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From The Hitler Conspiracies (Richard J. Evans, 2010) pp23-37

It was in Russia, however, that the ideas that went into the Protocols found their final synthesis. Russia’s five million or so Jews were subject to numerous legal restrictions, including the obligation to live in an area on the western side of the Tsar’s domains known as the Pale of Settlement. As a number of Jews, angered by these restrictions, joined the growing revolutionary movement, the supporters of the Tsarist autocracy and the Orthodox Church unleashed a swelling wave of extreme and violent antisemitism. It was in this atmosphere of mounting political tension that the Protocols came into the public domain. They were first published, though without the final section, in the autumn of 1903 in a newspaper edited by Pavel Aleksandrovich Krushevan, a noted antisemite who had recently organized a pogrom in Kishinev, in his native province of Bessarabia, in which forty-five Jews had been killed and over a thousand Jewish homes and shops destroyed. In 1905 a revised version was published by Sergei Nilus, a minor landowner and former civil servant who blamed the Jews for the failure of his estate. A religious rather than a racist antisemite, obsessed with visions of the coming Apocalypse, Nilus procured a wider distribution for the document, improved the quality of the language and added material bringing the Protocols into a bogus relationship with the Basel Zionist Congress. Significant portions of the text took up features of The Rabbi’s Speech, putting them into a new form and context.

But these did not form the main part of the text. In presenting it to the public, Krushevan mentioned that the document was at least in part translated from the French, and indeed sections of it were extensively lifted from a tract published in 1864 by a French writer, Maurice Joly. This was anything but an antisemitic document. It was in fact an attack from the left on the manipulative and dictatorial regime of the Emperor Napoleon III, cast in the form of an imaginary dialogue between Montesquieu, who speaks in favour of liberalism, and Machiavelli, who expounds many of the cynical justifications for dictatorship that can be found in the Protocols and which Joly attributed to the Emperor Napoleon III. Not surprisingly, it is Machiavellis arguments that mostly feature in the antisemitic tract, transmuted into justifications for the political aims and methods of the supposed Jewish world conspiracy. It was most probably in 1902 that the Protocols were actually put together in southern Russia (the language used in early editions bears strong traces of Ukrainian). The unknown compiler assembled parts of The Rabbi’s Speech and the satire by Joly (which made its way from France to Russia in the mid-1890s and was translated into Russian) with a concoction of the supposed decisions of the Zionist Congress in Basel to form the final text of the Protocols.35 The hybrid origins of the tract were also revealed by their obsession with finance, especially the Gold Standard, in which they gave a distorted version of some of the policies that the Russian Finance Minister Sergei Yulyevich Witte was trying to introduce in order to modernize the Russian economy, bitterly opposed by conservative elements among the Russian elites.

In their final form, therefore, the Protocols were a hastily assembled mishmash of French, German and Russian sources, and their confused and chaotic nature bears witness to the slapdash and careless manner in with which they were composed 36 Cohn’s hypothesis that they already existed in full, in French, in 1897 or 1898, has no foundation in the documentary record: the pre-Nilus assembly was definitely carried out in Russia. Unfortunately, it is still unclear precisely who produced this final version: although Pavel Krushevan may well have played a role in putting them together, there is no hard evidence to back up this suspicion, and the identity of the compiler remains for the moment at least a mystery.

Russian antisemitism found violent expression before 1914 in the shape of the counter-revolutionary ‘Black Hundreds’, gangs who roamed the country in the wake of the failed 1905 Revolution murdering Jews, whom they identified as the malign agents of the upheaval. Antisemitic violence re-emerged in the wake of the Revolution of 1917, above all in the White’ counter-revolutionary movement against the Bolsheviks, who came to power in 1917 and imprisoned and subsequently murdered Tsar Nicholas II, along with his family. As civil war spread across Russia in the autumn of 1918, two ‘White’ officers, Pyotr Nikolaevich Schabelsky-Bork and Fyodor Viktorovich Vinberg, both fanatical antisemites, escaped to the West on a train provided by the Germans, who were evacuating the areas they had continued to occupy in Ukraine during the First World War until the Armistice of iI November. Arriving as Germany itself was in the throes of revolution, following the enforced abdication of the Kaiser, the two men lost no time in publicizing their view that both the Russian and the German revolutions, as well as the world war itself, were the work of the Elders of Zion. They brought a copy of the Protocols with them, and in the third issue of their yearbook Luch Sveta (Ray of Light) they printed the complete text of Nilus’s final, 1911 version of the document.

They also gave a copy to a man called Ludwig Müller von Hausen, founder of an obscure ultra-right organization established in Germany shortly before the war called the Association against the Presumption of the Jews. Subsidized by a group of aristocratic patrons, including most probably members of the deposed German royal family, the pamphlet was translated into German and published by Müller von Hausen in January 1920. In the violent post-revolutionary atmosphere of the times, when the former Imperial Establishment, along with many of its middle-class supporters and beneficiaries, was raging against the German revolution and the democratic Weimar Republic founded in its wake, the tract was an instant success in circles of the far right. It was reprinted five times before the end of 1920 and sold over 120,000 copies within a few months. By 1933 it had gone through thirty-three editions, many of them decked out with freshly composed appendices and specially drawn illustrations. ‘With the publication in German of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Hitler’s most recent biographer Volker Ullrich has concluded,.. conspiracy theory had become a stock element of ethnic-chauvinistic German propaganda 40 For extreme right-wing antisemites, Germany’s defeat in 1918, the fall of the Kaiser’s regime and the coming of democracy in the Weimar Republic were all proof of the accuracy of the Protocols. The Jews had triumphed, and so they no longer needed to keep the document secret, as they had allegedly done up to then.

One of the first to read the book in German was General Erich Ludendorff, who had been in effect the military leader of Germany during the latter part of the First World War and took a leading part in two violent but unsuccessful attempts to overthrow the Weimar Republic, including the Kapp Putsch of 1920, when Berlin was briefly taken over in an ultra-right military coup, and the Nazi ‘beer-hall putsch’ in Munich in 1923. By the time he got hold of a copy, he had already written his account of the war, but he was still able to insert an extra footnote recommending the Protocols to his readers and declaring that in the light of their revelations, modern and especially contemporary history would need to be completely rewritten. Ludendorff went on to note that the document ‘has been strongly attacked by the opposing side and characterized as historically inaccurate. But this did not really matter. The fact was that he had already formulated his views, and the Protocols did not in the end have a great deal of influence on them.

However, the document clearly did influence a secret, conspiratorial collection of young far-right extremists in the early years of the Weimar Republic known as the Organisation Consul. The group was among other things responsible for the assassination of Walther Rathenau, a wealthy businessman, intellectual and politician who had been a key figure in the management of the economy during the war. In 1922 Rathenau was appointed German Foreign Minister. He quickly concluded a treaty with the Soviet Union in which Germany and Russia, the two pariahs of the international order, renounced territorial and financial claims on each other. It was an important step towards bringing Germany back into the diplomatic arena. But for the extreme right, it was an act of treachery to conclude any kind of agreement with the Bolsheviks, let alone one renouncing all daims on Soviet territory. For the Organisation Consul in particular, it was a product of the international Jewish conspiracy described in the Pro-tocols. For Rathenau was a Jew, and in 1909 he had been incautious enough to complain in a newspaper article that three hundred men, all of whom know one another, guide the economic destinies of the Continent and seek their successors among their followers’. His purpose was to advocate a broadening out of the economic elites of Germany, France and other European countries, and he made no mention of Jews anywhere in the article, but for the young fanatics of the Organisation Consul, encouraged by Ludendorff, the claim could only have one meaning: Rathenau, as Ernst Techow, one of the members of the organization, alleged, was one of the three hundred Elders of Zion, whose purpose and aim was to bring the whole world under Jewish influence, as the example of Bolshevist Russia already showed’. Questioned by the judge at the assassins’ trial, Techow said that he had got the idea of the ‘three hundred Elders’ from ‘a pamphlet’, namely the Protocols, and in his summing-up the judge drew the attention of the courts and the media to ‘that vulgar libel, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which sows in confused and immature minds the urge to murder’.

The Protocols did not impact on these young murderers in an ideological vacuum. For the thinking of the ultra right in Germany already before the war was permeated by a heady brew of ideas derived from the French monarchist Artur de Gobineau, who in the mid-nineteenth century invented the concept of an Aryan master race; the Social Darwinist concept of history as a struggle between races for the ‘survival of the fittest’; and the identification of socialism as the product of a Jewish plot to destroy European civilization. Such ideas were propagated in a number of publications, most notably the foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899) by the antisemitic composer Richard Wagner’s son-in-law, the even more antisemitic Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Similar works, such as Theodor Fritsch’s Handbook of the Jewish Question or Adolf Wahrmund’s The Law of the Nomad and Today’s Jewish Domination (1887), also advanced the claim that the Jews were the hidden force behind many events and tendencies their authors regarded as malign.* Ultra-right nationalist newspapers, magazines, tracts and pamphlets propagated the idea of the Jews as a hidden influence behind everything they hated in modern life, from feminism and socialism to atonal music and abstract art, well before the First World War. In the wake of Germany’s defeat in the First World War, and the febrile atmosphere of revolution and counter-revolution that followed it, antisemitism became a central part of far-right ideology.

In post-revolutionary Bavaria in particular, a number of tiny counter-revolutionary political groupings fulminated against the Jews, who, they claimed, both prompted revolutionary subversion and engaged in war profiteering. Such propaganda of course grossly exaggerated the role of Jews both in the Socialist and Communist parties and in the world of banking and high finance. The obvious objection to such claims, namely that capitalists and Communists spent much of their time and energy fighting each other, was met with the paranoid response that this only showed how the Jews were acting as hidden puppet-masters, dividing society against itself from behind the scenes. It was from this milieu, rather than directly from the Protocols, that Adolf Hitler gained the antisemitic beliefs that were so central to his world-view.

Hitler first mentioned the Protocols in notes he compiled for a meeting held on 12 August 192I; a report of a speech he delivered in the south Bavarian town of Rosenheim on 19 August 1921 noted that
‘Hitler shows from the book The Elders of Zion, drawn up at the Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, that establishing their rule, by whatever means, has always been and will always be the Semites® goal?47 However, Hitler’s private library, which eventually contained more than 16,000 volumes, did not contain a copy of the Protocols. Even if it had, that would not have proved that he had read the document; almost all of the volumes in the collection were clearly unread. Like many people, he learned about the Protocols indirectly. Leaving aside the probability that he was informed of their content, or at least their import, through conversations with his friends, notably his early mentor Dietrich Eckart, after the end of the First World War the vehicle seems to have been a series of newspaper articles ghost-written for the American motor manufacturer Henry Ford and published in i920 in a collected, bound edition under the title The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, and translated into German in 1922. A copy was included in Hitler’s library. A large part of the book, beginning with Chapter 1o, is devoted to an exposition of the Protocols, illustrated by copious quotations from the text. It was from this book that Hitler’s later propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels also learned about the Protocols in 1924, prompting him to seek out the actual document so that he could gain a proper understanding of the ‘Jewish question’, as he put it.

By 1923, as hyperinflation was destroying economic life and social stability in Germany, Hitler was referring to the Protocols in his speeches. Among other things, he declared: ‘According to the Zionist Protocols the intention is to make the masses submit through hunger to a second revolution [after that of 1918] under the Star of David. 50 Not long after this, Hitler attempted to seize power in Munich in a violent armed coup and was arrested, tried and sentenced to a brief period of ‘fortress confinement’ by a lenient nationalist judge. He used his enforced leisure to compose his lengthy political and autobiographical tract Mein Kampf (My Struggle), and here, too, he made reference to the Protocols.