: Privatkanzlei Adolf Hitler (Adolf Hitler Private Office).

PP/AIA: Polizeiprasidium, Abteilung IA (Police Headquarters, Department IA).

PPS: Polizeiprasidium Stuttgart (Stuttgart Police Headquarters).

PVE: Polizeiverwaltung Elberfeld (Elberfeld Police Administration).

RA/ZSS: Reichsarchiv, Zweigstelle Spandau (State Archives, Spandau Branch).

RK: Reichskanzlei (State Chancellery).

RKUoO: Reichskommissar fur die Oberwach ung der offentlichen Ordnung (State Commissioner for the Supervision of Public Order).

RMbO: Reichsministerium fur die besetzten Ostgebiete (State Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories).

RMI: Reichsministerium des Innern (State Ministry of the Interior).

RP: Regierungs-Prasident ([Bavarian] Chairman of the Regional Council).

RSHA: Reichssicherheitshauptamt (State Security Main Office).

RuSHA-SS/VP: Rasse und Siedlungshauptamt-SS, Verwaltung Prag (SS Race and Settlement Main Office, Prague Administration).

RWM: Reichswehrministerium (Army Ministry).

SALM: Staatsanwalt bei dem Landgerichte Munchen (Prosecuting Attorney at the Munich District Court).

SAM: Staatsanwaltschafren Munchen (Munich Prosecuting Attorneys' Office).

SAUV: Sitzung des Ausschusses zur Untersuchung der Vorgange vom 1. Mai 1923 und der gegen Reichsund Landesverfassung gerichteten Bestrebungen vom 26. September bis 9. November 1923 (Sitting of the Committee for the Investigation of the Events of May I, 1923 and of the Efforts from September 26 up to November 9, 1923 that Were Directed Against the National/State Constitution).

SKoO: Staatskommissar fur offentliche Ordnung (State Commissioner for Public Order).

FRENCH AGENCIES

DB: Deuxieme Bureau (Second Section, primary intelligence agency).

EMG: Etat-Major General (General Staff Headquarters).

EMMF: Etat-Major du Marechal Foch (Staff Headquarters of Marshall Foch).

IIA: : International Information Agency, Paris.

MAE: Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres (Ministry of Foreign Affairs).

MG: Ministere de la Guerre (Ministry of War).

MMFH: Mission Militaire Francaise en Hongrie (French Military Mission in Hungary).

MMFP: Mission Militaire Francaise en Pologne (French Military Mission in Poland).

MMFT: Mission Militaire Francaise en Tchecoslovaquie (French Military Mission in Czechoslovakia).

QB/SO: Quatrieme Bureau, Section d'Orient (Fourth Section, Eastern Department).

SG: Sulrete Generale (General Security).

SN: Surete Nationale (National Security).

VNCCP: Ville de Nancy Commissariat Central de Police (Nancy Central Police Station).

RUSSIAN AGENCIES

ATsVO: Administretivnyi Tsentr vnepartinnogo obedineniia (Administrative Center of the Non-Party Association, a Russian emigre organization in Prague).

KI: Komintern (Communist International, Comintern).

OKL: O. K. London (military organization).

ROVS: Russkii Obshii-voinskii soiuz (Russian Universal Military Union).

POLISH AGENCY

SGOD: Sztab Glowny Oddzial drugi (Main Headquarters Second Section, primary intelligence agency).
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Wed Jan 23, 2019 12:00 am

Introduction

In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of October 1917, anti-Bolshevik exiles from the former Russian Empire, known as "White emigres," contributed extensively to the making of German National Socialism. This book examines the formative political, financial, military, and ideological influences that White emigres exerted on Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement. This study of White emigre contributions to Hitlerism demonstrates that National Socialism did not develop merely as a peculiarly German phenomenon. National Socialism arose in the early post-World War I period (1918-1923) from an international radical right milieu in which embittered volkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans collaborated with vengeful White emigres in an anti-Entente (Britain and France), anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic struggle.

From 1920 to 1923, Hitler allied himself with a conspiratorial volkisch German/White emigre association headquartered in Munich, Aufbau: Wirtschafts-politische Vereinigung fur den Osten (Reconstruction: Economic-Political Organization for the East), hereafter Aufbau. This secretive union sought to combat international Jewry and to overthrow both the German Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union in league with National Socialists. Aufbau contributed considerable sums of money to Hitler's National Socialist movement. Moreover, early National Socialist ideology combined volkisch notions of Germanic racial and spiritual superiority with the apocalyptic White emigre Aufbau conspiracy theory in which Jews, who operated as a seamless web of conniving finance capitalists and murderous Bolsheviks, threatened to conquer the world and then to send it to perdition. Aufbau left a powerful anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic legacy to National Socialism after 1923 as well.

Prominent White emigre Aufbau members who influenced Hitler's political and military strategies as well as his anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic Weltanschauung (world-view) included First Lieutenant Max von Scheubner-Richter, General Vladimir Biskupskii, Colonel Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, Colonel Fedor Vinberg, and Alfred Rosenberg. Scheubner-Richter de facto led Aufbau until he was shot fatally while marching with Hitler and General Erich von Ludendorff during the disastrous Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch of November 1923. Hitler subsequently asserted that Scheubner-Richter alone of the martyrs of the failed undertaking had proved irreplaceable. [1]

General Biskupskii acted as Scheubner-Richter's invaluable partner at the head of Aufbau, and he later directed the White emigre community in the Third Reich. [2] Poltavets-Ostranitsa led Aufbau's Ukrainian section, and he sought to establish a National Socialist Ukraine. [3] Shabelskii-Bork transferred The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an inflammatory forgery that influenced National Socialists and other anti-Semites around the world, from the Ukraine to Berlin for publication in German shortly after World War I. [4] Vinberg held detailed ideological discussions with Hitler, and he convinced the Fuhrer that the Soviet Union represented a "Jewish dictatorship." [5]

Rosenberg has been largely overlooked in the historical literature despite his crucial contributions to National Socialism. [6] The White emigre served as the leading National Socialist philosopher after Hitler himself. He collaborated with Dietrich Eckart, Hitler's early mentor, in the newspaper Auf gut deutsch: Wochenschrift fur Ordnung und Recht (In Plain German: Weekly for Law and Order). He de facto took over the editorship of the National Socialist periodical the Volkischer Beobachter (Volkisch Observer) from the ailing Eckart in 1923. He conceived a dire threat to the racially and spiritually superior Germans from a worldwide Jewish capitalist-Bolshevik conspiracy. He led the National Socialist Party during Hitler's imprisonment following the Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch. [7] Finally, he directed Germany's rule over formerly Soviet areas in World War II, and he participated in the atrocities of the Final Solution through his post as Reichsminister fur die besetzten Ostgebiete (State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories). [8]


The overall cohesion of this book is aided by the fortunate circumstance that a surprisingly stable core group of White emigre adventurers repeatedly conspired with volkisch German colleagues, including National Socialists, in various anti-Bolshevik and anti-Weimar Republic schemes from 1918 to 1923. Moreover, with the notable exceptions of Scheubner-Richter, who was killed in 1923, and Vinberg, who moved to Paris the same year, this central group of Aufbau White emigres, including Biskupskii, Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Shabelskii-Bork, Rosenberg, and others who will be introduced below, went on to serve the National Socialist cause after Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933.

Failure represents a recurrent theme in this work. Far right movements in the Russian Empire and Imperial Germany attained only a small fraction of the political influence that they desired and which has subsequently been attributed to them. The principal White emigre figures in this book's primary period of consideration, 1917 to 1923, proved three-time losers. They fell short in various anti-Bolshevik undertakings in the course of the Russian Civil War. They regrouped in East-Elbian Germany only to undergo a severe setback when the far right Kapp Putsch collapsed in March 1920. They reorganized once again in Bavaria only to suffer near-catastrophic defeat and even death in the Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch of November 1923. White emigre fortunes did improve considerably after Hitler's ascension to power. With the utter military defeat of the Third Reich in World War II, however, White emigre aspirations of toppling the Soviet Union in league with National Socialist Germany disappeared.

Using the word "Russian" in conjunction with the exiles from the collapsed Russian Empire who most shaped National Socialism's genesis and development proves problematic given the extreme complexity of multi-ethnic Imperial Russia. [9] Many of these refugees from the East came from Baltic German or Ukrainian ethnic backgrounds, but they had belonged to the Russian Empire politically. Numerous Baltic German and Ukrainian expatriates had resented the Imperial Russian state. I refer to right-wing exiles from the former Russian Empire who opposed the "Red" Bolsheviks, or Majority Social Democrats, as "White emigres." This term is employed in Russian academic circles. Former subjects of Imperial Russia who fought the Bolsheviks became known as "Whites" since Bolshevik leaders insulted their foes by calling them this in the early part of the Russian Civil War. The Bolsheviks wished to associate their enemies with the reactionary Bourbon Dynasty that had ruled France after Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's defeat and exile in 1815. [10]

The significance of substantial White emigre influences on Hitler's Weltanschauung has become more apparent since Brigitte Hamann convincingly argued in her 1996 work, Hitler's Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Hitler's Vienna: Apprentice Years of a Dictator), that Hitler was not yet anti-Semitic during his "hunger years" in Vienna from 1908 to 1913. He even defended the Jews in intense political arguments with those who denounced them. [11] Hamann's book refutes the earlier historical consensus which had contended that Hitler developed an acutely anti-Semitic world-view during his time in Vienna. [12]

Further indications of the relatively late development of Hitler's far right political ideas exist. Hitler's correspondence and private writings from World War I (1914-1918) lack anti-Semitic passages. [13] Hitler's comrades during World War I did not detect anti-Semitic views among his beliefs. [14] Moreover, according to Aide-de-Camp Hans Mend, Hitler's immediate commanding officer on the Western Front in World War I, Hitler occasionally praised Jews, and he exhibited socialist leanings. He often held "rabble-rousing speeches" in which he called himself a representative of the "class-conscious proletariat." [15] Hitler only began to crystallize his virulent anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Weltanschauung in Munich in late 1919 in the context of intercultural collaboration between alienated volkisch Germans and radical White emigres.

Debate on modern German history has dealt with an idea that gained momentum in the 1960s, namely that of a pernicious German Sonderweg (special path). According to the Sonderweg theory, bourgeois Germans brought about a historical deviation through their weakness that ultimately led to the Third Reich and its crimes. [16] The German historian Ernst Nolte attacked the Sonderweg thesis in his 1987 work, Der europaische Burgerkrieg 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (The European Civil War 1917-1945: National Socialism and Bolshevism). He maintained that National Socialism fundamentally represented a reaction against Bolshevism. [17]

In the Historikerstreit( Historians' Debate) in the second half of the 1980s, most scholars rejected Nolte's ideas of causation. [18] The majority of the historians involved in the Historikerstreit affirmed the horrific singularity of National Socialism in general and the Holocaust in particular. [19] In the 1990s, the American scholar Daniel Goldhagen sparked a second Historikerstreit by reintroducing an extreme version of the Sonderweg theory in his book Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. [20] He placed allegedly unparalleled "eliminationist" German anti-Semitism at the center of his historical schema. [21] German academics in particular attacked Goldhagen's ideas as dangerously simplistic."

The positions of Goldhagen and Nolte represent opposing views of German and foreign influences on National Socialism. In Hitler's Willing Executioners, Goldhagen argues for the peculiarly German nature of National Socialism and the Holocaust. He emphasizes what he terms the "eliminationist mind-set" of "German antisemitism" to the exclusion of virtually all other factors. He asserts that it is "not essential to discuss German antisemitism comparatively." He nevertheless concludes, "No other European country came close" to equaling Germany's anti-Semitism. "The unmatched volume and the vitriolic and murderous substance of German antisemitic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alone indicate that German antisemitism was sui generis." [23] Goldhagen thus avoids a sufficient comparative analysis in his treatment of supposedly unequaled German anti-Semitism.


Nolte, on the other hand, stresses the crucial influence of the Bolshevik seizure and consolidation of power in Russia on the National Socialist movement. He is known for arguing that scholars must "historicize" the Final Solution by comparing it with other mass slaughters, most notably those committed under Soviet rule. [24] In The European Civil war 1917-1945, Nolte argues that resistance to Bolshevism formed National Socialism's "most fundamental point." He downplays the importance of German anti-Semitism in the genesis and development of National Socialism. He argues that National Socialism's essence existed "neither in criminal tendencies nor in anti-Semitic obsessions." Rather, the "fear and hate-filled relation to Communism was in fact the moving center of Hitler's feelings and of Hitler's ideology." Nolte further stresses: "Bolshevism was both nightmare and example for National Socialism."

In the conclusion of his work, Nolte provocatively asserts that by holding the Jews responsible for the menace of Bolshevism, Hitler and Reichsfuhrer SS (State Leader SS) Heinrich Himmler "carried the original Bolshevik concept of destruction to a new dimension." Nolte further maintains: "The Gulag Archipelago is more original than Auschwitz and ... a causal nexus exists between them." [25] Nolte's views contain merit in that National Socialists fiercely resisted Bolshevism at the same time that it awed them. Nolte's arguments, however, can lead one to consider National Socialism's Final Solution as a mere reaction to foreign developments.

While I tend more towards Nolte's views than those of Goldhagen, I defend a middle position between Goldhagen's German-specific explanation of National Socialism's murderous development and Nolte's Bolshevik-centered analysis of National Socialism's crimes. National Socialism had both German and Russian roots. The National Socialist movement developed primarily as a synthesis of radical right German and Russian movements and ideas. National Socialism arose out of a radical right post-World War I Munich milieu of vengeful volkisch Germans and rancorous White emigres. Several of the latter despised Bolshevism and yet admired the determination of its leaders as well as its practices of subversion followed by strict centralization, thorough militarization, and the ruthless elimination of political enemies.

I stress Aufbau's pivotal role in guiding National Socialists and White emigres in a joint anti-Entente, anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic struggle. While National Socialism developed largely in the framework of the volkisch movement, White emigre Aufbau members significantly influenced Hitler's political, military, and ideological views. Aufbau shaped early National Socialist strategies for combating both the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union. The conspiratorial organization under Scheubner-Richter, who served as Hitler's close counselor and foreign policy advisor, sought to form an international alliance headed by nationalist and even National Socialist Germans and Russians (actually Russians, Ukrainians, and Baltic peoples) against the Entente, the Weimar Republic, and "Jewish Bolshevism." Aufbau goaded a doomed putsch against the Weimar Republic under Hitler and Ludendorff. Finally, Aufbau warned the early National Socialist movement that "Jewish Bolshevism" posed an apocalyptic danger that threatened to engulf Germany, Europe, and even the entire world.

This book improves a weakness in historical inquiry, as previous works on White emigre influences on National Socialism remain few and far between. In his groundbreaking 1939 book, L'Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de la propagande allemande d'apres des documents inedits (The Apocalypse of Our Times: The Hidden Side of German Propaganda According to Unpublished Documents), Henri Rollin stressed that "Hitlerism" represented a form of "anti-Soviet counter-revolution" which employed the "myth of a mysterious Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot." Rollin investigated the National Socialist belief, which was taken primarily from White emigre views, that a vast Jewish-Masonic conspiracy had provoked World War I, toppled the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and unleashed Bolshevism after undermining the existing order through the insidious spread of liberal ideas. German forces promptly destroyed Rollin's work in 1940 after they occupied France, and the book has remained in obscurity ever since. [26]

Almost thirty years passed before Walter Laqueur noted the lack of historical research on White emigre contributions to National Socialism in his book Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict. Laqueur remarked: "In the search for the origins of German National Socialism some highly abstruse and improbable influences have been prominently featured, but the more tangible and substantial impact of refugees from Russia has usually been overlooked." Laqueur argued that historians of the National Socialist movement had generally been neither interested in White emigre influences nor qualified to analyze them, while the post-Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch development of National Socialism overshadowed earlier National Socialist-White emigre collaboration. Laqueur's book performed a valuable service by drawing attention to National Socialist-White emigre interaction. Laqueur's work nonetheless offered a relatively superficial overview of White emigre contributions to National Socialism, largely because of the research constraints of the Cold War period. [27]

Since the 1960s, a few historians have addressed National Socialist-White emigre collaboration, including Norman Cohn in his work warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish world-Conspiracy and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," Robert Williams in his book Culture in Exile: Russian Emigres in Germany, 1881-1941, and the editor Karl Schlogel in his anthology Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918 bis 1941: Leben im europaischen Burgerkrieg (The Russian Emigre Community in Germany 1918 to 1941: Life in the European Civil war). Cohn's work examines the fabrication and dissemination of the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Russia to Germany, where they influenced National Socialists. [28] A German expert on the Protocols, Michael Hagemeister, has recently challenged Cohn's conclusion that the Imperial Russian Okhrana (Secret Police) in Paris fabricated the Protocols. [29] We will return to this theme in Chapter Two.

The books of Williams and Schlogel serve as valuable reference works on White emigre matters in general, but they do not focus on White emigre influences on National Socialism. Williams does briefly address White emigre contributions to National Socialism. He notes: "With the Third Reich came the new anti-Semitic virulence of the Nazis nurtured by the extreme right wing Russians and Balts who had discovered Hitler in Munich in the early 1920s." William's book does not, however, examine the alliance between National Socialists and many White emigres in detail. [30] Schlogel's work serves as a useful reference book on White emigres, but it treats White emigre influences on National Socialism as an ancillary topic. [31]

Among Russian historians, only Rafael Ganelin has examined the ideological contributions of White emigres to National Socialism substantially. He has noted that many right-wing exiles from the former Russian Empire believed that Jewish finance capitalism had supported the Bolshevik Revolution. This view became part of National Socialist ideology. Ganelin did not undertake large amounts of primary research. His most important essay, "Russian Black Hundreds and German National Socialism," relies primarily upon secondary Western publications. [32]

A relatively detailed work examining White emigre influences on National Socialism only appeared in 1998 with the publication of Johannes Baur's Die russische Kolonie in Munchen 1900-1945: Deutsch-russische Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (The Russian Colony in Munich 1900-1945: German-Russian Relations in the Twentieth Century). Baur asserts that White emigres influenced Hitler's conception of the Bolshevik Revolution. Moreover, the "anti-Semitic prophets of the emigration" helped to form National Socialist ideology by combining extreme anti-Bolshevism with anti-Semitism. These White emigres exhibited the "intention to destroy entire segments of the population and peoples." Baur nonetheless minimizes the extent of the "interaction between the Munich segment of the Russian monarchical right with the National Socialists." He maintains that the cooperation between these two groups was limited to a short period of time, with ideological and political differences extant from the beginning. [33]

Ideological and power-political divergences certainly existed between early National Socialists and Bavarian-based White emigres. Members of both sides sought to use the other for their own purposes. Nonetheless, despite inevitable divergences as found in any cross-cultural collaboration, many National Socialists and White emigres possessed substantial common ground. They launched a joint struggle against what they regarded as nefarious international Jews who manipulated both predatory finance capitalism in the West and bloody Bolshevism in the East. Four Aufbau members from the same Riga fraternity in Imperial Russia in particular bridged the gap between National Socialists and White emigres, as they belonged to both groups: Scheubner-Ricbter, Arno Schickedanz, Otto von Kursell, and Rosenberg.

Given the expanded research opportunities of the post-Cold War epoch, historians need to emphasize Russian influences on National Socialism more. Archival materials housed in Moscow that have only recently become available to historians in particular necessitate a reevaluation of White emigre contributions to National Socialism. During the summer of 1945, Soviet occupying forces in German Lower Silesia discovered vast German archives as well as great amounts of documents that the Germans had seized from occupied countries, most notably France and Poland. The entire archival collection was transported to Moscow, where it was stored in secrecy from the public and even from workers in other Soviet archives. [34] While Soviet authorities returned some of these records to East Germany during the Cold War, most of the seized archival collection remained under wraps in Moscow.

Russian authorities only admitted to possessing files looted from Germany and declassified them in 1991 after the Soviet Union had collapsed. Historians were allowed to investigate the huge archival collection at the Center for the Preservation of Historical-Documentary Collections, which had become part of the Russian State Military Archives by the time I examined materials there in 1999-2001. [35] I was temporarily denied access to the former Center in March 2001, likely as part of the chilled American-Russian relations that arose after the February 2001 arrest of the FBI operative Robert Hanssen as a double agent for both the Soviets and the Russians. [36]

In its heyday, the former Center contained large amounts of files dealing with National Socialist-White emigre collaboration, including reports from Hitler's Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police, commonly known as the Gestapo) and the Reichskommissar fur die Uberwachung der offentlichen Ordnung (State Commissioner for the Supervision of Public Order), the secret intelligence office of the Weimar Republic that reported on political developments and observed foreigners in Germany. [37] Regrettably, many State Commissioner files, most likely including one devoted specifically to Aufbau, have long been housed at the Sluzhba vneshnoi razvetki (Foreign Intelligence Service), where historians are not allowed to examine them. As a further hindrance, Russian authorities "temporarily" transferred the remaining State Commissioner documents there during the summer of 2001, fortunately after I had examined them thoroughly. I believe that I am the last Western scholar to investigate these valuable materials.


The former Center still houses important personal papers that I examined. For instance, the former Center possesses the extensive private collection of Ludwig Muller von Hausen. This volkisch publicist received The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from Shabelskii-Bork in 1919. He had the Protocols translated into German, and then he published them with commentary, thereby disseminating them to National Socialists and other anti-Semites. [38] The former Center also holds the unpublished diary of Walther Nicolai, the head of German Army Intelligence during World War I who subsequently provided anti-Bolshevik intelligence to Aufbau and the National Socialist Party. [39]

The former Center also contains valuable documents of French and Polish provenance that I analyzed. In particular, the institution possesses copies of French intelligence files from the Surete Generale (General Security) and its successor organization beginning in 1934, the Direction Generale de la Surete Nationale (General Department of National Security). The former Center also holds copies of military intelligence reports from the Deuxieme Bureau (Second Section). Moreover, the former Center houses Polish Sztab Glowny Oddzial drugi (Main Headquarters Second Section) intelligence reports on White emigre activities. The Narodnyi komissariat vnutrennikh del (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs, NKVD) began collecting these files in September 1939 after the Soviet Union invaded eastern Poland. [40]

This book is arranged thematically and chronologically. Chapter One provides background on National Socialism's genesis primarily as a synthesis of German and Russian radical right movements and ideologies by examining the development of the far right in the German and Russian Empires. Imperial German and Russian radical rightists, who considered themselves to possess spiritual and even racial superiority, developed elaborate anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic views. The redemptive aspect of volkisch German thought associated with the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the composer Richard Wagner, and the author Houston Stewart Chamberlain stressed that Germans needed to oppose materialistic Jews and to deny the will to live, thereby attaining salvation. Drawing inspiration from the mystically inclined authors Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Solovev [Soloviev], Imperial Russian far rightists propagated Orthodox Christian superiority and warned that an apocalyptic battle loomed between Russia at the head of all Slavs and conspiratorial international Jewry, where Russians would assume the role of Christ, and Jews would take the part of the Antichrist.

Despite their development of detailed religiously inspired anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic beliefs, far rightists in the German and Russian Empires failed politically in the period leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. The volkisch German right could not gain a mass following, nor could it replace the Kaiser with a military dictatorship under General Ludendorff in 1917. In Imperial Russia, the far right "Black Hundred" movement, of which the Soiuz russkago naroda (Union of the Russian People) formed the most important part, gained some initial popular successes in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905. The Black Hundred movement soon split into factions. however, that could not thwart the Tsar's abdication and the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The combined German-White/White emigre far right only began to thrive after the Bolsheviks had come to power and Germany had lost World War I. Volkisch Germans and Whites/White emigres primarily blamed these catastrophes on the Jews.

Chapter Two is divided into two parts. The first section focuses on the Ukraine in 1918 as the theater of the first large-scale anti-Bolshevik German-White military collaboration. The German-White anti-Bolshevik interaction in and just outside the Ukraine established a precedent for further cooperation between rightist Germans and Whites/White emigres both in Germany and abroad, notably as conducted in the Baltic region the following year. Many White officers who served in the Ukraine under German occupation went on to join Aufbau and to foster the National Socialist cause, including General Biskupskii, Colonel Vinberg, Colonel Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, and Lieutenant Shabelskii-Bork.

The second segment of Chapter Two deals with the Ukraine's role as a transfer zone for White ideology to postwar volkisch German circles in general and to Hitler in particular. During the winter of 1918/1919, German military personnel evacuated thousands of White officers from the Ukraine. One of them, Shabelskii-Bork, carried The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with him to Berlin. Once there, he gave the fabrication to the volkisch publicist Hausen for translation and publication in German. The Protocols' warnings of an insidious Jewish plot to achieve world domination through both insatiable finance capitalism and revolutionary turmoil greatly affected volkisch Germans and White emigres, including Hitler's mentors Eckart and Rosenberg. They in turn influenced Hitler's anti-Semitic views. Hitler used the Protocols as a blueprint of Jewish schemes to conquer the world, notably through the use of starvation as a means to subjugate nationalist majorities.

Chapter Three focuses on nationalist German-White/White emigre collaboration in the Baltic region and in Germany in 1919-1920. The first part of the chapter analyzes the anti-Bolshevik campaign of a combined German Freikorps (volunteer corps) and White Russian army in the Latvian Intervention of 1919. After allowing and even fostering the creation of Freikorps in the Baltic region, the Entente and the largely socialist German government ordered these units to end their anti-Bolshevik operation in tandem with White formations in Latvia. The early director of the Latvian Intervention, General Count Rudiger von der Goltz, complied with the demands of the Entente and the Weimar Republic, but thousands of Germans defied their orders by remaining in Latvia along with their White comrades. The Western Volunteer Army, as the combined German/White force in Latvia was called, came under the command of Colonel Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, who had served in the Ukraine under German occupation in 1918. After some early successes, Bermondt-Avalov's army suffered defeat. While the Latvian Intervention failed militarily, it fostered a strong sense of German/White solidarity.

In addition to serving as a German/White anti-Bolshevik crusade abroad, the Latvian Intervention complemented international far right efforts to overthrow the Weimar Republic. Nationalist Germans grouped around Wolfgang Kapp and Ludendorff hoped for support for their intended putsch from rightist German and White members of Bermondt-Avalov's Western Volunteer Army after they had triumphed over Bolshevism in Latvia and Russia. After the defeat of Bermondt-Avalov's forces, Kapp and Ludendorff used demobilized Germans and White emigres from the Latvian Intervention to undermine the Weimar Republic. National revolutionary undertakings climaxed with the abortive Kapp Putsch of March 1920, which Ludendorff, Scheubner-Richter, Biskupskii, Vinberg, Shabeiskii-Bork,Taboritskii, and even Hitler and Eckart supported. While the Kapp Putsch failed in Berlin, it succeeded in Munich, and it set the stage for increased cooperation between volkisch Germans, including National Socialists, and White emigres there.

Chapters Four through Seven examine Aufbau's rise and fall in Munich from 1920 to 1923. Aufbau gained its initial impetus from the cooperation between former volkisch German and White emigre Kapp Putsch conspirators located in Bavaria and General Piotr Vrangel's Southern Russian Armed Forces, which were based on the Crimean Peninsula in the Ukraine. Scheubner-Richter led a dangerous mission to the Crimea to specify the terms of mutual support between his right-wing German and White emigre backers in Bavaria and Vrangel's regime. The Red Army soon overran the Crimean Peninsula and sent Vrangel and his soldiers fleeing, but Scheubner-Richter nonetheless turned Aufbau into the dynamic focal point of volkisch German-White emigre collaboration.

Aufbau linked important volkisch Germans, most notably Hitler and General Ludendorff, whom Scheubner-Richter introduced to each other in the framework of Aufbau,
with prominent White emigres. Important White emigre members of Aufbau included First Secretary Scheubner-Richter himself, Vice President Biskupskii, Deputy Director Schickedanz, Ukrainian faction leader Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, Taboritskii, Rosenberg, and Rosenberg's collaborator in Eckart's newspaper In Plain German, Kursell. In addition to serving in Aufbau, Scheubner-Richter, Schickedanz, Kursell, and Rosenberg played active roles in the National Socialist Party. Aufbau's second secretary, the German Max Amann, also served as the National Socialist Party secretary.

After it consolidated itself into a powerful conspiratorial force in the first half of 1921 under Scheubner-Richter's de facto leadership, Aufbau tried and failed to unite all White emigres behind Grand Prince Kirill Romanov in league with National Socialists. Aufbau hoped to lead all White emigres in Europe in an anti-Bolshevik crusade that would replace Soviet rule with nationalist Russian, Ukrainian, and Baltic states. Instead of unifying all White emigres, Aufbau engaged in bitter internecine struggle with the Supreme Monarchical Council under the former Union of the Russian People faction leader Nikolai Markov II. The Council supported Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov, who had close ties to the French government, for Tsar. Markov II's Council sought to reestablish Imperial Russia in its former borders with French military assistance. Aufbau detested the Council's pro-French undertakings to such a degree that it entertained a hazardous tactical alliance with the Red Army.


The bitter opposition between KPD and NSDAP in the Weimar Republic is well known; meeting-hall battles and terrorist attacks were a daily occurrence. But from the very beginning there existed within each camp a National Bolshevist tendency, whose influence fluctuated from year to year. Here we must also distinguish between the surges within the general population and the "theoreticians" of the Conservative Revolution, who considered themselves an intellectual elite. In spite of a certain following of their own, this elite remained aloof from events, disdainfully voicing the opinion that the National Socialists had watered down the pure theory of the Conservative Revolution, as had all the other 500 groupings and tendencies within the Weimar Republic....

The victorious powers' financial and economic strangulation of Germany first made possible the "success" of the KPD and NSDAP, both of whom benefited from the ferment against the Versailles Treaty. From the outset, both parties sought to destroy the "system," the young Weimar Republic. The de facto collaboration between Nazis and Communists in this endeavor, repeatedly took on a very practical form, and was the ultimate cause of the Weimar Republic's collapse.

National Bolshevist Dreams

Whenever the National Bolshevist tendency was on the rise within the Nazi movement, discussion quickly moved to the necessity for an alliance between Germany and Russia as the key to defeating the "West," perhaps even leading to eventual world domination by both states. Many German military people, still laboring under the shock of the outcome of the war, cherished hopes that with the aid of the Russians, their humiliating defeat might be reversed. This hope was nourished by the Russian Army's advances in connection with the 1920 Russo-Polish war. Even though the advance was soon halted at Warsaw, an even greater resurgence of National Bolshevist ideas came with the hammer-blows of the Great Inflation of 1923 and the occupation of the Ruhr, both of which seemed to threaten the very existence of the Weimar Republic. This provided such National Bolshevist tendencies as Karl Radek, the most powerful functionary on the executive committee of the Communist International and a close confidante of Stalin, with the opportunity to push through the Nazi-Communist tactical alliance known as the so-called "Schlageter course" and the tactic of National Bolshevism itself.

Ruth Fischer, who since May 1923 had been a "leftist" on the Central Committee, told a meeting of volkisch students:

The German Reich .. , can only be saved if you, gentlemen of the German-volkisch side, realize that you must fight together with the Russians who are organized with the KPD. Whoever raises the cry against Jewish capital ... is already a fighter in the class struggle, whether he knows it or not. ... Stamp out the Jew capitalists, hang them from the lamp posts, trample them to death!


The broadest-based upsurge of National Bolshevism, however, took place in 1930. The world economic crisis was reaching a climax, the soup lines were growing in length, and, in the form of the Young and Dawes plans, the victorious powers were again attempting to unload a large part of the burden onto Germany. The National Bolshevist Strasser wing of the NSDAP, hoping to make the ideas of Moeller van den Bruck, Friedrich Naumann, and Mazaryk into reality, competed with Hitler for leadership of the party. Gregor Strasser coined the catchphrase, "anti-capitalist yearning" (antikapitalistische Sehnsucht), which captured the fancy of the entire German people.

In the tradition of Radek, the KPD attempted to assume leadership of this anti-Western current, and decreed such initiatives as the "Programmatic Declaration of the KPD for the National and Social Liberation of the German People" on Aug. 24, 1930, and the "Farmers Aid Program" in the spring of 1931. Within the KPD itself, the group around Heinz Naumann sought out active contact with National Bolshevist forces on the right. This tendency was later called the "Scheringer Course," referring to the infamous Lieutenant [Richard] Scheringer, who in 1930 had been arrested for his National Bolshevist activities within the Reichswehr and who had gone over to the KPD while still in prison. The German information service DID reported in a special Jan. 30, 1983 issue that:

after his arrest, Scheringer joined up with the KPD and attempted to bring right- and leftwing radical opponents of the Weimar Republic together into a "rebels' circle." Following the outbreak of war in 1939, through the mediation of the later Field Marshal von Reichenau, Scheringer formally requested that Hitler recall him into military service as a volunteer with his old rank. As the "division's most courageous officer," Artillery Captain Scheringer now successfully turned his guns against his Communist comrades. After World War II, Scheringer's silence about his Nazi past enabled him to become a state secretary, and he dedicated himself to the task of gathering together former functionaries from the "Imperial Food Trades" in the Communist-influenced "Association for Forestry and Agriculture." Scheringer was also influential in the "Leadership Ring of Former Soldiers," whose primary task was to follow Moscow's plan to mobilize ex-Nazis and former German officers against the so-called "remilitarization of the Federal Republic." Since the "reconstitution" of the Communist Party of Germany (DKP) in September 1968, Scheringer has been an "agricultural expert" on the DKP's executive committee. The activities of this Nazi-Communist not only undermined the Weimar Republic, as they do now the Federal Republic, but the personnel of this network has remained intact down to the present day.

On Aug. 9, 1931, under Moscow's strict instructions, the KPD supported the Stahlhelm's plebiscite against the Prussian administration, and on election day, in accordance with this order, in front of every voting place there was posted a red flag with hammer and sickle, side by side with a red swastika flag. (They lost the plebiscite just the same.) One year later the NSDAP and KPD jointly supported the strike of the Berlin Transportation Union. Under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht they followed the motto that anything which weakened the West would help them, putting faith in Stalin's slogan: "Through Hitler we will take power!"


This time the National Bolshevist tendency acquired more influence over the population than before. Strasser's wing in the NSDAP, however, still could not win out over Hitler's Munich clique, and formally subordinated itself on June 30, 1930, with Gregor Strasser knuckling under and his brother Otto leaving the NSDAP entirely. In 1932, it finally came to an open break between Gregor Strasser and Hitler, and on June 30, 1934, the "Night of the Long Knives," Hitler used his own methods to end the faction fighting within the NSDAP, shooting down Gregor Strasser along with all his followers in the SA.

Once again, as in the period before World War I, the so-called theoreticians of the Conservative Revolution had a much greater long-range influence than the pragmatic Gregor Strasser, or those who thought they could accomplish something by forming a new "popular conservative" party. In the wake of the power struggle, the so-called authors of the Conservative Revolution -- the National Revolutionaries and National Bolsheviks of the Weimar Republic -- had been partially wiped out by the Nazis, partially put into concentration camps, and partially driven abroad, where they were able to surround themselves with an absurd aura of resistance. Nevertheless, today they once again represent a serious threat.

-- The Hitler Book, edited by Helga Zepp-LaRouche


To further complementary right-wing German and Russian interests, Hitler assisted the pro-Kirill Aufbau in its struggle with Markov II's Supreme Monarchical Council. For its support, Kirill granted Hitler's National Socialist Party considerable subsidies in the context of the "German-Russian national cause." While Aufbau could not unite all White emigres in Germany (and beyond) behind Kirill and in harness with National Socialists, the Aufbau ideologues Scheubner-Richter, Vinberg, and Rosenberg called for "Germany-Russia above everything." They succeeded in convincing Hitler of the need for a nationalist German-Russian alliance against the Entente, the Weimar Republic, the Soviet Union, and international Jewry.

In addition to urging German-Russian collaboration, Aufbau engaged in terrorism. Biskupskii placed a contract for the assassination of Aleksandr Kerenskii, the former head of the 1917 Provisional Government in Russia. Two Aufbau colleagues, Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii, accidentally shot the prominent Constitutional Democrat Vladimir Nabokov in their attempt to murder the Russian Constitutional Democratic leader Pavel Miliukov. The Aufbau co-conspirators Biskupskii, Ludendorff, and his advisor Colonel Karl Bauer (at the least) colluded in the assassination of Weimar Germany's Foreign Minister, Walther Rathenau. In this undertaking, the Aufbau associates conspired with Organization C, a radical right union based in Munich under the important Kapp Putsch participant Captain Hermann Ehrhardt. This association carried out terrorist acts, planned military campaigns against the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union, and upheld close relations with Hitler's National Socialists.

As well as engaging in terrorism, Aufbau coordinated joint National Socialist-White emigre efforts to topple the Soviet Union through the use of military force.
Aufbau's goals vis-a-vis the Soviet Union became those of the National Socialist Party, as Scheubner-Richter rose to become Hitler's leading foreign policy advisor and one of his closest consultants in general. Aufbau's foreign policy called for weakening the Bolshevik regime through internal revolt and then overthrowing it with interventionary forces. Aufbau then planned to establish National Socialist successor states in the Ukraine, in the Baltic region, and in the Great Russian heartland. Hitler, who had not yet developed his concept that Germany needed to acquire Lebensraum (living space) in the East, approved of Aufbau's plans for reconstituting the Soviet Union. He especially wished to foster an independent National Socialist Ukraine under Poltavets-Ostranitsa.

In addition to scheming to overthrow the Soviet Union in league with National Socialists, Aufbau played a pivotal role in coordinating Hitler's preparations for a putsch against the Weimar Republic. Aufbau helped the National Socialist Party to build a substantial war chest for its intended coup by contributing funds from Aufbau members or allies such as Kirill well as by channeling funds from Henry Ford, the wealthy American industrialist and politician. Scheubner-Richter played a leading role in the increasingly belligerent Kampfbund (Combat League), a paramilitary organization under Hitler and General Ludendorff. In preparing for a putsch against the Weimar Republic, Scheubner-Richter drew from the perceived Bolshevik example, where a few determined men had shaped world history through subversion followed by strict centralization and militarization. Scheubner-Richter brought Hitler and Ludendorff together at the head of the Combat League for a determined show of force in the Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch of November 1923. He paid for this doomed undertaking with his life.

Chapter Eight analyzes Aufbau's early ideological contributions to National Socialism. Hitler, who only began to develop intense anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic beliefs in late 1919 in the context of volkisch German-White emigre interaction, learned a great deal from his early mentor Eckart and three Aufbau members: Scheubner-Richter, Vinberg, and Rosenberg. These ideological comrades served as the "four writers of the apocalypse." They influenced National Socialist ideology by adding White emigre conspiratorial-apocalyptic anti-Semitism to existing volkisch-redemptive notions of Germanic spiritual and racial superiority.

In the vein of Dostoevskii, the four writers of the apocalypse argued that a sinister worldwide Jewish conspiracy manipulated the twin evils of rapacious finance capitalism and bloodthirsty Bolshevism. They excoriated what they regarded as "Jewish Bolshevism." The ideological quartet warned that "Jewish Bolshevism" had killed many millions of Russians in general, and, in a more sinister manner, had exterminated Russia's nationalist intelligentsia. They emphasized that "Jewish Bolsheviks" threatened to annihilate the German nationalist intelligentsia and to slaughter many millions of other Germans in their bloody quest to achieve tyrannical world rule. While Bolshevism horrified him, Rosenberg nonetheless learned from what he perceived as its brutal method of eliminating political enemies. The four writers of the apocalypse radicalized the early National Socialist Party by warning that the "Jewish Bolshevik" peril threatened to pass from world conquest to world destruction.

This work concentrates on the genesis of National Socialism from 1917 to 1923, but Chapter Nine analyzes Aufbau's political, financial, military, and ideological legacy to National Socialism after 1923. Scheubner-Richter's tragic death at Hitler's side during the Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch served as a model of heroic sacrifice for the National Socialist cause. Biskupskii in particular continued to channel funds to the National Socialist Party after 1923. Rosenberg, Schickedanz, and Biskupskii held high posts in the Third Reich. Hitler and Rosenberg continued to use Ukrainian separatists under Poltavets-Ostranitsa to undermine the Soviet Union. Hitler's insistence on winning the Ukraine for Germany in the vein of Aufbau during World War II led him to divert powerful formations of the German Army southwards away from Moscow in 1941, with disastrous military results.

After subsiding somewhat during the National Socialist seizure and consolidation of power, Hitler's virulent anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism which he had largely derived from Aufbau thought, found pronounced expression in the later years of the Third Reich. Hitler's intense anti-Bolshevism, which Aufbau had shaped, largely led him to launch a risky invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Fundamental Aufbau-inspired National Socialist ideas on the pernicious nature of Jewish world conspirators continued to evolve after 1923, and they helped to motivate the National Socialist attempt to annihilate European Jewry in the Final Solution. As the State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Rosenberg aided Hitler in his dual crusades against Bolshevism and Jewry, which the Fuhrer often combined into a single struggle against "Jewish Bolshevism."

Popular notions notwithstanding, National Socialism did not arise as a mere continuation of peculiarly German radical right-wing politics. This book seeks to foster understanding of National Socialism and its attendant atrocities primarily as the result of cross-cultural interaction between groups defeated in World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution: alienated volkisch Germans and rancorous White emigres. Many anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic White emigres contributed extensively to the rise and development of National Socialism in Germany. They affected aggressive National Socialist political and military strategies, provided Hitler with extensive funding, influenced National Socialist ideology by warning apocalyptically of impending Jewish Bolshevik destruction, and helped to spur the Final Solution.

_______________
 
Notes:
 
1 Georg Franz-Willing, Ursprung der Hitlerbewegung 1919-1922 (Preussisch Oldendorf: K. W. Schutz KG, 1974), 198.
 
2 DB reports from November 11, 1922 and May 22, 1936, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opis 1, delo 386, reel, 157; opis 4, delo 168, reel I, I.
 
3 "Ukraine und Nationalsozialismus," Wirtschafts-politische Aufbau-Korrespondenz uber Ostfragen und ihre Bedeutung fur Deutschland, May 17, 1923, 4.
 
4 Gestapo report from April 13,1935, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 501, opis 3, delo 496a, 208.
 
5 Adolf Hitler, notes for a speech on November 2, 1922, Samtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, eds. Eberhard Jackel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 716.
 
6 Johannes Baur, Die russische Kolonie in Munchen, 1900-1945: Deutsch-russische Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 271.
 
7 Max Hildebert Boehm, "Baltische Einflusse auf die Anfange des Nationalsozlalismus," Jahrbuch des baltischen Deutschtums, 1967, 63.
 
8 Karlheinz Rudiger, "Reichsminister fur die besetzten Ostgebiete Alfred Rosenberg," KR, BAB,  [November 1941], NS 8, number 8, 2.
 
9 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1997), xix, xx.
 
10 Brian Crozier, The Rise and Fail of the Soviet Empire (Rocklin, CA: Prima Publishing, 1999), 19.
 
11 Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich: Piper, 1996), 239-241, 499, 500.
 
12 See, for instance, Alan Bullock's Hitler: A Study in Tyranny (New York: Harper and Row, 1962),  36, and Joachim C. Fest's Hitler, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace  Jovanovich, 1974), 42.
 
13 Hitler, Samtliche Aufzeichnungen, 60-84, 1,256, 1,257.
 
14 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889-1936: Hubris (London: Penguin Press, 1998), 64.
 
15 Hans Mend, "Protokoll aufgenommen am 22. Dezember 1939 mit Hans Mend, Reitlehrer und  Verwalter auf Schloss Eluholz Berg bei Starnberg a/See, ehemals Ulan im kgl. bayer. x. Ulanenregiment zugeteilt als Ordonnanzreiter im Oktober 1914 dem Inf. Rgt: 'List.' Seit Juni 1916 befordert  zum Offizier-Stellvertreter und zugeteilt dem 4. bayer. Feldartillerieregiment, Munitionskolonne  143 (Tankabwehr). Bei der Truppe bekannt als der 'Schimmelreiter,'" BHSAM/AK, Handschriftensammlung, number 3231, 2, 5.
 
16 Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1988), 102, 104.
 
17 Ernst Nolte, Der europaische Burgerkrieg 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt  am Main: Propylaen Verlag, 1987), 15.
 
18 Peter Baldwin, Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians' Debate (Boston: Beacon  Press, 1990), 9.
 
19 Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 53.
 
20 Ullrich Volker, "Hitler's willige Mordgesellen: Ein Buch provoziert einen neuen Historikerstreit:  Waren die Deutschen doch alleschuldig?" Ein Volk von Mordern? Die Dokumentation zur Goidhagen-Kontroverse um die Rolle der Deutschen im Holocaust, ed. Julius Schoeps (Hamburg: Hoffmann und  Campe, 1996), 89.
 
21 Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York:  Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 393.
 
22 Joseph Joffe, "Goldhagen in Germany," The New York Review of Books, November 28, 1996, 18.
 
23  Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 6, 9, 25, 419.
 
24 Maier, The Unmasterable Past, 66, 67.
 
25 Nolte, Der europaische Burgerkrieg, 15, 16, 21, 22, 545, 548.
 
26 Henri Rollin, L'Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de la propagande allemande d'apres des documents  inedits (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 9, 11, 168.
 
27 Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,  1965), 53.
 
28 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the "Protocols of  the Elders of Zion" (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 61, 62.
 
29 Michael Hagemeister. "Dec Mythos der Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,'" Verschworungstheorien:  Anthropologische Konstanten -- historische Varianten, eds. Ute Caumanns and Matthias Niendorf  (Osnabruck: Fibre Verlag, 2001), 99.
 
30  Robert Williams, Culture in Exile: Russian Emigres in Germany, 1881-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University  Press, 1972), 371.
 
31 Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918 bis 1941; Leben im europaischen Burgerkrieg, ed. Karl Schlogel  (Berlin: Akademie, 1995).
 
32 Rafael Ganelin, "Rossiiskoe chernosotenstvo i germanskii natsional-sotsializm," Natsionalnaia  pravata prezhde i teper, Istoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki, chast I: Rossiia i russkoe zarubezhe (Saint  Petersburg: Institut Sotsiologii rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 1992), 130.
 
33 Baur, Die russische Kolonie in Munchen, 279, 316.
 
34 Gotz AIy and Susanne Heim, Das Zentrale Staatsarchiv in Moskau ("Sonderarchiv") (Dusseldorf:  Hans-Bockler-Stiftung, 1992), 7; Patricia Kennedy Grimsted, "Displaced Archives and the Restitution  Problems on the Eastern Front in the Aftermath of the Second World War,”  Contemporary  European History, vol. 6, March 1997, 60.
 
35 Grimsted Archives of Russia Five Years After: "Purveyors of Sensations " or "Shadows Cast to the Past"?  (Amsterdam: International Institute of Social History, 1997), 65; Grimsted, "Displaced Archives,"  45.
 
36 Adrian Havill, The Spy Who Stayed out in the Cold: The Secret Lift of FBI Double Agent Robert Hanssen  (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2001), 7, 216-219.
 
37 Quellen zur Geschichte der UdSSR und der deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen 1917-1945 (Potsdam:  Zentrales Staatsarchiv, 1984), 106.
 
38 Gestapo report from April 13, 1935, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 501, opis 3, delo 496a, 208.
 
39 Walther Nicolai's commentary on his letter to Erich von Ludendorff from April 19, 1922, Tagebuch  (Diary), RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 1414, opis 1, delo 20, 174.
 
40 Grimsted, Trophies of 'War and Empire: The Archival Heritage of Ukraine, World War II and the  International Politics of Restitution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 289, 296, 302.
 
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Mon Jan 28, 2019 9:52 pm

Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER I: The far right in the German and Russian Empires

National Socialism with its intensely anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic ideology arose primarily as a synthesis of radical right German and Russian movements and ideas. This chapter illuminates the background of National Socialism's genesis by examining the development of the far right in Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire up to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. During a dynamic period of increasing industrialization and democratization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Imperial German and Russian radical rightists feared for their elevated societal positions, and they developed intensely anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic views. These beliefs later found prominent expression in Hitler's National Socialist movement, which fought against what it perceived to be an insidious international Jewish alliance between ravenous finance capitalism and murderous Bolshevism.

Volkisch German ideology increasingly represented Jews as racial parasites, but it also regarded the Jewish essence metaphysically as the manifestation of shallow materialism. In the spirit of the "denial of the will to live," a concept that the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer championed, volkisch theorists such as the composer Richard Wagner and the author Houston Stewart Chamberlain sought German religious redemption. This German struggle against the perceived worldly Jewish nature primarily took place on the spiritual plane and not on the political stage. While volkisch ideologues in Imperial Germany developed a substantial ideology based on hopes for German inner redemption as racially and spiritually superior beings, they could not achieve anything approaching the modest political success of Imperial Russian far rightists in the years leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

In the Russian Empire, "conservative revolutionaries," to borrow a phrase from one of their leading members, the author Fedor Dostoevskii, demonstrated more vitality than their right-wing German counterparts. They used religiously inspired notions of Orthodox Christian superiority and the apocalyptic battle for Russia's salvation from scheming Jews in a moderately successful political struggle against perceived materialistic, westernizing, and socialist Jewish elements. At the height of their powers immediately following the 1905 Revolution, Imperial Russian far rightists, most notably members of the Soiuz russkago naroda (Union of the Russian People), disseminated their anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic message to the broad masses far more effectively than pre-World War I volkisch Germans ever did.

I read the news about Kelsiyev [1] with much emotion. That's the right way, that's truth and reason! But be you very sure of this that (of course excepting the Poles) all our Liberals of socialistic leanings will rage like wild beasts. It will thrill them to the marrow. They'll hate it worse than if all their noses had been cut off. What are they to say now, whom now shall they bespatter? The most they can do is to gnash their teeth; and everyone at home quite understands that. Have you ever yet heard a sensible idea from any of our Liberals? They can but gnash their teeth, at any time; and indeed it mightily impresses school-boys. Of Kelsiyev, it will now be maintained that he has denounced them all. By God, you'll see that I am right. But can anyone "denounce" them, I ask you? In the first place, they have themselves compromised themselves; in the second who takes the slightest interest in them? They're not worth denouncing! . . .

_______________

Notes:

1 V. Kelsiyev, a political emigre, and collaborator with Herzen. He came back to Russia penitent, and became a collaborator on the extremely conservative Roussky Viestnik.

-- Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to his Family and Friends, translated by Ethel Colburn Mayne


Ultimately, far right alignments in Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire failed to develop into powerful societal forces. Volkisch German political activities culminated in "national opposition" efforts to replace Kaiser Wilhelm Hohenzollern II, seen as a weak leader, with a military dictatorship under the volkisch General Erich von Ludendorff in 1917. These endeavors miscarried. After a brief period of moderate success, Imperial Russian radical rightists faded into relative political insignificance. While they sought to uphold the autocratic prerogatives of Tsar Nikolai Romanov II, they could not thwart either the Tsar's abdication or the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917. German and Russian far right movements only came into vogue after the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I. Volkisch Germans, including National Socialists, and White emigres blamed both of these catastrophes primarily on sinister international Jewish conspirators.

THE VOLKISCH RIGHT IN IMPERIAL GERMANY

In order to understand the rise of volkisch ideology in Germany, one must examine the political development of the German state. The German Empire became a political entity only in 1871, and even then it failed to include millions of ethnic Germans. Late and incomplete German unification spurred a substantial volkisch ideology in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that Hitler ultimately drew upon. The adjective "volkisch" derives from the word "Volk" (people). Proponents of volkisch thought believed the German people to be an autonomous agent above the state largely because of its transcendental essence. [1] Volkisch ideas developed from German Romanticism, which opposed parliamentarianism, Westernism, and the Jewish spirit. Volkisch theorists rejected the modern, liberal, and capitalist world they associated with soulless Western Zivilisation (civilization) in favor of an organic and spiritual Gemeinschaft (community). Volkisch ideologues equated Jews with an essentially pernicious materialism. [2]

The historian Saul Friedlander has termed one current of volkisch ideology "redemptive anti-Semitism." This spiritual aspect of the volkisch movement conceived the "sacredness of Aryan blood" and fused this belief "with a decidedly religious vision, that of the need for a German (or Aryan) Christianity." [3] The transcendental ideas of the German philosopher Schopenhauer helped to crystallize the redemptive features of volkisch thought. In his 1844 magnum opus, The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer expressed a concept that developed into an important component of later volkisch beliefs, namely that the denial of the will to live led to salvation.

In The World as Will and Idea, Schopenhauer argued that most people strove to affirm their "will to live" with "sufficient success to keep them from despair, and sufficient failure to keep them from ennui and its consequences." The enlightened few, however, realized: "Existence is certainly to be regarded as an erring, to return from which is salvation." He found this belief to play a central role in Christianity. He maintained, "The doctrine of original sin (assertion of the will) and of salvation (denial of the will) is the great truth which constitutes the essence of Christianity." Thus true Christians had to deny their worldly desires in order to achieve spiritual purity.

Schopenhauer did not explicitly attribute the ability to deny the will to live to Germans or Aryans, but he did argue that Jews lacked this capacity. He stressed, "Christianity belongs to the ancient, true, and sublime faith of mankind, which is opposed to the false, shallow, and injurious optimism which exhibits itself in ... Judaism." He further asserted that the Old Testament was "foreign to true Christianity; for in the New Testament the world is always spoken of as something to which one does not belong, which one does not love, nay, whose lord is the devil." [4] Schopenhauer upheld Christian idealism as the opposite of Jewish materialism.


What is opposed to this really Christian fundamental view is everywhere and always only the Old Testament, with its [x]. [21] This appears with particular distinctness from that important third book of the Stromata of Clement. Arguing against the above-mentioned Encratite heretics, he there always confronts them merely with Judaism and its optimistic history of creation, with which the world-denying tendency of the New Testament is most certainly in contradiction. But the connexion of the New Testament with the Old is at bottom only an external, accidental, and in fact forced one; and, as I have said, this offered a sole point of contact for the Christian teaching only in the story of the Fall, which, moreover, in the Old Testament is isolated, and is not further utilized. Yet according to the Gospel account, it is just the orthodox followers of the Old Testament who bring about the crucifixion of the Founder, because they consider his teachings to be in contradiction with their own. In the above-mentioned third book of the Stromata of Clement the antagonism between optimism together with theism on the one hand, and pessimism together with asceticism on the other, comes out with surprising distinctness. This book is directed against the Gnostics, who taught precisely pessimism and asceticism, particularly (abstinence of every kind, but especially from all sexual satisfaction); for this reason, Clement vigorously censures them. But at the same time it becomes apparent that the spirit of the Old Testament stands in this antagonism with that of the New. For, apart from the Fall which appears in the Old Testament like an hors d'oeuvre, the spirit of the Old Testament is diametrically opposed to that of the New; the former is optimistic, and the latter pessimistic. This contradiction is brought out by Clement himself at the end of the eleventh chapter ( ), [22] although he will not admit it, but declares it to be apparent, like the good Jew that he is. In general, it is interesting to see how for Clement the New and Old Testaments always get mixed up, and how he strives to reconcile them, yet often drives out the New Testament with the Old. At the very beginning of the third chapter he objects to the Marcionites for having found fault with the creation, after the manner of Plato and Pythagoras, since Marcion teaches that nature is bad and made of bad material ( ); hence this world should not be populated, but man should abstain from marriage ( ). Now Clement, to whom the Old Testament is generally much more congenial and convincing than the New, takes this very much amiss. He sees in this their flagrant ingratitude, enmity, and resentment towards him who made the world, towards the just demiurge, whose work they themselves are. In godless rebellion "forsaking the natural disposition," they nevertheless disdained to make use of his creatures ( ). [23] Here in his holy ardour he will not allow the Marcionites even the honour of originality, but, armed with his well-known erudition, he reproaches them and supports his case with the finest quotations, that the ancient philosophers, that Heraclitus and Empedocles, Pythagoras and Plato, Orpheus and Pindar, Herodotus and Euripides, and in addition the Sibyls, already deeply deplored the wretched nature of the world, and thus taught pessimism. Now he does not notice in this scholarly enthusiasm that precisely in this way he is providing grist to the mill of the Marcionites, for he shows indeed that "All the wisest of all the ages" have taught and sung the same thing as they. On the contrary, he confidently and boldly quotes the most decided and emphatic utterances of the ancients in that sense. Of course, he is not put out by them; sages may lament the melancholy nature of existence, poets may pour out the most affecting lamentations about it, nature and experience may cry out ever so loudly against optimism; all this does not disturb our Church Father; he still holds his Jewish revelation in his hand, and remains confident. The demiurge has made the world; from this it is a priori certain that it is excellent, no matter what it looks like. It is then just the same with the second point, with the [x], by which, according to his view, the Marcionites reveal their ingratitude to the demiurge ( ), and the stubbornness with which they reject his gifts ( ). The tragic poets had already paved the way for the Encratites (to the detriment of their originality), and had said the same thing. Thus they lamented the infinite misery of existence, and added that it is better to bring no children into such a world. Again he supports this with the finest passages, and at the same time accuses the Pythagoreans of having renounced sexual pleasure for this reason. All this, however, does not worry him at all; he sticks to his principle that through their abstinence all these sin against the demiurge, since they teach that one should not marry, should not beget children, should not bring into the world new miserable beings, should not produce fresh fodder for death ( [x] c. 6). [24] Since the learned Church Father thus denounces, he does not appear to have foreseen that, just after his time, the celibacy of the Christian priesthood would be introduced more and more, and finally in the eleventh century would be passed into law, because it is in keeping with the spirit of the New Testament. It is precisely this spirit that the Gnostics grasped more profoundly and understood better than did our Church Father, who was more of a Jew than a Christian. The point of view of the Gnostics stands out very clearly at the beginning of the ninth chapter, where the following is quoted from the Gospel of the Egyptians: (Aiunt enim dixisse Servatorem: "Veni ad dissolvendum opera feminae": feminae quidem, cupiditatis,' opera autem, generationem et interitum); [25] but particularly at the end of the thirteenth chapter and at the beginning of the fourteenth. The Church, of course, had to consider how to set on its feet a religion that could also walk and stand in the world as it is, and among men; she therefore declared these men to be heretics. At the conclusion of the seventh chapter, our Church Father sets up Indian asceticism as bad in opposition to the Christian-Jewish; here is clearly brought out the fundamental difference in the spirit of the two religions. In Judaism and Christianity, everything runs back to obedience or disobedience to God's command, as befits us creatures, (nobis qui ab Omnipotentis voluntate effecti sumus) [26] c. 14. Then comes, as a second duty, to serve the Lord, to praise his works, and to overflow with thankfulness. In Brahmanism and Buddhism, of course, the matter has quite a different aspect, since in the latter all improvement, conversion, and salvation to be hoped for from this world of suffering, from this Samsara, proceed from knowledge of the four fundamental truths: (1) dolor, (2) doloris ortus, (3) doloris interitus, (4) octopartita via ad doloris sedationem. [27] Dhammapada, ed. Fausboll, pp. 35 and 347. The explanation of these four truths is found in Burnouf, Introduction a l'histoire du Buddhisme, p. 629, and in all descriptions of Buddhism.

In truth it is not Judaism with its [x], [28] but Brahmanism and Buddhism that in spirit and ethical tendency are akin to Christianity. The spirit and ethical tendency, however, are the essentials of a religion, not the myths in which it clothes them. Therefore I do not abandon the belief that the teachings of Christianity are to be derived in some way from those first and original religions. I have already pointed out some traces of this in the second volume of the Parerga, § 179. In addition to these is the statement of Epiphanius (Haereses, xviii) that the first Jewish Christians of Jerusalem, who called themselves Nazarenes, abstained from all animal food. By virtue of this origin (or at any rate of this agreement), Christianity belongs to the ancient, true, and sublime faith of mankind. This faith stands in contrast to the false, shallow, and pernicious optimism that manifests itself in Greek paganism, Judaism, and Islam. To a certain extent the Zend religion holds the mean, since it opposes to Ormuzd a pessimistic counterpoise in Ahriman. The Jewish religion resulted from this Zend religion, as J. G. Rhode has thoroughly demonstrated in his book Die heilige Sage des Zendvolks; Jehovah came from Ormuzd, and Satan from Ahriman. The latter, however, plays only a very subordinate role in Judaism, in fact almost entirely disappears. In this way optimism gains the upper hand, and there is left only the myth of the Fall as a pessimistic element, which (as the fable of Meshian and Meshiane) is also taken from the Zend-Avesta, but nevertheless falls into oblivion until it, as well as Satan, is again taken up by Christianity. But Ormuzd himself is derived from Brahmanism, although from a lower region thereof; he is no other than Indra, that subordinate god of the firmament and the atmosphere, who is frequently in competition with men. This has been very clearly shown by the eminent scholar I. J. Schmidt in his work Ueber die Verwandtschaft der gnostisch-theosophischen Lehren mit den Religionssystemen des Orients, vorzuglich dem Buddhismus. This Indra-Ormuzd-Jehovah afterwards had to pass into Christianity, as that religion arose in Judaea. But in consequence of the cosmopolitan character of Christianity, he laid aside his proper name, in order to be described in the language of each converted nation by the appellative of the superhuman individuals he supplanted, as , Deus, which comes from the Sanskrit Deva (from which also devil, Teufel is derived), or among the Gothic-Germanic nations by the word God, Gott, which comes from Odin, or Wodan, Guodan, Godan. In just the same way he assumed in Islam, which also springs from Judaism, the name of Allah, which existed previously in Arabia. Analogously to this, when the gods of the Greek Olympus were transplanted to Italy in prehistoric times, they assumed the names of the gods who reigned there previously; hence among the Romans Zeus is called Jupiter, Hera Juno, Hermes Mercury, and so on. In China the first embarrassment of the missionaries arose from the fact that the Chinese language has absolutely no appellative of the kind, and also no word for creating; [29] for the three religions of China know of no gods either in the plural or in the singular.

However it may be in other respects, that [x] [30] of the Old Testament is really foreign to Christianity proper; for in the New Testament the world is generally spoken of as something to which we do not belong, which we do not love, the ruler of which, in fact, is the devil. [31] This agrees with the ascetic spirit of the denial of one's self and the overcoming of the world. Like boundless love of one's neighbour, even of one's enemy, this spirit is the fundamental characteristic which Christianity has in common with Brahmanism and Buddhism, and which is evidence of their relationship. There is nothing in which we have to distinguish the kernel from the shell so much as in Christianity. Just because I value this kernel highly, I sometimes treat the shell with little ceremony; yet it is thicker than is often supposed.

-- The World As Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenhauer


As cited by Dietrich Eckart, Hitler's early volkisch mentor, Schopenhauer elaborated on Judaism's overwhelmingly materialistic nature in his work Parerga. He asserted, "The true Jewish religion ... is the crudest of all religions, since it is the only one that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, nor even any trace of it." He also maintained: "Judaism ... is a religion without any metaphysical tendency." This argument corresponded with his claim that what passed for the Jewish religion merely represented a "war-cry in the subjugation of foreign peoples." [5] According to Schopenhauer, Jews focused on shallow worldly gain and could not negate the will to live in order to achieve salvation.

The real religion of the Jews, as presented and taught in Genesis and all the historical books up to the end of Chronicles, is the crudest of all religions because it is the only one that has absolutely no doctrine of immortality, not even a trace thereof. When he dies, each king, each hero or prophet, is buried with his fathers and with this everything is finished. There is no trace of any existence after death; indeed every idea of this kind seems to be purposely dismissed. For example, Jehovah delivers a long eulogy to King Josiah and ends it with the promise of a reward. It says: [x] ['Behold, I will gather thee to thy fathers, and thou shalt be gathered to thy grave in peace.' 2 Chronicles 34: 28); thus he shall not live to see Nebuchadnezzar. But there is no idea of another existence after death and with it of a positive reward instead of the merely negative one of dying and of suffering no further sorrows. On the contrary, when Jehovah has sufficiently used up and tormented his handiwork and plaything, he throws it away into the ditch; that is the reward for it. Just because the religion of the Jews knows no immortality and consequently no punishments after death, Jehovah can threaten the sinner, the one who prospers on earth, only with punishing his misdeeds in the persons of his children and children's children unto the fourth generation, as may be seen in Exodus 34:7, and Numbers 14: 18. This proves the absence of any doctrine of immortality. Likewise the passage in Tobias, 3: 6, where the latter begs Jehovah to let him die, [x] ['that I may be saved, and return to dust']; nothing more, no notion of an existence after death. In the Old Testament the reward promised to virtue is to live a really long time on earth (e.g. Deuteronomy 5:16 and 33); in the Veda, on the other hand, it is not to be born again. The contempt in which the Jews were always held by contemporary peoples may have been due in great measure to the poor character of their religion. What is said in Ecclesiastes 3:19, 20 is the true sentiment of the Jews' religion. If immortality is alluded to, as in Daniel 12:2, it is as an imported foreign doctrine, as is evident from Daniel, :4 and 6. In the second book of Maccabees, chapter 7, the doctrine of immortality appears clearly to be of Babylonian origin. All other religions, those of the Indians, both Brahmans and Buddhists, of the Egyptians, Persians, and even of the Druids, teach immortality and, with the exception of the Persians in the Zendavesta, metempsychosis as well. D. G. v. Ekendahl establishes in his review of the Svenska Siare och Skalder of Atterbom, in the Blatter fur litter. Unterhaltung, 25 August 1843, that the Edda, especially the Voluspa, teaches transmigration of souls. Even Greeks and Romans had something post letum ['after death'], namely Tartarus and Elysium, and said:

unt aliquid manes, letum non omnia finit:
Luridaque evictos effugit umbra rogos.
Propertius, IV. 7.

['The shades of the departed are still something, death does not end all: the lurid shadow rises triumphant from the fiery flames.']


Speaking generally, the really essential element in a religion as such consists in the conviction it gives that our existence proper is not limited to our life, but is infinite. Now this wretched religion of the Jews does not do this at all, in fact it does not even attempt it. It is, therefore, the crudest and poorest of all religions and consists merely in an absurd and revolting theism. It amounts to this that the [x] ['Lord'], who has created the world, desires to be worshipped and adored; and so above all he is jealous, is envious of his colleagues, of all the other gods; if sacrifices are made to them he is furious and his Jews have a bad time. All these other religions and their gods are stigmatized in the Septuagint as [x] ['abomination']; but it is crude Judaism without any immortality that really merits this description. [/b]It is most deplorable that this religion has become the basis of the prevailing religion of Europe; for it is a religion without any metaphysical tendency. While all other religions endeavour to explain to the people by symbols and parables the metaphysical significance of life, the religion of the Jews is entirely immanent and furnishes nothing but a mere war-cry in the struggle with other nations.[/b] Lessing's Erziehung des Menschmgeschlechts should be called education of the Jewish race, for the whole of the human race with the exception of these elect of God was convinced of that truth. The Jews are the chosen people of their God and he is the chosen God of his people. And this need not trouble anyone else. [x] ['I will be their God, and they shall be my people'] is a passage from one of the prophets, according to Clement of Alexandria. But when I observe that the present nations of Europe to a certain extent regard themselves as the heirs to that chosen people of God, I cannot conceal my regret. On the other hand, Judaism cannot be denied the reputation of being the only really monotheistic religion on earth; for no other religion can boast of an objective God, creator of heaven and earth.

-- Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, by Arthur Schopenhauer


In constructing his Weltanschauung of Germanic redemption through self-negation, the German composer Richard Wagner borrowed extensively from Schopenhauer's philosophy of achieving salvation by repudiating the will to live. Wagner read Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Idea four times in 1854 and 1855. He enthused of the philosopher: "His cardinal idea, the ultimate negation of the will to live, is terribly solemn but uniquely redeeming. It was not new to me, of course, and cannot be entertained at all by anyone in whom it does not already reside." [6] Wagner ultimately claimed that the only path to "true hope" meant establishing "the Schopenhauerian philosophy as the basis of all further intellectual and moral culture.'' [7]

Wagner expressed anti-Semitic views in his schema of attaining salvation by negating the will to live. He ended his notorious essay, "Judaism in Music," which he originally wrote in 1850 and revised in 1869, by urging "the Jew" to attain redemption along with the German, for which he would have "to cease being a Jew." Wagner named a Jewish author, Ludwig Borne, who had achieved this transformation after realizing that the Jews could only find salvation with their "redemption into true men." Wagner stressed, "Borne of all people teaches us as well that this redemption ... costs sweat, affliction, anxieties, and an abundance of pain and suffering." He then exhorted the Jews:


Take part in this regenerative work of redemption through self-destruction. and then we will be united and undifferentiated! But consider that only one thing can be your redemption from the curse that weighs heavily upon you: the redemption of Ahasuerus: downfall! [8]


In this passage, Wagner referred to the myth of Ahasuerus, or the Wandering Jew, a cobbler who, according to seventeenth-century legend, had mocked Jesus and had thereby brought a curse upon himself to live until the second coming of Christ. Only then would he be granted the release of death. [9] Wagner called upon the Jews to join the Germans in effecting regenerative redemption through self-negation. By admonishing them that only their downfall would redeem them, however, he seems to have thought that this in itself would daunt them. For Wagner, the Jews remained too attached to their own worldly interests to renounce their materialism, and thus they would by and large remain beyond the bounds of redemption.

Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, is nothing but the personification of the whole Jewish race. Since he sinned grievously against the Saviour and World-Redeemer, he shall never be delivered from earthly existence and its burden and moreover shall wander homeless in foreign lands. This is just the flight and fate of the small Jewish race which, strange to relate, was driven from its native land some two thousand years ago and has ever since existed and wandered homeless. On the other hand, many great and illustrious nations with which this pettifogging little nation cannot possibly be compared, such as the Assyrians, Medes, Persians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Etruscans and others have passed to eternal rest and entirely disappeared. And so even today, this gens extorris, [26] this John Lackland among the nations, is to be found all over the globe, nowhere at home and nowhere strangers. Moreover, it asserts its nationality with unprecedented obstinacy and, mindful of Abraham who dwelt in Canaan as a stranger but who gradually became master of the whole land, as his God had promised him (Genesis 17: 8), it would also like to set foot somewhere and take root in order to arrive once more at a country, without which, of course, a people is like a ball floating in air.* Till then, it lives parasitically on other nations and their soil; but yet it is inspired with the liveliest patriotism for its own nation. This is seen in the very firm way in which Jews stick together on the principle of each for all and all for each, so that this patriotism sine patria inspires greater enthusiasm than does any other. The rest of the Jews are the fatherland of the Jew; and so he fights for them as he would pro ara et focis, [27] and no community on earth sticks so firmly together as does this. It follows from this that it is absurd to want to concede to them a share in the government or administration of any country. Originally amalgamated and one with their state, their religion is by no means the main issue here, but rather merely the bond that holds them together, the point de ralliement, [28] and the banner whereby they recognize one another. This is also seen in the fact that even the converted Jew who has been baptized does not by any means bring upon himself the hatred and loathing of all the rest, as do all other apostates. On the contrary, he continues as a rule to be their friend and companion and to regard them as his true countrymen, naturally with a few orthodox exceptions. Even in the case of the regular and solemn Jewish prayer for which ten must be present, a Jew turned Christian, but no other Christian, may be present if one of the ten is missing. The same holds good of all the other religious acts. The case would be even clearer if Christianity were to decline and cease altogether; for then the Jews would not on that account cease to exist and to hang together as Jews, separately and by themselves. Accordingly, it is an extremely superficial and false view to regard the Jews merely as a religious sect. But if, in order to countenance this error, Judaism is described by an expression borrowed from the Christian Church as 'Jewish Confession', then this is a fundamentally false expression which is deliberately calculated to mislead and should not be allowed at all. On the contrary, 'Jewish Nation' is the correct expression. The Jews have absolutely no confession; monotheism is part of their nationality and political constitution and is with them a matter of course. Indeed it is quite clear that monotheism and Judaism are convertible terms. The fact that the well-known faults attaching to the Jewish national character, of which a surprising absence of all that is expressed by the word verecundia [29] is the most conspicuous, although this fault is far more useful in the world than is perhaps any positive quality; the fact, I say, that such faults are to be attributed mainly to the long and unjust oppression they have suffered, excuses them, it is true, but does not do away with them. I am bound to praise absolutely the rational Jew who, on giving up old myths, humbug, and prejudices by being baptized, quits an association that brings him neither honour nor advantage (although the latter occurs in exceptional cases), even if he should not take the Christian faith very seriously. For is this not the case with every young Christian who repeats his credo at his confirmation? To save him even this step, however, and to bring to an end in the gentlest manner the whole tragi-comic state of affairs, the best way is certainly for marriages to be permitted and even encouraged between Jews and Gentiles. The Church cannot object to this for there is the authority of the apostle himself (1 Corinthians 7: 12-16). Then in the course of a hundred years, there will be only a very few Jews left and soon the ghost will be exorcized. Ahasuerus will be buried and the chosen people will not know where their abode was. This desirable result, however, will be frustrated if the emancipation of the Jews is carried to the point of their obtaining political rights, and thus an interest in the administration and government of Christian countries. For then they will be and remain Jews really only con amore. Justice demands that they should enjoy with others equal civil rights; but to concede to them a share in the running of the State is absurd. They are and remain a foreign oriental race, and so must always be regarded merely as domiciled foreigners. When some twenty-five years ago the emancipation of the Jews was debated in the English Parliament, a speaker put forward the following hypothetical case. An English Jew comes to Lisbon where he meets two men in extreme want and distress; yet it is only in his power to save one of them. Personally to him they are both strangers. Yet if one of them is an Englishman but a Christian, and the other a Portuguese but a Jew, whom will he save? I do not think that any sensible Christian and any sincere Jew will be in doubt as to the answer. But it gives us some indication of the rights to be conceded to the Jews.

-- Parerga and Paralipomena: Short Philosophical Essays, by Arthur Schopenhauer


Wagner's magnum opus, the four-part opera cycle based on Teutonic mythology and legend, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), powerfully expresses the alleged Germanic capacity to negate the will to live heroically as compared to the Jewish drive for earthly power. Wagner wrote of his work, "Here everything is tragic through and through, and the will that wanted to shape a world according to its plan can in the end attain nothing more satisfying than to break itself through a dignified downfall." [10] In the Ring, Wotan, the chief god, seeks to transcend "divine splendor's boasting ignominy." He exclaims: "I renounce my work. I only want one thing more: the end, the end!" [11]

In his quest for a "dignified downfall," Wotan arranges for his daughter, the Valkyrie Brunnhilde, to work a "world-redeeming deed." She carries out this mission by riding into the funeral pyre of her dead lover, Wotan's heroic grandson Siegfried, while wearing the ring of the Nibelung, which grants earthly power. Brunnhilde's heroic self-negation purifies the ring of its dread curse and allows Wotan to destroy Valhalla, his splendid castle in the sky, with its assembled gods and heroes. [12] After this conflagration, a purified new world arises from out of the old order's destruction. [13]

Wagner's Ring portrays heroic Germanic self-abnegation in contrast to the Jewish lust for earthly power. The Germanic deities Wotan and Brunnhilde destroy themselves to redeem the world. The fiendish Alberich, on the other hand, who crafts the accursed ring in the first place, and his son Hagen, who dastardly stabs Siegfried in the back, remain slaves to their material desires. They exhibit no redemptive spiritual tendencies. Hagen meets his doom in an ignominious manner. He leaps to his death in a final grab for the ring "as if insane." [14] Wagner intended Alberich and Hagen to represent what he regarded as the worldly and corrupting Jewish essence. Alberich symbolized the menace of purebred Jews and his son Hagen embodied the threat inherent in the bastardized offspring of Germans and Jews. [15]



-- Der Ring Des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), by Richard Wagner


In his later prose writings and in his final opera, Parsifal, Wagner advocated a "true religion" for Germans as opposed to Jews in which compassion arose from suffering. [16] He drew heavily upon Schopenhauerian thought in advocating this "true religion" based on the "annulment of the will" that could effect a "great regeneration." He stressed that Jews were incapable of attaining this "true religion." He even asserted that Jesus had not been a Jew. [17] In formulating his ideas, Wagner borrowed from the racist notions of the French author Count Arthur de Gobineau, who had released his Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races) [The Moral and Intellectual Diversity of Races, With Particular Reference to Their Respective Influence in the Civil and Political History of Mankind] in 1855. [18] Gobineau conceived an "Aryan ruling race." [19] Wagner, for his part, argued that the "so-called white race" manifested the "ability of deliberate suffering to an exceptional degree." [20] "The Jew," on the other hand, possessed

no religion whatsoever, but rather only a belief in certain promises of his God that by no means extends to an atemporal life beyond ... , but solely to precisely this present life on earth, on which power over everything alive and lifeless ... remains promised to his tribe. [21]


Wagner thus upheld a strict racist divide between idealistic Germans and materialistic Jews. Subsequent volkisch theorists drew upon this dichotomy.

Wagner tended to avoid concrete proposals for combating the Jewish menace, though he did address this topic on at least two occasions. He wrote in a revised version of "Judaism in Music" in 1869 that he was "unable to decide" whether the "downfall of our culture can be arrested by a violent ejection of the destructive foreign element," meaning the Jews. [22] In his 1881 essay, "Know Thyself," he prophesied that when the "demon of suffering humanity" no longer had a place to lurk among the Germans, "there will also no longer be -- any Jew." He then asserted that the "current movement that has only just become conceivable among us again could make this great solution possible for us Germans sooner than for every other nation as soon as we carry out that 'know thyself' into the innermost core of our existence." [23] While imprecise in his language, Wagner clearly displayed a menacing attitude towards Jews.

After Wagner's death in 1883, the volkisch ideologue Houston Stewart Chamberlain disseminated Wagnerian ideas to a large audience. Chamberlain was a born Englishman who married Wagner's daughter Eva and moved into Wagner's former villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth, Bavaria. [24] Chamberlain asserted in 1883: "I must confess I doubt whether humanity ever produced a greater, perhaps as great a genius as Richard Wagner." [25] His first book dealt with Wagner, the "great German Meister." In his work Richard Wagner, Chamberlain summarized many of Wagner's somewhat abstruse views. He asserted that Wagner had traced the fundamental causes of human decadence to the "deterioration of the blood" and to the "demoralizing influence of the Jews." He summed up Wagner's doctrine of regeneration as the belief, "Out of the inner negation of the world the affirmation of redemption will be born." [26]

With his major work, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, which was first published in 1899 and went through twenty-four German editions by 1938, Chamberlain wished to establish himself as a great volkisch thinker in his own right. [27] He clearly owed a great debt to Wagnerian thought, however. In Foundations, Chamberlain continued in the vein of Wagner's racist dichotomy between idealistic Germans and materialistic Jews. With regard to the "Teutons," he asserted: ''A race so profoundly and inwardly religious is unknown to history." The Jewish people, on the other hand, remained "quite stunted in its religious growth."

In Chamberlain's view, the profound Germanic religious nature as opposed to the Jewish lack of deep spiritual feeling also manifested itself when one compared German and Jewish heroes. Chamberlain argued that the "Germanic" character possessed the notion of "victory in downfall (in other words, the true heroism centered in the inner motive, not in the outward distress)." This self-negating aspect as well as "loyalty" distinguished "a Siegfried, a Tristan, a Parzival" from a "Semitic Samson whose heroism lies in his hair." Chamberlain thus argued that while Jewish heroes perhaps defied death, they did not transcend it as Germanic ones did.

Chamberlain used Schopenhauerian philosophy in maintaining a spiritual gulf between Germanics and Jews. He praised the "unworldly, speculative, ideal tendency of mind" that had "received monumental expression in the nineteenth century in Schopenhauer's doctrine of the negation of the will to live." He noted: "The will is here in a way directed inwardly. This is quite different in the case of the Jew. His will at all times took an outward direction; it was the unconditional will to live." Chamberlain further argued that in opposition to the ''Aryan negation of the will," the Jews displayed the "enormous predominance of will." He asserted, "For while the Indian taught the negation of the will, and Christ its 'conversion,' religion is for the Semite the idolization of his will, its most glowing, immoderate and fanatical assertion."

Chamberlain used ominous language when he described the battle between Germanics and Jews. He emphasized: "To this day these two powers -- Jews and Teutonic races -- stand, wherever the recent spread of the Chaos has not blurred their features, now as friendly, now as hostile, but always as alien forces face to face." He warned, "No arguing about 'humanity' can alter the fact that this means a struggle. Where the struggle is not waged with cannon balls, it goes on silently in the heart of society .... But this struggle, silent though it be, is above all others a struggle for life and death." [28] Chamberlain, the leading volkisch theorist around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus believed that an unbridgeable chasm divided will-denying Germans from will-affirming Jews.

While German far rightists who drew inspiration from the ideas of Chamberlain, Schopenhauer, and Wagner possessed a coherent volkisch ideology that asserted German racial and spiritual superiority over the materialistic Jews through the German ability to negate the will to live, the Imperial German volkisch right could not establish a politically successful movement. After the founding of the German Empire in 1871, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck focused on a "domestic preventive war" against what he perceived as dangerous internal enemies: not Jews, but Catholics, in what became known as the Kulturkampf (Culture Struggle). [29] The modest acme of anti-Semitic volkisch political success in Imperial Germany arrived in the early 1890s. In 1892, the Conservative Party adopted the Tivoli Program, which asserted: "We combat the widely obtruding and decomposing Jewish influence on our popular life." Ardent anti-Semitic parties won 2.9 percent of the parliamentary vote in 1893. After this slight victory, however, German political parties specifically devoted to anti-Semitism declined to insignificance. [30]

The most noteworthy twentieth-century Imperial German volkisch manifestation began when Heinrich Class gave the then little-known Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League) with approximately 14,000 members a pronounced anti-Semitic character when he became chairman in February 1908. [31] Class had familiarized himself with the racist ideas of Count Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He honored both thinkers as "great men." As the leader of the Pan-German League, he required the regional branches of the organization to acquaint themselves with Gobineau's work on the inequality of the races and to hold discussion sessions on it. [32] In 1909, Class released a work influenced by Chamberlain that he intended to serve as a popular history, Deutsche Geschichte (German History). He treated what he deemed the heroic struggles of Germanic peoples and also warned of the "Jewish peril." [33] He ultimately received personal praise from Chamberlain himself for his book. [34]

While the "Jewish question" had remained relatively dormant in German politics from 1894 on, it flared up again after the so-called "Jewish elections" of 1912, when the Social Democratic vote rose from 53 to 110 seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament." In response to the elections, Class wrote an anti-Semitic book, Wenn ich der Kaiser war (If I Were the Kaiser), in March and April 1912 under the pseudonym Daniel Frymann. [36] He noted: "Today the entire people is dissatisfied with the way it is governed." After remarking that the Kaiser had expressed admiration of Chamberlain and had expedited the printing of thousands of copies of Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, Class asked, "Has the Kaiser read and understood the book? How is it then possible that directly afterwards he became a patron of the Jews ... ?" Class further called for the rebirth of "German idealism," and he asserted, "The Jews are the upholders and teachers of the materialism that reigns today."

In his Kaiser work, Class proposed drastically curtailing Jewish rights. He advocated halting all future Jewish immigration into Germany, expelling all Jews who had not become German citizens, and subjecting remaining Jews in Germany to alien status. All those who had belonged to the Hebraic religion in January 1871 along with the descendents of such people, even if only from one parent, were to be classified as Jews. Jews would be forbidden to serve as civil servants, officers, enlisted men, lawyers, teachers, and theater directors, and they would possess neither the right to vote nor to own land. They would only be allowed to write for "Jewish" newspapers, and they would have to pay twice as many taxes as German citizens. Class concluded his work with the appeal that the National Socialists subsequently stressed: "Germany to the Germans!"
[37] Class' Kaiser book went through five editions of 5,000 copies each before World War I. Class later lamented, however, that while his work had found many readers and was generally considered "interesting," Germany's political elite had disregarded his anti-Semitic warnings and proposals. [38]

Class' Kaiser book was not the only manifestation of increased anti-Semitic activity in Germany in 1912. In February of that year, Ludwig Muller von Hausen, a fervent admirer of Schopenhauer, founded the Verband gegen Uberhebung des Judentumes (Association against the Presumption of Jewry) in Berlin. [39] The association's statutes asserted that the organization sought "to waken racial pride, to boost volkisch consciousness, and to work against any Jewish presumption." Only Germans of ''Aryan descent" could serve as regular members, while certain foreigners could become extraordinary ones. [40]

Hausen sought to gain Class' favor. He soon established that the latter had written the Kaiser book that he esteemed, and he joined Class' Pan-German League. Hausen sought to impress Class with the influence of his Association against the Presumption of Jewry. Hausen wrote Class that while his organization possessed only a few hundred members, they included large landowners, important industrialists, high-ranking governmental officials, and leading officers. [41] Incidentally, the future National Socialist Party secretary, Martin Bormann, joined Hausen's Association in July 1920. [42]

Class and Hausen established a personal relationship that thrived for a while but then deteriorated. They met for the first time in September 1913 in Berlin and then met again in October and November of that year. Class gave Hausen 1,500 marks to support the work of the Association against the Presumption of Jewry, followed by another 1,000 marks later on. [43] Class and Hausen later had a serious falling out, however, in one of the many examples of Class' pronounced weakness at maintaining amicable relations with other important volkisch leaders, ultimately including Hitler. [44] Hausen developed derogatory views of Class. He claimed in 1922, "I have never had a high opinion of Class, holding him to be a conceited, cowardly person of very mediocre education." [45]

Despite the efforts of Class and Hausen to alert the Germans to the supposed Jewish peril, anti-Semitism remained much less extreme in Imperial Germany than in France, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Imperial Russia on the Eve of World War I. [46] Neither Class' Pan-German League nor Hausen's Association against the Presumption of Jewry gained mass followings. Moreover, after modest successes in the late nineteenth century, the fortunes of German parties specifically devoted to anti-Semitism declined in the prewar period. [47] German volkisch-redemptive anti-Semitism did not flourish until after the catastrophic outcome of World War I.

During World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm Hohenzollern II managed to weather national opposition intrigues from the right. The Kaiser surmounted rightist opposition stemming primarily from Heinrich Class' Pan-German League and the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei (German Fatherland Party) under Wolfgang Kapp, the Generallandschaftsdirektor (General Countryside Director) of East Prussia. [48] In late August 1917, Kapp invited his close comrade General Count Rudiger von der Goltz to collaborate in the official formation of the German Fatherland Party. [49] Kapp served as the chairman of the German Fatherland Party, and Goltz acted as the second chairman of the East Prussian branch of the organization. [50] Goltz went on to coordinate an anti-Bolshevik intervention of German/White Russian forces in Latvia in 1919 with Kapp's backing. The German Fatherland Party collected nationalist forces into a powerful behind-the-scenes force. The organization secretly planned to place Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz at the head of a nationalist German government as a "strong man" with Kapp as his advisor. [51]

The volkisch leaders Kapp and Class cooperated with one another in their national opposition undertakings. Kapp valued the right-wing activities of Class' Pan-German League. In order to gain support for his own conspiratorial alliance, Kapp asked Class to serve on the German Fatherland Party's Advisory Committee. Class agreed. By this time, membership in Class' Pan-German League had reached 37,000. The volkisch theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who had been granted German citizenship in August 1916, played a leading role in the association. [52] Kapp, Class, and Chamberlain collaborated on the editorial staff of a volkisch newspaper in 1917: Deutschlands Erneuerung: Monatsschrift for das deutsche Volk (Germanys Renewal: Monthly for the German People). This publication provided a theoretical underpinning for the German Fatherland Party's bid for power. [53]

In addition to receiving assistance for his nationalist schemes from Class and Chamberlain, Kapp obtained the support of Ludwig Muller von Hausen, the leader of the Association against the Presumption of Jewry, in 1917. Hausen had curtailed his political activities during the first half of World War I before becoming more politically active again in the war's later years. Despite his advanced age, he had served as an artillery captain on both the Eastern and Western Fronts. He had received the Iron Cross, First Class, for his efforts. He had corresponded with General Erich von Ludendorff, the chief of the Army General Staff. In fact, he had served the general in an advisory capacity. In 1917, Hausen worked to increase the membership of Kapp's German Fatherland Party. [54]

Hausen's volkisch colleague General Ludendorff played an important role in right-wing intrigues against the Kaiser. Ludendorff was Germany's most valuable military strategist as well as a leading volkisch activist who later allied himself closely with Hitler. He supported Kapp's German Fatherland Party. He regarded the organization as a means of strengthening the German will to win the war." He also followed the activities of Class' Pan-German League with great interest. He admired the association's determination to fight on until final victory. Class visited Ludendorff at Army Headquarters in October 1917 with the backing of both his Pan-German League and Kapp's German Fatherland Party. Working in the vein of what he termed "national opposition," Class tried to convince the influential general to seize dictatorial powers.

Class stressed that the Kaiser had long since lost the trust of the people, whereas the Army High Command enjoyed widespread popular support. Ludendorff should therefore inaugurate a military dictatorship to see the German people through to victory. Ludendorff replied that this plan was not realistic, since he was fully occupied with directing military affairs and could not run the country politically as well. Class and Kapp's collaboration deteriorated in the face of this setback. Frictions developed between them. Kapp jettisoned the Advisory Committee of the German Fatherland Party in which Class played a prominent role at the end of 1917. [56] The Kaiser was spared removal in a putsch from the right and instead fled to the Netherlands under the pressure of revolution from the left in November 1918.

RUSSIAN CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTIONARIES UP TO THE BOLSHEVIK REVOLUTION

In a manner similar to anti-Semitic volkisch German theorists who argued that the Germans possessed the heroic capability to achieve redemption by denying the will to live. Imperial Russian conservative revolutionaries used concepts of superior Russian or Slavic spirituality to further their anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic arguments. Russian far rightists also propagated apocalyptic notions of Europe's imminent demise largely through the agency of the Jews. Many conservative revolutionaries associated the Jews with the Antichrist, the foe of Jesus who is written of in the biblical Book of Revelation.

While they failed to reshape Imperial Russian society according to their desires, Imperial Russian far rightists nonetheless managed to transcend mere theoretical musings to achieve a concrete political dimension superior to that of their German counterparts. Russian conservative revolutionaries better implemented their ideas in the political sphere than politically weak volkisch leaders in Germany. Imperial Russian revolutionary nationalists urged the Russian Empire to lead the entire Slavic world in launching a determined political action to escape allegedly decadent Europe's imminent demise.

The author and journalist Fedor Dostoevskii crystallized conservative revolutionary ideology in Imperial Russia much like Wagner shaped volkisch views in Germany.
Like Wagner, Dostoevskii failed at socialist revolutionary undertakings in his youth. He was even sentenced to death before receiving a last-minute reprieve. He subsequently refocused his energies into joining those whom he termed "revolutionaries ... out of conservatism." [57] Dostoevskii's intellectual development resembled that of one of his greatest literary creations, Radian Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment. Raskolnikov commits a brutal double homicide in pursuit of utopian revolutionary ideals before ultimately embracing Orthodox Christianity with its emphasis on the redemptive powers of suffering.
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

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While he is best known for his psychologically insightful novels, Dostoevskii expressed his ideological views most clearly in his Diary of a Writer, which he published in 1873, 1876, 1877, 1880, and January 1881 immediately before his death. [58] As we will see in Chapter Eight, this work greatly influenced White emigre views. Dostoevskii supported the altar and the throne in Diary of a Writer. He argued that the Russians possessed "two awful strengths," namely their "spiritual indivisibility" and their "closest unity with the monarch." He placed the "idea of the Russian people" squarely within Orthodox Christianity. [59] Here he clearly demonstrated the conservative aspect of his conservative revolutionary outlook. Dostoevskii described himself as a member of the particularly fervent wing of Slavophilism that believed: "Our great Russia, at the head of the united Slavs, will speak its own new, wholesome, and as yet unheard of word ... to the entire world." His Slavophile beliefs contained strong apocalyptic overtones. Writing in January 1877, he stressed that the time had arrived for something "eternal, millenary." He heralded the approach of a final confrontation between the "Catholic idea," meant in political as well as religious terms, its opponent Protestantism, an "only negative" belief, and "the third world idea, the Slavic idea, an idea coming into being." He noted that the resolution of these great world-views could not be submitted to "petty, Judaizing, third-rate considerations." He remained vague on what the "Slavic idea" represented in this passage. In an earlier section of Diary of a Writer, however, he wrote of "our world purpose" to become the "servants of all, for universal reconciliation" to bring about the "final unification of humanity." [60]

Dostoevskii exhibited pronounced anti-Semitic beliefs, which he expressed most clearly in Chapter Two of the March 1877 section of Diary of a Writer, "The Jewish Question." He blamed the Jews for perennially forming a "status in statu" (state within the state). He accused them of exhibiting "estrangement and alienation." He blamed them for believing, "Only one true people exists on the earth, the Jewish one, and ... although there are others, it is nevertheless necessary to regard them as non-existent." He lamented that Jews controlled the stock market, capital, credit, and international politics. He warned of them: "Their kingdom is approaching, their entire kingdom! The triumph of ideas is coming before which feelings of philanthropy, thirst for the truth, Christian feelings, national and even folk pride of the European peoples will flag" in the face of "materialism, the blind, lustful craving for personal material security."

While Dostoevskii attributed a salvational role to the Russian people at the head of the united Slavs, he apocalyptically foretold Europe's imminent demise, largely because of Jewish machinations. Writing in August 1877, he stressed that "Europe" faced a "general, common, and terrible fall." He prophesied: ''All these parliamentarisms, all currently prevailing civil theories, all accumulated riches, banks, sciences, Jews, all of these will tumble down in an instant without leaving a trace, except perhaps the Jews, who even then will not be at a loss to profit from the situation." He claimed that this collapse stood '''near, in the doorway,'" referring to Revelation 3:20, a passage of the last book of the Bible that foretells the destruction of the sinful world in great upheaval and chaos, after which the Kingdom of God will appear on earth. [61]

In the vein of Dostoevskii, many Imperial Russian far rightists around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries believed that the Kingdom of God would only come after the destruction of Western civilization. [61] Most notably, the author Vladimir Solovev treated this theme in 1900 by releasing ''A Short Tale of the Anti-Christ" as part of his Three Conversations. He dealt with the "man of the future," the Anti-Christ, in order "to reveal in advance the deceptive mask behind which the abyss of evil is hiding." In Solovev's tale, the Anti-Christ gains power with the help of Freemasons and the Comite permanent universe! (Standing Universal Committee). This conspiratorial organization could easily be interpreted in an anti-Semitic manner as the Alliance israelite universelle (Universal Jewish Alliance). [63]

Solovev's Anti-Christ story deeply impressed Sergei Nilus, who became famous for disseminating the infamous anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Nilus regarded Solovev's story as a prophetic warning, and he related it to contemporary political conditions in the Russian Empire. [64] He rejected modern Western civilization and regarded Jews and Freemasons as the forerunners of the Anti-Christ. [65] He anticipated the Anti-Christ's imminent arrival and the destruction of Western civilization, after which the Kingdom of God would appear. [66] The Imperial Russian radical right in general tended to view the Orthodox Christian struggle against Jewry and Freemasonry as the final battle between Christ and Anti-Christ along the lines of the last book of the Bible, Revelation. [67] Apocalyptic anti-Semitism formed an integral component of the Imperial Russian far right.

On a more practical level, Imperial Russian far rightists drew material for their anti-Semitic arguments from the societal segregation of the Russian Empire's 5,215,800 Jews (as of 1897) from Gentiles. [68] Whereas large numbers of Jews in Germany desired to assimilate into German society, Russian Jews as a whole maintained their own distinct culture, religion, and literary language. Largely because of restrictive laws, as of the 1880s, only 0.7 percent of Russian Jews worked in agriculture, while 38.7 percent participated in commerce. [69] Jews often faced harsh conditions in the Russian Empire. Large-scale anti-Semitic pogroms erupted in 1871, and the Imperial Russian government expelled many Jews in 1881. [70]

Jews, who composed approximately 4 percent of the population in the Russian Empire overall but 12 percent in the Pale of Settlement where they were concentrated, participated disproportionately in revolutionary activities. In some areas of the Pale of Settlement during the period from 1901 to 1904, the proportion of political prisoners who were Jewish reached nearly 2/3. The figure was 48.2 percent in the Kiev region, and in the Odessa district the ratio of Jewish political prisoners reached 55 percent. From 1892 to 1902, Jews made up 23.4 percent of the members of the Social Democrats. At the time of the 1905 Revolution, Jews constituted 18.9 percent of the membership of the Bolsheviks, the "majority" faction of the Social Democrats. [71]

Concerned with the rising number of Jewish (and Gentile) revolutionaries in Imperial Russia, a group of writers and publicists under the leadership of Prince D. P. Golitsyn founded the Russkoe Sobranie (Russian Assembly) in January 1901. Other leaders of the right-wing organization included Vladimir Purishkevich, an official in the Interior Ministry, and Prince Mikhail Volkonskii, an author. The Russian Assembly warned of the "danger" of the "cosmopolitanism of the upper levels of our society," and it sought to uphold "Orthodoxy, autocracy, and national character." The association's statutes urged members to conduct the "study of the phenomenon of Russian and Slavic folk life in its present and past" with the special task of "safeguarding . . . the purity and correctness of Russian speech." The Russian Assembly thus cast itself as a defender of imperiled Russian values.

The Russian Assembly distinctly represented upper-class interests. The great majority of the organization's members came from the nobility, and the association received the explicit support of Tsar Nikolai Romanov II. The Russian Assembly adopted a rather exclusivist membership policy. The Assembly had approximately 120 members at first, though the number of members increased significantly thereafter. The outbreak of the 1905 Revolution soon demonstrated the need for greater mass support of rightwing endeavors.

In October 1905, in the midst of socialist revolutionary upheaval, members of the Russian Assembly gathered like-minded conservative reformers in Saint Petersburg to form a new right-wing organization. The small assembly elected Aleksandr Dubrovin, a Saint Petersburg physician and a leading figure in the Russian Assembly, to lead the new organization, the Soiuz russkago naroda (Union of the Russian People). Dubrovin possessed a strong will and a coarse personality. His associate Purishkevich, the second man in the Union who also played a leading role in the Russian Assembly, exhibited a far more refined demeanor. He came from a noble landed family, had graduated with honors from the Historical-Philological Department of Novorossiisk Universiyy, and possessed formidable speaking abilities. [72]

Early anti-Semitic Union ideology drew from the Slavophile legacy in the vein of Dostoevskii to protest against the increasing westernization of Russian society, and it also exhibited racist tendencies. The Union opposed liberal bourgeois sentiments and idealized the old order that had existed up until the time of the westernizer Tsar Peter the Great, who had ruled Imperial Russia from 1689 to 1725. [73] The goals of the Union resembled those of its parent organization the Russian Assembly. The Union statutes stressed that the organization worked for the "preservation of Orthodoxy, absolute Russian autocracy, and national character." The Union statutes further demonstrated racist thinking similar to that of volkisch German thought. The statutes stipulated that only "born Russian people" could join the Union, with "Great Russians'" "Belorussians," and "Little Russians" (Ukrainians) all considered "Russians." Jews, on the other hand, could not enter the Union "even in the case that they adopt Christianity." [74]

The Union established conservative revolutionary squads popularly known as "Black Hundreds." These fearsome groups gave their name to the Russian far right from 1905 to 1917. Black Hundreds carried out anti-revolutionary pogroms in October 1905 in which they killed a total of I,622 people, 711 of whom were Jews. The pogroms of October 1905 proved the worst manifestation of Black Hundred violence. [75]


Despite the Union's use of illegal Black Hundred squads to terrorize and assassinate Jewish and socialist opponents, Imperial authorities supported the Union. Piotr Rachkovskii, the head of the Okhrana (Tsarist Secret Police) abroad, supported the Union's activities. [76] He even acted as Union leader Dubrovin's advisor. [77] Representatives of the Union received even greater official recognition when they met with Tsar Nikolai Romanov II in December 1905. The Tsar assured them: "I am counting on you." [78]

Mikhail Kommissarov, a prominent member of the Saint Petersburg Okhrana, provided the Union with additional support. Kommissarov proved a most colorful adventurer who underwent many permutations in his career of intrigue and deceit. He ultimately helped to establish Aufbau, the Munich-based volkisch German/White emigre organization that greatly influenced the National Socialist movement, in 1920 as a double agent before he openly joined the Soviet cause. After the outbreak of socialist revolution in the Russian Empire in 1905, he established a clandestine printing press in the basement of Okhrana headquarters. He used this press to print anti-Semitic leaflets calling for pogroms. He lost his position because of his unauthorized dissemination of pogrom literature, but his writings galvanized Black Hundred violence against Jews and socialist revolutionaries. [79]

At the time of elections for the first Duma (Parliament) in 1906, intense anti-Semitism and fear of popular unrest marked Union ideology. An early Union campaign poster urged voters to elect the

best Russian people .... in order that the Orthodox faith is not trampled upon in Russia, in order that Russia is for the Russians, in order that non-Russians, Jews and Jewified traitor-plotters do not seize power and enslave the Russian people, and in order that the volition of the autocratic Tsar does not become lower than the decisions of various parties in the State Duma and does not become distorted by careless and mercenary bureaucrats. [80]


Virulent anti-Semitism found a central place in the Union election platform that Purishkevich, a prominent Union member and an official in the Interior Ministry, drew up in 1906. Purishkevich dedicated the longest section of the text to the "Jewish question," the "fateful question for all civilized peoples alike." The document accused the Jews of manifesting "unbelievable misanthropy" and "irreconcilable hatred of Russia and everything Russian." The election platform further claimed that the "revolutionary movement in Russia" represented "business almost exclusively in the hands of Jews."

The Imperial Russian government already greatly limited Jews' rights, forbidding them from governmental service, for instance, and severely restricting where they could live. Purishkevich went further. In his election platform, he called for all Jews residing within Imperial Russian borders to be "deemed foreigners immediately, but without the rights and privileges granted to all other foreigners." This would mean that Jews could not serve in the armed forces or in the civil service, would be subject to even stricter residency regulations, would be forbidden to attend institutions of learning with Gentiles, and would be excluded from several professions, notably those in the fields of medicine and the press. Russian trade and industry were to be taken from the hands of "foreigners and Jews." [81] Purishkevich's anti-Semitic election platform helped him to become elected to the Duma as a representative from Bessarabia. [82] He went on to serve in the second, third, and fourth Dumas. [83]

Black Hundred parties including the Union of the Russian People received 6.1 percent of the vote in the first Duma elections of 1906. These electoral results proved considerably more impressive than those of any comparable volkisch groupings in Germany, but they were much less than anticipated. Black Hundred organizations achieved their best electoral results in the Pale of Settlement where the Jewish population was the greatest. They faired more poorly in the Great Russian heartland. Nonetheless, the Union in particular influenced the Imperial Russian government beyond what its modest electoral standing suggested.

The Union of the Russian People grew rapidly. It soon overshadowed all other more elitist Black Hundred organizations such as its parent organization, the Russian Assembly, and the Monarchical Party. The Union appealed to a wide population base since members of the intelligentsia played the leading roles in the organization. Of the forty-seven members of the Union's Head Council, only fifteen belonged to the nobility. The Union also included substantial contingents of farmers and workers. The Union established local divisions in every major Imperial Russian city and in the countryside as well. It comprised over 900 branches throughout Imperial Russia by April 1907. Membership in the Union peaked in the first half of 1908 at over 100,000 of the approximately 400,000 members of all Black Hundred organizations. [84]

The Union propagated its anti-Semitic far right views through its newspaper, Russkoe Znamia (The Russian Banner). The Union leader Dubrovin edited the paper. The Russian Banner had approximately 14,500 readers, including the Tsar. [85] A July 1907 article, "The 'Peaceful' Conquest of Russia," argued that Zionism was an "illusion." In reality, Imperial Russia's Jews intended to create their own state "in Russia itself." The piece warned that in less than a decade, the country would only appear to be Russian, while "as a matter of fact, the state will be Jewish." Jews would rule as "masters" whereas Russians would serve as the Jews' "labor force," would suppress internal discord, meaning "the remnants of Russian national consciousness," and would protect the borders of the "Jewish state" from foreign enemies. [86]

Largely because of internal strife, the Union of the Russian People failed to spread its warnings of an insidious Jewish conspiracy to the degree it desired. In the fall of 1907, the talented Union leader Putishkevich vehemently criticized Dubrovin's authoritarianism and left the Union. He grouped together others dissatisfied with Dubrovin's leadership and formed the Russkii narodnyi soiuz imeni Mikhaila Arkhangela (Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union). The new organization's March 1908 statutes approved of the Duma, but noted: "In all other respects, the program of the Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union concurs with the program of the Union of the Russian People." With the split of the Union of the Russian People, the Black Hundred movement in the Russian Empire entered a period of decline.

Black Hundred fortunes only briefly improved beginning in March 1911, when a twelve-year-old boy was butchered in Kiev and the belief spread among the populace that Jews had killed him as part of a ritual. A member of the Union of the Russian People in Kiev wrote an appeal that appeared throughout the city: “Russian People! If you value your children, then kill the Yids! Kill them until there is not even a single Yid in Russia!” In April 1911, Purishkevich and Nikolai Markov II, the influential leader of the Kursk branch of the Union of the Russian People, argued before the Duma that Jews had murdered the boy in Kiev as part of a demonic ritual. [87] An article in a July 1911 edition of the Union newspaper The Russian Banner warned, “Our poor dear children, fear and be afraid of your primordial enemy, tormenter and infanticide, accursed of God and man – the Yid!” The article further admonished Russian children to avoid “the Yid” as if he were a “plague-stricken pest.” [88]

A front-page article in an August 1913 edition of The Russian Banner asserted: “The guilt of the Kiev Jewish Kahal in this matter is established,” no matter what verdict the court would pronounce in the ritual murder case (the accused were found not guilty). Moreover, Jewry deserved to be “expelled from Russia to a country where the use of human blood is not considered a crime.” The article argued that the Russian government had to adopt severe measures against this “accursed people,” the Jews. The piece stressed, “The Yids must be placed artificially in conditions such that they continually die out.” [89] The Union thus served as the first European political group seriously to propose physically exterminating Jews.


While the public uproar over the supposed Jewish ritual murder in Kiev aided the far right’s cause in Imperial Russia, a new split weakened the Black Hundred movement in 1911. At the All-Russian Congress of the Union of the Russian People in Moscow in November 1911, Markov II challenged Union leader Dubrovin’s authority. Other members of the Union’s Head Council backed Markov II, and he received the outside support of Purishkevich, who had already left the Union. Dubrovin reacted by dismissing the offending members from the Union’s Head Council and reconstituting it with reliable supporters. [90] In August 1912, Dubrovin renamed the organization the Vserossiiskogo Dubrinskogo soiuzza russkoga naroda (All-Russian Dubrovin Union of the Russian People) with himself as lifetime leader. Markov II formed another faction of the Union of the Russian People in November 1912. [91]

Dubrovin struggled to maintain his authority in far right Russian circles. Two close colleagues and friends, Aleksandr Bork, who belonged to the Union’s Head Council, and his wife Elsa Shabelskii-Bork, who regularly attended Head Council meetings in an advisory capacity, aided him in his efforts to maintain control of the Union. The couple submitted articles to The Russian Banner in accordance with Dubrovin’s wishes. [92] The pair also began publishing a newspaper, Svoboda I poriadok (Freedom and Order), with police money in December 1913. [93] The Tsar himself avidly read this paper. [94]


In his opening editorial from December 1913, Bork struck an apocalyptic tone. He quoted from Revelation 3:16 in castigating “superficial servants of Christ’s church” who were “neither cold nor hot.” He further warned that “dark forces” were leading humanity to “ruin.” He called for struggle against “Jewish Freemasonry,” which was preparing a “violent … anti-Christian revolution” in Imperial Russia along the lines of those that had “already succeeded in so many countries.” [95] Bork thus viewed Jewry as an apocalyptic force bent on destruction.

In the Russian Empire on the outbreak of World War I, anti-Semitism was relatively widespread, but the Black Hundred movement remained in a disorganized state. As war with Germany loomed, the predominantly pro-German attitude of the Black Hundred movement exacerbated its political weakness. Union of the Russian People leadership tended quite early towards a pro-German stance, largely because of Imperial Russia’s continuing rivalry with Great Britain in Central Asia. [96] In May 1914, the Union faction leader Nikolai Markov II asserted in the Russian Duma that a “small alliance with Germany” was superior to a “great friendship with England.” [97] The majority of rightist monarchists in Imperial Russia favored a German-Russian alliance along the lines that Markov II proposed. [98]

The generally positive attitude towards the German Empire in the Black Hundred movement also applied to the Baltic German population of the Russian Empire. While Union of the Russian People ideology generally disapproved of minority nationalities in Imperial Russia, Baltic Germans proved an exception. In fact, Baltic Germans generally enjoyed a favorable reputation in the Russian radical right. Point 17 of the statutes of Purishkevich’s Michael the Archangel Russian People’s Union expressed “particular trust in the German population of the Empire.” This point had to be removed after the outbreak of World War I, but a generally pro-Baltic German attitude remained among members of the Imperial Russian far right. [99]


The activities and views of right-wing Baltic German subjects of the Russian Empire deserve greater attention than they have received because of the key role that some Baltic Germans subsequently played in the National Socialist movement. The Rubonia Fraternity at the Riga Polytechnic Institute (named after the Rubon, the Roman term for the Duna River that flows through Riga) spurred Baltic German pride. The majority of the Rubonia Fraternity members came from upper-class Baltic German families in the Russian Baltic provinces. [100] Four members of the Rubonia Fraternity eventually immigrated to Germany and played important roles in Aufbau and the National Socialist Party: Max von Scheubner-Richter, Otto von Kursell, Arno Schickedanz, and Alfred Rosenberg.

Scheubner-Richter was born Richter in Riga in 1884 to an Imperial German father and a Baltic German mother. He received his double name in the course of a love affair with Mathilde von Scheubner, the noble wife of a prominent member of Riga society. He absconded from Riga to Munich with Mathilde, who was almost thirty years his senior, and married her in 1911. A relative of Richter’s wife adopted him and granted him her noble name von Scheubner in 1912, entitling him to the name von Scheubner-Richter. [101]

While he was still known as Richter, Scheubner-Richter became friends with Kursell, who had been born into a noble Estonian Baltic Germany family in Saint Petersburg in 1884. [102] Scheubner-Richter and Kursell had first met at the Petri High School in Reval, in what became Estonia. The two Baltic Germans began studying together at the Riga Polytechnic Institute as members of the Rubonia Fraternity in 1905. Scheubner-Richter specialized in chemistry and Kursell studied architecture. Kursell valued Scheubner-Richter as a “popular, cheerful comrade” who held a variety of leadership positions in the Rubonia Fraternity. [103] Kursell was himself a charismatic person and, like Scheubner-Richter, a ladies’ man. [104]

While he was legally considered a subject of Imperial Germany, Scheubner-Richter spoke fluent Russian from his early Russian schooling, and he regarded himself as a Baltic German since he had spent his entire youth in the Imperial Russian Baltic ports Riga and Reval and had risked his life for Baltic German interests in 1905. During the Revolution of 1905, nationalist Latvians and Estonians had joined forces with socialist revolutionaries to overthrow Baltic German landowners who held the leading societal role in the Baltic provinces. Scheubner-Richter had been shot in the knee while serving in the Baltic German Selbstschutz (Self-Protection) forces that had combated this anti-Baltic German alliance. [105]  

The two other Rubonia Fraternity members who went on to play important roles in Aufbau and the National Socialist movement, Rosenberg and Schickedanz, entered Rubonia in 1910 and studied there together until 1917. Rosenberg had been born in 1893 in Reval to merchant Baltic German parents. His colleague Schickedanz had been born into a Riga merchant family in 1893. Rosenberg majored in architecture and Schickedanz studied chemistry. [106] Rosenberg admired volkisch ideology. As a young man, he read German mythology, Schopenhauer, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He characterized the last as “the strongest positive influence in my youth.” Russian literature also strongly affected him, most notably the works of Dostoevskii. [107] Rosenberg later helped to shape National Socialist ideology by synthesizing volkisch German ideas with White émigré views.

Unlike the Rubonia Fraternity members Scheubner-Richter, Kursell, Schickedanz, and Rosenberg, a man of noble Baltic German ancestry who went on to influence the National Socialist movement, Fedor Vinberg, regarded himself unequivocally as a Russian. [108] Vinberg grew up in Saint Petersburg as the son of a general who eventually served as a member of the Highest Russian Military Council. He studied at the Classical Gymnasium in Kiev in his youth and subsequently joined the army, reaching the rank of colonel in 1913.

Vinberg attained a high status in Imperial Russia. In 1913, the Tsar named him to serve as his court equerry, meaning that he frequently participated in important ceremonies at the Tsar’s court. With the outbreak of World War I, Colonel Vinberg was assigned command of an infantry regiment. He used his connections to receive an audience with Tsaritsa Aleksandra Romanov, with whom he developed an intense personal relationship if not an outright affair.
He pleaded to be allowed to serve in a cavalry regiment. The Tsaritsa saw to it that he received a position in the staff headquarters of the Second Russian Army as he desired. [109]

Vinberg participated in the Black Hundred movement. He belonged to Purishkevich’s Michael of the Archangel Russian People’s Union. Purishkevich “especially impressed” Vinberg early on, though they became somewhat alienated from each other as World War I progressed. [110] After the Tsar’s abdication during the February Revolution of 1917, Vinberg refused to serve the Provisional Government under Aleksandr Kerenskii. Kerenskii’s regime suppressed Black Hundred organizations before any other political groupings. In May 1917, Vinberg launched a counter-revolutionary initiative by founding a secret alliance, Officer’s Duty, which included both members of the officer corps and a few hundred men from outside it. [111] Vinberg remained a staunch supporter of the monarchy in the face of revolutionary upheaval.

Counter-revolutionary activities in which Vinberg participated during the period of Kerenskii’s Provisional Government culminated in the unsuccessful Kornilov Putsch of August 27-30, 1917 under the leadership of General Lavr Kornilov. Vinberg and members of his conspiratorial Officer’s Duty organization took part in this undertaking. [112] Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, the son of the couple who had published the Union of the Russian People newspaper Freedom and Order and a member of both the Union of the Russian People and Purishkevich's Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union, also supported the Kornilov Putsch. Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, Shabelskii-Bork's comrade from the Cavalry Regiment of the Caucasian Division, also took part in this counter-revolutionary endeavor. [113] Like Vinberg, both Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii went on to serve Aufbau and the National Socialist cause.

In the summer of 1917, Lieutenants Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii formed an organization of officers loyal to the Tsar. They traveled to the front at the end of June 1917 to assess which cavalry regiments would best serve for a monarchical coup in the capital Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg was then known. Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii planned to assist General Kornilov by using loyal Tsarist cavalry officers to storm the Winter Palace and to arrest Kerenskii's Provisional Government in August 1917, but their preparations were discovered and thwarted beforehand. [114] The Failed Kornilov Putsch increased public fears of repressive right wing counterrevolution. The unsuccessful undertaking undermined remaining public confidence in Russian army officers, and it helped to bring Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks out of the isolation that they had engendered through their own armed protest in July 1917. [115]

After the Kornilov Putsch collapsed, Colonel Vinberg continued to oppose leftist force in Russia. He collaborated with Purishkevich, who formed an underground monarchical organization in September 1917 that included many former members of the now dissolved Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union. [116] Vinberg contributed articles to the "non-socialist" newspaper Narodnyi Tribun (The People's Tribune), which Purishkevich began publishing in September 1917. [117] In an October 1917 essay, "Fighting Value," Vinberg lamented that the 'Revolution" had "torn out" the "lofty religious, public, and civil ideals" from the "souls of the soldiers" in Russia. [118] At this time, he was primarily concerned with the dissolution of the Russian Army as a potent fighting force.

Vinberg wrote an article for The People's Tribune a few days later in which he again lamented the current state of affairs in Russia. In his essay, "Contrasts," he claimed that while the Italian Army was fighting bravely against an overwhelming German force, soldiers of the numerically far superior Russian Army were running "unrestrained" from German troops. Moreover, "Native fields and settlements have been pillaged and destroyed by our own soldiers and peasants." Vinberg used the language of a disappointed lover in expressing his woe: "My poor people! ... I loved and believed in you so! ... What they have done to you!" [119] The spread of revolution and the dissolution of the army devastated Vinberg.

Vinberg's impotent frustration as expressed in Purishkevich's The People's Tribune underscored the inability of the Black Hundred movement to thwart the Bolshevik seizure of power. [120] The Bolsheviks closed The People's Tribune after they had overthrown Kerenskii's Provisional Government in October 1917 (according to the Julian calendar then used in Russia). [121] Vinberg was suddenly faced with the rule of what he termed the "Jewish Bolsheviks." [122] The success of the "October Revolution," as the Bolshevik seizure of power became known, forced Black Hundred activities in Russia to become strictly conspiratorial. [123]

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Vinberg's co-conspirator in the Kornilov Putsch, Shabelskii-Bork, retreated to his estate near Petrograd, where he researched the causes of the February and October Revolutions for Purishkevich's underground monarchical organization. Shabelskii-Bork concluded that the Entente (Britain and France) had fomented revolution in Imperial Russia since it had feared the "Russian peril" as much as the German one. He decided that the restoration of the Russian monarchy could not be achieved with Entente aid, but only through the "reestablishment of the traditional friendship between Russia and Germany." [124]

Bolshevik leaders broke up Purishkevich's underground monarchical organization and imprisoned Purishkevich, Vinberg, and Shabelskii-Bork, among others, in December 1917.
Bolshevik authorities charged the three comrades with organizing a monarchical conspiracy against the fledgling Soviet regime. [125] At their trial that began in late December, Shabelskii-Bork impressed Vinberg with his fervent monarchism. [126] Vinberg moved Shabelskii-Bork by assuring the tribunal. “My head can roll off of your execution block, but it will never bow to the Revolution.” [127] The Bolshevik court convicted and imprisoned Purishkevich, Vinberg, and Shabelskii-Bork. [128] Vinberg and Shabelskii-Bork shared the same prison cell, where Vinberg received the thanks of the similarly incarcerated former Tsar for working on his behalf. [129] Vinberg and Shabelskii-Bork began a close friendship in this cell that later led to the transfer of Black Hundred ideology to the early National Socialist movement, most notably in the form of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

CONCLUSION

Far rightests in Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire established detailed anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-semitic ideologies in the period leading up to the 1917 Russian Revolution. Largely internally orientated volkisch German thought drew on the idealistic views of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Volkisch ideology conceived a pernicious materialistic Jewish essence that the spiritually and racially superior Germans needed to transcend by negating the will to live, thereby redeeming the world. More externally fixated Russian radical right beliefs, which were associated with the Slavophiles in general and the authors Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Solovev in particular, expressed apocalyptic visions of Jewish world conspirators who threatened to ruin Imperial Russia and eventually the world. Russians needed to lead all Slavs to combat this menace in a concrete political struggle. Anti-Semitic National Socialist ideology later arose largely as a synthesis of German volkisch-redemptive and Russian conspiratorial-apocalyptic thought.

While the Black Hundred movement in Imperial Russia, of which the Union of the Russian People formed the most important component, managed to disseminate its anti-Semitic ideology to a considerably broader audience than any comparable volkisch German alliance, far right movements in both Imperial Russia and the German Empire nonetheless failed to achieve their political aspirations. Russian conservative revolutionaries fiercely defended the Tsar, but after initial moderate successes, the Black Hundred movement’s influence declined dramatically. Far rightists could not prevent the Tsar’s abdication, nor could they thwart the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. The Russian far right only regained a powerful drive and coherence that had been lacking of late after the Bolshevik Revolution. The Bolshevik “Reds” provided an insidious political foe for “Whites” that fit earlier apocalyptic Black Hundred warnings.

No powerful political volkisch movement developed in Imperial Germany up to the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. Heinrich Class’ Pan-German League, Ludwig Muller von Haussen’s Association against the Presumption of Jewry, and Wolfgang Kapp’s German Fatherland Party all failed to attract mass followings. Numerically slight volkisch elements that grouped around Kapp and Class ultimately concluded that a military dictatorship under the volkisch General Erich von Ludendorff represented a superior option to the rule of the ineffectual Kaiser. Volkisch Germans could not establish such a dictatorship, however.

In any case, although the days of the Kaiser were numbered, German prospects for victory in World War I improved considerably when the Russian Empire collapsed in 1917. German forces advanced deep into former Imperial Russian territory in 1918, most notably into the Ukraine, where right-wing German officers interacted with their monarchical Russian or Ukrainian counterparts on a large scale for the first time. German-White cooperation in the Ukraine set a precedent for further international right-wing alliances after Imperial Germany lost World War I, notably as seen in the Baltic region in 1919. Hitler’s National Socialists subsequently drew upon the tradition of German-White collaboration that had been established in the Ukraine.

_______________

Notes:

1 Max Hildebert Boehm, Das eigenstandige Volk in der Krise der Gegenwart (Vienna: Wilhelm Braumuller, 1971), I.
  
2 Peter Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany & Austria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 31; George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York: Howard Fertig, 1964), 4-7.
 
3 Saul Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume I: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 86, 87.
 
4 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea, vols. I and III, trans. R. B, Haldane and J, Kemp (London: Kegan Paul, Trench. Trubner and Co., 1909), vol. I, 422, 524; vol. III. 423, 447.
 
5 Quoted from Dietrich Eckart, "Das Judentum in und ausser uns: Grundsatzliche Betrachtungen von  Dietrich Eckart: I," Aufgut deutsch: Wochenschrift for Ordnung und Recht, January 10, 1919, 12; quoted  from Eckart, "Das ist der Jude! Laienpredigt uber Juden- und Christentum von Dietrich Eckart," Auf  gut deutsch, [August/September], 1920, 55; quoted from Eckart, "Der Baccalaureus," Auf gut deutsch,  October 23, 1919, 7.
 
6 Cited from Martin Gregor-Dellin, Richard Wagner: His Life, His Work, His Century (New York:  Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 257.
 
7 Richard Wagner, "Was nutzt diese Erkenntniss?" Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. X  (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel, 1907), 257.
 
8 Wagner, "Das Judenthum in der Musik," Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. V, 85.
 
9 "Wandering Jew," The Jewish Encyclopedia, 1916, 462.
 
10 Wagner, "Uber Staat und Religion," Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. VIII, 220.
 
11 Wagner, Die Walkure, Act Two, Scene Two, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. III, III.
 
12 Wagner, Siegfried, Act Three, Scene One, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. III, 222; Wagner, Gotterdammerung, Act Three, Scene Three, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. 3, 311-313.
 
13 William O. Cord, The Teutonic Mythology of Richard Wagner’s "The Ring of the Nibelungen" (Queenston, Ont.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1991), 84.
 
14 Wagner, Das Rheingoid, Scene Four, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. III, 59; Wagner, Gotterdammerung, &'t Three, Scene Three, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. III, 311-313.
 
15 Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 310, 311.
 
16 Friedlander, "Hitler und Wagner," Richard Wagner im Dritten Reich: Ein Schloss Elmau-Symposium, eds. Friedlander and Jorn Rusen (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2000), 172.
 
17 Wagner, "Religion und Kunst," Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. X, 232, 243, 245.
 
18 Ivan Hannaford, Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996), 264.
 
19 Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28.
 
20 Wagner, "Heldenthum und Christenthum," Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. X, 281.
 
21 Wagner, "Erkenne dich selbst," Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, vol. X, 271.
 
22 Wagner, ''Appendix to 'Judaism in Music,'" Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. III, trans. William  Ashton Ellis (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1894), 121.
 
23 Wagner, "Erkenne dich selbst," 274.
 
24 Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New  York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 15, 347-349.
 
25 Winfried Schuler, Der Bayreuther Kreis von seiner Entstehung bis zum Ausgang der Wilhelminischen  Ara (Munster: Verlag Aschendorff; 1971), 74, 113.
 
26 Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner, trans. G. Ainslie Hight (Philadelphia: J. B.  Lippincott Co., 1900), 171, 182, 387.
 
27 Field, Evangelist of Race, 225; Schuler, Der Bayreuther Kreis, 117.
 
28 Chamberlain, Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, vols. I and II, trans. John Lees (New York:  Howard Fertig, 1968), vol. I, 213, 214, 226, 246, 256, 257, 419, 507, 578; vol. II, 43, 259.
 
29 David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in a Nineteenth-Century German Village (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 85, 86.
 
30 Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany &Austria, 112, 114, 119.
 
31 Protocol from a meeting of the Alldeutscher Verband leadership on March 2, 1918, BAB, 8048, number 117, 6; Heinrich Class, Wider den Strom: Vom werden und Wachsen der nationalen Opposition im alten Reich, vol. I (Leipzig: Koehler, 1932), 33, 88, 128.
 
32 Class, Wider den Strom, vol. I, 87, 88,131.
 
33 Einhart [Class], Deutsche Geschichte, second edn. (Leipzig: Dietrich'schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1909), V, 290.
 
34 Class, Wider den Strom, vol. II, BAK, Kleine Erwerbung 499, 331.
 
35 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 75.
 
36 Class, Wider den Strom, vol. I, 233.
 
37 Daniel Frymann [Class], Wenn ich der Kaiser war - Politische Wahrheiten und Notwendigkeiten, fifth edn. (Leipzig: Dietrich'schen Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1914), 3, 32, 35, 74-76, 132, 135.
 
38 Class, Wider den Strom, vol. I, 236; vol. II, 373, 374.
 
39 Letter from Ludwig Muller von Hausen to Maria Groener from June 25, 1920, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, dew 221, 54.
 
40 Statutes of the Verband gegen Uberhebung des Judentumes, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis 1, delo 6, 1, 4.
 
41 Letters from Hausen to Class from November 11 and December 11, 1912; Hausen's 1912 membership  card for the Alldeutscher Verband, Ortsgruppe Berlin, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 577, opis I, delo 218,  3, 5, 218.
 
42 Martin Bormann's Verband gegen Uberhebung des Judentumes membership card number 1086  from July 7, 1920, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis 1, delo 27, 24.
 
43 Letters from Hausen to Class from October 8, 1913 and December 21, 1916; letters from Class to  Hausen from October 10 and November 4, 1913, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 577, opis I, delo 218, 17,  19, 22, 86.
 
44 Class, essay fragment, 1936, BAK, Kleine Erwerbung 499, 12.
 
45 Letter from Hausen to K. Duncker from April 21, 1922, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo  213, 8.
 
46 Friedlander, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 81.
 
47 Pulzer, The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism in Germany & Austria, 119, 292.
 
48 Elisabeth Schwarze, "Einleitung," Nachlass Wolfgang Kapp (Berlin: GSAPKB, 1997), VI.
 
49 Letter from Wolfgang Kapp to Rudiger von def Goltz from August 28, 1917, GSAPKB, Repasitur 92, number 455, 3.
 
50 Foundational Protocol of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei on September 3, 1917, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 460, 4.
 
51 Schwarze, "Einleitung,” VII.
 
52 Class, Wider den Strom, vol. II, 66, 209, 214; protocols of the Alldeutscher Verband meeting in Berlin on June 29 and 30, 1918, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, dela 844, 110.
 
53 Erich Kuhn, "Werbung fur Mitarbeit” (Munich: J. F. Lehmanns Verlag, June 1916), GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 792, 12, 35.
 
54 Letter from Hausen to Kapp from October 17, 1917, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo 219, 2; letter from Hausen to the RA/ZSS from March 23, 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 577, opis 1, delo 2, 2-4; Hausen's note on a letter from E. Rumpler Luftfahrzeugbau from August 25, 1914, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fimd 577, opis I, delo 1, 2.
 
55 Walther Nicolai, Tagebuch (Diary), August 17, 1917, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 1414, opis U, delo 15, 12.
 
56 Class, Wider den Strom, vol. I, 22; vol. II, 226, 233, 234, 237.
 
57 Fedor Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii E M Dostoevskago, vol. X (Saint  Petersburg: A. F. Marks, 1895), 221.
 
58 Dostoevskii. Tagebuch eines Schriftstellers, trans. E. K. Rahsin (Munich: Piper, 1992), 641.
 
59 Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia, vol. X, 440; vol. XI, 8.
 
60 Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia, vol. X, 225, 226; vol. XI, 5, 6, 8, 240, 241.
 
61 Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelia, vol. XI, 94, 98, 114, 495.
 
62 Otto-Ernst Schuddekopf, Linke Leute von rechts: Die nationalrevolutioniiren Minderheiten und der  Kommunismus in der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1960), 33.
 
63 Michael Hagemeister, “Vladimir Solov'ev: Reconciler and Polemicist," Eastern Christian Studies 2:  Selected Papers of the International Vladimir Solovev Conference held at the University of Nijmegen,  the Netherlands, in September 1998 (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 287, 289, 290.
 
64 S. A. Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii 1905-1914 (Moscow: IzdateIstvo Vsesoiuznogo zaochnogo  politekhnicheskogo instituta, 1992), 28; Hagemeister, “Vladimir Solov'ev," 288.
 
65 Hagemeister, "Die 'Protokolle der Weisen von Zion' und der Basler Zionistenkongress von 1897,"  Der Traum von Israel: Die Ursprunge des modernen Zionismus, ed. Heiko Haumann (Weinheim:  Beltz Atheniium Verlag, 1998), 257.
 
66 James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1976), 260; Schuddekopf, Linke  Leute von rechts, 33.
 
67 D. I. Raskin, "Ideologiia russkogo pravogo radikalizma v kontse XIX nachale:XX vv," Natsionalnaia  pravaia prezhde i teper, lstoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki, chast I: Rossiia i russkoe zarubezhe (Saint  Petersburg: Institut Sotsiologii rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 1992), 39.
 
68 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii 1905-1914, 23.
 
69 Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 6; Stepanov,  Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 25, 26.
 
70 Hannaford, Race, 318.
 
71 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 23, 27.
 
72 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossi;, 32, 33, 90, 91, 110; Spisok chlenov Russkogo Sobraniia s prilozheniem  istoricheskogo ocherky sobraniia (Saint Petersburg: Tip. Spb. Gradonachalstva, 1906), 1, 21, 27, 55.
 
73 Raskin, "Ideologiia russkogo pravogo radikalizma," 5.
 
74 "Ustav Obschestva pod nazvaniem 'Soiuz Russkago Naroda,’" GARF, fond 116, opis I, delo 6, 14-17.
 
75 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 57, 142.
 
76 Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press,  1988), 238-242.
 
77 Rafael Ganelin, "Chernosotennye organizatsii, politicheskaia politsiia i gosudarstvennaia vlast v  tsarskoi Rossii," Natsionalnaia pravaia, 78.
 
78 Vladimir Purishkevich, "Izbiratdnaia programma Soiuza Russkago Naroda, Russkomu Narodu,"  Russkoe Znamia, September 19, 1906, 2.
 
79 RKUoO report from January 29, 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 539, 33; LGPO  report to the RKUoO from August 8, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 772, opis 3, delo 539, 17.
 
80 "Obedinennyi russkii narod." GARF, fond 116, opis I, delo I, 14.

81 Purishkevich, "Izbiratelnaia programma Soiuza Russkago Naroda," 2, 3.
 
82. MG report to the QB/SO from January 12, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 198, opis 17, delo 414,  reel I, 24.
 
83 Ganelin, "Chernosotennye organizatsii," 87.
 
84 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 93, 95. 105, 109, 111, 112, 123, 167; LGPO report to the RKOaO  from November 28, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 772, opis I, delo 96, 46, 47.
 
85 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 104, 266.
 
86 Andrei Chernyi, "'Mirnoe' zavoevanie Rossii," Russkoe Znamia, July 19, 1907, 2.
 
87. Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 168, 174, 175, 266, 270.

88. U. Soiuznik, “Russkim detiam,” Russkoe Znamia, July 7, 1911, 2.

89. “Istoriia ubiistva Iuschinskago,” Russkoe Znamia, August 9, 1913, 1.

90. Aleksandr Dubrovin, “Gorechovskomu Otdelu Soiuza russkago Naroda,” March 1912, GARF, fond 116, opis I, delo 1, 32.  

91. Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 192.

92. Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 189; letters from Aleksandr Bork and E.A. Shabelskii-Bork to Dubrovin from September 3, 1903, and in the period from 1905 to 1910, GARF, fond 116, opis I, delo 807, 1, 2, 14, 18, 34.

93. Ganelin, “Rossiiskoe chernosotenstvo I germanskii national-sotsializm,” Natsionalnaia pravaia, 142.

94. Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, “Uber Mein Leben,” March 1926, GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953, 91.

95. Bork, editorial, Svoboda I poriadok, December 1, 1913, 1.

96. Hans Rogger and Eugen Weber, The European Right: A Historical Profile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 495.

97. Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 322.

98. LGPO report to the RKUoO from December 24, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I, delo 96, 56.

99 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 22, 323.

100. Woldemar Helb, Album Rubonorum, 1875-1972, fourth edn. (Neustadt an der Aisch: Verlag Degener & Co., 1972), 7.

101. Helb, Album Rubonorum, 148; Karsten Bruggemann, “Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (1884-1923) – der ‘Fuhrer der Fuhrers’?” Deutschbalten, Weimarer Republic und Drittes Reich, ed. Michael Garlef (Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 2001), 124; Boehm, “Baltische Einflusse auf die Anfangte des Nationalsozialismus,” Jahrbuch des baltischen Duetschtums, 1967, 59.

102. RKUoO report from May 7, 1925, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 4, delo 52, 145.

103. Otto von Kursell, “Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis,” ed Henrik Fischer (Munich, 1969), Helb, Album Rubonorum, 141, 148.

104. Julia Hass (Otto von Kursell’s daughter), personal interview, January 21, 2003.

105. Aleksandr von Lampe, Dnevnik (Diary), Berlin, November 21, 1923, GARF, fond 5853, opis I, delo 13, reel 2, 5860; Kursell, “Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis,” 3, 9.

106. Helb, Album Rubonorum, 164, 165.

107. Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1972), 12, 14, 17.

108. Ganelin, “Rossiiskoe chernosotenstvo I germanskii national-sotsializm,” 139.

109. Fedor Vinberg’s testimony included in a PDM report to the BSMI from March 30, 1922, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 3, 92, 93.

110. Vinberg, Der Kreuzesweg Russlands: Teil I: Die Ursachen des Ubels, trans. K. von Jarmersted (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1922), 59.

111. Vinberg’s March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 3, 93; Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 327.

112. Vinberg, Der Kreuzesweg Russlands, 59; Vinberg’s March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 3, 93; fiche 4, 1; Stephanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 327.

113 Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the "Protocols of the  Elders of Zion," (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), 127; JM charge against Shabelskii-Bork and Sergei Taboritskii from May 29, 1922, GSAPKB, Repositur 84a number 14953.16.

114 Shabelskii-Bork, "Uber Mein Leben," GSAPKB, Repositur 843, number 14953, 99.

115 Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernization and Revolution 1881-1917 (New York: Longman, 1983), 284.

116 Stepanov, Chernaia Stonia v Rossii, 328.

117 Purishkevich, editorial, Narodnyi Tribun: Organ Purishkevicha, September 5, 1917. I.

118 Vinberg, "Voesposobnost," Narodnyi Tribun, October 19, 1917, 3.

119 Vinberg, "Kontrasty," Narodnyi Tribun, October 22, 1917, 2.

120 Raskin, "Ideologiia russkogo pravogo radikalizma." 12.

121 Narodnyi Tribun, October 24, 1917.

122 Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 1.

123 LGPO report to the RKUoO from November 28, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I, delo 96, 47.

124 Shabelskii-Bark, "Uber Mein Leben," GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953, 95, 96, 98.

125 Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnila v Rosii, 329

126. Vinberg’s March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 1 3.

127. Shabelskii-Bork, “Uber Mein Leben,” GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953, 99, 103.

128. Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii, 329; Vinberg’s March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 1.

129. Shabelskii-Bork, “Uber Mein Leben,” GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953, 101, 103.
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Tue Jan 29, 2019 2:57 am

 Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER 2: At the extreme in the Ukraine and in Germany

The term "Ukraine" derives from the meaning "at the extremity," referring to the area's early location at the periphery of the Russian and Polish spheres of influence. During the final stages of World War I and in the immediate postwar period, the semi-autonomous Ukraine served as a seedbed of extremist movements and ideas, as right-wing Germans interacted with anti-Bolshevik Whites on a large scale for the first time. After the Imperial Russian Army collapsed because of military reverses and internal revolution, Imperial German occupying forces in the Ukraine formed a largely clandestine common front with Whites against the fledgling Bolshevik regime to the north.

Although Imperial German efforts to establish a stable Ukrainian satellite state ultimately failed because of German military reverses on the distant Western Front and revolution at home, the alliance between right-wing Germans and Whites in the Ukraine strengthened pro-German sentiments throughout the White movement. The German Ukrainian Intervention established a precedent for further large-scale nationalist German-Russian military collaboration, notably as conducted along the Baltic Sea in Latvia during 1919. The international anti-Bolshevik cooperation that began in the Ukraine ultimately fostered close National Socialist collaboration with White emigres.

German military personnel retreating from the Ukraine around the turn of the year 1918/1919 took thousands of pro-nationalist German White officers with them, and many other Whites who had participated in anti-Bolshevik operations in or just outside the Ukraine traveled to Germany through other means. Several of these White officers went on to join Aufbau and to serve the National Socialist cause, notably General Vladimir Biskupskii, Colonel Fedor Vinberg, Colonel Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Colonel Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, and Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork.

Shabelskii-Bork arrived in Berlin on a German troop train in early 1919 with a fateful copy of the rabble-rousing anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He gave the Protocols to the volkisch publicist Ludwig Muller von Hausen for translation and publication in German. After Hausen published the Protocols, they greatly affected the volkisch German/White emigre milieu from which the National Socialist Party emerged. Hitler's early mentor Dietrich Eckart, who worked closely with the White emigre Alfred Rosenberg, recoiled in horror at the contents of the Protocols and most likely made Hitler aware of them. The Protocols influenced Hitler's views of an international Jewish conspiracy that manipulated liberal capitalism, fomented revolutionary movements, and used starvation to subdue opponents in order to achieve world domination.


GERMAN-WHITE COOPERATION IN THE UKRAINIAN INTERVENTION

In late 1917, the German General Staff supported Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotskii's Bolsheviks not because it approved of them ideologically, but in order to weaken the Russian Army. Following the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917, the German Empire's tactical pro-Bolshevik foreign policy led to extensive negotiations between Imperial German and Soviet representatives in the city of Brest-Litovsk. General Max Hoffmann led the German side of the talks in Brest-Litovsk despite his inner disgust at the Soviet delegation under the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs Trotskii. [1] Trotskii noted the artificial cordiality with which Hoffmann treated him at the negotiations in Brest-Litovsk. [2]

Generals Hoffman and Erich von Ludendorff, the chief of the Imperial German Army General Staff, wished to keep the strategically and agriculturally valuable Ukraine out of the control of advancing Bolshevik forces. Nonetheless, Bolshevik troops captured Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in late January 1918. Working-class Jews there warmly welcomed the occupying Bolshevik forces, and many of them enthusiastically collaborated with the Bolsheviks. These acts inflamed anti-Semitic resentments among the local population. [3] In early February 1918, Hoffmann called for German measures to stop the Bolshevik drive southwards. He stressed that the Ukraine represented the "most vital element in Russia." Ludendorff argued that if the Germans did not intercede more forcefully, then the Bolsheviks would "beat the Ukraine to death," thereby rendering it useless to Germany. [4]

The German Army High Command refused to let the Soviets consolidate their power in the Ukraine. While German and Austro-Hungarian troops officially marched into the Ukraine on February 9, 1918 at the request of the marginally independent Ukrainian government, the Rada, historians write of a de facto Central Power occupation of the Ukraine. [5] With the advance of German and Austro-Hungarian forces, Bolshevik troops evacuated Kiev at the end of February 1918. Primarily German occupying forces officially took control there at the beginning of March 1918. [6] Generals Ludendorff and Hoffmann saw their wishes to gain the Ukraine for Germany fulfilled.


A leading Ukrainian anti-Bolshevik, General Pavel Skoropadskii, who went on to lead the Ukraine under German occupation, displayed ambivalence towards the German advance into his homeland. He resented outside help in the struggle against Bolshevism, but given his own losing battle against the Red Army as commander of the 34th Corps, he knew that the Ukrainians needed foreign assistance to rid themselves of the Bolsheviks. [7] Skoropadskii was descended from Hetman Ivan Skoropadskii, who had ruled an autonomous Ukraine at the beginning of the eighteenth century. He owned two estates in the Ukraine. When Bolshevik forces had captured Kiev, Skoropadskii had hid in the countryside. Politics had followed him there, as he had ironically lodged with a Jew, who had angered him by asserting that the Bolsheviks would inevitably triumph in the Ukraine, and that this turn of events would help the Jews.

Skoropadskii watched German troops march into Kiev at the end of February 1918 with mixed emotions. On the one hand, he was pleased to be back in the Ukrainian capital. On the other hand, he acutely felt the "disgrace" of the situation in which the Ukrainian spectators of the German advance not only acquiesced to this occupation, but were also "secretly happy" because the Germans had liberated them from the "hated yoke of the Bolsheviks." Skoropadskii estimated that Bolshevik forces had killed at least three thousand officers and tortured countless others during their brief rule in Kiev, a time of "pure hell." [8] While he approved of the German defeat of Bolshevism in the Ukraine, he resented having to bow to German authority.

Around the time that German forces marched into the Ukraine to the mixed feelings of Skoropadskii, German military leaders feared and distrusted the new Soviet regime even while German representatives negotiated with it. As of early March 1918, Walther Nicolai, the head of the German Army High Command Intelligence Service who went on to supply intelligence to the National Socialist Party, believed that Bolshevism now represented the true danger to Germany's Eastern Security. He regarded Lenin as a threat to emerge as the "Napoleon of this epoch" who would endanger the power of the established elites in Germany and beyond. General Ludendorff agreed with Nicolai. [9]

Despite the reservations that many Imperial German military leaders felt towards negotiating with the Bolsheviks, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was concluded between the German Empire and Bolshevik Russia on March 10, 1918. The pact granted Germany control of considerable formerly Russian territories, including the Ukraine, and it allowed the German General Staff to transfer approximately one million soldiers from the Eastern Front to the Western Front. [10] German military authorities began playing a double game. They officially respected the peace between Imperial Germany and the Bolshevik regime, but at the same time they clandestinely fostered anti-Bolshevik operations in the Ukraine.

After establishing themselves in the Ukraine in the course of March 1918, the leaders of Army Group Eichhorn, as the German occupying force in the Ukraine was termed, worked to undermine the existing Ukrainian government, the Rada.
Army Group Eichhorn leaders dismissed the Rada as a "debate club" and desired a more reliable pro-German regime. [11] The Rada lacked authority with the masses, and it proved too leftist and too intellectual to win the support of the landowners and to collaborate smoothly with German occupying forces. [12] German occupying authorities desired a government that better represented Ukrainian large landowners and capitalists, who were grateful to the Germans for returning the property that the Bolsheviks had appropriated during their brief period of rule in the Ukraine. [13]

Ukrainian Cossacks, the descendents of frontiersmen who had been organized as cavalry units in the Tsarist Army, played an important role in the German scheme to topple the Rada. The ataman, or leader, of the Ukrainian Cossacks who called himself Colonel Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa quickly established contact with the German and Austro-Hungarian General Staffs in Kiev. [14] He would later lead a Ukrainian Cossack National Socialist movement in tandem with Hitler. Poltavets-Ostranitsa fit the description of the term "Cossack," which derives from a Turkish word meaning "adventurer."
He claimed, without basis, to be descended from a Ukrainian hetman, or ruler, Ostranitsa, on his mother's side. [15] He actually did not come from the nobility. He had changed the spelling of his given name from "Poltavtzev" and added the noble title "Ostranitsa." [16]

Whatever deceptions he employed regarding his ancestry, Poltavets-Ostranitsa had served admirably as a soldier during World War I, and he aroused the interest of German occupying authorities in the Ukraine since he had become a staunch opponent of the Rada. As a cavalry officer in the Imperial Russian Army, he had been wounded twice and had received several decorations for bravery. After Aleksandr Kerenskii had established the Provisional Government in early 1917, Poltavets-Ostranitsa had traveled to Kiev, where he had been elected to serve in the Military Committee of the Rada. [17] He had acted as the leading organizer of anti-Bolshevik forces on the Rada's behalf. [18] He had soon come into conflict with the socialist leadership in the Ukrainian government, however, and had had to leave the body. [19]

Poltavets-Ostranitsa had begun his own bid for power in the Ukraine. According to one source, he had financed his anti-Rada activities by using men loyal to him to plunder and then burn the estate of a Polish countess that they had been hired to protect. [20] Poltavets-Ostranitsa had led a small and yet efficient force that had defeated a punitive expedition from the Rada. The charismatic Cossack leader had established a new Cossack governing body. He had called a Ukrainian National Cossack Assembly for October 1917. He later claimed that 60,000 Cossacks had attended. He had been elected hetman, or leader, but he had refused the title, claiming that he was too young, only twenty-eight. He had recommended General Skoropadskii as honorary hetman.

In the course of March 1918, Army Group Eichhorn authorities decided that Poltavets-Ostranitsa and the Ukrainian Cossacks he represented could be used to overthrow the Rada. German military leaders approved of the Ukrainian National Cossack Organization that Poltavets-Ostranitsa de facto led. This association sought to create an independent Ukraine, defeat Bolshevism, and maintain close relations with the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Central Power occupational authorities held a large conference at the end of March 1918, and they decided to give Poltavets-Ostranitsa one million marks to overthrow the Rada. [21]

Largely because of Poltavets-Ostranitsa's German-backed intrigues, the days of the unpopular Rada were numbered. Poltavets-Ostranitsa joined forces with the older Skoropadskii to overthrow the Rada. Poltavets-Ostranitsa supported Skoropadskii's Party of the Ukrainian People's Union, which declared that while Jewry opposed the "Ukrainian idea," the Germans would "kill the parasitical tendencies of Jewry with their creative work." [22] Poltavets-Ostranitsa arranged a congress at the end of April 1918 that included Cossacks loyal to him as well as members of Skoropadskii's Party of the Ukrainian People's Union. [23] The assembly chose Poltavets-Ostranitsa to serve as Cossack Chancellor of the Ukraine, and Skoropadskii was declared the Hetman of the Ukraine, thereby nullifying the Rada's rule. [24] German occupying authorities officially adopted a neutral policy in the Ukrainian power struggle, but they secretly helped Poltavets-Ostranitsa and Skoropadskii to overthrow the Rada. [25]

After the successful coup against the Rada, Poltavets-Ostranitsa strengthened his Ukrainian National Cossack Organization. This league formed the only significant military basis of Skoropadskii's regime besides occupying Central Power troops. Poltavets-Ostranitsa submitted a program to Hetman Skoropadskii calling for a close alliance with Germany, the "liberation" of the Caucasus region, and the inclusion of the Caucasus in a Black Sea League in which the Ukraine would play the leading role. Poltavets-Ostranitsa's idea of a pro-German Black Sea League later influenced National Socialist Eastern policies. In his drive to create a pro-German Black Sea League, Poltavets-Ostranitsa increasingly experienced problems with his nominal superior, Skoropadskii, who doubted the Central Powers' prospects for victory and increasingly sided with the Entente in a clandestine manner. [26]


In addition to supporting Poltavets-Ostranitsa, German military leaders fostered the creation of White armies in and just outside the Ukraine after initial reservations. Despite generally smooth relations between Army Group Eichhorn and Skoropadskii's Hetmanate, in which Poltavets-Ostranitsa played a leading role, German military leaders initially feared a Ukrainian revolt and therefore did not arm Ukrainian forces. At the end of May 1918, however, German military authorities in the Ukraine agreed to implement a plan that the Rada had drafted to create an army composed of eight corps. [27] The Imperial German Army funded what became known as the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, and the members of this force wore old German officer uniforms. The Ukrainian Volunteer Army contained large numbers of Tsarist officers, including many who had taken refuge in Kiev after fleeing from the Bolsheviks to the north. [28]

In a June 1918 situation report, General Ludendorff expressed strong anti-Bolshevik and pro-White views. He stressed that he utterly distrusted "dishonest" Soviet machinations. He argued: "We cannot expect anything from this Soviet government although it only lives through our mercy. It is a perpetual danger for us." He emphasized that while the German government could officially only deal with the Bolshevik regime, it should nonetheless "establish contact with rightist, more monarchical groups in someway and influence them so that the monarchical movement will march in full accordance with our wishes when it has established its position." [29] Members of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army gave good grounds for Ludendorff's optimistic expectations of them. They thanked the Germans for saving their property from Bolshevik confiscation and for protecting their lives. [30]

General Vladimir Biskupskii played a prominent role in the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. He was a prince from a noble landed Ukrainian family in the Kharkov region. [31] He had belonged to the far right Union of the Russian People. He later claimed to have collaborated closely with Aleksandr Dubrovin, the leader of the Union, and he proudly asserted that the Union had represented the world's first manifestation of "Fascism/National Socialism." [32] The White general had displayed considerable military competence and bravery. He had graduated with top honors from a military academy and had received several decorations for courage and initiative during World War I. He had belonged to the pro-German faction of the Tsarist Army. After the Russian Empire had collapsed, he had made his way to the Ukraine. Skoropadskii named him the commander of the 1st Cavalry Division of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army in June 1918. [33] Biskupskii went on to cooperate closely with Hitler in the context of Aufbau.

A far right monarchical grouping in the Great Russian heartland to the north of the Ukraine where Biskupskii served Skoropadskii exerted increasing influence over Ukrainian matters. This group helped to create a new military formation, the Southern Army. From Petrograd, Nikolai Markov II, the former leader of a faction of the Union of the Russian People, led the Soiuz vernych (Union of the Faithful). This association sought to restore the Russian monarchy. Markov II directed the Union as a highly conspiratorial organization. The Union had a southern branch that increased its right-wing activities in the Ukraine in the summer of 1918.

In July 1918, the southern branch of the Union of the Faithful formed the Monarchical Bloc in Kiev. The Bloc supported Hetman Skoropadskii and guided his policies towards a Great Russian stance and a firm German-Russian alliance. [34] Fedor Evaldt served as a prominent member of the Bloc. [35] Evaldt went on to join Aufbau in postwar Munich. Other leading members of the Monarchical Bloc included Boris Pelikan, a former member of the far right Russian Assembly, and Konstantin Scheglovitov, a former member of the Union of the Russian People and the son of the former Imperial Russian Minister of Justice. [36] In 1920, both Pelikan and Scheglovitov helped to form Aufbau.

Beginning in July 1918, the Monarchical Bloc collaborated with Army Group Eichhorn, notably through Scheglovitov, to organize the Southern Army under the leadership of Bloc member Count P. Keller. [37] German military authorities could not back the Southern Army openly because of the official German alliance with the Bolshevik regime, but they clandestinely supported the White army by supplying it with weapons, munitions, and money. [38] Right-wing German circles approved of the creation of the Southern Army. [39] This force served as the primary anti-Bolshevik grouping in the southern regions of the former Russian Empire. It based its operations just outside the Ukraine in the city of Voronezh on the Don River.
Despite its impressive name, the Southern Army only reached a strength of approximately 16,000 volunteers, of which a disproportionately high 30 percent were officers. [40]

The adventurer who became known as the dashing Caucasian noble Colonel Pavel Bermondt-Avalov first played a leading role in White affairs in the Southern Army under the simple name of Bermondt. [41] Bermondt had belonged to the Black Hundred movement in Imperial Russia. [42] He had reached the rank of lieutenant by the end of 1915. When the Imperial Russian Army had collapsed in 1917, he had commanded a unit in the Ukraine. He had subsequently joined Skoropadskii and Poltavets-Ostranitsa's White cause. Skoropadskii promoted him to the rank of colonel and named him the leader of the counter-intelligence agency of the nascent Southern Army. [43] Bermondt later became famous under the name Bermondt-Avalov in the 1919 Latvian Intervention, where he commanded a joint German-Russian anti-Bolshevik force.

The Southern Army in which Bermondt made a name for himself was to cooperate with the Cossack General Piotr Krasnov's Vsevelikoe Voisko Donskoe (Great Don Host), which promulgated the vitriolic tract known in English as the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Like the Southern Army, the Great Don Host received considerable German material support through secret channels.
[44] Krasnov expressed his anti-Semitism by permitting Ivan Rodionov, a Ukrainian Cossack who had been active in the Black Hundred movement, to print the Protocols in Chasovoi (The Sentinel), the official newspaper of the Great Don Host. [45]

The Protocols ultimately influenced National Socialists and other anti-Semites around the world. It is worth noting that the Protocols had not been widely distributed in pre-Revolutionary Russian society, even in far right circles. They only drew considerable attention during the Russian Civil War. The Protocols depict an alleged conspiratorial international organization dedicated to establishing Jewish world rule. Jewish power is to be achieved primarily through liberal capitalism, which the Jews use to foment revolt and chaos so that they can establish a Jewish despot to rule over the world. The Protocols also describe the monstrous world state that the Jews allegedly strive to create. [46]

The Protocols' origins remain the subject of controversy. In his work Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn presents an ultimately unfounded version of the Protocols' genesis. Cohn argues that Piotr Rachkovskii, the head of the foreign section of the Okhrana (Tsarist Secret Police), wrote the Protocols in French in Paris and then sent them to an Imperial Russian monk, Sergei Nilus, for translation. This supposedly took place as part of an intrigue to eliminate the Tsar's favorite holy man in favor of Nilus. [47] A German expert on the Protocols, Michael Hagemeister, has recently noted that the holy man in question, Monsieur Philippe, had already died in France when Nilus, who was not a monk, though he wrote widely on religious topics, published the Protocols during the revolutionary year 1905 in the appendix of one of his devotional books, The Great in the Small and the Anti-Christ as an Imminent Political Possibility: Notes of an Orthodox Believer. [48]

Cohn based his version of the Protocols' origins primarily on filtered information that the Russian emigre historian Boris Nikolaevskii had given him, as seen in correspondence between Cohn's Russian wife Vera and Nikolaevskii. Nikolaevskii wrote Vera Cohn that already at the beginning of the 1930s he had privately concluded that Rachkovskii had not had anything to do with the fabrication of the Protocols nor even could have. Nikolaevskii admitted that he had decided not to present his research findings since this would have damaged the case of anti-Hitler authorities at the Bern Trial of 1934-1935 who sought to prove that the Imperial Russian Okhrana had forged the Protocols.

The Slavist Cesare G. De Michelis has recently carried out a detailed textual analysis of early versions of the Protocols which demonstrates that the Protocols were not fabricated in Paris, but within Imperial Russian borders between April 1902 and August 1903. The earliest versions of the Protocols contain pronounced Ukrainian features, whereas later ones were given French overtones to lend them the appearance of a credible foreign account. [49] The fabricator or fabricators of the Protocols may well have been influenced by Vladimir Solovev's 1900 story, "A Short Tale of the Anti-Christ," which was included in his Three Conversations. This cannot be proven, however, since the author or authors of the Protocols remain unknown. [50] As we shall see, despite their suspect origins, the Protocols found great credence in right-wing circles.

Traveling to Germany proved the politic action for anti-Semitic White leaders in and just outside the Ukraine to undertake in the summer of 1918. The Great Don Host leader General Krasnov dispatched his representative, Duke Georgii Leuchrenbergskii, a member of the Russian nobility who possessed an estate in Germany, to Berlin in July 1918. [51] Leuchtenbergskii met with the Kaiser and other Imperial German leaders, including General Ludendorff, with whom he held extensive consultations at the Army High Command in Belgium in August 1918. Leuchtenbergskii secured a trade agreement with the German government whereby the Great Don Host would provide agricultural products in return for German machinery and chemicals. [52] The complementary nature of German industrial production and southern Russian, or Ukrainian, agricultural richness fostered German-White collaboration in the time of the Kaiser's rule and beyond, including during the period of Hitler's Third Reich.

Other Whites left the Ukraine for Germany in the summer of 1918. General Biskupskii of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army journeyed to Berlin to demonstrate his fidelity to Germany. [53] Hetman Skoropadskii arrived in Berlin in early September 1918. The Kaiser assured him that he wished an independent Ukraine. Skoropadskii then met with General Ludendorff at the Army High Command Headquarters in Spa, Belgium. Ludendorff suggested coordinating the Ukrainian Volunteer Army with the Southern Army and Krasnov's Don Cossacks to attack the Bolsheviks. He promised to release Russian prisoners of war to serve in the Ukrainian Volunteer and Southern Armies. He urged this combined anti-Bolshevik force to attack from the south while the German Army marched against the Bolsheviks from the west. [54] With Imperial Germany's deteriorating military position on the Western Front and in the Balkans, however, this strategy of coordinated anti-Bolshevik action ultimately had to be abandoned.


As a sidelight to the major German-backed White endeavors that were focused in and just outside the Ukraine, in September 1918, the former Black Hundred member Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, who had been released from a Bolshevik prison through a May 1, 1918 amnesty, undertook a dangerous undercover mission to help the Tsar and his family, whom he believed to be still alive in Bolshevik captivity. He disguised himself as a Bolshevik and traveled to Ekaterinburg in the Urals while it was still under Bolshevik control. After White troops captured the city later in the month, he participated in the official investigation of the Bolshevik murder of the Tsarist family. [55]

The White investigators discovered that the Tsaritsa had possessed Black Hundred member Sergei Nilus' The Great in the Small and the Anti-Christ as an Imminent Political Possibility with a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. They also noted that she had drawn a swastika in her room. [56] The report that the White commission, which included Shabelskii-Bork, compiled eventually appeared in the Volkischer Beobachter (Volkisch Observer). An article in a September 1920 edition of the newspaper, soon before the paper became the official newspaper of the National Socialist Party, claimed that Jews had murdered the Tsar and his family. The paper concluded this from information in the White commission's report that the walls in which the assassination of the Tsar and his family had taken place had been covered with graffiti in German, Hungarian, and Hebrew. [57]

Shabelskii-Bork had arrived too late to save the Tsar and his family, and time began running out for the Southern Army and Skoropadskii's Hetmanate as well. Count Keller found himself unable to carry out his mission of leading the Southern Army against the Bolsheviks. In September and October 1918, he had to refocus his energies on leading the weak Ukrainian Volunteer Army against an internal revolt under the Ukrainian socialist Simon Petliura, who sought to overthrow Skoropadskii's Hetmanate. [58] Colonel Bermondt was likewise forced to leave his organizational activities for the Southern Army to form a machine-gun unit, which he then deployed in the defense of Kiev under Keller. [59] General Biskupskii also served under Keller against Petliura. Skoropadskii named him the commander of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army's Third Corps. [60]

In his new defensive role, Keller also made use of the services of Shabelskii-Bork's colleague Colonel Fedor Vinberg, who had journeyed to Kiev in the face of considerable danger after being released from Bolshevik incarceration on May 1, 1918. Vinberg commanded a unit composed of approximately 5,000 former Tsarist officers with only 400 to 500 ordinary soldiers. This extremely lopsided ratio demonstrated an acute lack of peasant and worker support for White forces in the Ukraine. Keller and Vinberg realized that they could only function with considerable German material assistance, which initially came in abundance. [61]

Vinberg became acquainted with Shabelskii-Bork's comrade Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii in the fall of 1918, when the latter likewise operated under Keller's command to suppress Petliura's uprising. Taboritskii had earlier fled Bolshevik rule and had journeyed into the "sun[light] of the German occupation." Already in January 1918, he had concluded: "Not Germany, but the Entente is the worst enemy of Russia and ... only Germany can save Russia. It became clear to me that Russia's future lay in an alliance with Germany, as Germany's future did in an alliance with Russia." In addition to opposing Petliura's troops, Keller ordered Taboritskii to form command units that were to fight in the Baltic region as a counterpart to the Southern Army. Parts of the forces that Taboritskii helped to organize later fought in the 1919 Latvian Intervention under the command of Colonel Bermondt-Avalov. [62]

The outbreak of revolution in Germany on November 9, 1918 overthrew the rule of the Kaiser and undermined German-White collaboration in the Ukraine. Vinberg later claimed that the revolutionary German government's discontinuation of support for the Ukrainian Volunteer Army had led to the defeat of Keller's forces and to the death of Keller himself. [63] Hetman Skoropadskii openly broke with a pro-German policy at the time of the German Revolution. He symbolized his new pro-Entente orientation by ostentatiously replacing a medal that the Kaiser had given him with a French decoration. [64] Skoropadskii subsequently attributed his downfall to the Entente's "gross error" in not sending a representative to Kiev and providing military assistance to demonstrate de facto support. [65] Skoropadskii's nominal subordinate Poltavets-Ostranitsa wished to continue a German-Ukrainian alliance. The pro-Entente Skoropadskii ordered him to be arrested, a fate that the Cossack leader avoided by fleeing the Ukraine. He eventually made his way to Germany. [66]

Shabelskii-Bork suffered as well under the chaotic conditions in the Ukraine during the fall of 1918. After discovering the murder of the Tsarist family in September, he had carried out conspiratorial counterrevolutionary activities in Bolshevik-controlled Russia for two months. As the Chrezvychainaia Komissia po Borbe s Kontr-revolutsiei (Extraordinary Commission for the Struggle with Counter-revolution, commonly known as the Cheka) had arrested more and more of his accomplices inside Soviet territory, he had traveled to the Ukraine to serve in the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. Troops loyal to Petliura arrested him in late November before he could make it to Kiev, however. [67]

Signs of the approaching collapse of Skoropadskii's Hetmanate appeared, as when Fedor Evaldt became the military commander of Kiev despite the open knowledge that he had embezzled funds intended for the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. [68] Petliura's forces captured the final remnants of the Ukrainian Volunteer Army, only about 2,000 men, on December 17, 1918 and entered Kiev. In addition to Shabelskii-Bork, Petliura's forces in Kiev incarcerated the White officers Keller, Vinberg, Taboritskii, and Bermondt. [69] Some of Petliura's soldiers shot Keller, who had been assigned to take command of the Northern Army in the Baltic region, on the night of December 20/21, 1918. [70] Executions of other White officers, including Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii, were scheduled for the beginning of January. [71]

German forces rescued the remaining White officers that Petliura's forces had incarcerated. On December 29, 1918, General Bronsart von Schellendorf negotiated the White officers' release. German forces transported the officers to Germany beginning on December 31, 1918. [72] The Germans took approximately 3,000 intensely anti-Bolshevik White officers and soldiers with them when they withdrew from the Ukraine. [73]
Despite his turn from Germany to the Entente, retreating German forces even took Skoropadskii to Germany by disguising him as a wounded German military surgeon. [74] Vinberg and Shabelskii-Bork met each other once again on the way to the main train station in Kiev, and from that point on they remained inseparable "true friends" in me words of Vinberg. Taboritskii joined them during the train ride to Germany, and the three colleagues began an intense period of anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic collaboration in Germany in which they soon supported Hitler's National Socialist cause. [75]

WHITE EMIGRE IDEOLOGY'S TRANSFER FROM THE UKRAINE TO GERMANY

After the end of military collaboration between Germans and Whites, primarily officers, in the Ukraine in 1918, the transfer of White emigre ideology westwards, most notably in the form of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, gained crucial significance in internal German affairs. According to a previously unknown Gestapo report from April 1935 that is currently housed in Moscow, Lieutenant Shabelskii-Bork fled the Ukraine under German protection around the turn of the year 1918/1919 with a copy of the 1911 edition of Nilus' The Great in the Small and the Anti-Christ as an Imminent Political Possibility that contained the Protocols. [76] The Protocols soon became known throughout Germany and the world.

After being transported by train from Kiev to Berlin in a three-week journey, Shabelskii-Bork and his comrades Colonel Vinberg and Lieutenant Taboritskii established themselves in the German capital towards the end of January 1919, where they began disseminating anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic views. [77] Berlin represented the logical destination for the White officer trio. The number of White emigres in Germany as a whole reached 600,000 by 1920, and the largest White emigre community in Germany developed in Berlin as the fortunes of the White armies declined. [78] Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii were only three of the approximately two million former citizens of Imperial Russia who had fled Bolshevik rule or who had earlier been held as prisoners of war and did not wish to go to Bolshevik Russia. [79]

Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii propagated anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic propaganda in Berlin. Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii moved into the same quarters and developed a close friendship while coordinating their activities with Vinberg, who founded the monarchist exile newspaper Prizyv (The Call) in August 1919. The Call sought to foster "close friendly relations between Germany and Russia," meaning between these states as restored monarchies. Taboritskii acted as The Call's technical editor. Shabelskii-Bork drafted the primarily Russian news that The Call dealt with. [80] He also ran the newspaper's feuilleton section. [81] Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii appealed for nationalist Germans and Russians to combine forces against the supposed Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik world conspiracy. [82] Hitler's early mentor Dietrich Eckart urged nationalist Germans to pay greater attention to The Call in a March 1920 edition of his newspaper Auf gut deutsch: Wochenschrift fur Ordnung und Recht (In Plain German: Weekly for Law and Order). [83]

In addition to editing The Call, which served as the mouthpiece of the anti-Semitic far right wing of Germany's White emigre population, Vinberg integrated White emigres with volkisch Germans in Berlin. [84] He soon achieved what the French military intelligence agency the Deuxieme Bureau (Second Section) described as a "preponderant influence" among White emigre and volkisch German circles in the German capital. [85] Vinberg's most important volkisch German contact was Ludwig Muller von Hausen, the leader of the Association against the Presumption of Jewry.


Hausen, who could read Russian, read Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii's The Call regularly. [86] He marked off articles that he found valuable and sometimes had them translated into German, such as a piece from a November 1919 edition of The Call, "Satanists of the Twentieth Century." This essay claimed that the Soviet Commissar for War, the Jew Trotskii, and other high-ranking Soviet leaders had held a black mass within the walls of the Kremlin in Moscow in which they had prayed to the devil for help in defeating their White enemies. The article claimed that the Latvian member of the Red Army who had reported this satanic ritual was executed the next day upon Trotskii's orders. [87]

Hausen also circled an article from the February 6, 1920 edition of The Call, ''An Interesting Document." [88] This piece dealt with the Zunder Document, a prominent piece of spurious anti-Semitic literature that circulated among White forces during the Russian Civil War. The Zunder Document was purportedly a letter from the Central Committee of the Israelite International League that had been found on the corpse of Zunder, a Jewish Bolshevik leader. This forged letter stressed, "We," the "Sons of Israel," stood "on the threshold of the command of the world" after bringing "the Russian people under the yoke of Jewish power." The supposed Jewish authors stressed that now "we must make an end of the best and leading elements of the Russian people, so that ... vanquished Russia may not find any leader!" [89] Hausen printed the Zunder Document in his newspaper Auf Vorposten (On Outpost Duty).

Before it became the official National Socialist newspaper, the Volkisch Observer printed the Zunder Document. The paper's editors had perhaps become aware of the letter through Hausen. The newspaper's editors printed the document in the February 25, 1920 edition of the paper under the title, "A Jewish Secret Document." The piece on the spurious text noted that the source of its information was the February 6, 1920 edition of Vinberg's The Call. The commentary on the Zunder Document in the Volkisch Observer asserted: "Judaism's most secret goals emerge undisguised in this secret circular of the Jews in Russia." [90] For many far rightists, the Zunder Document demonstrated that the Jews had launched the Bolshevik Revolution and sought to eradicate nationalist Russian leaders.

Hausen is best known not for publicizing the Zunder Document, but for publishing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He printed the Protocols for the first time in German in 1919. The precise manner in which the Protocols reached Germany from the East earlier remained unknown. [91] As we have seen, Vinberg's colleague Shabelskii-Bork carried a copy of Sergei Nilus' The Great in the Small and the Anti-Christ as an Imminent Political Possibility that included the Protocols from the Ukraine to Berlin. In February 1919, Shabelskii-Bork gave the Protocols to Hausen. [92] Hausen hired someone to translate the Protocols from Russian into German. [93]

Shabelskii-Bork's comrade Vinberg took the Protocols very seriously. In his 1922 book translated from Russian into German as Der Kreuzesweg Russlands (Russia, Via Dolorosa), he warned against "Jewish imperialism" with its goal of "the foundation of Jewish world rule." He argued that the Protocols and "other secret documents that have fallen into the hands of Christians by chance" demonstrated that the Jews strove for a "purely Jewish despotic monarchy." [94] In a letter published in a May 1923 edition of the National Socialist newspaper the Volkisch Observer, Vinberg stressed that the Protocols had "revealed the secret plans of Jewry." [95] Like many other far rightists, Vinberg erroneously believed in the Protocols' authenticity as an accurate blueprint of nefarious Jewish designs for world domination.

Hausen received information on Nilus' personality and on the provenance of the Protocols from an intelligence agency in Berlin under General Kurlov, who had earlier served as the head of the Imperial Russian Okhrana. Kurlov had abused his post of Assistant to the Interior Minister in the Russian Empire by making unauthorized use of secret funds. He had managed to be expelled from Pavel Skoropadskii's Hetmanate in the Ukraine in 1918 before resurfacing in Berlin and establishing his intelligence organization. [96] Citing a "high official" in the former Tsarist Interior Ministry, almost certainly Kurlov, Hausen claimed that the Protocols had originally been drafted in Hebrew and then translated into French. Then the Russian Interior Ministry had received a copy of them and transferred them to Nilus for translation into Russian and publication. [97] While false, Hausen's version of the Protocols' origins lent the document a certain allure.

One of Kurlov's collaborators, Lientenant Iurii Kartsov, also provided Hausen with information on Nilus. While Aufbau's leading personality Max von Scheubner-Richter later praised him as one of many fine "Russian patriots," Kartsov had a reputation as an "utterly undependable" person. He possessed significant connections in Berlin through his work for the German intelligence agency in the Ukraine in 1918. [98] He had dealings with Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii, who were close to Hausen. [99] According to an April 1920 report that he submitted to Hausen, Kartsov had known Nilus personally, and he believed that the mystical Russian had already translated the Protocols in 1898. Nilus had sent the Protocols to Imperial Russian authorities. He had only received the reply that they proved "most interesting," but that it was too late to publish the information.

Of Nilus personally, Kartsov noted in his report to Hausen that the Russian author was approximately seventy-five years old and "completely un-statesmanlike." Nilus was "not concerned with the racial question, regarding the Jewish plague rather from a mere religious standpoint as the wrath of God for sinful humanity. He sees in the rule of the Jews the rule of Satan, which will later be followed by redemption through God." [100] While Kartsov's information on the origins of the Protocols was mistaken, his description of Nilus' personal beliefs was accurate.

Hausen was in a good position to spread White emigre ideology, most notably in the form of the Protocols, from Berlin to Munich, where the National Socialist movement arose. He served as a prominent leader of the Germanenorden (German Order), a secretive organization dedicated to protecting "Aryan blood." [101] The German Order had founded an extension in Munich in August 1918, the Thule Gesellschaft (Thule Society). The Thule Society sought to serve as the "guardian and reviver of the volkisch spirit." [102] The secretive association was named after an old term for Iceland, where Germanic peoples had found refuge from Christianity. The organization used a swastika with a sword as its symbol. [103] The Thule Society possessed around 200 members in 1919, but those who belonged to the association possessed connections that made the organization more powerful than its numbers suggested. [104]

The Thule Society purchased a volkisch newspaper, the Munchener Beobachter (Munich Observer). [105] The Munich Observer possessed a circulation of approximately 1,000 readers as of October 1918. A version of the paper was distributed throughout Germany under the title the Volkisch Observer for the first time in August 1919, while the Munich Observer continued to be distributed locally. As of the beginning of October 1919, the Munich Observer had gained 9,000 subscribers, while the Volkisch Observer possessed a circulation of 8,800. [106]

Hausen corresponded regularly with the editors of the Volkisch Observer in 1919. [107] He sent The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which ultimately found great resonance in Germany and around the world, to the Volkisch Observer in November 1919.
He mailed the Protocols for the immediate purpose of helping the newspaper's editors in a lawsuit that the Jewish United Order Benai Brith Lodge had filed against them. [108] After suggesting some stalling tactics, Hausen noted that he had sent his soon-to-be released work, Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion (The Secrets of the Wise Men of Zion). He asserted that with the help of this book, "You can probably gather so much material that the judge will need a year to work through it."

Anticipating difficulties, Hausen noted: "The Minutes would make a devastating judgment possible, but we unfortunately do not have the original text, and the Jews will dispute its authenticity." He stressed, "We have therefore provided indirect evidence in the introduction that the Jews have acted according to the same guidelines that we find in the reports of the 'Wise Men of Zion' throughout time and in the most varied lands." [109] Hausen thus harbored misgivings about the Protocols' authenticity, but he did believe that they revealed what he regarded as the quintessentially pernicious Jewish essence.

Catholicism has no more fear of a well-sharpened stiletto than monarchies have, but these two bases of social order can fall by corruption. Let us then never cease to corrupt. Tertullian was right in saying, that the blood of martyrs was the seed of Christians. Let us, then, not make martyrs, but let us popularise vice amongst the multitudes. Let us cause them to draw it in by their five senses; to drink it in; to be saturated with it; and that land which Aretinus has sown is always disposed to receive lewd teachings. Make vicious hearts, and you will have no more Catholics. Keep the priest away from labour, from the altar, from virtue. Seek adroitly to otherwise occupy his thoughts and his hours. Make him lazy, a gourmand, and a patriot. He will become ambitious, intriguing, and perverse. You will thus have a thousand times better accomplished your task, than if you had blunted the point of your stiletto upon the bones of some poor wretches. I do not wish, nor do you any more, my friend Nubius, to devote my life to conspiracies, in order to be dragged along in the old ruts.

"It is corruption en masse that we have undertaken: the corruption of the people by the clergy, and the corruption of the clergy by ourselves; the corruption which ought, one day to enable us to put the Church in her tomb. I have recently heard one of our friends, laughing in a philosophic manner at our projects, say to us: 'in order to destroy Catholicism it is necessary to commence by suppressing woman.' The words are true in a sense; but since we cannot suppress woman, let us corrupt her with the Church, corruptio optimi pessima. The object we have in view is sufficiently good to tempt men such as we are; let us not separate ourselves from it for some miserable personal satisfaction of vengeance. The best poniard with which to strike the Church is corruption. To work, then, even to the very end."


... The Alta Vendita, then, sat down calmly to consider the best means to accomplish this design. Satan and his fallen angels could devise no more efficacious methods than they found out. They resolved to spread impurity by every method used in the past by demons to tempt men to sin, to make the practice of sin habitual, and to keep the unhappy victim in the state of sin to the end. They had, being living men, means to accomplish this purpose, which devils could not use without the aid of men. Christian civilization established upon the ruins of the licentiousness of Paganism had kept European society pure. Vice, when it did appear, had to hide its head for shame. Public decency, supported by public opinion, kept it down. So long as morality existed as a recognized virtue, the Revolution had no chance of permanent success; and so the men of the Alta Vendita resolved to bring back the world to a state of brutal licentiousness not only as bad as that of Paganism, but to a state at which even the morality of the Pagans would shudder.

-- Grand Orient Freemasonry Unmasked As the Secret Power Behind Communism, by Monsignor George F. Dillon DD.


And when we see that the methods which were practised by this Association for the express purpose of breaking all the bands of society, were employed solely in order that the leaders might rule the world with uncontroulable power, while all the rest, even of the associated, will be degraded in their own estimation, corrupted in their principles, and employed as mere tools of the ambition of their unknown superiors; surely a free-born Briton will not hesitate to reject at once, and without any farther examination, a plan so big with mischief, so disgraceful to its underling adherents, and so uncertain in its issue.

-- Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on In the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies, Collected from Good Authorities, by John Robison, A.M.


All four gospels suggest either implicitly or explicitly that because the Jews were not allowed to punish other Jews who were guilty of blasphemy, they had to prevail on the reluctant Romans to kill Jesus. Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of Judea, is described as basically sympathetic to Jesus but unable to withstand the pressure from the Jews who demanded Jesus’ execution. This idea is expressed most clearly in the gospel of John: “Pilate said, ‘Take him yourselves and judge him according to your own law.’ The Jews replied, ‘We are not permitted to put anyone to death'” (18:31).

-- Who Killed Jesus? From the Gospels to Nostra Aetate, how Jews were accused of deicide, by Martin I. Lockshin


The editors of the Volkisch Observer thanked Hausen for his assistance and pledged with regard to the Protocols, "We will study them immediately." [110] An April 1920 edition of the Volkisch Observer ran a large front-page article, "The Secrets of the Wise Men of Zion." This piece "emphatically" recommended the book on the Protocols released by Hausen's On Outpost Duty publishing house in 1919. The essay claimed: "There is no book which demonstrates the spirit of Jewry the same way." The editorial stressed that despite the "enormous significance" of Hausen's work, space constraints necessitated the newspaper to print only some key sections to give a "faint picture" of the work as a whole.

The Volkisch Observer printed some sections of Hausen's work that alleged to expose sinister Jewish strivings for world domination. "The end justifies the means," the newspaper quoted Hausen's book. In accordance with this motto, Jewish leaders supposedly carried out their evil plans with less attention to "the good and the moral than with the necessary and the useful." Further, the "wise men of Zion" are supposed to have stressed, "Our motto is: power and cunning!" Moreover: "We must not shy away from bribery, deceit, and betrayal as soon as they serve the attainment of our plans." Another passage from Hausen's work printed in the newspaper had Jews claim that they had come "to influence through the press and yet remained in the shadows; thanks to it we have brought mountains of gold into our hands without concerning ourselves that we had to scoop [them] out of streams of blood and tears."
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Tue Jan 29, 2019 2:57 am

Part 2 of 2

Another section of the Volkisch Observer that quoted Hausen's Protocols book treated other dastardly means that the "wise men of Zion" used in their drive for world domination. For instance, Jews supposedly only placed bureaucrats with "slavish abilities" in leading positions. These officials could thus be used as "pawns" in the hands of Jewish "schooled and talented advisors, who have been brought up from youth for rule over the entire world." Moreover, the Jews allegedly "alone" controlled "the rule of money," which they upheld through artificial poverty: "Hunger provides the financial power with ... the rights to the workers .... We move the masses through need and the envy and hatred that arise from it and eliminate those who are in our way with their help." When the time was ripe, the Jews were to switch over from cunning and deceit to brutal force: "Our empire ... must establish a reign of terror ... in order to force blind and unconditional obedience." [111] The Volkisch Observer took the warnings contained in the Protocols very seriously.

The Volkisch Observer received severe criticism for printing parts of the Protocols. A June 1920 article in the newspaper noted that Jews vehemently denied the authenticity of the Protocols. Admitting that the origins of the Protocols remained suspicious, the piece followed Hausen's tactics, claiming:

Even if the accounts are not historical in the sense of this term, the history books of Jewish authors as well as serious and impartial German researchers prove nothing else than that the contents of the controversial book are a true to life ... reflection of Jewish lust for power, avarice, and spirit of subversion. [112]


The Protocols were a vicious forgery, but they expressed the fears that anti-Semites felt when faced with rapid societal flux in the form of increasing democratization and industrialization. Since they spoke so well to the insecurities of former privileged groups who feared that they were slipping down the social ladder, the Protocols possessed an intense immediacy for many far rightists. By presenting a dastardly meta-historical enemy of all peoples, the Jew, the Protocols clearly explained the turmoil and upheavals of the modern world that so upset radical right Germans and Russians in particular.

Hitler's most important early mentors, the volkisch publicist Dietrich Eckart and his White emigre colleague Alfred Rosenberg, both attended meetings of the Thule Society in Munich as guests, and they became aware of Hausen's translation of the Protocols in late 1919, even before sections of it appeared in the Volkisch Observer. [113] They were outraged at what they read, the former more than the latter. Through his collaboration with Eckart and Rosenberg beginning in late 1919, Hitler received his most sustained volkisch indoctrination as well as his introduction to apocalyptic and anti-Semitic White emigre thought, which warned in the vein of the Protocols that a sinister international Jewish conspiracy controlled both finance capitalism and Bolshevism as tools to achieve world rule.

Eckart has been largely overlooked in the historical literature. The only work in English that examines his career in any detail is a doctoral dissertation, Ralph Engelmann's Dietrich Eckart and the Genesis of Nazism. [114] The only non-National Socialist German book that concentrates on Eckart's anti-Semitic ideology is Margarete Plewnia's Auf dem Weg zu Hitler: Der "volkische" Publizist Dietrich Eckart (On the Wey to Hitler: The "Volkisch" Publicist Dietrich Eckart). [115] The Protocols significantly shaped Eckart's outlook, and Eckart's role in influencing Hitler's anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic ideas in league with Rosenberg warrants greater attention.

Eckart enjoyed moderate influence as a publicist. He had worked as a journalist in Berlin before co-publishing a nationalist wartime newspaper in Munich, Unser Vaterland (Our Fatherland), which had opposed defeatist elements in Germany. He had solicited articles for this paper from the volkisch theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain. [116] In December 1918, Eckart used funds from the Thule Society to launch an attack against Jewish left-wing revolutionary forces in Germany by founding the right-wing political newspaper In Plain German. [117] He sent 2,500 copies throughout Germany in accordance with an address list that he had drawn up. [118]

Eckart propounded volkisch ideology in the pages of In Plain German. He called upon the Germans to negate Jewish world-affirmation. In formulating his views, he borrowed from the volkisch theories of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Chamberlain, in which the primarily world-denying Germans needed to transcend the corrupting influence of the materialistic and world-affirming Jews. [119] Eckart argued that the "true German ... lives between the two worlds" of world-affirmation and world-negation. [120] On the other hand: "World-affirmation ... shows itself totally pure in the Jewish people, without any addition of world-negation."  [121] Hitler echoed Eckart's reasoning in a November 1922 speech. He asserted, "The purely earthly is Jewish; among us it is an inner distortion ... The struggle between both poles has been going on for a long time already." [122]

Eckart met Rosenberg through the Thule Society in late 1918. [123] The two men soon became close collaborators. Rosenberg offered his services to Eckart by asking: "Can you use a fighter against Jerusalem?" Eckart responded, "Certainly!" [124] When Eckart repeatedly sank into periods of lethargy in 1919 and 1920, Rosenberg ran In Plain German for considerable stretches at a time. [125] Eckart greatly valued Rosenberg. He referred to him in an early edition of In Plain German as his "tireless friend." [126] Eckart and Rosenberg began corresponding with Hausen at some point, but he maintained a rather condescending attitude towards them. He noted: "Both have thoroughly attached themselves to the Jewish/Masonic question, but both are newcomers in it after all." [127]

When Hitler met Eckart and Rosenberg in late 1919, he was an obscure agitator for the fledgling Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (German Worker's Party), a subsidiary organization of the Thule Society and the forerunner of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Worker's Party, or NSDAP), which was founded in February 1920. [128] According to Eckart's secretary, Hitler met Eckart in a small Munich pub in the fall of 1919. [129] Rosenberg later recalled meeting Hitler in the company of Eckart in a small Munich bar in the fall of 1919 as well. At the time of their meeting, Hitler already knew of the writings of both Eckart and Rosenberg in In Plain German. [130]

Hitler and Eckart quickly developed a relationship of mutual respect, and Hitler and Rosenberg soon admired each other as well. Hitler electrified Eckart with his persuasive power and intensity so that Eckart remarked early on: "That is Germany's coming man, of whom the world will one day speak." The two men began meeting with each other regularly. [131] Hitler later praised Eckart in glowing terms. He dedicated his autobiographical work Mein Kampf (My Struggle) in part to "that man, one of the best, who devoted his life to the awakening of his, our people, in his writings and his thoughts and finally in his deeds: Dietrich Eckart." [132]The Fuhrer asserted in January 1942 that Eckart had shone for him "like the polar star." [133] Like Eckart, Rosenberg was extremely impressed with Hitler early on. [134] He joined the German Worker's Party as one of its earliest members. [135] Hitler valued Rosenberg's views greatly, once remarking that Rosenberg was the only man whose ideas he would always listen to. [136]


Eckart and Rosenberg helped to synthesize volkisch-redemptive views of German spiritual and racial superiority with conspiratorial-apocalyptic White emigre conceptions of international Jewry as a malevolent force that strove for world domination through dastardly means. In so doing, they greatly influenced early National Socialist ideology. From November 1919 until the summer of 1920, the scope of Hitler's anti-Semitic arguments broadened considerably. Hitler's increasingly virulent anti-Semitism can largely be attributed to his early ideological apprenticeship under Eckart and Rosenberg, both of whom the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion influenced. [137]

The precise manner in which Hitler became aware of the Protocols remains unknown, but Eckart most likely introduced them to him in late 1919. Eckart first dealt with the Protocols in an October 10, 1919 edition of In Plain German. He cited what a Protestant British publication printed in Jerusalem had mistakenly termed a "publicity leaflet" proclaiming "Jewish world rule" that the "Jewish lodge 'The Wise Men of Zion'" had distributed in Imperial Russia in 1911. Eckart claimed that the "wise men of Zion" had already announced the destruction of the German and Russian Empires in 1911. He noted that he had seen a map before the war with Germany truncated along the lines of the borders that it currently possessed according to the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, while the Russian Empire had been labeled a "desert." He lamented that the "Jew Trotskii" presided over a "field of corpses" that had once been Imperial Russia. He bitterly remarked: "Oh, how wise you wise men from Zion are!" [138]

Eckart treated Hausen's translation of the Protocols in a December 1919 article in In Plain German, "The Midgard Serpent." He asserted that one read Hausen's work on the Protocols "again and again and yet does not get to the end of it since with almost every paragraph one lets the book fall as if paralyzed with unspeakable horror." He claimed that Hausen's translation of the Protocols and the "publicity leaflet" of the "Jewish lodge 'The Wise Men of Zion'" in Imperial Russia (which he had referred to in October) undoubtedly originated from the same source. Thus, he emphasized: "The Russian Jews already knew in advance of the collapse of the Tsarist Empire as well as the German monarchy in 1911 and just as surely already at that time announced Bolshevik chaos with Jewish world domination as background." Eckart then cited some sections of Hausen's Protocols translation, noting that these segments "suffice to attest to the authenticity of the entirety." [139]

In a November 1920 essay in In Plain German, '''Jewry uber alles'" ('"Jewry above Everything"'), Eckart demonstrated the intense impression that the Protocols had made on him by quoting a passage from them that had not appeared in his December 1919 article on the Protocols or in the Volkisch Observer. He reprinted the supposed words of Jewish conspirators: "The world ruler who will take the place of the currently existing governments has the duty to remove such societies even if he has to drown them in their own blood." For Eckart, this assertion represented a dire and legitimate warning of what the peoples of the world faced unless they took decisive anti-Semitic action.

Eckart upheld the Protocols as a genuine document. In his '''Jewry above Everything'" article, he noted that the "entire Jewish press" had labeled the Protocols a forgery, but he dismissed this as "the usual tactic of the Hebrews. That which one cannot refute, one chalks up as a forgery." Referring to the spread of the Protocols around the world, Eckart argued that despite Jewish protests, "In all peoples, in England, France, Greece, Romania, Poland, Hungary, and so on, the scales are beginning to fall from [people's] eyes: everywhere forces are stirring and engaging in the work of the liberation from humanity's mortal enemy." [140] Eckart thus sounded a call to arms for all anti-Semites of the world.

While Eckart unequivocally believed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an authentic warning for Gentiles around the world, his White emigre colleague Rosenberg adopted a considerably more skeptical attitude towards the Protocols. Konrad Heiden argued in his 1944 book Der Fuhrer that Rosenberg received the Protocols from a mysterious stranger in Moscow in 1917. [141] Michael Hagemeister, a German expert on the Protocols, has stressed that Heiden's undocumented assertion that someone gave Rosenberg a copy of the Protocols in Moscow and that he then brought them to Germany belongs in the "realm of legend." [142] After Rosenberg became aware of the Protocols in postwar Munich, he maintained a far more critical attitude towards them than historians have often suggested. In his first major work, which was released early in 1920, Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (The Trail of the Jew through the Ages), he did not refer directly to the Protocols. [143]

Rosenberg examined the Protocols in his 1923 book Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die judische Weltpolitik (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Jewish World Politics), which, according to the Volkisch Observer, was the first work to make a "critical" examination of the "problem of the 'Protocols.'" [144] In his work, Rosenberg remained more skeptical towards the Protocols than Eckart. He claimed that the Zionist author Asher Ginsburg could very well have written the Protocols, but no "conclusive" proof of this existed, so the question of the authorship of the Protocols remained "open." He further noted that no "juridicially conclusive proof" existed for the Protocols either as absolutely genuine or as a forgery.

In a manner similar to Hausen, the publisher of the first German version of the Protocols, Rosenberg noted that in any case, documents from "ancient times as well as from the most recent past" demonstrated "precisely the same sense" as the Protocols, from "the Talmud to the Frankforter Zeitung [Frankfort Times] and the Rote Fahne [Red Flag]." Rosenberg further asserted that the Protocols stated that which the "Jewish leaders of Bolshevism themselves openly describe as their plan." While he harbored doubts of the Protocols' authenticity, Rosenberg agreed with a central point of the Protocols: "First subversion, then dictatorship." [145] The belief that the Jews undermined existing state authorities to form a new Jewish-controlled international tyranny found wide credence among White emigre circles and in the ranks of the early National Socialists.

Hitler referred to the Protocols as evidence of Jewish plans for world rule. The first indication of Hitler's internalization of the sinister message of the Protocols came in his notes for an August 1921 speech:

Starvation as power -- (Russia) ... Starvation in the service of Jewry[.] "Wise Men of Zion[.]" Objection "not every Jew will know this," What the wise man comprehends intellectually the ordinary one does out of instinct... Starvation in Russia[:] charitably, 40 mill[ion] are dying. [146]


In an oration a few days later, he cited the Protocols as evidence of the age-old and continuing Jewish goal of "the extraction of rule, no matter through which means." [147] In an April 1923 speech, he stressed that the Jews sought "to extend their invisible state as a supreme dictatorial tyranny over the entire world." [148] This was the basic warning contained in the Protocols. Hitler again treated the theme of the Jewish use of starvation as a weapon in an August 1923 oration. He asserted, "In the books of the wise men of Zion it is written: 'Hunger must wear down the broad masses and drive them spinelessly into our arms!"' [149]

Finally, in Mein Kampf, Hitler stressed the crucial importance of the Protocols in both revealing and undermining diabolical Jewish plans for ruthless world domination:

To what an extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably by the Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion, so infinitely hated by the Jews. They are based on a forgery, the Frankfurter Zeitung moans and screams once every week: the best proof that they are authentic. What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed. And that is what matters. It is completely indifferent from what Jewish brain these disclosures originate; the important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims. The best criticism applied to them, however, is reality. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the standpoint of this book will at once understand the screaming of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the property of a people, the Jewish menace may be considered as broken. [150]


In her seminal 1979 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt quoted Heinrich Himmler, the head of the Schutzstaffel (SS), as asserting, "We owe the art of government to the Jews," referring primarily to the Protocols, which "the Fuhrer [had] learned by heart." [151] While this is an exaggeration, the Protocols did provide terrifying visions of an all-encompassing Jewish world conspiracy. The warnings in the Protocols greatly influenced the ideology of the National Socialist movement. The Protocols went through thirty-three editions by the time Hitler came to power in 1933, and they became the most widely distributed work in the world after the Bible. [152]

CONCLUSION

The 1918 Imperial German intervention in the Ukraine, the land "at the extremity," led to the transfer of extremist anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic White views to postwar volkisch German circles in Berlin and Munich, including the immediate milieu from which the National Socialist movement arose. Most notably, Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork carried The Protocols of the Elders of Zion from the Ukraine to Berlin and then gave them to Ludwig Muller von Hausen, a volkisch publicist, for translation and publication in German. Hitler's early mentors Dietrich Eckart and Alfred Rosenberg internalized the warnings of looming Jewish world rule contained in the Protocols. The Protocols in turn influenced Hitler's Weltanschauung through their graphic portrayal of ruthless Jewish plans to take over the world through insidious means, notably starving resisting peoples. Hitler used the Protocols as a powerful weapon against what he perceived as the menace of international Jewry.

As well as facilitating the cross-cultural transfer of dangerous right-wing views, the German Ukrainian Intervention forged enduring pro-nationalist German sentiments among leading White officers who served under Germany's aegis in the Ukraine. Germany's occupation of the Ukraine began a process of right-wing German-White/White emigre collaboration, as it brought together men who shared common enemies: the Entente, the Bolsheviks, and the Jews. Several White officers who had played prominent roles in the Ukraine under German occupation went on to serve the National Socialist movement in Germany, notably General Vladimir Biskupskii, Colonel Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Colonel Fedor Vinberg, Lieutenant Shabelskii-Bork, Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, and Colonel Pavel Bermondt, later known as Bermondt-Avalov.

Germany's Ukrainian adventure set a precedent for further nationalist German-White anti-Bolshevik military cooperation, as German officers learned to value their White officer counterparts as loyal pro-Germans and anti-Bolsheviks. In particular, the German/White alliance established in and just outside the Ukraine in 1918 served as a precedent for the 1919 Latvian Intervention under the leadership of Bermondt-Avalov. In this campaign, German Freikorps (volunteer corps) fought shoulder to shoulder with White formations in an anti-Bolshevik crusade from which many future National Socialists emerged.

_______________

Notes:

1 MR report to the BSMA from January 14, 1918, BHSAM, BsMA 33, number 97676, 116.
 
2 Leon Trotsky, My Life: The Rise and Fall of a Dictator (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1930), 312.
 
3 DB report from March 6, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 198, opis 9, delo 4474, reel I, 48.
 
4 Protocol of an RK conference on February 5, 1918, BAB, 43, number 2448/4, 111, 130.
 
5  Wlodzimierz Medrzecki, "Bayerische Truppenteile in der Ukraine im Jahr 1918," Bayern und  Osteuropa: Au; der Geschichte der Beziehungen Bayerns, Frankens und Schwabens mit Russland, der  Ukraine, und Weissrussland, ed. Hermann Beyer-Thoma (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000),  441.
 
6 DB report from March 6, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 198, opis 9, dela 4474, reel I, 47.
 
7 Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 1, delo  105b, 9.
 
8  Pavel Skoropadskii, Erinnerungen von Pavlo Skoropadsky aufgeschrieben in Bertin in der Zeit von  Januar bis Mai 1918, trans. Helene Ott-Skoropadskii (Berlin, 1918), IZG, Ms 584, 51, 102, 113, 116.
 
9 Walther Nicolai, Tagebuch (Diary), March 6, 1918, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 1414, opis I, delo 16, 77.
 
10 Letter from Max Hoffmann to his wife from August 15, 1918, BA/MF, Nachlass 37, number 2, 231.
 
11 Wilhelm Groener report from March 23, 1918, BA/MF, Nachlass 46, number 172, 4.
 
12 Interrogation of Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen from October 1945, The National Archives,  Records of the Department of State, Special Interrogation Mission to Germany, 1945-46, IZG,  number 679, roll I, 411.
 
13 Wilhelm Groener report from March 23, 1918, BA/MF, Nachlass 46, number 172, 6.
 
14 Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I,  delo 105b, 9.
 
15 DB report from August 11, 1933, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opis I, delo 954, reel 5, 355.
 
16 RKUoO report from July 26, 1926, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 1, delo 101, 5.
 
17 Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I,  delo 105b, 9.
 
18 SGOD report from December 22, 1928, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 308, opis 7, delo 265, 5.
 
19 Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I,  delo 105b, 9.
 
20 RKUoO report from July 26, 1926, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 1, delo 101, 6.
 
21 Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 1, delo  105b, 9; 1926 memorandum on behalf of Poltavets-Ostranitsa; RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond  772, opis I, delo 105b, 7.
 
22 Proclamation from Skoropadskii from April 20, 1918, BA/MF, Nachlass 46, number 172, 57.
 
23 1926 memorandum on behalf of Poltavets-Ostranitsa, RKUo0, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond772, Opis 1,  delo 105b, 7.
 
24 Letter from Poltavets-Ostranitsa to Adolf Hitler from March 25, 1929, PKAH, RGVA (TsKhIDK),  fond 1355, opis I, delo 3, 57; Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUo0, RGVA (TsKhIDK),  fond 772, opis I, delo 105b, 9.
 
25 Skoropadskii, Erinnerungen, 173.
 
26 Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I,  delo 105b, 9.
 
27 Skoropadskii, Erinnerungen, 222.
 
28 DB report from March 6, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 198, opis 9, delo 4474, reel 1, 47; interrogation  of Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen from October 1945, The National Archives, IZG, number 679,  roll I, 412.
 
29 Letter from Erich von Ludendorff to the Reichskanzler, June 9, 1918, BNMF, Nachlass 46, number  173, 35-37.
 
30 OHLHGE report from June 14, 1918, BA/MF, Nachlass 46, number 173, 60.
 
31 LGPO report to the RKUoO from July 20, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 8ta,  19, 24.
 
32 Translation of Vladimir Biskupskii's September 7, 1939 comments, APA, BAB, NS 43, number  35, 49.
 
33 LGPO report to the RKUoO from July 20, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 81a,  19, 24, 35; DB report from May 22, 1936, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opis 4, delo 168, reel 1, 1.
 
34 LGPO reports to the RKUoO from November 28 and December 24, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK),  fond 772, opis I, delo 96, 48, 57.
 
35 MMFT report to the DB from December 24, 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 7, opis 2, delo 2575,  reel 2, 134.
 
36 Spisak chlenov Russkogo Sobraniia s prilozkeniem istoricheskogo ocherky sobraniia (Saint Petersburg:  Tip. Spb. Gradonachalstva, 1906), 52; RKUoO report from June 17, 1922, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond  772, opis 3, delo 539, 21a, 21V.
 
37 LGPO report from June 3, 1921, GSAPKB, Repositur 77, title 1813, number 2, 7; LGPO report to  the RKUoO from November 28, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I, delo 96, 49.
 
38 Telegram from HGE/1a to OKO from July 1918, BA/MF, Nachlass 46, number 173, 115.
 
39 Letter from Pavel Bermondt-Avalov to Wolfgang Kapp from November 9, 1919, GSAPKB, Repositur  92, number 815, 88.
 
40 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampf gegen den Bolschewismus: Erinnerungen von General Furst Awaloff,  Oberbefehlshaber der Deutsch-Russischen Westarmee im Baltikum (Hamburg: Von J. J. Augustin,  1925), 45.
 
41 Letter from Baron von Delingshausen to the RKUoO from January 18, 1922, RGVA (TsKhIDK),  fond 772, opis 3, delo 71, 88.
 
42 Letter to the editorial staff of Volia Rossii from February 28, 1921, ATsVO, GARF, fond 5893, opis I,  delo 201, 87.
 
43 LGPO report to the RKUoO from September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 772, opis 3, delo 71,  16, 17.
 
44 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampfgegen den Bolschewismus, 45.
 
45 ATsVO report from August 1921, GARF, fond 5893, opis I, delo 39, 4.
 
46 Michael Hagemeister, "Die 'Protokolle der Weisen von Zion' und der Basler Zionistenkongress  von 1897," Der Traum von Israel: Die Ursprunge des modernen Zionismus, ed. Heiko Haumann  (Weinheim: Beltz Athenaum Verlag, 1998), 259; Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth  of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" (Chico, CA: Scholars Press,  1981), 61, 62.
 
47 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 83-87.
 
48 Hagemeister, "Der Mythos der 'Protokolle dec Weisen von Zion,'" Verschworungstheorien: Anthropologische  Konstanten - historische Varianten, eds. Ute Caumanns and Matthias Niendorf (Osnabruck:  Fibre Verlag, 2001), 97; Hagemeister, "Vladimir Solov'ev: Reconciler and Polemicist," Eastern Christian  Studies 2: Selected Papers of the International Vladimir Solov'ev Conference held at the University  of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in September 1998 (Leuven: Peeters, 2000), 288.
 
49 Hagemeister, "Der Mythos der 'Protokolle der Weisen von Zion," 96, 99.
 
50 Hagemeister, "Vladimir Solov'ev," 293.
 
51 Robert Williams, Culture in Exile: Russian Emigres in Germany, 1881-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 76.
 
52 Vsevelikoe Voisko Donskoe, Embassy in Berlin reports from July), 1918 and another time in 1918, GARF, fond 1261, opis I, delo 40, 2, 27; letter from Georgii Leuchtenbergskii to Piotr Krasnov from August 22, 1918, GARF, fond 1261, delo 40, 24, 25.
 
53 DB report from May 22, 1936, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opls 4, delo 168, reel I, I.
 
54 Skoropadskii, Erinnerungen, 346, 348, 351, 378.
 
55 Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, "Ober Mein Leben," March 1926, GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953,  103-105.
 
56 Henri Rollin, L 'Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de In propagande allemande d'apres des documents  inedits (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 480, 481.
 
57 "Wer waren die Morder des Zaren?” Volkischer Beobachter. September 9, 1920, 2.
 
58 DB report from March 6, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 198, opis 9, delo 4474, reel I, 48; Fedor  Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, I.
 
59 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampf gegen den Bolschewismus, 47.
 
60 LGPO report to the RKUoO from July 20, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 772, opis 3, delo 81a, 35.
 
61 Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 1.
 
62 Letter from Sergei Taboritskii to Mrs. Shabelskii-Bork from March 18, 1926, GSAPKB, Repositur  84a, number 14953, 78, 79.
 
63 Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 1.
 
64 Gestapo report from May 2, 1934, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 501, opis 3, delo 496a, 44.
 
65 Skoropadskii, Erinnerungen, I, 2.
 
66 Poltavets-Ostranitsa's 1926 curriculum vitae, RKUoO, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis I, delo  105b, 9.
 
67 Shabelskii-Bork, "Uber Mein Leben," GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953, 109.
 
68 MMFT report to the DB from December 24, 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opis 2, delo 2575,  reel 2, 134.
 
69 Letter from Taboritskii to Mrs. Shabelskii-Bork from March 18, 1926, GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number  14953, 81; LGPO report to the RKUoO from September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772,  opis 3, delo 71, 17.
 
70 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampfgegen den Bolschewismus, 488.
 
71 Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 2, 25.
 
72 DB report from March 6, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 198, opis 9, delo 4474, reel I, 47.
 
73 A. V. Smolin, Beloe dvizhenie na Severo-Zapade Ross 1918-1920 (Saint Petersburg, Dmitrii Bulanin,  1999), 335.
 
74 Interrogation of Ambassador Herbert von Dirksen from October 1945, The National Archives, IZG,  number 679, roll I, 415.
 
75 Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 4, 25.
 
76 Gestapo report from April 13, 1935. RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 501, opis 3, delo 496a, 208.
 
77 Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 3, 92; fiche 4, 2, 5.
 
78 Letter from Ludwig von Knorring to the RMI from September 20, 1921, BAB, 1501, number 14139,  47; L. K. Skarenkov, "Eine Chronik def russischen Emigration in Deutschland: Die Materialien  des General Aleksej A. von Lampe," Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918 bis 1941: Leben im  europaischen Burgerkrieg, ed. Karl Schlogel (Berlin: Akademie, 1995), 48.
 
79 Schlogel, "Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918-1941: Fragen und Thesen," Russische Emigration  in Deutschland, 11; RMI report from December 15, 1921, BAB, 1501, number 14139, 58.
 
80 Vinberg's March 30, 1922 testimony, BHSAM, BSMI 22, number 71624, fiche 4, 2, 4, 5, 25.
 
81 Shabelskii-Bork, “Uber Mein Leben," GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953, 110.
 
82 Rollin, L'Apocalypse de notre temps, 153.
 
83 Dietrich Eckart, "Die Schlacht auf den Katalaunischen Feldern," Auf gut deutsch: Wochenschrift fur  Ordnung und Recht, February 20, 1920.
 
84 Rafael Ganelin, "Rossiiskoe chernosotenstvo i germanskii natsional-sotsializm," Natsionalnaia  pravaia prezhde i teper, lstoriko-sotsiologicheskie ocherki, chast I: Rossiia i russkoe zarubezhe (Saint  Petersburg: Institut Sotsiologii rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 1992), 137.
 
85 DB report from March 6, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 198, opis 9, delo 4474, reel 1, 48.

86 Handwritten note from Muller von Hausen in Cyrillic letters, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis 2,  delo 131, 200.
 
87 "Satanisten des XX. Jahrhunderts," translated article from November 5, 1919 edition of Prizyv in  Hausen's possession, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 577, opis I, delo 541, 3.
 
88 "Liubopytnyi Dokument," Prizyv, February 6, 1920, 2, in Hausen's possession, RGVA (TsKhIDK),  fond 577, opis 1, delo 541.
 
89 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 119-121, 139.
 
90 "Ein judisches Geheimdokument," Volkischer Beobachter, February 25, 1920, 1.
 
91 Hagemeister, "Die 'Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,'" 261.
 
92 Gestapo report from April 13, 1935, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 501, opis 3, delo 496a, 208.
 
93 Letter from Hausen to Carl Marz from March 26, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo  853, 32.
 
94 Vinberg, Der Kreuzesweg Russlands: Teil I: Die Ursachen des Ubels, trans. K. von Jarmersted (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1922), 28, 35.
 
95 Vinberg, “Der wackere Zentralverein," Volkischer Beobachter, May 9, 1923, 3.
 
96 LGPO reports to the RKUoO from June 2 and August 8, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 81a, 15; delo 539, 17. 20.
 
97 Letter from Hausen to Marz from March 26, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo 853, 33.
 
98 Iurii Kartsov, "Existiert die Schuldfrage uberhaupt?" Aufbau-Korrespondenz, October 4, 1922, 3; LGPO report to the RKUoO from June 2, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 81a,16.
 
99 Hagemeister, "Sergej Nilus und die 'Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,''' Jahrbuch fur Antisemitismusforschung der  Technischen Universitat Berlin, ed. Wolfgang Benz (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag,  1996), 137.
 
100 Kartsov's report to Hausen from April 30, 1920, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 577, opis 2, delo 9, 36.
 
101 Hagemeister, "Die 'Protokolle der Weisen von Zion,'" 262; Martin Sabrow, Der Rathenaumord:  Rekonstruktion einer Verschworung gegen die Republik Von Weimar (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1994), 45.
 
102 Rudolf von Sebottendorff, "Aus der Geschichte der Thule Gesellschaft," Thule-Bote, Gilbhart  (October) 31, 1933, I, BSAM, SAM, number 7716, 9.
 
103 Detlev Rose, Die Thule Gesellschaft: Legende-Mythos- Wirklichkeit (Tubingen: Grabert-Verlag,  1994), 35.
 
104 Interview with Johann Hering on August 29, 1951, IZG, ZS 67, 2.
 
105 Sebottendorff, "Aus der Geschichte der Thule Gesellschaft," Thule-Bote, Gilbhart (October) 31,  1933, I, BSAM, SAM, number 7716, 9.
 
106 Sebottendorff, "Die Thule Gesellschaft," Thule-Bote, Gilbhart (October) 31, 1933, 2, BSAM, SAM, number 7716, 10.
 
107 Hausen's correspondence with the Volkischer Beobachter RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo 479.
 
108 Letter from Hanns Muller to Hausen from November 26, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo 479, 32.
 
109 Letter from Hausen to Muller from November 29, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo 479, 35.
 
110 Letter from Muller to Hausen from December 10, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis I, delo 479, 37.
 
111 "Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion," Volkischer Beobachter, April 22, 1920, I.
 
112 "Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion," Volkischer Beobachter, June 27, 1920, 2.
 
113 Rose, Die Thule Gesellschaft, 79.
 
114 Ralph Engelmann, Dietrich Eckart and the Genesis of Nazism, diss. Washington University (Ann  Arbor: University Microfilms, 1971).
 
115 Margarete Plewnia, Auf dem weg zu Hitler: Der "volkische" Publizist Dietrich Eckart (Bremen:  Schunemann Universitatsverlag, 1970).
 
116 Geoffrey G. Field, Evangelist of Race: The Germanic Vision of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (New  York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 390.
 
117 Werner Maser, Der Sturm auf die Republik: Fruhgeschichte der NSDAP (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-  Anstalt, 1973), 179; Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler, 29.
 
118 Alfred Rosenberg, Memoirs, KR, BAB, NS S, number 20, 2.
 
119 Eckart, "Das ist der Jude! Laienpredigt Uber Juden- und Christentum von Dietrich Eckart," Auf  gut deutsch, [August/September], 1920, 44; Eckart, “In letzter Stunde," Auf gut deutsch, March 15,  1921, 7; Eckart, "Das Judentum in und ausser uns: Grundsatzliche Betrachtungen von Dietrich  Eckart: 1," Auf gut deutsch, January 10, 1919, 14, 15.
 
120 Eckart, "Theorie und Praxis,” Auf gut deutsch, September 12, 1919, 2.
 
121 Eckart, "Das Judentum in und ausser uns: IV.," Auf gut deutsch, January 31, 1919, 15, 16.
 
122 "Positiver Antisemitismus," Volkischer Beobachter, November 4, 1922, I.
 
123 Maser, Der Sturm auf die Republik,181, 182.
 
124 Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology (London: B. T.  Batsford Ltd., 1972), 24.
 
125 Rosenberg, Memoirs, KR, BAB, NS 8, number 20, 2.
 
126 Eckart, "Das fressende Feuer," Auf gut deutsch, August 22, 1919.
 
127 Letter from Hausen to Marz from April 6, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 577, opis I, delo 853, 41.
 
128 Maser, Der Sturm auf die Republik, 150; Rose, Die Thule Gesellschaft, 79.
 
129 Interview with Walburga Reicheneder on January 11, 1952, IZG, ZS 119, 1.
 
130 Rosenberg, Memoirs, KR, BAB, NS 8, number 20, 16.
 
131 Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler, 66, 67.
 
132 Hitler, Mein Kampf trans. Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), 687.
 
133 Hitler, Hitler's Table Talk 194Z-44: His Private Conversations, trans. Norman Cameron and R. H. Stevens, second edn. (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1973), 217.
 
134 Rosenberg, "Meine erste Begegnung mit dem Fuhrer," The National Archives, Records of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1941-45, IZG, number 454, roll 63, 578.
 
135 Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1965), 56.
 
136 Christine Pajouh, "Die Ostpolitik Rosenbergs 1941-1944," Deutschbalten, Weimarer Republik und  Drittes Reich, ed. Michael Garleff (Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 2001), 167.
 
137 Plewnia, Auf dem weg zu Hitler, 95.
 
138 Eckart, "Tagebuch," Auf gut deutsch, October 10, 1919.
 
139 Eckart, "Die Midgardschlange," Auf gut deutsch, December 30, 1919.
 
140 Eckart, '''Jewry uber alles,’” Auf gut deutsch, November 26, 1920.
 
141 Konrad Heiden, Der Fuhrer: Hitler's Rise to Power, trans, Ralph Mannheim (Boston: Houghton  Mifflin, 1944), 1.
 
142 Hagemeister, “Sergej Nilus und die 'Protokolle der Weisen von Zion," 136.
 
143 Rosenberg, Die Spur des Juden im Wandel der Zeiten (Munich: Deutscher Volks-Verlag, 1920).
 
144 "Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion und die judische Weltpolitik,” Volkischer Beobachter, August  21, 1923, 3.
 
145 Rosenberg, Die Protokolle der weisen von Zion und die Judische Weltpolitik (Munich: Deutscher  Volks-Verlag, 1923), 8, 9, 32, 45.
 
146 Hitler, notes for a speech on August 12, 1921, Samtliche Aufzeichnungen 1905-1924, eds. Eberhard  Jackel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 451-453.
 
147 Hitler, speech on August 19, 1921, Samtliche Aufzeichnungen, 458.
 
148 ''Adolf Hitler’s Ehrentag," Volkischer Beobachter, April 22/23, 1923, I.
 
149 Hitler, speech on August 1, 1923, Samtliche Aufzeichnungen, 955.
 
150 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 306, 307.
 
151 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Hardcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979),  360.
 
152 Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, 128, 138; Rollin, L 'Apocalypse de notre temps, 40.
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

Postby admin » Tue Jan 29, 2019 11:37 pm

Part 1 of 2

CHAPTER 3: "Hand in hand with Germany"

The 1919 Latvian Intervention of a combined anti-Bolshevik German/White force built upon the international right-wing collaboration that had been established during the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918. The German/White crusade against Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region is more well known than the German Ukrainian Intervention, notably due to the German author Klaus Theweleit's detailed study of the German Freikorps (volunteer corps) in the Baltic area, Male Fantasies. [1] Freikorps in Latvia fought side by side with Whites, including many veterans of previous anti-Bolshevik operations directed from inside and just outside the Ukraine under Germany's aegis. White emigres played key leadership roles in the Latvian Intervention. Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, who had earlier helped to establish the Southern Army near the Ukraine in 1918, rose to lead the German/White expeditionary force in Latvia. General Vladimir Biskupskii, who had played a leading role in Hetman Pavel Skoropadskii's Ukrainian Volunteer Army, represented Bermondt-Avalov's Western Volunteer Army politically in Berlin.

In addition to spurring the pro-nationalist German careers of Bermondt-Avalov and Biskupskii (both White officers went on to serve Hitler's National Socialist movement), the Latvian Intervention solidified the Baltic German "Rubonia clique" of four determined anti-Bolsheviks from the same Riga fraternity in Imperial Russia. This right-wing quartet consisted of Max von Scheubner-Richter, who had aided the Imperial German advance into the Baltic region during World War I, Otto von Kursell, Arno Schickedanz, and Alfred Rosenberg. All four comrades went on to play important roles in Aufbau, the Munich-based conspiratorial organization that integrated volkisch German and White emigre efforts to overthrow both the Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union. All four colleagues likewise joined the National Socialist Party early on.

Like Germany's Ukrainian occupation, the Latvian Intervention failed militarily after some early successes. It nonetheless engendered solidarity between alienated volkisch Germans and resentful Whites who regarded themselves as trapped by Bolshevism to the East, the Entente to the West, and Germany's perfidious left-wing regime in the middle. Moreover, the Latvian Intervention significantly affected international rightwing collaboration against the Weimar Republic. The Baltic adventure served not only as an anti-Bolshevik crusade abroad, but also as a means of supporting national revolutionary strivings to overthrow the Weimar Republic. German and White soldiers in Latvia backed the nationalist German conspiracy to establish a right-wing German regime under Wolfgang Kapp, who had sought to replace the Kaiser with a military-dictatorship under General Erich von Ludendorff, the Chief of the Army General Staff, during World War I.

Kapp and his co-conspirators, most notably General Ludendorff, counted on support for their intended putsch from combined German/White forces after these had defeated the Bolsheviks in Latvia and Russia. After the failure of Latvian Intervention, Kapp and his allies used demobilized German Baltikumkampfer (Baltic fighters) and the remnants of White units to undermine the largely socialist German government. Nationalist German/White emigre counter-revolutionary efforts culminated in the Kapp Putsch of March 1920. While this undertaking failed overall, it succeeded in Bavaria, and it set a precedent for combined volkisch German/White emigre action to reconstitute the German state through violent means. The National Socialist Party under Hitler's leadership subsequently drew from this legacy of international right-wing intrigue.


THE LATVIAN INTERVENTION AND PREPARATIONS FOR NATIONAL RENEWAL

The Latvian Intervention of 1919 came after German wartime successes in the Baltic region. During World War I, Imperial German armed forces made significant advances along the east coast of the Baltic Sea before the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917. German troops captured Riga, the largest and most important city of the Baltic provinces of the former Russian Empire, in early September 1917. [2] The Riga native First Lieutenant Max von Scheubner-Richter played a leading role in the German occupation of Baltic lands, which many Baltic Germans regarded as an act of liberation. He served as the deputy leader of the Army High Command East VIII Press Office in Riga. More importantly, the Political Section of the German Army General Staff in Riga assigned him to solve political and military problems relating to the planned German advance into Livonia and Estonia.

The German Political Section considered Scheubner-Richter to be an appropriate choice for such important strategic responsibilities because of his upbringing in the Russian Empire along with his studies to become a lecturer in Russian history. Scheubner-Richter had also gathered valuable wartime experience in Eastern matters. He had served as the German vice consul in the Ottoman Empire with the mission of fostering Caucasian and Ukrainian independence movements within the Russian Empire. He had also unsuccessfully pressured the Ottoman government to stop its wartime massacre of Christian Armenians. The Political Section of the Army Chief of Staff had sent him to Stockholm in July 1917, where he had used the haven of neutral territory to initiate contacts with various anti-Bolshevik groups in Russia, most notably with Ukrainians and Georgians. [3] Scheubner-Richter had come to the attention of General Ludendorff, the chief of the Army General Staff, through his daring and initiative. He had subsequently enjoyed the general's patronage. [4]

With the Bolshevik seizure of power in early November 1917, Scheubner-Richter worried that the Baltic Germans still under Bolshevik rule must have it the worst in Bolshevik Russia. He tirelessly planned the German advance into Livonia and Estonia. [5] His commanding officer in Riga, Major General Buchfink, found Scheubner-Richter to possess great intelligence, courage, and initiative. Buchfink later stressed that his operations in the Baltic region would not have been possible without Scheubner-Richter's knowledge of Russian and Baltic conditions. Buchfink further stressed that Scheubner-Richter was well known and appreciated in the German Officer Corps and was one of the most beloved figures in Riga society. [6]

Scheubner-Richter's efforts to bring the Baltic region under German control succeeded initially, but he soon experienced frustration. Imperial German troops captured Reval, Estonia's principal city, in late February 1918. [7] Scheubner-Richter earned the Iron Cross, First Class, for his contributions to the German advance into Livonia and Estonia. Aware that the fledgling Bolshevik regime could not offer serious military resistance, he pressed for German forces to advance on Petrograd, then the Soviet capital, to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and to establish a nationalist Russian government friendly to Imperial Germany. The German negotiations with Bolshevik representatives in Brest-Litovsk precluded this course of action, however. Rebuffed in his efforts to convince the German Army High Command to capture Petrograd, the most Scheubner-Richter could do to undermine Bolshevik rule in early 1918 was to establish an anti-Bolshevik secret service that extracted information from sources within Bolshevik Russia. [8]

Years later, Scheubner-Richter wrote articles in the National Socialist newspaper the Volkisch Observer that criticized Imperial Germany's failure to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in 1918. In a March 1923 commentary, "The Red Army," he argued that the German High Command's failure to march on Petrograd in 1918 to end the "Bolshevik specter" had allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their power in Russia and had led to the outbreak of socialist revolution in Imperial Germany on November 9, 1918.
[9] In a September 1923 essay, "Germany's Bolshevization," Scheubner-Richter stressed that despite his advice to capture Petrograd and to install "a Russian national government friendly towards us," the German High Command, under pressure from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Reichstag (Parliament), had agreed to the "insanity" of negotiations in Brest-Litovsk. [10]

Two of Scheubner-Richter's colleagues from the Rubonia Fraternity at the Riga Polytechnic Institute, Alfred Rosenberg and Otto von Kursell, began collaborating with Scheubner-Richter in late 1918. Like Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg favored a German advance on Petrograd. [11] He had learned to hate Bolshevism through firsthand experience. He had witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution towards the end of his studies at the Polytechnic Institute that had been relocated from Riga to Moscow, and he had received his degree in architecture early in 1918 under Bolshevik rule. He had left Moscow for Reval as a convinced opponent of Bolshevism. [12]

German occupying forces in Estonia hired Rosenberg as a German teacher in October 1918, thereby beginning his extensive career in German service. [13] Like Scheubner-Richter, Rosenberg warned of the Bolshevik peril in the rightist newspaper Das neue Deutschland (The New Germany). [14] He gave his first public speech in the Reval City Hall on "Marxism and Jewry." [15] Even at this early stage of his career, Rosenberg had formed the basis for his later assertions of the menace of "Jewish Bolshevism."

In addition to working with Rosenberg, Scheubner-Richter joined up with his old Rubonia brother Otto von Kursell in late 1918 to help rebuild Baltic German cultural life after the depredations of war. Kursell had served in the Tsarist Army in the Reval Engineering Battalion before the Bolshevik Revolution, and he considered himself lucky to have survived the Bolshevik seizure of power. [16] After German troops had occupied Reval, Kursell had joined the Baltic German Selbstschutz, or Self-Defense League, in that city. [17] He subsequently worked for Scheubner-Richter in the Political Section of Army High Command East VIII. Both colleagues collaborated to rebuild their alma mater, the Riga Polytechnic Institute. [18]

In October 1918, the German Army High Command East VIII centered in Riga, for which Scheubner-Richter and Kursell worked, established partially and entirely White military formations. The High Command set up the Baltische Landeswehr (Baltic Defense Force) under Major Alfred Fletcher. Fletcher maintained close relations with Wolfgang Kapp, who led the right-wing German Fatherland Party, which wished to institute a military dictatorship to replace the Kaiser. The High Command organized four formations of the Baltic Defense Force. The first unit comprised Baltic Germans who had fought in the Imperial German Army, the second and third formations were made up of Baltic Germans who had served in the Imperial Russian Army, and the fourth detachment was composed of men who had not fought in any armed forces.

The Baltic Defense Force initially contained approximately 1,000 soldiers. Arno Schickedanz, the fourth member of the Rubonia clique after Scheubner-Richter, Kursell, and Rosenberg, played a prominent role in the formation. [19] Like Rosenberg, Schickedanz had experienced the Bolshevik Revolution firsthand. He had earned his degree in chemistry at the Polytechnic Institute in Moscow early in 1918 under Bolshevik rule before disassociating himself from the Bolsheviks. He left Bolshevik Russia and then volunteered for service in the cavalry of the Baltic Defense Force in the fall of 1918. [20]

As well as establishing the Baltic Defense Force in October 1918, the German Army High Command East VIII began organizing a White volunteer force called the Northern Army as a complement to the Southern Army based just outside the Ukraine that German authorities supported. The Northern Army was based in northwestern Russia, including the Baltic region. The necessary funds, weapons, clothing, and rations came from the Imperial German government. The Northern Army was to be combat ready in two-and-a-half months and was to swear an oath of loyalty to the Tsar. Finally having agreed to strike directly at the heart of Bolshevism, the German Army High Command charged the Northern Army with capturing Petrograd, overthrowing the Bolshevik regime, and proclaiming a military dictatorship until the monarchy could be reestablished in Russia. [21]

German Fatherland Party leader Kapp supported the Northern Army, which was soon overwhelmed because of worsening political and military circumstances. He believed that German forces had to support monarchists in Russia to bring about a nationalist Russian state that would serve as Germany's ally against the Entente. Kapp personally wrote the chief of staff of the Northern Army, Colonel Heye, and stressed that German troops had to support the Russian monarchists. [22] The outbreak of revolution in Germany in early November severely weakened the position of German occupying forces in the Baltic as well as in the Ukraine. A grand nationalist German-Russian rapprochement in the Baltic region along the lines that Kapp desired did not materialize in 1918. By the end of November 1918, the Northern Army faced rout at the hand of the advancing Red Army. [23]


Scheubner-Richter had played an important role in German successes in the Baltic region, and he led a rearguard action when faced with a rapidly deteriorating situation in Latvia. He transferred from his recently acquired position as leader of the Press Office of the Army High Command East VIII to the German Embassy in Riga in December 1918. [24] High Command East personnel left Riga on the night of December 29/30, 1918, but Scheubner-Richter volunteered to stay behind as the acting head of the German Embassy in Riga. He negotiated with primarily Latvian Bolshevik forces, which captured the city on January 3, 1919. He secured the evacuation of 2,400 Reich Germans and a number of Baltic Germans to Germany before Bolshevik officers arrested him. Bolshevik leaders wished to execute him as a dangerous counter-revolutionary agent, but the German Foreign Office brought sufficient pressure to bear on Latvian Bolshevik leaders to release him.

After his brush with death at the hands of Bolsheviks in Riga, Scheubner-Richter traveled to Konigsberg in East Prussia as an even more fiercely determined anti-Bolshevik. [25] He acted as the political advisor of August Winnig, the socialist German government's charge who served as Reichskommissar (State Commissioner) of the narrow Eastern territories still under German occupation. [26] Scheubner-Richter sent reports of the Bolshevik peril to the new socialist government in Berlin, which distrusted Bolshevism and fostered the formation of German Freikorps to fight against Bolshevik forces in the Baltic region. [27]

Scheubner-Richter's superior Winnig concluded an agreement with the fledgling non-Bolshevik exile Latvian government under Minister President Karlis Ulmanis whereby German volunteers for military service in Latvia would gain the right to receive Latvian citizenship and with it the ability to acquire land.
[28] Entente representatives undertook a delicate balancing act at this time. They were wary of granting the new socialist German government too much leeway, yet they feared the spread of Bolshevism into Germany. Entente authorities ultimately decided to cast a blind eye on the establishment of significant German forces in the Baltic region though this was specifically forbidden according to the terms of the November 11, 1918 Armistice. [29]

[bUnder Winnig's overall supervision, Scheubner-Richter performed organizational and propaganda tasks to further the establishment of Freikorps to fight in Latvia.[/b] [30] To intensify anti-Bolshevik propaganda, he founded the Zentralausschuss fur den ostpreussischen Heimatdienst (Central Committee for the East Prussian Home Service) in February 1919. [31] This organization was subordinated to the Reichszentrale fur Heimatdienst (Central Office for Home Service), which worked for "reconstruction" through the means of disseminating "indisputable facts" about Bolshevism that would lead to the "people's enlightenment." [32] Scheubner-Richter proved one of Bolshevism's greatest opponents.

Hoping to regain the initiative in the Baltic region, where Scheubner-Richter directed his energies, General Rudiger von der Goltz, the former leader in Wolfgang Kapp's now outlawed German Fatherland Party, set about creating a powerful anti-Bolshevik force in Latvia. Goltz officially took command of German Freikorps in the Baltic region, primarily in the southern portion of Latvia, in the middle of February 1919. [33] He enjoyed great popularity among opponents of Bolshevism in the Baltic region, largely because he had led the German military expedition that had secured Finnish independence from Bolshevik Russia in the spring of 1918. [34] Like Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg, Goltz had unsuccessfully lobbied the German Army High Command to advance on Petrograd to overthrow the fledgling Bolshevik regime in 1918. [35]

Goltz viewed his struggle against the Bolsheviks in the Baltic region as a fight against a plague that threatened all of Europe. In his 1920 memoirs, Goltz asserted that he had fought against the "Bolshevik Weltanschauung of Asiatic bondage" in the Latvian Intervention in an effort to prevent the "downfall of the West." [36] A sense of Goltz's missionary spirit can be gained from his 1921 novel The Guilt, which is set in the immediate postwar period. The protagonist, Pastor Lange, concludes:

The guilt of our people is that it did not want to fight out this necessary struggle because of its love of peace. Now, for its own good, it is being forced to do so through its irreconcilable enemies, for God Himself wishes this struggle ... And we clergymen must not stop preaching this holy war ... Thus let us go forward with God! We follow the cross that shines radiantly before us through terrible struggle, through darkness and affliction ... We march to the East, from whence the radiance dawns over the West and the entire world -- ex oriente lux (from the East -- light)! [37]


Goltz thus employed religiously inspired crusading zeal in his anti-Bolshevik efforts.

In his political views, Goltz favored Ostpolitik (Eastern policy) in the form of German-White anti-Bolshevik collaboration on land as a counterweight to the Entente, which primarily demonstrated its power at sea. He advocated an "economic and political rapprochement with the coming Russia." By this he meant that he wished to help overthrow the Bolshevik regime and then "open up broad economic regions and win a new friend in an alliance against the English world empire in the form of the coming bourgeois Russia." [38] Goltz's Ostpolitik sought to tip the balance of power into Germany's favor once again through a German-White Russian alliance.

German-sponsored anti-Bolshevik forces in Latvia under Goltz's overall leadership in early 1919 consisted of the Iron Division under Major Josef Bischoff near the Baltic Sea and the Baltic Defense Force under Kapp's colleague Major Fletcher inland. The Baltic Defense Force included a Russian detachment under Prince Anatol Levin composed of infantry and cavalry units. Levin's force consisted entirely of officers at the beginning, but it added common soldiers from Russian prisoner of war camps in Germany. Levin's unit reached a combat strength of 600 men. [39] Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, the comrade of Colonel Fedor Vinberg and Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, recruited interned Russian soldiers for the Latvian Intervention and organized them into effective combat units from Berlin. [40]

Baltic Defense Force commander Fletcher kept his ultra-nationalist colleague Wolfgang Kapp updated on events in Latvia. Kapp and Fletcher corresponded regularly. [41] In a letter from early March 1919, Fletcher emphasized that he enjoyed good relations with the Baltic Germans under his command as well as the Russian and Latvian formations that served under him. He noted that these units were "composed almost completely of former Russian (Tsarist) officers." He boasted to Kapp, "You can believe that I am creating order with my dazzling 'White Guard' ... (hated by all Reds in Russia and Germany)." He further stressed:

We have somewhat urgently sent some masters of the "proletariat of all countries" out of the castles and cities and into the Beyond. This is a matter of life and death. There are no prisoners, and that is why these criminals sometimes fight desperately when surrounded. [42]


Fletcher regarded his Baltic Defense Force to be engaged in an all-or-nothing struggle against Bolshevism.

Kapp placed high hopes on Goltz's military formations to which Fletcher's Baltic Defense Force belonged, not only as determined anti-Bolshevik units that were proving their mettle abroad, but also as a source of armed support in his bid to establish a nationalist German regime under his leadership. At the same time that he cultivated ties with forces in the Baltic region that he ultimately hoped to use in a nationalist putsch in Germany, Kapp oversaw the creation of sympathetic nationalist cells inside Germany that would support his bid for power at an auspicious time. [43] In the early months of 1919, Kapp established the Ostpreussischer Heimatbund (East Prussian Home League) to work towards his goal of national renewal. The League officially sought the "repulse of Bolshevism" and the "strengthening of the national idea." [44] Behind the scenes, Kapp planned to overthrow the despised primarily socialist German government. [45]

In addition to counting on support from General Goltz, Kapp placed considerable hopes on General Max Hoffmann, who had led the German negotiations with Bolshevik representatives in Brest-Litovsk but had later supported anti-Bolshevik formations in the Ukraine. Kapp and Hoffmann had begun collaborating closely during World War I. [46] In 1919, Hoffmann helped to create dependable military units inside of Germany that Goltz's troops could collaborate with to topple the primarily socialist German government.
The overthrow of the German government was to spread from Kapp's East Elbian stronghold to less well-developed western regions with the assistance of power bases in Stuttgart, Darmstadt, and Munich. [47]

Munich, the birthplace of National Socialism, served as the most significant western outpost of Kapp's support. In addition to organizing paramilitary forces under sympathetic officers there, Kapp supported the anti-governmental activities of Dietrich Eckart, Hitler's early mentor. Eckart had seized Kapp's attention through his volkisch play Heinrich der Hohenstaufe (Heinrich the Hohenstaufe) in August 1916. [48] Already at this time, Kapp had argued that Eckart's work needed to be disseminated to "broad circles" to bring about the "awakening of national life." [49] Kapp had subscribed to Eckart's anti-Semitic publication Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German), immediately upon its appearance in late 1918. Pleased with Eckart's endeavor, Kapp had given him 1,000 marks to further his work. [50]

Eckart thanked Kapp profusely in February 1919 for his considerable financial and moral support, which had come as a "miracle" when he had needed it most. He asserted, "That which lifts me up the most is the certainty you give me that I am running my paper in the right spirit, that I am running it in your spirit." [51] After Eckart received Kapp's moral and financial backing, the number of subscribers to In Plain German grew continually yet modestly, reaching 500 by February 1919 and eventually peaking at approximately 5,000. [52]

During the time of his editorship of In Plain German, Eckart cooperated with anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic members of the Rubonia clique from Riga. We have already noted that Eckart collaborated closely with Rosenberg, who wrote articles for In Plain German. Rosenberg's colleague Scheubner-Richter traveled to Munich in 1919 on the urging of the fellow Rubonia Fraternity member Arno Schickedanz, who had already settled in Munich. Once in the Bavarian capital, Scheubner-Richter assessed Rosenberg's efforts to gain financial backing for White forces still fighting in Russia. Rosenberg introduced Scheubner-Richter to industrial circles and White emigres in Munich society. [53] Scheubner-Richter met Eckart, most likely through Rosenberg, and he in turn introduced Eckart to the former Rubonia member Otto von Kursell, who had settled in Munich earlier in 1919. [54]

Scheubner-Richter soon returned to northern Germany to lead anti-Bolshevik activities there, and Schickedanz seems not to have collaborated closely with Eckart, but Kursell assisted Eckart with In Plain German. He specialized in portraying Jewish figures in a sinister manner. In one joint venture, Eckart wrote caustic verses to each of Kursell's drawings of Jewish leaders in Germany. A special edition of In Plain German with Kursell's drawings and Eckart's commentary circulated throughout Germany. It provoked a visceral anti-Semitic reaction. [55] In addition to assisting Eckart and Rosenberg with In Plain German, Kursell held anti-Bolshevik speeches in Munich. He warned that the propaganda and recruiting methods of revolutionary leaders in Germany followed the pattern set earlier by the Bolsheviks in Russia. [56]

In addition to supporting the anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic propaganda activities of Eckart and the largely White emigre circle around him in Munich, Kapp kept in contact with his colleague Ludwig Muller von Hausen, who had published the influential anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in German. Hausen played a shadowy role in the Latvian Intervention. He proved extremely well informed on secret far right German/White plans for closer collaboration. He possessed a detailed outline for an anti-Bolshevik alliance of nationalist Germans and Whites marked "Strictly confidential," and dated from Berlin, March 16, 1919: "Draft of a Program for the Activity of an Organization for an Economic Rapprochement between Germany and Russia."

This secretive organization was to provide a "unified direction" and a "headquarters" to the "Russian circles inside as well as outside of Russia who are striving for a close economic-political alliance with Germany." It was also to direct "careful, clever propaganda" towards these Russian elements to prepare them for "energetic action against the Entente." The international organization was to establish a "secret intelligence apparatus" to monitor the mood among the Russian populace and to determine the intentions of the Entente. Moreover, it was to direct "anti-Bolshevik front propaganda" from Germany eastwards in collaboration with the largely anti-governmental Grenzschutz Ost (Frontier Guards East). This conspiratorial German/White association was to establish contacts with White emigre colonies throughout the world and to supervise Russian prisoner of war camps in Germany.

Finally, with regard to organization, the German/Russian entity was to possess both a German and a Russian office in Berlin, with a German representative in the Russian bureau and a Russian representative in the German one. These two offices were to keep in close contact with each other. The central leadership of the entire organization was to be composed of a secret committee of three Germans and two Russians. [57] With further evidence lacking, the degree to which this conspiratorial organization of nationalist Germans and Whites progressed beyond the planning stage remains unclear


In any case, prospects for a successful German/White anti-Bolshevik campaign in Latvia that could be used as a springboard to establish nationalist regimes in Germany and Russia reached a high point on May 22, 1919. On this date, the roughly 14,000 Baltic and Reich Germans and approximately 2,000 Russians and Latvians of Major Fletcher's Baltic Defense Force captured Riga. [58] The Baltic Defense Force's capture of Riga proved the greatest single success of the German-backed Latvian Intervention of 1919. The coup offered White circles throughout the former Russian Empire and abroad the hope of witnessing the overthrow of hated Bolshevik rule.

Baltic Defense Force cavalry officer Arno Schickedanz participated in the capture of Riga. He subsequently submitted a report of conditions in the former hanseatic city to his Rubonia brother Scheubner-Richter, who was in Danzig serving as the leader of the Central Committee of the Ostdeutscher Heimatdienst (East German Home Service). [59] Schickedanz related how the Baltic Defense Force had successfully stormed the city, but regrettably too late to stop Bolshevik authorities from shooting thirty hostages. He noted that the city's dazed citizens at first had seemed unable to grasp that they had been freed from the "brutality and atrocities of the criminal, bestial Commissars." After the shock of recent events had worn off, however, Riga's population had embraced the Baltic Defense Force for ending Bolshevik terror and accompanying starvation.

Schickedanz asserted that Bolshevik Commissars in Riga had represented "the most depraved criminals one can think of." They had plundered shamelessly. Bolshevik forced labor policies particularly outraged Schickedanz. Bolshevik leaders had collected members of the intelligentsia and the middle class who had become "unemployed" with the "nationalization, that is, closing" of stores and businesses, and "out of pure pleasure in torturing" had forced them to perform degrading tasks such as carrying manure, chopping wood, and cleaning toilets. Schickedanz wrote Scheubner-Richter that Bolsheviks had treated these forced laborers with great brutality, beating them, kicking them, and even dumping excrement over their heads. He asserted: "The Swedes during the 30 Years' War were lenient people in comparison with these beasts." [60] Schickedanz's report demonstrated an intense hatred of the Bolsheviks among White forces in Latvia, and it helped to inflame anti-Bolshevik passions in Germany.

While Arno Schickedanz received considerable credit for his participation in the capture of Riga, the most famous actor in the Baltic Intervention proved to be the White leader Colonel Pavel Bermondt-Avalov. Around the turn of the year 1918/1919, Bermondt, as he then still called himself, traveled to Germany in the third of four German Army convoys from the Ukraine that evacuated White officers and soldiers after Pavel Skoropadskii's Hetmanate had collapsed. Bermondt impressed White leaders with his bravery in volunteering to lead and to protect his particular troop transport. Bermondt arrived at Camp Salzwedel located between Berlin and Hamburg in late January 1919.

Once in Camp Salzwedel, Bermondt used his charisma to attract the attention of rightist German circles around Generals Ludendorff and Hoffmann. These men advocated using White officers from the Ukraine to organize the Russian prisoners of war housed in Germany into anti-Bolshevik combat units to be employed in Latvia. [61] Nationalist German military leaders involved in this scheme generally regarded White officers who had been evacuated from the Ukraine as dependable pro-Germans who intensely hated the Entente as well as the Bolsheviks. [62] With permission from above, Bermondt organized a mounted machine-gun unit from White internees at Camp Salzwedel in early February 1919.

Bermondt traveled to Berlin in the second half of February 1919 to raise support for his White detachment. Generals Ludendorff and Hoffmann approved Bermondt's proposal to raise an interventionary force of White soldiers for an anti-Bolshevik campaign in the Baltic region. The German generals believed that Bermondt's forces would counterbalance the army of General Nikolai Iudenich in Estonia, which they regarded as fully under the control of the British. The German War Minister Gustav Noske, acting on behalf of the socialist German government, approved using Bermondt's forces in the Baltic at the end of March 1919, thus demonstrating that not only German far rightists sought to drive back the Bolshevik threat from the East. [63]

After a period of organization, Bermondt's White soldiers began leaving Berlin for Latvia on May 30, 1919. British and French representatives learned of these troop movements and ordered them to stop, as they reared an increasing German-Russian rapprochement. Bermondt's men continued to move into the Baltic secretly nonetheless. Bermondt himself arrived in Mitau outside Riga in the middle of June 1919. At the time, his forces numbered approximately 3,500 pro-Tsarist officers and soldiers. [64]

Bermondt immediately held talks with General Goltz, the overall German commander in Latvia. He asked for and received German troops for his White contingent to counteract Entente propaganda that the Germans supported Bolshevism. He assessed relations between members of German Freikorps and the Baltic Defense Force on the one hand and his Whites on the other as the "very best." Bermondt observed that Russians and Germans fraternized on the streets and in cafes, thereby reestablishing bonds of friendship that had been severed during World War l. He noted that the Whites under his command were disappointed at the double-dealings of Britain and France and impressed with the willingness of the Germans to help to rebuild Russia despite the difficult situation that the Entente had placed them in. [65]

Although Bermondt had earlier agreed to serve under the Russian commander Prince Anatol Levin, when Entente representatives ordered Levin to subordinate his forces to General Iudenich in Estonia on July 18, 1919 and Levin complied, Bermondt remained stationed in Mitau, Latvia. [66] He even incorporated White officers traveling north to fight with General Iudenich into the ranks of his own forces. [67] On the whole, Bermondt's troops, both Russians and Germans, supported his decision to defy the Entente. In fact, his men idolized him as a charismatic leader. [68]

While Colonel Bermondt consolidated his power in Latvia in defiance of the Entente, Kapp intensified his putsch preparations. In July 1919, he founded the Nationale Vereinigung (National Union), a conglomeration of counter-revolutionary forces that coordinated preparations centered in Prussia and Bavaria to overthrow the Weimar Republic. [69] The German state was known this way because of the ongoing Constitutional Convention that had been convened in the idyllic Thuringian city of Weimar in February 1919. Kapp's National Union united nationalist German officers, established refuge for Baltic troops in Germany so that they could be mobilized for anti-Weimar Republic undertakings after they victoriously returned from abroad, and disseminated political propaganda against German socialists. [70]

Kapp's National Union included several prominent nationalist German leaders. General Ludendorff played a leading role in the conspiratorial organization. [71] Colonel Karl Bauer, Ludendorff's political representative during World War I and a future member of Aufbau, represented the "soul" of the organization. [72] Captain Waldemar Pabst, who had perceived Bolshevism as a "world danger" in November 1915 and had quashed revolutionary uprisings in such cities as Berlin, Munich, and Braunschweig, served as the secretary of the National Union. This meant that he supervised the organization's administrative affairs. [73] August Winnig, then the minister of East Prussia, worked with the National Union, as did the Riga native First Lieutenant Scheubner-Richter, who collaborated with Winnig. [74]

Kapp and his co-conspirators in the National Union faced a difficult military situation in Latvia, where Colonel Bermondt played an increasingly prominent role, largely because of Entente demands that the German government cease its support of anti-Bolshevik operations there. Latvian Intervention leader General Goltz obeyed the orders of the German government, which was itself under the increasing pressure of the perfidious Entente, by leaving Latvia in early August 1919. He nevertheless continued to play a key role in the Latvian Intervention from behind the scenes. [75]

Goltz favored creating a Russian volunteer army under Colonel Bermondt to direct combined German/White forces in Latvia, but Bermondt faced serious competition for leadership in Latvia from the former Black Hundred member General Vladimir Biskupskii. [76] Biskupskii had evaded French surveillance after the fall of Skoropadskii's Hetmanate in the Ukraine to travel to Berlin. He possessed staunch pro-German views. In a heated argument on the German-Lithuanian border, a French general accused him of being "more German than the Germans themselves." [77] The Deutsche Legion (German Legion), which now included all the Freikorps in Latvia, as a whole preferred Biskupskii to Bermondt. [78] General Iudenich in Estonia favored Biskupskii as well. He pressured General Goltz to name Biskupskii the leader of all anti-Bolshevik volunteer forces in Latvia. Goltz refused, however, stressing that he would only collaborate with Bermondt. [79]

Goltz formed a competent general staff around Colonel Bermondt to lead what was to be called the Western Volunteer Army. This combined German/White force was to advance into the heartland of Bolshevik Russia in defiance of both the Entente and the German government. Goltz wished Bermondt's forces to act in concert with the White armies of General Anton Denikin in the Ukraine and Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak in Siberia. With their combined strength, these forces were to overthrow the Bolshevik regime and to create a pro-German Russian state that the Germans could ally with against the Entente. On September 21, 1919, Goltz and Bermondt concluded an agreement with the approval of War Minister Noske, who increasingly opposed socialist political leadership in Berlin. This arrangement stipulated that all German forces in Latvia join Bermondt's Western Volunteer Army. This process was completed by October 3, 1919. The army numbered approximately 52,000 men, of which roughly 40,000 were Germans, while the rest came from the former Russian Empire.

Serving under the Imperial Russian flag represented the logical choice for German members of the German Legion and the Baltic Defense Force to make. They felt that the German government had betrayed them. Moreover, they wished to fight for their right to remain in Latvia and to receive land as they had been promised.
They were at present not granted the right to settle in Latvia after the cessation of hostilities. Ulmanis' Latvian government, which had established itself in Riga after the Baltic Defense Force's capture of the city the previous May, had reneged on its earlier pledges. [80] German soldiers in Latvia also realized that monarchical Russians represented some of their few allies. Major Josef Bischoff, the leader of the Iron Division in Latvia, told his troops: "We want to help the Russians to liberate their fatherland from the scourge of humanity." He stressed, "By helping our friends the Russians, we are acting for the benefit of Germany." [81]

The German soldiers of the Western Volunteer Army who viewed their interests to be tied in with those of Whites served under a shameless self-promoter. After officially taking control of the Western Volunteer Army in the early autumn of 1919, Colonel Bermondt began to call himself Prince Bermondt-Avalov. He claimed that he had earlier used the simple name Bermondt to protect his wife from Bolshevik reprisals. [82] According to an informant to the State Commissioner for the Supervision of Public Order, Bermondt paid a legitimate Prince Avalov to support his claim that he himself was a Prince Avalov. [83] Bermondt-Avalov's origins remain shrouded in mystery. In the middle of the 1920s, the State Commissioner concluded that it was unclear whether Bermondt-Avalov was justified in using his name and title. It remained possible that he was the illegitimate son of Prince Mikhail Avalov, as a member of the Avalov family had claimed. [84] In any case, the adventurer became famous under the name Bermondt-Avalov, sometimes shortened to Avalov.

Bermondt-Avalov later asserted that he had operated in Latvia under the motto that only "hand in hand with Germany" could White forces save the Russian fatherland. [85] He subsequently stressed of the Latvian Intervention under his leadership: "The foundation stone of the revival of Bismarck's policy was laid in the Baltic," meaning a return to friendship along the lines of the "Holy Alliance" that Imperial Germany and Tsarist Russia had belonged to in the late nineteenth century. [86] A general idea of Bermondt-Avalov's views as the popular commander of German and White forces in Latvia can be gained from his 1921 essay "The Legacy of the Revolution and Bolshevism."

In his treatise, Bermondt-Avalov called for an "army advance into the interior of Russia," followed by a military dictatorship in which "the rights of the military governors are unlimited." All Jews were to be treated as foreigners under the "self-determination of peoples, the motto which the Jews themselves preach." These measures were necessary "to reestablish the mighty, strong organism of a great Russia." [87] Bermondt-Avalov had gained inspiration for his political views from the Imperial Russian Black Hundred movement to which he had belonged. [88]

During the Latvian Intervention in which Colonel Bermondt-Avalov drew the most attention, General Biskupskii had to content himself with acting as Bermondt-Avalov's largely ineffective political representative in Berlin. [89] Biskupskii served as the president of the exile organization the Russian National Political Committee. [90] Kapp's associate Waldemar Pabst, the secretary of the National Union, had established this body. [91] Bermondt-Avalov officially recognized the Committee as the sole governing agency of Western Russia. [92] In practice, however, he circumvented its authority through his personal representative, Andreas Remmer. Remmer, a Baltic German businessman from Latvia who had once held a leading position in the Imperial Russian Interior Ministry, had a reputation for underhanded dealings. Bolsheviks had imprisoned him in the wake of the October Revolution of 1917, but he had managed to emerge from prison in June 1918 after paying a considerable bribe. [93] Bermondt-Avalov named this dubious character his foreign minister and used him to undercut Biskupskii's authority.

Remmer abused Bermondt-Avalov's trust. The Baltic German dissipated the majority of the funds that he received from German authorities for the Western Volunteer Army in pursuit of the high life in the expensive Hotel Continental in Berlin. [95] Despite his questionable morality, Remmer continued to serve as an important White agent. He maintained contacts with both anti-Bolshevik nationalist forces and Bolshevik authorities during the time of intense National Socialist cooperation with White emigre circles from 1920 to 1923.
We shall examine this theme in subsequent chapters.

The connected endeavors of Colonel Bermondt-Avalov's bid for victory in Latvia and Russia with political backing in Berlin and Kapp's drive for political leadership in Germany came to a crucial juncture in early October 1919. Bermondt-Avalov planned an assault on Riga, the seat of Latvian Minister President Karlis Ulmanis' government, for the night of October 7/8 to remove a despised political foe and to secure his rear for an advance into the Soviet heartland. [95] On the eve of this venture, Kapp, who presumably knew of Bermondt-Avalov's plans, called a conference of co-conspirators from the National Union. Colonel Bauer and Captain Pabst, among others, attended the meeting. Kapp suggested launching a putsch against the Weimar Republic in the near future. [96] Kapp held detailed discussions with General Ludendorff on a daily basis beginning in October. He allotted the general the post of military dictator in the planned nationalist government. [97]

Kapp's hopes for the military support of Bermondt-Avalov's German/White forces after their triumph in Latvia and beyond soon faded, however. After gaining some initial tactical victories outside Riga, Bermondt-Avalov's Western Volunteer Army faced increasingly effective resistance from Ulmanis' Latvian troops. Moreover, the English fleet opened deadly fire on Bermondt-Avalov's army. [98] Bermondt-Avalov later claimed that English warships had released their salvos on his troops only minutes after one of his subordinates had given an English officer a friendly reception over tea. [99]

The fact that the English fleet had left General Iudenich's army in the lurch by leaving it to attack Bermondt-Avalov's forces in Latvia led to outrage among many Whites. For example, the White emigre and National Socialist ideologue Rosenberg later wrote angrily of the English fleet's assault on the Western Volunteer Army. In the pages of Eckart's newspaper In Plain German, Rosenberg claimed that England had wished to play the Whites against the Reds to weaken Russia as a whole while simultaneously protecting "Jewish world criminals" in Russia to obtain valuable economic concessions from them. [100] In a similar vein, he claimed in the pages of the National Socialist periodical the Volkisch Observer: "The Entente never seriously fought Bolshevism, but only ensured the starvation and the bleeding white of the Russian people." [101]

Helping to fuel right-wing discontent, the primarily socialist German government, which was under intense pressure from the Entente, acted on its threats to force the German Legion and the Baltic Defense Force to evacuate Latvia. The German government closed the East Prussian border, thereby severing Bermondt-Avalov's lines of communication, and it canceled troop wages and supplies. [102] Scheubner-Richter later claimed in the Volkisch Observer that the German government had cut off support for the Freikorps and the allied White Russian formations in Latvia under the pretense of threats from the Entente, "but in actuality because of the pressure of democratic, socialist, and above all Jewish circles" inside of Germany itself in the "sell-out of German honor." [103] He thus gave a sense of the betrayal that Freikorps members and White forces in Latvia felt in the autumn of 1919.

In this dire military situation, Colonel Bermondt-Avalov received some assistance from First Lieutenant Gerhard Rossbach, the commander of the first German Freikorps established after the November 11, 1918 Armistice. In October 1919, Rossbach ordered his battalion, the Sturmabteilung Rossbach (Storm Section Rossbach), to march from West Prussia to Latvia. [104] Upon arrival in Latvia in early November 1919, Rossbach placed himself and his approximately 1,500 men under Bermondt-Avalov's command. [105] The Storm Section Rossbach joined Major Bischoff"s Iron Division, where the German soldiers wore Russian cockades and received their wages in rubles. [106] While Rossbach's daring insubordination did little to alter the overall grim military and political situation that the Western Volunteer Army faced, Rossbach gained General Ludendorff's favor through his illegal march into Latvia. [107] Rossbach later became a prominent National Socialist who played an important role in the November 1923 Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch.

First Lieutenant Rossbach's insubordinate march into Latvia helped Bermondt-Avalov's cause somewhat, but disaster nonetheless struck the Western Volunteer Army on November 3, 1919. Latvian troops under Ulmanis' direction launched a powerful counterattack and broke through the front south of Riga. At the same time, Lithuanian forces attacked Bermondt-Avalov's troops from the rear and cur off their few remaining lines of communication with Germany. [108] Facing rout, Bermondt-Avalov wrote a letter to his colleague Kapp, the head of the conspiratorial National Union, on November 9, 1919, which was the one-year anniversary of Imperial Germany's collapse.

In his letter to Kapp, Bermondt-Avalov stressed that he was devoting all of his energies to the "merciless struggle against Bolshevism," and he asked for the "assistance that is so necessary for our common cause." He argued: "A lasting understanding between Russia and Germany is necessary in the interests of the common fight against Bolsheviks and Spartacists, quite apart from the fact that it is the natural consequence of the geographical situation." In stressing his pro-German credentials to Kapp, Bermondt-Avalov called the "Russo-German War" the "greatest misfortune of our century." He further argued, "In helping us in our struggle against Bolshevism, Germany combats its own Spartacism with ideas related to Russian Communism as well." He concluded:

I would like to emphasize my unshakeable intent to collaborate with those German circles that support our efforts ... I willingly commit myself to do everything that serves the common interests of Russia and Germany, which were friends for centuries and should have remained so. [109]


Whatever his faults as a charismatic military leader, Bermondt-Avalov remained committed to the idea of a nationalist German-Russian alliance, and he consistently worked to strengthen what he viewed as an eminently logical and necessary Central and Eastern European strategic partnership against the Entente.
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Re: The Russian Roots of Nazism, by Michael Kellogg

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Even in the face of defeat, Colonel Bermondt-Avalov continued to hope for a turnaround in the fortunes of his Western Volunteer Army. The primarily socialist German government, for its part, had tepidly supported and then increasingly outright opposed Bermondt-Avalov's army, yet it did not wish the force's destruction. Socialist leaders therefore arranged for Major General Eberhard to take command of the army and to lead it safely back to Germany. Colonel Bermondt-Avalov ceded command to Eberhard on November 19, 1919. The German government managed to persuade Latvian and Lithuanian forces to suspend major operations to allow for an orderly retreat of the so-called Baltikumkampfur (Baltic fighters).[110]

The Western Volunteer Army evacuated Mitau on the night of November 21/22, 1919. Many members of the force vented their rage at the situation by attacking Jews. [111] During the evacuation, many soldiers beat Jews as perceived enemies. Primarily Russian troops had earlier plundered Jewish stores since the Jews had refused to accept Bermondt-Avalov's currency. [112] The retreating army displayed intense anti-Weimar Republic sentiments as well. General Goltz even conceived a "Dolchstoss" or "stab in the back" on the part of the Weimar German government. [113]

Even in this desperate position, Bermondt-Avalov still hoped for an improvement in his fortunes through the assistance of Kapp and the powerful nationalist German collaborators around him. Bermondt-Avalov wrote a letter to Kapp in late November 1919. He noted that he had not achieved the "hoped-for success" in Latvia, but that this was inevitable given his army's lack of wages, clothing, and provisions. He stressed that as soon as his forces received the necessary support, they would again "take up the struggle for the culture and security of Europe" and stop the "wild Bolshevik horde" from "overflowing East Prussia." [114] Even at this late hour, Bermondt-Avalov still hoped for fruitful cooperation with Kapp and his co-conspirators to overthrow the Bolshevik regime.

Despite his fervent desire to continue an anti-Bolshevik struggle in the Baltic region and beyond, Bermondt-Avalov had to back down, at least publicly. He officially relinquished the leadership of the remnants of the White contingents of the Western Volunteer Army in late December 1919. In his last order, he told his men, "You were greeted as friends, not as foreign troops, and you must be grateful to the German people and keep this gratitude in your hearts for ever." [115] Bermondt-Avalov's rival, General Vladimir Biskupskii, sought to keep the Russian units of the Western Volunteer Army under arms as coherent military formations, but under pressure from the Entente, the White soldiers were disarmed and interned. [116]

Even after the disappointing end of the Latvian Intervention, White circles under Biskupskii and Bermondt-Avalov remained dedicated to defeating Bolshevism militarily, and they covertly built up German/Russian formations in Germany to achieve this goal. [117] In another development, General Goltz, the mastermind of the Latvian intervention, worked with Latvian Intervention supporter General Hoffmann behind the scenes to name General Biskupskii, whom they viewed as a strong leader, General-Inspector of the Russian Forces Interned in Germany. While the remnants of Bermondt-Avalov's army, which were interned in Camp Altengrabow not far from Berlin, officially passed under the control of Biskupskii and General Altvater, in fact the demobilized soldiers remained by and large intensely loyal to Bermondt-Avalov. [118]

With the internment of the White remnants of Bermondt-Avalov's Western Volunteer Army, Kapp, General Ludendorff, and their nationalist backers lost significant military support for their political aspirations. They also could not count on the assistance of demobilized Freikorps from the Baltic region, as the primarily socialist German government dissolved such units in January 1920 in an act of self-protection. [119] Kapp's colleague General Goltz nevertheless placed significant numbers of Baltikumer, as the German veterans of the Latvian Intervention were known, in East-Elbian military colonies. Here they served as a reserve against Bolshevism in Germany and abroad. Goltz ensured that only politically dependable soldiers joined such establishments, most notably former members of the now legendary Storm Section Rossbach. [120]

NATIONALIST GERMAN-WHITE EMIGRE COLLABORATION IN THE KAPP PUTSCH

While Goltz placed dependable soldiers from the Baltic Intervention in safe locations throughout East Elbian Prussia so that they could be used in a putsch against the Weimar Republic, General Ludendorff intensified his preparations to establish a right-wing dictatorship in which he would play a leading role. Weimar Germany's secret political police later asserted that Ludendorff had been the "father of the Kapp Putsch." [121] As well as counting upon interned White soldiers, Ludendorff upheld relations with Whites inside the former Russian Empire itself. In particular, he kept in contact with the Narodno-gosudarstvennaia Partiia (People's State Party), a successor organization to Vladimir Purishkevich's Black Hundred association, Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union. [122]

Purishkevich had nationalist and pro-German views. While heading Hetman Pavel Skoropadskii's health service in the Ukraine, he had led a small and yet active group that had desired an autocratic Tsar for a reconstituted Russian state and had admired Germany as a champion of order. [123] He had established the pro-German, anti-Bolshevik, and anti-Semitic People's State Party in late 1918 in Rostov/Don under the aegis of General Piotr Krasnov's Cossack formation, the Great Don Host. Krasnov's Cossacks had continued to fight against Bolshevik forces after Skoropadskii's Hetmanate in the Ukraine had collapsed in December 1918. [124]

Purishkevich disseminated his nationalist and anti-Semitic views in his newspaper, Blagovest: Zhurnal russkoi monarkhicheskoi narodnogosudarstvennoi mysli (The Ringing of the Church Bells: Journal for Russian Monarchical Peoples-State Thought). He advocated a "national dictatorship." He further argued that the Jews opposed the "Russian national spirit," and he called for an "open fight against Jewry." [125] The Ringing of the Church Bells cited the Russian author Fedor Dostoevskii's assertions, "The Jew and his Kahal" formed a "conspiracy against Russians," and "The Jews are Russia's undoing." [126]

Purishkevich's People's State Party displayed intense anti-Semitism in other ways. The organization believed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. [127] Moreover, the anti-Semitic Party Program stressed that the Jews had to be separated from Russian society through economic boycott, revocation of their citizenship rights, and severe limitation of their access to secondary education. The Party Program exhibited racist thought. It defined Jews as both those who practiced the Jewish religion and those who had converted to Christianity. The document ended with the assertion about the Jews: "Their role [in social and political life] is over once and for all." [128]

In January 1919, N. N. Fermot, the People's State Party's vice president, received one of General Ludendorff's emissaries while residing in Paris. Fermor left Paris for Berlin at the end of the month carrying a letter for Ludendorff. [129] The contents of this letter remain unknown, but Fermor's actions suggest significant collaboration between the nationalist circle around Kapp and Ludendorff and Purishkevich's People's State Party in the time leading up to the Kapp Putsch of March 1920. In any case, Purishkevich died of typhus in February 1920, and his death led to the decline of the People's State Party. [130]

While the conspiratorial clique around Kapp and General Ludendorff hoped for White assistance to overthrow the Weimar Republic, they relied most heavily upon Captain Hermann Ehrhardt's Second Marine Brigade (commonly known as the Ehrhardt Brigade) for armed support. Ehrhardt, a corvette captain, had founded his brigade in February 1919. The Ehrhardt Brigade had used 2,000 men to help overthrow the Soviet Bavarian Republic in May 1919 and had subsequently fought Polish invaders in Upper Silesia.
[131] Ehrhardt had also kept close tabs on the Latvian Intervention. In September 1919, he had written Kapp from Mitau, the site of Colonel Bermondt-Avalov's Western Volunteer Army Headquarters. Ehrhardt had asked Kapp to use his influence with General Ludendorff on behalf of Captain Heinz Guderian, who later became famous as Hitler's greatest proponent of armored warfare. [132] In 1920, the Ehrhardt Brigade was stationed near Berlin.

The conspiratorial circle around Kapp and Ludendorff faced a critical situation on March 10, 1920, when War Minister Noske ordered the dissolution of the Ehrhardt Brigade. [133] Ehrhardt consulted with Kapp's colleague Captain Pabst at length the next day. Ehrhardt agreed to march his brigade on Berlin during the night of March 12 so that his soldiers would be at the Brandenburg Gate in the center of Berlin the next morning. [134] Ehrhardt appeared as promised on the morning of March 13 with roughly 3,000 men. Hermann Goring, who later became one of the leading figures of the Third Reich, played a key leadership role in the Ehrhardt Brigade's renegade occupation of the German capital on behalf of Kapp. [135] The primarily socialist German government fled Berlin at the appearance of Ehrhardt's troops. [136]

Kapp seized political control in Berlin. He used the specter of Bolshevism to justify his putsch.
He issued a proclamation, "To the German People!" in which he stressed that the Weimar Republic had proved unable to fend off the threat of "devastation and murder through belligerent Bolshevism." He stressed that Germany faced "external and internal collapse" and therefore needed a "strong state authority." [137] He established a militaristic regime in which General Ludendorff, Colonel Bauer, and Captain Pabst played important roles. [138] Kapp faced a serious weakness, however, in that he lacked broad popular backing for his undertaking. [139]

Kapp received support for his putsch from volkisch Bavarians, including the Munich publicist Eckart and his then little-known pupil Hitler. Eckart had mobilized his considerable social connections to assist Hitler, including tying him to Kapp. [140] Kapp had met with Eckart in Munich in early 1920. [141] Eckart had then traveled to Berlin to confer with Kapp in Berlin three weeks before the latter's putsch attempt. Eckart had warned Kapp of "Bolshevism," stressing that "the Jews" would use the "easily led masses" to seize power in Germany "as in Russia." To counter this danger, Eckart had proposed imprisoning the Jews, at least the most influential ones, while there was still time. [142] After launching his putsch, Kapp arranged for Eckart and Hitler to be flown up from Munich to Berlin. [143]

In Berlin, Eckart soon despaired of Kapp's chances of leading a successful national revolution. Kapp did not imprison Jews as Eckart had recommended. Instead, he merely confiscated flour for matzos. This insufficient action subsequently led Eckart to comment in In Plain German: "One does not provoke wild animals, one locks them up." Kapp had refused to implement such a radical policy, and Eckart later asserted that Kapp's "half measures" had ensured his downfall. The last straw for Eckart came when he witnessed three Jews at Kapp's headquarters, "not groveling, but provocatively impudent." [144] Eckart had wished to help Kapp's undertaking precisely to combat Jewish influence in Germany, and the presence of Jewish representatives in Kapp's vicinity disgusted him.

According to a report that Kapp's pupil Hitler wrote, when he had met with Kapp's press chief on March 17, 1920, he had realized, "This could not be a national revolution" and that the Kapp Putsch would fail, "for the press chief was a Jew." [145] Hitler referred to Ignatz Trebitsch-Lincoln, an adventurer born to Jewish parents in Hungary who had left for Canada at the age of twenty and converted to Christianity, adding the name Lincoln to his original name Trebitsch. After a three-year prison term in England for falsifying documents, he had traveled to Berlin in 1919 and had begun collaborating with Kapp's colleague Colonel Bauer to coordinate a putsch against the Weimar Republic. Trebitsch-Lincoln emerged from behind the scenes in March 1920 to serve as Kapp's press chief. [146] After the Kapp Putsch failed, he fled to Budapest and passed information about monarchical activities in Germany to French intelligence. [147]


While Eckart and Hitler despaired of Kapp's undertaking early on, leading White emigres supported the undertaking more enthusiastically. The Russian remnants of the Western Volunteer Army unequivocally supported the Kapp Putsch. These men under the official direction of General Biskupskii and the unofficial leadership of Colonel Bermondt-Avalov had long been preparing to support Kapp's bid for power. [148] Shortly before the Kapp Putsch, Bermondt-Avalov wrote General Altvater at the Altengrabow Camp, where most of the former Western Volunteer Army members were interned. Bermondt-Avalov assured Altvater that conditions appeared favorable. He asserted that money, clothing, and munitions would shortly arrive, and he urged Altvater to keep the officers and soldiers together and on alert. [149] Biskupskii, the nominal head of the White elements of Bermondt-Avalov's former army, also supported Kapp's brief seizure of power. [150]

Other White emigres supported the Kapp Putsch. First Lieutenant Scheubner-Richter appeared in Berlin to assist Kapp's cause. Because of his open support of the Kapp Putsch, he was subsequently forced to give up his position as the secretary of the Ostdeutscher Heimatdienst (East German Home Service). [151] Colonel Fedor Vinberg and his associates Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork and Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, who published the far right newspaper The Call, compromised their position in Berlin by supporting the Kapp Putsch. [152]

Despite the assistance of leading White emigres in league with key German military figures, Kapp's undertaking collapsed within a week because it lacked popular support.
[153] Years later, in an essay titled "Looks Back and Parallels," Scheubner-Richter regarded the Kapp Putsch as an endeavor that "fatherland-loving men" had carried out in the belief that the Germans had opened their eyes. He lamented that this calculation had proved false. He drew parallels between the Kapp Putsch and the Kornilov Putsch, in which General Lavr Kornilov and his co-conspirators, including the White trio of Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii, had attempted to overthrow the Provisional Government in Russia in August 1917. [154]

In his own post-putsch assessment of the situation, Kapp indicated the considerable degree to which he had placed his hopes on the assistance of White forces. He wrote a letter from exile in Sweden to a friend after the failure of his putsch. He remarked that East Prussia had lost its ability to serve as the focal point of an "uprising" in Germany. This condition of impotence would last for the foreseeable future unless the "restoration of a strong national Russia" took place. [155] Such a turn of events did not occur, and East Prussia did indeed recede as the center of conservative revolutionary conspiracies in Germany. Bavaria, the birthplace of National Socialism, subsequently assumed this mantle.

CONCLUSION

The intense German-White/White emigre collaboration in 1919 and early 1920 in Latvia and Germany failed to achieve its objectives. The year 1919 witnessed the rise and fall of Colonel Pavel Bermondt-Avalov's Western Volunteer Army, which primarily consisted of German Freikorps and White Russian units. The Latvian Intervention under Bermondt-Avalov built upon the German-White cooperation that had been established in the Ukraine in 1918 as well as German successes in the Baltic region in World War I, in which the Baltic German First Lieutenant Max von Scheubner-Richter had played a prominent role. Bermondt-Avalov sought to work "hand in hand with Germany" to destroy Bolshevik rule. After some initial successes, Bermondt-Avalov's Western Volunteer Army faced rout and had to retreat back to Germany, largely because of increasing pressure from the Entente as well as the Weimar Republic.

Early 1920 saw the ignominious defeat of the first large-scale German-White emigre political alliance in Germany when the far right Kapp Putsch collapsed. The nationalist German conspirators around Kapp used demobilized German and White emigre formations from the Latvian Intervention to support the preparation and execution of their putsch. Volkisch German participants in the Kapp Putsch included, in addition to Wolfgang Kapp, General Erich von Ludendorff, his advisor Colonel Karl Bauer, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, whose troops deposed the largely socialist German government, as well as Adolf Hitler and his mentor Dietrich Eckart. White emigre supporters of the doomed undertaking included Bermondt-Avalov, General Vladimir Biskupskii, who had represented the Western Volunteer Army politically in Berlin, Scheubner-Richter, Colonel Fedor Vinberg, Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, and Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii. All of these officers went on to serve the National Socialist cause.

While the Latvian Intervention and the Kapp Putsch failed to achieve their immediate military and political objectives, they nevertheless fostered determined volkisch German-White/White emigre collaboration between men who viewed themselves as trapped between Bolshevik expansion from the East, Entente pressure from the West, and the opposition and betrayal of the left-wing political establishment in Germany. The Latvian Intervention in particular granted a powerful sense of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Entente, and anti-Weimar Republic solidarity to its right-wing German and White emigre participants. Many Baltikumer (Baltic fighters) went on to join the National Socialist Party. [156]

The collapse of the Kapp Putsch in Berlin following the failure of the Latvian Intervention brought about a low point in the fortunes of the German/White emigre far right. National revolutionary German and White emigre conspirators based in East Elbian Prussia undermined their political position by participating in the Kapp Putsch. They subsequently either had to maintain low profiles or to flee the region altogether. From late March 1920 on, Bavaria in general and Munich in particular, where the Kapp Putsch had succeeded, provided the leading haven for the collaboration of volkisch Germans (increasingly under National Socialist leadership) and pro-nationalist German White emigres. From their power base in Bavaria, National Socialists and their volkisch allies conspired with White emigres in various anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Semitic, and anti-Bolshevik schemes.

_______________

Notes:

1 Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University  of Minnesota Press, 1989).
 
2 Protocol of a Baltischer Vertrauensrat meeting on March 1, 1919, BAB, 8054, number 2, 138.
 
3 Max von Scheubner-Richter, "Abriss des Lebens- und Bildungsganges von Dr. Max Erwin von  Scheubner-Richter," sent to Walther Nicolai in April 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 1414, opis 1, delo  21, 230; Otto von Kursell, "Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis," ed. Henrik  Fischer (Munich, 1969), 4, 5, 9, 24.
 
4 Max Hildebert Boehm, “Baltische Einflusse auf die Anfange des Nationalsozialismus," Jahrbuch des  baltischen Deutschtums, 1967, 59, 60.
 
5 Kursell, “Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis," 9.
 
6 Evaluation of Scheubner-Richter from Major-General Buchfink sent to Nicolai on March 20, 1923,  RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 1414, opis 1, delo 21, 228.
 
7 Protocol of a Baltischer Vertrauensrat meeting on March 1, 1919, BAB, 8054, number 2, 138.
 
8 Kursell, "Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis," 10, 11.
 
9 Scheubner-Richter, "Die Rote Armee," Volkischer Beobachter, March 21, 1923, 3.
 
10 Scheubner-Richter, "Deutschlands Bolschewisierung," Volkischer Beobachter, September 21, 1923, I.
 
11 Alfred Rosenberg, "Von Brest-Litowsk nach Versailles," Volkischer Beobachter, May 8, 1921, 5.
 
12 Waldemar Helb, Album Rubonorum, 1875-1972, fourth edn. (Neustadt an def Aisch: Verlag Degener  & Co., 1972), 165.
 
13 PDM report from January 26, 1931, NSDAPHA, BAB, NS 26, number 1259, 8.
 
14 Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson,  1965), 60; Seppo Kuusisto, Alfred Rosenberg in der nationalsozialistischen Aussenpolitik 1933-1939,  trans. Christian Krotzl (Helsinki: Finska Historiska Samfundet, 1984), 12, 13, 30.
 
15 "Der Kampfer Alfred Rosenberg: Zur Ernennung des Reichsleiters zum Reichsminister fur die  besetzten Gebiete," Parteipresse-Sonderdienst, Nr. 368, November 17, 1941, KR, BAB, NS 8, number  8, 8.
 
16 Wolfgang Frank, "Professor Otto v. Kursell: Wie ich den Fuhrer zeichnete," Hamburger Illustrierte,  March 6, 1934, BHSAM, Sammlung Personen, number 7440, 12.
 
17 Helb, Album Rubonorum, 141.
 
18 Kursell, "Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis," 9, 10.
 
19 Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampfgegen den Bolschewismus: Erinnerungen von General Furst Awaloff,  Oberbefehlshaber der Deutsch-Russischen Westarmee im Baltikum (Hamburg: Von J. J. Augustin, 1925),  251, 252.
 
20 Helb, Album Rubonorum, 165.
 
21 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampf gegen den Bolschewismus, 68-70.
 
22 Bruno Thoss, Der Ludendorff-Kreis 1919-1923: Munchen als Zentrum der mitteleuropaischen Gegenrevolution  zwischen Revolution und Hitler-Putsch (Munich: Stadtarchiv Munchen, 1978), 372.
 
23 Myller-Leibnitz, “V. Der Ruckmarsch der 10. Armee im Winter 1918/19," [1937?], RGVA  (TsKhIDK), fond 1424, opis 1, delo 13, 39.
 
24 Scheubner-Richter, ''Abriss des Lebens- und Bildungsganges," April 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond  1414, opis I, delo 21, 230, 231.
 
25 Kursell, "Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis," 12, 24.
 
26 Robert Williams, Culture in Exile: Russian Emigres in Germany, 1881-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University  Press, 1972), I65; Rudolf Klatt, Ostpreussen unter dem Reichskommissariat 1919/1920 (Heidelberg:  Quelle & Meyer, 1958), 82.
 
27 Scheubner-Richter, "Deutschlands Bolschewisierung," I; Muller-Leibnitz, "V. Der Ruckmarsch der  10. Armee im Winter 1918/19," RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 1424, opis I, delo 13, 38.
 
28 "Die Ereignisse im Baltikum vom Herbst 1918 bis Ende 1919," January 1920, BA/MF, RWM, Nachlass  247, number 91, 4.
 
29 A. V. Smolin, Beloe dvizhenie na Severo-Zapade Rossii 1918-1920 (Saint Petersburg, Dmitrii Bulanin,  1999), 334.
 
30 Kursell, "Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis," 13.
 
31 Williams, Culture in Exile, 164; Klatt, Ostpreussen unter dem Reichskommissariat, 139.
 
32 "Reichszentrale fur Heimatdienst," a booklet, RKUoO, BAB, 1507, number 23, 4.
 
33 Muller-Leibnitz, "II. Der Feldzug im Baltikum 1919," [1937?], RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 1255, opis 2,  delo, 48, 4.
 
34 "Hochwohlgeborener Herr Generalmajor Graf von der Goltz!", BA/MF, Nachlass 714, number I,  I; Eduard Freiherr von der Goltz, Kriegsgedachtnisbuch des Geschlechts der Grafen und Freiherrn von  der Goltz (Potsdam: Stiftungsverlag, 1919), 29.
 
35 Rosenberg, "Von Brest-Litowsk nach Versailles," 5.
 
36 Rudiger von der Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und im Baltikum (Leipzig: Koehler, 1920), V.
 
37 Goltz, Die Schuld (Greifswald: L. Bamberg, 1921), 288, 292.
 
38 Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und im Baltikum, 127, 147.
 
39 Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und im Baltikum, 124, 221; Muller-Leibnitz, "II. Der Feldzug im  Baltikum 1919," RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 1255, opis 2, delo 48, 24.
 
40 JM charge against Piotr Shabeiskii-Bork and Sergei Taboritskii from May 29, 1922, GSAPKB,  Repositur 84a, number 14953, 16; letter from Taboritskii to Mrs. Shabelskii-Bork from March 18,  1926, GSAPKB, Repositur 84a, number 14953, 80.
 
41 Wolfgang Kapp correspondence, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 801.
 
42 Letter from Alfred Fletcher to Kapp from March 11, 1919, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 801, 57.
 
43 Kapp, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Marz-Unternehmens," 1922, BAK, Nachlass 309, number 7, 18.
 
44 DB report from October 12, 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opis I, delo 878, reel 4, 331, 332.
 
45 Kapp, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Marz-Unternehmens," 1922, BAK, Nachlass 309, number 7, 18.
 
46 Letter from Max Hoffmann to his wife from January 16, 1917, BA/MF, Nachlass 37, number 2, 155.
 
47 Kapp, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Marz-Unternehmens," 1922, BAK, Nachlass 309, number 7, 18.
 
48 Letter from Karl Graf von Bothmer to Kapp from August 28, 1916, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 792, 55.
 
49 Letter from Kapp to Bothmer from September 8, 1916, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 792, 73.
 
50 Dietrich Eckart's examination at the AGM from July 10, 1920, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 567, opis 1, delo 2496, 17.
 
51 Letter from Eckart to Kapp from February 11, 1919, BAK, Nachlass 309, number 7.
 
52 Margarete Plewnia, Auf dem Weg zu Hitler: Der "volkische" Publizist Dietrich Eckart (Bremen: Schunemann Universitatsverlag, 1970), 29.
 
53 Paul Leverkuhn, Posten auf ewiger Wache: Aus dem abenteurreichen Leben des Max von Scheubner-Richter  (Essen: Essener Verlagsanstalt, 1938), 184.
 
54 Johannes Baur, Die russische Kolonie in Munchen, 1900-1945: Deutsch-russische Beziehungen im 20.  Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1998), 182, 185; Frank, "Professor Otto v. Kursell: Wie  ich den Fuhrer zeichnete," Hamburger Illustrierte, March 6, 1934 BHSAM, Sammlung Personen,  number 7440, 12.
 
55 Rosenberg, Memoirs, KR, BAB, NS 8, number 20, 3.
 
56 Frank, "Professor Otto v. Kursell: Wie ich den Fuhrer zeichnete," Hamburger Illustrierte, March 6,  1934, BHSAM, Sammlung Personen, number 7440, 12.
 
57 Draft in possession of Hausen, March 16, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 577, opis 2, delo 130, 1-5.
 
58 Georg Taube, "Der Esten Krieg," [1920], BAB, 8025, number 15, 3.
 
59 Kursell, "Dr. Ing. Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter zum Gedachtnis," 25.
 
60 Arno Schickedanz, [May] 1919 report to Scheubner-Richter. IZG, ZS 2368, 2-6, 8.
 
61 RKUo0 report from January 18, 1922, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 71, 91, 92; DB  report from March 6, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 198, opis 9, delo 4474, reel 1, 48.
 
62 Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und im Baltikum, 221.
 
63 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampfgegen den Bolschewismus, 51, 52, 128; LGPO report to the RK050 from  September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 71, 18.
 
64 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampf gegen den Bolschewismus, 145, 146, 151; Smolin, Beloe dvizhenie na  Severo-Zapade Rossii, 337.
 
65 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampfgegen den Bolschewismus, 151, 152, 164.
 
66 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampf gegen den Bolschewismus, 153, 156; Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland  und im Baltikum, 222, 223.
 
67 LGPO report to the RKUoO from September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 71,  18.
 
68 Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und im Baltikum, 224.
 
69 Elisabeth Schwarze, "Einleitung," Nachlass Wolfgang Kapp (Berlin: GSAPKB, 1997), VIII.
 
70 Kapp, "Zur Vorgeschichte des Marz-Unternehmens," 1922, BAK, Nachlass 309, number 7, 19.
 
71 Waldemar Pabst, "Das Kapp-Unternehmen," 1952, BA/MF, Nachlass 620, number 3, 6; Heinrich  Class, Wider den Strom, vol. 2, BAK, Kleine Erwerbung 499, 233.
 
72 RKUoO report from November 1920, BAB, 1507, number 208, 48.
 
73 Pabst, "Auszug aus meinem Lebenslauf, 1954, BA/MF, Nachlass 620, number I, 2; RKUoO report.  [1925?), RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 781, 4.
 
74 Pabst, "Nachkriegserlebnisse als ra und Stahschef der Garde-Kav.- (Schu) Division," BA/MF, Nachlass 620, number 2, 136; Williams, Culture in Exile, 98, 165.
 
75 Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und im Baltikum, 245.
 
76 Andreas Remmer's testimony from June 1, 1923, BHSAM, BSMA 36, number 103009, 12.
 
77 RKUoO report from July 20, 1922, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 772, opis I, delo 96, 150, 151.
 
78 Captain Wagener, "Bericht uber die augenblickliche Lage in Mitau," Berlin, September 8, 1919, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 815, 40.
 
79 Remmer's testimony from June 1, 1923, BHSAM, BSMA 36, number 103009, 12.
 
80 Goltz, Meine Sendung in Finnland und im Baltikum, 147, 225.
 
81 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampfgegen den Bolschewismus, 204.
 
82 LGPO report to the RKUoO from September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3,  delo 71, 18.
 
83 RKUoO report from January 11, 1922, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond 772, opis 3, delo 71, 80, 81.
 
84 RKUoO report to the RMI from December 6, 1926, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3,  delo 71, 196.
 
85 Bermondt-Avalov, "Offener Brief an die Englander," Deutsches Abendblatt, May 8, 1921, included in an LGPO report to the RKUoO from September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond772, opis 3, delo 71,12.
 
86 Letter from Bermondt-Avalov to Karl Werkmann from September 27, 1925, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 603, opis 2, delo 30, 2.
 
87 Bermondt-Avalov, "Das Erbe der Revolution und des Bolschewismus," included in an RKUoO report from September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 71, 22-24, 30.
 
88 Letter to the editorial staff of Volia Rossii from February 28, 1921, ATsVO, GARF, fond 5893, opis I, delo 201, 87.
 
89 Remmer's testimony from June 1, 1923, BHSAM, BSMA 36, number 103009, 12.
 
90 Vladimir Biskupskii's testimony included in a PDM report to the BSMA from June 2, 1923, BHSAM, BSMA 36, number 103009, 7.
 
91 Thoss, Der Ludenendorff-Kreis, 372.
 
92 Smolin, Beloe dvizhenie na Severo-Zapade Rossii, 345.
 
93 RKUoO report to the PP/AIA from May 30, 1924, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 81a, 58; Remmer testimony from June 1, 1923, BHSAM, BSMA 36, number 103009, 10.
 
94 RKUoO report from May 8, 1924 and RKUoO report to the PP/AIA from May 30, 1924, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond772, opis 3, delo 81a, 52, 58.
 
95 "Die Ereignisse im Baltikum vom Herbst 1918 bis Ende 1919," January 1920, BA/MF, RWM, Nachlass 247, number 91, 6.
 
96 Charge against Hermann Ehrhardt from May 5, 1923, RKUoO, BAB, 1507, number 339, 87/5.
 
97 RKUo0 report from March 18, 1920, BAB, 1507, number 214, 9, 12.
 
98 "Die Ereignisse im Baltikum vom Herbst 1918 his Ende 1919," January 1920, BA/MF, RWM,  Nachlass 247, number 91, 7.
 
99 Bermondt-Avalov, "Offener Brief an die Englander," Deutsches Abendblatt, May 8, 1921, included  in an LGPO report to the RKUoO from September 9, 1921, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3,  delo 71, 14.
 
100 Eckart/Rosenberg, "Zwischen den Schachern," Auf gut deutsch: Wochenschrift fur Ordnung und  Recht, March 5, 1920.
 
101 Rosenberg, ''Antisemitismus: Eine wirtschaftliche, politische, nationale, religiose und sittliche  Notwendigkeit, (Schluss)," Volkischer Beobachter, August 21, 1921, 3.
 
102 "Die Ereignisse im Baltikum vom Herbst 1918 bis Ende 1919," January 1920, BA/MF, RWM,  Nachlass 247, number 91, 6.
 
103 Scheubner-Richter, "Deutschlands Bolschewisierung," I.
 
104 Gerhard Rossbach's deposition from May 11, 1923, RKUoO, BAB, 1507, number 211, 149.
 
105 RKUoO report from January 2, 1923, BAB, 1507, number 345, 274.
 
106 Interview with Rossbach on December 13, 1951, IZG, ZS 128, 6.
 
107 Erich von Ludendorff's deposition from May 16, 1923, RKUoO, BAB, 1507, number 211, 136.
 
108 "Die Ereignisse im Baltikum vom Herbst 1915 bis Ende 1919," January 1920, BA/MF, RWM,  Nachlass 247, number 91, 7.
 
109 Letter from Bermondt-Avalov to Kapp from November 9, 1919, GSAPK, Repositur92, number 815, 88.
 
110 "Die Ereignisse im Baltikum vom Herbst 1918 bis Ende 1919," January 1920, BA/MF, RWM, Nachlass 247, number 91, 7; Smolin, Beloe dvizhenie na Severo-Zapade Rossii, 349.
 
111 Bermondt-Avalov, Im Kampfgegen den Bolschewismus, 229.
 
112 LGPO report from December 1, 1919, GSAPKB, Repositur 77, title 1810, number 2, 29, 31.
 
113 Johannes Erger, Der Kapp-Luttwitz-Putsch: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Innenpolitik 1919/20 (Dusseldorf: Droste Verlag, 1967), 54.
 
114 Letter from Bermondt-Avalov to Kapp from November 28, 1919, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 815, 93.
 
115 Bermondt-Avalov's order of resignation from December 24, 1919, RGVA, fond 40147, opis I, delo 18, 17.
 
116 "Tagebuchauszug von General der Infanterie a. D. Hasse," December 2, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 1255, opis 2, delo 42, 10.
 
117 LGPOP report from March 9, 1920, GSAPKB, Repositur 77, title 1810, number I, 76.
 
118 OKL report from April 8, 1920, RGVA, fond 40147, opis I, delo 48, 1. 3, 4.
 
119 Interview with Rossbach on December 13, 1951, IZG, ZS 128, 6.
 
120 Goltz, "Erste Versuche," BA/MF, Nachlass 714, number 14, 1.
 
121 RKUo0 report to the BSMA from January 31, 1924, BHSAM, BSMA 36, number 103456, 7.
 
122 Rafael Ganelin, "Beloe dvizhenie i 'Protokoly sionskikh mudretsov,'" Natsionainaia pravaia prezhde  i teper: Istoriko-sotsiowgicheskie ocherki, chast I: Rossiia i russkoe zarubezhe (Saint Petersburg: Institut  Sotsiologii rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 1992), 127.
 
123 EMG report to the DB from October 22, 1919, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opis I, delo 953, reel 4,  313.
 
124 ATsVO report from September 27, 1921, GARF, fond 5893, opis 1, delo 46, 7.
 
125 Vladimir Purishkevich, "Bez zabrala," Blagovest: Zhurnal russkoi monarkhicheskoi narodno-gosudarst-vennoi mysli, December 1919, 1, 2. GARF.
 
126 Nikolai Ismailov, "Chudesnyi son," Blagovest, December 1919, 3.
 
127 "Sionskie Protokoly," Chasovoi, January 23, 1919, 1, GARF.
 
128 Henri Rollin, L 'Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de de la propagande allemande d'apres des documents inedits (Paris: Gallimard, 1939), 169, 170.
 
129 SG report from January 28, 1920, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond I, opis 27, delo 12518, 2.
 
130 S. A. Stepanov, Chernaia Sotnia v Rossii 1905-1914 (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Vsesoiuznogo zaochnogo politekhnicheskogo instituta, 1992), 329.
 
131 RKUoO report from September 2, 1921, BAB, 1507, number 568, 24; deposition of Manfred von Killinger from December 22, 1922, RKUoO, BAH, 1507. number 339, 412.
 
132 Letter from Ehrhardt to Kapp from September 12, 1919, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 815, 43.
 
133 Deposition of Killinger from December 22, 1922, RKUoO, BAH, 1507, number 339, 412.
 
134 Charge against Ehrhardt from May 5,1923, RKUoO, BAB, 1507, number 339, 8716, 7.
 
135 RKUoO report from July 13, 1923, BAH, 1507, number 442, 100; deposition of Killinger from December 22, 1922, RKUoO, BAB, 1507, number 339, 412.
 
136 RKUoO report, [1925?], RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 781, 4.
 
137 Kapp, ''An das deutsche Volk!" [March 1920], BAK, Nachlass 309, number 7.
 
138 RKUoO report, [1925?], RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond772, opis 3, delo 781, 4.
 
139 Erger, Der Kapp-Luttwitz-Putsch, 300.
 
140 Rosenberg, "Meine erste Begegnung mit dem Fuhrer,” The National Archives, Records of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, 1941-45, IZG, number 454, roll 63, 578.
 
141 Letter from Karl Mayr to Kapp from September 24, 1920, GSAPKB, Repositur 92, number 840/1, 4.
 
142 Eckart's examination at the AGM on July 10, 1920, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 567, opis 1, delo 2496, 17.
 
143 Letter from Wilhelm Kiefer to Anneliese Kapp from June 24, 1958, BAK, Nachlass 309, number 20.
 
144 Eckart, "Kapp," Auf gut deutsch, April 16, 1920, 4.
 
145 Adolf Hitler, March 29, 1920 report on the Kapp Putsch, Samtliche Aufzeichnungen, eds. Eberhard Jackel and Axel Kuhn (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 117.
 
146 AA report to the RKUoO from April 23, 1926, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond772, opis 3, delo 927, 30, 32, 33.
 
147 RMI report to the RKUoO from July 16, 1926, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 927, 47;  PDB report to the RKUoO from May 28, 1926, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 772, opis 3, delo 927, 40.
 
148 DB report from July 23,1920, RGVA (TsKhIDK), fond 7, opis I, delo 1255, reel 2, 209.
 
149 SKoO report to the AA from April 26, 1920, PAAA, 83377, 62.
 
150 Ganelin, "Rossiiskoe chernosotenstvo i germanskii national-sotsializm," Natsionalnaia pravaia,  142.
 
151 Scheubner-Richter, ''Abriss des Lebens- und Bildungsganges," April 1923, RGVA (TsKhIDK),fond  1414, opis 1, delo 21, 231.
 
152 Aleksandr von Lampe, Dnevnik (Diary), Berlin, August 13, 1920, GARF, fond 5853, opis I, delo 3,  920.
 
153 Erger, Der Kapp-Luttwitz-Putsch, 300.
 
154 Scheubner-Richter, "Ruckblicke und Parallelen," Wirtschafts-politische Aufbau-Korrespondenz uber  Ostfragen und ihre Bedeutung fur Deutschland, July 19, 1922, 2.
 
155 Letter from Kapp to an East Prussian friend from September 22, 1920, BAK, Nachlass 309, number  7.
 
156 RKUoO report from November 24, 1922, BAB, 1507, number 345, 266.
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