By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

 The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion

In his work Warrant for Genocide, Norman Cohn presents an ultimately unfounded version of the origins of the Protocols in which Piotr Rachkovskii, the head of the foreign section of the Okhrana, wrote the Protocols in French in Paris and then sent them to a Russian monk, Sergel Nilus, for translation as part of an Intrigue to eliminate the Tsar's favorite holy man in favor of Nilus.

However 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 Antichrist as an Imminent Political Possibility: Notes of an Orthodox Believer.(1)

Cohn based his version of the Protocols' origins primarily on filtered information that the Russian Bon's Nikolaevskii gave him, as evidenced in correspondence between Cohn's Russian wife Vera and Nikolaevskii.

Nikolaevskii wrote Vera Cohn that already at the beginning of the 1930's he had privately concluded that Rachkovskii did not have 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 authorities at the famous Bern Trial of 1934-35 (the first time ever, a “book” went on trial) who had sought to prove that the Okhrana had forged the Protocols.

Research Cesare G. De Michelis carried out five years ago demonstrates that the Protocols 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. The original fabricators; of the Protocols in the Russian Empire may well have been influenced by Vladimir Solovev's Antichrist tale, but this cannot be proven since the authors of the Protocols remain unknown.(2)

In any case, Solovev's "A Short Tale of the Antichrist" deeply impressed Nilus, a member of the "Black Hundred" movement, who used the story as a prophetic warning and related it to contemporary political conditions in the Russian Empire.

Nilus rejected modern Western civilization and identified Jews and Freemasons as the forerunners of the Antichrist. He drew from the religious revival then taking place in Imperial Russia in anticipating the Antichrist's imminent arrival and the destruction of Western civilization, after which the Kingdom of God would appear.(3) His propagation of the Protocols thus accorded well with his ideological views.

As seen in the introduction, grown out of the Russian Assembly, and the Monarchical Party, the Union of the Russian People grew rapidly. The Union appealed to a wide population base since members of the intelligentsia played the leading roles in the organization.

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 1,622 people, 711 of whom were Jews.

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.

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."

Largely due to internal strife, the “Union of the Russian People” failed to spread its warnings of a supposed world Jewish conspiracy to the degree it desired. In the fall of 1907, Purishkevich vehemently criticized Dubrovin's authoritarianism and left the organization. He grouped together others dissatisfied with Dubrovin’s leadership and formed the “Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union”, whose March 1908 statutes stipulated the necessity for a functional parliament in Russia, but noted that "in all other respects the program of the the Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union concurs with the program of the Union of the Russian People."

With the breakup of the “Union of the Russian People” , the "Black Hundred" movement entered a period of decline that was only briefly broken in March 1911 when a twelve year-old boy was butchered in Kiev and the conviction spread among the populace that he had been the victim of a Jewish ritual murder. (Currently, June 2003, “ritual murder” stories are still popular, as seen earlier this month as it was claimed in a trial regarding the murder of a pregnant women. That was killed near San Francisco while her separated husband went fishing nearby.)

A member of the Soiuz (Union of the Russian People) in Kiev wrote an appeal that appeared throughout the city: "Russian People! If you value your children, then kill (beite) the Yids! Kill them until there is not even a single Yid in Russia!"

In April 1911, Nikolai Markov II, the influential leader of the Kursk branch of the Union of the Russian People”, and Purishkevich argued before the Duma that Jews had murdered the boy in Kiev as part of a demonic ritual.(4)

An article in a July 1911 edition of “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."(5)

A front page article in an August 1913 edition of “The Russian Banner” asserted that whatever verdict the court finally pronounced in the ritual murder case (the accused were found not guilty), "the guilt of the Kiev Jewish Kahal in this matter is established" and Jewry deserved to be "expelled from Russia to a country where the use of human blood is not considered a crime." The article stressed that the Russian government had to take severe measures against the Jews, this "accursed people," arguing that "the Yids must be placed artificially in conditions such that they continually die out.(6)

The “Union of the Russian People” thus served as the first European political grouping seriously to propose physically exterminating Jews.

While the public uproar over the supposed Jewish ritual murder in Kiev aided the far night cause in Russia, a new split soon weakened the "Black Hundred" movement. At the All-Russian Congress of the “Union of the Russian People” in Moscow in November 19l1 , Markov II, backed by other members of the Head Council and with the outside support of Purishkevich. challenged Dubrovin's authority.

Dubrovin reacted by dismissing the offending members from the Head Council and reconstituting it with loyal supporters. Markov II formed another faction of the Soitc russkago naroda with members loyal to him personally.(7)

Dubrovin struggled to maintain his authority in far right Russian circles. Two close coleagues and friends aided him in his efforts, Aleksandr Bork, who belonged to the Soiuz' Head Council, and his wife Elsa Shabelskii-Bork, who regularly attended Head Council meetings in an advisory capacity.(8)

In addition to submitting articles to Russkoe Znamia in accordance with Dubrovin's desires, the couple began publishing the newspaper “Freedom and Order” with police money in December 1913.(9) Tsar Nikolai II claimed to read this newspaper with great pleasure.(10)

In his opening editorial from December 1913, Bork struck an apocalyptic tone, quoting 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." Bork called for struggle with "Jewish Freemasonry,” which was preparing a "violent,... anti-Christian revolution" in Imperial Russia.(11)

The imminent outbreak of world war and the revolutionary "Red" upheaval that subsequently ensued eventually lent such apocalyptic warnings a pressing prophetic quality among members of the losing "White" side of the Russian Civil War.

In twentieth-century prewar Germany, no far right organization arose with anything approaching the mass appeal, modest as it was, of the “Union of the Russian People” or the “Michael the Archangel Russian People's Union”. In the closest comparable German development to the short-lived rise of the "Black Hundred" movement, Heinrich Class gave the then little-known Alldeutscher Verband (Pan-German League) with approximately 14.000 members a pronounced anti-Semitic character when he took over as Chairman in February 1908.

Class had familiarized himself with the racist ideas of Count Arthur de Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. He honored both theorists as "great men." As leader of the AlIdeutscher Verband, he required the regional branches of the organization to acquaint themselves with Gobineau's work on the inequality of races and to hold discussion sessions on it. (12)

In 1909, Class released a work influenced by Chamberlain 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."(13)

He ultimately received personal praise from Chamberlain himself for his book.(14)

While the "Jewish question" had remained relatively dormant in German politics from 1894 on, it flared up again after the elections of 1912, when the Social Democratic vote more than doubled, rising from 53 to 110 seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament.(15)

Class wrote a work, Wenn ich der Kaiser waer” (If I Were the Kaiser) in March and April 1912 under the pseudonym Daniel Frymann, noting that "today the entire people is dissatisfied with the way it is governed.(16)

After noting that Kaiser Wilhelm Hohenzollern II had earlier 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 called for the rebirth of "German idealism," in his work, asserting, "the Jews are the upholders and teachers of the materialism that reigns today."

Class proposed 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. Under Class' proposed system. Jews would be forbidden to serve as civil servants, officers, enlisted men, lawyers, teachers, and theater directors, and they would neither possess the night 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.(17)

Class thus made demands in 1912 similar to those that the leaders of the Union of the Russian People) had already put forward in 1906, but whereas the “Union of the Russian People” fervently supported the Russian Emperor, Class severely reproached the German Kaiser.

Class himself later lamented, however, that while his work had found many readers and was generally considered "Interesting," those for whom he had primarily intended it. members of Germany's political elite, had disregarded his anti Semitic warnings and proposals.(18)

Class' Kaiser book did not represent the only manifestation of revived anti Semitic activity in Germany in 1912. In May of that same year, Ludwig Mueller von Hausen, a fervent admirer of Schopenhauer, founded the Verband gegen Oberhebung des Judentumes (Association against Jewish Presumption) in Berlin. The Verband's statutes asserted that the association sought "to waken racial pride, to boost Voelkisch 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.(19)

Hausen admired Class, soon established that the latter had authored the Kaiser book that he admired under a pseudonym, and he joined Class' Alldeutscher Verband.(20)

Hausen wrote Class that while his organization only possessed "a few hundred" members, they included large landowners, large industrialists, high-ranking governmental officials, and leading officers.(21) The future National Socialist Party Secretary. Martin Bormann. joined Hausen's Verband in July 1920(22)

Hausen and Class met for the first time in September 1913 in Berlin. While they later underwent a serious failing out, one of the many examples of Class' pronounced weakness at maintaining amicable relations with other important Voelkisch leaders,
including with Hitler, they collaborated early on.(23)

But German Voekisch-redemptive anti-Semitism did not really flourish until after the catastrophic outcome of the First World War. In the prewar period, the fortunes of German parties specifically based on anti-Semitism declined after modest successes in the late nineteenth century.(24)

In the Russian Empire on the outbreak of World War I, anti-Semitism remained relatively widespread, but the "Black Hundred" movement remained in a disorganized state, a condition that its predominantly pro-German views exacerbated. "Black Hundred" sympathies lay primarily with monarchical Germany and Austria-Hungary in the tradition of the nineteenth-century Holy Alliance.

“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.(25)

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.(26)

The views of night wing Baltic German citizens of the Russian Empire deserve attention due to the key role that the Baltic Germans subsequently played in the National Socialist movement.

The Next White Russian Army

Introduction: A Russian Connection

In this series of lectures I will discuss a number of early influences on the rise of Hitler and the early Nazi party.

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 the White Russian Influence on 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 the White Russian Influence on 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.

 

1) Cohn. Warrant for Genocide. 83-87. Hagemeister, "Der Mythos der Protokolle der Weisen von Zion."'

2) Hagemeister, "Der Mythos der Protokolle der Weisen von Zion."' In “Verschwoerungstheorien” eds Ute Caumanns and Mathias Niendorf, 96,99.

3) Hagemeister "Vladimir Soloviev.- Eastern Christian Studies 2.: Selected Papers of the International Vladimir Soloviev Conference held at the University of' Nijmegen. the Netherlands. in September 1998 (Leuven: Peeters. 2000), 287 293.

4) Reference here is to the blood libel trial involving Menahem Mendel Beilis. S. A Stepanov, Chernaia sotnia v Rossii: 1905-1914,1992, 168,174,175,266,270.

5) U. Soluznik "Russkim detiam." Russkoe Znamia. July 7, 1911. 2.

6) Istoriia ublistva fuschijiskago." Russkoe Znamia. August 9. 1913, 1.

7) Aleksandr Dubrovin. "Gorechovskomu Otdelu Soiuza russkago Naroda." March 1912. GAPT,fiond 116. opi.v 1. delo 1. 32.

8) letters from Aleksandr Bork and E. A. Shabelskii-Bork to Dubrovin from September 3, 1903, and in period from 1905 to 19 10. GARF.j6nd 116, opis 1, delo 807. 1. 2. 14.

9) Undated letters from E. A. Shabelskii-Bork to Dubrovin. GAPT.jond 116, opis 1. delo 807. 18. 34.

10) Piotr Shabelskil -Bork. "Ober Mein Leben." March 1926. GSAPK. Repositur 84a, number 14953, 91.

11) Bork. Editorial. Stoboda iporiadok. December 1, 1913, L

12) Protocol from a meeting of the Alldeutscher Verband leadership on March 2. 1918. BA, Reich 8048. number 117.

13) Einhart. Deutsche Geschichte. second ed. (Leipzig: 1909),290.

14) Class. Wider den Strom, vol. 2, BAK, Kleine Enverbung 499. 331.

15) Friedlaender. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 75.

16) Daniel Frymann . Wenn ich der Kaiser waer Politische Wahrhenen und Notwendtgkeiten, fifth ed. (1914), 3.

17) Frymann . Idem: 32. 35. 74-76. 132, 135.

18) Class. Wider den Strom. vol. 1, 236, vol. 2. 373, 374.

19) Letter from Ludwig Millier von Hausen to Maria Groener from June 25. 1920. RGVA (TKhlDK),./6nd 577, opis 1, delo 221, 54, Statutes of the Verbandgegen Oberhebung des Judentumes, RGVA (TKhIDK), fond 577. opis 1. delo 6. 1, 4.

20) Letter ftom Hausen to Class from December 11. 1912. RGVA (TKhIDK). fond 577. opis 1. delo 218. 5. Hausen's 1912 membership card for the.411deurscher Verband, Orisgruppe Berlin. RGVA (TKhlDK)._/bnd 577, opis 1. delo 218. 127.

21) Letter from Hausen to Class from November 11, 1912. RGVA (TKhIDK), Jbnd 577, opis 1. delo 218. 3.

22)Martin Bormann's Verhand gegen Oberhebung des Adentumes membership card number 1086 from July 7. 1920. RGVA (TKhIDK).fond 577. opts 1. delo 27. 24.

23) Letter from Hausen to Class from October 8. 1913, RGVA (TKhIDK).fond 577, opis 1. delo 218. 17.

23) Letter from Hausem to K. Duncker from April 21. 1922, RGVA (TKhIDK), fond 577, opis 1. delo 213. 8: Class. untitled essay. 1936. BAK. Kleine Erwerbung 499, 12.

12 Letters from Class to Hausen from October 10 and November 4. 1913. RGVA (TKhIDK).fond 577. opis 1. delo 218. 19. 22.- letter from Hausen to Class from December 21. 1916, RGVA (TKhIDK)..fond 577. opis 1. delo 218. 86.

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

25) LGPO repon to the R060 from December 24. 192 1. RGVA (TKhIDK),-fond 772. opi5 1. delo 96. 56.

26) Stepanov, Chernaia Soinia v Rossit. 22. 323.

 

 

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