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This long post started as an investigation about the Left and Syria which I started after I read the Sol Process blog’s publication of three posts concerning shady pro-Assad sources used in leftist circles (which can be read here: part I, part II, part III), and which later expanded into a more extensive investigation as well as an internal leftist critique of the Left’s present crisis from a radical leftist internationalist and anti-fascist perspective. I also thank the acknowledgement of my blog post by Russia Without BS, whose blog was helpful in the initial stages of my research.

Note for safety purposes: this post will contain links to far-right pages for documentation and sourcing purposes, and any link to such a page will be in bold and italic, such as this.

Note: This post is an investigation of fascist attempts to infiltrate leftist spaces and of contradictory alliances between fascists and certain specific leftists, and is not an attempt at supporting the disingenuous “horseshoe theory”, and should not be used to cast blanked judgements or denigrate the whole of the Left and leftism.

On Some Obscure Strains Of Fascism

I will first provide some historical context by exploring the history of early alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries and of some lesser known forms of fascism which, unlike the majority of Western fascists who supported the United States’ anti-Communism during the Cold War, instead actively supported and rallied around the Soviet Union.

The Feudal Socialists

Alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries are by themselves nothing new, as already in the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx was criticizing the Feudal Socialists. Alliances between revolutionaries and reactionaries are by themselves nothing new: in 1848 Karl Marx was already criticizing the Feudal Socialists in the Communist Manifesto. The Feudal Socialists were members of the French and English aristocracies who had lost their privileges in the revolutions of 1830 and sought to restore the old aristocratic order by trying to appeal to the working class to attack the bourgeoisie: they presented themselves as protectors of the working class proclaiming that under their rule bourgeois exploitation did not yet exist while at the same time railing against the creation of a revolutionary proletariat which would undo the old order of society completely. The reactionary and aristocratic nature of their movements however meant that they never really gained any mass support. Those who adopted this strategy included a section of the Legitimists, the French royalists who sought a restoration of the Ancien Régime and supported the traditionalist House of Bourbon’s claim to the throne of France against the then ruling and more liberal House of Orléans.

The Maurrassians, the Sorelians and the Birth of Fascism

The Dreyfus Affair

The Dreyfus Affair was a crisis which erupted under the French Third Republic in 1894 when French army captain Alfred Dreyfus was convicted of allegedly handing over secret French military documents to the German army. Despite evidence exonerating Dreyfus, he was still arrested and court-martialed due to anti-Semitic prejudice against him. Dreyfus was not given a fair trial and was condemned to life imprisonment and dishonorably discharged, with anti-Semitic groups publicizing the affair and the public supporting the conviction.

Dreyfus’ family members were the only ones who kept on challenging the verdict and claim he was innocent until evidence surfaced that another army officer was the one who had given these documents to the German army, after which the pro-Dreyfus side gained increasing support and novelist Emile Zola wrote an open letter titled “J’Accuse!” (I Accuse!) which accused the government and the army of anti-Semitism and covering up the Dreyfus case, for which Zola was convicted of libel against the army and had to flee to England. His article had a profound impact and divided the France into two camps: the anti-Dreyfusards, comprising the Catholic Church, the army and the right wing who feared the reversal of the verdict would weaken the military establishment, and the Dreyfusards, made up of a coalition of moderate Republicans, Socialists and Radicals.

With the Dreyfusards gaining ground, a document implicating Dreyfus was revealed to be a forgery and Major Hubert-Joseph Henry confessed fabricating it. However the anti-Dreyfusards became a threat to the Republic and the Republican parties formed a coalition and a left-wing cabinet was set up to defend the Republic.

When Dreyfus was found guilty again in 1899, a year after the reopening of the case, the French President instead decided to pardon him, and Dreyfus was eventually freed and exonerated.

The Action Française and Charles Maurras

Among the most extreme nationalist movements of the late 19th century was the Action Française, founded in 1899 as part of the anti-Dreyfusard nationalist reaction, and which became dominated soon after by Charles Maurras, under whom it became a far-right neo-monarchist organization. Action Française combined support of an Orléanais monarchy based on legitimist principles and corporate representation under a neo-traditionalist state with a radical nationalism into an authoritarian, exclusionary and intolerant a ideology called “integral nationalism” conceptualizing the nation as an “organic whole” with the monarch as its head. Despite Maurras’ own agnosticism and interest in spiritualism and magic rather than Christianity, Action Française saw religion as a force of order and supported nationalism, tradition and religion, drawing its support from the Catholic public. According to Maurras’ and Action Française‘s vitriolic intolerant ideology, minorities labelled as the four “States within the State” – Jews, Freemasons, Protestants and Metics – were supposedly taking over society by secretly helping each other to positions of power. Action Française acquired a prominent position within the early 20th century nationalist movement in France through a cultivation of style and aesthetics and through an elitist yet at the same time most vitriolic propaganda. The activists of Action Française, Les Camelots du Roi (the Streethawkers of the King), sold its publications and engaged in street fights against leftists and liberals, and though it has been called the first pre-fascist “shirt movement” of radical nationalism, its upper-class elitist nature means it never sought to properly become an organized party or develop a militia. The Action Française was so extreme that the pretender to the throne rejected it and the Papacy later excommunicated Maurras in 1927.

With the outbreak of massive strikes in 1906 following the Courrières mining disaster where French 1109 coal miners died in a coal dust explosion, Action Française started involving itself in social issues by forging links with trade unions and cooperating with syndicalists against the Republic. Maurras proclaimed that the solution to the inevitability of class struggle in democracy was the installation of an authoritarian class collaborationist monarchy, and between 1906 and the outbreak of the First World War, Action Française collaborated with various syndicalist movements.

Georges Sorel and the Cercle Proudhon

Among Maurras’ collaborators was Georges Sorel, who started as an orthodox Marxist in the early 1890s and supported the Dreyfusard camp due to his conviction that socialism was a moral issue, although he later became disillusioned by how the politicians on the Left exploited the affair to join the parliamentary system and access the privileges of bourgeois institutions and came to regard the outcome of the affair as a “political revolution” which had confused class relationships. Sorel’s belief of socialism being an ethical issue led him to later go through a process of significant revision of Marxism after supporting Eduard Bernstein’s revisionism against Karl Kautsky. Embracing accelerationism with the hope that the development of capitalism would modernize society and encourage class consciousness, Sorel rejected materialism as well as liberal democracy and cooperation with the bourgeoisie and political liberalism in favor of direct action and transforming the proletariat as a whole into a weapon against the liberal order, saw violence as an end in itself and considered that society needed to be saved and regenerated from what he considered as “humanity’s tendency to slide towards decadence”. Consistent to Sorel’s thought, however, was a rejection of bourgeois society and its values of rationalism, the Enlightenment and intellectualism and an embrace of pessimism and a cult of heroic ages and values, and his theory of myths, according to which the masses need myths to mobilize, and Sorel embraced philosopher Henri Bergson’s rejection of rationalism in favor of intuition. By the end of this process of revisionism, Sorel had become a revolutionary syndicalist for whom the “myth” of the general strike would mobilize the proletarian to act against the French Third Republic and its bourgeois system.

With the decline of strike activity in 1909 and disappointed by the push for reforms rather than revolution by the Confédération Générale du Travail, however, Sorel abandoned socialism and in 1914 he declared that “socialism is dead”. The radical nationalist Right was sympathetic to Sorel’s anti-liberal, anti-bourgeois and anti-Jacobin but extremely militaristic proletarianism which rejected the principles of the French Revolution, and soon after Sorel read the second edition of the Maurras’ book Enquête Sur La Monarchie (Investigations on Monarchy) where Sorel was positively mentioned, a collaboration started between him and Maurras’ Action Française with the aim of overthrowing the bourgeois French Third Republic.

Following the failure of a common project between Sorel, his disciple Édouard Berth and the Action Française‘s Georges Valois of a national-socialist journal called La Cité Française, Valois and Berth founded a National Syndicalist political group called the Cercle Proudhon (Proudhon Circle) while Sorel, whom the group claimed as its mentor, refused to participate in the Cercle due to his own apprehensions towards the Maurrassians, and instead founded his own anti-Semitic and nationalist journal, L’Indépendance. Sorel however became dissatisfied with nationalism, left L’Indépendance in 1913 and opposed the union sacrée and the entry of France in the First World War in 1914 before later praising Lenin after the Russian Revolution in 1917.

The common theme uniting the Sorelians and the Maurrassians was their opposition to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and the aim of the Cercle was to provide a common platform for nationalists and leftist anti-democrats. The Cercle Proudhon had a particular interpretation of the works of Anarchist theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, largely due to his influence on syndicalism, but also because Action Française itself was attracted to his anti-Semitism and support for the traditional patriarchal family, and their own reinterpretation of his opposition to bourgeois democracy, even though Proudhon himself was not a fascist or a proto-fascist. Out of the Cercle Proudhon, Georges Valois formed the Faisceau, the first French fascist party

The Sorelians and the Italian Fascists

At the same time that Sorel was preparing to launch La Cité Française, one his Sorel’s disciples in Italy was Arturo Labriola, who was also one of the main theoreticians of revolutionary syndicalism in Italy and in 1902 had started the publication of a revolutionary syndicalist called Avanguardia Socialista, to which contributed Sergio Panunzio, who later became one of the main theoreticians of Italian fascism. Around that time, the revolutionary syndicalists had left the Socialist Party in 1907 and the main socialist trade union, the CGL, in 1909, and founded their own Unione Sindicale Italiana (USI), becoming more heterodox in the process. Labriola developed doctrines emphasizing the need of developing a “society of producers” and elaborated his own theory of a “proletarian nation” according to which Italy was an exploited nation and revolutionary transformation concerned all of society instead of class alone. Among the other syndicalist leaders, Panunzio stressed the importance of violence, Robert Michels elaborated on mass mobilization and the need of new elites, and Labriola developed corporatist economic theories. These revolutionary syndicalists had an interpretation of Marxism whereby they advocated for developing Italian capitalism as a prerequisite for a revolutionary movement and were in favor of cross-class collaboration with the farmers and the workers and supported “proletarian nationalism” and Italian expansionism. In 1910, the journal La Lupa was founded by revolutionary syndicalist Paolo Orano and, like the Cercle Proudhon, united syndicalist leaders such as Orano, Labriola, Angelo Oliviero Olivetti and Michels, and nationalists around Enrico Corradini.

Some of Sorel’s Italian disciples even left the Socialist Party to join Italian nationalist Enrico Corradini, who in 1910 founded the Italian Nationalist Association. The Italian Nationalist Association itself was an anti-socialist upper class and elitist organization though, based on the suggestions of the syndicalists close to him, Corradini described Italy as an exploited “proletarian nation” which had to undergo a class collaborationist national revolution which would modernize and strengthen Italy and turn it into a militarist and imperialist power. This process transformed many revolutionary syndicalists into nationalist syndicalists, and many syndicalists and nationalists supported Italy’s 1911 war against the Ottoman Empire and its subsequent occupation of Libya. By 1914, the revolutionary syndicalists had significantly revised Marxism and some of its leaders became nationalists who supported Italy’s entry in the First World War on the side of the Entente, thus becoming national syndicalists who later counted among the founders of the Italian fascist movement and members of the regime of Mussolini.

The USI itself adopted a neutral stance during the war, and its interventionist national syndicalist wing was put in minority position and subsequently expelled; one of the expelled members, Alceste De Ambris, together with Angelo Oliviero Olivetti in October 1914 co-founded the Revolutionary Fasci of Internationalist Action, which called on Italian workers to support Italian intervention in the war. The next month Benito Mussolini, himself a former syndicalist who had read Sorel before later becoming an anti-Communist nationalist, founded the Autonomous Fasci of Revolutionary Action and started his own publication funded by pro-interventionist business interests, Il Popolo d’Italia (The People of Italy) after his expulsion from the Socialist Party for his support of Italian intervention in the war. Olivetti’s fascio merged with Mussolini’s to form the Fasci of Revolutionary Action in December 1914, whose purpose was to mobilize the masses into supporting the war, and in 1915 Il Popolo d’Italia first referred to it as the “fascist movement”. De Ambris became one of the founders in 1918 of the Unione Italiana del Lavoro, a national syndicalist union formed out of the interventionist wing expelled from the USI, and he co-authored the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 before later becoming an opponent of fascism and Mussolini and joining the anti-fascist Arditi del Popolo. Michele Bianchi, a former revolutionary syndicalist turned national syndicalist who had helped De Ambris found the Unione Italiana del Lavoro, later joined Mussolini and helped him found the Italian Fasci of Combat and the Fascist Party, of which he became the first secretary general, and was one of the leaders of Mussolini’s March on Rome. Sergio Panunzio joined Mussolini’s first fascio, and Paolo Orano and Robert Michels later joined the Fascist Party. The Italian Nationalist Association also later merged into Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party and many of its members became important figures of his regime, and within it formed part of the “Fascist Right” faction opposed to the national syndicalist “Fascist Left” faction led by Olivetti, Panunzio and Bianchi.

The Conservative Revolution

As part of the reaction against the Enlightenment arose a movement known as the Conservative Revolution, which traces its origin to Counter-Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his disciples in Germany, who combined cultural criticism and anti-rationalism, and to the denunciation of liberalism and rationalism as “un-German” by nationalists like Johann Fichte and Ernst Arndt. The Conservative Revolution developed in the backdrop of the drastic transformations Germany was experiencing in the 19th century, with Otto von Bismarck’s Unification of Germany and his establishment of a semi-authoritarian system with a weak parliament, with urbanization and the rise of class antagonisms and decline in Christian faith and specifically German culture accompanying the industrialization of Germany, and with Bismarck’s persecution of socialists and Catholics, which resulted in Germans blaming the parliamentary system and its parties for these conflicts, and the spread of the wish for the rise a Caesarist a national hero who would unify German society.

The Conservative Revolution started as a criticism of modernity, with early ambiguous figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoyevsky having been described as leading early members of this movement. The next generations of the Conservative Revolutionaries’ works however were marked by a fusion of cultural criticism and extreme nationalism, giving rise to an ideology of cultural despair and mystical nationalism which held liberalism as alien to the spirit and tradition of Germany: they attacked materialist capitalist society, castigated the press, the political parties and the new political elites, feared the “moral decay” of the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the lower classes, and railed against the “spiritual emptiness of life” and the “decline of intellect and virtue” of urban and commercial mass society while at the same time romanticizing earlier rural communities of kings and peasants. The Conservative Revolutionaries adhered to a conspiratorial view of history whereby these ancient folk communities they idealized had been destroyed by a supposed conspiracy of outside forces, with certain early members of the movement like Biblical scholar, racist and anti-Semite Paul de Lagarde assigning a supposed “Jewish identity” to these alleged forces of dissolution.

Unlike the traditional conservatives who sought to preserve the old order, the Conservative Revolutionaries hated the liberal order, which they blamed for turning them into lonely outcasts, combined conservatism with revolutionary ideas and sought to break away from the present they lived in to create a future society based on a past they idealized. The Conservative Revolution was a revolt against modernity and liberal, industrial society and, while it was anti-socialist and anti-Communist, its main target was liberalism, which its ideologues held as alien to German society and equated with secularism, rationalism and humanism, exploitative capitalist society and embourgeoisement, and on which it blamed all the ills of Western society. In contrast to this, the Conservative Revolutionaries posed as defenders of national redemption, supported a return to a folk-community of believers in a new unifying German national religion, and in their quest for national heroism they glorified violence, justifying it by social Darwinism and racism. The Conservative Revolutionaries saw themselves as the guardians of an ancient tradition and, attacking what they perceived to be the ills of German society, they turned to folk-rootedness and nationalism and intended to become prophets who would lead to a national rebirth through idealist and utopian reforms meant to turn Germany into the prime world power by unifying it and purging it of all internal conflict.

The Conservative Revolution Under the Weimar Republic

The Conservative Revolutionaries initially welcomed the outbreak of the First World War, which they saw as a promising break with the past. Having supported the struggle against the West, which they saw as antithetical to Germany, the Conservative Revolutionaries reviled the liberal capitalist Weimar Republic, which represented everything they opposed, and it was precisely under Weimar Germany that they came to prominence. Though the older generations of the Conservative Revolution had sought to accommodate themselves to the Republic, its younger members who had experienced the war insisted it should be replaced by a dictatorship and either worked with the German far-right seeking to overthrow it or stayed out of the political arena to delegitimize it.

Arthur Moeller van den Bruck

The main figure of the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany was Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, according to whom the world consisted of old and young nations, with Fate supporting the young over the old, and whereby he rationalized Germany’s defeat in the Great War by claiming that old Britain and France had co-opted the young and gullible United States. Therefore, for him, the future of Germany was eastwards, between the liberal West and collectivist Russia.

Germany’s defeat and the German Revolution in which the German Empire was overthrown and replaced by the Weimar Republic gave rise to a sense of alienation and dissatisfaction among the middle classes and former officers among whom Moeller found his audience, and he subsequently animated the June Club, which was founded in 1919 and was based on national socialist and corporatist premises in addition to a strong anti-Westernism which became more pronounced after the Treaty of Versailles (the Club itself was named for the month the treaty was signed). The June Club was of considerable influence within conservative circles, and its meetings were occasionally attended by the future chancellor published a journal called Gewissen (Conscience) which lamented the decline of Germany, showed concern for the German diaspora, criticized party politics and advocated for replacing the Republic by a dictatorship.

The most influential of Moeller’s publications was Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich), published in 1922 and in which Moeller summarized the resentments and aspirations of the Conservative Revolutionaries and laid down the vision of a conservative revolution which would establish a system of nationalist “socialism” uniting the classes in Germany into state he called the Third Reich, which constituted one of the most powerful anti-Republican ideas under the Weimar Republic. Moeller however had a nervous breakdown and committed suicide in 1925. Moeller’s myth of the Third Reich was appropriated by the Nazis though they later repudiated him in 1933 and denied he had had any influence on them, largely because Moeller himself was not an anti-Semite.

Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler was another major figure of the Conservative Revolution. An opponent of liberal democracy, which he considered a “foreign concept” imported from England, he first published his magnum opus, The Decline of the West, in 1918 where he laid down his deterministic understanding of history according to which cultures develop like organisms which grow, develop, age and die, with their final stage of decline and death being when they become “civilizations”. According to his thesis, the transition from a “culture” to a “civilization” was marked by the appearance of rationalists such as Rousseau, Socrates and the Buddha, the decline of the culture-bearing elites and their replacement by the bourgeoisie, and accompanied itself by mass democracy, wars, expansionism and Caesarism: authoritarian rulers like Caesar or Augustus. For Spengler, the 19th and 20th centuries were when Europe declined from a “culture” into a “civilization”, with Napoleon being an equivalent of Alexander the Great who foreshadowed the age of Caesarism. The Decline of the West was a best-seller, largely because it comforted Germans by rationalizing the hardships of Germany as part of larger historical processes, though Moeller criticized it by claiming that, while Spengler had rightly predicted the decline of the West, Germany’s defeat had instead restored the promise of vitality.

The next year Spengler published Prussianism and Socialism with the aim of uniting German socialists and conservatives against the Weimar Republic, and in which he rejected Marxism as an “English ideology” and instead asserted a corporatist, nationalist and militarist “socialism” under the authority of a monarchical and authoritarian Prussian state inspired by the “Soldier King” Frederick William I of Prussia. The second volume of The Decline of the West was published in 1922, and in 1931, he wrote Man and Technics, where claimed that “colored peoples” gaining access to “Western technology” would turn it against “Nordic peoples”.

Spengler was a precursor of the Nazi regime and Hitler adopted much of the apocalyptic tone of The Decline of the West. However, while Spengler had initially voted for Hitler over Paul von Hindenburg in 1932, quickly became disillusioned and found Hitler vulgar, and he consequently faced isolation under the Nazi regime for his rejection of anti-Semitism and of racialist theories (Spengler instead adhered to a form of spiritual racism) and his criticisms of the Nazis.

Karl Haushofer

Another prominent member of the Conservative Revolution was Karl Haushofer, one of the leading theoreticians of “geopolitics”, a theory of international relations developed by Friedrich Ratzel and Halford Mackinder, and which conceived relations between states in terms of social Darwinist competition according to which whoever controlled the area dominated by the Russian Empire would be the major world power. Haushofer had been a military attaché to Japan following the latter’s victory against the Russian Empire in 1905, a victory which inspired anti-colonial nationalists around the world and led to the Russian Revolution of 1905 which was itself a prelude to the Revolution of 1917. After serving in the German Army in the First World War, Haushofer became an advocate of an alliance between Germany and Russia, and eventually with China and Japan. Unlike the Nazis who prefered Western colonialism and white supremacist domination of the Third World, Haushofer instead advocated for German support for anti-colonial struggles against the British and French Empires. Haushofer however exerted influence on the Nazi party, especially through his pupil Rudolf Hess, and Hitler absorbed the concept of Lebensraum from Haushofer, though in a vulgarized pseudo-scientific form where Nazi racialism was combined with an expansionist category of space and the idea that the destiny of Germany was in the East. Karl Haushofer kept on providing rationalizations for Nazi expansionism, though he eventually became disillusioned with the Nazi regime. Haushofer never became a full-fledged Nazi, partly because his wife was half-Jewish, which made his task of justifying Germany’s expansion distasteful for him. Haushofer also differed from official Nazi policy in his firm belief that peace with Britain should be important for German policy, which inspired Hess’s failed attempt to negotiate with Britain. His son Albrecht was involved in the German resistance and participated in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944, and Karl and his wife committed suicide after being investigated for war crimes after the war.

Other figures of the Conservative Revolution included Carl Schmitt, who rejected parliamentary democracy, elaborated legal theories resting on the idea that modern societies needed a “total state” to function and identified politics as the distinction between a “friend” and an “enemy”, and Edgar Jung, who supported a fascist version of the Conservative Revolution envisioning an “organic German nation”.

The Conservative Revolution and the Nazis

Shortly before Moeller’s suicide, June Club itself was dissolved and transformed into the more aristocratic Herrenklub (which Moeller had refused to join), which sponsored a journal called Der Ring, the direct successor of the then defunct Gewissen. The Conservative Revolutionaries’ influence was initially limited mostly to sections of the Republic’s institutions such as former members of the German Youth Movement (which was itself part of the Conservative Revolution) who had joined the civil service and the government in large numbers. These ideas also became widespread within the Reichswehr, the newly formed army of Weimar Republic, under the leadership of the chief of staff and later commander in chief Hans von Seeckt who was himself close to Conservative Revolutionary ideas, and which many former Freikorps members who shared ideas similar to those of the Conservative Revolutionaries had joined. However, with the Great Depression, their ideas gained traction within German society and Der Ring hailed the undermining of the parliament by the succeeding Chancellors , Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher.

The Conservative Revolution itself was ambivalent towards the Nazis in that, while its members supported many aspects of Nazi ideology and welcomed its rise, they were elitists with a contempt for the masses reserving their ideas to an esoteric minority circle, and therefore saw themselves as paving the way for the creation of a “new Germany” in which they did not see a role for the Nazis, which they considered a vulgar mass movement and disliked those who joined it. Unlike the Nazis, the Conservative Revolutionaries expressed support for an alliance with the Soviet Union based on their own idea of a romantic and anti-capitalist “German socialism” (unlike Soviet socialism where the proletariat is the revolutionary element, their “German socialism” considered the “deeply revolutionary Völk” as its base), did not write about biological racism (though other forms of racism are present in their works), and eschewed the use of the Republic’s institutions to obtain power. During the last days of the Weimar Republic, this ambivalence manifested itself in how they were were torn between opposing the Nazis, which meant supporting the Republic they despised, or siding against the Republic by supporting the Nazis, with whom they still had their differences despite shared similarities: while they welcomed the rise of the Nazis due to their shared reactionary ideals, they disliked the mass character of the Nazi movement

The attacks by the Conservative Revolutionaries on the Weimar Republic and its culture along with their spread of Caesarism and of a “sentimental brutality” shaped the mental and ideological climate that set the stage for the Nazis by making the German middle classes more receptive to Nazi ideology and paved the way for their rise: the Nazis gathered the millions of malcontents about whom the Conservative Revolutionaries had spoken and for whom they elaborated dangerous and elusive ideas. Many Conservative Revolutionaries welcomed Hitler’s rise as the way to fulfill their goal, and Der Ring supported Hitler’s Third Reich by identifying it with Moeller’s. Some Conservative Revolutionaries joined the Nazis, the most prominent example being Carl Schmitt, who went on to join the Nazi party in 1933 and become the “crown jurist” of the Nazi regime, writing the legal justification for Hitler’s massacre of the Nazi party’s Strasserist wing in the Night of the Long Knives, and later formulating the concept of Grossraum, which denotes an area dominated by a power representing a specific “political idea”, inspired by the American Monroe doctrine and based on international law to justify Hitler’s expansionism. Edgar Jung became an opponent of the Nazi regime and was murdered during the Night of the Long Knives, while other Conservative Revolutionaries opposed to the Nazis went into exile and some Conservative Revolutionaries participated in the failed attempt to assassinate Hitler 0n July 20, 1944.

Julius Evola

Julius Evola was born to an aristocratic family of Sicilian origins in Rome in 1898, and in his teens had been interested in Italy’s literary avant-garde movement and in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist movement in art. Evola participated in the First World War in his late teens before embarking on a quest for self-transcendence to break with bourgeois values, symptomatic of the “lost generation” which had experienced the First World War and could not adjust to settled civilian life.

After the war he dismissed Futurism as loud and showy and he instead became a member of the Dada artistic movement and gave readings of avant-garde poetry before giving up on painting due to the commercialization of avant-garde. He became influenced by German idealist philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Hegel and by Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolutionaries, and he indulged himself in “transrational” philosophy and published a number of works of “philosophical idealism”, according to which an “absolute individual” who had “achieved complete control over himself through wisdom” could easily eliminate the limits of the “real world”. Evola subsequently immersed himself in the study of magic, the occult, alchemy and Eastern religions, and especially the Indian esoteric tradition of Tantrism, which complemented Western idealism in his quest for self-transcendence, and Evola perceived its secrecy and “elitism” as negating Western rationalism and democracy, in accordance to his anti-democratic and anti-modernist political thought rooted in his readings of Plato, Nietzsche and Oswald Spengler, whose The Decline of the West Evola later translated into Italian.

Having immersed himself in the study of Western esoteric tradition in the 1920s, he met a Roman occultist named Arturo Reghini through Masonic and Theosophical circles. Reghini, who was devoted to renewing classical tradition in a fiercely pagan and anti-Christian spirit, was himself immersed in magic, alchemy and theurgy, and he edited two journals, Atanòr and Ignis, which covered initiate studies such as Pythagoreanism, yoga, Kabbalah and Egyptian Freemasonry. Reghini strongly influenced Evola in the years from 1924 to 1930, introducing him to traditional texts of alchemy, whose symbolism they regarded as universal key to the macrocosm of the universe and microcosm of man, and many articles and reviews by Evola were published in Reghini’s journal. Reghini and Evola considered the Roman patrician world and the imperial constitution to be the closest approximation to their ideal state and considered its strict hierarchy to represent a “higher, transcendental, absolute order”, which they believed the universalism of Christianity had allagedly negated and dissolved, supposedly presaging the “disorder of the modern world”.

A circle formed around Evola and Reghini, and in 1927 Evola founded the Group of Ur, an association of Italian intellectuals dedicated to studying the “esoteric and initiate disciplines with seriousness and rigor”. The Group of Ur published a monthly journal named Ur (renamed Krur in 1929) from 1927 to 1929, and Evola’s three-year affiliation with this group earned him a lifelong reputation of a theosophist crackpot, though Evola himself rejected theosophy as a “degenerate caricature of ancient wisdom”. Reghini, in a 1924 article in Atanòr, wrote that he had fifteen years earlier predicted the rise of a regime based on the ancient world and he had welcomed the rise of Fascism, and the Group of Ur performed rituals to inspire the fascist regime with the spirit of the Roman Empire.

Through Reghini, Evola came under the influence of René Guénon, a French orientalist and traditionalist who invoked the notion of a primordial Tradition which supposedly reflected itself in the “authentic religious traditions” of the East and West. Guénon was an occultist who was interested in Theosophy and Freemasonry and more especially in the Hindu philosophy of Advaita Vedanta, which was then becoming popular in the West through Vivekananda. Guénon believed that Hindu Vedanta represented a “primordial Tradition” whose transcendent truths were also preserved in Islam and medieval Catholicism, and that the modern West had supposedly lost all connection with this tradition. According to Guénon’s book written in 1927, The Crisis of the Modern World, the West had “succumbed to a spiritual decline”, embraced materialization, and become focused on a “humanistic” concern of man’s importance and consciousness which allegedly replaced all transcendence with individualism. For Guénon, this was the fulfillment of the Hindu Puranic divisions of time, the four yugas, each successively shorter than the previous one and corresponding to the Golden, Silver, Bronze and Iron Ages of Classical Greek tradition, with the present age supposedly being the “Dark Age” or Kali Yuga. Evola was subsequently inspired by Guénon into organizing his thoughts around the central concept of the critique of modernity.

Beginning in 1925, Evola started writing political journalism with the goal of transforming fascism to fit his own ideas of spiritual aristocracy and monarchy by attacking the fascist regime for its proximity to the Church, its functionaries’ careerism and its dependence on the bourgeoisie and the masses. These attacks resulted in the publication in 1928 of his book Pagan Imperialism, in which he celebrated ancient Rome and condemned the Church and the universalism of both American democracy and Soviet Communism, and that same year he declared that the identification of Italian tradition with the Christian and Catholic Church was “the most absurd of all errors”. Mussolini was impressed and wrote an article in response to Reghini’s requests for the fascist regime to initiate an era of “pagan imperialism”. The regime’s goal of a Concordat with the Catholic Church and the Lateran Treaty of 1929 however destroyed the Group of Ur’s hopes of influencing the new order and Evola declared fascism a “laughable revolution”.

In 1930, Evola founded a review named Torre to advocate for an elitist conservatism in opposition to what he denounced as the demagogic tendencies of official fascism. Fanatical anti-Semite Giovanni Preziosi admired Torre and introduced Evola to Roberto Farinacci, the local fascist chief in Cremona as well as one of the most prominent anti-Semites in Mussolini’s regime, and who later became one of the main pro-Nazi figures in fascist Italy. While Farinacci and the more radical fascists supported Evola’s calls for a “more radical, more intrepid, truly absolute fascism”, Mussolini instead did not tolerate this opposition, suppressed Torre and subjected its staff to a character assassination campaign, and Evola had to maintain a group of bodyguards, and Torre had died out by June 1930.

In 1934, Evola wrote The Revolt Against the Modern World, heavily influenced by René Guénon. Like Guénon, Evola believed in the Hindu cycle of ages and equated the modern world to the Kali Yuga, or “Dark Age”, and according to The Revolt Against the Modern World the West had experienced “a decline” from “higher spiritual values” to materialism, the rise of which Evola held responsible for liberalism, democracy, egalitarianism and democracy, all of which he considered evil, and he labeled Communism and capitalism as “twin evils” resulting from the replacement of the spiritual by the material. He condemned this “modern decadence” on the Renaissance, Humanism the Reformation and especially the French Revolution and considered this “decadence” to have started with the formation of the medieval Communes in Italy, which he saw as the “pioneers” of the “profane and anti-traditional idea of society based on economic and mercantile factors”. He instead applauded the poet Dante’s condemnation of the revolt of the cities of northern Italy, considered the Ghibelline dynasty of the Hohenstaufen emperors (which ruled from 1152 to 1272) as the “Germanic champion” of “sacred regality” in a revived Holy Roman Empire and praised Emperor Frederick I as having affirmed “the supranational and sacred principle” of empire against the “anarchy of the Communes”. Evola considered the rise of the Communes to be a preview of the French Revolution and blamed their revolt against the Holy Roman Empire for having destroyed the “organic unity” of Italy by starting a long period of instability and civil wars while Spain, England and France were emerging from the Middle Ages under strong national monarchies. In contrast, he appealed to the ancient pagan societies of Rome and Sparta and their patriarchal warrior culture, condemned the ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals for “causing the decline of traditional values” through their questioning, and claimed that a supposed need for a “spiritual virility” consisting of hierarchy, caste, monarchy, race, myth, religion and ritual constituted a “fundamental truth” of men and society. In Evola’s worldview, the world of tradition had been the victim of the process of modernization of Europe spearheaded by Italy, and the loss of this “spiritual virility” supposedly meant Man’s retreat from cosmos to chaos, the inability to create order and the disintegration of Europe.

Around the time of the publication of The Revolt Against the Modern World, Evola soon revived the idea of Torre in Farinacci’s own fascist publication, Regime Fascista. Evola edited a page in Regime Fascista where prominent right-wing intellectuals contributed discussions on fascist “philosophy”, and René Guénon allowed the publication of excerpts and translations of his works in Regime Fascista. Evola himself called on the fascist regime to adopt a more aggressive and imperialist foreign policy on this page, and on the eve of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935, he advised Mussolini to transform Italy into a “warrior nation” that would “appreciate and admire” the “sacred valor of war”. Evola became Farinacci’s candidate to succeed Giovanni Gentile as the philosopher of true fascism, though this succession never happened. Evola’s relationship with Regime Fascista however continued until the collapse of the Fascist regime in 1943.

Evola had however always refused to join the Fascist Party even though he had up to a point seen fascism as a “cure” for the supposed “ailments” he believed had allegedly been “caused by American capitalism and Soviet Communism”, and his relationship with Italian fascism was complicated. For him, the “greatest merit” of fascism was “to have revitalized in Italy the idea of a State” and he approved of the fascist motto of “Everything within the State, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”, in accordance to his belief that “Man must belong to a traditional, organic and hierarchical order”. Evola saw Mussolini as working towards this direction through his replacement of parliamentary democracy by fascist corporatism and by imposing a culture of discipline against the “bourgeois spirit” (Evola considered the “glory” of fascism to be its war on the behalf of “Roman ideals” against the “bourgeois race”). He however disapproved of the fascist regime’s bureaucratic centralism and its alliance with the Catholic Church, of the fascist party’s sidelining of the aristocracy and the monarchy and Mussolini becoming a rival of the king instead of his loyal counselor and forming a traditional state, and thought the Fascist Party should have been merged into the state after Mussolini seizure of power instead of existing as a parallel state.

Evola found Italian fascism to be too compromising and from the mid-30s onward he spent time in Germany, where he felt “in his natural element” and where his books were successful among right-wing German intellectuals. In his view, fascism had “attained its most sublime form” in Germany because right-wing thinkers such as leading Conservative Revolutionaries had been taken seriously by the Nazis. Evola himself became popular in those circles after he started lecturing at the University of Berlin and the city’s Herrenklub from 1934, with his articles being published in German right-wing and conservative periodicals from 1928 to 1943, and he sought to create an elite organization similar to the Herrenklub in Rome. Evola admired Hitler far more than Mussolini, and he admired the Nazi SS, considered them to be a vehicle of the state, hierarchy, “racial heritage” and a revival of ancient pagan warrior elites and he compared them more favorably to the Moschettieri di Mussolini, though the SS rejected Evola’s ideas as supranational, aristocratic and reactionary. What he liked most about Nazi Germany was the regime’s “attempt to create a kind of new political-military Order with precise qualifications of race”, though he disliked Nazi populism, plebeian culture and nationalism as manifestations of modernity, and considered the Führer principle by which Hitler derived his legitimacy from the Völk as ignoring transcendent reality

Evola was a racist, though he rejected the biological racism of the Nazis, which he saw as “based on reductionist and materialist science”, and he instead adhered to a spiritual conception of racism where he considered race as not solely biological, but subject to spirit and tradition, with his conception of “race” being divided into body, mind (religion and adherence to tradition) and soul (character and emotions), and he asserted that races only declined when their spirit failed. Evola’s interpretation of the word “Aryan” was similarly metaphysical and in his book on Buddhism he translated arya to mean “aristocratic” or “high caste” and “illuminated” as well as related to the populations who migrated into northern India at the end of the Bronze Age, and whom now discredited white supremacist theories then claimed were “light-skinned Nordic invaders”. Evola was a virulent anti-Semite, and he quoted the notorious anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to accuse the “Jewish press and finance” of spreading the “liberal virus” which would supposedly destroy all remnants of monarchy and aristocracy, and he published his own preface and an essay in the Italian translation of the Protocols. When his friend, Romanian fascist and Iron Guard founder and leader Corneliu Codreanu, was murdered in 1938, Evola responded with the vilest anti-Semitic tirades.

In his book written in 1941, The Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race, Evola expressed his anti-Semitism by accusing Jewish culture of possessing a “corrosive irony” which according to him had allegedly “affected Europe” and by blaming Jewish intellectuals for “demolishing the foundations of Europe’s traditional culture”. Evola however saw the Nazi musings on race as polemicism and expediency and he considered their conspiratorial view of history as a “demagogic aberration”: he instead believed that racism could have “positive results” if interpreted in Nietzschean terms of spirit instead of biological terms of blood. Likewise, his anti-Semitism instead was metaphysical and he saw Jewish people as a “symbol for the rule of money, individualism and economic materialism in the modern world”. Evola denigrated Judaism as having “degenerated into a secular ethic of professional advancement and mammonism”, and he accused Jews of supposedly “poisoning, debasing and soiling all that is high and noble”. Instead of the Nazis’ anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which accused Jews of being the source of the “decadence” of the modern world, Evola’s own anti-Semitism consisted of him accusing Jewish people of supposedly “taking advantage” of humanism, the Reformation and the rise of rationalism to allegedly “rise to lofty heights of power and influence in the modern world” and “subvert ‘Aryan’ spirituality” and “create the secularized scientistic and mechanistic world of modernity”: he described banking and rational calculation in early Europe as “fatal Jewish influence” and claimed that the presence of individuals who happened to be Jewish in both the Russian Revolution and American banking and industry was “evidence” of “erosive influence”. Evola’s anti-Semitism also took the form of him citing the Jewish backgrounds of Sigmund Freud (the founder of psychoanalysis), Albert Einstein (the developer of the Theory of Relativity), Karl Marx (the theoretician of Historical Materialism), and to accuse Jews of allegedly being “at the forefront of modernistic ideas” and of supposedly “denigrating lofty ideas by ascribing every human motive to economic and sexual motives”.

Another manifestation of Evola’s racism was that the asserted that in Italy “Nordic elements” coexisted in perpetual anarchy with “African” and “Mediterranean” elements, and he claimed that this was an “absence of psychic equilibrium” which supposedly “explained” the “complex, creative and infuriating history of the Italian people”, and Evola’s writings provided a theory of “Nordic Romanità” to Mussolini, who since 1921 had been trying to create a “new type breed of man in Italy” by “introducing a higher civic consciousness” among Italians. Evola believed in the existence of “inferior peoples” and he advocated for the imposition of social Darwinism on all areas which later came to be known as the Third World by claiming that some “races” supposedly possessed an alleged “dominant character” and that some others were allegedly “intended by nature to be slaves”, and his remarks about the Ethiopians, who were later terrorized and colonized by Fascist Italy, showed how his views concurred with Mussolini’s fascist imperialism. Evola supported the fascist regime’s attempt to create “a race imbued with a traditional and anti-materialistic conception of human nature”, though he was disappointed by how the fascist regime did not realize this goal and he complained that Mussolini failed in his plan to “improve the race”.



From as early as 1935, Mussolini had already admired Evola’s articles on race and his Fascist regime officially adopted Evola’s ideas when Italy enacted its own racial laws in 1938, and Mussolini was impressed by The Synthesis of the Doctrine of Race, with a subsequent printing carrying the title The Synthesis of the Fascist Doctrine of Race; when Mussolini finally met Evola in September 1941, he promised to support Evola’s German-Italian journal, Blood and Spirit, though by then the Italian fascist regime was already losing the Second World War and Blood and Spirit never appeared. Until 1941 Evola had been hoping that the process of “fascistization” would “correct the manifold defects” of the Italian people though, after the Fascist Grand Council overthrew and arrested Mussolini in 1943 and the outbreak of the Italian Civil War opposing the Communist Italian Resistance to the fascists, he declared that “a damaged and inconsistent human component” had been hidden under the facade of fascism and that “it was not fascism that acted negatively on the Italian people” but that it was the Italian “race” which had “acted negatively on fascism”, and he lamented that the Italians had not fought “until the end without a lament and without a rebellion” unlike the Germans who “fought on” because of their supposed “love of discipline”.

Evola was in Berlin when Italy officially surrendered to the Allies in September 1943, and he was among the first to meet Mussolini in Hitler’s lair after the Waffen-SS officer Otto Skorzeny had freed him from imprisonment. He subsequently participated in the creation of the fascist Republic of Salò, and in September 1943 he returned to Rome with Farinacci and started organizing a far-right group called Movimento per la Rinascita dell’Italia. Evola however disapproved of the pseudo-egalitarianism of Mussolini’s new government and of the Congress of Verona, held in November of that year, where the Italian fascist movement was reconstituted. When Rome was liberated by the Allies in June 1944, Julius Evola fled to Vienna where he sought to assist the Nazis by working with fascist leaders all over Central Europe and acting as liaison for the SS as Nazi Germany tried forming a “European army” against the United States and the Soviet Union. He was injured during an aerial bombardment of Vienna, his wounds forcing him to remain in Austria until the war was over and paralyzing him from the waist down and forcing him to remain in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

Following the war, Evola returned to Italy, though he regarded its liberation by the Allies as an “unmitigated disaster” which would lead Italy to embrace liberalism. He was however popular among young Italian neo-fascists, largely because his reputation had not been ruined by the war. Though Evola rejected participation in party politics, rejecting even the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), Europe’s first neo-fascist party founded by veterans of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò he had once helped create, he was however influential among the Italian neo-fascist Right, especially among the more radical sections of the MSI which formed an evoliani faction within the MSI led by Pino Rauti, himself a disciple of Evola. In the 40s, Evola guided this faction towards more reactionary positions through his writings in La Rivolta Ideale, the journal of the MSI, and later through his pamphlet titled Orientamenti (Orientations), written in 1950. Giuliano Salierni, a young MSI activist in the 40s and early 50s, later recalled how he and other young MSI members visited Evola to listen to his accounts of working with the Nazis and his calls for violence against Communists.

In Orientamenti, Evola described Europe as “afflicted” by the same condition as Italy’s for centuries whereby it had become weakened and “dominated by stronger outside powers”: for him, the French and Spanish invasions of Italy of the 15th and 16th centuries had caused a “moral devastation” in Italy and left it disoriented, and he claimed that its 20th century analogue was the domination of Europe by the US and the USSR. In Orientamenti, Evola called for the “European man” to “rise again” by embracing an “aristocratic conception of life” to renew himself spiritually, and for his “brothers in the new battle array” to see capitalism and Bolshevism as “degrees of the same illness” and the US and the USSR as “two branches of the same evil”. In Orientamenti, Evola stressed the “warrior ethic” and “legionary spirit” and outlined how ideals, elites and order could be maintained with the MSI, the police and the army taking over the state. He however warned his followers against subversion, on grounds that it would not work and would condemn the “aristocratic revolution” to failure, and instead advised them to “prepare silently the spiritual ambience” form when a new form of authority would form and to “advance with pure force when the moment strikes”.

In 1951 Evola and twenty neo-fascists were arrested and tried for attempting to revive the Fascist Party, which is illegal in Italy’s post-war constitution. Evola was also accused of being the inspirer of the Fasci of Revolutionary Action, a violent shadow organization of the MSI which carried out the far-right’s strategy of tension through indiscriminate bombings and aggression against Communists. Evola defended himself by claiming that he could not be held responsible for how his books were interpreted and the case against him came to nothing since he had never been an official member of the Facist Party or of neo-fascist organizations, and he continued agitating for far-right causes and remained the guru of the neo-fascist Right in Italy until his death in 1974.

While remaining an independent intellectual, Evola was still influential among Italian neo-fascists whose members described themselves as the “generation of 1945”, hailed Evola as a “celestial warrior” and were opposed to both American capitalism and Soviet Communism. In 1956, he wrote Men Among the Ruins for this new generation of neo-fascists, with an introduction by Junio Valerio Borghese, a veteran of Mussolini’s fascist regime and one of the most influential figures of Italy’s post-war neo-fascist Right. In Men Among the Ruins, he argued that the task of the Right in the post-war years was a counter-revolution, or, more accurately, a “conservative revolution”, which consisted, politically, of outmaneuvering the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and the Italian Communist Party (PCI), who for him respectively represented American capitalism and Soviet Communism, and, ideologically (and by borrowing from Marxist Antonio Gramci’s ideas on cultural hegemony and counter-hegemony), of forming a counter-hegemony against the DC and the PCI (which he considered the hegemonic forces in Italy) which would be led by a minority elite of reactionary “supermen” adhering to an anti-bourgeois, warrior view of life. However he held that mainstream Italian conservatives had “played into the hands of the Left” by attaching themselves to the capitalist order and that his revolution should not be based on bourgeois sociopolitical structures, but on the the state and “values and interests of a superior character” which transcend the economy.

However, with post-war capitalist growth and consumerism sweeping away the remnants of tradition, hierarchy and order, Evola had given up on these means and his 1961 book, Riding the Tiger, was more pessimistic. For him, feminism and women’s liberation, the progress of modernity and liberty, and the spread of drugs, sex and alcohol meant that the world had “entered the final period of Kali Yuga” and nothing of it was worth salvaging, and his solution for this was for the West to retrace its steps and turn to spirituality through an anti-modern and traditional philosophy. Evola’s recommendations to his disciples was to withdraw from the politics of nation-states: he identified with aristocrats like Bismarck and, like Bismarck who considered nationalism to be a dangerous modern development, he was distrustful of nationalism, which in the aftermath of the French Revolution had been used by the then Left to defeat the aristocratic order and was still a revolutionary force in the form of Third World anti-colonial struggles in the 60s. Instead, he thought that a “new European order” would arise from the remains of the Second World War: he called for a cooperation between the the European reactionary elites against American and Soviet occupation of Europe modeled on the international volunteers who had joined the Waffen-SS, who for him were reminiscent of the Order of Teutonic Knights, and he was encouraged by the emergence all across post-war Europe of neo-fascist organizations, whom he encouraged into a total way against the Left and the Center in a “revolutionary struggle” to restore Tradition.

Evola’s influence among Italian neo-fascists in the 60s was even stronger than it had been in the 50s. Evola became the figurehead of counter-revolution among the generation of 1968 and Giorgio Almirante, the leader of the MSI, called Evola “our Marcuse – only better”, in reference to the status of the Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse as figurehead of the 1968 student movements and of the New Left. In the late 60s, many of Evola’s books were reissued and prominent neo-fascist leaders in the early 70s called him the “intellectual hero” of the militant neo-fascist movement in Italy and considered Riding the Tiger as its “breviary”. Evola was against accommodation with the liberal order, instead advocating for violence (Evola was fascinated by and agreed with Georges Sorel’s theories of violence), organizing the right-wing into a fighting force, calling on his followers to become “spiritual warriors” who would overthrow the liberal order through a “holy war” to establish a “metaphysical Regnum” and a “solar civilization” and declaring that, “It is not a question of contesting and polemicizing, but of blowing up everything”. The strategy of tension of neo-fascists in Italy escalated around this time, starting with the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan in 1969, which was one of the early episodes which marked the beginning of two decades of turmoil in Italy known as the Years of Lead, with numerous violent neo-fascists throughout this period using Evola’s works as inspiration. Evola, who had advocated a radical doctrine of anti-egalitarianism, anti-democracy, anti-liberalism and anti-Semitism, was the prime thinker of the Italian extra-parliamentary neo-fascist Right throughout the thirty years prior to his death in 1974.

German National Bolshevism

Laufenberg and Wolffheim

The very first National-Bolsheviks were Heinrich Laufenberg, a former member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who had been President of the Council of the Workers and Soldiers in Hamburg during the German Revolution, and Fritz Wolffheim, an ex-member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) who was then living in Hamburg, and who were both leaders of the Hamburg branch of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) during the 1910s. In 1919 they submitted to Karl Radek their policy of having the working class ally with the bourgeoisie into a nationalist dictatorship of the proletariat which would fight a national liberation war (a position which would strangely be adopted by various Marxist-Leninist and Maoist groups in the late 20th century) against the Entente powers occupying Germany following WWI. Laufenberg’s and Wolffheim’s proposal was rejected by Radek and labelled as an absurdity by Vladimir Lenin himself, and they were soon expelled from the KPD. Laufenberg and Wolffheim later helped the Communist Workers Party of Germany (KAPD), but were soon expelled from it as well because of their National Bolshevism, their expulsion being Radek’s condition for admitting the KAPD to the Third Congress of the Comintern.

The Treaty of Rapallo

Prussia, which then formed the core of Germany, had long looked towards Russia according to the long military tradition of its General Staff, which had considered Russia to be a natural ally from the reign of Frederick the Great in the 18th century onward, with several royal weddings having united the Prussian and Russian monarchies, and this alliance being later stressed again when the Tsar supported Prussia against Napoleon in the early 19th century. Bismarck, who had unified Germany, insisted that Prussia must align with Russia, who was Germany’s closest and mineral-rich neighbor, and Germany and Russia entertained strong trade relations due to Russia’s need for German goods and Germany’s need for raw materials from mineral-rich Russia from Bismarck’s days until the First World War.

Following Germany’s defeat in the First World War, the Weimar Republic sought to circumvent the limitations on the Prussian-dominated Reichswehr imposed by the Treaty of Versailles through secret military collaboration whereby illegal and secret far-right German paramilitaries of the Schwarze Reichswehr, underground formations of the Reichswehr which included Freikorps, were permitted to train in Soviet territory and provide training for the newly created Red Army. This cooperation was formalized by the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922 and the secret Soviet-German Military Pact, proposed by the Reichswehr‘s Hans von Seeckt and supported by the Reichswehr‘s conservative Prussian military elite, for whom the national interests of Russia and Germany were compatible despite their ideological differences. The Reichsbank‘s president Hjalmar Schacht negotiated for Germany to give credits to the Soviet Union while German firms were allowed to establish factories for the production of war equipment in Soviet territory (these circumstances meant that, ironically, many of the weapons produced in Soviet factories under the auspices of the Treaty of Rapallo were later used by the Nazi regime against Russian cities during the Second World War).

The start of the Occupation of the Ruhr by France and Belgium in 1923, meant to force Germany to continue paying war reparations, however threatened this cooperation and resulted in rising nationalism in Germany, especially among the working class, and the Comintern subsequently pushed for cooperation between the Communists and the ultra-nationalists. In June 1923 Radek gave a speech to the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Comintern praising Leo Schlageter, a far-right Freikorps member who together with his unit joined the NSDAP in 1921 and engaged in sabotage against the French forces occupying the Ruhr before being executed by them in May 1923. Radek’s speech was positively received from particular left-wing and right-wing circles in Germany and was a followed by a period of cooperation between the KPD and the Nazis against the Versailles Treaty during which KPD member Ruth Fischer infamously attacked “Jewish capital” in an attempt to appeal to Nazi students, and the KPD’s newspaper reprinted articles by members of the German far-right such as Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (though Moeller was critical of Radek’s ideas, he supported the idea of an alliance with Russia, which he considered to be a “proletarian nation” which would be a “natural ally” for “proletarian Germany”) even as its rank and file members were fighting against fascists on the streets.

This second National-Bolshevik wave died off during the period of growth Germany experienced from the mid- to late-1920s, though following the Comintern’s “social fascism” turn (itself partly a reaction to the SPD using Freikorps units to crush the Spartacist uprising, during which revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered) the KPD cooperated again with the NSDAP in an attempt to bring down the Social Democratic Party-led government of Prussia in 1931, again with opposition from its rank and file base and again with support from the Comintern, which wished to end diplomatic talks between France and Germany. The next year, the KPD participated in a failed strike together with the NSDAP, while again rank and file Communists instead engaged in street battles against Nazi Brownshirts, and which were damaging to the KPD by revealing its poor organizing skills and lack of workplace support and making it appear confused while helping Nazi propaganda by giving credence to NSDAP claims of being a worker friendly party without harming the Nazis’ relationship with the industrialists. This strategy, also based on the flawed accelerationist idea that the fascists’ policies would lead to a proletarian revolution and summed by then leader of the KPD Ernst Thälmann’s slogan “After Hitler, Our Turn!”, actively helped the rise of the Nazis, and the KPD refused to form a United Front with the SPD and preferred directing its attacks against the social demorats even after the Nazis seized power and unleashed their violence on the German Left.

Ernst Niekisch

The third period of National-Bolshevism came with Ernst Niekisch, a member of the SPD who had participated in the foundation of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and was chairman of its Central Council. Niekisch was later expelled from the SPD for his extreme nationalism, after which he joined the Old Social Democratic Party of Germany, which he pushed towards a more nationalist direction and called for a “Prussian-Slavonic bloc” from Vlissingen to Vladivostok, and became involved with the Conservative Revolution, though he never adhered to the “Prussian socialism” of the Conservative Revolutionaries and maintained his original Communist outlook. Niekisch saw the Russian Revolution as a national form of class struggle, advocated for a nationalist form of Communism and together with Conservative Revolutionary Ernst Jünger he joined the Consortium for the Study of Soviet Planned Economy (ARPLAN), which aimed to establish cooperation between Germany and the Soviet Union, and which he saw as the only way of opposing the Treaty of Versailles. Niekisch was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Nazi regime in 1934 and was released after the Second World War, becoming an orthodox Marxist and moving to West Germany following the suppression of the 1953 workers uprising by the German Democratic Republic with Soviet support. Among those influenced by Niekisch was Otto Paetel, who formed the Group of Social Revolutionary Nationalists, which opposed the Versailles Treaty, supported close cooperation with the Soviet Union and saw anti-capitalism as the means to free Germany from Western occupation. Unlike Niekisch, who was staunchly anti-Nazi, Paetel attempted to work with the Hitler Youth and many members of his organization also belonged to the “left wing” of the Nazi party of Gregor and Otto Strasser.

The Brownshirts and the Strasserists

Following the Nazis’ seizure of power in 1933, many Communists from the KPD defected to the Nazis, being derisively labeled as “Beefsteak Nazis”- Nazis who were “Brown on the outside and Red on the inside”. These former Communists joined and had a significant presence in the Sturmabteilung (abbreviated as the SA, also known as the Brownshirts and the Stormtroopers), the Nazi paramilitaries led by Ernst Röhm.

Ernst Röhm

Ernst Röhm was a veteran of the First World War, and an officer in the Imperial German Army and the Reichswehr who served in the Freikorps which destroyed the socialist Bavarian Soviet Republic. In 1919, he joined the recently formed German Workers’ Party, which became the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (the NSDAP, or the Nazi party) the next year, and Röhm soon became a close friend and ally of Hitler and helped him found the Sturmabteilung. In 1923 he participated in the Beer Hall Putsch, and after the failure of the coup he was tried and found guilty of high treason and discharged from the Reichswehr before spending two years as military advisor in Bolivia. Röhm was recalled back to Germany by Hitler after the latter’s electoral success in 1930 to take command of the SA. Röhm drastically expanded the SA and turned them into a paramilitary force which helped Hitler’s rise to power between 1930 and 1933 by fighting against Communists, engaging in racist and especially anti-Semitic violence, and intimidating opposition to the Nazis. Röhm and the SA belonged to a left-wing section of the Nazi party adhering to a “socialist” form of Nazism advocating for the overthrow of the German upper classes, nationalizations, and programs to support the petite bourgeoisie which was still anti-Semitic and anti-Communist, and Röhm saw the Brownshirts, whose members came primarily from the working class, as the core of the “revolution” envisaged by this wing of the Nazi party.

Following Hitler’s seizure of power, Röhm began agitating for a fascist “revolution” and calling for the the formation of a “people’s army” by merging the Reichswehr into the much larger SA, which terrified the army, the Junker landowners and the industrialists whose support Hitler needed to secure his power and for his plans to rearm Germany. Hitler himself had considered the socialist slogans as merely propaganda to attract the masses and regarded the SA as a force whose purpose was to provide the violence needed to propel the Nazi party into power which had become expendable. Following Hitler’s dismissal of a number of Nazi “radicals” and his alliance with industrialists, the dissatisfied SA increased their agitation for a “revolution”. Meanwhile, Hitler secured the support of the Reichswehr for his goal of succeeding President Paul von Hindenburg, in exchange of which he would curb the ambitions of Röhm, reduce the power of the SA and guarantee the Army’s and the Navy’s positions as the sole bearers of arms of his Reich. With the agitation of the SA intensifying, the Junkers and industrialists around President Paul von Hindenburg and Vice Chancellor von Papen called for an end to the Nazi terror. In June 1934 von Papen gave a speech, written by Edgar Julius Jung, against the excesses of the Nazi regime at the University of Marburg which called for an end to the “revolution” and the Nazi terror and for a restoration of measures of freedom, including freedom of the press. Goebbels attempted to suppress the speech in vain, and Papen was furious at the suppression of his speech and told Hitler he could not tolerate such a ban by a “junior minister”, insisting that he had spoken as a “trustee of the President” and warned Hitler that he would inform President Hindenburg of this immediately. Hindenburg himself soon issued an ultimatum to Hitler according to which he would declare martial law and hand over the state to the army unless order was not restored in Germany as soon as possible. This threatened Hitler’s goals of succeeding President Hindenburg as well as the Nazi government and, with the encouragement of Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring, who were Röhm’s enemies within the NSDAP, Hitler had Hitler had Röhm killed and the SA leadership purged from June 30 to July 2 of 1934 during the Night of the Long Knives. Edgar Julius Jung was arrested by the Gestapo and murdered during the Night of the Long Knives for his participation in the Marburg Speech. This purge was interpreted as a positive event by the KPD, who tried appealing to SA members.

Gregor and Otto Strasser

Strasserism was a form of National-Socialism advocated by the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, both German veterans of the First World War who later served in the Freikorps which destroyed the Bavarian Soviet Republic. Gregor took part in the Kapp Putsch of 1920 which attempted to overthrow the Weimar Republic and replace it with a reactionary authoritarian state while Otto joined the Social Democratic Party and opposed the coup. Both Gregor and Otto later joined Hitler’s Nazi party, Gregor joining the SA and expanding the Nazi party in Bavaria taking part in the Beer Hall Putsch, following which he was imprisoned for a few weeks until his election to the Bavarian Landtag allowed him to be freed, and after Hitler was released from jail and the ban on the NSDAP was lifted in 1925 he organized and expanded the Nazi party in northern Germany while Hitler was banned from speaking publicly. Otto, who had been a friend of Arthur Moeller van den Bruck in the early days of the June Club, was allegedly the one who had introduced the idea of the Third Reich to the Nazis.

The Strasser brothers led a left-wing faction of the Nazi party adhering to a Völkisch and anti-Marxist form of “socialism” which advocated for nationalizations and a mass action, worker-based and anti-capitalist while still extremely anti-Semitic and anti-Communist form of Nazism, with Otto interpreting Stalinism as a Russian form of National-Socialism and advocating for cooperation with the Soviet Union and with the anti-imperialist peoples of the East such as China and India against the “declining” West. The Strasser brothers opposed Hitler’s alliance with industrialists, and this as well as rivalry between Gregor Strasser and Hitler led to clashes between them, and Otto was expelled from the Nazi party in 1930 and formed the Black Front before later going in exile and later returning to West Germany after the Second World War, where he remained active among neo-fascists. In 1930 Hitler removed Gregor from his position as head of the NDSAP’s propaganda which he had occupied since 1926, and gave his position to Goebbels. After Gregor was proposed the post of Vice-Chancellor in 1932, the rift between Strasser and Hitler increased, and Strasser resigned at the end of the year and retired from politics. Gregor Strasser was later arrested and killed and his faction of the Nazi party was purged during the Night of the Long Knives.

Otto Ernst Remer and the Socialist Reich Party

Under the Nazi regime, Otto Ernst Remer had been a Wehrmacht officer and became Hitler’s bodyguard after playing a prominent role in suppressing the coup attempt of July 20, 1944. After the war he became the first of Hitler’s generals to enter the post-war political arena, and in 1949 he founded a Strasserist party called the Socialist Reich Party (SRP), which was initially one of many neo-Nazi groups which had sprouted in post-war Germany but quickly out-flanked the rest of the ultra-nationalist movement and became West Germany’s leading far-right organization.

Like many “former” Nazis, Remer had been approached by US intelligence in the late 40s, but he rejected their attempts to recruit him. During this period of large-scale restoration and recruitment of Nazis by the Americans and the Western-backed Federal German Republic in the early post-war period, many “former” Nazis had joined Konrad Adenauer’s governing Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and West Germany’s civil service on condition that they officially recanted their Nazi views and supported the Western alliance, but Remer, on the other hand, mocked the former Nazis who converted to liberal democracy after the war and declared that he would not help the Americans so long as Germany was an “occupied country”. Remer and the leaders of the SRP were among the many veterans of the Nazi regime who considered the defeat of the Nazis at the battle of Stalingrad to be a confirmation of Bismarck’s injunction that the interests of Germany must never come in conflict with those of Russia, and he and a number of SRP activists instead decided to agitate from the outside against the Allied occupation of West Germany and incited the crowds against the German Federal Republic’s proximity to the United States, relentlessly attacking the United States and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s “American satellite policy” and blaming them for the partition of Germany. He railed against the “shit democracy” imposed by the Americans, attacked Konrad Adenauer as an American puppet, referred to Hitler’s chosen successor Karl Dönitz as the “last legitimate sovereign of an all-German Reich”, denied the Holocaust and dismissed the Nazi regime’s atrocities as “Allied propaganda” while claiming that National-Socialism “could not be eradicated”, and his SRP was at the time described as “the first party in which the Old Nazis can feel at home”. Remer rejected any cooperation with the Western powers and instead advocated for Europe to be an “independent third force” opposed to both capitalism and Communism which would supposedly be led by a “strong, reunified German Reich“.

A large minority of Germans who believed that Adenauer “prioritized American interests over German ones” was receptive to Remer’s nationalist-neutralist line, and the American occupation authorities watched in dismay as the SRP gained momentum. The SRP soon attracted about 10,000 members and set up various auxiliary organizations, including a women’s league, a youth group, an anti-Marxist labor union, and the Reichsfront, a paramilitary formation whose members were largely employees of the British-run German Service Organization, which included all German employees of the British occupation forces in Germany, with British press reporting that most of Remer’s Brownshirt army was housed in British military installations. The Reichsfront was soon dissolved by an edict, and in September 1950 the West German government declared the SRP an enemy of the state and federal employees were threatened with dismissal if they joined the SRP after it scored well in the local elections. This policy was supported by US intelligence, who had been keeping tabs on Remer and compiling reports on the SRP, considering it the most dangerous of radical rightist parties in West Germany, and who feared that the SRP would gain control of the Bundestag and legally come to power like the pre-war Nazis. The SRP was however still able to mobilize sufficiently large masses of the German electorate by its shameless appeals to the Nazi regime so that it was able to score 11% of the vote in state elections in Lower Saxony in May 1951, out-polling Adenauer’s CDU in several districts. The apathy of the German public concerning the rise of the neo-Nazis worried the Americans, who feared a resurgence of German nationalism. However, even though SRP candidates were banned from campaigning publicly, it continued to score well in local elections, receiving nearly as many votes as the CDU in Bremen. West German police soon raided SRP offices in Hamburg and other cities, breaking up meetings with tear gas and billy club attacks, and the Federal Republic banned the Reichszeitung, the SRP’s newspaper, and started legal proceedings to outlaw the party. Remer threatened to retaliate by answering terror with terror and vigorously denounced the Western alliance while avoiding criticism of the Soviet Union and East Germany.

With the Cold War settling in, the Soviets were alarmed by the Western powers pushing for the rearmament of West Germany and its integration into an anti-Communist military bloc, and they condemned these plans as an attempt to resurrect the fascist Wehrmacht under American control. In an attempt to derail the rearmament process, in March 1952 Stalin endorsed German reunification in free elections up to the Oder-Neisse line with free elections in a diplomatic note more commonly known as the Stalin Note or the March Note. According to this proposal, Germany would be allowed to maintain its own military and weapons industry, restrictions on German trade and economic development would be lifted, and all foreign occupation troops would be withdrawn after an agreement while all former members of the German army and all former Nazis, except for those condemned for war crimes, would have their civil and political rights fully restored. The condition was that Germany would remain neutral and would not be allowed to join any coalition or military alliances with its former enemies or against any power which had fought against it during the Second World War. The proposal swayed fence sitters in West Germany and galvanized neutralist feeling, with unification being more popular than integration into the West according to surveys, and even some members of Adenauer’s CDU were favorable to the Soviet proposal: reunification and self-determination without war, an independent German army and a market for German products in the Eastern bloc was more attractive for them than the prospect of a permanently divided Germany under American control and without any possibility of regaining the territories lost during the war. Stalin reiterated his proposal twice that year, but Adenauer and the Americans each time dismissed the offer as a “public-relations gesture calculated to disrupt the Western alliance” and tried to wriggle out by asserting that only a democratically elected German government could decide whether or not to align itself with either superpower. The American refusal to accept a neutral Germany out of fear it would be “favorable to Soviet plans” thus aborted a chance to end the Cold War.

[Note: The Bruderschaft was a political and mystical secret society founded in July 1949 as a paramilitary cadre organization by former Hitler Youth, Wehrmacht and SS officers. The Bruderschaft had a membership of 2,500 members and therefore did hope to achieve its goals through the democratic processes due to its small membership. The Bruderschaft cultivated ties with neo-Nazi groups in South America, the Middle-East and the rest of Europe, being instrumental in the underground ratlines that allowed Nazis to flee abroad after the Second World War.

The Bruderschaft had a close working relationship with the SRP, and its chief ideologue, the former SS officer Alfred Franke-Gricksch, held a position in line with Remer’s by supporting the concept of “Europe as a third force” and calling for a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. Franke-Gricksch visited East Germany for a series of meetings with the aim of coordinating a common struggle for reunification on invitation by the Lieutenant General Vincent Müller, the vice-chairman of the National Democratic Party of East Germany, the East German political party set up for former members of the Nazi party and the Wehrmacht by the Soviets and which was allowed to operate in the same bloc led by East Germany’s ruling Marxist-Leninist party, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Franke-Gricksch quickly opened lines of communication with the Soviet Military Administration and the East Zone authorities while also being in contact with Otto Skorzeny, the former Waffen-SS officer who had once freed Mussolini from prison and was at that time a prominent member of the Bruderschaft, concerning his visits to the East Zone.

(Note: The setting up of the National Democratic Party was part of Stalin’s strategy to use German nationalism against the West in the same way that the Americans were exploiting German national sentiments against the USSR. In January 1947, Stalin had instructed SED leaders to attract Nazi collaborators instead of eliminating them to avoid pushing all former Nazis to the Western camp. Stalin’s decision to cooperate with ex-Nazis however dismayed German Communists and the Soviet Military Administration, who waited until a year to implement it and disbanded the commission on denazification only in May 1948. Stalin expected the idea of a centralized, reunified and neutral Germany to be so irresistible to German nationalists that it would overcome their enmity towards the Soviets and the Communists, and Soviet diplomacy and propaganda pushed the idea of a centralized German state which was contrasted with Western proposals of federalization and decentralization. Reluctant to take the responsibility for Germany’s partition and wanting that role to be played by the Western powers, Stalin deliberately stayed one step behind the Western powers’ actions, creating units of secret police and military in the East Zone after the Western powers took decisive steps towards the separation of East Germany.)

The founder and co-leader of the Bruderschaft, Helmut Beck-Broichsitter, had also been visiting the East Zone, though this was part of a double-faced game whereby he secretly negotiated with the Soviets while at the same time offering his services to the Americans. Beck-Broichsitter proposed to American State Department officials the idea of a military vigilante network handpicked by the Bruderschaft to combat “Red terror” throughout West Germany.

Beck-Broichsitter and Franke-Gricksch were unable to agree on which side to support in the East-West conflict and became embroiled in a major dispute which split the Bruderschaft into competing factions and eventually destroyed the organization. Beck-Broichsitter complained to the Americans that Franke-Gricksch had more money than him because of the Soviets’ largesse while also accusing him of extorting money from German industrialists who were seeking to buy protection in the event of a Soviet invasion. Beck-Broichsitter revealed his own offers of Soviet financial support to the Americans in an attempt to use this as a lever obtain money from them.

Word of Beck-Broichsitter’s association with US intelligence soon reached the Soviets, and the Soviet authorities suspected the Bruderschaft had been infiltrated by American intelligence and kept a wary eye on Franke-Gricksch. In October 1951, Alfred Francke-Gricksch disappeared in East Berlin and was never heard from again. His wife who had disappeared while searching for him returned to West Germany some years later with the information that he had been sentenced to death by a Soviet military court.]

Remer saw the Note as a proposal for genuine negotiations and condemned Adenauer’s intransigence. With opposition to American plans for rearming West Germany pervasive all across the West German political spectrum, the neutralist scene included anti-war pacifists, Social Democrats, Communists and even fanatical Nazis, and the SRP started working with the West German Communist Party (SRP chairman Fritz Dorls had already met with Communist Party leaders to cement their anti-Adenauer ties in 1951 and both parties campaigned against US intervention in the Korean War). While the Communist Party was effectively a proxy of Soviet foreign policy with little influence over West German politics, the SRP was a growing mass-based party which instead pursued strategic relations with the Soviet Union with the hope of reunifying and rearming Germany and using its position between the East and the West to dominate Europe, with Dorls declaring that an understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union was the only danger to the SRP’s plans. Dorls and SRP operatives occasionally traveled to East Germany to clandestinely meet the East German National Front, an organization closely monitored by Communist officials which was set up by the Soviets as a concession for former Nazis, army officials and figures associated with the Nazi regime after the abrupt end of Soviet denazification policy in 1948.

[Note: While the Soviets had been better than the Western powers at purging Nazis from public institutions and bringing them to trial for their war crimes, Soviet policy soon shifted with the hardening of the Cold War and the US plans to arm West Germany, and soon East Germany took a “nationalist course” and “former” Nazis who had “atoned by honest labor” were incorporated into the new regime, with ex-Nazis who converted to Communism being made eligible for rehabilitation and many Gestapo, SS and Wehrmacht veterans being integrated into the East German police and the Stasi, though this rehabilitation never occurred on a scale as large as in West Germany.]

In addition to discussing with former Nazis in East Germany, the SRP met directly with Soviet authorities there; both the Soviets and the SRP saw tactical considerations as being more important than ideological differences, and Soviet intelligence saw the neo-Nazi SRP as being a better investment than the Communist Party while the SRP was willing to work with the Soviets to receive the funding it needed. During this period, the SRP received Soviet funding while the Communist Party did not receive any such support from the USSR and, though SRP leaders did not acknowledge their contacts with the Soviets at the time, Remer later admitted having sent representatives to the Soviet headquarters in Pankow, Berlin. Though the SRP was committed to radical far-right ideology and was professedly anti-Communist, it was extremely anti-American and anti-British while never criticizing East Germany and the Soviet Union, instead supporting the Soviet line on neutrality in exchange of support for East German authorities and acting as a disruptive element in West Berlin for the Soviets, the party itself being suspected of working with the Soviets and soon gaining a reputation for having ties to the USSR, with these rumors being confirmed when a number of SRP officials soon left the party when they learned of its links to the Soviet bloc.

[Note: Another member of the German far-right who supported the Soviet line was the former SS officer Fritz Brehm, who was a major figure in the Bavarian section of the German Party, a radical nationalist party which had participated in the Bundestag’s original national ruling coalition. Brehm played a leading role in a number of Soviet-financed newspapers which supported a nationalist-neutralist line.

However not all neo-Nazis who had an anti-American stance were paid Soviet agents, and some radical nationalists wanted on their own what coincidentally happened to be Soviet objectives as well, and since they were doing out of their own volition what the Soviets would have wanted them to do, there was no need for bribery or solicitude from the Soviets. In other cases, it was the radical nationalists who, for various reasons, contacted the Soviets and East Zone authorities instead of being sought out by them.]

Initially, there had been a significant grassroots opposition to the rearmament, especially among ex-soldiers who formed a large and potentially disruptive element in West Germany and who identified with the slogan “Ohne mich!” (“Count me out!”) that Remer had popularized and which was the rallying cry of the SRP against the Bonn-Washington rearmament axis. Remer was staunchly against accommodation with the West and declared that he would “only consider German rearmament when it was possible to assure all of Germany was to be defended”, and insisted that Germans should not fight to cover an American retreat if the Soviets got the upper hand in a war. He taunted US officials by announcing that he would “show the Russians all the way to the Rhine” and that the SRP would “post themselves as policemen, spreading their arms so that the Russians can find their way through Germany as quickly as possible” should a conflict erupt between the US and the USSR. Remer invoked the treaty of Rapallo, which has always remained a powerful symbol and slogan in German-Russian diplomacy, to insist that German national interests required an agreement with Russia on the basis of the Soviet proposals of March 1952.

Attempting to undermine the SRP and boost his own popularity, Adenauer started courting soldiers associations, including the most prominent of these, the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit (Mutual Aid Association, abbreviated as HIAG), a lobbying group formed in October 1951 by former Waffen-SS members which glorified the Waffen-SS while publishing negationist material denying its crimes and campaigned for Waffen-SS veterans who had been denied pensions and other benefits after the Nuremberg Trials had established the entire Waffen-SS as a criminal organization.

Remer’s hard-line pro-Soviet posturing however may have played into the hands of the German nationalists who supported cooperation with the West so long as they could obtain concessions from the US: with a possible new Treaty of Rapallo threatening American plans to rearm West Germany, Adenauer pressured the Americans into additional compromises during the negotiations for the independence of West Germany. American insistence on a West German army and fears that West Germany would drift towards neutrality if Adenauer’s requests were refused meant that the US yielded on nearly every point, and the Contractual Agreement signed on May 1952 allowed the Federal German Republic to exercise authority over its internal and external affairs in exchange of which West Germany would commit 12 divisions to a European military force. With its newfound sovereignty, the Federal Republic soon passed a law which allowed former SS members to join the Bundeswehr, the new West German army, with the same rank they had held during the Second World War, with generals who had served in Hitler’s Wehrmacht commanding the new army, a decision which earned Adenauer the support of Kurt Meyer, the head of the HIAG.

The Americans found the Cold War to be preferable to a neutral and unified Germany who might play the East and the West against each other to dominate Europe, and therefore adopted a dual containment policy of putting golden handcuffs on Germany (the Americans believed that anchoring West Germany into the Western alliance was the best way of preventing a resurgence of nationalism and irredentism, and simultaneously hoped that the economic recovery and rise of living standards would sweep away the Germans’ Völkisch obsessions) while containing the Soviets: while the overt purpose of NATO was to be a Western alliance against the Soviet Union, its tacit purpose was also to contain Germany, and it has been argued that its basis was to protect Western interests against Germany rather than against the USSR. The post-war economic recovery in West Germany and the suppression of the workers uprising of 1953 in East Germany made the West’s golden handcuffs appear more attractive to many in West Germany, and the debate over rearmament was so divisive that it seriously undermined the anti-Communist opposition to Adenauer and caused so many splits among the radical nationalists that the neo-Nazis who supported neutralism were weakened. At the same time, Adenauer won over prominent right-wing leaders by offering them ministerial positions and other concessions.

US officials meanwhile feared the SRP’s willingness to cut a deal with the Soviet Union to unify Germany, and recommended that the SRP be destroyed. The SRP had been kept under close surveillance by Western intelligence agencies, and many of its leading members were convicted on various charges which ranged from slandering the Federal Republic to tearing down the West German flag. Remer himself was sentenced to a four-month prison sentence for publicly insulting Adenauer, with Remer comparing his conviction to the persecution and crucifixion of Jesus Christ, causing political figures in Germany to fear that Remer would become a martyr and that his party would benefit from it. While serving his sentence, Remer was tried and convicted for defaming the 20th of July conspirators (Remer’s book, July 20th, was one of the most popular books about the coup attempt in circulation among German ultra-nationalist circles), with the landmark case establishing that the Nazi regime was illegal and that the Germans who tried overthrowing Hitler were not guilty of treason. The SRP soon began to fracture under intense government pressure, with key members forming new groups, other members vowing to continue the party underground, and talks of infiltrating and taking over other parties. Rudolf Aschenauer, the pro-Nazi attorney who had been defense lawyer for hundreds of Nazis during the Nuremberg trials, agreed to form a camouflaged successor party to the SRP in the form of new nationalist party, though his plans were doomed once US intelligence learned about them (strangely, despite his ties to the pro-Soviet SRP, Aschenauer had also worked with the rabidly anti-Communist American senator Joseph McCarthy in an attempt to overturn the convictions of Nazi war criminals who had been sentenced for participating in the Malmedy massacre where unarmed American prisoners of war had been killed by the Waffen SS). In October 1952, the SRP was branded as the direct successor of the Nazi party and was outlawed by West German Constitutional Court. Seeking to avoid another prison term, Remer went into hiding, making his way to Egypt in 1953 where, in his own words, he “served as political advisor to Nasser”, and then to Damascus.

Francis Parker Yockey

As Anarchist researcher Kevin Coogan details in his book, Francis Parker Yockey was born in Chicago, Illinois in the United States, where he briefly flirted with Marxism in his youth before soon abandoning it for fascism. After reading Oswald Spengler and meeting Carl Schmitt, Yockey came under the influence of the Conservative Revolutionaries, including Haushofer, and was influenced by their ideas on cultural elites and geopolitics, their support of an alliance between Germany and the Soviet Union and their advocacy of German support for anti-colonial struggles.

Yockey would later associate with fascists during the Interwar period and during the Second World War including Charles Coughlin, the German-American Bund, the National German-American Alliance, the Silver Shirts, the America First Movement, among others. During WWII, Yockey would enlist in the US army despite opposing the entry of the US in the war, disappearing for