Hitler's 'Russian' connection: White emigre political and ideological influence on the genesis and development of National Socialism (Adolf Hitler, Germany)

Historians have generally focused on the German origins of National Socialism, thereby overlooking crucial “Russian” influences. This dissertation examines the extensive degree to which “White émigrés,” anti-Bolshevik exiles from the former Russian Empire, contributed politically, militarily, financially, and ideologically to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist movement. This study of the international right wing collaboration that shaped National Socialism analyzes materials from German and Russian archives of German, French, Russian, and Polish provenance, including many previously unknown documents.; The German occupation of the Ukraine in 1918 and the Latvian Intervention of 1919 engendered collaboration between right wing German and White officers that led to the formation of the powerful Aufbau Vereinigung (Reconstruction Organization), a conspiratorial body headquartered in Munich that served as the focal point of interaction between radical members of the White emigration and the early National Socialist movement. Aufbau funded Hitler and guided joint National Socialist/White émigré efforts to overthrow both the Soviet Union and the Weimar Republic up until the disastrous Hitler Putsch of 1923, which caused Aufbau's downfall.; Hitler only began to crystallize his far right, anti-Semitic world view in 1919 in the context of intercultural collaboration between alienated völkisch (nationalist) Germans and radical right White émigrés. Early National Socialist ideology largely developed from völkisch -redemptive German and conspiratorial-apocalyptic White émigré thought, combining notions of Germanic racial and spiritual superiority with the conviction that an international Jewish conspiracy which manipulated both capitalism and Bolshevism threatened to destroy the world.; Aufbau bequeathed a considerable legacy to National Socialism after 1923. Hitler continued to use White émigrés to destabilize the Soviet Union, focusing on the Ukraine as Aufbau had. He ultimately gave the Ukraine precedence over Moscow in the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union, thereby undermining German prospects for victory. Fundamental Aufbau conceptions of the “Jewish Bolshevik” world peril significantly informed National Socialist ideology in the Third Reich, eventually helping to motivate the mass murder of European Jews in the “Final Solution” during World War II. National Socialism and its attendant atrocities must be understood in the context of cross-cultural völkisch German/radical White émigré interaction.