History is endlessly fascinating; if you dig deep enough, it is filled with surprises. For instance, I have just learned that one of Adolph Hitler’s most prominent (and most virulent) ideologists was inspired by a book he found while living and studying in Moscow during the Russian Revolution, a book which would provide, in many ways, a road map to fascism.
In the summer of 1917, writes Konrad Heiden (in The Fuhrer), “The globe was afire. The Tsar’s empire was crumbling. The German-Russian phase of the First World War was drawing to an end in bloody trenches; in the streets of Moscow, the Russian Revolution was ebbing and flowing. Alfred Rosenberg was then twenty-four years old. The son of a shoemaker, he was of German descent, but, as an Estonian, he was a subject of the Russian tsar. He had been raised in the German and Russian languages. He had been studying engineering and architecture at Riga, on the Baltic; when the German army occupied Riga, he had fled. Now he was studying in Moscow.”
Who was Alfred Rosenberg, and why was he important? Wikipedia to the rescue: “The author of a seminal work of Nazi ideology, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), Alfred Rosenberg is considered one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds, including its racial theory, its hatred of the Jewish people, the need for ‘Lebensraum,’ abrogation of the Treaty of Versailles, and opposition to what was considered ‘degenerate’ modern art.”
Alfred Rosenberg would be hanged as a war criminal in 1946 after being convicted at the postwar Nuremberg trials. According to Konrad Heiden, it was during Rosenberg’s time in Moscow in 1917 that he first stumbled upon a book which immediately seized his imagination and never let go. The book was a blueprint for world domination, an astonishingly explicit threat to existing governments everywhere: “We shall so wear down the nations,” the authors of the book declared, “that they will be forced to offer us world domination. We shall stretch out our arms like pincers in all directions and introduce an order of such violence that all people will bow to us.”
The book that opened Alfred Rosenberg’s eyes to the looming worldwide danger was The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; it originated, so Rosenberg learned, with “a group of old Jews who met together in a back room in Basel, Switzerland in 1897.” The book laid out in detail the “accursed wisdom” and “diabolical plans” of Jewish conspirators “aiming to devour the world.” These ‘protocols’ not only alerted Rosenberg to the menace of Jewry; they provided him with insights as to “how to establish dictatorship with the help (and abuse) of democratic methods,” insights he would put to use as a Nazi ideologist and advisor to Adolf Hitler. Konrad Heiden calls this the “true content” of the Protocols: “Democracy, if followed to its logical conclusion, provides a usurper with his best weapons.”
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were, of course, a hoax. The book had been composed and distributed by agents of the Russian Okhrana, the tsar’s secret police force, who had cobbled it together around the turn of the century. It was based on obscure writings from the French author Maurice Joly (1864) and Hermann Godsche, a German writer (1868); the former’s work was a disguised diatribe directed against Napoleon III of France, and the latter’s was a nightmarish anti-Semitic novel. What was the Okhrana’s motive in forging the Protocols? Writes Heiden, “They wanted to frighten the Tsar and drive him to bloodshed by persuading him that the Jews of the whole world had devised a secret conspiracy to achieve domination, first over Russia, then over the whole world.” Russia’s tsar at the time was Nicholas II, the inept and ill-fated ruler who would be driven from his throne in 1917 and murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918. But his regime had been threatened almost from its beginning (1894) by reformists and radicals of various stripes—liberals, socialists, anarchists, and Marxists. The insecure Nicholas was easy prey for the machinations of the Okhrana.
Konrad Heiden traces the events: once tsarist agents had come upon the older manuscripts, “General Oryevsky of the Okhrana had a pamphlet prepared which served as a frame in which Joly’s and Godsche’s ideas were embroidered in glowing colors.” Oryevsky was aided by General Ratchkovsky of the French division of the Okhrana; “Ratchkovsky,” continues Heiden, “saw the explosive power inherent in these time-worn and seemingly harmless works. The Okhrana men saw the pamphlet as material they could make good use of.” The Okhrana men, as it happened, were everywhere; the tsar’s intelligence had a global reach. “Everywhere, the Okhrana tracked down the activities of Russian, and not only Russian, revolutionaries. It was a kind of world conspiracy: a net of spies, intriguers, bribe-givers, and political agitators, which Tsarist Russia had cast over the world.”
The fraudulent Protocols would eventually come to have global impact, but their influence was first felt in Russia, as intended: “The Okhrana’s plan was the first great attempt at a mighty counter-revolution against the democratic and social revolutions of the nineteenth century.” At the turn of the century, “Society in Russia was farther advanced in its spiritual disintegration and more prepared for revolution than anywhere else in the world; at the same time, the State power was stronger than anywhere else.” Social conflict was unavoidable, and the Okhrana wanted to force Tsar Nicholas’ hand. “The plan was to fuse the passion of the people and the cold power of the State into a counter-revolutionary force that would shake society to its foundations.” While the Okhrana’s plan did not entirely succeed (though it prompted spasms of violence against Russian Jews by right-wing squads known as “the Black Hundreds”), it at least gave Russia the distinction of being “the spiritual mother country of modern fascism, as it later became the world center of Communism.”
Notably, the German government, during the Great War, provided financial support to anti-tsarist groups in and out of Russia in an attempt to destabilize Nicholas' regime. In 1917, the Germans arranged for Lenin’s return to Russia; they continued supporting the Bolsheviks until they seized power that November. Within a year, however, despite Russia's surrender, Germany had lost the larger war. Meanwhile, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion had fallen into the hands of Alfred Rosenberg, who, after the war, would be instrumental in helping create the agenda for Hitler’s National Socialist Party. 1 Later, less than a decade after taking power, Germany’s Hitler would sign a pact with Russia’s Joseph Stalin, a pact (which Hitler predictably broke) that cleared the way for Germany to launch World War II.
Bolshevism and Nazism were intertwined from the beginning. The most cursory look at the 20th century shows that Russia and Germany were at the forefront of the single bloodiest era in history. 2 The Bolsheviks and the Nazis, both of them on the political fringe of their respective countries, came to power at least in part due to the intrigues and machinations of their country’s governments. In attempting to arrange the world to their designs, those governments set the world ablaze. 3
It seems to be the case that “History,” as Edward Gibbon wrote, “is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.” Aldous Huxley sadly observed, “The most important of all the lessons of history is that men do not learn very much from the lessons of history.” And Ambrose Bierce put his cynical spin on the subject: “History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.”
To paraphrase the Roman writer Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it history." God save us from the schemers who believe the world is clay to be molded to their will.
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Konrad Heiden, The Fuhrer (1944) I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Heiden’s narrative, but whatever the book’s merit as history, it boasts literary flair and provides fascinating character studies of the Nazi inner circle—Hitler, Hess, Goering, Rosenberg, et al.
1 The Protocols would also fall into the hands of Henry Ford, who would then launch scurrilous anti-Semitic attacks in his newspaper. Ford was much admired both in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia.
2 Honorable mention goes to Great Britain. In fairness, Konrad Heiden himself suggests that German's Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) may have taken a higher toll, proportionate to the population, than 20th-century mass slaughter.
3 Honorable mention goes to Great Britain.
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