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The Wirtschaftliche Aufbau-Vereinigung (Economic Reconstruction Organization) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German Nazis who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. Aufbau was also the name of the organization's periodical.[1]
The organization was founded in 1921 by General Vasily Biskupsky and the political writer Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. The future top Nazi functionaries Alfred Rosenberg and Arno Schickedanz served as officers within Aufbau[2] According to the historian Michael Kellogg, the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing the NSDAP with, for example, funds from monarchists and businessmen, such as Henry Ford.[3]
Prominent Aufbau members were involved in terrorist activities and collaborated with Organisation Consul in the assassinations of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and Russian émigré Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (who shielded the actual target, the Constitutional Democratic leader Pavel Milyukov) in 1922.[4]
After the death of Scheubner-Richter in the Beer Hall Putsch, Aufbau rapidly declined, and notions of Lebensraum and Slavic inferiority, naturally unpopular with the Russians, gained a stronger hold on the Nazi movement.[5]
Kellogg claims that the long-term influence of Aufbau played a large role in the theorization of the final solution and in Hitler's decision to divert troops away from Moscow towards Ukraine in 1941.[6]
Prominent members of Aufbau included:
- Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)
- Alfred Rosenberg (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)
- Fyodor Vinberg (Russian officer)
- Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork (Russian officer)
- General Vasily Biskupsky (Russian officer)
- Erich Ludendorff
- Max Amann
- Boris Brasol (Russian émigré)
- Sergey Taboritsky (Russian journalist)
- Max Bauer (advisor to Ludendorff)
- Ivan Poltavets'-Ostrianytsia (head of the Ukrainian section)
- ^ Laqueur 1965, p. 76.
- ^ Petrov, Igor; Beyda, Oleg (2021-01-01). "Stakeholders, Hangers-On, and Copycats: the Russian Right in Berlin in 1933" Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies – The George Washington University. lliberalism Studies Program Working Papers no. 6, April 2021.
- ^ Kellogg 2005, p. 15–16.
- ^ Kellogg 2005, p. 276.
- ^ Laqueur 1965, p. 79, 89.
- ^ Kellogg 2005, p. 241, 279.