Mystic to Nazi Hate of Jew Provided by Czarist Pogrom Chiefs

The ultra-reactionary flotsam and jetsam of the old White Russian party has, since 1920, been affiliated with Hitler and the National Socialists. To Hitler they have brought their long experience in organizing pogroms (many of them are recruited from the notorious Black Hundreds of the Kishineff pogroms), their valuable observations on the way the Bolshevists ran their revolution and a well built-up philosophy of absolutism, militarism and anti-Semitism.

The presence in Germany of this group, which is now openly supporting Hitler and in which he found Alfred Rosenberg, his ex-Esthonian confidential foreign minister, is thus explained by the Paris Temps: After the Bolshevist debacle the remains of the great White armies of the Ukraine and the Russian Baltic provinces (now the republics of Esthonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) took refuge in Bavaria and associated themselves with the National Socialist party. In these groups of soldiers were to be found Germans, humiliated and exasperated by the Versailles treaty, German immigrant settlers of Russia, and dissatisfied Bohemian, Silesian and Alsatian Germans. All these groups sublimated their sense of disorientation and inferiority in post-war Europe by a rabid German nationalism. The chief component of the group was, however, the Baltic Germans, once Russian subjects (like Rosenberg for example).

THEIR ILLIBERAL TRADITION

To understand their psychosis it must be remembered that in illiterate Tsarist Russia it was the Baltic Germans who formed the greater number of government functionaries and many of the army officers and chief industrialists. And historically, their policy was the abolition of democratic tendencies in government and the extermination of the Jews. They upheld it in Tsarist Russia; they gave it to the Hitlerites of Germany.

Of all the National Socialists of those early 1920’s the Baltic Germans were the most exalted. Proud of the role they had played for so many centuries in Russia, they considered themselves a race of masters.

They imagined themselves the worthy successors of those implacable Knights of the Teutonic Order which had colonized medieval Prussia and the Baltic coast. The Russian Revolution and the German Revolution (i.e., the democratic post-war revolution) wounded their pride, and their dream has been for thirteen years once again to play the role of autocratic masters, to spread the cult of absolutist pan-Germanism and to give vent to their brutal anti-Semitism. One has only to read the Berlin newspaper of the party, Priziv, (the Summons), the review published by the ex-imperial officer, Col. Winberg, and paradoxically called The Ray of Light, and The Way of the Cross, a political treatise by Col. Winberg (published at Munich in 1919 and 1922 respectively) to see how much valuable propaganda this party gave Hitler.

AMONG THE LEADERS

From the very start, then, Hitler, who is himself an Austrian dissatisfied with Austria and rationalizing his sense of inferiority in a militant and acquired Germanism, has been able to count on a heterogeneous group of dissatisfied nationals of other lands whose imagination and appetites could only be satisfied by a militant Germanism. Among them we find the Englishman Houston Stewart Chamberlain, naturalized as a German before the war and one of the chief philosophers of the Nordic superiority theory, Paul Rohrbach and Alfred Rosenberg, both philosophical politicians and naturalized Russians, the old Tsarist chief of the Ukraine, General Biskoupsky, the hero of fiscal scandals in the Baltic provinces, and Col. Winberg, who spread from America to Japan the notorious Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion.