When the Emperor of Austria-Hungary pleaded with the German Kaiser to not grant passage to Lenin’s train across Germany to the Bolshevik leadership, Wilhelm II dismissed the proposal and only agreed the sealed train carrying the Bolshevik leadership would not travel via Austrian territory, but straight from Germany to Russia.
Understanding what was at stake, Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary immediately sought peace with the Allies through secret negotiations conducted by his brother-in law, Prince Sixtus of Bourbon-Parma. Plus attempting to get out of WWI entirely, the Austro-Hungarian Government also asked for a separate peace with Russia. By then however, given it’s exact timing, the German Emperor Wilhelm II had already pulled the trigger. The leader of the White Russian army, General Kerensky wrote:
“On the eve of the Bolshevik seizure of power the Austro-Hungarian Government addressed to the Provisional Government a request for a separate peace. The move was made without knowledge of Berlin. It was particularly significant because Foreign Minister Tereshchenko had long been preparing, with the cooperation of the diplomatic representatives in Bulgaria and Turkey, a plan for negotiations that would have meant the exit of Bulgaria and Turkey from the war.”
Colonel Nikitine further stated that the timing of the Bolshevik coup, or 'Revolution' as they were pleased to call it, was not divorced from this initiative. He observed: Bolshevik Titers and others credit Lenin with having timed the rising correctly, although Trotsky deferred it to the 7th September, but in point of fact its actual date had been fixed by the German General Staff beforehand - and it was known to the members of the Provisional Government. In July the outbreak occurred by their instructions and against the wishes of Lenin, whereas in October he fully concurred in it.
The timing of both the 'July Days' and the October Revolution appears to lend circumstantial support to the claim. Certainly the 'July Days' coincided with the so-called Kerensky Offensive, when the Russian Army launched what was to be its last major attack of the war on the Eastern front. The October Revolution was perfectly timed to scotch any hope of peace negotiations by Austria bearing fruit.
Parallel to this the Bolsheviks began to publish the secret treaties between Russia and the Western Allies, where Russia was to have annexed Constantinople and the Straits, while Britain and France carved up the rest of the Ottoman Empire between them. On mainland Europe, the French and Russians were both have a free hand in defining their respective frontiers with Germany, and Russia was free to do what she would with a common frontier with the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Also the territorial promises made to Italy at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
One of Germany's own, war aims that the British Empire would lose India as a price for going to war against Germany. With Britain's Grand Fleet controlling the seas, there was no prospect of a direct attack on British India. The only other options, both of which Germany adopted, were to employ Indian nationalists or to try to infiltrate German and Turkish teams into India and Afghanistan in order to incite an invasion of India by Afghanistan and simultaneously inspire the Indian masses to rise against the British.The only overland routes by which they could achieve this were through Persia, or across Transcaucasia and Transcaspia. Whilst Russia remained in the war the latter route was completely blocked, although the Germans tried to instigate a revolution among the Georgians through the nationalist Prince Machabelli and others. With the cooperation of the Turks, the Germans persistently attempted to sneak clandestine parties across Persia to their goals, and strained to incite the Persian Government to go to war with Britain and Russia. To counteract these efforts both the British and Russians intervened in Persia, and successfully blocked these attempts though, on too many occasions for comfort, it was a near run thing.
One of Germany's own avowed war aims that the British Empire would lose India as a price for going to war against Germany. With Britain's Grand Fleet controlling the seas, there was no prospect of a direct attack on British India. The only other options, both of which Germany adopted, were to employ Indian nationalists or to try to infiltrate German and Turkish teams into India and Afghanistan in order to incite an invasion of India by Afghanistan and simultaneously inspire the Indian masses to rise against the British.
The only overland routes by which they could achieve this were through Persia, or across Transcaucasia and Transcaspia. Whilst Russia remained in the war the latter route was completely blocked, although the Germans tried to instigate a revolution among the Georgians through the nationalist Prince Machabelli and others. With the cooperation of the Turks, the Germans persistently attempted to sneak clandestine parties across Persia to their goals, and strained to incite the Persian Government to go to war with Britain and Russia. To counteract these efforts both the British and Russians intervened in Persia, and successfully blocked these attempts though, on too many occasions for comfort, it was a near run thing.
The British also had been endeavouring to finance both the Armenians and Cossacks. A stopgap was engineered by purchasing 2,808,000 roubles from the Imperial Bank of Persia, a sum to be redeemed in London at a value of £48,264--14s. The rouble notes were taken to Tiflis by King's Messenger. On 4 February 1918 after setting out from Baghdad, a British convoy of forty-two vehicles arrived at the foot of the Hamadan Pass, in the Zagros Mountains of Kurdistan, en route to Tiflis, Georgia and the Caspian Sea. But the pass was blocked by snow.
In the meantime, elements within Russia that the Allies tried to use to fight the Germans and the Bolsheviks all laboured under the same disadvantage. All were completely landlocked and the Allies could not send them any direct assistance. Thus money, not men, was all that could be offered. Thus the British began surreptitiously supporting counter-revolutionary movements in Siberia. A telegram from Sir J. Jordan, the British Ambassador in Peking, contained in the files of the Political and Secret Department of the India Office, shows this clearly. Its subject is the difficulties involved in financing these different movements. Among those whom the British were financing was the Ataman Semenoff, a singularly unruly and unpleasant individual who, operating from the safety of China, made repeated incursions into Siberia. These were reputedly antiBolshevik, but by all accounts they bore more resemblance to unlicensed pillaging expeditions. Henry Sly, the British Consul at Harbin, was responsible for these payments and had received two original grants of £20,000 for this purpose, and these had realized 897,993 roubles.
Just like in the case of Germans, this was entirely in keeping with the traditional British policy of subsidizing continental opposition to a sovereign or country that threatened to establish hegemony over the continent. It had been a tried and trusted weapon against Philip II, the Bourbon kings and Napoleon. In Russia shortage of suitable candidates sometimes meant backing unsavory individuals such as Semenoff. Yet he was a mere sardine in the ocean in the broader context of what the Allies were trying to achieve in Siberia. On his own, this sardine could never be a threat to Bolshevik rule much less to German domination of Russia.
Thus Lord Robert Cecil and the former Military Attache in Russia, Colonel Knox, had been advocating Japanese intervention since December 1917. It was in January 1918 however that the British War Cabinet started giving the prospect serious consideration. After debating the issue for nearly two weeks, a majority of the War Cabinet finally agreed to favor it on the 24th.
Although the Japanese Government favored military intervention, they demanded the political support of the United States before taking any active step. Months of diplomatic wrangling ensued as the British, French and Italians attempted to pressure and persuade President Wilson to embark on this venture. Ultimately, the military interventions with American backing did take place once the British and French contrived to gain Wilson's support through the use of further clandestine maneuvers, but this was to come later in the year.
For now, the Allies were faced with a new enemy in Moscow. On 26 April the new German Ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach, presented his credentials to Swrdlov in Moscow. Mirbach was forty-seven years old and the head of a wealthy family of Prussian Catholics. He was a career diplomat who had been Counselor in the German Embassy in St Petersburg between 1908 and 1911. Specialized American historian Richard Pipes states that the German Foreign Office instructed Mirbach to support the Bolshevik Government and under no circumstances should he enter into communication with opposition parties.
British agents
and their Russian supporters didn’t leave it at this, at 3.30 p.m. on 6
July gunshots and an explosion echoed in the German Embassy. Two men, raced
out and leaped the Embassy fence and dived into a waiting car. Inside the
Embassy, Count von Mirbach lay dead.
The Germans
decide to move their Embassy staff to Petrograd, accompanied by 800 German
soldiers in Russian uniform. The Germans, in an arrangement with the Bolsheviks,
so the Bolsheviks would not be embarrassed by appearing to be subservient
to the Germans. As soon a new German Ambassador Dr. Helfferich, was
appointed, the Bolsheviks invited the Germans, to march an army to north
Russia along a route they would prepare for them. This was to run from
the Finnish to the north, avoiding Petrograd and Petrozavodsk. Such an
advance would inevitably threaten any advance the Allies made from Murmansk
and Archangel. In return, the Bolsheviks wanted the German army in the
Ukraine to combat any attempt by the Volunteer Army to march north.
The Allies in turn where hoping they could create an uprising of the common people the Allies planned to interdict the food supplies to the cities under Bolshevik dominion. In a letter, Rene Marchand , the Russian correspondent for Le Figaro wrote:
“After that, two sabotage agents made a report about the steps they had taken to cut off Petrograd from food supplies. One of them said that everything was made ready to blow up the bridge which spanned the River Volkhov near Avanka. The other reported that he was only waiting for a specific order to blow up the Cherepovetz Bridge, which connected Petrograd with the Eastern provinces from where the city's food supply came. According to the plot, the blowing up of the bridges was supposed to be timed with the mutiny of two Lettish regiments in Vologda, in order to prevent troops of the Petrograd garrison from reaching the attacking mutineers.”
Explaining this, the British Naval Attaché in Petrograd Captain Francis Cromie wrote in a letter to Admiral William R. Hall: “The Hand that feeds this people will be the Master of Russia, in spite of any military force that may be sent against it, and everyone agrees with my opinion that if the Allies can hold Vologda (and the troops are only waiting for us to come to turn over to us) we can call on the people of Russia to hold the railways for us and assist us to distribute Siberian corn to the big towns. They will do anything in return for food, and are at last convinced that the Germans cannot help in this matter, and that their present Government will not.”
Apart from a relatively small number of people however, the Russians wanted an end to the war. This had been the main motive behind popular support for the Bolsheviks in 1917. The fact was ignored in the Western capitals as was the fact that the opposition parties did not speak for the mass of the Russian people.
When the Cheka raided the premises of the Allied officers and agents on 31 August, they found eighteen pounds of explosives in his flat at the French lycee where he had been using a teaching post as a cover, together with a code and 28,000 roubles. French agent Martial de Verthamon escaped. The plan to sever the stronghold of Bolshevism from its sustenance by sabotage was the special sphere of the French. Yet sabotage was not the only tool. The main supplies of grain reached central Russia from the Ukraine, the Kuban and Siberia. The Ukraine was in German hands and was in chaos. The Kuban Cossacks had joined the Volunteer Army. Under the protective umbrella of the Czechoslovak Legion, the Whites controlled much of Siberia and there was the prospect of the junction of the Czechoslovaks and the Allies from the north. These factors opened the prospect of cutting off Siberian foodstuffs on a strategic scale. The plan was thus to work on two levels: an immediate threat created by sabotage; a strategic one founded upon domination of the grain-producing areas and their communications.
Also walking a tightrope, the Germans now decided to switch their weight between the Bolsheviks and extreme Monarchists in order to keep Russia divided and to enable them to apply pressure to either party should one or the other not meet German demands. By playing them off against each other, they could reasonably expect to wield considerable influence over whichever party held power in Russia. The German-backed White movement was so numerically small as to be derisory, but the threat of increased German support may well have lent it potency beyond that merited by its numbers. To this end the Germans had also been using the nascent Ukrainian nationalism as a tool to fragment the Russian Empire. As Russia descended into chaos, Ukraine grew stronger, and at the end of the year declared independence.
The clandestine operations of the Allies increasingly were becoming clearly aimed at overthrowing the Bolsheviks. They were courting the widest possible range of political elements in Russia to create, it was hoped, a national force that would be powerful enough to crush the Bolsheviks with the aid of limited Allied forces. Their intrigues embraced every antiBolshevik party from the Right Social Revolutionaries to the Monarchists and, with these last, they were in direct competition with the Germans.
When the Allies had won over most of the parties in Russia that opposed the Bolsheviks, timed to coincide with a potential Allied intervention, the Germans decided to plan a coup. In fact, Germany's long-running flirtation with the Monarchists at this point owed much to both the original concept of their plan for a Mitteleuropa, a huge Central European constitutional-monarchic bloc under German leadership, and the nature and proclivities of the ruling elite: the Kings, Grand Dukes and Princes of the German Empire, backed by one of the staunchest upholders of the principle of monarchy - the Kaiser.Thus it was that plans were laid for the Duke of Urach to be consecrated King of Lithuania, and Prince Friedrich Karl of Hesse to become King of Finland, while the Archduke Karl Stephan of Austria-Hungary was a serious contender for the throne of the intended puppet kingdom of Poland.
Most of the
more extreme Monarchists had rallied in Kiev, capital of the now German
puppet state of the Ukraine, where the Germans had installed a former Tsarist
General, Skoropadsky. There is no doubt that the British were aware.of
these intrigues, if not their ultimate outcome. Captain Cromie's deputy,
Engineer Commander George Wilfred Le Page, sent home a report on them that
received wide circulation. It is worth quoting:
"“Following
information received from Staff of Ludendorff. German General Staff consider
in a month their attack on Western Front will render Allied Armies incapable
of taking the offensive for some considerable time. They then propose to
turn to Russia break Brest peace and declare a Monarchy. This has not yet
been finally agreed to by Reichstag Party. Conditions will be more favourable
than Brest Peace Conference, return of all territory to Russia even Ukraine,
Estonia, Finland, Courland to be autonomous under either German or Russian
Suzerainity [sic suzerainty], but German culture of Baltic States to have
full sway. Finland to be independent under Russian protection. Economic
conditions will be onerous but less so than at present. Candidate for Throne
is Grand Duke Michael and a high German Agent has already been sent to
Perm to open negotiations but Grand Duke has temporarily disappeared.My
informant a high Russian Officer whose name must remain secret a personal
friend and in whom I have complete confidence has lately travelled much
and has been much in contact with peasants, says until further famine is
threatened, the crisis will be in July and it is then Germans will declare
Monarchy, in August new harvest will be available and all this will be
put down to new Monarchy regime. He considers Monarchy only means of saving
situation and in view of German purpose it would seem such is the case
and that it would be to Allies advantage to forestall Germans."
Grand Duke M'
was Michael Alexandrovich, the younger brother of Nicholas II who had been
made the heir to the Russian throne in the latter's Instrument of Abdication.
He had held the throne for one day, before abdicating in the face of the
hostility of the Muscovites and the absence of any guarantees for his personal
safety. He had lived under house arrest at Perm and disappeared from his
hotel room there on the night of 12/ 13 June 1918. The official version
of his fate - that the Bolsheviks murdered him - rests on the wholly unreliable
account given by Nikolai Sokolov, the man chosen by the White Russians
to investigate the fate of the Romanovs. However, there is a powerful body
of evidence from German, British and Swedish sources that indicates he
was rescued from Perm. The stakes had been further raised when Noulens,
the French Ambassador, promised the Monarchists also, French support. The
Germans were suitably alarmed.
From Kaiser to Fuehrer
Brigitte Hamann, in her book translated as “Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship” was able to convincingly show that Hitler during his Vienna years was not an ant-semitist, and thus must have started when he was in Muenich, where he had contact with Monarchist circles. It was at this point that memories of strange rumours about collaboration with the Nazi’s in Belgium of General Wrangl former head of the Russian White Armee. and of his alleged connection to a group in Munich called ‘Aufbau’. More important evidence of direct connections to Hitler however I found two months later in General Wrangel: Russia's White Crusader (1987) detailing connections between members of a group called ‘Aufbau’ and Adolf Hitler. Jews were identified with Communists in White propaganda.
Historians should have long discard the notion of a linear German Sonderweg (special path) that led directly to Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Instead historians should understand the genesis and development of National Socialism in the context of cross-cultural interaction between defeated groups from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution: alienated völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful White émigrés. While the National Socialist movement largely developed in a völkisch framework, many White émigrés made crucial political, military, financial, and ideological contributions to National Socialism.
Hitler's National Socialist movement would not have arisen in the form it did without the twin upheavals of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. Far right movements in both the German and Russian Empires, while stronger in the latter than in the former, proved politically weak. Imperial German culture did develop coherent völkisch views with redemptive overtones. In particular, the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the composer Richard Wagner, and the author Houston Stewart Chamberlain urged the German people to transcend the shallow materialism that they associated with the Jews and to attain redemption by negating the will to live. Despite this detailed philosophy, no völkisch movement with mass appeal developed before the disastrous outcome of World War I. Neither Heinrich Class' Pan-German League, Ludwig Müller von Hausen's Association against the Presumption of Jewry, nor Wolfgang Kapp's German Fatherland Party gained broad popular support. Kapp and Class also failed to replace the Kaiser with a military dictatorship under the völkisch General Erich von Ludendorff in 1917.
In the Russian Empire, far rightists achieved greater political success than their völkisch German counterparts, but they soon declined in importance. Beginning in the revolutionary year 1905, the Black Hundred movement, which drew from the apocalyptic ideas of the authors Fedor Dostoevskii and Vladimir Solovev, gained a mass following. Led by the Union of the Russian People, Black Hundred organizations disseminated anti-Western, anti-socialist, and anti-Semitic views to a relatively wide audience. Imperial Russian conservative revolutionaries cast their political struggle in apocalyptic terms by associating the Jews with the Anti-Christ. They proposed drastic restrictions against the Jews in order to protect what they regarded as the imperiled Tsar, altar, and people. Yet while radical rightists in the Russian Empire succeeded politically much more than völkisch Germans, the Black Hundred movement soon fragmented, and Imperial Russian far rightists could not thwart the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917.
With the collapse of Imperial Russia that Black Hundred forces had been unable to hinder, German troops were able to advance deep into former Imperial Russian territories. The German occupation of the Ukraine beginning late in World War I engendered large-scale cooperation between right-wing German and Russian or Ukrainian officers. This interaction in turn fostered further anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic collaboration between rightist Germans, including National Socialists, and Whites/White émigrés in both Germany and abroad. The German Ukrainian Intervention furthered the pro-nationalist German careers of leading White officers who went on to serve the National Socialist cause, including General Vladimir Biskupskii, Colonel Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Colonel Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, Lieutenant Sergei Taboritskii, Colonel Fedor Vinberg, and Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork.
German forces retreating from the Ukraine in the winter of 1918/1919 brought thousands of sympathetic White officers with them, including Shabelskii-Bork, who carried the incendiary anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion with him to Berlin. After receiving them from Shabelskii-Bork, the völkisch publicist Hausen had the Protocols translated into German, and then he published them with commentary. The Protocols' monstrous depiction of a ruthless Jewish drive for world domination through the means of both insatiable finance capitalism and bloody revolutionary upheaval greatly influenced many völkisch Germans and White émigrés, including Hitler's early mentors, the völkisch publicist Dietrich Eckart and his White émigré assistant Alfred Rosenberg. The Protocols also significantly affected Hitler's own anti-Semitic Weltanschauung (world view), particularly through their assertion that the Jews used starvation as a means to destroy nationalist resistance. The Protocols provided Hitler with a sharp weapon against what he perceived as the menace of international Jewry.
In addition to leading to the transfer of the Protocols from the Ukraine to Germany, the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 set a precedent for further German-White military collaboration, most notably as witnessed in the 1919 Latvian Intervention. In this campaign, a combined force of German Freikorps (volunteer corps) and White units fought under Colonel Bermondt-Avalov, a White officer who had served in the Ukraine under German occupation. Bermondt-Avalov sought to work "hand in hand with Germany" to topple the Bolshevik regime. After some initial successes, the Latvian Intervention failed militarily, largely because of increasing opposition from the Entente (Britain and France) and the primarily socialist German government. The operation nonetheless strengthened the solidarity between right-wing Germans and Whites, who viewed themselves as trapped by Bolshevik expansion from the East, Entente pressure from the West, and the betrayal of the Weimar German government in the middle.
As well as serving as a German/White anti-Bolshevik crusade abroad, the Latvian Intervention tied into the first right-wing attempt to overthrow the Weimar Republic, the Kapp Putsch of March 1920. Many völkisch Germans and White émigrés, including veterans of the Latvian Intervention, participated in this coup. Leading völkisch Germans other than Kapp who supported this unsuccessful undertaking included General Ludendorff, his advisor Colonel Karl Bauer, Captain Hermann Ehrhardt, who led the troops that occupied Berlin and sent the German government fleeing, and even Hitler and Eckart. Notable White émigré participants in the doomed putsch included the Baltic German Max von Scheubner-Richter, who had helped to plan the Imperial German advance into the Baltic region in World War I, Biskupskii, Bermondt-Avalov, Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii.
After the Kapp Putsch collapsed in Berlin, leading völkisch Germans and White émigrés regrouped in Bavaria, where the Kapp Putsch had succeeded. Former rightist German and White émigré Kapp Putsch conspirators and their wealthy Bavarian backers soon established economic and military relations with General Piotr Vrangel's Southern Russian Armed Forces, which were situated on the Crimean Peninsula in the Ukraine. ScheubnerRichter led a dangerous mission to the Crimea to stipulate the terms of the cooperation between his far right German and White émigré backers in Bavaria and Vrangel's regime. Scheubner-Richter held fruitful negotiations with Vrangel that led to large-scale collaboration between the right-wing Germans and White émigrés he represented and Vrangel's government. This alliance soon crumbled, however, because of the Red Army's stunningly rapid victory over Vrangel's forces.
This brief German/White émigré/White connection nonetheless spurred the creation of the Munich-based Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organization), a conspiratorial anti-Entente, anti-Weimar Republic, antiBolshevik, and anti-Semitic association of völkisch Germans, including National Socialists, and White émigrés. First Secretary Scheubner-Richter and Vice President Biskupskii de facto led Aufbau. Hitler collaborated closely with Aufbau from 1920 to 1923. At least four White émigré Aufbau members also belonged to the National Socialist Party: Scheubner-Richter, Deputy Director Arno Schickedanz, who had fought in the Latvian Intervention, and two close collaborators with Hitler's mentor Eckart, Otto von Kursell and Rosenberg. Other White émigré Aufbau members who did not belong to the National Socialist Party but who nonetheless supported it included Biskupskii, Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Vinberg, Shabelskii-Bork, and Taboritskii. Max Amann, a German, acted both as Aufbau's second secretary and as the secretary of the National Socialist Party. Scheubner Richter also introduced Hitler to General Ludendorff in the framework of Aufbau, thereby setting in motion a political alliance that culminated in the calamitous November 1923 Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch.
After its consolidation as an influential völkisch German-White émigré alliance in the first half of 1921, Aufbau tried and failed to unite all White émigrés in Germany and beyond. Aufbau organized the May June 1921 Monarchical Congress at Bad Reichenhall (in Bavaria), which lent White émigrés worldwide the appearance of unity. Aufbau nonetheless could not unify all European White émigrés behind the Tsarist candidate Grand Prince Kirill Romanov for a pro-National Socialist crusade against the Bolsheviks, which would establish nationalist Russian, Ukrainian, and Baltic successor states.
Aufbau fought bitterly against the pro-French Supreme Monarchical Council under the former leader of a faction of the Union of the Russian People, Nikolai Markov II. The Council backed Grand Prince Nikolai Nikolaevich Romanov, who lived in Paris and maintained close relations with the French government, for Tsar. The Supreme Monarchical Council counted on French military assistance to reconstruct Imperial Russia in its former borders. In its acrimonious struggle against the Council, Aufbau went so far as to envision a risky tactical alliance with the Red Army. Internecine struggle among White émigrés in Germany aided the still unstable Soviet regime.
Hitler's rising National Socialist Party supported Aufbau in its struggle against Markov II's pro-French Supreme Monarchical Council. Hitler allied himself with Kirill Romanov's candidacy for the Tsarist throne in return for Kirill's considerable financial support of the National Socialist movement through Aufbau as an intermediary. Aufbau proved a valuable source of funding for the early National Socialist Party in general. The conspiratorial organization helped to finance Hitler's National Socialists by providing money from wealthy Aufbau members or allies including Kirill and by channeling funds from the prominent anti-Semitic American industrialist and politician Henry Ford.
While Aufbau could not unite all White émigrés in Europe behind Kirill, it did convince Hitler that nationalist Germans and Russians should ally against Bolshevism, the Entente, the Weimar Republic, and Jewry. The Aufbau ideologues Scheubner-Richter, Vinberg, and Rosenberg maintained that the Jews had pitted Imperial Germany and the Russian Empire against each other although the two nations had possessed complementary interests. The Jews had done this, the Aufbau colleagues argued, to set the stage for their own tyrannical` world rule. While he later enacted brutal policies towards the Russians in World War II, in his early political career, Hitler adopted Aufbau's pro-Russian standpoint by repeatedly urging nationalist Germans and Russians to overcome their recent Jew-instigated hostilities by combining their forces against international Jewry, which manifested itself most horrifyingly in "Jewish Bolshevism."
In addition to calling for a nationalist German-Russian alliance, Aufbau acted as a terrorist organization. The Aufbau colleagues Biskupskii and Bauer placed a death contract on Aleksandr Kerenskii, the former head of the 1917 Provisional Government in Russia. The Aufbau members Shabelskii-Bork and Taboritskii, most likely under the urging of their superior Vinberg, attempted to murder the Russian Constitutional Democratic leader Pavel Miliukov, but they accidentally killed another prominent Constitutional Democrat, Vladimir Nabokov, instead. At least three Aufbau members with ties to the NSDAP, Biskupskii, Ludendorff, and Ludendorff's advisor Bauer, colluded in the most shocking assassination of the Weimar Republic, that of Germany's Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau. In these last two crimes, Aufbau members collaborated with Captain Ehrhardt's Organization C, a conspiratorial far right association based in Munich that engaged in terrorism, coordinated anti-Weimar Republic and anti-Bolshevik military preparations, and maintained close ties with the National Socialist Party.
As well as supportingAufbau's terrorist activities, Hitler's National Socialists collaborated with Aufbau to overthrow the Soviet Union through subversion and military interventions. Aufbau's military schemes to topple the Soviet Union became those of the National Socialist movement, as Aufbau's de facto leader Scheubner-Richter served as Hitler's foreign policy advisor and one of his closest counselors in general. Aufbau directed anti-Bolshevik subversion in the Soviet Union and planned broad military advances into the Ukraine, the Baltic region, and the Great Russian heartland in order to crush Bolshevism and to establish National Socialist Russian, Ukrainian, and Baltic states. Hitler approved of Aufbau's Eastern strategy, as he had not yet developed his idea of Germany's need to gain Lebensraum (living space) in the East. He especially wished to wrest the agriculturally and industrially valuable Ukraine from Soviet control through collaboration with the Ukrainian Cossack leader Poltavets-Ostranitsa, who led Aufbau's Ukrainian section.
In addition to scheming with National Socialists to overthrow the Soviet Union, Aufbau helped to guide National Socialist efforts to topple the Weimar Republic through the means of paramilitary force. Hitler's closest advisor Scheubner-Richter played a key role in the preparations for a rightwing putsch against the Weimar Republic that was to be launched from Bavaria under the leadership of Hitler and Ludendorff. Scheubner-Richter developed a militant plan of action that borrowed from the Bolshevik model. While he hated "Jewish Bolshevism," he nonetheless admired the "energy" of the (Jewish) Soviet Commissar for War Lev Trotskii. Scheubner-Richter also esteemed the Bolshevik example where, as he believed, a few determined men had changed world history, and he attributed the effective tactics of subversion followed by ruthless centralization and militarization to Trotskii. While he never worded it that clearly, in effect, ScheubnerRichter wished to play Trotskii to Hitler's Lenin by leading a national revolutionary force to reconstitute Germany through violent means.
In late 1922 and 1923, Scheubner-Richter collaborated with Hitler and General Ludendorff to lead various paramilitary groupings that finally coalesced into the Kampfbund (Combat League), which displayed increasing militancy towards the Weimar Republic. National Socialist and Aufbau anti-Weimar Republic cooperation climaxed in the disastrous Hitler/ Ludendorff Putsch of November 1923, which Scheubner-Richter had goaded Hitler to launch. Scheubner- Richter marched at Hitler's side during this doomed undertaking until he was shot fatally in the heart. The collapse of the Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch caused a low point in National SocialistWhite émigré collaboration, but Hitler nonetheless placed two Aufbau members in charge of the NSDAP during his imprisonment: Rosenberg and Amann.
While Aufbau failed to place Hitler and Ludendorff in charge in Germany, it greatly influenced National Socialist ideology. Early antiBolshevik and anti-Semitic National Socialist thought developed largely as a post-World War I mixture of völkisch-redemptive German and conspiratorial-apocalyptic White émigré views. National Socialist ideology combined völkisch notions of Germanic racial and spiritual superiority with apocalyptic White émigré ideas of threatened world ruin at the hands of insidious international Jewish conspirators. Hitler only began to crystallize his anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Weltanschauung in late i9î9, when he started learning from his early mentors Eckart and Rosenberg. He soon became acquainted with the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic beliefs of Scheubner-Richter and Vinberg as well. The Aufbau White émigrés Scheubner-Richter, Vinberg, and Rosenberg, along with their völkisch colleague Eckart, influenced National Socialist ideology as the "four writers of the apocalypse," who warned of ever-expanding "Jewish Bolshevik" destruction.
The four writers of the apocalypse argued along the lines of Dostoevskii that international Jewry manipulated both rapacious finance capitalism in the West and bloodthirsty Bolshevism in the East. They stressed that "Jewish Bolshevism" had killed many millions of Russians through misrule and enforced starvation. The ideological quartet emphasized that worse than this, "Jewish Bolsheviks" had systematically annihilated the nationalist Russian intelligentsia. The four writers of the apocalypse maintained that "Jewish Bolsheviks" threatened to spread this terrifying process of extermination to Germany and beyond. While Rosenberg vilified what he perceived as the quintessential Bolshevik practice of eradicating political enemies, he nonetheless appreciated the efficacy of this method. Eckart, Scheubner-Richter, Vinberg, and Rosenberg adopted an apocalyptic standpoint in their arguments by asserting that "Jewish Bolshevism" threatened to ruin Germany, Europe, and even the entire world. Hitler assumed the apocalyptic stance of his four ideological colleagues by pledging to fight the alleged Jewish drive to destroy the world through the spread of Bolshevism.
Aufbau thought significantly influenced early National Socialist ideology, and Aufbau bequeathed a powerful legacy to National Socialism after 1923 as well. Scheubner-Richter's death in the Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch served as an example of heroic sacrifice for the National Socialist cause. Biskupskii continued to channel funds to the NSDAP after 1923, and he led White émigrés in the Third Reich as the head of the Russian Trust Authority. Rosenberg held high posts in the Third Reich, such as leader of the National Socialist Foreign Policy Office along with his colleague Schickedanz and State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Hitler and Rosenberg worked to detach the Ukraine from the Soviet Union in collaboration with Poltavets-Ostranitsa. During World War II, Hitler's desire to gain the Ukraine for Germany in the tradition of Aufbau led him to divert strong formations of the German Army southwards away from Moscow in 1941, thereby granting the Red Army a valuable respite.
Moreover, Aufbau's early warnings of the "Jewish Bolshevik" peril radicalized later National Socialist anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism. After a period of compromise while attaining power and then consolidating their rule, Hitler's National Socialists returned to their original intense antiBolshevik and anti-Semitic roots, which Aufbau had greatly influenced, by invading the Soviet Union and exterminating millions of Jews in the Final Solution. As the State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Rosenberg aided Hider in both of these quintessentially National Socialist undertakings. To a considerable degree, apocalyptic White émigré conceptions of the "Jewish Bolshevik" menace found their expression in heinous National Socialist deeds.
When given the opportunity under the cover of World War II, the National Socialist regime sought to destroy European Jewry, and it came dangerously close to succeeding. The most striking feature of the Final Solution proved its rationalized irrationality. Great numbers of Germans and their auxiliaries from Eastern and Western Europe devoted large amounts of scarce resources to slaughtering millions of Jews at the same time that a total war was raging which was to end either in glorious victory or abject defeat. National Socialists placed a high -priority on exterminating Jews when military interests dictated using as many of them as possible for slave labor. This skewed policy indicated the considerable degree to which Hitler had internalized the apocalyptic White émigré standpoint that the Jews threatened to ruin Germany and the rest of the world as they had Russia.
“Union of the Russian People” leadership had tended quite early towards a pro-German stance, largely due to Imperial Russia's continuing rivalry with Great Britain in Central Asia. In May 1914, “Union of the Russian People” faction leader Nikolai Markov II asserted in the Duma that a "small alliance with Germany" proved superior to a "great friendship with England. The majority of rightist monarchists in Imperial Russia favored a German-Russian alliance along the lines he proposed.
The generally positive attitude towards Germany proper among 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, overall enjoying a positive reputation in the Russian radical right. Point 17 of the statutes of Vladimir Punshkevich's “Michael the Archangel Russian Peoplke’s Union” expressed "particular trust in the German population of the Empire." This point had to be removed with the outbreak of World WarI, but a generally pro-Baltic German attitude remained.( Stepanov, Chernaia Soinia v Rossit. 22. 323.)
Despite dissenting voices, the German General Staff overall initially supported Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotskis's Bolsheviks in order to weaken the Imperial Russian Army, its numerically largest military foe. This policy culminated in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which was finally concluded on March 10, 1918.
But General Ludendorff, the Chief of the Imperial German Army General Staff. agreed with Walther Nicolai, the head of the German Army High Command Intelligence Service, who went on to supply intelligence to the National Socialist Party, that Bolshevism now represented the true danger to Germany's Eastern security, with Lenin threatening to emerge as the "Napoleon of this epoch. And General Hoffman, who maintained close relations with Wolfgang Kapp, who would later stage the famous 1923 Munich coup together with Hitler and Ludendorf, sympathized with these views.
White Russian General Vladimir Biskupskil, who went on to collaborate closely with Hitler in postwar Munich, played a leading role in the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. Biskupskii, a prince (kniaz), came from a noble Ukrainian family from the Kharkov region 30 and he himself possessed an estate outside of Kharkov. He had played an active role in the Union of the Russian People, claiming to have collaborated closely with Aleksandr Dubrovin, the leader of the "Black Hundred" organization. Biskupskii later proudly asserted that the Soiuz had represented the world's first manifestation of Fascism/National Socialism.
Although it would be wrong to place Nazi crimes outside Western history, the Nazism's uniqueness however lay in its lethal synthesis of the West's regimes of discipline and punishment; its imperialism; industrialized death and total war.
Clearly Nazi Lebensraum took inspiration from British imperialism and the brutality of white settlers against Native Americans. Indicating that imperialism was the real model for Nazi violence, not Bolshevism. But, the fusion of anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism that followed World War I occurred with special vigor in Germany, which, to a degree not previously seen. Unlike previous colonial racism, the Nazi regime did not see the Jew as too primitive to avoid extinction, but rather as the enemy of civilization that only a conspiracy theory can explain.
The Hitler Conspiracy: The Russian Roots of Nazism
Unknown to historians until we published this series of articles fifteen months ago, anti-Semitic Russian exiles contributed politically, financially, militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This study refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon: instead, it arose primarily from the cooperation between völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful White émigrés. From 1920–1923, Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-White émigré organization, 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.
Hitler's
Secret "Protocols" P.1
The Protocols
of the Wise Elders of Zion, were not fabricated in Paris, but within
Imperial Russia between April 1902 and August 1903. The earliest versions
of the Protocols contain pronounced Ukrainian features, whereas later ones
were given French overtones in order to lend them the appearance of credible
accounts from abroad.
Hitler's
Secret "Protocols" P.2
General Vladimir
Biskupskil, who went on to collaborate closely with Hitler in the context
of the Aufbau Vereinigung in postwar Munich, played a leading role in the
Ukrainian Volunteer Army. "Conservative revolutionaries" in Imperial Germany
and Russia established detailed anti-Western, anti-Semitic ideologies in
the months leading up to the Bolshevik Revolution. The largely internally-orientated
voelkisch model focused on alleged Germanic racial and spiritual superiority
through a heightened capacity to negate the will heroically, whereas the
more externally- fixated Russian version offered apocalyptic visions of
concrete political struggle between Russians at the head of all Slavs and
perceived Jewish world-conspirators.
Hitler’s
Source P.1
The Protocols
did provide anti-Semitic arguments that strongly influenced the ideology
of the National Socialist movement, going through 33 editions by the time
Hitler came to power and becoming the most widely-distributed work in the
world after the Bible. The National Socialist regime did not reprint the
Protocols after the outbreak of World War II, though, perhaps precisely
due to the Protocols' parallels with both brutal National Socialist occupation
policies in Eastern Europe and public pacification efforts domestically.
Hitler’s
Source P.2
Anticipating
Tsarist pretender Kirill's arrival in Germany, General Ludendorff worked
to establish an intelligence service for Kirill in early April 1922. He
asked Walther Nicolai, who had served him as the head of the German Army
High Command Intelligence Service during World War one, to use his considerable
experience and connections to establish a reliable pro-Kirill intelligence
service for the struggle against Bolshevism.
The
German Kaiser's Confident P.1
By 1937 the
NSDAP, the Wehrmacht, and, to a lesser extent, German society accepted
Ludendorffs ideology. In the regime and the Wehrmacht he had tacit allies
who helped to legitimize and propagate Deutsche Gotterkenntnis. Those who
sympathized with him and his ideology existed at all levels of the Nazi
hierarchy. Although today he may be forgotten, and although his memorial
shrine in Tutzing may be neglected, Erich Ludendorff was one of the most
important Germans of the twentieth century.
The
German Kaiser's Confident P.2
The Ludendorffs
(now Hohe Warte) advocated a return to traditional rural German culture
since they believed that the demands of modem capitalist society had tom
the German people from the soil, causing them to forget their heritage
and ensuring their submission to finance and industrial capital. The Ludendorffs'
ideology paralleled similar intellectual developments among Conservative
Revolutionaries.
The
Ideologists and First Financiers of Hitler P.1
Before the
establishment of the “Aufbau” Vereinigung in late 1920, the collaboration
between Eckart and Rosenberg in the context of Eckhart’s Newspaper In Plain
German.” Formed the crux of the fusion between voelkisch-redemptive German
and White Russian world conspiratonial-apocalyptic anti-Semitic thought,
where "positive" notions of Germanic spiritual and racial superiority fused
with more negative visions of impending "Jewish Bolshevik" destruction
supported by Jewish finance capitalists.
The
Ideologists and First Financiers of Hitler P.2
By 1923, Hitler
had thoroughly internalized Aufbau’s and the people around it, assertions,
of the nature of socialism and its most aggressive variant Bolshevism as
mere tools of Jewish finance capitalism to enslave European peoples…
Dietrich
Eckart, Rosenberg, and White Russian Creators of Nazi Ideology, P.1
The ensuing
military conflagration, Eckart continued, had led to the destruction of
Imperial Russia so that "Jewish Bolshevism" could take root there. He also
warned that there would arise "from the Neva to the Rhine, on the bloody
ruins of the previous national traditions, a single Jewish empire.
Dietrich
Eckart, Rosenberg, and White Russian Creators of Nazi Ideology, P.2
Hitler in his
unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein Kampf, further expounded upon the Aufbau/Eckartian
theme of the "Jewish Bolshevik" annihilation of the leading elements of
Russian society as a precedent for further Jewish atrocities. He argued
that "Jewry exterminated the previous foreign upper strata with the help
of Slavic racial instincts."
The
"Final" Solution Before WWII, P.1
Hitler continued
to express a view of history whereby Jews pitted Germans and Russians against
each other after 1923. As witnessed in his unpublished 1928 sequel to Mein
Kampf. He argued of "the Jew's" drive to dominate the European peoples
that he -methodically agitates for world war" with the aim of "the destruction
of inwardly anti-Semitic Russia as well as the destruction of the German
Reich. which in administration and the army still offered resistance to
the Jew."
The
"Final" Solution Before WWII, P.2
That which
Jewry once planned against Germany and all peoples of Europe. this must
(Jewry) itself suffer today, and responsibility before the history of European
culture demands that we do not carry out this fateful separation (Schicksalstrennung)
with sentimentality and weakness, but with clear, rational awareness and
firm determination.” (Rosenberg 1941 press release dealing with his public
assumption of the position of State Minister for the Occupied Eastern
Territories.)
Early
Nazis and the Mystical Connection P.1
Like the mystical
inclined author Sergei Nilus, who had played a crucial role in popularizing
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Vinberg viewed Jews as a satanic force.
Early
Nazis and the Mystical Connection P.2
Hitler asserted
that "liberalism, our press, the stock market, and Freemasonry" together
represented nothing but "Instrument[s] of the Jews"
Early
Nazis and the Mystical Connection P.3
By the time
of Ludendorfrs death, Deutsche Gotterkenninis had become for Nazis a legitimate
Weltanschauung. Ludendorff's vision of a totalitarian society unified in
the face of external and internal threats was nearly identical to the Weltanschauung
of Nazism.
