The might be the most developed book I have read on the creation and creators of Hitler.Much has been written about the banking aspect of the Rise of Nazi Germany, but not so with the State actors outside of Germany and their motive,this book covers that in spades. I put the link to part 1 at the bottom of this if you missed it,take care all...
Conjuring Hitler
How Britain and America
Made the Third Reich
By Guido Giacomo Preparat
2
The Veblenian Prophecy
From the Councils to Versailles by
Way of Russian Fratricide,1919–20
MEPHISTOPHELES: Faust, stab thine arm courageously, And bind thy
soul that at some certain day Great Lucifer may claim as his own.
FAUST: Lo, Mephistophiles, for love of thee [stabbing his arm]. I cut mine
arm, and with my proper blood assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s…
MEPHISTOPHELES: But, Faustus, thou must write it in manner of a deed
of gift.
FAUST: Ay, so I will [writes]. But Mephistophile, my blood congeals and
I can write no more.
MEPHISTOPHELES: I’ll fetch thee fire to dissolve it straight.
FAUST: What might the staying of my blood portend? Is it unwilling I
should write this bill? [re-enter Mephistophiles with a chafer of coals].
MEPHISTOPHELES: Here’s fire; come, Faustus, set it on.
Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus, Sc. V (58–91).1
The impossible revolution
Germany surrendered in November 1918, Kaiser William II abdicated and
the Reich imploded. From the interior of Germany’s disarrayed society
emerged for an instant, to demand ‘change,’ a diffuse and overall pacific
procession of the underclass and its Bohemian phalanx – anarchists,
intellectuals and artists. This manifestation was promptly quashed by the
German elite’s weakened yet spiritually intact military appendage with the
tacit approval of the propertied middle class. The German armies marched
back home to strangle the sedition were spearheaded by ‘creatures of steel’:
young and merciless storm-troopers forged by war that commingled with
ghostly formations of unyielding veterans in a novel alliance blessed by
divinities theretofore unnamed. The country witnessed the birth of the so called
Conservative Revolution: a movement issued from the fathomless
depths of German hood, drunk with the ecstasy of war, yet ferociously
hostile to the modern pursuit of gain, as well as to the archaisms of royalty
and hereditary nobility. Nazism was a very special offshoot of this ‘revival
from the deep,’ which ramified in a tangled web of associations, parties, and secret orders – of such a revival writer Ernst Jünger, also a war veteran,
became the celebrated troubadour.
Thorstein Veblen
In one such order, lance corporal Hitler
was inducted in late 1919. Meanwhile the Allies cleared the Russian stage of
the last vestiges of czardom: actively funding the nihilistic dictatorship of
the Bolsheviks, they allowed the latter to buy off the bulk of Nicholas’s army
and defeat the czarist White generals in Russia’s civil massacre of 1919–22.
Simultaneously, at Versailles, the Anglo-Americans laid the groundwork for
the incubation of Russia’s forthcoming enemy: by imposing reparations
that did not seriously cut into the income of Germany’s privileged classes,
they induced a process of rehabilitation of the Reich’s reactionary clans,
with the secret intention of fostering a radical, anti-Bolshevik force, which
could have been catapulted against the Russian ramparts and smashed
thereafter in a repeated two-front global engagement. The only thinker
of the age possessing the clairvoyant lucidity to assess and comprehend
these transformations was the American Thorstein Veblen: after having
examined the late development of the German Reich, he predicted its
rout and, more importantly, he alone became alive to the reawakening of
a peculiar sort of religious furor, which the war seemed to have unleashed
all across Germany. Already in 1915, he depicted what was in fact an
amazing sketch that foreboded the haranguing Fuhrer; furthermore, in
1920, after the infamous Peace Treaty ratified in Versailles failed to carry
out the dispositions which Veblen had thought necessary for disarming
Germany and turning her into a peaceable partner of the Anglo-Saxon
commonwealths, he prophesied by 20 years the forthcoming Armageddon between Bolshevik Russia and Reactionary Germany (1941). This prophecy,
uttered in a review of J. M. Keynes’s best-selling book on the Parisian Peace
Treaty, stands possibly as Political Economy’s most extraordinary document
– a testimony of the highest genius – and as the lasting and screaming
accusation of the horrendous plot that was being hatched by the British
during the six months of the Peace Conference following World War I.
Germany never experienced revolution. Much would be made of the
alleged rift between Left and Right; many would account it as one of Hitler’s
ingredients for success. But the chasm dividing the kept from the proletarian
classes was more apparent than real: the future clashes between the Nazi
Brown shirts and the Red squads of the Communist Party were much more
the effect of foreign intrusion into German politics than the result of a
congenital antagonism gnawing at the foundations of the German order, as
will be shown in Chapter 4. This is to say that, as for most of the ‘democratic’
West, Imperial Germany was overall a stable and cohesive society, and that
whatever its sources of class contention and inequality, these were never articulated creatively and effectively by a true revolutionary movement.
There was no true will to sedition in Germany before World War I, nor
would there be afterwards. For six strange months between the surrender
of November 1918 and the proclamation of the Weimar Republic in June
of 1919, Germany would burn with the fever that follows a change of
regime: a period of semi-benign protest, unorganized, which came soon to
be marred by the interference of intellectual independents, private militias,
foreign intrigue, and finished by the returning armies, which cleansed the
isolated uprising in blood. This was the relatively unknown interval of the
German Councils, after which Hitler came of political age.
We now turn to the narrative of the German revolution that was not
meant to be – it never was for reasons that Veblen made manifest after he
dissected the body of Europe’s Labor movement at the end of the nineteenth
century: on the basis of these early observations, which he coupled with
his thorough study of the doomed Reich, Veblen would later have found
himself ideally situated to cast the shocking prophecy of 1920.
* * *
At the turn of the twentieth century, save a few obdurate militants, orthodox
Socialists in the industrialized West were giving up on ‘Revolution.’
The working masses were somewhat less discontented with the room
and board with which the establishment was providing them – the billeted
quarters were, relatively speaking, growing somewhat larger, and the bill of
fare more varied every year. Panem et circenses (the bread line and the movies)
had contributed their satisfactory share to the capitalists’ comprehensive
effort to tame the unrest of the masses.
August Bebel
In Germany, by 1912, when the S.P.D (Sozalistische Partei Deutschlands) –
the Socialist Party of Germany, the world’s largest and most organized
– became the leading political concern of the country with 34.8 percent of
all votes in 1912,[2] the laborers’ acquired distaste for the winds of change
had found its most mature expression in August Bebel, the unchallenged
Napoleon of German Socialism, who characterized Revolution as ‘the great
crashing mess’ (der grosse Kladderadatsch).3
Plainly, the working ants of the German anthill harbored no keen desire
to revolt, nor were their French and British counterparts any more willing
to shake their own tree, so to speak. They merely wished to compromise
and, like the poly chrome crew of a whaling ship, went no further than chaffing with the captains over their due share.
But in principle, all Socialists were internationalists – brothers across
borders – and pacifists. Then the war came, and the great cosmopolitan
assembly of the world’s Socialists, the so-called International, which had
been poised to receive no less an award than the Nobel Prize for peace, was
torn asunder by the pull of chauvinistic rage.4
In August 1914 the parliamentary faction of the S.P.D voted unanimously
for the War Credits. In England and France, the proletarians likewise rallied
behind the flag and readied themselves to slaughter their homologous athwart the firing line. The Kaiser in a felicitous rhetorical turn proclaimed
that he no longer knew parties, but only Germans.
‘This is betrayal!,’ decried the sparse chieftains of the intransigent Left,
who held the gentrified leaders of the S.P.D responsible for reneging on the
internationalist and humane bent of the party. The revolution, they said,
was being sacrificed by a posse of factory foremen-turned-bourgeois, whose
co-opted role was that of shaping the workforce into a contented fixture
of the capitalist stronghold.
And the denunciation was not far off the mark. More precisely the alliance
of elite and proletarians, sealed in the name of patriotic superstition, was
a peculiar consummation of conservatism. The kept class, headed by the
emperor in Germany, and by the bureaucratic and business elite in the
Liberal commonwealths, being in great measure ‘sheltered from the stress
of economic exigencies which prevail in any modern, highly organized
industrial community,’ was (and still is) by nature the standard-bearer of
all those socially retarded (that is, barbarian) practices that breed in the
shaded precinct of privilege and hereditary fainéantise: for example, sports,
finance, and war.5
The abjectly poor, and all those persons whose energies are entirely
absorbed by the struggle for daily sustenance, are conservative because
they cannot afford the effort of taking thought for the day after tomorrow;
just as the highly prosperous are conservative because they have small
occasion to be discontented with the situation as it stands to-day.6
Lodged in the urban slum, where the exercise of prevarication and brutality
fashioned the mind, and suffering therefore deprivation and spiritual
debilitation, the underclass was made to acquire great fluency in the
language of invidious rivalry and clannish ferocity.
It cost the Junkers no time to clothe the masses in Feldgrau, the field-gray
color of the Reich’s uniforms. French, British, American, and Nipponese
ardor in reaching the war front was likewise remarkable – less so that of the Slavs, whose patriotic fitness, let alone business sensitivity, appeared to be
never quite attuned to the governing passions of the times.
Exposed since birth to the violence of the ghetto, the German underclass
was further ‘sterilized’ by the repeated practice of trade unionism, whose
bargaining routines, by making membership exclusive, that is, ‘scarce’,7
habituated the members to secure privileges at the expense of their fellow
laborers: a business-savvy blue-collar chauvinist always made a ‘good’ army
private.
The prolonged discipline of warlike stimulation and business chicane
turned the laborer into a foolproof instrument of the Western hierarchies,
and the great expectations of the revolutionaries into much regrettable
disappointment. Veblen in 1907 noted:
That part of the population that has adhered to the socialist ideals has
also grown more patriotic and more loyal, and the leaders and keepers of
socialist opinion have shared in the growth of chauvinism with the rest of
the German people…[The S.P.D leaders] aver that they stand for national
aggrandizement first and for international comity second…They are now
as much, if not more in touch with the ideas of English Liberalism, than
with those of Revolutionary Marxism.8
Barring the rashes caused by a few slipshod anarchists, Germany, in fact,
possessed no rebellious core threatening to break out and consume her
wholesale. Certainly the S.P.D suffered trouble and profound divisiveness
over the war: in 1917, the splinter grouping of the ‘Independents’ seceded
from the party’s main body to form the U.S.P.D,*
while strikes intermittently
roiled the industrial performance of the Socialist electors throughout the
conflict. Doubtless, dissent existed. But all in all, like Russia’s peasant
wasteland, Germany’s enchanted forest, tenanted by most obedient
laborers, haughty bourgeois, and blind aristocrats, was easily domitable
terrain – from within as well as from without. Tractable human material,
despite the country’s professed devotion to war, which was itself, quite
aptly, a somnambulist enterprise.
* Unabhängige Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands, the Independent Socialist Party of
Germany
September 29, 1918, appears to be the point of attack in the script of
Germany’s so-called ‘Revolution of 1918–19.’9
On September 13, Austria sent out an SOS; two days later, the defensive
line of the Central Powers collapsed: the Allies had pierced the Balkan ramparts and forced the capitulation of Bulgaria. On the same day, the Allies
in the West attacked the Hindenburg line on a wide front. It was Germany’s
last fortified line of defense and it began to give way.
For three years, Germany had been de facto ruled by her generals; by one
in particular, Erich Ludendorff. It was he who contrived every spectacular
attempt during the conflict to break loose from the siege: he launched the
unrestricted submarine warfare, sent Lenin to Russia, foisted the ‘predatory
peace’ on the Bolsheviks, and organized the last great assault of spring
1918. Presently, he was about to close the door on the Second Reich with
another ‘colossal’ exploit.10
When he saw the Reich compromised, Ludendorff turned the unthinkable
into a fait accompli: he ordered parliamentary democracy and took the S.P.D
into the government. As he brought this about, he also made haste to
inform the Kaiser and the Cabinet that the cause was lost, and urged that
an armistice be sought with the Allies forthwith. ‘So we have been lied
to all these years!’ howled the ministers. The emperor himself was quite
incredulous, though no one could treasure the sentiment of a discredited
mascot, least of all Ludendorff, who was taking aim to hit three targets with
a single shot: (1) pacify the home front and soothe the Allies by setting
up a parliamentary facade prior to the peace talks; (2) saddle the Socialists
with the shame of defeat (‘the poisoned gift’ of command); and, most
important, (3) save the army.
On October 5, the German public was finally apprised that it now had a
parliamentary democracy under the Liberal Prince Max of Baden, and that
as its very first act this government had addressed an immediate petition
for peace and armistice to the American President.
On January 8, 1918, President Wilson had issued a loose platform
for a new world order, the so-called Fourteen Points, based upon:
transparent diplomacy, free trade and navigation, disarmament, and self determination.
Between October 3 and 23, Wilson cabled the German Chancellery
three notes, in which he demanded that the Reich (1) retreat from the
occupied territories; (2) cease the U-boat war; and (3) force the Kaiser’s
abdication. Suddenly, on October 25, Ludendorff, on the basis of mixed
information from the front, recanted it all: he hustled the Kaiser to break off
the negotiations with Wilson and resume the fight; Wilhelm, and Germany,
had had enough of the general: he was dismissed and replaced with General
Groener, a logistics expert at the War Ministry. A chasm gaped in the
foundations of the Reich.
Then the big mess came crashing down upon the Fatherland.
On Schilling Wharf, outside Wilhelmshaven, a corps of naval officers,
in open defiance of the new government’s orders, decided to launch the
German flotilla, which throughout the war had lain at anchor and rusted
by inanition, in a temerarious sortie against the archenemy, the Royal Navy
– a mutiny, in short.
On October 30, 1918, the crews of the Thüringen and the Helgoland
mutinied against their mutinous officers, in what amounted, in fact, to a
pledge of allegiance on the sailors’ part to the new government. The sea
dogs’ obstruction impeached the sortie. While the disobedient (to their
immediate superiors), but law-abiding sailors were incarcerated, their
shipmates of the Third Squadron staged a manifestation in Kiel protesting
their incrimination. A lieutenant named Steinhäuser was sent to disperse
the rally; facing non-compliance he ordered his platoon to fire on the
protesters – 29 were mown down. But before the rest scattered, a sailor
swung around, drew a pistol, aimed at Steinhäuser, and gunned him down.
On November 3, 1918, it was Revolution in Germany.
On the morning of Monday, November 4, the sailors elected Soldiers’
Councils (or Soviets),*
disarmed their officers, armed themselves and ran
up the red flag on their ships. The marines of the garrison declared their
solidarity to the movement, and the dockers moved for a general strike.
*
The so-called Räte (sing. Rat), the German equivalent of ‘Soviet.’
From the third day onward it no longer took sailors to trigger off
Revolution: it was spreading under its own impetus like a forest fire. As
if by tacit agreement, the pattern everywhere was the same: the garrisons
elected soldiers’ councils, the workers elected workers’ councils, the
military authorities capitulated, surrendered or fled, the civil authorities,
scared and cowed, recognized the new sovereignty of the workers’ and
soldiers’ councils.11
After the officer caste, to which Germany had surrendered total command
of herself even before the war, momentarily relinquished the helm with
Ludendorff’s dismissal, it was left, for a time, to the army’s and the
industry’s rank and file to improvise in the rudderless nation a semblance
of administrative emancipation: it irresistibly took the form of a ‘council’ – a
spontaneous anarchic life-form prone to jealous self-governance, whose
ganglia fed off the associative limbs of the communal body: agriculture
and artisan.
It was ‘wild’ – chaotic, and scarcely representative – Soviets that Germany
witnessed in these days: they were untamed by the suddenness of the uprising, and the undeniable bullying of the underclass, which, as payback
for years of resented regimentation, was avidly seeking to redress older torts
and clamor its right to rule.
The aristocrats momentarily recoiled in their estates’ subterranean
corridors, while the bourgeois cast preoccupied glances from their
window sills. Von Bülow, the erstwhile chancellor of the Reich’s apogee,
looked on:
In Berlin, on November 9, I witnessed the beginnings of a revolution…
She was like an old hag, toothless and bald…I have never in my life
seen anything more brutally vulgar than those straggling lines of tanks
and lorries manned by drunken sailors and deserters…I have seldom
witnessed anything so nauseating, so maddeningly revolting and base,
as the spectacle of half-grown louts, tricked out with the red armlets of
social democracy, who, in bands of several at a time, came creeping up
behind any officer wearing the Iron Cross or the order Pour le mérite, to
pin down his elbows at his side and tear off his epaulettes…[Quoting
Napoleon] Avec un bataillon on baleyerait toute cette canaille*
…12
*
‘With a single battalion one could sweep all this rabble away.’
Friederich Ebert.
In less than two weeks Germany counted 15,000 of such soviets: they
featured a simple hierarchical structure that was capped by an executive
directorate of six members, the Council of the People’s Commissars, led by
S.P.D leader Friederich Ebert. Thus all decisions had in fact been remitted to
a solid majority of non-revolutionary Socialists – overall, the uprising, at
least in the beginning, was a pacific one. The fate of the ‘Revolution’ was
in the hands of the S.P.D.
The ‘mess’ was not going to last long. But the pang of dissent of November
1918 was genuine: it appeared to have been unmarred by sooty conspiracies
and Bolshevik agitation, whose exponents, by then grouped in the so-called
Spartakus League, formed but a trifling minority of the movement. And
yet the insurgents, most of them Socialists drawn from the proletariat,
middle-class intelligentsia, and non-commissioned officers,13 were now at a
loss to make good of this exhilarating respite from the Junkers’ corvée. Like
his confrère in the Soviet of St. Petersburg in 1905, the Common Man of
Germany’s Räterepublik (Councils’ Republic) of 1918 was meekly requesting
benevolent stewardship from the top.
The rebellious lull was not going to last long because the workers
controlled less than the soldiers commanded, which was nothing; and
those with the keys to the financial network were obviously absent from what turned out to be a convulsed village fair, overhung by unfavorable
skies. Before these could so darken as to unleash a full-blown storm, a
double betrayal was consummated at the Wilhelmstrasse: the aristocracy,
in the guise of the army and the bureaucracy, agreed to throw the Kaiser
overboard if the Socialists, in the name of ‘order,’ set out at once to smother
the ‘Revolution’ – to betray, that is, blood of their own blood.
The German revolution found an ignorant people and an official class
of bureaucratic philistines. The people shouted for Socialism, yet they
had no clear conception of what Socialism should be. They recognized
their oppressors; they knew well enough what they did not want; but
they had little idea of what they did want. The Social Democrats and
the Trade Unions leaders were linked by blood and friendship with the
representatives of the Monarchy and of capitalism, whose sins were their
sins. They were satisfied with the juste milieu of the bourgeois; they had
no faith in the doctrines they had proclaimed, no faith in the people
who trusted them…They hated the revolution. Ebert had the courage
to say so out right.14
Max von Baden
On November 9, though the rattled Kaiser was still somewhat reluctant
to dismount from the throne, the Chancellor Max von Baden issued a
semi-mendacious announcement of Wilhelm’s abdication. The emperor
hesitated for a brief moment, then, fuming, he hurriedly boarded a train
to Holland, where from he would officially abdicate only three weeks later,
and disappear from recorded memory. Thereafter, soon exhausted by the
incipient intrigue, Prince Max washed his hands of the whole affair by
nominating, unconstitutionally – for it was a prerogative of the emperor
– the Socialist Fritz Ebert as Reich Chancellor, and fled to his domain on
Lake Constance, never to be seen again.
Matthias Erzberger
It was during this time that, without knowing whether he represented a
republic or an empire, Matthias Erzberger, a restless and notorious Catholic
politico from Württemberg, accompanied by two officers and the German
ambassador to Bulgaria, Count Obendorff, was sent as Governmental
Representative on the Armistice Commission to the forest of Compiègne*
to tender Germany’s surrender to the Allies. Maréchal Foch, Erzberger’s
interlocutor, began to enumerate to the German legation what appeared
to be the conditions of a Diktat rather than an armistice: evacuation of
war zones; surrender of ports, war material, equipment, prisoners (without reciprocity), tonnage and vehicles; and annulment of the Soviet peace
of Brest-Litovsk. General Hindenburg cabled Erzberger that for the sake
of lifting the strangulating blockade the armistice had to be signed.
Erzberger, a consummate haggler, succeeded in wresting from Foch a
rebate on the weapons to be released and an extension on the evacuation
deadline. The German signatures were affixed to the document of the
armistice on November 11, 1918. The following day, upon his return to
Germany, Erzberger was congratulated by Hindenburg and Groener on his
performance.15 World War I had formally come to an end.
*
Fifty miles north of Paris.
When the news reached Adolf Hitler, he was recovering from temporary
blindness at the military hospital of Pasewalk in Pomerania. After four years
of unceasing activity on the western no-man’s land, which he had zigzagged
in a myriad of suicidal missions as Meldegänger (message courier), he was
clouded by a blinding spray of mustard gas in Flanders during the last
stages of the war. Upon learning from the hospital’s chaplain of Erzberger’s
accomplishment, he despaired, and mused:
Again, everything went black before my eyes; I tottered and groped my
way back to the dormitory, threw myself on my bunk, and dug my
burning head into my blanket and pillow…And so it had all been in
vain. In vain all the sacrifices and privations; in vain the hunger and
thirst of months which were often endless’…in vain the death of two
millions who died…There followed terrible days and even worse nights
– I knew all was lost. Only fools, liars and criminals could hope in the
mercy of the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those
responsible for this deed.16
Now Fritz Ebert, the brand new Socialist chancellor, had to fulfill his half
of the covenant with Groener and the army: he was to tame the Conciliate Movement, and lead it on, unawares, to the slaughterhouse. Meanwhile,
the Councils’ improvisation, performed with reckless underestimation of
the forces of Reaction, was brought nonetheless to a higher pitch: when it
first convened in Berlin on December 16, 1918, the First National Congress
of the Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils moved at once to reform the army:
the supreme command, they proclaimed, was to rest with the People’s
commissars, disciplinary powers were to be wielded by the councils, insignia
of rank abolished, and chiefs chosen by acclamation.
General Kurt von Schleicher
The generals could tolerate this circus no longer; Ebert and associates
needed only to provide them with a pretext to suppress the show. On
Christmas Eve, 1918, it was easily found by accusing, mendaciously, the officious praetorian guard of the Revolution, the People’s Naval Division
– a pell-mell but decently equipped aggregation of proletarian rebels in
arms – of foul play and conspiratorial subversion, and withholding its
pay accordingly. Violent confrontation ensued between the sailors and
the Socialist leaders. As Ebert refused to see its commander, the Division
occupied the Chancellery, thus offering the generals sufficient grounds
for the much desired military intervention. One such high officer at the
War Ministry, who, aside from Groener, promised Ebert immediate succor,
was General Kurt von Schleicher, a creature of shadows, who would haunt
henceforth the anguished démarche of German politics until the rise of
Nazism: incarnating despite himself the cursed fate of Germany, he would
rise to become Weimar’s last chancellor.*
In the first clash that followed between regulars and Reds, the Reds, on
the brink of a scorching defeat, were suddenly rescued by swarms of popular
sympathy, which flooded the streets and held back the Reichswehr troops
from dealing the sailors the crushing blow. The rebels carried the day, and
got their pay; the number of dead remains unknown.
This was merely the prelude of the greater wave of repression that was
gathering at the gates of the German capital, and which would decide the
fate of the Revolution in the week of January 5–12, 1919.
On December 30, 1918, by further meiosis, The German Left (S.P.D),
through its 1917 filtration of the ‘Independents,’ spawned the extreme
nucleus of the K.P.D,† Germany’s Communist Party, which did not at
first fashion itself after Lenin’s dictatorial Bolshevik organization. Karl
Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who had drafted its manifesto, became
its icons.17 Till the very end of parliamentary rule in 1933 the Communists
would antagonize the mother party (the S.P.D) for allegedly behaving as the
meretricious handmaiden of capitalism. Subsequently maneuvered from
Russia, the K.P.D would wage its Muscovite politics in an air of unreality,
and with such fractious obstinacy as to elicit the founded suspicion that
it came into being more as a tool of destabilization than as an organ of
proletarian representation. The K.P.D played no significant role in the
uprising of 1919.
† Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands.
In January the government finally acted: Ebert appointed his fellow
Socialist Noske commander in chief of elite squadrons of shock troops
(special forces) that had at long last returned from the front, loose gangs of
eternal lansquenets that showed no inclination to depose their weapons: the Freikorps. For a Socialist tribune of ‘the people’ to preside over this sort of
company had to have been a disquieting assignment, but Noske shrugged:
‘It’s all right by me,’ he said, ‘someone has got to be the bloodhound.’
The home front was now teeming with these marauding ghosts of the
Thirty Years’ War and the resurrected barbarian clans of Tacitus’s Germania:
splintered brigades of unshaven hunters – limbs of a single body blindly
obedient to their fearless chief – were about to conquer the urban centers.
‘Principes pro victoria pugnant, comites pro principe (The chiefs fight for
victory, but the retainers for the chief).’18 The names of many such fearsome
chieftains would inscribe themselves in the chronicles of the counterrevolution:
Ehrhard (‘The Consul’), von Epp, Reinhardt, von Stephani,
Maercker, Pabst…
The Freikorps, recruited frantically at the end of the war and now
numbering roughly 400,000 men, were unleashed upon Berlin and many
other tumultuous German cities, which had seen the advent of Soviets. The
so-called ‘White’ (that is, counter-revolutionary) repression was merciless.
In Berlin, on the night of Jaunuary 15, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were
knocked senseless with rifle butts and then shot in the head: they had had no
part in the ‘revolution’, but their continual exposes on the K.P.D’s press organ
Die rote Fahne (The Red Flag) of Ebert’s lurid compact with Quartermaster of
the General Staff Groener had to cease. Good riddance even for Moscow,
bent as it was on ‘winning dominant control…over the newly formed
Communist Party,’19 and purging it of its independent minds.
It was a new breed of men, ‘slender, haggard…forged of steel,’ that
marched back home with a vengeance from the front.20 Neither disconsolate
monarchists nor rugged proletarians with nothing to come home to, these
Geächteten, banished scavengers, who for the most part had once been part of
the lettered bourgeoisie, had fallen prey to a different sentiment. It was as if
the disintegration of the Reich’s nobility scaffolding in November 1918 had
uncorked a more ancient worship of the unfathomable idea of Germany.
All of them were looking for something different…They still hadn’t
received the password. They foreboded this word; they would utter it,
ashamed of its sound, tweak and eviscerate it with silent fear, and though
they avoided it in the play of their various discussions, they always felt it
hovering upon them. Eroded by time, mysterious, fascinating, intuited
and not acknowledged, loved and not obeyed, the word radiated magic
forces from the heart of deep darkness. The word was: Germany.
21
Combat, ‘the tempests of steel,’ and the laceration of the Wilhelmine
pretense had awakened a great many veterans to the exigency of building a new order. While they were convinced that Germany’s Prussian humiliating
past had to be repudiated entirely, the intellectual spokesmen of the
Freikorps grappled uncomfortably with their middle-class heritage, whose
custody of intellectual tradition they valued but whose philistinism they
abhorred. In the course of numberless punitive raids conducted in the
industrial slums, the White squadrons of the Freikorps surveyed the proles
huddled in their feculent foyers and bunks with a blend of languor and
excitable repulsion: the country was torn; to them this ghetto-humanity
was one of aliens.
We marched in the suburbs, and from tranquil houses, elegant, ensconced
in the foliage, cheers were echoed and flowers thrown at us. Many
bourgeois were on the streets and waved at us, and some houses flew
the flag. What hid behind those drawn blinds, behind those indifferent
window panes, underneath which we passed haggard, exhausted, yet
resolute, deserved, so we thought with conviction, our dedication. Here
life had taken another course, reached another level; its intensity exuded
an extreme sophistication that jarred with our rough jackboots and filthy
hands. Our cupidity did not rise up to those houses, but they sheltered,
we knew it, the fruits of a culture belonging to a century that had just
run its course. The world of the bourgeois, the ideas created by the
bourgeoisie, the worldly learning, personal freedom, pride in work, agility
of the spirit: all of this was exposed to the assault of the bestialized masses
and we stood as its defenders because it was irreplaceable…Yet it was we
who fighting behind old banners saved the Fatherland from chaos. May
God forgive us, that was our sin against the spirit. We thought of saving
the citizen yet we saved the bourgeois.
Once even I went inside a proletarian dorm house. I saw a room not
larger than ten square feet, full of beds. Seven people, men, women,
and children slept in that dump. Two women were lying in bed, each
with a child; when we came in one of them burst out with a ridiculous laugh and those that were loitering before the front door came streaming
inside. The sergeant approached; swiftly, then, the woman lifted her
blankets and gown, and a crackling erupted from her white buttocks.
We startled back as the others doubled over in crass laughter, clapping
their thighs, choked by guffaws; even the kids laughed: ‘pigs!’ would
shout the women and children, and all of a sudden the room was full
of screaming bodies; we backed up, slowly, until we found ourselves in
the hallway again.22
Profiting from the middle class’s apathy, the new lansquenets tamed the
underclass and muffled in blood this brief civil war which, paradoxically,
Social Democracy waged against its very children – the working class – by
the proxy of White counter-revolutionary brigades.23
Kurt Eisner
In Munich, events had been no less extraordinary. Even before Erzberger
signed the armistice, on November 7, massed on the Theresienwiese, a
150,000-strong crowd of children, men, and women, led by a blind
peasant by the name of Gandorfer, acclaimed Kurt Eisner as leader of the
Bavarian Republic, a former Berlin playwright of Jewish origin, and former
U.S.P.D radical.
In harangues addressed to swarms of soldiers and civilians, Eisner
envisioned a ‘dictatorship of freemen’ and railed against Liberalism’s
poisonous alchemy: how can one commix, he growled, brotherly love
with the struggle for profit? That was like ‘casting quicksilver in lead…
Nonsense!’24 Hardly a representative of South German rhythm, Eisner was
rather ‘one of those hybrid personages, such as arise in History births in
times of chaos, an apparition conjured from some political Walpurgis to
cast the anathema on the cadaver of the Second Reich.’25
With a view to manipulating the millenarian fervor of Munich’s new
apostles of radicalism and their desire to purge Germany’s imperial past
out of collective recollection, the US Administration seized the opportunity
and invited Eisner to initiate a campaign, which, through the disclosure of
classified government documents, should have ushered in the complete and
public avowal of Germany’s culpability for starting the war. Eisner complied
by publishing duly edited – to enhance their sinister drift – excerpts of
documents retrieved in the Bavarian Foreign Office.
Eisner’s possibly well-intentioned but defacto pandering move elicited
an uproar of indignation from the still patriotically sensitive masses, whom
he was thus beginning to alienate.
The frenzied march of the Munich Council proceeded nevertheless; in
late November, at the cry of ‘Los von Berlin!’ (‘Away from Berlin!’) the
Bavarian Republic broke off relations with Berlin’s Foreign Ministry.
The middle class grew restive, and a White repression was feared. The
Bavarians voted on January 15, 1919. In all 32 districts in which he had
presented his candidacy, Eisner was beaten – his affiliated party fringe
garnered about 2 percent of the vote. His career was finished.
Count Anton von Arco-Valley
On February 21, as he rehearsed the farewell speech on his way to the
Landtag,*
Count Anton von Arco-Valley, a youth of 24, emptied his revolver
at Eisner, who, hit repeatedly in the head, sank down in a pool of blood.Arco-Valley was knocked senseless with a crowbar by Eisner’s bodyguard
and surrendered to the authorities, to which he confessed that he had
committed the crime to prove his mettle to the recruiters of a secret lodge,
a certain Thule Society, which had refused him admission on account
of his racial ‘impurity’ – his mother was Jewish. Another useful idiot?
Most likely.
*
The building of the State Assembly.
Possibly, the Thulists, by inspiring Arco with the ‘pledge,’ sought to cause
a Red (Bolshevik) takeover of the Councils, and thereby elicit the retaliation
of White forces, to which they were providing a logistical base of sorts.26
After the assassination, the Central Committee of Munich’s Councils
imposed a curfew and declared a general strike all across Bavaria. In March,
the legacy of Eisner was disputed by two hostile factions: the Socialists under
the local leader Hoffman, and the anarcho-Communist revolutionaries. In
a five-day interlude – from April 7, the day of the official proclamation of
the first Munich Räterepublik, through to April 12, 1919 – during which the
Hoffman Cabinet, overwhelmed by the conjoint revolutionary action of
the Councils of several neighboring cities, retreated to the nearby city of
Bamberg, the anarchist harlequins staged a fanfare against boredom in the
newly proclaimed Bavarian Soviet. The programmatic highlights of their
sideshow were state-mandated proficiency in the poetry of Walt Whitman
for all pupils by the age of ten along with the abolition of history classes,
and issues of a special money stamped with an expiration date.27
In a still mysterious succession of maneuvers, a triumvirate of Russian
Social Revolutionaries*
– Levien, Léviné, and Axelrod – allegedly operating
without any sort of mandate from Moscow,28 supplanted the incumbent
rebels and managed to establish itself at the head of what would be the
second and final Conciliate experiment in Munich on April 12, 1919. The
anarchists scampered at once from the political scene,
‘…vivas to those who have failed…’ (Walt Whitman)29
while the three ‘Russians,’ as the revolutionary agents came to be referred
to, nurtured with the help of the local Red Army a recrudescence of terror
and debauchery.
*
One of the competing revolutionary factions of Russia, which in principle, and unlike
Bolshevism, stood for the peasantry but which ultimately, before it was wiped out by
Lenin and his associates, afforded many a nest to an inchoate and perplexing pack of
political assassins.
Their tenure was not bound to last longer than a fortnight, however,
for the White guards of Noske, previously summoned by the Hoffman
government exiled in Franconia, were about to encircle Munich. In the last scramble before the White wrath descended upon the Bavarian capital,
Levien and Léviné, reviled as ‘Jewish instigators of the working masses,’
were expelled from the Councils’ Congress, though their connection to
the Red Army remained strong.
Determined to suppress the source of anti-Semitic instigation, which,
so they held, had turned popular sentiment against them, the ‘Russians’
ordered the liquidation of the Thule Society, whose authorship and diffusion
of an endless stream of Jew-baiting pamphlets had been identified without
difficulty.30 Two hundred of its affiliates were wanted; by the end of April,
seven of them – men and women of high ‘lineage’ – were apprehended and
sequestered in a public gymnasium. Before the Whites entered the city, they
were put against the wall and executed – the martyrs of Thule.
The White retribution for the Red anarchy, and its crazed Russian coda,
was bloodier than Berlin’s. The White ‘liberators’ of Munich featured
among others a Captain Ernst Röhm, as the chief of munitions in von
Epp’s brigade, and Thulist war veteran Rudolf Hess, a new recruit in the
Regensburg Freikorps.
By May, order had been re-established in Bavaria.
Of this chapter of his life the Führer was reticent.* Upon leaving the hospital Hitler did not join a Freikorps to fight Left-wing radicalism; he steered clear of the bloody street-fighting of the spring.31 Ever since Nazi hierarchs had wondered, ‘What the hell was Adolf doing in Munich in March–April of 1919?’32
* Indeed, this early account of Hitler’s activities has saddled him with the additional charge – surely a trifle, if weighed against the Führer’s load of sins – of political incoherence and opportunism. Yet the inconsistency is more apparent than real: for instance, Hitler’s avowed anti-monarchism, like that of the Geächteten, would remain one of his abiding traits, as much as his attraction to corporatist economics – both of which were two defining features the Right shared with Left. This embarrassing falter in the Führer’s evolution strengthens the contention that Hitler in 1919 was in fact far more a creation than a creator: a pupil seeking a master, and not vice versa.
Hitler was waiting to be molded.
When in May discipline was instituted anew in the ranks of the army,
Hitler was exposed to a program of anti-Bolshevik propaganda coordinated by a Captain Mayr, who, after the liquidation of the Red Army, had been
in search of capable proselytizers in uniform. Mayr would serve as Hitler’s
first political ‘midwife.’
After attending a series of courses at Munich University in politics and economics, the latter taught by Gottfried Feder, an engineer by profession, it was not long before Hitler discovered the prodigious effects of his own oratorical gifts. By August, in the capacity of Bildungsoffizier (‘instruction officer’), he was already entrusted with a jam-packed lecturing assignment, which he fulfilled with enthusiasm, drawing increasing numbers of soldiers and listeners, who recognized him as Mayr’s most talented propagandist.
In early autumn, he was dispatched as an informant to spy on the several political formations that were mushrooming all over Germany in these times of political upheaval.
On Friday, September 12, 1919, he was sent to report on a meeting of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). As he walked into a squalid tavern attended by a meager scatter of listless hangers-on, Gottfried Feder was delivering a tirade on usury, which Hitler had already heard. As he prepared to leave, a Professor Baumann stepped up to percolate the merits of separatism – France was indeed conspiring at this time with whatever natives it could bribe to sever from the Fatherland as large as piece of southwestern territory as it could to create a buffer zone between herself and Germany.
Suddenly, Hitler lunged for the lectern, and in a bout of possessed nationalist eloquence, drove Baumann out of the locale. Anton Drexler, a railroad locksmith and chairman of the Party, did little to conceal his exhilaration at such a display of rhetorical virtuosity; he pushed on Hitler a pamphlet of his composition and invited him to return, forthwith. He immediately confided to the others: ‘He’s got guts, we can use him.’33
A few days later Hitler received in the mail an unsolicited membership card of the D.A.P bearing the number 555.34 He did return.
On October 16, 1919, in a crammed basement hall of one of Munich’s
large drinking saloons, the Hofbräukeller,35 which was hosting the D.A.P’s
first public appearance, Hitler provided a torrential diatribe to an audience of
111 individuals, including a young Balt sociology student, Alfred Rosenberg,(L)and his master, Dietrich Eckart.(R)
Upon inhaling the fluid, the two, who had of late been vainly scouting the Bavarian waste for a suitable ‘drummer,’ tapped each other with side glances of gleeful shock: ‘He’s come.’36
Once in every generation a spiritual epidemic spreads like lightning… attacking the souls of the living for some purpose which is hidden from us and causing a kind of mirage in the shape of some being characteristic of the place that, perhaps, lived here hundreds years ago and still yearns for physical form…You can’t hear the note from a vibrating tuning fork until it touches wood and sets it resonating. Perhaps it is simply a spiritual growth without any inherent consciousness, a structure that develops like a crystal out of formless chaos according to a constant law.37
For a time Hitler drew two stipends, as an army informant, and party speaker. On March 31, 1920, the date of his official discharge, Hitler committed to a life of political activism.
The creation in January 1919 of the D.A.P, a political unit in full trim that would have relayed the ‘masses to the nationalist Right,’ achieved this purpose.39 From the Germanic Order, Thule inherited the symbolic insignia of the swastika,40 the eagle and the dagger, and a racial gnosis insisting on the purity of the affiliate’s blood.
The Hakenkreuz or gamma cross is a solar emblem and a polar sign: ‘it evokes a circular movement around an axis or a fixed point…it is always suggestive of movement, dynamism, unlike the cross.’41 According to the Germanic mythology of the Germanenorden, the swastika rotated around a polar axis planted in the Hyperborean (northernmost) sacred island of Thule, the cradle of a white race of ancestors.
When order begins to totter, particularly during the caesura between two historical epochs, [peculiar] forces rise from their subterranean and angular lairs, or even from the zone of their private dissoluteness. Their end is despotism, more or less intelligent, but always shaped after the model of the animal kingdom. Therefore, even in their speeches and writings, they are wont to attribute beastly traits to the victims they strive to annihilate.42
In June 1918 von Sebottendorff had boosted the nascent organization with the acquisition of a newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Poet and freelance writer Dietrich Eckart, one of the Society’s ‘luminaries’ that attended the October 16 gathering, would later provide the sum with which the Nazi party acquired the paper as its official press organ in December 1920.43
Eckart had continuously made use of his own periodical, Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German) – a forum for conservative-revolutionary literati – to inveigh against ‘Jewishness,’ which, he averred, consisted at heart of a form of earthly, materialist, worship. To such adamant ‘affirmation of life’ on the part of Jews, he added, must be opposed a peculiar feeling for immortality, which was through and through a Teutonic sentiment – a notion of eternal regeneration through unrelenting death and sacrifice. Something which Ernst Jünger, a bard whose visions were not too remote from the lore of the Thulists, would describe as ‘the double-entry of life’ – die doppelte Buchführung des Lebens. 44
Eckart’s meditation ended in a somber tone, brooding over the forthcoming irreconcilable yet necessary coexistence of Jews and Germans, the former acting upon the latter as a fornication of vital ‘bacteria’ within an organism, the German nation, yearning for eschatological deliverance at the end of time.45
From the columns of the Völkischer Beobachter, von Sebottendorff had similarly intimated on November 9, 1918, the day of the Revolution, that ‘the whole living realm is doomed to extinction, so as to make everything else live; even we must be prepared to suffer death in order to let our children and the children of our children live. The humiliated anguish of Germany is the threshold beyond which life renews itself.’46
Following his induction into the Society as an honorary member by way of the D.A.P,47 Hitler underwent the proper initiation into mysteries of the mother lodge.48
Other members of the Thule Gesellschaft that would bear upon the vicissitudes of Nazism were, among others, Hitler’s economics teacher Gottfried Feder; Hans Frank, the governor of occupied Poland during World War II; the future Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, and the Third Reich’s ideologue of the race, Alfred Rosenberg.
There develop in the great Orders secret and subterranean channels in which the historian is lost.49
Many critics of contemporary historiography have demanded that the Russian chapter in modern primers be rewritten; and rightly so. What ought to be spelled out in simple words is that the ‘Bolshevik menace from the East’ was from beginning to end a fake specter animated by the lies of the Western apparatuses. The Communist presence in Eurasia added yet another degree of complexity to the ‘strategy of tension’ in the West: in fact, it allowed to keep Eurasia in check, and the world poised on the brink of an ever pending ideological, or rather imaginary, conflict – a conflict with the faceless, despotic, ‘asiatic enemy’. How Western Russia had been consigned to Lenin and his acolytes has been recounted in Chapter 1. Thereafter, the Allies had to shield their ‘revolutionary assets’ and see to it that these consolidated their hold over the entire landmass, from Moscow to Vladivostok. To effect this, the White counter-revolutionary armies of the generals loyal to the Czar had to be wiped out – and Britain had to come up with a peculiar plan. Peculiar, because the scenario was rather awkward: the Reds, who with the support of foreign capital, had been gradually erecting from Moscow a despotic bureaucracy since late 1917, were surrounded by the White czarists in the north (Murmansk), the south (the Caucasus), and the east (Siberia). The Whites, dynastic and traditionalists, professed themselves as friends of the Allies – and they were sincere – whereas the Communist Reds employed only the foulest language when speaking of the American and European ‘Liberal democracies’: in words, and in words only, their ideological hatred for Western capitalism knew no bounds. Now the catch of such a scenario was that the West had to behave in such a way as to fool both its public and the Whites into believing that it was supporting the latter, when in fact the Anglo-Americans were looking forward to the complete physical elimination of the White czarists – their allies, on paper. And all of this had to be done to fulfill the aim of setting up a Communist enemy in the East, against whom, in time, the ‘new reactionary’ Germany would have risen.* So the problem which faced the British clubs was how to make a clean job of backstabbing the Whites, after these had repeatedly called upon Britain and her allies to help them defeat the ‘Red, blasphemous monsters.’ What Britain would do, with the help of America and the most heinous complicity of France and Japan, who should have had no part in this anti-European plot, was to engage in a mock fight on the side of the Whites versus the Reds, committing very limited resources and men. Thus what was in fact an operation of sabotage by neglect – a pretense to fight – was masked as a pro-White intervention, whose surreptitious objective was to instigate the Whites to combat under unfavorable conditions, deceitfully hamper their advances, prepare the terrain for their rout, and finally evacuate the Allied contingent by blaming the defeat on the putative inefficiency of the Whites. This would have turned out to be yet another indescribable disaster engineered by the western elites, not only for the terrible loss of Russian life it would have entailed, but especially for the murderous mendacity and duplicity displayed by the Western governments in provoking it, and subsequently justifying it to their electorates.
* The dynamics of this part of the plot are discussed in the final sections of this chapter.
As had been the wish of the Sea Powers, the Bolsheviks were now in command of a region corresponding to the heart of the ‘land-mass,’ that is, western Russia, with its 70 million people, half of the country’s population. Now one had to monitor and steer the next steps of this infant power. As promised, Lenin signed the peace with Germany (the Treaty of Brest of March 1918), and the truce on the Eastern Front brought the complexities of the ‘game’ into relief.
1. Germany, as seen, was ‘at peace’ with Bolshevik Russia in March 1918; she could now shift her eastern divisions to the Western Front. To parry this eventuality, Britain involved the United States in the war, and thus propped up the Western Front with massive American reinforcements.
2. In June 1918, the fear of the Allies, according to a US State Department memorandum, was that Germany might at any time violate the Treaty of Brest, turn against the detested Bolsheviks, and ally herself with the former inimical yet kindred White czarist generals to build a counterrevolutionary White International across the Eurasian landmass. The Germans had indeed begun to move in this direction in early 1918 by dispatching forces in Finland, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine to support White against Red troops.50
3. It was going to take pains to convince the public of the Allied Liberal democracies, whose raison d’être was the sacred defense of property, that Bolshevism, which lived to abolish it, was ‘the lesser evil’ between Red and White rule. This was done by resorting to the bogey of ‘White autocracy’ – a diversionary exercise that had been conjured with success during the deposition of Czar Nicholas in March 1917. It was hoped that the average Westerner would come to fear in his dreams the traditional bugaboo of the ferocious Boyar far more than the thoroughly unfamiliar figure of the ‘collectivizing commissar.’
4. The Sea Powers in effect looked forward to the strengthening of Lenin’s regime, and to its eventual unbridgeable opposition to any form of German influence.
5. To counteract point (2), namely, Germany’s advance into Russia, a makeshift Eastern Front had to be recreated immediately.
6. The Whites had to be lured into the Allied camp, away from any tempting alliance with the Germans, and, by a savvy and systematic policy of multiple sabotage by neglect, be thrown to the Reds to die a slow death in a civil war. In other words, what was required was an Allied scheme that could afford a light military intervention in the cardinal apices of the landmass. From such a fanned vantage point, the Allied outposts would have sentried the conduct of the Whites.
7. If the Whites, the better soldiers, could not be so debilitated as to lose the Civil War against the Reds; if the Whites, that is, should have won the Civil War, the Allied vanguards in Russia were to encourage at once the fragmentation of the heartland into as a many competing fiefdoms as there were White commanders.51
The plan was difficult, but feasible.
A sizable portion thereof had already been completed during the 1917 intrigues, which had dealt the rival factions highly uneven hands. In the fall of 1919, when the decisive battles of the Civil War took place, the Red Army had 3 million men under arms, who would become 5 million by the spring of 1920,52 whereas the combined effective of the White Armies never exceeded 250,000.53 While the Reds could tap a population of 70 million, altogether the Whites could never rely on more than 9 million individuals. Though they were the superior fighters, they could be strangled with moderate ease. It was going to be a game of debilitation and patience.
Before signing the peace with Germany, Lenin and Trotsky had already declared themselves amenable to take ‘potatoes and ammunition from the Anglo-French imperialist robbers’; now, they wondered naively what prevented all the imperialist powers, including Germany, from burying their past grudges and ganging up against their Communist foe;54 and while they mused, the Allies set out to implement the second phase of the plan.
Far eastern Russia. As their ‘eastern sentinel,’ in February 1918 Japan, France and Britain hired Semenov, the notorious Cossack chief of a gang of torturers, rapists and assassins,55 and enjoined him not to extend his radius of terror beyond his remote base at the confines of Mongolia.56 On the surface Semenov passed for a White, but he was merely a pawn. In April 1918, with a nod from Washington, Tokyo debarked the first squadron of reconnoitering officers in eastern Siberia to keep an eye on the Whites from Manchuria, whose western periphery would be guarded by the Cossack satraps.
Northwestern Russia. Simultaneously, a British corps was landed in northern Russia – in the Murmansk region, neighboring Finland. The official mission of such a corps was to rally the local forces against German meddling in Finland. In this northern corner of the heartland, and in open defiance of Moscow’s anti-imperialist directives, the Soviet of Murmansk would work hand in glove with the Allies to repel the Finnish White Guards, and thwart the German scheme of establishing a submarine base in the White Sea. By November 11, 1918, the day of the armistice, these goals were accomplished.57
Siberia and The Urals. In May 1918, there were 40,000 native Czech soldiers strewn in several trains along the Trans-Siberian railroad, bound for Vladivostok – Russia’s far eastern port on the Pacific Ocean. Thence, this corps of Legionnaires recruited in Ukraine before the war and once loyal to the Czar was to be conveyed halfway across the world to the Western Front as reinforcement to the Allies. France had an idea: responding to the Sea Powers’ urge to recreate an Eastern Front, she took the fate of the Czechs under her own wing, and instigated her new proteges to cause an incident with the Reds whereby hostilities might be opened. Easily effected: when the Soviet authorities demanded that the Czechs surrendered their weapons, the Legionnaires refused. The tension degenerated into conflict. On May 25, the Czechs overpowered the Red garrison at Chelyabinsk in the Urals. A month thereafter they would have occupied several other Siberian centers, and overseen therein the constitution of Councils by the local bourgeoisie. Playing cat’s paw for France and her seafaring Allies, the Czechs had thus erected a new front in the east. Then, upon orders from France, they were ordered to dig in into the heart of Eurasia and stake another vantage point from which the Allies might survey the Russian evolution.
In July the Legion seized the city of Ekaterinburg: the bodies of the imperial family were found littering the cellar of a merchant’s villa, in which they had been sequestered by the Soviets. Before the Czechs entered the city, the Bolsheviks had murdered all the Romanov's at close range to eliminate the possibility of their restoration to the throne: in 1917, the Kerensky government had entreated Britain to offer asylum to the Czar and his family, but not to mar the sensitivities of the Labor Party, the British, always the foes of ‘autocracy,’ had declined.58 Apparently, Britain hadn’t been able to forgive the Czar for attempting to betray her in 1916.
With the momentary Czech capture of Kazan on the Volga, in August 1918, the treasure trove of the Red government – the former gold hoard of the Czar – fell into the possession of the Allied camp.
Moved by the cavalier actions of the Czechs, on July 17, 1918, President Wilson drafted his controversial Aide Memoir, in which he gauged America’s military intervention in the Russian quagmire admissible ‘only to help the Czechoslovakians consolidate their forces…’59 America’s standby operation – entrusted in late August to US General William Graves, who, before taking his leave was admonished by the President to ‘watch his step’60 – was not orchestrated to engage Bolshevism, but, again, to observe the steps of the Whites. Finally, in August, 1918, the expeditionary corps of all three Sea Powers, Britain, America, and Japan, and of their French minion were landed in Vladivostok. Upon being deployed, all four powers publicly announced to Russia that they had come in peace, ‘as friends’ to save them ‘from dismemberment and destruction at the hands of Germany.’61 But no one in Siberia ever caught sight of German troops intent on harassing either the native peoples or the Czechs. The Allies were not speaking a word of truth. By autumn, the Japanese contingent numbered 72,000 men – ten times larger than the American one.62
By mid-1918, Siberia demanded a White commander.
Before the local orientation could identify a chief, the British rushed
to slip a straw man in the cockpit. For the role British intelligence cast a
former czarist admiral, Aleksandr Kolchak, who had been on its payroll
since November 1917.
Flanked and directed by General Knox, Britain’s intelligence officer in the Siberia, Kolchak, with the cooperation of the Siberian Whites, and the discreet assent of the Czechs, usurped command of the Siberian counterrevolutionary outpost a week after the armistice in the West, on November 18, 1918, and made Omsk the capital of his dictatorship. His was also the gold taken at Kazan, for the time being. News of the riches at the disposal of the Supreme Ruler were then flashed around the world.63
Prague. As a thank you to the Czechs for their rumble in the Urals, on October 28, 1918, from the fragmentation of Austria-Hungary, the Allies reinvented Bohemia as the brand new Czechoslovak Republic, and, duly, France was the first to give it official recognition on October 15, 1919; the others followed suit.
London. At the end of the war, everyone was betting on a surefire victory of the Whites over the Reds.64 In January 1919, on Churchill’s map in Whitehall, the situation looked desperate for the Reds.65
Paris. In the same month, the Great Powers had convened at Versailles for the Peace Conference that would redraw the world map after the Great War. Russia’s absence from the proceedings was conspicuous: the country had in fact no legitimate representation, driven as it was by the contest yet unsettled between Whites and Reds. The time had come for the Allies to tilt the scales in favor of their Red creature. Against the czarists, they elaborated a sophisticated tactic of debilitation by tarry and deceit, whereby the designated White victim, while cordoned off and ‘outgunned,’66 would be goaded by the slowly evanescing presence of the Allied instigators to engage the far more numerous Reds along a vast, fissures front, which the Whites could not control.
The first step in this terrible Anglo-American ploy was to isolate progressively the Whites with a diplomatic discourtesy: from Versailles, with studied aloofness towards their White ‘ally,’ and tacit encouragement for their Bolshevik work-horse, the Allies invited the two factions to meet in Turkey with a view to negotiate. In Paris, and elsewhere, the Whites felt outrageously offended: this, they railed, amounted to granting the Bolsheviks official status and treating them like equals! Though the Reds said yes, the Whites would not deal with the godless impostors.
In the West the public, ever confused, did not quite understand why their governments were so slow in doing away with this nasty Bolshevik variable – Whites aside. Were not the Reds a plague on the capitalist West, they asked?
Ever mendacious, the Elder Statesmen of the West adduced the customary pretexts: a blockade round Russia, they responded, would be cruel, and a serious intervention would have required no fewer than 400,000 men – an absolute luxury, exclaimed the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who, like his American counterpart, agreed instead to a ‘plan of limited intervention’ – by now, a code-name for the Allied standby operation of anti-White sabotage.67
In fact, no restraint – ethical or otherwise – had prevented the British (1) from killing by means of the 1914–19 blockade approximately 800,000 innocent Germans,68 and (2) from fitting an army of 900,000 for their Middle-Eastern expedition in World War I: cruelty and expense had hardly ever detracted Britain from pursuing a vital imperial goal. Clearly the Western spokesmen were yet again peddling lies, and the public never seemed to possess sufficient imagination to conceive that its very leaders had not only installed the Bolsheviks in power, but were presently scheming to hand them over the whole of Eurasia.
Inducting Hitler into
the mother lodge
Such was the world Hitler found upon returning to Munich as a
convalescing soldier in December 1918. Allegedly, his first political duty
– an appointment to distribute ‘educational’ material to the troops – took
place under the revolutionary administration of the Workers’ and Soldiers’
Councils (from late February to April, 1919), and was thus carried out under
Socialist auspices. Of this chapter of his life the Führer was reticent.* Upon leaving the hospital Hitler did not join a Freikorps to fight Left-wing radicalism; he steered clear of the bloody street-fighting of the spring.31 Ever since Nazi hierarchs had wondered, ‘What the hell was Adolf doing in Munich in March–April of 1919?’32
* Indeed, this early account of Hitler’s activities has saddled him with the additional charge – surely a trifle, if weighed against the Führer’s load of sins – of political incoherence and opportunism. Yet the inconsistency is more apparent than real: for instance, Hitler’s avowed anti-monarchism, like that of the Geächteten, would remain one of his abiding traits, as much as his attraction to corporatist economics – both of which were two defining features the Right shared with Left. This embarrassing falter in the Führer’s evolution strengthens the contention that Hitler in 1919 was in fact far more a creation than a creator: a pupil seeking a master, and not vice versa.
Hitler was waiting to be molded.
After attending a series of courses at Munich University in politics and economics, the latter taught by Gottfried Feder, an engineer by profession, it was not long before Hitler discovered the prodigious effects of his own oratorical gifts. By August, in the capacity of Bildungsoffizier (‘instruction officer’), he was already entrusted with a jam-packed lecturing assignment, which he fulfilled with enthusiasm, drawing increasing numbers of soldiers and listeners, who recognized him as Mayr’s most talented propagandist.
In early autumn, he was dispatched as an informant to spy on the several political formations that were mushrooming all over Germany in these times of political upheaval.
On Friday, September 12, 1919, he was sent to report on a meeting of the German Workers’ Party (Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP). As he walked into a squalid tavern attended by a meager scatter of listless hangers-on, Gottfried Feder was delivering a tirade on usury, which Hitler had already heard. As he prepared to leave, a Professor Baumann stepped up to percolate the merits of separatism – France was indeed conspiring at this time with whatever natives it could bribe to sever from the Fatherland as large as piece of southwestern territory as it could to create a buffer zone between herself and Germany.
Suddenly, Hitler lunged for the lectern, and in a bout of possessed nationalist eloquence, drove Baumann out of the locale. Anton Drexler, a railroad locksmith and chairman of the Party, did little to conceal his exhilaration at such a display of rhetorical virtuosity; he pushed on Hitler a pamphlet of his composition and invited him to return, forthwith. He immediately confided to the others: ‘He’s got guts, we can use him.’33
A few days later Hitler received in the mail an unsolicited membership card of the D.A.P bearing the number 555.34 He did return.
Upon inhaling the fluid, the two, who had of late been vainly scouting the Bavarian waste for a suitable ‘drummer,’ tapped each other with side glances of gleeful shock: ‘He’s come.’36
Once in every generation a spiritual epidemic spreads like lightning… attacking the souls of the living for some purpose which is hidden from us and causing a kind of mirage in the shape of some being characteristic of the place that, perhaps, lived here hundreds years ago and still yearns for physical form…You can’t hear the note from a vibrating tuning fork until it touches wood and sets it resonating. Perhaps it is simply a spiritual growth without any inherent consciousness, a structure that develops like a crystal out of formless chaos according to a constant law.37
For a time Hitler drew two stipends, as an army informant, and party speaker. On March 31, 1920, the date of his official discharge, Hitler committed to a life of political activism.
von Sebottendorff
At the behest of an occultist by the name of von Sebottendorff, Karl
Harrer, a sports journalist, together with Anton Drexler, had in October
1918 founded a ‘Political Workers Circle’ with a view to constituting a front
for the Thule Society. The Thule Gesellschaft was incorporated in August
of 1918 by Sebottendorff, as a branch of ‘a much more important secret
society known as the Germanenorden—Germanic Order’ 38 – which in turn
had been founded in 1912, and whose role in the counter-revolutionary
movement in Munich has been mentioned above. The creation in January 1919 of the D.A.P, a political unit in full trim that would have relayed the ‘masses to the nationalist Right,’ achieved this purpose.39 From the Germanic Order, Thule inherited the symbolic insignia of the swastika,40 the eagle and the dagger, and a racial gnosis insisting on the purity of the affiliate’s blood.
The Hakenkreuz or gamma cross is a solar emblem and a polar sign: ‘it evokes a circular movement around an axis or a fixed point…it is always suggestive of movement, dynamism, unlike the cross.’41 According to the Germanic mythology of the Germanenorden, the swastika rotated around a polar axis planted in the Hyperborean (northernmost) sacred island of Thule, the cradle of a white race of ancestors.
When order begins to totter, particularly during the caesura between two historical epochs, [peculiar] forces rise from their subterranean and angular lairs, or even from the zone of their private dissoluteness. Their end is despotism, more or less intelligent, but always shaped after the model of the animal kingdom. Therefore, even in their speeches and writings, they are wont to attribute beastly traits to the victims they strive to annihilate.42
In June 1918 von Sebottendorff had boosted the nascent organization with the acquisition of a newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter. Poet and freelance writer Dietrich Eckart, one of the Society’s ‘luminaries’ that attended the October 16 gathering, would later provide the sum with which the Nazi party acquired the paper as its official press organ in December 1920.43
Eckart had continuously made use of his own periodical, Auf gut deutsch (In Plain German) – a forum for conservative-revolutionary literati – to inveigh against ‘Jewishness,’ which, he averred, consisted at heart of a form of earthly, materialist, worship. To such adamant ‘affirmation of life’ on the part of Jews, he added, must be opposed a peculiar feeling for immortality, which was through and through a Teutonic sentiment – a notion of eternal regeneration through unrelenting death and sacrifice. Something which Ernst Jünger, a bard whose visions were not too remote from the lore of the Thulists, would describe as ‘the double-entry of life’ – die doppelte Buchführung des Lebens. 44
Eckart’s meditation ended in a somber tone, brooding over the forthcoming irreconcilable yet necessary coexistence of Jews and Germans, the former acting upon the latter as a fornication of vital ‘bacteria’ within an organism, the German nation, yearning for eschatological deliverance at the end of time.45
From the columns of the Völkischer Beobachter, von Sebottendorff had similarly intimated on November 9, 1918, the day of the Revolution, that ‘the whole living realm is doomed to extinction, so as to make everything else live; even we must be prepared to suffer death in order to let our children and the children of our children live. The humiliated anguish of Germany is the threshold beyond which life renews itself.’46
Following his induction into the Society as an honorary member by way of the D.A.P,47 Hitler underwent the proper initiation into mysteries of the mother lodge.48
Other members of the Thule Gesellschaft that would bear upon the vicissitudes of Nazism were, among others, Hitler’s economics teacher Gottfried Feder; Hans Frank, the governor of occupied Poland during World War II; the future Deputy Führer, Rudolf Hess, and the Third Reich’s ideologue of the race, Alfred Rosenberg.
There develop in the great Orders secret and subterranean channels in which the historian is lost.49
The Allied betrayal of
the Russian Whites
But in Russia the fratricide was going to be something else.Many critics of contemporary historiography have demanded that the Russian chapter in modern primers be rewritten; and rightly so. What ought to be spelled out in simple words is that the ‘Bolshevik menace from the East’ was from beginning to end a fake specter animated by the lies of the Western apparatuses. The Communist presence in Eurasia added yet another degree of complexity to the ‘strategy of tension’ in the West: in fact, it allowed to keep Eurasia in check, and the world poised on the brink of an ever pending ideological, or rather imaginary, conflict – a conflict with the faceless, despotic, ‘asiatic enemy’. How Western Russia had been consigned to Lenin and his acolytes has been recounted in Chapter 1. Thereafter, the Allies had to shield their ‘revolutionary assets’ and see to it that these consolidated their hold over the entire landmass, from Moscow to Vladivostok. To effect this, the White counter-revolutionary armies of the generals loyal to the Czar had to be wiped out – and Britain had to come up with a peculiar plan. Peculiar, because the scenario was rather awkward: the Reds, who with the support of foreign capital, had been gradually erecting from Moscow a despotic bureaucracy since late 1917, were surrounded by the White czarists in the north (Murmansk), the south (the Caucasus), and the east (Siberia). The Whites, dynastic and traditionalists, professed themselves as friends of the Allies – and they were sincere – whereas the Communist Reds employed only the foulest language when speaking of the American and European ‘Liberal democracies’: in words, and in words only, their ideological hatred for Western capitalism knew no bounds. Now the catch of such a scenario was that the West had to behave in such a way as to fool both its public and the Whites into believing that it was supporting the latter, when in fact the Anglo-Americans were looking forward to the complete physical elimination of the White czarists – their allies, on paper. And all of this had to be done to fulfill the aim of setting up a Communist enemy in the East, against whom, in time, the ‘new reactionary’ Germany would have risen.* So the problem which faced the British clubs was how to make a clean job of backstabbing the Whites, after these had repeatedly called upon Britain and her allies to help them defeat the ‘Red, blasphemous monsters.’ What Britain would do, with the help of America and the most heinous complicity of France and Japan, who should have had no part in this anti-European plot, was to engage in a mock fight on the side of the Whites versus the Reds, committing very limited resources and men. Thus what was in fact an operation of sabotage by neglect – a pretense to fight – was masked as a pro-White intervention, whose surreptitious objective was to instigate the Whites to combat under unfavorable conditions, deceitfully hamper their advances, prepare the terrain for their rout, and finally evacuate the Allied contingent by blaming the defeat on the putative inefficiency of the Whites. This would have turned out to be yet another indescribable disaster engineered by the western elites, not only for the terrible loss of Russian life it would have entailed, but especially for the murderous mendacity and duplicity displayed by the Western governments in provoking it, and subsequently justifying it to their electorates.
* The dynamics of this part of the plot are discussed in the final sections of this chapter.
As had been the wish of the Sea Powers, the Bolsheviks were now in command of a region corresponding to the heart of the ‘land-mass,’ that is, western Russia, with its 70 million people, half of the country’s population. Now one had to monitor and steer the next steps of this infant power. As promised, Lenin signed the peace with Germany (the Treaty of Brest of March 1918), and the truce on the Eastern Front brought the complexities of the ‘game’ into relief.
1. Germany, as seen, was ‘at peace’ with Bolshevik Russia in March 1918; she could now shift her eastern divisions to the Western Front. To parry this eventuality, Britain involved the United States in the war, and thus propped up the Western Front with massive American reinforcements.
2. In June 1918, the fear of the Allies, according to a US State Department memorandum, was that Germany might at any time violate the Treaty of Brest, turn against the detested Bolsheviks, and ally herself with the former inimical yet kindred White czarist generals to build a counterrevolutionary White International across the Eurasian landmass. The Germans had indeed begun to move in this direction in early 1918 by dispatching forces in Finland, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine to support White against Red troops.50
3. It was going to take pains to convince the public of the Allied Liberal democracies, whose raison d’être was the sacred defense of property, that Bolshevism, which lived to abolish it, was ‘the lesser evil’ between Red and White rule. This was done by resorting to the bogey of ‘White autocracy’ – a diversionary exercise that had been conjured with success during the deposition of Czar Nicholas in March 1917. It was hoped that the average Westerner would come to fear in his dreams the traditional bugaboo of the ferocious Boyar far more than the thoroughly unfamiliar figure of the ‘collectivizing commissar.’
4. The Sea Powers in effect looked forward to the strengthening of Lenin’s regime, and to its eventual unbridgeable opposition to any form of German influence.
5. To counteract point (2), namely, Germany’s advance into Russia, a makeshift Eastern Front had to be recreated immediately.
6. The Whites had to be lured into the Allied camp, away from any tempting alliance with the Germans, and, by a savvy and systematic policy of multiple sabotage by neglect, be thrown to the Reds to die a slow death in a civil war. In other words, what was required was an Allied scheme that could afford a light military intervention in the cardinal apices of the landmass. From such a fanned vantage point, the Allied outposts would have sentried the conduct of the Whites.
7. If the Whites, the better soldiers, could not be so debilitated as to lose the Civil War against the Reds; if the Whites, that is, should have won the Civil War, the Allied vanguards in Russia were to encourage at once the fragmentation of the heartland into as a many competing fiefdoms as there were White commanders.51
The plan was difficult, but feasible.
A sizable portion thereof had already been completed during the 1917 intrigues, which had dealt the rival factions highly uneven hands. In the fall of 1919, when the decisive battles of the Civil War took place, the Red Army had 3 million men under arms, who would become 5 million by the spring of 1920,52 whereas the combined effective of the White Armies never exceeded 250,000.53 While the Reds could tap a population of 70 million, altogether the Whites could never rely on more than 9 million individuals. Though they were the superior fighters, they could be strangled with moderate ease. It was going to be a game of debilitation and patience.
Before signing the peace with Germany, Lenin and Trotsky had already declared themselves amenable to take ‘potatoes and ammunition from the Anglo-French imperialist robbers’; now, they wondered naively what prevented all the imperialist powers, including Germany, from burying their past grudges and ganging up against their Communist foe;54 and while they mused, the Allies set out to implement the second phase of the plan.
Far eastern Russia. As their ‘eastern sentinel,’ in February 1918 Japan, France and Britain hired Semenov, the notorious Cossack chief of a gang of torturers, rapists and assassins,55 and enjoined him not to extend his radius of terror beyond his remote base at the confines of Mongolia.56 On the surface Semenov passed for a White, but he was merely a pawn. In April 1918, with a nod from Washington, Tokyo debarked the first squadron of reconnoitering officers in eastern Siberia to keep an eye on the Whites from Manchuria, whose western periphery would be guarded by the Cossack satraps.
Northwestern Russia. Simultaneously, a British corps was landed in northern Russia – in the Murmansk region, neighboring Finland. The official mission of such a corps was to rally the local forces against German meddling in Finland. In this northern corner of the heartland, and in open defiance of Moscow’s anti-imperialist directives, the Soviet of Murmansk would work hand in glove with the Allies to repel the Finnish White Guards, and thwart the German scheme of establishing a submarine base in the White Sea. By November 11, 1918, the day of the armistice, these goals were accomplished.57
Siberia and The Urals. In May 1918, there were 40,000 native Czech soldiers strewn in several trains along the Trans-Siberian railroad, bound for Vladivostok – Russia’s far eastern port on the Pacific Ocean. Thence, this corps of Legionnaires recruited in Ukraine before the war and once loyal to the Czar was to be conveyed halfway across the world to the Western Front as reinforcement to the Allies. France had an idea: responding to the Sea Powers’ urge to recreate an Eastern Front, she took the fate of the Czechs under her own wing, and instigated her new proteges to cause an incident with the Reds whereby hostilities might be opened. Easily effected: when the Soviet authorities demanded that the Czechs surrendered their weapons, the Legionnaires refused. The tension degenerated into conflict. On May 25, the Czechs overpowered the Red garrison at Chelyabinsk in the Urals. A month thereafter they would have occupied several other Siberian centers, and overseen therein the constitution of Councils by the local bourgeoisie. Playing cat’s paw for France and her seafaring Allies, the Czechs had thus erected a new front in the east. Then, upon orders from France, they were ordered to dig in into the heart of Eurasia and stake another vantage point from which the Allies might survey the Russian evolution.
In July the Legion seized the city of Ekaterinburg: the bodies of the imperial family were found littering the cellar of a merchant’s villa, in which they had been sequestered by the Soviets. Before the Czechs entered the city, the Bolsheviks had murdered all the Romanov's at close range to eliminate the possibility of their restoration to the throne: in 1917, the Kerensky government had entreated Britain to offer asylum to the Czar and his family, but not to mar the sensitivities of the Labor Party, the British, always the foes of ‘autocracy,’ had declined.58 Apparently, Britain hadn’t been able to forgive the Czar for attempting to betray her in 1916.
With the momentary Czech capture of Kazan on the Volga, in August 1918, the treasure trove of the Red government – the former gold hoard of the Czar – fell into the possession of the Allied camp.
Moved by the cavalier actions of the Czechs, on July 17, 1918, President Wilson drafted his controversial Aide Memoir, in which he gauged America’s military intervention in the Russian quagmire admissible ‘only to help the Czechoslovakians consolidate their forces…’59 America’s standby operation – entrusted in late August to US General William Graves, who, before taking his leave was admonished by the President to ‘watch his step’60 – was not orchestrated to engage Bolshevism, but, again, to observe the steps of the Whites. Finally, in August, 1918, the expeditionary corps of all three Sea Powers, Britain, America, and Japan, and of their French minion were landed in Vladivostok. Upon being deployed, all four powers publicly announced to Russia that they had come in peace, ‘as friends’ to save them ‘from dismemberment and destruction at the hands of Germany.’61 But no one in Siberia ever caught sight of German troops intent on harassing either the native peoples or the Czechs. The Allies were not speaking a word of truth. By autumn, the Japanese contingent numbered 72,000 men – ten times larger than the American one.62
By mid-1918, Siberia demanded a White commander.
Flanked and directed by General Knox, Britain’s intelligence officer in the Siberia, Kolchak, with the cooperation of the Siberian Whites, and the discreet assent of the Czechs, usurped command of the Siberian counterrevolutionary outpost a week after the armistice in the West, on November 18, 1918, and made Omsk the capital of his dictatorship. His was also the gold taken at Kazan, for the time being. News of the riches at the disposal of the Supreme Ruler were then flashed around the world.63
Prague. As a thank you to the Czechs for their rumble in the Urals, on October 28, 1918, from the fragmentation of Austria-Hungary, the Allies reinvented Bohemia as the brand new Czechoslovak Republic, and, duly, France was the first to give it official recognition on October 15, 1919; the others followed suit.
London. At the end of the war, everyone was betting on a surefire victory of the Whites over the Reds.64 In January 1919, on Churchill’s map in Whitehall, the situation looked desperate for the Reds.65
Paris. In the same month, the Great Powers had convened at Versailles for the Peace Conference that would redraw the world map after the Great War. Russia’s absence from the proceedings was conspicuous: the country had in fact no legitimate representation, driven as it was by the contest yet unsettled between Whites and Reds. The time had come for the Allies to tilt the scales in favor of their Red creature. Against the czarists, they elaborated a sophisticated tactic of debilitation by tarry and deceit, whereby the designated White victim, while cordoned off and ‘outgunned,’66 would be goaded by the slowly evanescing presence of the Allied instigators to engage the far more numerous Reds along a vast, fissures front, which the Whites could not control.
The first step in this terrible Anglo-American ploy was to isolate progressively the Whites with a diplomatic discourtesy: from Versailles, with studied aloofness towards their White ‘ally,’ and tacit encouragement for their Bolshevik work-horse, the Allies invited the two factions to meet in Turkey with a view to negotiate. In Paris, and elsewhere, the Whites felt outrageously offended: this, they railed, amounted to granting the Bolsheviks official status and treating them like equals! Though the Reds said yes, the Whites would not deal with the godless impostors.
In the West the public, ever confused, did not quite understand why their governments were so slow in doing away with this nasty Bolshevik variable – Whites aside. Were not the Reds a plague on the capitalist West, they asked?
Ever mendacious, the Elder Statesmen of the West adduced the customary pretexts: a blockade round Russia, they responded, would be cruel, and a serious intervention would have required no fewer than 400,000 men – an absolute luxury, exclaimed the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, who, like his American counterpart, agreed instead to a ‘plan of limited intervention’ – by now, a code-name for the Allied standby operation of anti-White sabotage.67
In fact, no restraint – ethical or otherwise – had prevented the British (1) from killing by means of the 1914–19 blockade approximately 800,000 innocent Germans,68 and (2) from fitting an army of 900,000 for their Middle-Eastern expedition in World War I: cruelty and expense had hardly ever detracted Britain from pursuing a vital imperial goal. Clearly the Western spokesmen were yet again peddling lies, and the public never seemed to possess sufficient imagination to conceive that its very leaders had not only installed the Bolsheviks in power, but were presently scheming to hand them over the whole of Eurasia.
Figure 2.1
Southwestern Russia. In the South, White General Denikin was the master of a sector projecting from the northern shores of the Black and Caspian seas (see Figure 2.1).69 Britain and France would see to it that Denikin’s
muster for ‘Russia, One and Indivisible’ went to the devil.
Since November 1918, Britain had intrigued with as many satellites as
she could bribe abaft the Whites’ enclave: that is, beyond the Caspian Sea
in Transcaspia, where she struck several oil deals, and in Transcaucasia –
Azerbaijan and Georgia – from which she killed two birds with one stone by
securing imports of cotton and opposing every effort of Denikin’s to restore the
Caspian fleet.
70 Likewise, France, whom czarist Russia had saved from defeat
in the summer of 1914 by attacking the Reich, declared, most ungratefully,
that she did ‘not believe in White Russia.’ Nor did she profess to have
any liking for the Red Kremlin either – so what would she do? She would
‘concentrate on separating Russia from Germany by means of a “barbed
wired fence” of friendly states anchored in Poland.’71 And Britain could
not be more approving.
The British Establishment had, as usual, inveigled the French politicians
into their Russian occupation scheme. Prime Minister Clémenceau was
invited to sign, in the utmost secrecy, a convention whereby the British
would cut the French in on some of Southern Russia’s choicest real estate.
On December 23, 1917, two months after Lenin’s coup, the treaty was
signed by Clémenceau and the British. French divisions would be sent
to occupy Ukraine, in exchange for which Clémenceau would receive
concessions in Bessarabia and the Crimea, as well as in Ukraine – an
area larger than France herself. The British Establishment had conceived
this munificent scheme in order to divert attention from their own
monopolization of petroleum in the Caucasus and the Persian Gulf.72
So in December 1918, escorted by a regiment of Greeks and Poles, the
French whetted the anchor at Odessa in Crimea. But after being severely
thrashed by a corps of Ukrainian irregulars, the French disengaged in April
1919, though not before destroying the entire Russian Black Sea Fleet – ‘to
leave nothing for the Bolsheviks,’ so they claimed – 73 and laying open
thereby the whole of Denikin’s left flank.74
Throughout this distressing intermission, hamstrung in the rear by France
on the Black, and Britain on the Caspian Sea, General Denikin sent repeated
requests for aid to representatives of those self-same powers, who took
no time to respond ‘absorbed’ as they were in the intricacies of the Peace
Conference.75 Yet in spite of the crippling, Denikin’s recruiting élan in the
South grew in June, so much so that he pledged allegiance to Kolchak in
a drive to unite Russia that moved the admiral to tears.
White Siberia. Presently, the focus shifted to Kolchak. By May of 1919,
his western advance across the Urals was nearly triumphant.
The Whites, enthusiastic, kept pressuring the Anglo-Americans for official
recognition. The latter, hard pressed to mask their dissatisfaction, had to
resort to some other charade to gain precious time: raising their brows
like distrustful schoolmasters, they conditioned diplomatic recognition
upon the establishment in White Siberia of a Liberal democratic order
à la Kerensky. In other words, to obtain London’s seal of approval the
Whites were warned that they had better introduce reform in land tenure,
suffrage, and so on – the usual institutional package containing all that is
fit, according to Britain.76 Kolchak naturally assented, and the Allies curtly
replied that ‘they would consider’: naturally, the recognition would never
be granted.
But Kolchak could not be sacrificed just yet: his gold chest exceeded by
52.7 percent the entire gold reserve of the Bank of England.77 In the summer of
1919, over a third of this treasure was dispatched by train to Vladivostok,
where no less than 18 foreign banks, eager for a share of the Russian
business, had established branches. Thereafter the gold was either sold on
the international market in exchange for foreign cash, or was swallowed in
the vaults of banks in Yokohama, Osaka, Shanghai, Honk Kong, and San
Francisco as security for loans.78
Though Kolchak splurged like a king, the Siberian tangle was such as to
make his task ‘almost impossible.’79 How?
1. The Cossaks to the Far East had been planted in his side by the Japanese
to strangle the vital flow of provisions traveling on the Trans-Siberian
railway from Vladivostok to Omsk.
2. Immediately after Kolchak’s coup, the Czechs suddenly made a public
display of their fatigue and confessed the desire to withdraw from the fray.
Directed by General Janin, specially expedited from France to engineer
the Czech back stab of Kolchak’s White armies, the Legion left the Ural
front in mass, receding towards Japan’s westernmost outpost. Presently,
the Czechs abstained vigorously from all participation in Russian central
affairs, exasperating Kolchak ‘to the point of madness.’80
3. As for US General William Graves, the gossip in Siberia was that by not
supporting Kolchak he was in fact giving aid to the Bolsheviks.81 Which
was the truth. Likewise, the British did nothing.
By August, Kolchak was losing.
Thereafter, the stories of White discomfiture were all the same: they
began with smashing offensives that brought the Whites to over-extend
themselves, until they were systematically routed by the Red Army, whose
far superior numbers always allowed it to regroup and drive back the White
assault. Numbers and numbers alone settled this matter.
By November Kolchak was finished; he had lasted but a year.
In a two-month epic exodus along the Trans-Siberian railroad, Kolchak
hitched his six convoys to a locomotive bound to Vladivostok to escape
from the creeping Red hordes – in one such convoy was the gold. Traveling
in the front cars of the caravan were the French General Janin and the
Czechs, who so relented the pace of the advance as to allow the Reds to
overtake the tail of the train. In the long 1,500-mile trek, 1 million men,
women, and children would perish.
In January 1920, the British War Office was proud to report that Kolchak
had ceased to be a factor in Russian military affairs.82 The mission was
accomplished: American and British troops evacuated Siberia. On January
31, two Czech officers boarded Kolchak’s car and informed the commander
that he would be surrendered to the local authorities. ‘So the Allies have
betrayed me?’ the White admiral calmly inquired. In February 1920, while
facing interrogation by the Reds, Kolchak, this sad king of all dupes, would
avow in a moment of placated distress: ‘the meaning and essence of this
[Allied] intervention remains quite obscure to me.’83 He was shot and
dumped under the icy crust of the Ushakovka river soon thereafter. Along
with the head of Kolchak, the Bolsheviks were served two-thirds of the
Czar’s gold, the remainder having previously been deposited in the safes
of the West.
The only losses suffered by the Allies were incurred in the North. There,
owing to the ragged countenance of the White resistance, the Allies,
commanded by Anglo-American forces, were reluctantly called upon from
backstage to engage the Reds in a series of broken escaramouches, which
enabled them to temporize and hold the position in a stratagem of wait and-see
staked on the fortune of Kolchak. Demobilization began in March,
and was completed by the end of 1919, when the admiral was lost. After
relinquishing some war materiel, the Allies left the White generals behind
to grapple with their (bleak) destiny. Upon seizing Archangel’sk in February
1920, the Bolsheviks immediately butchered 500 White officers.
In Russia, the Anglo-American death toll for what had been in essence a
game of make-believe tallied up to approximately 500 lives out of a force of
18,000 men – in the West, instead, the United States had promptly expended
114,000 lives of the 2 million troops sent to France, in a deployment costing $36.2 billion.84 When it came to killing the Germans, America had been
ready to see 2 million of its soldiers die. But when the time had arrived
to fight the 3–5 million ‘evil Communists,’ London and Washington
committed together approximately 1 percent of the American contingent
in France. And of their men, sent to overview the end of the Whites, the
Anglo-Americans had even been willing to sacrifice a handful, just in order
to keep up appearances – to ‘show’ that, because a few of theirs had been
cut down by Red fire, Britain and America had indeed come to ‘help the
Whites.’ Which was the opposite of the truth. Siding ‘officially’ with the
Whites, 500 Anglo-Americans soldiers were killed by the Reds in a tussle
in the polar north, which was part of an extraordinary double-cross of the
White generals staged by the Anglo-American clubs for the benefit of the
Reds themselves: such was the twisted beauty of imperial scheming.
In the Baltic, the recurrent pattern was slightly altered by the paradoxical
presence of German regulars and Freikorps, commanded by General von
Goltz. A clause of the armistice tolerated their incumbency in Courland*
‘as a stopgap measure,’85 to oppose the Red invasion of the Baltic seaboard,
which the Allies sought to retain as an independent buffer between Germany
and Russia.
As Goltz’s armies prepared in June 1919 to give White commander
Yudenitch main forte to launch a wide offensive against St. Petersburg, they
were recalled by the German government under the peremptory injunction
of the Allies, disbanded and repatriated forthwith. Embittered, Goltz would
later remember how Yudenitch’s Northern Army of unkempt beggars was
massacred after having been ‘egged on in the most unscrupulous manner by the British.’86
In the South, France cut the Bolsheviks further slack by encouraging its
other great protege in the East, Poland, with whom the Reds had locked
horns over territorial disputes, to sign two successive truces with the
Russians. Thereupon the Red Army, commanded by the dashing young
General Mikahil Tukhachevsky, shifted massive reinforcements to the south
to defeat Denikin in the fall of 1919, and Wrangel, the second-in-command,
the following year, thus suppressing once and for all the southern hotbed
of anti-Bolshevik resistance. As the White squadron chiefs were hurriedly
evacuated aboard Allied vessels, their horses, forsaken on the surf of Crimea,
thrust themselves in the water chasing after their riders.87
Japan, the sole Sea Power with a contingent of 70,000 men that could
have struck the Reds and never did,88 finally retired in 1922 after having lame Kolchak, vouched for the indescribable violence of the Cossack
cutthroats, and corroborated its hold over Manchuria. In 1922, the czarist
empire became the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The great
‘imaginary foe’ of the West had at long last been conjured.89
US President Wilson was satisfied that it had been left to the Russians ‘to
fight it out amongst themselves.’90 And Secretary of State Lansing, officially
America’s most vehement anti-Bolshevik, resignedly declared in early 1920:
‘We simply did the best we could in an impossible situation, which resulted
from Kolchak’s inability to create an efficient army.’91
On the surface, the Sea Powers seemed to have been moonstruck by an
odd sort of geopolitical geometry, whereby the prospect of facing a viscerally
anti-Western Communist dictatorship ruling over a surface 60 times greater
than the German Reich roused far less concern than the Germans’ appetite
for Middle Europe. Indeed, Lloyd George assured his Cabinet in December
1918 that a Bolshevized Russia was by no means ‘such a danger [to England]
as the old Russian Empire, with all its aggressive officials and million
troops,’92 and a year later he candidly reiterated, shattering there with the
hopes of the last fighting Whites, that Kolchak’s and Denikin’s Russia, ‘One
and Indivisible,’ was not in Britain’s ‘best interests.’93
Nor could they be blamed of cynical indifference, the Allies pleaded, for
they had extended aid to the Whites to the extent of tons of war materiel and provided millions of dollars worth of assistance, although Churchill
himself admittedly found such a claim ‘to be vastly exaggerated on the
grounds that British aid consisted largely of WWI surplus that was of no
further use to Britain and had little monetary value.’94
Presumably, the actual beneficiaries of Allied aid, as many had suspected,
were not the Whites, but, contrary to all preconceptions except those of
geopolitics, the Reds themselves.
The magnitude of Western assistance to the Bolsheviks is not known,
though in early 1918, for instance, it was a matter of some notoriety that
the United States was conveying funds to Bolshevik Russia for purchases
of weaponry and munitions via Wall Street operator Raymond Robins, for
whom Trotsky was ‘the greatest Jew since Jesus.’95
The significant number of contracts, concessions, and licenses
subsequently released by Lenin’s empire to American firms during the Civil
War, and in its immediate aftermath, formed something of a smoking gun
of Bolshevism’s early Allied sponsorship: $25 million of Soviet commissions
for US manufactures between July 1919 and January 1920,96 not to mention
Lenin’s concession for the extraction of asbestos to Armand Hammer in 1921,97 and the 60-year lease granted in 1920 to Frank Vanderlip’s*
US
consortium formed to exploit the coal, petroleum and fisheries of a North
Siberian region covering 600,000 square kilometers (Frankfurter Zeitung,
November 20, 1920).98
* The chairman of the National City Bank in New York.
Finally, in 1933, the Soviet government, upon perusal of ‘official American documentation,’ would waive ‘any and all claims…for the damages allegedly caused by the United States in the Soviet Union through its participation in the [Siberian] intervention’:99 for nebulous reasons, it would take the Reds 13 years to acknowledge officially that General Graves had come to Siberia to help, not to thwart them.
Never, surely, have countries continued to show themselves so much at their worst as did the Allies in Russia from 1917 to 1920. Among other things, their efforts served everywhere to compromise the enemies of Bolshevism and to strengthen the Communist themselves. So important was this factor that I think it may well be questioned whether Bolshevism would ever have prevailed throughout Russia had the Western governments not aided its progress to power by this ill conceived interference…These expeditions were little side-shows of policy, complicated and obscure in origin…embracing in their motivation many considerations having nothing to do with a desire to overthrow Soviet power for ideological reasons.100
American historian and diplomat George F. Kennan had, like many of his compatriots, been somewhat at a loss to plumb what had been a contrived method of solving the first equation of Eurasia’s system: that is, by raising a phantom regime in Russia hostile to Germany. Contemporaries had failed to appreciate that the White elephants were naturally foredoomed – the breaking of the Eurasian embrace demanded it, and all such Allied ‘sideshows’ were but sequences of premeditated butchery. Feigning a cautious policy of intervention, the governments of Britain, France and the United States misled their public into believing that they indeed requited the hatred of the Communists by ‘siding’ with their enemies’ enemies (the Whites), when in fact they had been double-crossing these Whites all along. Hence the reproach that the Allies had shown themselves ‘at their worst,’ translated by and large into an ungracious refusal to tribute the due credit to what amounted to a perfectly executed maneuver, costing a collateral loss of but 500 lives, to rid the landmass of the bulk of the Junkers’ potential Russian allies beyond the Eurasian fault line. Save for the distasteful bickering of Russia’s fratricidal war, whose loss of life amounted to around 10 million souls, the operation had been a complete success – this was rather the Allied West ‘at its best.’
On November 5, the American position was further clarified by the note of the US Secretary of State, Lansing, to Germany, according to which the latter would ‘make compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allied…Powers and to their property…by such an aggression by land, by sea, and from the air.’101 Upon these premises the Germans signed the Armistice.
Meanwhile, on February 6, 1919, the National Assembly convened in Weimar, away from the provisional disorders of Berlin, and five days later republican Germany was given her first president: the Socialist Friedrich Ebert.
Soon it was the ‘reparations’ that they all began to argue about. If by ‘damage’ only wreckage of property had been intended, France, upon whose soil the devastation had been wrought, would have claimed the bulk of the indemnities. To tilt the scales somewhat more in Britain’s favor, Jan Smuts, an affiliate of Milner’s Kindergarten* as well as South Africa’s negotiator in Paris, found a loophole in the Lansing Note: citing the wording of the clause, according to which Germany ‘was liable for all damage done to civilians,’ he cunningly bent Wilson into including in the reparation bill allowances for soldiers’ families, as well as pensions for widows and orphans.
Economist John Maynard Keynes, representing the British Treasury at Versailles, reckoned that not only did such allowances violate Wilson’s negotiatory Points, but they also amounted to a figure two and half times the total bill for the war damages inflicted on the Western Front. Adding to a preliminary remittance in cash of $5 million, expected by May 1921, the allowances (25 billion dollars), and the compensation for war ravages (10 billion dollars), Keynes assessed the reparation load at 40 million dollars: a figure equal to three times the Reich’s pre-war income,which,he affirmed, was beyond the paying capacity of vanquished Germany.102 He was indignant – the envisaged sums appeared patently absurd.
But the victorious public was fed expectations of another species: the British adumbrated a request of $120 billion; the French a fantastic toll of $220 billion.103 With such a heated audience thirsting for extravagantly vindictive tributes, Lloyd George and the French Prime Minister, Clémenceau, Britain’s and France’s chief negotiators, could scarcely afford to parade on the home front a loot of ‘merely’ $40 million without risking a political lynching. Then Lloyd George chanced upon the clever device of leaving the final figure unnamed, deputizing the task to a commission of experts, which was scheduled to deliver an estimate in two years – by May 1921. The explosive mixture was skillfully inoculated in the text of the Treaty by John Foster Dulles – a New York lawyer connected in high places – in the form of the infamous Article 231, which had gone down in history as the ‘war guilt clause’ (Kriegsschuldfrage). By this Article Germany was coerced to accept the responsibility, and thus sign a ‘blank check,’ ‘for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied…and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany.’
The apportionment of the prospective German spoils was thus tentatively arranged by the victors: 50 per cent to France, 30 percent to Britain and the remaining 20 percent divided up among the lesser allies.104
Having served its purpose, the decoy of the Fourteen Points was torn up and tossed in the trashcan. Its mouthpiece, Wilson, like a dollar watch wound too tight and then discarded, ticked into malfunction and finally broke down: in Paris the President fell seriously ill. He had sworn for no annexations, yet he acquiesced in Allied occupation; he had promised no indemnities, but he agreed to unilateral reparations. He had vowed to uproot ‘secret diplomacy’ and watched his allies make it the very clay wherewith the Treaty was being fashioned: when the German delegation arrived in Paris in late April to receive the contents of the Treaty on May 7, 1919, Lloyd George stuttered as he read a document that neither he nor any other Allied plenipotentiary had seen in its completed form.105 They had all haggled furiously, but the hand that had drafted the achieved compact had remained hidden.
When the Germans were apprised of the Treaty’s nature, they sat back dumbstruck. Then, recomposing themselves somewhat, they invited their leader, Foreign Minister Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau – the very man whom Parvus Helphand had gulled in 1917 – to deliver the legation's remonstrance: in a long speech, Brockdorff lamented the violation of the ‘pre-armistice commitments. As a deliberate insult to his listeners, he spoke from a seated position.’106
In Berlin, the Reichstag (the parliament) excoriated the Treaty with an uproar of abuse. At Versailles the German legation counter-proposed: in a masterful 443-page response redacted in keeping with the original Wilsonian pact, the Treaty’s Articles were rebuffed one by one: Germany offered $25 billion dollars, and ‘most territorial changes were rejected except where they could be shown to be based on self-determination (thus adopting Wilson’s point of view)’.107 Even the doyen of sociology, Max Weber, was dragged by Germany into the foray to protest, as Lenin had done years previously, that the war had been every power’s sin.108
But the Allies were irremovable: Germany, the sole culprit of the war’s atrocities, was given a five-day ultimatum to accept the Treaty on pain of military invasion. Not to affix its signature to such a Schandfrieden (shameful peace), Weimar’s first government under the Socialist Scheidemann resigned in concert after only four months. In a desperate act of wounded patriotism, on June 21 the crews of the German fleet impounded at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles scuttled 400,000 tons of expensive shipping, and lost ten sailors to British gunfire in the undertaking.109 In Berlin it was Matthias Erzberger, once again, who bent over to take the brunt of unpopular decisions: in November he had signed the humiliating armistice, now, as Finance Minister of the new Cabinet, he took it upon himself to inflict upon this whole affair the last turn of the screw. He challenged the parliament’s die hard opponents of ratification to lead, as men of their word, a government that would face renewed hostilities. While these immediately recoiled from the prospective engagement, General Groener assured Reich President Ebert that he would placate the (infuriated) army. By a parliamentary maneuver designed to save the honor of the ‘patriots’ as well as to enable the pragmatists to ratify it, the Treaty was accepted on June 23, and Germany was spared Allied occupation.110
As to the territorial alterations, the Treaty carried two significant dispositions. The first was the Polish Corridor: France had wanted to give east Prussia to Poland, but the drafters of the Treaty conceived a far more sophisticated arrangement whereby east Prussia was to be traversed by a corridor connecting Poland to the North Sea by way of the free city of Danzig, a full-fledged German enclave to be placed under international tutelage. This corridor thus severed a sizable block of eastern Germany from the body of the Fatherland. As a contraption for sparking eventual ethnic, territorial, and political incendiary dispute, it was bound to be efficacious: in fact, it was the trigger set up for the next war.
The second territorial provision was the Rhineland settlement: the Rhineland and a zone 50 kilometers wide along the right bank were to be permanently demilitarized and any violation of the clause could be regarded as a hostile act by the signatories of the Treaty. The condition implied that any German troops or fortifications were excluded from this area forever. ‘This was the most important disposition of the Treaty of Versailles, as it exposed the economic backbone of Germany’s ability to wage warfare to a quick French military thrust.’111 French troops were granted the right to occupy such a zone for 15 years.
Bearing down ‘like two jailers’ upon the flanks of ‘the chained giant,’112 Versailles’ novel creations, Poland and Czechoslovakia, kept a careful watch over Germany, who thus found herself stripped of her armed forces, which were reduced to a professional contingent of 100,000 men. The country was deprived of many of her mines; reduced in population by 6.5 million citizens (10 percent of the total)113 and 2.4 million souls lost at war; bereft of her merchant navy, her colonies, and 13 percent of her territory; depleted of 75 percent of her iron ore reserves, 26 percent of her coal production, as well as 44 percent and 38 percent of her pig iron and steel production respectively;114 and ‘obliged to devote part of [her] industrial might to building ships for the Allies and to provide coal to France.’115
By the time the Germans assented to ratify the Treaty, Keynes had already abandoned the Conference in high dudgeon, chagrined by the pensions clause – ‘one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom,’ he wailed, ‘for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.’116 A clause whose provenance, however, he could not afford to divulge because it was the ruse of his good friend Smuts.117
When the final bill was issued in May 1921, Germany would be asked to pay, in 37 yearly installments, $34 billion: two and half times her 1913 annual income and ten times the tribute she had imposed upon France in 1871. Keynes had decried the pretension that such a sum could have been remitted through trade surpluses by a much weakened Reich in a competitive environment. After much diligent accounting of Germany’s assets, he had suggested a reparation tribute of $10 billion dollars (that is, 75 percent of Germany’s 1913 net product), to be amortized over several decades.118
With the blockade the Allies had already murdered 800,000 Germans and 1 million of their productive animals; blackmailing Weimar to kill more,Britain had her way, and brought Germany to sign the humiliating compact. On June 28, 1919, exactly five years after Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, as Dr. Johannes Bell, Minister of Transportation in Weimar’s second Cabinet, accompanied to Versailles by Foreign Minister Müller, stooped to sign the Treaty, the pen’s ink, like the blood in Faustus’s arm, congealed: the pen would not work. Edward House, America’s secretive negotiator, who stood by, leaned forward to offer his.119
Only then was the blockade lifted; only then did the Allies allow ships carrying food to dock at German ports.
Though his virtuosity and ‘good heart’ might have all been expended for naught, Keynes was yet determined not to begrudge his bourgeois aficionados another ‘classic’ inspired by the recent Parisian events, which he drafted hastily in the winter of 1919; he entitled it The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The book, which sold 100,000 copies instantly, and was translated into eleven languages, featured an unrelenting and self-satisfied indulgence in technical detail, mingled with occasional psycho-logistic portraiture, which alternatively dwelt on the buckle of Clémenceau’s shoe, Wilson’s neck muscles, and Lloyd George’s goat-footed purposelessness. The Treaty, Keynes sentenced, was harsh and unjust, and it would fuel terrible resentment.
The book was the sort of Christmas buy that the educated middle classes could never forbear in their periodical and conscientious drive to keep abreast of international affairs. And it was the kind of book, too, that whispered the things these educated and yet perennially baffled readers wished to hear: little tales about the regrettable myopia, benighted judgment and malicious blunders of senescent fighters called upon tasks greater than they; little tales whose moral is that bad deeds always happen by pernicious mistake. Needless to say, Keynes’s opus, like all expressions of so-called ‘enlightened conservatism,’ did not challenge the current state of affairs: the best solution, he concluded, was to stand behind the Weimar Republic, which was after all the creature of Versailles. He invited the various parties to moderation. So he played it safe and took the ‘the middle road,’ enumerating in his valediction the alternatives to Versailles, which were made to appear invariably worse than the status quo. Interestingly, this ‘appeasing’ excerpt foreshadowed the taste of the game that Britain would play in the 1930's versus the rest of the international community to push Hitler to war. A game featuring Soviet Russia as the proverbial ‘subversive enemy in the East,’ against whom Britain would pit a Germany dumbfounded, and perennially jostled by her fear of Communist Russia, on one hand, and her no less intense contempt for the European neighbors, on the other.
The present Government of Germany stands for German unity more perhaps than for anything else…A victory of [Communism] in Germany might well be the prelude to revolution everywhere; it…would precipitate the dreaded union of Germany and Russia; it would certainly put an end to any expectation which have been built on the financial and economic clauses of the Treaty of Peace…But, on the other hand, a victory of reaction in Germany…from the ashes of cosmopolitan militarism… would be regarded by everyone as a threat to the security of Europe, and as endangering the fruits of victory on the basis of the Peace…Let us encourage and assist Germany to take up again her place in Europe as a creator and organizer of wealth…120
Overall the Germans relished the book.
The seemingly honest and straightforward self-denunciation coming from a prestigious exponent of the British camp could not fail to soothe somewhat Germany’s wounded honor, and much hope was thus staked on the book’s cheering exhortation to set in motion ‘those forces of imagination’ necessary to overcome this ‘dead season of [the West’s] fortunes.’121
‘Dead season’, indeed, which did not, however, prevent Keynes from engaging immediately thereafter in happy-go-lucky speculation against the Reichsmark of poor, ‘ruined’ Germany: he sold it short, while buying dollars, making a killing. But in May 1920 the fall of the German currency momentarily halted: Keynes went under by £13,000. The book’s royalties and a further advance from Macmillan, the publisher, of £1500 were not sufficient to plug the gamble loss: pawning his good name, Keynes was afforded a credit reprieve by his bank’s director, who knew him as a famous man.122
The ball was now in the court of the United States, which was entitled vis-à-vis the Allies to approximately $10 billion worth of credits, over 40 percent of which from the British. Britain was a net war creditor as well, but the bulk of her loans to France, Russia, and Italy (roughly 90 percent) was of poor quality; understandably, Keynes had suggested as the chief remedy to the financial deadlock of the Peace Conference the cancellation of Allied inter-indebtedness.123 But America, still holding on to her legitimate claims, withdrew from the European swamp. With two successive votes (November 1919 and March 1920) the American Senate, in a sudden plot led by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, defeated the Treaty, and left it to France and Britain to deal directly with their German neighbor. The United States would seal a separate peace with Germany in Berlin, on August 25, 1921, whereby the reparation dues indirectly owed to the United States were safeguarded.
By killing the Treaty, America not only yielded purposely to Britain and France the delicate management of the reparations, of which she ultimately held the strings, she also voided, no less designedly, a triangle of military assistance, contracted separately in 1919, between America, Britain, and France, aimed at protecting the latter ‘in the event of any unprovoked aggression by Germany.’124
Wilson, the rusted air pipe of much empty promise who had sworn to keep America out of the war in 1916, succumbed to thrombosis in a campaigning tour de force across the American heartland from Kansas City to Tacoma, which he had undertaken in early 1920 as a last measure to garner votes in favor of active American participation in the post-war administration of Europe. He was voted out of office in 1921. In Omaha Wilson, like many other ‘moderates,’ saw in the Parisian Treaty the seed of ‘another and far more disastrous war.’125
But his Fourteen Points had baited the Germans into surrender – it had not all been in vain.
Shortly before the new century, he embarked on an evolutionary expedition to scrutinize human anthills with the cool meticulousness of an entomologist. But humans being in some critical respects different from insects, he soon ran into methodological difficulties: how was he to account for society’s several forms of aggregate motion? Like various arthropods, men might practice deception, wage war, toil for the sustentation of the ‘home,’ and minister to an awesome ‘queen’ – thus far the zoological similitude might impose itself with cogency. But there were things that men did which the ants did not: for instance, they prayed and they dissipated. Why?
Veblen recognized that there was an entire range of human activities that were afforded no representation in the animal kingdom, which was broadly delimited by survival, cunning, and organization. And these activities were too singular and too strikingly human not to be accounted for in some form. What of, say, witch hunts, religious worship, mass sacrifice, or imperial pageantry? Who thought them first, and why? The origin of all such collective rites, Veblen reasoned, had to be lurking in a remoter lagoon he was yet to find. And while in the solitude of the cabin he engraved with neat calligraphy his travelogue in violet ink, his drifting ship kept gliding along. Until the bowsprit struck upon something. He had reached the reefs of ‘occult agencies’. He never would or could steer his vessel through such a cruising ground, but he circumnavigated it, closely, and almost obsessively, alone, for over two decades – too frightened to penetrate it, too enthralled to lose sight of it.
There is no call to undervalue occult agencies [such as manifest destiny, national genius, or Providential guidance]…but granting that these and their like are the hidden springs, it is also to be called to mind that it is their nature to remain hidden, and that the tangible agencies through which these presumed hidden prime movers work must therefore be sufficient for the work without recourse to the hidden springs; which can have an effect only by force of a magical efficacy.126
In 1915, Veblen returned from a long, virtual exploration of the German anthill. The famed culture of the Fatherland, whose language he read with facility, was far from foreign to him. Though a hyphenate creature of three worlds – the heart in Norway, the mind in America and the spirit at sea – by style, school, method, and erudition, Veblen was a ‘German’ institutional scholar himself.
But the re-emergence in the late Wilhelmine empire of the ‘feudalistic ideal,’ the ‘overbearing magniloquence,’ and the ‘predaceous rule of the Teutonic invaders,’ gripped him with a discomfort so acute that by the end of the investigation it had matured into full-blown revulsion.127 As emphasized earlier, Veblen believed that the commonwealths of the West should have had much to fear from Germany’s peculiar blend of ‘warlike swagger’ and technological sophistication.128 But beyond this central political preoccupation, Veblen had discovered in the folds of German society, underneath the thin cloak of Prussianism, the presence of a deeper spring of collective motion. Something whose alien drift, under particular circumstances and through the agency of ‘gifted personalities,’ might have carried sufficient force to envelop the whole of Germany’s social aggregate and transform it into an entity altogether diverse. Possibly inspired by recollections of Anabaptist furor, the captain gave the following description of the singular categories of ‘gifted’ types and of their potential doings under the influence of this hidden source:
In the successful departures in the domain of faith…it will be seen that any such novel or aberrant scheme of habits of thought touching the supernatural uniformly takes its rise as an affection of a certain small number of individuals, who, it may be presumed, have been thrown into a frame of mind propitious to this new fashion of thinking by some line of discipline, physical and spiritual, or rather both, that is not congruous with the previously accepted views on these matters. It will ordinarily be admitted by all but the converts that such pioneers in the domain of the supernatural are exceptional or erratic individuals, specially gifted personalities, perhaps even affected with pathological idiosyncrasies or subject to præternatural influences…The resulting variant of the cult will then presently find a wider acceptance, in case the discipline exercised by current conditions is such as to bend the habits of thought of some appreciable number of persons with a bias that conforms to this novel drift of religious conceit. And if the new variant of the faith is fortunate enough to coincide passably with the current drift of workday habituation, the band of proselytes will presently multiply into such a formidable popular religious movement as will acquire general credibility and become an authentic formulation of the faith. Quid ab omnibus, quid unique creditur, credendum est. Many will so come into line with the new religious conceit who could not conceivably have spun the same yarn out of their own wool under any provocation; and the variant may then even come to supplant the parent type of the cult from which it sprang.129
Veblen would not conclude his report without a physiognomic sketch of this German aberrant type that periodically heralded such religious awakenings ‘from the deep.’
Temperamentally erratic individuals…, and such as are schooled by special class traditions or predisposed by special class interest, will readily see the merits of warlike enterprise and keep alive the tradition of national animosity. Patriotism, piracy, and prerogative converge to a common issue. Where it happens that an individual gifted with an extravagant congenital basis of this character is at the same time exposed to circumstances favorable to the development of truculent megalomania and is placed in such a position of irresponsible authority and authentic prerogative as will lend countenance to his idiosyncrasies, his bent may easily gather vogue, become fashionable, and with due persistence and shrewd management come so ubiquitously into habitual acceptance as in effect to throw the population at large into an enthusiastically bellicose frame of mind.130
The year was 1915. Veblen had dreamt of the Freikorps, Jünger, and beyond.
A convinced pacifist before 1914, he turned his coat to the disbelief of his colleagues and friends in 1917, when America entered the war. Shielding his approval of the US Administration’s military effort behind a wall of silence and impenetrable reserve,131 he advanced a proposal for securing lasting peace in the terminal chapters of his 1917 opus The Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation.
For Veblen, the Great War offered the opportunity to rid the West of its chief ill: the dynastic spirit, of which, he claimed, Germany was imbued to a pathological degree.
Veblen insisted that with Germany’s dynastic spirit, whose proneness to mischief was compounded by its extreme and unpredictable fanatical excrescences, no compromise was possible. It had to be extirpated, root and branch. The German people, he added, was no less susceptible to kindness than its European neighbors, but prolonged and unfortunate habituation to received schemes of feudalistic servility had molded its mind into a ferocious patriotic bent, which was ‘not of the essence of human life.’132 Germany, after the fire, would have to unlearn such archaic preconceptions. The remedy he envisaged for cementing a peaceful alliance of the West was what he termed ‘coalescence by neutralization.’ This meant forming a League of Nations, which would be led pedagogically by Britain and America – Veblen recognized these two countries for the time being as the pacific pillars of the world comity, despite the grave shortcomings of their inequitable monetary systems. Admitted within the League ‘on a footing of formal equality,’ Germany was to divest herself of her monarchy and shape her citizens into ‘ungraded and masterless men before the law.’133
Veblen admonished the Western statesmen, were they to win the war, not to impose on Germany a trade boycott – a traditional trigger of national jealousy: ‘the people underlying the defeated governments,’ he wrote, ‘are not to be dealt with as vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by their culpable masters.’134 There followed a list of categorical directives applicable in the eventuality of Germany’s defeat: (1) elimination of the imperial establishment, (2) removal of all warlike equipment, (3) cancellation of the German public debt, (4) assumption by the League of all debts incurred and equal distribution of the obligations assumed impartially among the members of the League, victors and vanquished alike, and (5) a single indemnification for all civilians in the invaded territories. He trusted that Britain, in whose hands the naval control would ‘best be left,’135 and America, ‘about whom the pacific nations are to cluster as some sort of queen-bee,’136 would implement them faultlessly. In 1917 Veblen appeared to confide in the good faith and missionary calling of the Sea Powers.
But the latter draft, in spite of the impeccable mechanics, was more the fruit of wish than of dispassionate reflection.
Veblen detested the Anglo-Saxon captains of finance and the inequality they congenitally thrived upon not much less than he despised the Junkers, the German absentees. And when the Russian Communists stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, his heart caught fire—he hurrahed the Bolshevik takeover of November 1917.
It thus seemed that in Lenin’s Russia, the aspirations of Veblen might have found their definitive countenance: a promised land without landlords and corporate officers, where machines would be allowed to whir at capacity under the expert watch of dis-articulated ‘Soviets of engineers.’137 Eden, perhaps. And though he was an assiduous traveler, he never visited the Soviet utopia, but rather contented himself with reading the extraordinary tales of early Red enthusiasts, who marveled over the thousand wonders of this mythical Eurasian realm of social emancipation.
‘Bolshevism,’ he wrote in 1919,
is revolutionary. It aims to carry democracy and majority rule over into the domain of industry. Therefore it is a menace to the established order. It is charged with being a menace to private property, to business, to industry, to state and church, to law and morals, to civilization, and to mankind at large.138
Enough, that was, to throw a heretic and master of iconoclasm of his caliber squarely into the Red camp. By the end of the war he had taken sides, he had chosen his colors.
And then in 1920 he was asked to review for the Political Science Quarterly what had already become the Liberals’ new bible: Keynes’ bestseller on the Peace Conference.
Hardly anyone noticed, but on this occasion, the captain sculpted Political Economy’s most beautiful piece.
Sparing formalities, Veblen moved to demolish Keynes’s tract in toto. The book’s ‘wide vogue,’ he wrote, was in fact the commercial echo of the
prevailing attitude of thoughtful men toward the same range of questions. It is the attitude of men accustomed to take political documents at face value…Keynes accepts the Treaty as…a conclusive settlement rather than a strategic point of departure for further negotiations and a continuation of warlike enterprise.139
It was rather unforgivable, Veblen suggested, for an expert ‘so advantageously placed’ as Keynes to fail so sonorously to discern the obvious nature of the pantomime orchestrated at Versailles. Behind a ‘screen of diplomatic verbiage,’ the Elder Statesmen were pursuing a precise design, whose main points Keynes, above all desirous like any other publicist of repute to reflect ‘the commonplace attitude of thoughtful citizens,’ successfully avoided.
The main argument, which Veblen was presently ready to unfold, was comprised of three propositions: (1) the thesis, (2) the prophecy, (3) the clue.
1. Veblen’s thesis. ‘The central and most binding provision of the Treaty is an unrecorded clause by which the governments of the Great Powers are banded together for the suppression of Soviet Russia…It may be said to have been the parchment upon which the Treaty was written.’140 Veblen presently broke his brief intellectual truce with the Western establishment and resumed his inveterate opposition to capitalist oligarchism, determined this last time to fight till the end. Still riding on the wave of his starry eyed tryst with Bolshevism, he reiterated that Communist Russia was a menace to absentee ownership, that is, a threat to a system predicated on the abolition of the disproportionate rents afforded by property and finance. Therefore, he continued, only the complete and swift annihilation of Bolshevism might be counted on to guarantee the peace of the business democracies of the West.
2. The prophecy. The pessimism, shock, and moral indignation at the Treaty’s provisions, which ever since Keynes are still a must for anyone eager to strike the ‘Liberal pose,’ footed up to much unwarranted affectation, said Veblen, for ‘the stipulations touching the German indemnity’ rather betrayed ‘a notable leniency, amounting to something like collusive remissness.’ In other words, all the reparations garble was truly ‘a diplomatic bluff, designed to gain time, divert attention, and keep the various claimants in a reasonably patient frame of mind during the period of rehabilitation to reinstate the reactionary regime in Germany and erect it as a bulwark against Bolshevism.’141 The contrivance thought out by the British delegates in Versailles not to fix the terms of the German tribute sought to flush a torrent of ‘bargaining, counter-chaffering and indefinite further adjustments,’ in the swirl of which ‘Germany must not be crippled in such a degree as would leave the imperial establishment materially weakened in its campaign against Bolshevism abroad and radicalism at home.’142 So the Treaty was in essence an articulate trap by which the German upper class – the custodians of Reaction – were to be left untouched, and thus uncured of the feudal disease, while the grief and resentment of the underclass – the proximate victims of the reparations’ bloodletting – was counted on to provide as much fodder for ‘radicalism’ as the sheltered Junkers required to re-establish a reactionary, anti-Bolshevik regime.
3. The Clue. What gave the Allied plot away? On the basis of his 1917 recommendations, Veblen observed that ‘The provisions of the Treaty shrewdly avoid any measures that would involve confiscation of property.’ ‘There is no reason, other than the reason of absentee ownership’, he continued,
why the Treaty should not have provided for a comprehensive repudiation of the German war debt, imperial, state, and municipal, with a view to diverting that much of German income to the benefit of those who suffered from German aggression. So also no other reason stood in the way of a comprehensive confiscation of German wealth, so far as that wealth is covered by securities and is therefore held by absentee owners, and there is no question as to the war guilt of these owners.143
The levers of command of a modern democracy are not operated from its ministries, but from its financial network. The financial strength of a capitalist regime is crushed the moment its portfolios of securities – bonds, stocks, debentures, and cash and all like titles of ownership – are passed into foreign hands. Such critical confiscation, which would have sapped the tenure of the German absentee owners, was never effected under the terms of the Treaty, and deliberately so. Thus the nature of Versailles’ diplomatic contrivances revealed that ‘the statesmen of the victorious Powers have taken sides with the war-guilty absentee owners of Germany against their underlying population.’144
From this it followed that all dispositions touching disarmament and indemnification were to be sabotaged behind a hustle and bustle of diplomatic trucking so prolonged and muddled as to disaffect the participation of the unknowing public. Hereafter it will be seen how Germany would begin to rearm in earnest with the secret cooperation of Russia as early as 1920, while, as a whole, her burden of reparations would have been, by 1932,‘very slight.’145 ‘Indeed,’ Veblen concluded, ‘the measures hitherto taken in the execution of this Peace Treaty’s provisional terms throw something of an air if fantasy over Mr. Keynes’s apprehensions on this head.’146
In sum, Veblen’s thesis was, of course, wrong: one thing of which the Liberal regimes of the West were never afraid was precisely Bolshevism, which they secretly nurtured since it took its baby steps in the spring of 1917. Veblen remained convinced to the last of Germany’s war-guilt, when in fact, as argued in the previous chapter, the Prussian Reich had been but the drunken victim of an extraordinary siege entirely orchestrated by England.
As to the clue, the fate of Germany’s financial wealth, whose complicated shuffle in the international system would indeed set off the disastrous hyperinflation of 1923, followed a path more tortuous than Veblen could have foreseen in 1920, though his inference was on the mark.
But as far as the conspiratorial dynamics of the Treaty was concerned, Veblen was clairvoyant; he had made three considerations: (1) Germany was spiritually prone to a cyclical recrudescence of eerie fanaticism; (2) the sham of the reparations was designed to cause distress only among ordinary Germans; (3) the German dynastic absentees, that is, the true rulers, had been spared by the Allies any sort of punitive sanction. Therefore Veblen could deduce that the Treaty concealed a complex manipulation of the German situation – a manipulation whereby a movement animated by ‘truculent megalomania’ could be expected (1) to exploit popular dissatisfaction by fomenting radicalism at home, and (2) eventually come to an understanding with the propertied and military elites under the sign of war. The attack would be suitably directed against the enemy of choice: Bolshevism. In brief, with the terminology of hindsight, Veblen’s review divined the advent of Nazism as the conjured champion of the disgraced German masses, and as Europe’s contrived anti-Communist bastion. Versailles was an indescribable fabrication.
Thus Veblen prophesied no less than: (1) the religious nature of Nazism (2) the reactionary coming of the Hitlerites, and (3) Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of Russia of June 22, 1941 (in his words: ‘suppression of Soviet Russia,’ ‘Germany…as a bulwark against Bolshevism’), more than 20 years prior to the events.
The Treaty was no lamentable fumble, or, say, ‘a disaster of the first rank,’147 as all Keynesian fans have always been itching to believe; it was not the accidental prelude to World War II, but rather its conscious blueprint.
Had Veblen not invited all those Bolshevik romances to cloud his gaze, this gentle Quixote of the deep north would have seen that Versailles was not aimed at Moscow, but at Germany herself; aimed, that is, at a colossal conflagration by which Germany, caught again between two fronts, could at long last be razed to the ground and sundered in two, right along the fault line – as she would be after World War II.
To be continued...next
The Meltdown and the
Geopolitical Correctness of Mein Kampf
Between the Kapp and the Beerhall Putsch, 1920–23
part 1
http://stillchillinonhistory.blogspot.com/2017/01/part-1-conjuring-hitlerhow-britain-and.htmlfootnotes Chapter 2
1. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959 [1588]), pp. 26–7.
2. Volker Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Press, 1994), p. 336. 3. Sebastian Haffner, The Failure of a Revolution. Germany, 1918–1919 (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986 [1969]), p. 16.
4. D. Authier and J. Barriot, La sinistra comunista in Germania (Milano: La Salamandra, 1981 [1976]), p. 40.
5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, 1979 [1899]), p. 198.
6. Ibid, p. 204.
7. Thorstein Veblen, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (The Modern Point of View and the New Order) (New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1919), p. 165.
8. Thorstein Veblen, ‘The Economics of Karl Marx II,’ in Thorstein Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (New York: Capricorn Books, 1969 [1907]), pp. 453–4.
9. Haffner, Failure, p. 16.
10. Ibid., p. 28.
11. Ibid., p. 57.
12. Bernhard von Bülow, ‘Revolution in Berlin,’ in A. Kaes, M. Jay and E. Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 56–7.
13. Morgan Philips Price, Dispatches from the Weimar Republic. Versailles and German Fascism (London: Pluto Press, 1999 [1919–29]), p. 23.
14. Ernst Toller, I was a German. The Autobiography of Ernst Toller (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1934), pp. 141–2.
15. Klaus Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1959), pp. 274–82.
16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1971 [1925]), pp. 204–6.
17. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), p. 155.
18. Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1992 [98 AD]), p. 152.
19. Kennan, Russia, p. 158.
20. Ernst Jünger, ‘Fire’ (1922), in Kaes et al., Weimar Sourcebook, p. 19.
21. Ernst Von Salomon, I proscritti (Die Geächteten) (Parma: Edizioni all’insegna del veltro, 1979 [1930]), p. 49.
22. Ibid., pp. 36–40, 86.
23. Haffner, Failure, p. 161.
24. Freya Eisner, Kurt Eisner: die Politik des libertären Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979), p. 110.
25. I. Benoist-Méchin, Histoire de l’armée allemande (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1966), Vol. 1, p. 270. Preparata 03 chap06 272 10/3/05 12:01:17 pm Notes 273
26. Rudolf Von Sebottendorff, Prima che Hitler venisse. Storia della Società Thule (Bevor Hitler kam) (Torino: Edizioni Delta-Arktos, 1987 [1933]), pp. 73–143.
27. Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community. The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 331. Gustav Landauer introduced his reforms as Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction. Silvio Gesell, a former businessman turned anarchist guru and monetary reformer, was appointed to Munich’s Soviet as Finance Minister to launch his radical proposal for stamped scrip (paper certifi cates with a maturity date) (Silvio Gesell, The Natural Economic Order (San Antonio: Free-Economy Publishing Co., 1920), pp. 130ff.).
28. Kennan, Russia, p. 160.
29. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Penguin Books, 1986 [1855]), p. 42.
30. Von Sebottendorff, Hitler, pp. 121ff.
31. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 120.
32. Douglas Reed, Nemesi? La storia di Otto Strasser (Roma: Edizioni delle catacombe, 1944), p. 55.
33. Kershaw, Hubris, p. 126.
34. Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York: Vintage Books, 1975 [1973]), p. 118.
35. Kershaw, Hubris, p. 140.
36. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 2, pp. 225–6.
37. Gustav Meyrink, The Golem (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus, 1995 [1915]), p. 59.
38. Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Reich. The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974 [1971]), p. 165.
39. Fest, Hitler, p. 116, and René Alleau, Hitler et les sociétés secrètes. Enquête sur les sources occultes du nazisme (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1969), p. 139.
40. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. Secret Aryan Cults and Their Infl uence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1985), p. 151.
41. Werner Gerson, Le Nazisme société secrète (Paris: J’ai lu, 1969), pp. 176–7.
42. Ernst Jünger, Das abenteurliche Herz. Figuren und Capriccios (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlaganstalt, 1938), pp. 75–6.
43. Kershaw, Hubris, p. 155.
44. Jünger, Herz, p. 66.
45. Dietrich Eckart, ‘Jewishness In and Around Us: Fundamental Refl ections,’ in B. Miller Lane and L. Rupp (eds), Nazi Ideology Before 1933. A Documentation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978 [1919]), pp. 23–5.
46. Von Sebottendorff, Hitler, p. 55.
47. Ibid., p. 208.
48. Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots, p. 152.
49. Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1947 [1939]), p. 28.
50. N. Gordon-Levin Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics. America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 91–5.
51. Ibid., p. 219.
52. Angiolo Forzoni, Rublo. Storia civile e monetaria delle Russia da Ivan a Stalin (Roma: Valerio Levi Editore, 1991), p. 342.
53. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 235.
54. Gordon-Levin, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 78–80.
55. Peter Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), p. 49.
56. Ibid., p. 51.
57. George Stewart, The White Armies of Russia: A Chronicle of Counter-Revolution and Allied Intervention (New York: Macmillan Company, 1933), pp. 83–91. Preparata 03 chap06 273 10/3/05 12:01:18 pm 274 Conjuring Hitler
58. Pipes, Concise History, p. 92.
59. Stewart, White Armies, pp. 137–8.
60. Kennan, Russia, p. 108.
61. Stewart, White Armies, pp. 135–6.
62. In Siberia, Britain, France and Italy fi elded 1,400, 1,400, and 1,200 men respectively (ibid., p. 226).
63. Jonathan Smele, Civil War in Siberia. The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 72, 97–9, 418.
64. Stewart, White Armies, p. 153.
65. Richard Luckett, The White Generals. An Account of the White Movement in Russia and the Russian Civil War (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 231.
66. Pipes, Concise History, p. 235.
67. ‘There must be no attempt to conquer Bolshevik Russia by force of arms…The anti-Bolshevik armies must not be used to restore the old tsarist regime…[and] reimpos[e] on the peasants the old feudal conditions [!] under which they held their land…’ (Lloyd George, quoted in ibid., p. 250).
68. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 261.
69. The high tide of the White movement against the Soviets was reached in September 1919.
70. Stewart, White Armies, p. 166.
71. Pipes, Concise History, p. 252.
72. Léon Degrelle, Hitler: Born at Versailles (Costa Mesa; Institute for Historical Review, 1987), p. 430.
73. Stewart, White Armies, p. 173.
74. Luckett, White Generals, p. 257.
75. Stewart, White Armies, p. 162.
76. Gordon-Levin, Woodrow Wilson, p. 224.
77. Geminello Alvi, Dell’estremo occidente. Il secolo americano in Europa. Storie economiche (Firenze: Marco Nardi Editore, 1993), p. 158.
78. Smele, Civil War, pp. 419–20.
79. Luckett, White Generals, p. 226.
80. Stewart, White Armies, p. 296.
81. Ibid., p. 286.
82. Ibid., p. 314.
83. Smele, Civil War, p. 201.
84. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 337.
85. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919. Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 222.
86. Stewart, White Armies, p. 243.
87. Forzoni, Rublo, p. 342.
88. Fleming, Kolchak, p. 71.
89. As such did Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s lieutenant, and later Egyptian President, refer to the USSR, whenever the alleged hostility of Russia was factored into any form of geopolitical analysis (John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars. Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 33).
90. Gordon-Levin, Woodrow Wilson, p. 231.
91. Ibid., p. 230.
92. Pipes, Concise History, p. 250.
93. Ibid., p. 270.
94. Ibid., p. 250.
95. R. H. Bruce Lockart, British Agent (London: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1933), p. 222. Preparata 03 chap06 274 10/3/05 12:01:18 pm Notes 275
96. Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1981), p. 158.
97. Edward Jay Epstein, Dossier: The Secret Story of Armand Hammer (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 45–85.
98. Giovanni Preziosi, Giudaismo, bolscevismo, plutocrazia e massoneria (Torino: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1941), p. 127.
99. Kennan, Russia, p. 113.
100. Ibid., pp. 117–18.
101. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Penguin Books, 1995 [1920]), p. 153.
102. Ibid., p. 165.
103. Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 181.
104. Ibid., p. 192.
105. Charles L. Mee Jr., The End of Order, Versailles 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), pp. 209–210.
106. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 272.
107. Ibid.
108. Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 466.
109. Ibid., p. 472.
110. Epstein, Erzberger, p. 323.
111. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 277.
112. Bernhard von Bülow, Le memorie del Principe di Bülow, Volume III, 1901–1920 (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1931), p. 322.
113. One million Germans were allotted to Poland, 3 million to Czechoslovakia, half a million to Hungary and Yugoslavia, and 700,000 to Romania (Quigley, Tragedy, p. 280).
114. Hans Mommsen, The Rise & Fall of the Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 110.
115. Mee, End of Order, p. 222.
116. Keynes, Economic Consequences, p. 146.
117. Erich Eyck, Storia della repubblica di Weimar, 1918–1933 (Geschichte der weimarer Republik) (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1966 [1956]), p. 131.
118. Keynes, Economic Consequences, p. 200.
119. Mee, End of Order, p. 256.
120. Keynes, Economic Consequences, pp. 289–90, 294.
121. Ibid., pp. 296–7.
122. Alvi, Occidente, p. 141.
123. Keynes, Economic Consequences, pp. 269.
124. Graham Hutton, Is it Peace? (New York: Macmillan Company, 1937), pp. 73–4.
125. Hamilton Armstrong, Peace and Counterpeace. From Wilson to Hitler (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), p. 98.
126. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan & Co., 1915), p. 69.
127. E. W. Jorgensen and H. I. Jorgensen, Thorstein Veblen. Victorian Firebrand (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 149.
128. Thorstein Veblen, The Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1998 [1917]) p. 277.
129. Veblen, Imperial Germany, pp. 54–5.
130. Ibid., p. 58, emphasis added.
131. Jorgensen and Jorgensen, Thorstein Veblen, p. 150.
132. Veblen, Nature of Peace, p. 142.
133. Ibid., p. 150.
134. Ibid., p. 270.
135. Ibid., p. 280 Preparata 03 chap06 275 10/3/05 12:01:18 pm 276 Conjuring Hitler
136. Ibid., p. 295.
137. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963 [1921]).
138. Thorstein Veblen, ‘Bolshevism is a Menace – to Whom?’ (1919), in Thorstein Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), p. 400.
139. Thorstein Veblen, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ (1920), in Veblen, Essays, pp. 462–3; emphasis added.
140. Ibid., p. 466.
141. Ibid., p. 468; emphasis added.
142. Ibid., p. 469; emphasis added.
143. Ibid.
144. Ibid., p. 470.
145. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 312.
146. Veblen, ‘Economic Consequences,’ p. 470.
147. Gerald Feldman, The Great Disorder. Politics, Economics and Society in the German Infl ation, 1914–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 148.
* The chairman of the National City Bank in New York.
Finally, in 1933, the Soviet government, upon perusal of ‘official American documentation,’ would waive ‘any and all claims…for the damages allegedly caused by the United States in the Soviet Union through its participation in the [Siberian] intervention’:99 for nebulous reasons, it would take the Reds 13 years to acknowledge officially that General Graves had come to Siberia to help, not to thwart them.
Never, surely, have countries continued to show themselves so much at their worst as did the Allies in Russia from 1917 to 1920. Among other things, their efforts served everywhere to compromise the enemies of Bolshevism and to strengthen the Communist themselves. So important was this factor that I think it may well be questioned whether Bolshevism would ever have prevailed throughout Russia had the Western governments not aided its progress to power by this ill conceived interference…These expeditions were little side-shows of policy, complicated and obscure in origin…embracing in their motivation many considerations having nothing to do with a desire to overthrow Soviet power for ideological reasons.100
American historian and diplomat George F. Kennan had, like many of his compatriots, been somewhat at a loss to plumb what had been a contrived method of solving the first equation of Eurasia’s system: that is, by raising a phantom regime in Russia hostile to Germany. Contemporaries had failed to appreciate that the White elephants were naturally foredoomed – the breaking of the Eurasian embrace demanded it, and all such Allied ‘sideshows’ were but sequences of premeditated butchery. Feigning a cautious policy of intervention, the governments of Britain, France and the United States misled their public into believing that they indeed requited the hatred of the Communists by ‘siding’ with their enemies’ enemies (the Whites), when in fact they had been double-crossing these Whites all along. Hence the reproach that the Allies had shown themselves ‘at their worst,’ translated by and large into an ungracious refusal to tribute the due credit to what amounted to a perfectly executed maneuver, costing a collateral loss of but 500 lives, to rid the landmass of the bulk of the Junkers’ potential Russian allies beyond the Eurasian fault line. Save for the distasteful bickering of Russia’s fratricidal war, whose loss of life amounted to around 10 million souls, the operation had been a complete success – this was rather the Allied West ‘at its best.’
The peace treaty that was too harsh
Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, issued during the terminal phase of
the war, in January 1918, as the tentative charter of the world’s post-war
community, had merely contemplated the ‘restoration’ of invaded territories,
and assured the fighting parties that there would be ‘no annexations, no
contributions, no punitive damages.’ On November 5, the American position was further clarified by the note of the US Secretary of State, Lansing, to Germany, according to which the latter would ‘make compensation for all damage done to the civilian population of the Allied…Powers and to their property…by such an aggression by land, by sea, and from the air.’101 Upon these premises the Germans signed the Armistice.
Meanwhile, on February 6, 1919, the National Assembly convened in Weimar, away from the provisional disorders of Berlin, and five days later republican Germany was given her first president: the Socialist Friedrich Ebert.
Soon it was the ‘reparations’ that they all began to argue about. If by ‘damage’ only wreckage of property had been intended, France, upon whose soil the devastation had been wrought, would have claimed the bulk of the indemnities. To tilt the scales somewhat more in Britain’s favor, Jan Smuts, an affiliate of Milner’s Kindergarten* as well as South Africa’s negotiator in Paris, found a loophole in the Lansing Note: citing the wording of the clause, according to which Germany ‘was liable for all damage done to civilians,’ he cunningly bent Wilson into including in the reparation bill allowances for soldiers’ families, as well as pensions for widows and orphans.
Economist John Maynard Keynes, representing the British Treasury at Versailles, reckoned that not only did such allowances violate Wilson’s negotiatory Points, but they also amounted to a figure two and half times the total bill for the war damages inflicted on the Western Front. Adding to a preliminary remittance in cash of $5 million, expected by May 1921, the allowances (25 billion dollars), and the compensation for war ravages (10 billion dollars), Keynes assessed the reparation load at 40 million dollars: a figure equal to three times the Reich’s pre-war income,which,he affirmed, was beyond the paying capacity of vanquished Germany.102 He was indignant – the envisaged sums appeared patently absurd.
But the victorious public was fed expectations of another species: the British adumbrated a request of $120 billion; the French a fantastic toll of $220 billion.103 With such a heated audience thirsting for extravagantly vindictive tributes, Lloyd George and the French Prime Minister, Clémenceau, Britain’s and France’s chief negotiators, could scarcely afford to parade on the home front a loot of ‘merely’ $40 million without risking a political lynching. Then Lloyd George chanced upon the clever device of leaving the final figure unnamed, deputizing the task to a commission of experts, which was scheduled to deliver an estimate in two years – by May 1921. The explosive mixture was skillfully inoculated in the text of the Treaty by John Foster Dulles – a New York lawyer connected in high places – in the form of the infamous Article 231, which had gone down in history as the ‘war guilt clause’ (Kriegsschuldfrage). By this Article Germany was coerced to accept the responsibility, and thus sign a ‘blank check,’ ‘for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied…and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany.’
The apportionment of the prospective German spoils was thus tentatively arranged by the victors: 50 per cent to France, 30 percent to Britain and the remaining 20 percent divided up among the lesser allies.104
Having served its purpose, the decoy of the Fourteen Points was torn up and tossed in the trashcan. Its mouthpiece, Wilson, like a dollar watch wound too tight and then discarded, ticked into malfunction and finally broke down: in Paris the President fell seriously ill. He had sworn for no annexations, yet he acquiesced in Allied occupation; he had promised no indemnities, but he agreed to unilateral reparations. He had vowed to uproot ‘secret diplomacy’ and watched his allies make it the very clay wherewith the Treaty was being fashioned: when the German delegation arrived in Paris in late April to receive the contents of the Treaty on May 7, 1919, Lloyd George stuttered as he read a document that neither he nor any other Allied plenipotentiary had seen in its completed form.105 They had all haggled furiously, but the hand that had drafted the achieved compact had remained hidden.
When the Germans were apprised of the Treaty’s nature, they sat back dumbstruck. Then, recomposing themselves somewhat, they invited their leader, Foreign Minister Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau – the very man whom Parvus Helphand had gulled in 1917 – to deliver the legation's remonstrance: in a long speech, Brockdorff lamented the violation of the ‘pre-armistice commitments. As a deliberate insult to his listeners, he spoke from a seated position.’106
In Berlin, the Reichstag (the parliament) excoriated the Treaty with an uproar of abuse. At Versailles the German legation counter-proposed: in a masterful 443-page response redacted in keeping with the original Wilsonian pact, the Treaty’s Articles were rebuffed one by one: Germany offered $25 billion dollars, and ‘most territorial changes were rejected except where they could be shown to be based on self-determination (thus adopting Wilson’s point of view)’.107 Even the doyen of sociology, Max Weber, was dragged by Germany into the foray to protest, as Lenin had done years previously, that the war had been every power’s sin.108
But the Allies were irremovable: Germany, the sole culprit of the war’s atrocities, was given a five-day ultimatum to accept the Treaty on pain of military invasion. Not to affix its signature to such a Schandfrieden (shameful peace), Weimar’s first government under the Socialist Scheidemann resigned in concert after only four months. In a desperate act of wounded patriotism, on June 21 the crews of the German fleet impounded at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles scuttled 400,000 tons of expensive shipping, and lost ten sailors to British gunfire in the undertaking.109 In Berlin it was Matthias Erzberger, once again, who bent over to take the brunt of unpopular decisions: in November he had signed the humiliating armistice, now, as Finance Minister of the new Cabinet, he took it upon himself to inflict upon this whole affair the last turn of the screw. He challenged the parliament’s die hard opponents of ratification to lead, as men of their word, a government that would face renewed hostilities. While these immediately recoiled from the prospective engagement, General Groener assured Reich President Ebert that he would placate the (infuriated) army. By a parliamentary maneuver designed to save the honor of the ‘patriots’ as well as to enable the pragmatists to ratify it, the Treaty was accepted on June 23, and Germany was spared Allied occupation.110
As to the territorial alterations, the Treaty carried two significant dispositions. The first was the Polish Corridor: France had wanted to give east Prussia to Poland, but the drafters of the Treaty conceived a far more sophisticated arrangement whereby east Prussia was to be traversed by a corridor connecting Poland to the North Sea by way of the free city of Danzig, a full-fledged German enclave to be placed under international tutelage. This corridor thus severed a sizable block of eastern Germany from the body of the Fatherland. As a contraption for sparking eventual ethnic, territorial, and political incendiary dispute, it was bound to be efficacious: in fact, it was the trigger set up for the next war.
The second territorial provision was the Rhineland settlement: the Rhineland and a zone 50 kilometers wide along the right bank were to be permanently demilitarized and any violation of the clause could be regarded as a hostile act by the signatories of the Treaty. The condition implied that any German troops or fortifications were excluded from this area forever. ‘This was the most important disposition of the Treaty of Versailles, as it exposed the economic backbone of Germany’s ability to wage warfare to a quick French military thrust.’111 French troops were granted the right to occupy such a zone for 15 years.
Bearing down ‘like two jailers’ upon the flanks of ‘the chained giant,’112 Versailles’ novel creations, Poland and Czechoslovakia, kept a careful watch over Germany, who thus found herself stripped of her armed forces, which were reduced to a professional contingent of 100,000 men. The country was deprived of many of her mines; reduced in population by 6.5 million citizens (10 percent of the total)113 and 2.4 million souls lost at war; bereft of her merchant navy, her colonies, and 13 percent of her territory; depleted of 75 percent of her iron ore reserves, 26 percent of her coal production, as well as 44 percent and 38 percent of her pig iron and steel production respectively;114 and ‘obliged to devote part of [her] industrial might to building ships for the Allies and to provide coal to France.’115
By the time the Germans assented to ratify the Treaty, Keynes had already abandoned the Conference in high dudgeon, chagrined by the pensions clause – ‘one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom,’ he wailed, ‘for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.’116 A clause whose provenance, however, he could not afford to divulge because it was the ruse of his good friend Smuts.117
When the final bill was issued in May 1921, Germany would be asked to pay, in 37 yearly installments, $34 billion: two and half times her 1913 annual income and ten times the tribute she had imposed upon France in 1871. Keynes had decried the pretension that such a sum could have been remitted through trade surpluses by a much weakened Reich in a competitive environment. After much diligent accounting of Germany’s assets, he had suggested a reparation tribute of $10 billion dollars (that is, 75 percent of Germany’s 1913 net product), to be amortized over several decades.118
With the blockade the Allies had already murdered 800,000 Germans and 1 million of their productive animals; blackmailing Weimar to kill more,Britain had her way, and brought Germany to sign the humiliating compact. On June 28, 1919, exactly five years after Gavrilo Princip’s assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, as Dr. Johannes Bell, Minister of Transportation in Weimar’s second Cabinet, accompanied to Versailles by Foreign Minister Müller, stooped to sign the Treaty, the pen’s ink, like the blood in Faustus’s arm, congealed: the pen would not work. Edward House, America’s secretive negotiator, who stood by, leaned forward to offer his.119
Only then was the blockade lifted; only then did the Allies allow ships carrying food to dock at German ports.
Though his virtuosity and ‘good heart’ might have all been expended for naught, Keynes was yet determined not to begrudge his bourgeois aficionados another ‘classic’ inspired by the recent Parisian events, which he drafted hastily in the winter of 1919; he entitled it The Economic Consequences of the Peace. The book, which sold 100,000 copies instantly, and was translated into eleven languages, featured an unrelenting and self-satisfied indulgence in technical detail, mingled with occasional psycho-logistic portraiture, which alternatively dwelt on the buckle of Clémenceau’s shoe, Wilson’s neck muscles, and Lloyd George’s goat-footed purposelessness. The Treaty, Keynes sentenced, was harsh and unjust, and it would fuel terrible resentment.
The book was the sort of Christmas buy that the educated middle classes could never forbear in their periodical and conscientious drive to keep abreast of international affairs. And it was the kind of book, too, that whispered the things these educated and yet perennially baffled readers wished to hear: little tales about the regrettable myopia, benighted judgment and malicious blunders of senescent fighters called upon tasks greater than they; little tales whose moral is that bad deeds always happen by pernicious mistake. Needless to say, Keynes’s opus, like all expressions of so-called ‘enlightened conservatism,’ did not challenge the current state of affairs: the best solution, he concluded, was to stand behind the Weimar Republic, which was after all the creature of Versailles. He invited the various parties to moderation. So he played it safe and took the ‘the middle road,’ enumerating in his valediction the alternatives to Versailles, which were made to appear invariably worse than the status quo. Interestingly, this ‘appeasing’ excerpt foreshadowed the taste of the game that Britain would play in the 1930's versus the rest of the international community to push Hitler to war. A game featuring Soviet Russia as the proverbial ‘subversive enemy in the East,’ against whom Britain would pit a Germany dumbfounded, and perennially jostled by her fear of Communist Russia, on one hand, and her no less intense contempt for the European neighbors, on the other.
The present Government of Germany stands for German unity more perhaps than for anything else…A victory of [Communism] in Germany might well be the prelude to revolution everywhere; it…would precipitate the dreaded union of Germany and Russia; it would certainly put an end to any expectation which have been built on the financial and economic clauses of the Treaty of Peace…But, on the other hand, a victory of reaction in Germany…from the ashes of cosmopolitan militarism… would be regarded by everyone as a threat to the security of Europe, and as endangering the fruits of victory on the basis of the Peace…Let us encourage and assist Germany to take up again her place in Europe as a creator and organizer of wealth…120
Overall the Germans relished the book.
The seemingly honest and straightforward self-denunciation coming from a prestigious exponent of the British camp could not fail to soothe somewhat Germany’s wounded honor, and much hope was thus staked on the book’s cheering exhortation to set in motion ‘those forces of imagination’ necessary to overcome this ‘dead season of [the West’s] fortunes.’121
‘Dead season’, indeed, which did not, however, prevent Keynes from engaging immediately thereafter in happy-go-lucky speculation against the Reichsmark of poor, ‘ruined’ Germany: he sold it short, while buying dollars, making a killing. But in May 1920 the fall of the German currency momentarily halted: Keynes went under by £13,000. The book’s royalties and a further advance from Macmillan, the publisher, of £1500 were not sufficient to plug the gamble loss: pawning his good name, Keynes was afforded a credit reprieve by his bank’s director, who knew him as a famous man.122
The ball was now in the court of the United States, which was entitled vis-à-vis the Allies to approximately $10 billion worth of credits, over 40 percent of which from the British. Britain was a net war creditor as well, but the bulk of her loans to France, Russia, and Italy (roughly 90 percent) was of poor quality; understandably, Keynes had suggested as the chief remedy to the financial deadlock of the Peace Conference the cancellation of Allied inter-indebtedness.123 But America, still holding on to her legitimate claims, withdrew from the European swamp. With two successive votes (November 1919 and March 1920) the American Senate, in a sudden plot led by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, defeated the Treaty, and left it to France and Britain to deal directly with their German neighbor. The United States would seal a separate peace with Germany in Berlin, on August 25, 1921, whereby the reparation dues indirectly owed to the United States were safeguarded.
By killing the Treaty, America not only yielded purposely to Britain and France the delicate management of the reparations, of which she ultimately held the strings, she also voided, no less designedly, a triangle of military assistance, contracted separately in 1919, between America, Britain, and France, aimed at protecting the latter ‘in the event of any unprovoked aggression by Germany.’124
Wilson, the rusted air pipe of much empty promise who had sworn to keep America out of the war in 1916, succumbed to thrombosis in a campaigning tour de force across the American heartland from Kansas City to Tacoma, which he had undertaken in early 1920 as a last measure to garner votes in favor of active American participation in the post-war administration of Europe. He was voted out of office in 1921. In Omaha Wilson, like many other ‘moderates,’ saw in the Parisian Treaty the seed of ‘another and far more disastrous war.’125
But his Fourteen Points had baited the Germans into surrender – it had not all been in vain.
Dreaming of Hitler
and deciphering Versailles
Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929), more than a social scientist (the West’s
greatest), was a sea captain. Shortly before the new century, he embarked on an evolutionary expedition to scrutinize human anthills with the cool meticulousness of an entomologist. But humans being in some critical respects different from insects, he soon ran into methodological difficulties: how was he to account for society’s several forms of aggregate motion? Like various arthropods, men might practice deception, wage war, toil for the sustentation of the ‘home,’ and minister to an awesome ‘queen’ – thus far the zoological similitude might impose itself with cogency. But there were things that men did which the ants did not: for instance, they prayed and they dissipated. Why?
Veblen recognized that there was an entire range of human activities that were afforded no representation in the animal kingdom, which was broadly delimited by survival, cunning, and organization. And these activities were too singular and too strikingly human not to be accounted for in some form. What of, say, witch hunts, religious worship, mass sacrifice, or imperial pageantry? Who thought them first, and why? The origin of all such collective rites, Veblen reasoned, had to be lurking in a remoter lagoon he was yet to find. And while in the solitude of the cabin he engraved with neat calligraphy his travelogue in violet ink, his drifting ship kept gliding along. Until the bowsprit struck upon something. He had reached the reefs of ‘occult agencies’. He never would or could steer his vessel through such a cruising ground, but he circumnavigated it, closely, and almost obsessively, alone, for over two decades – too frightened to penetrate it, too enthralled to lose sight of it.
There is no call to undervalue occult agencies [such as manifest destiny, national genius, or Providential guidance]…but granting that these and their like are the hidden springs, it is also to be called to mind that it is their nature to remain hidden, and that the tangible agencies through which these presumed hidden prime movers work must therefore be sufficient for the work without recourse to the hidden springs; which can have an effect only by force of a magical efficacy.126
In 1915, Veblen returned from a long, virtual exploration of the German anthill. The famed culture of the Fatherland, whose language he read with facility, was far from foreign to him. Though a hyphenate creature of three worlds – the heart in Norway, the mind in America and the spirit at sea – by style, school, method, and erudition, Veblen was a ‘German’ institutional scholar himself.
But the re-emergence in the late Wilhelmine empire of the ‘feudalistic ideal,’ the ‘overbearing magniloquence,’ and the ‘predaceous rule of the Teutonic invaders,’ gripped him with a discomfort so acute that by the end of the investigation it had matured into full-blown revulsion.127 As emphasized earlier, Veblen believed that the commonwealths of the West should have had much to fear from Germany’s peculiar blend of ‘warlike swagger’ and technological sophistication.128 But beyond this central political preoccupation, Veblen had discovered in the folds of German society, underneath the thin cloak of Prussianism, the presence of a deeper spring of collective motion. Something whose alien drift, under particular circumstances and through the agency of ‘gifted personalities,’ might have carried sufficient force to envelop the whole of Germany’s social aggregate and transform it into an entity altogether diverse. Possibly inspired by recollections of Anabaptist furor, the captain gave the following description of the singular categories of ‘gifted’ types and of their potential doings under the influence of this hidden source:
In the successful departures in the domain of faith…it will be seen that any such novel or aberrant scheme of habits of thought touching the supernatural uniformly takes its rise as an affection of a certain small number of individuals, who, it may be presumed, have been thrown into a frame of mind propitious to this new fashion of thinking by some line of discipline, physical and spiritual, or rather both, that is not congruous with the previously accepted views on these matters. It will ordinarily be admitted by all but the converts that such pioneers in the domain of the supernatural are exceptional or erratic individuals, specially gifted personalities, perhaps even affected with pathological idiosyncrasies or subject to præternatural influences…The resulting variant of the cult will then presently find a wider acceptance, in case the discipline exercised by current conditions is such as to bend the habits of thought of some appreciable number of persons with a bias that conforms to this novel drift of religious conceit. And if the new variant of the faith is fortunate enough to coincide passably with the current drift of workday habituation, the band of proselytes will presently multiply into such a formidable popular religious movement as will acquire general credibility and become an authentic formulation of the faith. Quid ab omnibus, quid unique creditur, credendum est. Many will so come into line with the new religious conceit who could not conceivably have spun the same yarn out of their own wool under any provocation; and the variant may then even come to supplant the parent type of the cult from which it sprang.129
Veblen would not conclude his report without a physiognomic sketch of this German aberrant type that periodically heralded such religious awakenings ‘from the deep.’
Temperamentally erratic individuals…, and such as are schooled by special class traditions or predisposed by special class interest, will readily see the merits of warlike enterprise and keep alive the tradition of national animosity. Patriotism, piracy, and prerogative converge to a common issue. Where it happens that an individual gifted with an extravagant congenital basis of this character is at the same time exposed to circumstances favorable to the development of truculent megalomania and is placed in such a position of irresponsible authority and authentic prerogative as will lend countenance to his idiosyncrasies, his bent may easily gather vogue, become fashionable, and with due persistence and shrewd management come so ubiquitously into habitual acceptance as in effect to throw the population at large into an enthusiastically bellicose frame of mind.130
The year was 1915. Veblen had dreamt of the Freikorps, Jünger, and beyond.
A convinced pacifist before 1914, he turned his coat to the disbelief of his colleagues and friends in 1917, when America entered the war. Shielding his approval of the US Administration’s military effort behind a wall of silence and impenetrable reserve,131 he advanced a proposal for securing lasting peace in the terminal chapters of his 1917 opus The Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation.
For Veblen, the Great War offered the opportunity to rid the West of its chief ill: the dynastic spirit, of which, he claimed, Germany was imbued to a pathological degree.
Veblen insisted that with Germany’s dynastic spirit, whose proneness to mischief was compounded by its extreme and unpredictable fanatical excrescences, no compromise was possible. It had to be extirpated, root and branch. The German people, he added, was no less susceptible to kindness than its European neighbors, but prolonged and unfortunate habituation to received schemes of feudalistic servility had molded its mind into a ferocious patriotic bent, which was ‘not of the essence of human life.’132 Germany, after the fire, would have to unlearn such archaic preconceptions. The remedy he envisaged for cementing a peaceful alliance of the West was what he termed ‘coalescence by neutralization.’ This meant forming a League of Nations, which would be led pedagogically by Britain and America – Veblen recognized these two countries for the time being as the pacific pillars of the world comity, despite the grave shortcomings of their inequitable monetary systems. Admitted within the League ‘on a footing of formal equality,’ Germany was to divest herself of her monarchy and shape her citizens into ‘ungraded and masterless men before the law.’133
Veblen admonished the Western statesmen, were they to win the war, not to impose on Germany a trade boycott – a traditional trigger of national jealousy: ‘the people underlying the defeated governments,’ he wrote, ‘are not to be dealt with as vanquished enemies but as fellows in undeserved misfortune brought on by their culpable masters.’134 There followed a list of categorical directives applicable in the eventuality of Germany’s defeat: (1) elimination of the imperial establishment, (2) removal of all warlike equipment, (3) cancellation of the German public debt, (4) assumption by the League of all debts incurred and equal distribution of the obligations assumed impartially among the members of the League, victors and vanquished alike, and (5) a single indemnification for all civilians in the invaded territories. He trusted that Britain, in whose hands the naval control would ‘best be left,’135 and America, ‘about whom the pacific nations are to cluster as some sort of queen-bee,’136 would implement them faultlessly. In 1917 Veblen appeared to confide in the good faith and missionary calling of the Sea Powers.
But the latter draft, in spite of the impeccable mechanics, was more the fruit of wish than of dispassionate reflection.
Veblen detested the Anglo-Saxon captains of finance and the inequality they congenitally thrived upon not much less than he despised the Junkers, the German absentees. And when the Russian Communists stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, his heart caught fire—he hurrahed the Bolshevik takeover of November 1917.
It thus seemed that in Lenin’s Russia, the aspirations of Veblen might have found their definitive countenance: a promised land without landlords and corporate officers, where machines would be allowed to whir at capacity under the expert watch of dis-articulated ‘Soviets of engineers.’137 Eden, perhaps. And though he was an assiduous traveler, he never visited the Soviet utopia, but rather contented himself with reading the extraordinary tales of early Red enthusiasts, who marveled over the thousand wonders of this mythical Eurasian realm of social emancipation.
‘Bolshevism,’ he wrote in 1919,
is revolutionary. It aims to carry democracy and majority rule over into the domain of industry. Therefore it is a menace to the established order. It is charged with being a menace to private property, to business, to industry, to state and church, to law and morals, to civilization, and to mankind at large.138
Enough, that was, to throw a heretic and master of iconoclasm of his caliber squarely into the Red camp. By the end of the war he had taken sides, he had chosen his colors.
And then in 1920 he was asked to review for the Political Science Quarterly what had already become the Liberals’ new bible: Keynes’ bestseller on the Peace Conference.
Hardly anyone noticed, but on this occasion, the captain sculpted Political Economy’s most beautiful piece.
Sparing formalities, Veblen moved to demolish Keynes’s tract in toto. The book’s ‘wide vogue,’ he wrote, was in fact the commercial echo of the
prevailing attitude of thoughtful men toward the same range of questions. It is the attitude of men accustomed to take political documents at face value…Keynes accepts the Treaty as…a conclusive settlement rather than a strategic point of departure for further negotiations and a continuation of warlike enterprise.139
It was rather unforgivable, Veblen suggested, for an expert ‘so advantageously placed’ as Keynes to fail so sonorously to discern the obvious nature of the pantomime orchestrated at Versailles. Behind a ‘screen of diplomatic verbiage,’ the Elder Statesmen were pursuing a precise design, whose main points Keynes, above all desirous like any other publicist of repute to reflect ‘the commonplace attitude of thoughtful citizens,’ successfully avoided.
The main argument, which Veblen was presently ready to unfold, was comprised of three propositions: (1) the thesis, (2) the prophecy, (3) the clue.
1. Veblen’s thesis. ‘The central and most binding provision of the Treaty is an unrecorded clause by which the governments of the Great Powers are banded together for the suppression of Soviet Russia…It may be said to have been the parchment upon which the Treaty was written.’140 Veblen presently broke his brief intellectual truce with the Western establishment and resumed his inveterate opposition to capitalist oligarchism, determined this last time to fight till the end. Still riding on the wave of his starry eyed tryst with Bolshevism, he reiterated that Communist Russia was a menace to absentee ownership, that is, a threat to a system predicated on the abolition of the disproportionate rents afforded by property and finance. Therefore, he continued, only the complete and swift annihilation of Bolshevism might be counted on to guarantee the peace of the business democracies of the West.
2. The prophecy. The pessimism, shock, and moral indignation at the Treaty’s provisions, which ever since Keynes are still a must for anyone eager to strike the ‘Liberal pose,’ footed up to much unwarranted affectation, said Veblen, for ‘the stipulations touching the German indemnity’ rather betrayed ‘a notable leniency, amounting to something like collusive remissness.’ In other words, all the reparations garble was truly ‘a diplomatic bluff, designed to gain time, divert attention, and keep the various claimants in a reasonably patient frame of mind during the period of rehabilitation to reinstate the reactionary regime in Germany and erect it as a bulwark against Bolshevism.’141 The contrivance thought out by the British delegates in Versailles not to fix the terms of the German tribute sought to flush a torrent of ‘bargaining, counter-chaffering and indefinite further adjustments,’ in the swirl of which ‘Germany must not be crippled in such a degree as would leave the imperial establishment materially weakened in its campaign against Bolshevism abroad and radicalism at home.’142 So the Treaty was in essence an articulate trap by which the German upper class – the custodians of Reaction – were to be left untouched, and thus uncured of the feudal disease, while the grief and resentment of the underclass – the proximate victims of the reparations’ bloodletting – was counted on to provide as much fodder for ‘radicalism’ as the sheltered Junkers required to re-establish a reactionary, anti-Bolshevik regime.
3. The Clue. What gave the Allied plot away? On the basis of his 1917 recommendations, Veblen observed that ‘The provisions of the Treaty shrewdly avoid any measures that would involve confiscation of property.’ ‘There is no reason, other than the reason of absentee ownership’, he continued,
why the Treaty should not have provided for a comprehensive repudiation of the German war debt, imperial, state, and municipal, with a view to diverting that much of German income to the benefit of those who suffered from German aggression. So also no other reason stood in the way of a comprehensive confiscation of German wealth, so far as that wealth is covered by securities and is therefore held by absentee owners, and there is no question as to the war guilt of these owners.143
The levers of command of a modern democracy are not operated from its ministries, but from its financial network. The financial strength of a capitalist regime is crushed the moment its portfolios of securities – bonds, stocks, debentures, and cash and all like titles of ownership – are passed into foreign hands. Such critical confiscation, which would have sapped the tenure of the German absentee owners, was never effected under the terms of the Treaty, and deliberately so. Thus the nature of Versailles’ diplomatic contrivances revealed that ‘the statesmen of the victorious Powers have taken sides with the war-guilty absentee owners of Germany against their underlying population.’144
From this it followed that all dispositions touching disarmament and indemnification were to be sabotaged behind a hustle and bustle of diplomatic trucking so prolonged and muddled as to disaffect the participation of the unknowing public. Hereafter it will be seen how Germany would begin to rearm in earnest with the secret cooperation of Russia as early as 1920, while, as a whole, her burden of reparations would have been, by 1932,‘very slight.’145 ‘Indeed,’ Veblen concluded, ‘the measures hitherto taken in the execution of this Peace Treaty’s provisional terms throw something of an air if fantasy over Mr. Keynes’s apprehensions on this head.’146
In sum, Veblen’s thesis was, of course, wrong: one thing of which the Liberal regimes of the West were never afraid was precisely Bolshevism, which they secretly nurtured since it took its baby steps in the spring of 1917. Veblen remained convinced to the last of Germany’s war-guilt, when in fact, as argued in the previous chapter, the Prussian Reich had been but the drunken victim of an extraordinary siege entirely orchestrated by England.
As to the clue, the fate of Germany’s financial wealth, whose complicated shuffle in the international system would indeed set off the disastrous hyperinflation of 1923, followed a path more tortuous than Veblen could have foreseen in 1920, though his inference was on the mark.
But as far as the conspiratorial dynamics of the Treaty was concerned, Veblen was clairvoyant; he had made three considerations: (1) Germany was spiritually prone to a cyclical recrudescence of eerie fanaticism; (2) the sham of the reparations was designed to cause distress only among ordinary Germans; (3) the German dynastic absentees, that is, the true rulers, had been spared by the Allies any sort of punitive sanction. Therefore Veblen could deduce that the Treaty concealed a complex manipulation of the German situation – a manipulation whereby a movement animated by ‘truculent megalomania’ could be expected (1) to exploit popular dissatisfaction by fomenting radicalism at home, and (2) eventually come to an understanding with the propertied and military elites under the sign of war. The attack would be suitably directed against the enemy of choice: Bolshevism. In brief, with the terminology of hindsight, Veblen’s review divined the advent of Nazism as the conjured champion of the disgraced German masses, and as Europe’s contrived anti-Communist bastion. Versailles was an indescribable fabrication.
Thus Veblen prophesied no less than: (1) the religious nature of Nazism (2) the reactionary coming of the Hitlerites, and (3) Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s invasion of Russia of June 22, 1941 (in his words: ‘suppression of Soviet Russia,’ ‘Germany…as a bulwark against Bolshevism’), more than 20 years prior to the events.
The Treaty was no lamentable fumble, or, say, ‘a disaster of the first rank,’147 as all Keynesian fans have always been itching to believe; it was not the accidental prelude to World War II, but rather its conscious blueprint.
Had Veblen not invited all those Bolshevik romances to cloud his gaze, this gentle Quixote of the deep north would have seen that Versailles was not aimed at Moscow, but at Germany herself; aimed, that is, at a colossal conflagration by which Germany, caught again between two fronts, could at long last be razed to the ground and sundered in two, right along the fault line – as she would be after World War II.
To be continued...next
The Meltdown and the
Geopolitical Correctness of Mein Kampf
Between the Kapp and the Beerhall Putsch, 1920–23
part 1
http://stillchillinonhistory.blogspot.com/2017/01/part-1-conjuring-hitlerhow-britain-and.htmlfootnotes Chapter 2
1. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragedy of Doctor Faustus (New York: Washington Square Press, 1959 [1588]), pp. 26–7.
2. Volker Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 1871–1914 (Providence, RI: Berghahn Press, 1994), p. 336. 3. Sebastian Haffner, The Failure of a Revolution. Germany, 1918–1919 (Chicago: Banner Press, 1986 [1969]), p. 16.
4. D. Authier and J. Barriot, La sinistra comunista in Germania (Milano: La Salamandra, 1981 [1976]), p. 40.
5. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin Books, 1979 [1899]), p. 198.
6. Ibid, p. 204.
7. Thorstein Veblen, The Vested Interests and the Common Man (The Modern Point of View and the New Order) (New York: B. W. Huebsch, Inc., 1919), p. 165.
8. Thorstein Veblen, ‘The Economics of Karl Marx II,’ in Thorstein Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization (New York: Capricorn Books, 1969 [1907]), pp. 453–4.
9. Haffner, Failure, p. 16.
10. Ibid., p. 28.
11. Ibid., p. 57.
12. Bernhard von Bülow, ‘Revolution in Berlin,’ in A. Kaes, M. Jay and E. Dimendberg (eds), The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 56–7.
13. Morgan Philips Price, Dispatches from the Weimar Republic. Versailles and German Fascism (London: Pluto Press, 1999 [1919–29]), p. 23.
14. Ernst Toller, I was a German. The Autobiography of Ernst Toller (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1934), pp. 141–2.
15. Klaus Epstein, Matthias Erzberger and the Dilemma of German Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1959), pp. 274–82.
16. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1971 [1925]), pp. 204–6.
17. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1960), p. 155.
18. Tacitus, Agricola, Germania, Dialogus (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1992 [98 AD]), p. 152.
19. Kennan, Russia, p. 158.
20. Ernst Jünger, ‘Fire’ (1922), in Kaes et al., Weimar Sourcebook, p. 19.
21. Ernst Von Salomon, I proscritti (Die Geächteten) (Parma: Edizioni all’insegna del veltro, 1979 [1930]), p. 49.
22. Ibid., pp. 36–40, 86.
23. Haffner, Failure, p. 161.
24. Freya Eisner, Kurt Eisner: die Politik des libertären Sozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979), p. 110.
25. I. Benoist-Méchin, Histoire de l’armée allemande (Paris: Éditions Albin Michel, 1966), Vol. 1, p. 270. Preparata 03 chap06 272 10/3/05 12:01:17 pm Notes 273
26. Rudolf Von Sebottendorff, Prima che Hitler venisse. Storia della Società Thule (Bevor Hitler kam) (Torino: Edizioni Delta-Arktos, 1987 [1933]), pp. 73–143.
27. Eugene Lunn, Prophet of Community. The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 331. Gustav Landauer introduced his reforms as Commissioner for Enlightenment and Public Instruction. Silvio Gesell, a former businessman turned anarchist guru and monetary reformer, was appointed to Munich’s Soviet as Finance Minister to launch his radical proposal for stamped scrip (paper certifi cates with a maturity date) (Silvio Gesell, The Natural Economic Order (San Antonio: Free-Economy Publishing Co., 1920), pp. 130ff.).
28. Kennan, Russia, p. 160.
29. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (New York: Penguin Books, 1986 [1855]), p. 42.
30. Von Sebottendorff, Hitler, pp. 121ff.
31. Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889–1936: Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998), p. 120.
32. Douglas Reed, Nemesi? La storia di Otto Strasser (Roma: Edizioni delle catacombe, 1944), p. 55.
33. Kershaw, Hubris, p. 126.
34. Joachim Fest, Hitler (New York: Vintage Books, 1975 [1973]), p. 118.
35. Kershaw, Hubris, p. 140.
36. Benoist-Méchin, Armée allemande, Vol. 2, pp. 225–6.
37. Gustav Meyrink, The Golem (Sawtry, Cambs: Dedalus, 1995 [1915]), p. 59.
38. Jean-Michel Angebert, The Occult and the Reich. The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1974 [1971]), p. 165.
39. Fest, Hitler, p. 116, and René Alleau, Hitler et les sociétés secrètes. Enquête sur les sources occultes du nazisme (Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1969), p. 139.
40. Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism. Secret Aryan Cults and Their Infl uence on Nazi Ideology (New York: New York University Press, 1985), p. 151.
41. Werner Gerson, Le Nazisme société secrète (Paris: J’ai lu, 1969), pp. 176–7.
42. Ernst Jünger, Das abenteurliche Herz. Figuren und Capriccios (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlaganstalt, 1938), pp. 75–6.
43. Kershaw, Hubris, p. 155.
44. Jünger, Herz, p. 66.
45. Dietrich Eckart, ‘Jewishness In and Around Us: Fundamental Refl ections,’ in B. Miller Lane and L. Rupp (eds), Nazi Ideology Before 1933. A Documentation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978 [1919]), pp. 23–5.
46. Von Sebottendorff, Hitler, p. 55.
47. Ibid., p. 208.
48. Goodrick-Clarke, Occult Roots, p. 152.
49. Ernst Jünger, On the Marble Cliffs (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1947 [1939]), p. 28.
50. N. Gordon-Levin Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics. America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 91–5.
51. Ibid., p. 219.
52. Angiolo Forzoni, Rublo. Storia civile e monetaria delle Russia da Ivan a Stalin (Roma: Valerio Levi Editore, 1991), p. 342.
53. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 235.
54. Gordon-Levin, Woodrow Wilson, pp. 78–80.
55. Peter Fleming, The Fate of Admiral Kolchak (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963), p. 49.
56. Ibid., p. 51.
57. George Stewart, The White Armies of Russia: A Chronicle of Counter-Revolution and Allied Intervention (New York: Macmillan Company, 1933), pp. 83–91. Preparata 03 chap06 273 10/3/05 12:01:18 pm 274 Conjuring Hitler
58. Pipes, Concise History, p. 92.
59. Stewart, White Armies, pp. 137–8.
60. Kennan, Russia, p. 108.
61. Stewart, White Armies, pp. 135–6.
62. In Siberia, Britain, France and Italy fi elded 1,400, 1,400, and 1,200 men respectively (ibid., p. 226).
63. Jonathan Smele, Civil War in Siberia. The Anti-Bolshevik Government of Admiral Kolchak, 1918–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 72, 97–9, 418.
64. Stewart, White Armies, p. 153.
65. Richard Luckett, The White Generals. An Account of the White Movement in Russia and the Russian Civil War (New York: Viking Press, 1971), p. 231.
66. Pipes, Concise History, p. 235.
67. ‘There must be no attempt to conquer Bolshevik Russia by force of arms…The anti-Bolshevik armies must not be used to restore the old tsarist regime…[and] reimpos[e] on the peasants the old feudal conditions [!] under which they held their land…’ (Lloyd George, quoted in ibid., p. 250).
68. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 261.
69. The high tide of the White movement against the Soviets was reached in September 1919.
70. Stewart, White Armies, p. 166.
71. Pipes, Concise History, p. 252.
72. Léon Degrelle, Hitler: Born at Versailles (Costa Mesa; Institute for Historical Review, 1987), p. 430.
73. Stewart, White Armies, p. 173.
74. Luckett, White Generals, p. 257.
75. Stewart, White Armies, p. 162.
76. Gordon-Levin, Woodrow Wilson, p. 224.
77. Geminello Alvi, Dell’estremo occidente. Il secolo americano in Europa. Storie economiche (Firenze: Marco Nardi Editore, 1993), p. 158.
78. Smele, Civil War, pp. 419–20.
79. Luckett, White Generals, p. 226.
80. Stewart, White Armies, p. 296.
81. Ibid., p. 286.
82. Ibid., p. 314.
83. Smele, Civil War, p. 201.
84. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 337.
85. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919. Six Months that Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 222.
86. Stewart, White Armies, p. 243.
87. Forzoni, Rublo, p. 342.
88. Fleming, Kolchak, p. 71.
89. As such did Anwar Sadat, Nasser’s lieutenant, and later Egyptian President, refer to the USSR, whenever the alleged hostility of Russia was factored into any form of geopolitical analysis (John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars. Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 2000), p. 33).
90. Gordon-Levin, Woodrow Wilson, p. 231.
91. Ibid., p. 230.
92. Pipes, Concise History, p. 250.
93. Ibid., p. 270.
94. Ibid., p. 250.
95. R. H. Bruce Lockart, British Agent (London: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1933), p. 222. Preparata 03 chap06 274 10/3/05 12:01:18 pm Notes 275
96. Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1981), p. 158.
97. Edward Jay Epstein, Dossier: The Secret Story of Armand Hammer (New York: Random House, 1996), pp. 45–85.
98. Giovanni Preziosi, Giudaismo, bolscevismo, plutocrazia e massoneria (Torino: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1941), p. 127.
99. Kennan, Russia, p. 113.
100. Ibid., pp. 117–18.
101. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (New York: Penguin Books, 1995 [1920]), p. 153.
102. Ibid., p. 165.
103. Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 181.
104. Ibid., p. 192.
105. Charles L. Mee Jr., The End of Order, Versailles 1919 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1980), pp. 209–210.
106. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 272.
107. Ibid.
108. Macmillan, Paris 1919, p. 466.
109. Ibid., p. 472.
110. Epstein, Erzberger, p. 323.
111. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 277.
112. Bernhard von Bülow, Le memorie del Principe di Bülow, Volume III, 1901–1920 (Milano: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1931), p. 322.
113. One million Germans were allotted to Poland, 3 million to Czechoslovakia, half a million to Hungary and Yugoslavia, and 700,000 to Romania (Quigley, Tragedy, p. 280).
114. Hans Mommsen, The Rise & Fall of the Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), p. 110.
115. Mee, End of Order, p. 222.
116. Keynes, Economic Consequences, p. 146.
117. Erich Eyck, Storia della repubblica di Weimar, 1918–1933 (Geschichte der weimarer Republik) (Torino: Giulio Einaudi Editore, 1966 [1956]), p. 131.
118. Keynes, Economic Consequences, p. 200.
119. Mee, End of Order, p. 256.
120. Keynes, Economic Consequences, pp. 289–90, 294.
121. Ibid., pp. 296–7.
122. Alvi, Occidente, p. 141.
123. Keynes, Economic Consequences, pp. 269.
124. Graham Hutton, Is it Peace? (New York: Macmillan Company, 1937), pp. 73–4.
125. Hamilton Armstrong, Peace and Counterpeace. From Wilson to Hitler (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971), p. 98.
126. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan & Co., 1915), p. 69.
127. E. W. Jorgensen and H. I. Jorgensen, Thorstein Veblen. Victorian Firebrand (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999), p. 149.
128. Thorstein Veblen, The Nature of Peace and the Terms of its Perpetuation (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1998 [1917]) p. 277.
129. Veblen, Imperial Germany, pp. 54–5.
130. Ibid., p. 58, emphasis added.
131. Jorgensen and Jorgensen, Thorstein Veblen, p. 150.
132. Veblen, Nature of Peace, p. 142.
133. Ibid., p. 150.
134. Ibid., p. 270.
135. Ibid., p. 280 Preparata 03 chap06 275 10/3/05 12:01:18 pm 276 Conjuring Hitler
136. Ibid., p. 295.
137. Thorstein Veblen, The Engineers and the Price System (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1963 [1921]).
138. Thorstein Veblen, ‘Bolshevism is a Menace – to Whom?’ (1919), in Thorstein Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), p. 400.
139. Thorstein Veblen, ‘The Economic Consequences of the Peace’ (1920), in Veblen, Essays, pp. 462–3; emphasis added.
140. Ibid., p. 466.
141. Ibid., p. 468; emphasis added.
142. Ibid., p. 469; emphasis added.
143. Ibid.
144. Ibid., p. 470.
145. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 312.
146. Veblen, ‘Economic Consequences,’ p. 470.
147. Gerald Feldman, The Great Disorder. Politics, Economics and Society in the German Infl ation, 1914–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 148.
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