The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (New Studies in European History) PDF
345 Pages·2005·2.865 MB·English
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Preview The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945 (New Studies in European History)
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The primary value of this book lies in the author's intensive archival research (primarily in Russian archives which are, by now, closed to Russian as well as to foreign scholars). Unfortunately, the overall result is much less than the sum of all the research.
Kellogg to the contrary, much of story of Scheubner-Richter and others of the Rubonia fraternity, of the White émigrés in Germany and the extreme ideas they brought with them is well-known to the (relatively few) specialists, though not to the general public, being "locked away" in unpublished PhD theses and papers in obscure academic journals. What Kellogg does -- in a highly repetitive style (how often do I need to be told that "Scheubner-Richter" was really "First Lieutenant Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter"?) -- is to flesh out what was already known with fascinating details.
Unfortunately, Kellogg also tends to mistake conjecture and possibility for proof. For instance, the money trail -- if any -- from Russian pretender Grand Duke Kirill to Hitler is undocumented; how much money and where it came from is a welter of qualifiers like "considerable", "likely", "not entirely clear" (pp 248-9). Likewise, the absence of Scheubner-Richter and others from Germany on the day of Rathenau's murder becomes evidence of their advance knowledge of the impending assassination (pp 177-9); and so on.
More importantly, Kellogg fails in his primary enterprise, that of determining the Russian roots of Nazism. At most, his arguments support the notion of Baltic German roots; but he fails to show if and to what extent Baltic Germans like Scheubner-Richter or Rosenberg were influenced by specifically Russian ideas (as opposed to the general fund of ideas most European anti-Semites shared). As others have pointed out, radical anti-Semitism was not necessarily Russian, nor was the notion of identifying Bolshevism and Jews (after all, what with, say, Luxemburg in Berlin, Kun in Budapest, and most importantly, Leviné in Munich, did Hitler and his acolytes really need Russian émigrés to equate Jews and Communism?)
No less of a failure is the effort to establish Russian émigré influence on the Nazi "Drang nach Osten". Given the notions displayed in Mein Kampf, Kellogg is forced to posit a radical change in Hitler's racial outlook after 1923, but without any evidence for it. In fact, Brest-Litovsk and the plans for the exploitation and colonisation of Russian Poland and Ukraine drawn by Ludendorff's staff in 1916-18 fit much better with the evolution of Nazi policy than any notion of White émigré influence.
One can only hope that this work, despite its all too many shortcomings, will stimulate more interest in a topic so far unjustly ignored, especially by the general public.
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