Pyotr Ivanovich Ratschkowski

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pyotr I. Rachkovsky

Pyotr Ivanovich Ratschkowski ( Russian Пётр Иванович Рачковский ; * 1853 , † 1910 ) was the head of the Tsarist secret police in Ochrana . He is suspected of being the forger of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , or of having commissioned their forgery.

activity

From 1884 to 1902 Ratschkowski headed the foreign branch of the Ochrana secret police, which was based in Paris . His main task was to monitor and combat the numerous Russian emigrants who had fled abroad from prosecution. For this purpose he organized a wide-ranging network of informers that reached back to Russia itself. He also influenced French journalists to report positively about the Tsarist empire .

Protocols of the Elders of Zion

In 1921, Ratschkowski was named by Polish Countess Catherine Radziwill , who lived in exile in New York , as the initiator of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion , a forgery that seeks to prove the existence of a Jewish world conspiracy . His subordinate Matwei Golowinski is said to have carried out the forgery in Paris in French. The French Count Alexandre du Chayla relied on this information in his memoirs, also published in 1921. Here and during the 1935 Bern Trials he testified that Ratschkowski was behind the forgery. This genesis of the Protocols , which many scholars believe to be accurate, has recently been questioned by the Italian literary scholar Cesare G. De Michelis and the German historian Michael Hagemeister , who believe that the original text was written in Russia.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ben B. Fischer, Okhrana. The Paris Operations of the Russian Imperial Police , Diane Publ. Darby, PA 1999, p. 15
  2. ↑ Michael Hagemeister, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . Between History and Fiction , New German Critique 103 (2008), pp. 90 f. ( online (PDF; 4.1 MB), accessed November 1, 2011)
  3. ↑ Norman Cohn : "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy. Elster Verlag, Baden-Baden 1998, p. 80 f. (German edition first 1969)
  4. ↑ Daniel Pipes , Conspiracy. Fascination and Power of the Secret , Gerling Akademie Verlag Munich 1998, p. 137.
  5. ↑ Wolfgang Wippermann , Agents of Evil. Conspiracy theories from Luther to today , be.bra. Verlag, Berlin 2007, p. 67.
  6. ↑ Helmut Reinalter , The World Conspirators. What you should never know , Ecowin, Salzburg 2010, p. 121.
  7. ↑ Michael Hagemeister, The Myth of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion". In: Ute Caumanns and Mathias Niendorf (Eds.), Conspiracy Theories. Anthropological constants - historical variants , Fiber, Osnabrück 2001, pp. 89–101
  8. ^ Cesare G. De Michelis, The Non-Existent Manuscript. A Study of the Protocols of the Sages of Zion , University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2004

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Ratschkowski, Pyotr Ivanovich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Ratschkowski, Piotr; Рачковский, Пётр Иванович (Russian spelling)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Russian secret agent
DATE OF BIRTH 1853
DATE OF DEATH 1910