The Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organisation) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German Nazis who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. The group was originally known as Die Bruecke (The Bridge). Aufbau was also the name of a periodical it brought out.[1]

The Aufbau (Economic-Political Society for Aid to the East) was founded in 1921 by General Vasily Biskupsky and the political writer Max von Scheubner-Richter. The future top Nazi functionaries Alfred Rosenberg and Arno Schickedanz would serve for a time in the office of the organisation.[2] According to Michael Kellogg,[3] the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing the NSDAP with, for example, funds from Henry Ford. It gave Hitler the idea of a vast Jewish conspiracy, involving a close alliance between international finance and Bolshevism and threatening disaster for mankind.[4] Recent research on Hitler's early years in Vienna (1905-1913) appears to have shown that his antisemitism was at that time far less developed than it became under the new influences.[5]

Aufbau members became involved in terrorist activities, including the assassinations of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and Russian émigré Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (both in 1922).[6]

After the death of Scheubner-Richter in the putsch, Aufbau rapidly declined, and notions of Lebensraum and Slavic inferiority, naturally unpopular with the Russians, gained a stronger hold on the Nazi movement.[7]

The long-term influence of Aufbau has been traced in the implementation of the final solution[8] and in Hitler's disastrous decision to divert troops away from Moscow towards Ukraine in 1941.[9]

Prominent members of Aufbau included:

References

  1. ↑ Russia and Germany, A Century of Conflict by Walter Laqueur London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1965. p76
  2. ↑ Petrov, Igor; Beyda, Oleg (2021-01-01). "Stakeholders, Hangers-On, and Copycats: the Russian Right in Berlin in 1933" Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies – The George Washington University. lliberalism Studies Program Working Papers no. 6, April 2021.
  3. ↑ The Russian Roots of Nazism White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 by Michael Kellogg, Cambridge 2005
  4. ↑ Kellogg p278
  5. ↑ Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship by Brigitte Hamann New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. pp347-59.
  6. ↑ Kellogg p276
  7. ↑ Laqueur pp79 & 89
  8. ↑ Kellogg p241
  9. ↑ Kellogg p279
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