Introduction

Announcing his intention Hitler declared in January 1939: “If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” That same year half a dozen Nazi officials in utmost secrecy redrew the demographic map of Eastern Europe ready to execute all Jewish men, woman and children in the Eastern territories.

It started on 11 November 1939 with the complete extermination of the Jewish population of Ostrow Mazowiecki in Poland. And by early 1941 Hitler had decided to send three million Dutch as replacement to Poland. In March that year Himmler announced to the Gestapo leaders that: Three million men would be sent on foot to the territory which had been assigned to them. Their families-wives, children, and old people would be put on ships at the ports of the Netherlands bound for the city of Königsberg, and from there they would be sent by rail to Lublin. This plan would be put into effect as of April 20, the date of Hitler's birthday, as a birthday present to him (John H. Waller “The Devil’s Doctor” 2003 p.98).

Once Hitler started his attack on Russia, in the shortest amount of time Nazi death squads executed half a million civilians (Helmut Langerbein “Hitler’s Death Squads” 2004.

Emphasizing the conspirational intent, Hitler decided to eliminate all evidence of the mass executions in the occupied eastern territories. Under Decree No. 1005, classified as Top Secret (Geheime Reichssache), a Sonderkommando under Paul Blobel was charged with the planning and execution of these operations (Langerbein “Hitler’s Death Squads” p. 43).

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

Rather it was after reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Hitler for the first time wrote in his notebook  March 1921: struggle against Bolshevism in Russia means the eradication (Ausrottung) of the Jews.

Significantly the Protocols  had been brought to Germany at the end of WWI when German military personnel retreating from the Ukraine around the turn of the year 1918/1919, brought with them thousands of sympathetic White officers, including several who went on to serve the National Socialist cause in high-profile capacities. As explained in a seminar three years ago, once translated into German. the Protocols greatly influenced postwar voelkisch German circles in general and the fledgling National Socialist movement in particular. providing an important source of -evidence" of alleged conspiratorial Jewish strivings for world domination.

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.

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. (Abraham Ascher, The Revolution of 1905: Russia in Disarray (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 238–242.)

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.” (Report to the German State Commissioner for the Supervision of Public Order, report from 8 August, 1921, Center for the Preservation of Historical-Documentary Collections in Moscow, fond 772, opis 3, delo 539, 17.)

See also ....     

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.

In spite of the attractive preposition (if it were true), Nazism as an ideology was no religion, not just because Hitler said it was not, but also because it was to incoherent to be one. Nazis also did not spend time discussing the finer points of their ideology like for example Marxist-Leninists philosophers did. There was no sacred book of Nazism from which people took their texts for the day, like the bureaucrats of Stalin’s Russia did in case of the works by Marx, Engels and Lenin.

In fact since the end of the war there has been a strong temptation to dismiss Nazism as an anti-western aberration, the exact antithesis of the values of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy. This diagnosis was reworked by the historian François Furet after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. Furet interpreted Nazism and communism as symmetrical forms of reaction against the inevitable advent of a liberal political order (Furet, The Passing of an Illusion, 1999). In this view, the world in which we live is diametrically opposed to Nazi barbarity. Yet as I pointed out when we started this website (see for example: genocide.html ) there are many other threads that link the ideology of Nazism and its methods (domination and extermination) with the history of the West. Despite its pathological aberrations, the first link is ideological. Nazism emerged in the socio-political constellation of German nationalism, which was crisscrossed by currents well represented in European culture as a whole: racial anthropology, with its idea of a hierarchy of human groups dominated by “Aryans”; Social Darwinism, with its concept of natural selection of the fittest; and eugenics, with its reactionary utopia of an artificially created higher species.

Ideas on eugenics and radical hygiene, the fruit of liberal institutions and thinking, provided Nazism with a number of essential bases. Racial anthropology was well represented in Italy (Cesare Lombroso), Social Darwinism in England (Alfred Russel Wallace), eugenics in the United States (Francis Galton), and antisemitism in France (Eduard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, and many others). Plus earlier already  the Belgians, the British, the Germans and the French not only dominated Africa and East Asia through "rational organization," but caused a precipitate decline in their populations by disease, famine and overwork that in a number of cases can only be described as genocide. In its massive killing, propaganda and cult of violence, World War I served as an anteroom of National Socialism. The hatred of workers, which fed into the Nazi myth of the ‘Jewish Bolshevik,’ as well as nineteenth-century notions of euthanasia and eugenics, which targeted, and sometimes sterilized, the putatively unfit. Thus Moreover, the exacerbated nationalism and biological racism of the Nazis were closely linked to the culture and practice of imperialism that had characterised the whole of Europe since the beginning of the 19th century. Germany had not played a leading role in this development. On the contrary, it was a latecomer, a keen pupil following the two great colonial powers, France and Britain. The natural supremacy of the white race and its corollary, Europe’s civilising mission in Africa and Asia; the view of the world beyond Europe as a vast area to be colonised; the idea of colonial wars as conflicts in which the enemy was the civilian population of the countries to be conquered, rather than an army; the theory that the extinction of the inferior races was an inevitable consequence of progress: these central tenets of Nazi ideology were commonplaces of 19th-century European culture.

The Nazis’ aim of conquering Lebensraum (living space) for the German race in the vast Slavic territories of eastern Europe was essentially a transposition to the Old World of the model of colonial domination that other great powers had pursued in Africa and Asia for more than a century. Since the Nazis considered the Jews an enemy race, a hotbed of communism and in charge of the Soviet state, a crusade against them fitted in naturally with a war of conquest and extermination in the east. In Hitler’s grand design, the acquisition of Lebensraum, the destruction of the Soviet Union and the extermination of the Jews were complementary aims that converged in a single war (See Arno J Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken?: the Final Solution in History, 1988). But particularly in  the first world war, the total war, lay the roots of industrial extermination, the anonymous death of millions, and the authoritarian remodelling of European societies in the inter-war period. As the historian George Mosse has convincingly demonstrated, the first world war began a brutalisation of political life of which Nazism was the culmination (Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford, 1990). In the context of the civil wars and uprisings that shook Russia, Germany, Hungary and Italy between 1918 and 1923, fascism emerged as a typically reactionary, nationalistic and anti-democratic movement. To that extent, it was indeed the offspring of the counter-revolution waged throughout the “long” 19th century, from the anti-Jacobin coalition of 1793 to the massacres that followed the defeat of the Paris Commune of 1872.

However the fascists did not look to the past: they sought to build a new world. They found ways to collaborate with the former ruling elites only at the moment of taking power. Auschwitz was modelled throughout on the Taylorist principle of productive rationality, a mass-production corpse factory in which the assembly line was the arrival of convoys, selection, confiscation of possessions, undressing, gas chamber and crematory oven. Like Maurice Papon at his trial in Bordeaux, none of the accused at Nuremberg considered themselves guilty: all had simply followed orders. In the majority of cases, their tasks became criminal only at the end of a complex chain of activity that was invisible to most of them, or easily ignored. Hannah Arendt noted that Nazism had given birth to a new type of executioner, the bureaucrat at his desk, who killed by filling in forms. The relationship of Nazism to western modernity is thus essential to an understanding of its origins and the history of Nazi violence. Liberal 19th-century Europe - the heartland of racism, imperialism and colonial war - was the cultural and ideological laboratory in which Nazism developed. That development was not inevitable, since it required several intermediate stages, from the first world war to the crisis of the Weimar republic.

We should of course not read this as a one-way street, Enlightenment to genocide, plus if class racism helps to explain the historical pedigree of Jewish Bolshevism, why then did the Third Reich seek to redeem workers but destroy the Jews? Why did the Nazi regime pursue Lebensraum in the east first, rather than the recovery and expansion of its overseas empire when the German imperial imagination, which incorporated both Lebensraum and Weltpolitik, set Germany apart from other European imperialist powers?

 

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.

 

The text at the top reads: "World politics World revolution." The text at the bottom reads, "Freemasonry is an international organization beholden to Jewry with the political goal of establishing Jewish domination through world-wide revolution." The map, decorated with Masonic symbols (temple, square, and apron), shows where revolutions took place in Europe from the French Revolution in 1789 through the German Revolution in 1919. (Printed by WWII Nazi-Governement)

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