Counter-Currents
2,922 words
Michael Kellogg
The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945
Cambridge University Press, 2005
With the near-universal demonization of the Third Reich, historians have developed a blind spot for the genesis of German anti-Semitism. Michael Kellogg, in his 2005 work The Russian Roots of Nazism, sheds a sharp light on this topic and points our attention eastward. He reveals how the post-World War I atrocities of the Soviet Union along with the presence of a large, vengeful, and politically active White émigré population in Weimar Germany played a critical role in developing National Socialist attitudes on Jews and Bolshevism. And in making this argument, he not only addresses the errors of other historians, but he also makes an indirect case for much of Nazism itself.
Kellogg’s work is crucial for several reasons, most prominent being the facts themselves. The interwar period in Germany, the Baltic states, and Ukraine were roiled in conflict, intrigue, revolution, and, most of all, uncertainty. It was an interesting time. More importantly, it was consequential. Any history that discloses previously unknown or overlooked events from that time and place will have value.
Kellogg also exhibits remarkable academic discipline by not taking sides in the political drama he unfolds. There is nothing tendentious about The Russian Roots of Nazism aside from its pointed historiography. This is good since it lets the facts speak for themselves. On the other hand, Kellogg’s avoidance of a broader political schema makes the book a bit of a slog. It’s not biased, but it’s not sexy, either. But Kellogg’s prose is tight and serviceable, and he offers concise summaries at the end of each chapter and at the end of the book for those who wish to skim.
The Russian Roots of Nazism can also be viewed as a strike against the anti-German racism of Jewish writers such as Daniel Goldhagen. In his 1996 work, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen accuses the Germans of being inherently racist, anti-Semitic, and “eliminationist.” This takes the extreme form of what’s known as the Sonderweg (special path) thesis, which posits the inevitability of the Third Reich, given the weakness of the German bourgeoisie. Kellogg demolishes this idea by uncovering the foreign influences of National Socialism during its formative years and also by portraying Adolf Hitler in his mid-thirties and other early-period Nazis as three-dimensional human beings rather than comic book villains.
Most importantly, Kellogg demonstrates how the Nazis may have had excellent reasons for their anti-Semitism and their anti-Bolshevism, thereby justifying much of what they did during the interwar period. This may not have been Kellogg’s intention. Regardless, by eschewing a political agenda and by relying so heavily upon National Socialist primary sources (rather than the mountain of secondary sources that condemn the Nazis), Kellogg leaves the door open for a revisionist, and much more positive, interpretation of National Socialism.
Our story may as well begin in German-occupied Ukraine in 1918. After Soviet Russia’s capitulation in the war, many disaffected Russian and Ukrainian officers began cooperating with their German counterparts, bonding over their shared sense of nationalism and their mutual hatred for the Bolsheviks. When the Germans abandoned Ukraine the following year, they took thousands of these so-called “White” officers with them, including some, such as Vladimir Biskupsky, Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, Fedor Vinberg, and Piotr Shabelsky-Bork, who would work closely with the Nazis in years to come. Shabelsky-Bork deserves special mention because he was the first to transfer the forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to the West, thereby unleashing one of the most famous conspiracy theories upon the world.
As the Ukrainian Biskupsky became a leader among the 600,000 White émigrés in Weimar Germany, he also became one of two de facto leaders of a secret, conspiratorial organization known as Aufbau (or, Reconstruction) which promoted a particularly urgent strain of apocalyptic anti-Semitism. Max von Scheubner-Richter, a Baltic German émigré from Latvia, was the other, and soon this organization had had great influence upon the nascent Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler himself. In fact, Scheubner-Richter grew quite close to Hitler and marched arm-in-arm with him during the failed 1923 Putsch in Munich where he was shot and killed. Thereafter, Hitler considered him a martyr for National Socialism.
Two other White émigrés, Alfred Rosenberg, another Baltic German, and the Russian Fedor Vinberg, became leading theorists of National Socialism, with Rosenberg ultimately gaining the most stature in the Nazi Party. Publisher and early Hitler mentor Dietrich Eckart introduced Rosenberg to Hitler, and the men quickly grew to admire each other. When Hitler was imprisoned after the Munich Putsch, he appointed Rosenberg as his successor. By World War II, this émigré was so embedded in high-level Nazi operations that the Allies rewarded him at Nuremburg with a sentence of hanging.
Bavaria in the early 1920s was a unique petri dish of nationalist and anti-Semitic ideas and action. Stirred into the mix were the völkisch Germans. These were Aryan identitarians, Teutonic traditionalists, and Thule Society people who drew racialist ideas from the likes of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Many of these people were still smarting over the revolution of 1918, which forced the Kaiser to abdicate, and shared a distrust of Jews for their materialistic and “world-affirming” (that is, non-heroic, non-transcendent) behavior.
Add to this the White émigrés who brought with them not only The Protocols but the hyper-nationalist ideas of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vladimir Solovev. A militaristic form of Christianity played into this as well, with the great Jew-Gentile struggle often being portrayed in Biblical terms. These were people who had witnessed firsthand Red atrocities during the October Revolution and the Russian Civil War and had experience in the Tsar’s army or in the reactionary organization, the Black Hundreds. It’s no wonder they blamed the Jews for upending their world. Their world had been upended, and they couldn’t help but notice how a disproportionate number of Bolsheviks were Jews, especially at the top.
The result was an explosive burst of national and anti-Jewish sentiment which culminated in 1933 when Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany. Kellogg repeatedly stresses that without the Whites who were more anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik than the Germans after World War I, the National Socialists would likely not have been as successful as they were. No so-called “far-Right” organization in Germany before the Nazis had garnered popular support. This does away with the notion that the Germans were somehow inherently anti-Semitic. Where Goldhagen insists that “German antisemitism was sui generis,” Kellogg demonstrates that it was the powerful gestalt of the German völkisch movement and the White fear and fascination with Jewish Bolshevism which was sui generis.
Hitler harbored standard socialist views well into 1919. Hitler’s former immediate commander on the Western Front in World War I, Aide-de-Camp Hans Mend, asserted that his earlier underling had exclaimed towards the end of 1918 in Munich, “Thank God that the kings’ crowns have fallen from the tree. Now we proletarians have something to say”. . . .
You can buy Spencer Quinn’s novel White Like You here.
Hitler only began to develop a detailed anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic ideology beginning in the second half of 1919 through his collaboration with Eckart and Rosenberg, who served as his early mentors. Mend confirmed Hitler’s rapid political lurch from the far left to the far right in postwar Munich. When he heard Hitler speak publicly at the beginning of 1920, he thought, “Adi has changed his colors, the red lad!” In addition to borrowing anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic ideas from Eckart and Rosenberg, Hitler soon learned far-right concepts that castigated “Jewish Bolshevism” from the Aufbau ideologues Scheubner-Richter and Vinberg as well.
The White émigrés from 1918 to 1923 lent a sense of Manichean urgency to the postwar German zeitgeist. It was, in effect, good versus evil, Christ versus Anti-Christ, and the slew of conspiracy theories emanating from the Aufbau circle painted this struggle in the starkest black and white. For example, one theory posited that Leon Trotsky was a Satanist who practiced Black Mass rituals in the Kremlin and prayed to the Devil for the defeat of the Whites. But this alliance was also practical. If the völkisch Germans and the émigré Whites didn’t have the exact same enemies, their shared ethnocentrism gave them similar goals. Whereas the Whites aimed to conquer the Soviet Union and remove the Jewish yoke from the Slavic peoples, the Germans needed to defy the Entente and overthrow the socialist, pro-Soviet Weimar government. There was quite of bit of overlap here, and Hitler’s Nazi Party approved of the White plan to invade the Soviet Union and liberate independent republics such as Russia and Ukraine. Hitler indeed had a great interest in Nazifying Ukraine, which Kellogg believes was the deciding factor behind his disastrous order for the Wehrmacht to strike south in August 1941 when it was a mere 200 miles from Moscow.
The Whites contributed more than energy and ideas to the National Socialist cause before 1923. It also provided money and manpower. Many who marched during the doomed Munich Putsch were Whites, as were many of the soldiers who fought alongside the Germans against the Bolsheviks during the Latvian Intervention of 1919. Boris Brazol, a white émigré in the United States funneled much-needed funds from industrialist Henry Ford and worked closely with Scheubner-Richter. Brazol, notably, was a contributor to Ford’s anti-Semitic newspaper The Dearborn Independent and also translated Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer into English. More importantly, Kirill Romanov, exiled heir apparent to Tsardom in Russia, gave tremendous sums to the White-Nazi alliance. Many Whites supported his bid for power, and so did Hitler.
Sadly, many White émigrés opposed Kirill in favor of his cousin Nikolai who also aspired to Tsardom. The Nikolai faction, led by the émigré Nikolai Markov II, was Russian imperialist in nature and supported restoring Russia to its pre-1917 borders. Hitler and the Aufbau contingent preferred the more ethnocentric solution of petty nationalism in the defeated Soviet Union, with Russia, Ukraine, and other republics becoming independent entities. This impasse festered into acrimony and hatred among the Whites, and effectively prevented the invasion of the Soviet Union that they all so desperately wanted.
After the failed Putsch in 1923, White influence began to wane. Regardless, it never went away and, in some ways, enjoyed a resurgence in the 1930s with Alfred Rosenberg’s success in the Nazi Party. However, if there is a flaw to The Russian Roots of Nazism, in my mind, it’s that Kellogg fails to adequately address the issue of Lebensraum, or living space. He gives it minimal attention and quotes the famous passage in Mein Kampf Volume II (1926) in which Hitler insists the Germans “ . . . shift to the soil policy of the future” and “have in mind only Russia and her vassal border states.” Lebensraum, with its all imperial implications, clearly violates Aufbau’s ethnocentric notions of Nazifying Ukraine for the sake of the Ukrainians.
Kellogg seems to think it adequate to demonstrate that Hitler fully developed his Lebensraum ideas only after the 1923 Putsch. Thus, Kellogg abides by his thesis of the Russian roots of Nazism, that is, of how White émigré thought influenced early — and not middle or late — National Socialism. But this is too easy. If Aufbau ideas were truly the roots of Nazism, then why did Hitler reverse some of these ideas by the late 1920s? Kellogg doesn’t quite tell us.
Overshadowing this, however, is Kellogg’s assertion that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 after his 1939 non-aggression pact with Stalin in part because of the feverish anti-Bolshevism and anti-Semitism of the pre-Putsch White émigrés. The pact had devastated the Whites that were still living in Germany at that time. However,
[T]he cooperation between Hitler and Stalin that so discomfited Germany’s White émigré community did not last long. Hitler soon returned to his intense anti-Bolshevik roots, which he had largely developed during his close interaction with Aufbau in the early 1920s. Even while German armed forces were still engaged in the French campaign in June 1940, Hitler expressed his intention “to take action against the menace of the Soviet Union the moment our military position makes it at all possible.” He issued the first directive for the invasion of the Soviet Union in August 1940 under the telling name Aufbau Ost (Reconstruction East). In titling his planned Soviet campaign Aufbau Ost, Hitler demonstrated the lasting impression that Aufbau’s warnings against “Jewish Bolshevism” had made on his thinking.
Adding to this was how Rosenberg himself had urged Hitler to invade the Soviet Union as well.
Kellogg’s most valuable and revolutionary contribution to our understanding of this time involves his admirable academic restraint. Rarely does he pass judgment on his subjects, and certainly never during the 1918-1923 period on which his book mostly focuses — except in the few cases in which certain émigrés committed crimes such as embezzlement. Yes, in the last few pages, Kellogg rightly deplores the mass murder and extermination of Jews at the hand of Hitler — although, interestingly, he very rarely uses the term “Holocaust.” Rosenberg, who served as the State Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories during the war, greatly facilitated these horrific actions. But note how Kellogg insists on placing these actions within the larger context of Soviet atrocities from decades prior:
Rosenberg viewed his genocidal anti-Semitic actions in the occupied East as retaliation for the depredations of “Jewish Bolshevism.” The November 18, 1941 press release dealing with Rosenberg’s public assumption of the State Minister post stressed that the White émigré had entered politics since “he wanted to protect the German people from the same fate that he had lived through in Moscow.”
And what were these depredations?
In Mein Kampf, Hitler again treated the “Jewish Bolshevik” annihilation of the nationalist Russian intelligentsia. He drew upon Aufbau and Eckartian thought to describe a ruthless Jewish drive for world domination. With the stage set for the “last great revolution,” Hitler argued:
The democratic people’s Jew becomes the blood-Jew and tyrant over people. In a few years he tries to exterminate the national intelligentsia and by robbing the peoples of their natural intellectual leadership makes them ripe for the slave’s lot of permanent subjugation.
He further asserted, “The most frightful example of this kind is offered by Russia, where [the Jew] killed or starved about thirty million people with positively fanatical savagery, in part amid inhuman tortures.”
Kellogg later quotes Mein Kampf, demonstrating how Hitler “combined völkisch German and anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic White émigré beliefs” when stating of “the Jew” that
[H]is ultimate goal is denationalization, the muddled half-breeding of the other peoples, the lowering of the racial level of the most superior, as well as the domination of this racial mush through the extermination of the völkisch intelligentsias and their replacement by the members of his own people.
Now, is any of this true? Kellogg doesn’t say — indeed, it’s not his job to say. And we should be thankful for that. A Goldhagian approach, however, would be to dismiss it all as anti-Semitic lies and canards (just like The Protocols!) and smear anyone swayed by them as being irredeemably racist and anti-Semitic.
But with enough research under our belt from historians such as Robert Conquest, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Kevin MacDonald, and others, we now know that Hitler and the White émigrés were much closer to the truth than not. Tens of millions were starved or murdered in the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, and millions more died in the Great Terror and the Gulag Archipelago. From such authors, we have also learned that a disproportionate amount of the Soviet leadership in all facets of its military and government was indeed Jewish. Soviet Jews as a bloc remained enthusiastic for the Soviet Union even when it was committing its greatest atrocities. Lenin himself (as reported by Yuri Slezkine in The Jewish Century) attributed much of the success of the October Revolution to the Jews:
The fact that there were many Jewish intelligentsia members in the Russian cities was of great importance to the revolution. They put an end to the general sabotage that we were confronted with after the October Revolution. . . . The Jewish elements were mobilized . . . and thus saved the revolution at a difficult time. It was only thanks to this pool of a rational and literate labor force that we succeeded in taking over the state apparatus.
The Whites and the Nazis may have somewhat exaggerated Soviet crimes and often entertained fanciful conspiracy theories, but they were not wrong in linking Bolshevism to Jews and believing that the Soviet Union posed a dire threat to the West. By not shutting the door on such an interpretation of history, Kellogg indirectly allows the reader to develop a revisionist view of the Nazis as protectors rather than destroyers of civilization. Of course, it’s extremely difficult to justify Nazi atrocities during World War II (and Kellogg does no such thing), but after we read The Russian Roots of Nazism we learn that it was even more difficult to justify the Soviet atrocities which were greater, took place beforehand, and caused millions of Whites to emigrate westward to begin with.
The Whites knew this and they made sure the Nazis knew this. And thanks to Michael Kellogg, we know it too.
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32 comments
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This is pretty interesting. The emigre Russians with German ancestry seeded the Weimar Republic with hard-core anticommunist and anti… Counter Semitic intellectuals activists and cash.
The Romanovs had several German princesses and princlings in their bloodlines. Must have been the same for their warrior elites and aristocrats.
Was the October Revolution and subsequent civil war, just a combat between German ethnics and Jews, over who got to rule the place?
The Romanovs had several German princesses and princlings in their bloodlines.
Better said, the “Romanovs” WERE GERMANS. Since the 18th Century.
That was very bad and big error, that Nikolaus the Second waged war against Germany, and it was not in Russian, but in French and British interests.
Was the October Revolution and subsequent civil war, just a combat between German ethnics and Jews, over who got to rule the place?
Partially yes, with the Russians as “cannon food” on both sides. Anyway without the support of majority of the Russians the Bolsheviks could not get and hold the power.
OAS in France was ethnic French booted out of the colonies. Russia was a German Colony for two hundred years though.
Very keen observation. If one takes the list of White military commanders and the list of the marshals of Soviet Union will understand. Practically all the important White commanders were not Russians while all the future marshals were ethnic Russians.
More interesting is that many intelligence officers of the Tsarist Army and Ochrana were involved in the creation of OGP/Cheka/NKVD.
von Ungern-Sternberg was German while his Red nemesis was Pyotr Efimovich Shchetinkin, Russian and former tsarist officer.
Anton Denikin was part Russian part Polish – he suvived but it looks that he made too many wrong decisions, and escaped every ”assasination attempts”
Alexander Kolchak was of Romanian origin, from a noble Moldavian family (interesting how the Russian propaganda movie ”The Admiral” prefers to make him of Turkish origin), his counterpart was the Red Tukhachevsky, Russian, from a noble family, former Tsarist officer, future Marshal of the Soviet Union.
von Wrangel was German and was defeated by Mikhail Frunze (part Russian, part Romanian).
Anyway all the first five Marshals of Soviet Union were of Russian descent – Budyonny, Blyukher, Yegorov, Voroshilov and Tukhachevsky.
Here is a good list
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsarist_officers_in_the_Red_Army
The Bolsheviks won due to the large support of the Russian people, due to the fact that many officers of the Tsarist Army switched sides.
Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, Russian nobleman, head of Okhrana survived until 1938 as OGPU consultant!
Semyon Aralov, Russian, major in the Tsarist Army, Military Intelligence, turned Red. The first head of OGPU and founding member of Cheka.
Nikolai Skoblin was a Russian White general who was turned Red by his beautiful Russian wife. Involved in the kidnapping in Paris of the general Yevgeny Miller (another White German).
The Okhrana head cryptologist, I. A. Zybin, continued to work for Cheka.
Even the monster from Katyn, Vasily Blokhin the NKVD killer, was Russian from a peasant family and former Tsarist soldier. He killed 7000 Polish officers by himself. One man.
Now, it is a question that has to be really answered. What if all these Russians from the Army and Okhrana wanted to get rid of the noble foreign element (mostly of German origin) and it’s main symbol the Tsar?
What if in reality Okhrana wanted to compromise the Tsar and therefore the dubious usage of the infamous agents provocateurs like the killers Yevno Azef and Dmitry Bogrov (the Stolipin’s assasins)?
Who convinced the Tsar to enter WWI? Were they all a bunch of noble idiots as Russian propaganda suggests? I really do not think so. It is impossible. Too many good men, of good family and education, many hardened in the countless Russian wars.
Also interesting are the conversations between Tukhachevsky and Remy Roure while prisoners in Ingolstadt. It sheds a different light over these issues.
My belief is that the Russians wanted to overthrow the Tsar and the foreign bureaucracy, while they wanted to keep their empire and exploit countless other peoples and countries (they still do). They wanted to get rid of “Europe” and turn to “Asia” – in fact a political pattern since Alexander Nevsky.
Only that things get out of hand fast in such a complex and dynamic situation.
So the Russians started to passionately kill each other and everybody else while replacing some foreign overlords with some other foreign overlords, only much more brutal.
Alexander Kolchak was of Romanian origin, from a noble Moldavian family (interesting how the Russian propaganda movie ”The Admiral” prefers to make him of Turkish origin),
Well, not Turkish, but TURKIC, that’s not the same. Kolchak is a typical Kıpçak name. The Kıpçaklar, also known as Kumans or Polovtsi, have founded many Russian noble families. For example, prince Yussupov was of Kıpçak-Nogay origin, the descendant of the great Nogay ruler Edige, so as families of the Urussovs or the Beketovs.
It is impossible to imagine the Russian history (and the Russian present) without role of Turkic peoples and Russian descendants of Turks. Russia is a part of Eurasian World, of the Great Steppe, Uli Dala or, in the Persian, Deşt-i Kıpçak. The Germans and other Europeans have constituted only a small part of Russian population. Yes, there were much more Germans in the Russian Elite, but this elite was hated by the most of ordinary people, that´s why it was overthrown. All Jews of the world could not get and hold the power in Russia without essential support of (Eurasian) Russian people.
Colgeag is a relatively spread name in Romania. I do think it comes from something like Colț meaning Fang. Colțea, Colțuna, Colțac, Colțeac, Colciac, Colțişor there many variants.
Anyway there is a well documented book containing the names of noble family on the left bank of Prut river. The name Colgeag is given to be since at least before 1500. These noble families were even older. Some historians say that these names are before the Mongol invasion. (Dodon, like the name of the Putin’s clown in Moldavia of today is on that list).
So no, it is not Turkic. Also in the movie both Colgeac and his lover say that they are TURKS not turkic.
In Romania the Pecheneg theory of the noble families origin is just propaganda, made by a greek fanariot (Neagu Djuvara) whose books are full to the brim with errors, exagerations and lies.
Anyway there no DNA evidence to support the Pecheneg theory in Romania.
Otherwise a big YES. Everything else, besides the Colceag’s origin, is correct.
When Wrangel or Colgeag, no matter their loyalty and competence they were seen as foreigners and inerently hated.
The Bolshevik Revolution was based on the Russian people hate against this foreign elite.
The problem is that the Russian people is not yet ready to give up the Empire!
They want only the good things the Empire brings without the downside that if you want to keep the Empire you might get a total stranger ruling over you.
Just like Tukhachevsky. He wanted to be a second Napoleon only to be tortured and killed by some conquered Georgians, Poles, Latvians…
Funny, as the Czar seemed like a decent chap who would have gradually supported constitutional adjustments and reforms. It was all so fucking pointless to go full Communist. Without Lenin there was no Hitler etc. Germans could have migrated in as needed to create various industries instead of at the head of panzers.
Let’s not forget that Russia was founded by Scandinavian Vikings, though doomed through its conquest of Eastern lands and intermingling with Asian peoples. The roots of Russia were probably closer to that of Germany than we often realize.
Sounds like a very interesting book that I might like to read. I typically find ww2 stuff depressing, but this sounds like a good complement to Jewish Century. Ae van Vogts sci-fi novel Slan I read as a pro Nazi allegory. He had Russian Mennonite origins. Mennonites are germans, similar to the Baltic Germans. Another early twentieth century wn discussed at this website a few years back had Russian Mennonite origins too. It would seem that these expat Russian Germans were a major source of western anti Semitism in the early twentieth century. Quite interesting.
The leaders of the failed 1918-19 Communist revolution in Germany were heavily Jewish. Rosa Luxembourg is the most famous but she wasn’t the only one.
It is noteworthy that White officers assisted in intelligence gathering during the war. Ira Longin (alias “Longo”), working for Abwehr alongside Richard Kauder (austrian jew, known pseudonyms: “Klatt”, “Max”, “Fritz”), created Dienststelle I with headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria. This office became known as “Klatt Bureau” and remains one of the unsolved mysteries of WWII, as their reports caused suspicions among Abwehr leadership (namely col. Otto Wagner), that started doubting their veracity. One of the most succesful “Whites” in the field was Boris Smyslowsky (“von Regenau”) whose intelligence net (Sonderdivision R) recruited members of Komsomol, Party members and other functionaries. They collected intel on troop movements, liberated territories and red partisan tactics. Smyslowski managed to escape from incoming SMERSH manhunt and ended up in Argentine as a military instructor teaching anti-partisan warfare. White officers also assisted in interrogations of captured russian soldiers, while others like general Anton Turkul, helped forming ROA
In Finland White émigrés attempted to organise a military unit, consisting of war prisoners captured during the Winter War. Many of them were later arrested and handed over to SMERSH in 1945, all thanks to Interior Ministry headed by a communist Yrjö Leino.
There’s no Hitler without Lenin and the Bolsheviks first.
This is so basic that only a heavily propagandized society could have such reality suppressed for 80 years.
Russian proverb: “The Jew will always tell you what happened to him, but he won’t tell you why”.
It would be wise to learn the meaning of this and keep it permanently at hand.
If Hitler had listened to Rosenberg more than Himmler after Operation Barbarossa things could’ve been much different. Rosenberg wanted a pan-White coalition against jewish Bolshevism, which started with better treatment of Ukrainians and anti-Bolahevist Russians. If these groups were treated as allies rather than killed, the Soviet Union could have been destroyed, and it’s jewish menace exterminated.
Very fine article
2 books i have, speak to this subject…’Darkness From The East’ Serge De Chessin..1930 & ‘The Mind And Face of Bolshevism’ Rene Fulop-Miller…1927….
“America may speak English, but it thinks German. This is down to the people of German heritage in America. The whole public culture there, the universities – it’s much more like Germany than like British entities.” https://www.heise.de/tp/features/Germany-is-the-most-grown-up-country-in-the-world-today-3392277.html
Agreed. But someone who considers Adorno, Freud and
Merkel to be “great minds” has taken leave of his senses.
“Some German early medieval historians, such as Reinhold Kaiser feel that the concept of Germanic peoples is confusing and politically problematic, and that research on Germanic peoples should therefore be banned from modern scholarship. For this reason, Kaiser has criticized Rudolf Simek for writing books on Germanic peoples.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Simek#cite_note-2
This “feeling” is as logical as the one that wants to wrest the Anglo-Saxon past from the British.
Passage from tendencious Youtube audiobook “Der Nationalsozialistische Staat” (author unknown):
In 1932, Germany’s position in the world was still supposedly a threatened, powerless and disgraced one. It was different two or three years later. There one wooed the Reich from all sides, and made concessions to it.
Hitler lived with a few simple ideas: “Nature is cruel. Man belongs to it. He, too, is allowed to be cruel. Life is war. War is always. Only its forms change. Just as a predator lives at the expense of other animals, so a people lives at the expense of other peoples. What it wants to enjoy, it must take away from others. To enjoy in safety, it must either exterminate its neighbors or at least force them into permanent powerlessness. Compassion, love of neighbor, love of truth, loyalty to contract, all the Christian virtues, are inventions of the cowards and the weak. Nature does not know them. The strong man does not practice them. He beats the weaker to death. He lies, breaks contracts where it brings advantage. This is how it has always been. That is how all great empires came into being, the Roman, the British, that is how the German must come into being.”
How much this view runs through the man’s entire life, how openly he expressed it at all times, how precisely he acted according to it, can only amaze those who have not completely forgotten to marvel. On the first page of his first book he had written:
“Only when the frontier of the Reich encloses even the last German, without being able to offer any more the security of his food, does the moral right to acquire foreign land arise from the need of one’s own people. The plow is then the sword. And from the tears of war grows for posterity the daily bread.”
Twenty years later, a few months before the end, he philosophized in a speech to German officers:
“Among those processes which are essentially unchanging, remaining the same throughout the ages, and changing only in the form of the means employed, is war. Nature teaches us, every time we look at her actions, her events, that the principle of selection governs her. That the stronger remains victor and the weaker is defeated. Another world order and another world law is not conceivable. In a universe, in which the fixed stars force planets to circle around them, and planets force moons into their orbits, in which in most violent, gigantic events suns are destroyed one day, and others take their place. It teaches us also that what is valid in the big, is just as self-evident in the small as law. Above all, she does not know the concept of ‘humanity’, which says that the weaker is to be preserved and promoted under all circumstances. We humans did not create this world, but we are only very small bacteria or bacilli on this planet. We cannot deny these laws, we cannot eliminate them. That which seems cruel to man is naturally wise from the point of view of nature. A people that is not able to stand its ground must go, and another must take its place. Nature scatters the beings on the world, and then lets them struggle for their food and their daily bread. And the stronger keeps or conquers this place. And the weaker one loses it or gets none. In other words, war is itself inevitable. The smallness of a state, a nation or a people does not determine nature to a pity, but on the contrary: What is not strong enough is mercilessly eliminated by her. And in this seemingly ruthless cruelty lies ultimately cold reason.”
This was the philosophy: crude naturalism, learned from bad students-students of Darwin, and applied to politics. With its banal right and banal wrong it would not be worth talking about, if its prophet, who was the German head of state, had not seriously set out to maltreat European peoples in its sense.
Some well-edited footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fimW4tTwFCY
Before the American Indians developed a kind of “self-consciousness” in their origins, it often happened that representatives of their peoples on reservations (usually alcoholized by the “firewater” of the whites) consumed “Western movies” on tv, and cheered enthusiastically every time one of their own was shot off his horse by a “paleface”.
How was this to be explained? The principle is “everyone wants a winner.” Nobody likes losers. Hitler knew this very well: the crowd will eventually follow the winner, the undecided will sooner or later join the majority because they would rather be part of the winners than part of the losers.
That’s how the human psyche works. We are herd creatures. Everything that is presented to us today as alleged “critical judgment” and “intellectuality” is in truth only a paper-thin layer covering our tribalistic, atavistic instinct, which can break through again at any time when the time is right.
Up to now we have been living a miserable existence on the leash of our oppressors and brainwashers. The white race has never been sunken so low as today. We are like pinschers without claws and teeth, who do “sit up and beg” on command. No wonder the world has completely lost respect for us. We have lost moral authority in our own habitat.
We are like immature children, conditioned with rewards of all kinds for artificially created fake needs, taking the lies of the manipulators for the “truth”. It is high time to stand up, to let our peoples negotiate their own earthly future with each other as adult partners. The right to self-assertion is not given to us as a gift, we have to take it back. What costs nothing is worth nothing.
Losing a war or a battle is not part of our millennia-old genetics. We were not created to live an existence as slaves. White people tend to self-destruct at a certain point of resignation. Without the white race, the rest of the world will sink into darkness and chaos. The Asians cannot copy our technical-cultural and civilizational achievements for centuries.
So we are not only a blessing to ourselves, but a “world heritage” worth preserving for everyone else! If your strong arm wills it, all wheels will stand still! Our strong shoulders have been feeding foreign boarders through for centuries. We like to do what we can, we don’t ask anyone to slide on knees in front of us! But being spat in the face every day must come to an end!
We have the unconditional duty to leave our (too few) children a world worth living in, in which they may know themselves at home, safe and familiar, otherwise we are nothing more than shabby rags and traitors to our origin, which spans thousands of generations. No white child deserves to live an existence of penance and shame. We must – and will find! – a way to put an end to their dirty anti-white “game”!
Well let us say that the West recovers from its death-dive and rallies itself, and through struggle it brings under its control 10/10ths of the world where before 1914 it had 8/10ths.
If/when such a global Western victory is obtained, what then will substitute for the conflict that Hitler and others thought so essential?
Important question. I really don’t have an answer. Conflict is indeed built into our being, from evolution. But peace happens when one side wins. After global victory, then what?
I would not want to see Western fraternal conflicts become the war-replacement. But endless peace would atrophy Westerners. And the putting-down of colored rebellions would become un-inspiring work.
Excellent piece, but i cannot help myself:
“Of course, it’s extremely difficult to justify Nazi atrocities during World War II ”
Of course it is. They lost. It is therefore much easier to justify the Allies’ atrocities under the same period, even if they most likely were a lot worse.
Quinn: “Max von Scheubner-Richter ..,. grew quite close to Hitler and marched arm-in-arm with him during the failed 1923 Putsch in Munich where he was shot and killed. Thereafter, Hitler considered him a martyr for National Socialism.”
The Fuhrer listed him on the dedication page of Mein Kampf, along with the other fallen.
Good review, though it might have been longer. I will have to get this book. Thanks for bringing it to our attention.
That the Germans knew about the horrors of what Churchill called the Judeo-Bolsheviks (horrors vastly greater than even the worst attributed to the Nazis, by the way) has been well established. That the would be German Bolshevik Revolutionaries, as well as the leadership of the postwar Bavarian Marxist “Raterepublik”, were heavily Jewish was also well known among the German populace, as historian Gordon Craig makes clear in Germany: 1866-1945 (his contribution to the Oxford History of Modern Europe). Decades ago, I myself attended a John Randolph Club meeting at which the rightist German libertarian, Hans-Herrmann Hoppe, during the question and answer session following his lecture, discussed extensively the role that awareness and fear of Bolshevism among the post-WW1 German people (which included his own parents, and other family and friends he knew growing up in the 1950s-60s) played in building support for the Nazis, the only group that seemed willing really to challenge the Communists (think about that in today’s American context: how many white/conservative Americans might electorally support a really kick ass bunch of morally imperfect street rightists willing to go blow for blow with the antifa filth? [… how I wish I were young and strong again …]).
Without German awareness and fear of the Soviet Revolution, and the attempted soviet revolution in Germany following the Kaiser’s abdication, it is unlikely the Nazis would have been able to come to power (notwithstanding the Parliamentary trickery by which the minority Nazi Party actually gained the Chancellorship).
A fantastic essay, which clears up so much! I studied Russian History in college and didn’t get all these pieces put together at the time. I was only made aware of the horrid expenditure of lives of peasants and other ‘roadkill’ in the Soviet Union, from 1917 onward to 1990, when the whole nasty mess finally imploded. Anyone who believes that socialism does not end in communism and vast prison systems has their head in the sand. This essay lays out the basis of the Communist Horror in the Soviet Union. I am so glad to hear of the several books critiqued here and plan to get them all to more fully understand what I learned in college. And I had always wondered what made Hitler even think of invading Russia — vast, icy wasteland Russia — in winter yet, but now I see his objective, and realize the importance of the White emigres in his decisions.
Actually, I had only read snippets of ‘Mein Kampf’ and felt I had gotten the gist of it, but now I will read it through, thanks to this background material. And of course, this book by Kellogg as well.
It was my Minor in Russian History that led me to oppose Socialism any time and anywhere it reared its head, and which of course, has led me to White Nationalism. Now I have vastly increased my understanding of the subject. I can only wonder yet, what is being taught on this subject in our universities today, with multiculturalism and political correctness holding sway.
Awesome and highly recommended book, other than the occasional nod to the establishment narrative. At times it even seems sympathetic to its subjects, and the hostile parts seem artificially tacked to the book at the last minute. Only two errors or oversights in it: First of all, Ludendorff was not a “von”; he never held an official title of nobility. Second, the roots of the Protocols go back earlier than the Ukrainian publication in book form detailed in Kellogg’s book. For the original roots of the Protocols, see “Pogrom” by Steven Zipperstein. It’s biased, of course, but a very informative look at the origins of the Protocols and their first publisher (and probable author) a Russia-assimilated Moldavian named Pavel Krushevan. For a comrade of Krushevan named Purishkevich, another culturally Russified Bessarabian of more Romanian than Slavic blood, see my own book “The Sword of Michael.” Purishkevich is mentioned at times in Kellogg’s book, but his nationality is not. This, by the way, is the complete answer to the controversial half-truth that Codreanu drew some of his inspiration from Russians. Actually, the “White Russians” who apparently interested Codreanu were in fact Russified ethnic Romanians from just east of the Prut River.
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