by Thomas Weber
Hitler’s directing his gaze toward the East and taking anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism more seriously occurred at a time when Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckart became important in his life. Rosenberg, Scheubner-Richter’s fellow Old Boy of the Rubenia fraternity, would be one of the leading ideologues of the party. Hitler would say of him in 1922: “He is the only man whom I always listen to. He is a thinker.”22
Even though Scheubner-Richter and Rosenberg shared, by and large, a common political outlook, the latter, unlike the former, was certainly no dashing adventurer. Even many other National Socialists found Rosenberg impossible and lacking any charm. In the years to come, behind Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s back, people from Hitler’s entourage would liken Rosenberg to an “undernourished gaslight” because of his expressionless, pale face and his cold, lifeless, and sarcastic personality, as well as his apparent inability to appreciate beauty and the nicer things in life; their other descriptors included a “block of ice” and “a man without emotions, cold as the tip of a dog’s nose,” whose “pale lack-lustre eyes looked toward you but not at you, as though you were not there at all.”23
A Baltic German of German, Estonian, Latvian, and Huguenot pedigree, Rosenberg—who had grown up a subject of Tsar Nicholas II, studied in Moscow during the war, and experienced Bolshevik rule in Moscow—had left Russia in 1918. After a stint in Berlin, he had made Munich his home.24 Yet it would be a while before he fit well in southern Germany, as he spoke German with a heavy Russian accent. Even by the time Rosenberg was working for the Völkischer Beobachter, Hermann Esser had to edit his articles, as his German was unidiomatic.25 Like so many other leading figures of the early years of National Socialism in Munich, Rosenberg was Protestant and non–Upper Bavarian.
He met Hitler as early as the autumn of 1919 and soon thereafter joined the NSDAP. Within months, Rosenberg was playing an important role in the party, even though he could not offer it any material support, having lost everything when he immigrated to Germany. Once in Munich, he had been forced to rely on eating in soup kitchens to which he had to bring his own spoon, and had lodged for free, in an arrangement through a refugee committee, with a retired military doctor.26
Rosenberg mattered to the NSDAP because of his intellectual influence on Hitler. If we can believe the testimony of Helene and Ernst Hanfstaengl, who became close to Hitler in the winter of 1922/1923, Hitler, at least initially, put great faith in Rosenberg and turned to him particularly on questions relating to Bolshevism, Aryanism, and Teutonism. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s desire to put through his anti-Semitic program “at any cost” was a result of Rosenberg’s influence.27
Rosenberg’s primary concern was anti-Semitic anti-Bolshevism. Indeed, his very first political speech, given while he was still in Estonia, on the eve of his departure for Germany, had been about the nexus that he had seen between Marxism and Judaism. For Rosenberg, Russian Bolshevism was not a movement of Slavs, but rather one of primitive and violent Asiatic nomads being led by Jews. Yet while Rosenberg invoked supposedly Jewish Bolshevism more often, he nevertheless believed it to be linked intrinsically to Jewish capitalism. For him, Bolshevism and Jewish finance capitalism went hand in hand. For instance, on May 1, 1921, he wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter that the “Jewish stock exchange has united with the Jewish revolution.”28
Rosenberg believed in the existence of a Jewish conspiracy, stating that Jewish Bolshevik leaders answered to Jewish financiers. In his 1922 book Pest in Russland! (Plague in Russia!), he argued that Jewish finance capitalists ultimately called the shots in Russia: “If one understands capitalism as the high-powered exploitation of the masses by quite a small minority, then there has never been a greater capitalist state in history than the Jewish Soviet government since the days of October 1917.” He also believed that President Woodrow Wilson was just a puppet in the hands of Jewish bankers—who he thought also ran the stock exchanges of New York, London, and Paris—as well as Bolshevik leaders in Russia. According to Rosenberg, Jewish leaders, meeting in Freemasonry lodges, were plotting the takeover of the world. He saw Jewish influences everywhere, believing the Jewish spirit to be omnipresent. In a pamphlet that he would author in 1923, he called upon humankind to liberate itself from the “judification of the world.”29
It was this form of conspiratorial of anti-Semitism, one that, as far as Rosenberg was concerned, was not exterminatory in character30 but that represented Bolshevism as in the hands of finance capitalists, that allowed Hitler to integrate anti-Bolshevism more fully into his own initially anticapitalist form of anti-Semitism.31
Although ultimately that would change, Rosenberg still expressed pro-Russian sentiments in the early years of his interaction with Hitler. On February 21, 1921, Rosenberg published an article in Auf gut Deutsch that argued that “Russians and Germans are the noblest peoples of Europe; [… ] they will be dependent on each other not only politically, but culturally as well.”32
Other ideas originating in tsarist Russia sometimes flowed to Hitler indirectly, via Dietrich Eckart, who had been influenced heavily by the many personal contacts he had had ever since the first Russian “white” émigrés had appeared in Munich. As early as March 1919, he stated in Auf gut Deutsch that “German politics hardly has another choice than to enter an alliance with a new Russia after the elimination of the Bolshevik regime.” In February 1920, he claimed that the Russian people, oppressed by Jewish Bolsheviks, were Germany’s natural ally. “That Germany and Russia are dependent upon each other is not open to any doubt,” Eckart wrote, stressing the necessity of Germans to make connections with the “Russian people” and support them against Russia’s “current Jewish regime.”33
Eckart had also been influenced, as were many other people on the völkisch right in Germany, by the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a forged account of a conspiratorial international organization dedicated to establishing Jewish world rule. The “Protocols” had had hardly any influence in prewar and wartime Germany. Yet, when Russian émigrés brought copies with them to Germany in the wake of the war, they were translated into German and quickly gained notoriety in right-wing circles.34
It is difficult to measure Alfred Rosenberg and Dietrich Eckart’s role in Hitler’s pivot toward the East. His shift to the east had certainly started to occur at the time when Baltic Germans and “white” Russian émigrés had first appeared in Munich. Yet it is difficult to say whether the appearance of Rosenberg and others on the scene was the root cause of Hitler’s pivot toward the east and toward anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism; or whether his interest in Rosenberg and subsequently in Scheubner-Richter was an effect of the shift in his thinking toward the East. In other words, it is difficult to tell whether a cultural transfer of ideas had occurred on the back of the migration to Bavaria of Rosenberg and other émigrés from Russia, or whether the evolution of radical right-wing ideas in Russia and in southern Bavaria had run in tandem. In short, it is hard to measure whether there were specifically Russian roots to National Socialism and Hitler’s thinking.
What makes it almost impossible to tell whether the shift toward the kind of conspiratorial anti-Semitism associated with Rosenberg and right-wing Russians was the doing of Rosenberg and his associates, is that their ideas were neither novel nor confined to Russia. Such sentiments expressed after the First World War had existed previously and traveled from country to country prior to the war. Thus, it is certainly possible to find German homegrown incarnations of anti-Semitism that look very similar to those of right-wing Russians. Nevertheless, in the case of Hitler, it is difficult to come to any conclusion other than to say that it was through Rosenberg and others among the inflowing wave of Baltic Germans and “white” Russians that Hitler was exposed prominently to ideas of heightened conspiratorial anti-Semitism.
More important, it was through these émigrés that Hitler witnessed, right in front of his eyes, the existence of a German-Russian symbiotic group, which provided Hitler with inspiration i
n his quest to find an answer to the challenge of how to create a Germany that would never again lose a major war. He did not display any apparent anti-Slavic sentiments at the time; his racism still took a rather selective form. He seems to have been more influenced by the legacy of the intimate relationship of German and Russian conservatives going back to the days of Catherine the Great, a German woman who ruled Russia in the late 18th century, than by the anti-Slavic sentiment he encountered in prewar Vienna.
Hitler would hardly have turned as prominently toward Rosenberg and Scheubner-Richter as he did had their ideas not complemented his preexisting ideas. Likewise, the two men would hardly have continued to be treated as being of the utmost importance by Hitler if he previously had already fully developed his ideas about the East and about eastern Jews.
The Russian influence on Hitler mattered insofar as that he encountered Baltic Germans and “white” Russians and their ideas at a time when he was trying to refine and revise the answer he had found in 1919 to the question of how to build a sustainable Germany. Both his firsthand experience with intimate German-Russian collaboration in Munich and the cultural transfer from Russia to Germany of conspiratorial anti-Bolshevik ideas fueled his pivot toward the East and his growing interest in anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism. In that sense, there was a strong Russian element in the evolution of Hitler and National Socialism.
In Rosenberg and in Eckart, Hitler had advisers who made the intellectual case for German-Russian collaboration as a facilitator of a rebirth of Germany and Russia, and who stressed the importance of anti-Bolshevik anti-Semitism. In Scheubner-Richter, Hitler had an adviser who, unlike Rosenberg and Eckart, was a man of action and who did not just devise but also implemented policy. It was thus through Scheubner-Richter that he saw the ideas championed by Rosenberg and Eckart translated into reality, while Scheubner-Richter helped Hitler translate his own ideas into action, an important skill for any aspiring leader, but of particular importance to Hitler because he put such a premium on willpower and action. For instance, in his speech of January 1, 1921, he said:
This struggle will not be led by the majorities won by parties in parliamentary elections, but by the only majority that, as long as it has existed on this earth, has shaped the fortunes of states and peoples: The majority of force and of the greater will and of the energy; to set this force loose without concern for the number of people killed as a consequence. To be a true German today does not mean being a dreamer, but a revolutionary, it means not being satisfied with mere scientific conclusions, but to take up those conclusions with a passionate will to turn words into actions.35
After his return from the Crimean Peninsula and not long before his first meeting with Hitler, Scheubner-Richter had set up Aufbau (Reconstruction), a secret, Munich-based group of Germans and “white” émigrés that would be very active in late 1920 and the first half of 1921. Directed almost equally against Bolshevism, Jews, the Weimar Republic, Britain, America, and France, its goal was to overthrow the Bolshevik regime in Russia and make Grand Prince Kirill Romanov the head of a new pro-German monarchy. More generally, Aufbau’s aims were to reestablish monarchy in both Russia and Germany, as well as defeat Jewish dominance.
Technically, Scheubner-Richter was Aufbau’s first secretary, but he was the de facto head of the group. His second-in-command was Max Amann, the staff sergeant of Hitler’s First World War regimental HQ. Hitler would soon recruit Amann to become managing director of the NSDAP. Thus, the two people who effectively ran Aufbau were also leading National Socialists and were close to Hitler.
However, the memberships of the NSDAP and Aufbau were fundamentally different, especially since few party members could have afforded to join Aufbau. Members of Aufbau were supposed to finance activities aimed at overthrowing the Soviet regime and thus had to pay 100,000 marks to join, and another 20,000 marks in annual dues. Due to the secrecy of the group and scarce surviving documentation, little is known about its membership. It was formally headed by Baron Theodor von Cramer-Klett, who channeled money to Aufbau from the various businesses his family owned. Its vice president was Vladimir Biskupski, a high-ranking former Russian general. Various other “white” officers and officials who had moved to Munich in the wake of the Kapp Putsch were members, too, including Fyodor Vinberg, who had, while still in Berlin, republished the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Vinberg also edited a Russian newspaper in Munich, Luch Sveta (A Ray of Light), in which he argued that Jews and Freemasons represented evil as they sought to destroy Christianity and take over the world.36
Scheubner-Richter not only introduced Hitler to Aufbau and to Russian exiles; in March 1921, he would introduce him to the person who, whether intentionally or not, would facilitate Hitler’s rise to national prominence: General Erich Ludendorff, Germany’s most powerful military leader in the second half of the First World War.
During the German revolution of 1918/1919, Ludendorff had left Germany in disguise and as quietly as possible moved to Sweden, which had provided a safe haven for him. Upon his eventual return, he had been implicated in the Kapp Putsch. In the summer of 1920 he had joined the exodus of right-wing extremists to Munich, where his younger sister lived. Bavaria’s capital was both welcoming and forbidding to him: the Bavarian conservative political establishment provided a safe haven to Ludendorff in the same way that they had taken in other right-wing extremists from northern Germany, even though the very same establishment revered Ludendorff’s archenemy Rupprecht of Bavaria. Once in Bavaria, he turned to his protégé Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who became the chief planner of his activities. Scheubner-Richter also introduced Ludendorff to the members of Aufbau as well as to Adolf Hitler. As, by 1921, Scheubner-Richter was working closely with both Ludendorff and Hitler, it was through him that a fateful alliance would be struck between Germany’s formerly most powerful general and Hitler.37
That alliance would be driven by a mutual realization that they needed each other. Hitler required a prominent nationalist leader with a national standing who would take him under his wing and help him become a national leader, too. Ludendorff, meanwhile, would see in Hitler an energetic young man who was a great orator and who would be able to appeal to people beyond his own reach.
For the time being, however, the formation of that alliance still lay in the future. In the first half of 1921, to consolidate and increase the NSDAP’s following in Munich and southern Bavaria, Hitler stepped up his public appearances even further. In his speeches, he tried to be as provocative as possible, trying to find the limits of what was legally permissible to do and to say, so much so that on February 24, 1921, one year to the day after Hitler had announced the party platform in the Hofbräuhaus, Rudolf Heß expressed surprise to his mother that “Hitler is not yet in prison.” In early July, Heß wrote to his cousin Milly that Hitler put on a show for political gain, contrasting the persona people experienced during Hitler’s speeches with the Hitler he experienced the rest of the time: “Hitler’s tone in his speeches is not to everyone’s taste. However, it brings the masses to a point where they listen, and come again. One needs to adapt the tools to the material, and H[itler] can modify the way he speaks. I especially like hearing him speak about art.” Earlier in the year, he had already told his cousin that “the outwardly rough man is internally tender, which is evident in the tender way he handles children and his compassion for animals.”38
All the noise that Hitler had made in 1920 and early 1921, as well as the purchase of the Völkischer Beobachter, paid off spectacularly well: the NSDAP’s membership figures had increased tenfold between the beginning and the end of 1920, and by the middle of 1921, another thousand members had been added, bringing the NSDAP membership to approximately 3,200. With the beginning of the spread of the party across southern Bavaria, NSDAP was slowly changing its face. It still was an overwhelmingly urban party, but by the end of 1920, almost one in four members came from places other than Munich. With the spread of the party beyond Munich, there w
as a small increase in middle-class membership. And there had been a slight decrease in the share of members who were Protestant, due to the even smaller overall Protestant population of southern Bavaria outside Munich. Nevertheless, Protestants still remained very much overrepresented in the NSDAP—more than one in three members were Protestant. And in its self-image, the NSDAP also remained a party that catered successfully to workers. As Rudolf Heß wrote to his cousin Milly, “Over half of all members are manual workers, which is a far higher share than in all other non-Marxist parties. Germany’s future primarily depends on whether we can return the worker to the National ideal. In this regard, I see the most success in this movement—that is why I fight among their ranks.”39
The party still remained somewhat politically heterogeneous, as many people in Bavaria’s capital were still trying to find a footing in the postwar world and had not yet ceased to hold fluctuating political convictions. For instance, Heinrich Grassl, a man in his midforties, was simultaneously a member of the NSDAP and the liberal DDP. He would only quit the NSDAP once the party was taken over by Hitler.40
Compared to Munich’s overall population, the membership of Hitler’s party was still minuscule. Well under 0.5 percent of the population of Munich had joined the party by the summer of 1921. Yet despite its initial problems in 1920 of getting out its political message, the NSDAP ultimately had managed by the middle of 1921 to become the primary beneficiary of the consolidation of the fragmented radical right.