Anti-Bolshevist League
As early as December 1918, the original leadership group was planning to found a "National Socialist” party and agitated for a “German socialism” with a nationalist twist.
The circle around Stadtler and Heinrich von Gleichen was ousted from the management of the league in the spring of 1919 and continued its organizational activities in the Juniklub and in the associated Politisches Kolleg, journalistically above all in the magazine the Das Gewissen.
The initiator of the creation of the League was 32-year-old Eduard Stadtler, formerly a school teacher and activist of the Catholic Center Party, who returned from Russian captivity after the end of the First World War.
[5] Through the mediation of Helfferich, Stadtler received 5,000 marks in cash personally on November 28, 1918, as a "gift" from the Deutsche Bank from its director Paul Mankiewitz.
By the end of January, the league had set up branches in Hamburg, Bremen, Königsberg, Düsseldorf, Essen, Dresden, Halle, Leipzig and Wroclaw Legally, it was a non-profit association and as such was subject to the supervision of the State Commissioner for the Regulation of War Welfare in Prussia.
[8] The only item on the agenda was Stadtler's lecture "Bolshevism as a World Danger", which was intended to convince the business people present of the need to act against the revolution.
The American social historian Gerald D. Feldman gives significantly lower numbers: According to this, the fund received five million Reichsmarks from each business leader present.
The existence of the fund is considered to be certain in research, but the 500 million marks mentioned by Stadtler - an enormous amount at this point in time despite already noticeable inflation - are regarded as an "exaggeration or [...] [total sum] from the inflationary period".
In his memoirs, Stadtler reports how, after the end of the Spartacist Uprising, on January 12, 1919, he visited Waldemar Pabst, the commander of the Garde-Kavallerie-Schützen-Division, which was one of the largest troop units still intact in the Reichswehr under the supreme command of Hans von Seeckt had been ordered to Berlin at the beginning of the year to put down uprisings against the provisional Reich government, in the Eden Hotel.
He had convinced him of the "necessity" of the killings and broke "Gustav Noske's hesitance" about using the military in Berlin days before:“Parliament could remain stolen from us soldiers at the front, it would depend on men and deeds; if there are no leaders to be seen on our side for the time being, then at least the other side shouldn’t have any either.” Probably through an informer paid by one of Stadtler's organizations, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were tracked down by a "Wilmersdorf militia" on the evening of January 15 in their hiding place they had just occupied in Wilmersdorf, taken prisoner and taken to the Hotel Eden.
The members of the troop and vigilante received a large reward per person, which, as non-fiction author Frederik Hetman presumed also came from the anti-Bolshevik fund.
[12] As the immediate danger of the "Sovietization" of Germany subsided, the League increasingly emphasized the solidarity and national socialist elements of its ideology.
"[4] Stadtler explained that they wanted to break away from the competing association to combating Bolshevism, which published hate posters with bounty awards on Karl Radek and other leading members of the Spartacus League.
According to documents from the Reich Commissioner for the Surveillance of Public Order, by the end of 1922 she had organized exhibitions in 80 German cities that were visited by around 800,000 people, as well as around 8,600 lectures and around 400 training courses lasting several weeks, usually with 120 to 150 participants.
[16] In the history of East Germany, the Anti-Bolshevik fund was cited several times as evidence for the "agent theory", according to which “monopoly capital” stood behind Stadtler and ultimately financed fascism.
[17] According to the Berlin historian Ernst Nolte, "with this approach immediately winning a majority in the bourgeois camp, without having an impact on the masses - the radical right laid the foundations for their counterattack in the first few months after the revolution.
