Anti-Bolshevik League

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Propaganda poster of the Anti-Bolshevik League, 1919

The Anti-Bolshevik League (later the League for the Protection of German Culture ) was a short-lived German right-wing extremist organization that initially opposed the November Revolution and, above all, the Spartakusbund . It was founded in early December 1918 by the young conservative publicist Eduard Stadtler and financed by large industrialists.

According to Stadtler's memoirs published in 1935, German entrepreneurs organized and paid for the military operations of Freikorps against the Berlin January uprising and the contract killings of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on January 15, 1919.

The Anti-Bolshevik League distributed " anti-Bolshevik " or anti-communist literature and leaflets, organized lectures, exhibitions and training courses, sometimes in very large editions . The original leadership group planned to found a “national-socialist” party as early as December 1918 and agitated for a “German socialism ” turned nationalistically . The group around Stadtler and Heinrich von Gleichen was ousted from the leadership of the league in the spring of 1919 and continued its organizational activities in the June club and in this affiliated political college , journalistic mainly in the journal Das Gewissen .

background

The former secretary of the Catholic Windthorstbund and a member of the Center Party, Eduard Stadtler, was a soldier on the Eastern Front during the First World War and was taken prisoner by Russia in the summer of 1916. There he learned the Russian language and reported to the German embassy in Moscow in May 1918 , where he recommended himself to work as a “connoisseur of Russian conditions”. Here he joined the group around Karl von Bothmer and Wilhelm Henning , which advocated an intervention in the Russian civil war in favor of the White Army . He worked for the German press attaché for three months and returned to Germany in August. Since then, Stadtler has appeared several times as an anti-communist speaker on behalf of the war press office , for example on November 1, 1918 in the great hall of the Berlin Philharmonic on the subject of Bolshevism as a world threat . In October he founded an association for national and social solidarity . Originally, Stadtler envisaged the name Association for National Socialism for this, but was overruled by the co-founders - including Karl Helfferich , whom Stadtler knew from Moscow, Heinrich von Gleichen and the Catholic trade unionists Adam Stegerwald and Franz Röhr .

From this foundation in October 1918 the “Solidarity Circle” (also called “Club of the Young”, “Front of the Young” or - after the conference location, the flat of Gleichens in Potsdamer Strasse 121 I - called “I-Club”) the magazine Das Gewissen emerged, the most important ideologues of which, alongside Stadtler and Gleichen, were Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and Max Hildebert Boehm . The aim of the solidarians and their leading member Heinrich von Gleichen was to build up a small elite group. In this they differed from Stadtler, who envisioned a nationalist mass movement. After the proclamation of the republic on November 9, 1918, Stadtler supplied several newspapers with "2-3 articles a day" and appeared again as a speaker, including at the Berlin Citizens' Council at the invitation of Salomon Marx , to the Stadtler also in the following Maintained close relationships for months.

Foundation, program and first steps

Through the mediation of Helfferich, who did not want to make himself visible, Stadtler received 5,000 marks in cash from its director Paul Mankiewitz personally on November 28, 1918 as a “gift from the Deutsche Bank ” . He received another 3,000 marks from Friedrich Naumann from a political fund. On December 1, 1918, he was able to open a general secretariat at Lützowstrasse 107 in Berlin to study and combat Bolshevism . The Anti-Bolshevik League , launched on the same day, was originally intended as an umbrella organization for “friendly” organizations that were still to be founded or already existed. By the end of January, the league set up branches in Hamburg, Bremen, Königsberg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dresden, Halle, Leipzig and Breslau. Legally, it was a non-profit association and as such was subject to the supervision of the State Commissioner for regulating war welfare in Prussia.

With his political friends Gleichen, Röhr, Caesar von Schilling , Oskar Müller, Dörschlag, Axel Schmidt, Fritz Siebel , Momm and others, Stadtler formed an “action committee” and presented a “rescue program”. Among other things, the plan was to found a publishing house to issue anti-Bolshevik propaganda brochures, popular pamphlets under the title "Antispartakus" for mass distribution by parties and other organizations, a lecture cycle, the training of agitators and speakers, and the establishment of an anti-Bolshevik press and news service.

As a nationalist, Stadtler was an ardent opponent of the labor movement and its goals. He made no distinction between social democracy and communism , both of which he interpreted in the sense of a conspiracy theory as an attack on all values ​​of the German nation. That is why Stadtler, who had left the Center Party in 1918, immediately after the end of the war tried to win over leaders of German industry as well as right-wing party and media representatives to fight Bolshevism. Early on he did not see it as sufficient that the program of anti-Bolshevism was initially only negative, and therefore looked for an alternative concept of society. As a contrast to the “ class struggle- socialism” of the workers' parties, he propagated “the dictatorship of a national ” or “Christian-national socialism”. This objective should on the one hand the private ownership of means of production before expropriation protect as the council movement called for in the November Revolution, on the other hand, the parliamentary democracy in favor of a "purposeful dictatorial government" abolish, to take out the "party and class war" as part of a autoritär- to "overcome" family society. The adoption of the concept of socialism , which had been frowned upon and clearly assigned to the left , was also initially approved by the industrialist Hugo Stinnes . In January 1919, Stadtler spoke to a gathering of industrialists from the Ruhr area about his concept of “German socialism” at the Düsseldorf Stahlhof . In the propaganda of the league, concepts of council, revolution and socialism were emptied of their political and social content, turned anti-communist and used as a means of nationalist mobilization of broad layers. This was accompanied by the propaganda staging of a national (people) community among the “solidarians” . The historian Andreas Wirsching notices national Bolshevik undertones in Stadtler's program .

In order to make this plan plausible, the league clearly exaggerated the danger of a Bolshevik takeover of power in Germany. In February 1919, Ernst Troeltsch mocked the fact that Stadtler portrayed Bolshevism as a "first-rate intellectual power", "ruled over nine tenths of our people and that could only successfully counter a completely new doctrine, a completely anti-bourgeois ' activism '".

At the beginning of December, the league in Berlin published numerous leaflets and posters calling for the murder of leading figures in the Spartakusbund. Two of Stadtler's brochures appeared at the same time with initial print runs of 50,000 and 100,000 copies respectively. On December 8, 1918, the premises of the league were searched and sealed off by members of a workers' armed forces. The Berlin Executive Council , however, intervened and even ordered the return of the confiscated propaganda material.

Establishment of the Anti-Bolshevik Fund

On January 10, 1919, around 50 top representatives of German industry, trade and banking met and set up an anti-Bolshevik fund for German entrepreneurs . Paul Mankiewitz from Deutsche Bank organized the meeting on the premises of the Flugverbandhaus in Berlin. Among the invited participants, who were expressly to appear in person, were the head of the industrial association Hugo Stinnes, Albert Vögler , Carl Friedrich von Siemens , Otto Henrich ( Siemens-Schuckert-Werke ), Ernst von Borsig , Felix Deutsch from AEG , Arthur Salomonsohn from Disconto- Society .

The only item on the agenda was Stadtler's lecture “Bolshevism as a world threat”, which was intended to convince the economists present of the need to act against the revolution. In the general dismay about the lecture, Stinnes is said to have said, according to Stadtler's recollections, that he considers any discussion to be superfluous, he shares Stadtler's remarks “on every point” and suggests that the German economy should therefore provide 500 million marks. In the next room this sum had been approved and passed on to German capital through the associations of industry, trade and banks. The American social historian Gerald D. Feldman gives significantly lower numbers: According to this, the fund received five million Reichsmarks from every business leader present.

Stadtler reports in his memoir that a newly formed board of trustees administered the funds. This fund had been entrusted to a trusted man of Hugo Stinnes for support and distribution. From then on, money from this fund flowed generously to all anti-Bolshevik groups, including the following organizations:

  • the Anti-Bolshevik League under the cover name General Secretariat for the Study and Combat of Bolshevism
  • the Association to Combat Bolshevism
  • the citizens 'council movement (see Reich Citizens' Council )
  • Advertising agencies for the Freikorps
  • Student jobs
  • Self-protection formations (see Resident Services )
  • the coffers of the active troops
  • the Social Democratic Party of Germany .

Immediately after its establishment, 50 million Reichsmarks were made available through a bank loan. Alexander Ringleb was responsible for the administration and distribution of the incoming sums , who gave up his previous job as a judge. The existence of the fund is considered secure in research, the 500 million marks mentioned by Stadtler - an enormous amount at this point in time despite already noticeable inflation - are however regarded as an "exaggeration or [...] [total] from the inflationary period". The American social historian Gerald D. Feldman, on the other hand, estimates that the fund received five million Reichsmarks from every business leader present.

Contract killings

In his memoirs, Stadtler reports how after the end of the January fighting on January 12, 1919, he visited Waldemar Pabst , the commander of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division , which is one of the largest still intact troop units of the Reichswehr under the command of Hans von Seeckt had been ordered to Berlin at the beginning of the year to put down rebellions against the provisional government, at the Eden Hotel . He had convinced him of the "necessity" to also murder the Spartacus leaders Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg as well as Karl Radek - a socialist who was present in Berlin on behalf of Lenin :

“ Parliament could remain stolen from us soldiers at the front, men and deeds mattered; if there are no leaders to be seen on our side for the time being, then at least the other side shouldn't have any either. "

Probably through a paid by an organization Stadtler spy Liebknecht and Luxembourg were in their just been related hiding place in the evening of January 15th Wilmersdorf tracked by a "Wilmersdorfer vigilantes", captured and taken to the Hotel Eden. In the later trials against their murderers it was stated several times that an "SPD helper service" offered a head bonus of 100,000 marks for the apprehension of the Spartacus leaders. After severe abuse, they were murdered that night by members of the Guard Cavalry Rifle Division - according to Stadtler, "Mannen Major Pabsts". The members of the troops and the vigilante received a high reward per person, which, as the non-fiction author Frederik Hetman suspects, also came from the anti-Bolshevik fund.

End of funding from big industry

After the end of the immediate revolutionary crisis, a majority of the original financiers observed with growing displeasure that Stadtler continued to "operate with social-democratic means and played extensively on the 'national-socialist' scale." The spokesman for this group was AEG director Felix Deutsch, who rejected the Stinnes line, which was equally confrontational and “catastrophic” in terms of domestic and foreign policy, and relied on stabilization with the help of the Weimar coalition , at least in the short and medium term . Since the Weimar National Assembly was called on February 6, 1919, it was clear that Germany would not have a council system , as the industrialists had feared. In addition, Stadtler represented the interests of medium- sized companies more and more clearly in his lectures , not large-scale industry. For example, he called for “a responsible working group of all production forces as a countermeasure to party socialism”. On March 11, 1919, Stadtler reported in a letter about his dissatisfaction with his industrial financiers, who are based on mutuality: "My even if conservative and national socialism seems dangerous to them". At the end of March 1919 he was ousted from the leadership of the league after he had once again invoked “German socialism” in a program document. Most of the other “solidarians” left the league completely in the summer of 1919.

The Tübingen historian Gerhard Schulz puts the end of the financing by the industry for this point in time and judges, also with a view to the controversy about the contribution of financial aid from the industry to the rise of the NSDAP :

"The collaboration between industrialists and the newly emerging nationalist direction was short-lived."

Hans-Joachim Schwierskott and Joachim Petzold , on the other hand, assume a continuity of the anti-Bolshevik fund in the form of fixed monthly fees for the protagonists of the June club.

The historian Claudia Kemper believes that Stadtler had underestimated the orientation of entrepreneurs towards their economic interests: after the peace agreement, they no longer felt committed to the concept of organized capitalism pursued during the World War, which Stadtler wanted to build on. In addition, until mid-1919, when the Versailles Treaty came to the fore of public interest, “the subject of anti-Bolshevism in the monomaniacal form in which Stadtler represented it […] had been exhausted”.

Transformation into a league to protect German culture

In February 1919, leading members of the league such as Stadtler, Troeltsch, Gleichen and Joachim Tiburtius published a call for the establishment of a league for the protection of German culture in the Catholic daily Germania . From then on, the Anti-Bolshevik League appeared under this name. The leadership of the organization considered the renaming necessary after major league events in Essen and Hamburg had been blown up by workers. This seemed to indicate that the original name was "burned". Gleichen had also advised the renaming to make it clear “that our 'anti-Bolshevism' is under no circumstances only negative or even contains a point against the working class.” Stadtler explained that this was intended to move away from the competing association to combat Bolshevism take off, which brought out propaganda posters with head bonuses on Karl Radek and other leading members of the Spartakusbund . The league largely abandoned the "national-socialist" thrust of its publications and events after Stadtler's withdrawal. Now she took a more moderate course and from then on devoted herself to “educating” about the “dangers” of communism. In this phase it was financed, among other things, by the Reich Citizens' Council . Big industry and banks, however, remain influential. By the summer of 1919, the league had published eight different series of brochures with around 70 individual titles and a large number of leaflets. The brochures had titles such as In the Bolshevik Madhouse , The Imperialism of the Bolsheviks , The Despots of the Soviet Republic and The Asiatic Bolshevism - The End of Germany and Europe? . The league continued to agitate this style in the following years. According to the records of the Reich Commissioner for the Monitoring of Public Order , by the end of 1922 she had organized exhibitions in 80 German cities that had been visited by around 800,000 people, as well as around 8,600 lectures and around 400 training courses lasting several weeks with usually 120 to 150 participants.

Historical interpretation

In the history of the GDR , the anti-Bolshevik fund was cited several times as evidence of the agent theory , according to which “ monopoly capital ” stood behind Stadtler and ultimately financed fascism . The Munich historian Werner Maser also assumes that "the NSDAP has certainly received money from the 'anti-Bolshevik fund of the economy'". According to the Berlin historian Ernst Nolte , the radical right created the basis for its counter-attack in the first few months after the overthrow - without this approach immediately gaining a majority in the bourgeois camp or even gaining mass impact.

The historian Andreas Wirsching argues that the Anti-Bolshevist League and other anti-Bolshevik clubs and Home Guards to the Civil War rhetoric anknüpften that the Spartacus League and the Communist Party itself set in the world had had the "mesh and the interaction of extremes" in the early Weimar Republic located “at the root of civil war tension and destabilization”.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Claudia Kemper: The "Conscience" 1919-1925. Communication and networking of the young conservatives . Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-71385-5 , p. 123 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online); Joachim Petzold : Conservative Theorists of German Fascism. Young conservative ideologues in the Weimar Republic as spiritual pioneers of the fascist dictatorship , 2nd, revised and expanded edition. Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften, [East] Berlin 1982, p. 44.
  2. ↑ Reinhard Opitz : Fascism and Neo-Fascism. Volume 1. German fascism until 1945 , Pahl-Rugenstein, Cologne 1988, p. 93.
  3. ↑ Claudia Kemper: The "Conscience" 1919-1925. Communication and networking of the young conservatives . Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-71385-5 , p. 128 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  4. ^ Petzold, Conservative Theorists , p. 44.
  5. ↑ See Hans-Joachim Bieber: Bourgeoisie in the Revolution. Citizens' councils and citizen strikes in Germany 1918-1920 . Christians, Hamburg 1992, p. 199.
  6. ^ Eduard Stadtler: Memories. P. 12f.
  7. ^ Herbert Blechschmidt: Anti-Bolshevik League . In: The bourgeois parties in Germany. Handbook of the history of the bourgeois parties and other bourgeois interest organizations from Vormärz to 1945 . Edited by an editorial collective under the. Management of. Dieter Fricke. Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1968, Volume 1, p. 31.
  8. ↑ Andreas Wirsching : From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison . Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 304 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  9. ^ Eduard Stadtler: Memories, Vol. 1: As Antibolschewist 1918-1919. Neue Zeitverlag Düsseldorf 1935, p. 16 f.
  10. ^ Opitz, Faschismus , pp. 69 and 280.
  11. ^ Petzold, Conservative Theorists , p. 53.
  12. ↑ Joachim Petzold : Conservative Theorists , p. 52.
  13. ↑ Andreas Wirsching: From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison . Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 308 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  14. ↑ Quoted from Gerd Koenen: The Russia complex. The Germans and the East 1900–1945. CH Beck, Munich 2005, p. 248.
  15. ^ Wolfram Wette: Gustav Noske. A political biography . Droste, Düsseldorf 1987, p. 313.
  16. ^ Petzold: Conservative Theorists , p. 45.
  17. ↑ Jörg-R. Mettke: The big smear. Der Spiegel, December 3, 1984, accessed on August 13, 2019 .
  18. ↑ Gerald D. Feldman: Hugo Stinnes. Biography of an industrialist 1870-1924. Beck, Munich 1998, p. 553
  19. ^ Eduard Stadtler: Memories. Pp. 46-49.
  20. ↑ Werner Maser : The early history of the NSDAP Athenäum-Verlag, Königstein 1965, p. 407.
  21. ^ Joachim Petzold: The demagoguery of Hitler fascism. The political function of the Nazi ideology on the way to the fascist dictatorship . Akademie-Verlag, [East] Berlin 1982, p. 81.
  22. ↑ Gerald D. Feldman: Hugo Stinnes. Biography of an industrialist 1870-1924. CH Beck, Munich 1998, p. 553.
  23. ^ Stadtler: Memories. P. 52.
  24. ^ Eduard Stadtler: Memories. As an anti-Bolshevik 1918-1919. Neuer Zeitverlag, Düsseldorf 1935, p. 52.
  25. ↑ Frederik Hetmann: Rosa L. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1979, p. 266 f.
  26. ^ Petzold, Conservative Theorists , p. 45.
  27. ^ Petzold, Conservative Theorists , p. 54.
  28. ↑ Claudia Kemper: The "Conscience" 1919-1925. Communication and networking of the young conservatives . Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-71385-5 , p. 127 f. (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  29. ↑ Gerd Koenen: The Russia Complex. The Germans and the East 1900–1945. CH Beck, Munich 2005, p. 249.
  30. ↑ Gerhard Schulz: Rise of National Socialism. Crisis and Revolution in Germany. Propylaea, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna 1975, p. 303.
  31. ↑ See Petzold, Konservative Theoretiker , pp. 79 and 90 f. and Hans-Joachim Schwierskott: Arthur Moeller van den Bruck and revolutionary nationalism in the Weimar Republic , Musterschmidt, Göttingen 1962, p. 62ff.
  32. ↑ Claudia Kemper: The "Conscience" 1919-1925. Communication and networking of the young conservatives . Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-71385-5 , p. 130 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  33. ↑ Kai-Uwe Merz: The horror picture. Germany and Bolshevism 1917–1921. Propylaea, Berlin 1995, p. 276.
  34. ^ Rüdiger Stutz: Stability and changes in the political career of a right-wing extremist. On the development of Eduard Stadtler from the November Revolution to 1933 . In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , 34 (1986), pp. 797-806, p. 799.
  35. ↑ Claudia Kemper: The "Conscience" 1919-1925. Communication and networking of the young conservatives . Oldenbourg, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-71385-5 , p. 129 (accessed via De Gruyter Online)
  36. ↑ Gerd Koenen : The Russia Complex. The Germans and the East 1900–1945. CH Beck, Munich 2005, p. 248.
  37. ↑ Klemens von Klemperer : Conservative movements. Between the Empire and National Socialism , Oldenbourg, Munich and Vienna 1962, p. 118; Andreas Wirsching: From World War I to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison . Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 308 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).
  38. ^ See Blechschmidt, Antibolschewistische Liga , p. 34.
  39. ↑ Andreas Wirsching: From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison . Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 307, note 215 (accessed via De Gruyter Online).
  40. ^ Maser: Frühgeschichte , p. 407; similar to Hans Mommsen : Rise and Fall of the Republic of Weimar 1918–1933. Ullstein, Berlin 1998, p. 209.
  41. ^ Ernst Nolte: The crisis of the liberal system and the fascist movements , Piper, Munich 1968, p. 56; Blechschmidt, Antibolschewistische Liga , p. 32; Petzold, Conservative Theorists , pp. 48, 56.
  42. ↑ Andreas Wirsching: From World War to Civil War? Political extremism in Germany and France 1918–1933 / 39. Berlin and Paris in comparison . Oldenbourg, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-486-56357-2 , p. 310 (accessed from De Gruyter Online).