Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism 1917-1045 (Cambridge University Press, 2005, pp. 327
is an important, indeed startling volume in the excellent series "New Studies in European History". It was originally a dissertation at UCLA, and it is not light reading. Kellogg did research in numerous European archives. He traces the history of anrt.semitism in Germany and Russia, bringing in Wagner and his clique. Review of 'The Russian Roots of Nazism', Michael Kellogg, Cambridge University Press £45
Michael Kellogg has set himself a major task - to show that the roots of German Nazism came from reactionary anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic émigrés from the Russian Revolution. In attempting to do so, the author tries to defend what he calls 'a middle position' between the extreme German exclusivist position of Daniel Goldhagen (Hitler's Willing Executioners), who argued that the Germans were murderously anti-Semitic by nature and nurture, and the arguments of historians such as Ernst Nolte who claim that Nazism was primarily a reaction against Bolshevism.
However, he says that not enough attention has been paid to Alfred Rosenberg. Rosenberg ia the best known of a group of White Russians, many of them, like him from the Baltic states. who emigrated to Germany and greatly influenced the Nazi Party.. They helped establish in Bavaria an organization called Aufbau. They financed it, partly with money from Henry Ford. Aufbau was behind the campaign to discredit the Weimar Republic and the assassination of its Jewish Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau in 1922. This whole political structure came crashing down with the defeat of Hitler. The subject of this book is highly controversial.
