The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (review)

Michael Kellogg's book examines the contribution of Russian émigrés to the formation of Nazi ideology as well as the cooperation of far-right Russian émigrés in Germany with the Nazis. The author pays special attention to the Russian–German society Aufbau (Reconstruction), with which Adolf Hitler collaborated between 1920 and 1923. Chapter 4 is dedicated to Aufbau (109–35), but other parts of the book also touch on the subject. Among the leading figures of Aufbau were the Baltic German émigrés Max Scheubner-Richter, Arno Schickedanz, Alfred Rosenberg, and Otto von Kursell; the Russian émigrés General Vladimir Viktorovich Biskupskii, Fedor Viktorovich Vinberg, Petr Nikolaevich Shabel´skii-Bork, and Sergei Vladimirovich Taboritskii; and the "Ukrainian Cossack" Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa.

The distinct contribution of Russian émigrés to the formation of the Nazi ideology has been noted before by investigators. Usually mentioned have been German familiarity with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the conception of Bolshevism as the brainchild of Jewry (7–9).¹ Unlike his predecessors, Kellogg goes much further, writing of the "Russian roots of Nazism" and stressing that early National Socialism was based on a synthesis of German and Russian right-radical tendencies and ideologies. Kellogg draws a parallel between the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who argued that Germans should resist Jewish materialism, and the predictions of the Russian mystical writer Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoevskii and the philosopher Vladimir Sergeevich Solov´ev, who foresaw a battle between Russia and world Jewry, with Russia embodying Christ and Jewry the Antichrist (11–12).

Based on new archival materials and periodicals from 1919–23 that are now bibliographic rarities, Kellogg's book is the most detailed investigation of the phenomenon of cooperation between German and Russian rightists during the troubled period following the Great War.

In Kellogg's estimation it was precisely the influence of Aufbau that to a considerable degree defined the antisemitism and anti-Bolshevism of Hitler, which in turn led to the risky invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 and facilitated the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question." Even the fateful decision to direct a significant portion of German forces for the occupation of Ukraine instead of concentrating on the advance on Moscow in the summer and fall of 1941 was, in the author's opinion, a reflection of the influence of the ideas of Aufbau (16–17, 261–62).

Kellogg came to these conclusions based on his study of materials at the Center for the Preservation of Historical Documentary Collections in Moscow (Tsentr khraneniia istoriko-dokumental´nykh kollektsii [TsKhIDK], now part of the Russian State Military Archive), for many years closed to researchers. Kellogg investigated materials of the Secret Intelligence Office of the Weimar Republic, the Gestapo, and French and Polish intelligence (10–11). Several personal collections were deposited in the former TsKhIDK, among them the diary of Walter Nikolai, chief of German intelligence during World War I, who worked thereafter with Aufbau and the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP); and the fond of the well-known völkish publicist Ludwig Mueller von Hausen. It was precisely to the latter that Shabel´skii-Bork gave a copy of the Protocols with his own commentaries, introducing the text into German antisemitic discourse (11). Kellogg also employed materials of the State Archive of the Russian Federation, the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (the former Central Party Archive of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [CPSU] Central Committee), and several German archives.

Rosenberg's views, as Kellogg puts it, formed under the simultaneous influence of Germanic mythology (the works of Schopenhauer and Chamberlain, whom he read enthusiastically in his youth) and of Russian literature, in particular Dostoevskii. Here he has in mind, of course, the latter's antisemitic "publicistic" works. "Later on," the author concludes, "Rosenberg helped in the formation...