Michael Kellogg - The Russian Roots of Nazism

“The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945″ by Michael Kellogg, Cambridge University Press, 2005.

An excerpt from the Introduction (via Internet Archive):

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

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

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

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

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