Aufbau Vereinigung
Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation), a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group, formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German National Socialists who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.[1]
According to Michael Kellogg,[2] the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Hitler/Ludendorff putsch of 1923, as well as financing NSDAP with, for example, funds channelled from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind.[3] Recent research on Hitler's early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under these influences.[4]
Aufbau members became involved in terrorist activities, including the assassination of Walther Rathenau and that of Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (both in 1922).[5]
After the death of Scheubner-Richter in the putsch, Aufbau rapidly declined, and notions of Lebensraum and Slavic inferiority, naturally unpopular with the Russians, gained a stronger hold on the Nazi movement.[6]
The long-term influence of Aufbau has been traced in the implementation of the final solution[7] and in Hitler's disastrous decision to divert troops away from Moscow towards the Ukraine in 1941.[8]
Prominent members of Aufbau included:
- Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)
- Alfred Rosenberg (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)
- Fyodor Vinberg (Russian officer)
- Piotr Shabelsky-Bork (Russian officer)
- General Vasili Biskupsky (Russian officer)
- Erich Ludendorff
- Max Amann
- Boris Brasol (Russian émigré)
References
- ↑ Russia and Germany, A Century of Conflict by Walter Laqueur London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1965.) p76
- ↑ The Russian Roots of Nazism White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 * Michael Kellogg, Cambridge 2005
- ↑ Kellogg p278
- ↑ Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship by Brigitte Hamann New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp. 347-359.)
- ↑ Kellogg p276
- ↑ Laqueur pp79 & 89
- ↑ Kellogg P 241
- ↑ Kellogg p279