The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 (New Studies in European History)

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Fascism was a major influence on Nazism. The seizure of power by Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini in the March on Rome in 1922 drew admiration by Hitler, who less than a month later had begun to model himself and the Nazi Party upon Mussolini and the Fascists. [144] Hitler presented the Nazis as a form of German fascism. [145] [146] In November 1923, the Nazis attempted a "March on Berlin" modelled after the March on Rome, which resulted in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich. [147] There are only two possibilities in Germany; do not imagine that the people will forever go with the middle party, the party of compromises; one day it will turn to those who have most consistently foretold the coming ruin and have sought to dissociate themselves from it. And that party is either the Left: and then God help us! for it will lead us to complete destruction—to Bolshevism, or else it is a party of the Right which at the last, when the people is in utter despair, when it has lost all its spirit and has no longer any faith in anything, is determined for its part ruthlessly to seize the reins of power—that is the beginning of resistance of which I spoke a few minutes ago. [34]

The origins of this relationship date to the late 1990s, when Russia was shaken by a wave of racist violence committed by neo-Nazi skinhead gangs. After Putin’s accession to the presidency in 2000, his regime exploited this development in two ways. The Nazi notion of Slavs as inferior served as a legitimisation of their desire to create Lebensraum for Germans and other Germanic people in eastern Europe, where millions of Germans and other Germanic settlers would be moved into once those territories were conquered, while the original Slavic inhabitants were to be annihilated, removed or enslaved. [198] Nazi Germany's policy changed towards Slavs in response to military manpower shortages, forcing it to allow Slavs to serve in its armed forces within the occupied territories in spite of the fact that they were considered "subhuman". [199] Völkisch nationalism denounced soulless materialism, individualism and secularised urban industrial society, while advocating a "superior" society based on ethnic German "folk" culture and German "blood". [87] It denounced foreigners and foreign ideas and declared that Jews, Freemasons and others were "traitors to the nation" and unworthy of inclusion. [88] Völkisch nationalism saw the world in terms of natural law and romanticism and it viewed societies as organic, extolling the virtues of rural life, condemning the neglect of tradition and the decay of morals, denounced the destruction of the natural environment and condemned "cosmopolitan" cultures such as Jews and Romani. [89]Experts said this history makes it easy for the Russian media to draw connections between real Nazis and modern far-right groups to give the impression that the contemporary groups are larger and more influential than they are. Further information: Women in Nazi Germany Obligations of Polish workers in Germany, warning them of the death penalty for any sexual relations between Germans and Poles The Russian Roots of Nazism - White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 - by Michael Kellogg

Günther emphasised Jews' Near Eastern racial heritage. [186] Günther identified the mass conversion of the Khazars to Judaism in the 8th century as creating the two major branches of the Jewish people: those of primarily Near Eastern racial heritage became the Ashkenazi Jews (that he called Eastern Jews) while those of primarily Oriental racial heritage became the Sephardi Jews (that he called Southern Jews). [187] Günther claimed that the Near Eastern type was composed of commercially spirited and artful traders, and that the type held strong psychological manipulation skills which aided them in trade. [186] He claimed that the Near Eastern race had been "bred not so much for the conquest and exploitation of nature as it had been for the conquest and exploitation of people". [186] Günther believed that European peoples had a racially motivated aversion to peoples of Near Eastern racial origin and their traits, and as evidence of this he showed multiple examples of depictions of satanic figures with Near Eastern physiognomies in European art. [188] Cover of the racist booklet " Der Untermensch" published by SS in 1942. 4 million copies of the brochure were printed by Nazi Germany and distributed across occupied territories. The pamphlet depicted the Slavic and Jewish inhabitants of Eastern Europe as primitive people. [189]The Nazi Party won the greatest share of the popular vote in the two Reichstag general elections of 1932, making them the largest party in the legislature by far, albeit still short of an outright majority ( 37.3% on 31 July 1932 and 33.1% on 6 November 1932). Because none of the parties were willing or able to put together a coalition government, Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933 by President Paul von Hindenburg through the support and connivance of traditional conservative nationalists who believed that they could control him and his party. With the use of emergency presidential decrees by Hindenburg and a change in the Weimar Constitution which allowed the Cabinet to rule by direct decree, bypassing both Hindenburg and the Reichstag, the Nazis soon established a one-party state and began the Gleichschaltung.

Main article: Left–right political spectrum Left to right: Adolf Hitler, Hermann Göring, Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, and Rudolf Hess Nazis alongside members of the far-right reactionary and monarchist German National People's Party (DNVP) during the brief NSDAP–DNVP alliance in the Harzburg Front from 1931 to 1932 For Russia, it was a perfect opportunity,” Dr. Doroshenko said. “It was like, ‘We’ve been smearing them for so long and they’re still there, they’re still fighting, so we can justify our tactics of destroying Mariupol because we need to destroy these Nazis.’”

From 1920 to 1923, Hitler allied himself with a conspiratorial völkisch German/White émigré association headquartered in Munich, Aufbau: Wirtschafts-politische Vereinigung für den Osten (Reconstruction: Economic-Political Organization for the East), hereafter Aufbau. This secretive union sought to combat international Jewry and to overthrow both the German Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union in league with National Socialists. Aufbau contributed considerable sums of money to Hitler’s National Socialist movement. Moreover, early National Socialist ideology combined völkisch notions of Germanic racial and spiritual superiority with the apocalyptic White émigré Aufbau conspiracy theory in which Jews, who operated as a seamless web of conniving finance capitalists and murderous Bolsheviks, threatened to conquer the world and then to send it to perdition. Aufbau left a powerful anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic legacy to National Socialism after 1923 as well. Prominent White émigré Aufbau members who influenced Hitler’s political and military strategies as well as his anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic Weltanschauung (world-view) included First Lieutenant Max von Scheubner-Richter, General Vladimir Biskupskii, Colonel Ivan Poltavets-Ostranitsa, Lieutenant Piotr Shabelskii-Bork, Colonel Fedor Vinberg, and Alfred Rosenberg. Scheubner-Richter de facto led Aufbau until he was shot fatally while marching with Hitler and General Erich von Ludendorff during the disastrous Hitler/Ludendorff Putsch of November 1923. Hitler subsequently asserted that Scheubner-Richter alone of the “martyrs” of the failed undertaking had proved irreplaceable. 1 Many non-Americans gave me valuable assistance in carrying out this project. German academics who considerably aided my research include Michael Hagemeister and Karl Schlögel of Europe University-Viadrina in Frankfurt/Oder, Heinrich Winkler of Humboldt University in Berlin, Hermann Beyer-Thoma of the East European Institute in Munich, and Dr. Johannes Baur of Munich. In Moscow, Vasily Tsvetkov of Moscow State Pedagogical University alerted me to important archival materials, and Natasha Petina and Ludmilla Novikova helped me to translate difficult Russian texts. Joanna Grynczuk of Berlin translated Polish intelligence files for me. Dominika Plümpe of Berlin gave me helpful insights into my work. The Welsh journalist and historian Michael Joseph offered me a valuable critique. The positions of Goldhagen and Nolte represent opposing views of German and foreign influences on National Socialism. In Hitler’s Willing Executioners, Goldhagen argues for the peculiarly German nature of National Socialism and the Holocaust. He emphasizes what he terms the “eliminationist mind-set” of “German antisemitism” to the exclusion of virtually all other factors. He asserts that it is “not essential to discuss German antisemitism comparatively.” He nevertheless concludes, “No other European country came close” to equaling Germany’s anti-Semitism. “The unmatched volume and the vitriolic and murderous substance of German antisemitic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries alone indicate that German antisemitism was sui generis.” 23 Goldhagen thus avoids a sufficient comparative analysis in his treatment of supposedly unequaled German anti-Semitism. Multiple experts on the region said the claim that Ukraine is corrupted by Nazis is false. President Volodymyr Zelensky, who received 73 percent of the vote when he was elected in 2019, is Jewish, and all far-right parties combined received only about 2 percent of parliamentary votes in 2019 — short of the 5 percent threshold for representation.