Ernst Graf zu Reventlow
Encyclopedia
Ernst, Count Reventlow was a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 naval officer, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 and Nazi politician.

Early life

Ernst Christian Einar Ludwig Detlev Graf zu Reventlow was born at Husum, Schleswig-Holstein
Schleswig-Holstein
Schleswig-Holstein is the northernmost of the sixteen states of Germany, comprising most of the historical duchy of Holstein and the southern part of the former Duchy of Schleswig...

, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, the son of Ludwig Reventlow, a Danish
Denmark
Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

 nobleman, and Emilie Julie Anna Louise Rantzau. His younger sister was Fanny zu Reventlow
Fanny zu Reventlow
Franziska Reventlow was a German writer, artist and translator, who became famous as the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing in the years leading up to World War I.- Life :Fanny...

, the "Bohemian Countess" of Schwabing
Schwabing
Schwabing is a borough in the northern part of Munich, the capital of the German state of Bavaria. It is divided into the city borough 4 and the city borough 12...

. Reventlow embarked upon a career in the German Imperial navy, reaching the rank of lieutenant commander, before his marriage to a Frenchwoman, Marie-Gabrielle-Blanche d'Allemont, forced him to resign his commission. He became a free-lance writer on naval issues, and later general politics.

World War I

During World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, as an editorial writer on the Deutsche Tageszeitung, he advocated extreme ruthlessness, particularly in submarine warfare. He accused United States Ambassador
United States Ambassador to Germany
The United States has had diplomatic relations with the nation of Germany and its predecessor nation, the Kingdom of Prussia, since 1835. These relations were broken twice while Germany and the United States were at war...

 Gerard
James W. Gerard
James Watson Gerard was a U.S. lawyer and diplomat.-Biography:Gerard was born in Geneseo, N. Y. He graduated from Columbia in 1890 and from New York Law School. He was chairman of the Democratic campaign committee of New York County for four years, and served as major of the National Guard of the...

 of being a British
Great Britain
Great Britain or Britain is an island situated to the northwest of Continental Europe. It is the ninth largest island in the world, and the largest European island, as well as the largest of the British Isles...

 spy
SPY
SPY is a three-letter acronym that may refer to:* SPY , ticker symbol for Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts* SPY , a satirical monthly, trademarked all-caps* SPY , airport code for San Pédro, Côte d'Ivoire...

, but assailed Zimmermann
Arthur Zimmermann
Arthur Zimmermann was State Secretary for Foreign Affairs of the German Empire from November 22, 1916, until his resignation on August 6, 1917. His name is associated with the Zimmermann Telegram during World War I...

 for the plot to form an alliance berween Mexico
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...

 and Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...

 against the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

. He furiously attacked Germany's leaders for a supposed inclination to yield to the United States' demands for respect of its rights after the sinking of the Lusitania
RMS Lusitania
RMS Lusitania was a British ocean liner designed by Leonard Peskett and built by John Brown and Company of Clydebank, Scotland. The ship entered passenger service with the Cunard Line on 26 August 1907 and continued on the line's heavily-traveled passenger service between Liverpool, England and New...

, and the Tageszeitung was suspended 25 June 1915. For an attack on Bethmann-Hollweg
Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg
Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg was a German politician and statesman who served as Chancellor of the German Empire from 1909 to 1917.-Origins:...

, accusing him of misleading von Hindenburg
Paul von Hindenburg
Paul Ludwig Hans Anton von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg , known universally as Paul von Hindenburg was a Prussian-German field marshal, statesman, and politician, and served as the second President of Germany from 1925 to 1934....

, he was sued for slander in 1916.

He was highly critical of the policies of Kaiser Wilhelm II and later of the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...

. In 1920 he founded his own newspaper, Der Reichswart (“Reich Guardian”), which was published until his death.

National Bolshevik period

In the immediate post-World War I period, a National Bolshevik idea came from Comintern
Comintern
The Communist International, abbreviated as Comintern, also known as the Third International, was an international communist organization initiated in Moscow during March 1919...

 agent Karl Radek
Karl Radek
Karl Bernhardovic Radek was a socialist active in the Polish and German movements before World War I and an international Communist leader after the Russian Revolution....

 postulating that a community of interests existed between German nationalists and the isolated Bolshevik regime
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 in Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

. At first Reventlow denounced the “delusion of the so-called National Bolsheviks that Communism could turn towards nationalism,” but when Radek seized the occasion of the Ruhr occupation to deliver his Schlageter Oration before the Enlarged Executive Committee of the Comintern in 1923, Reventlow responded with sympathetic articles in Der Reichswart that were subsequently re-printed in the communist central organ Rote Fahne. This collaboration was short-lived, though it marks Reventlow clearly as a leftist. Later he was to write approvingly of the KPD’s domestic policies in the Deutsches Tageblatt and to demand fifty-percent managerial control of any enterprise by the workers. It is reported that Reventlow alone among the Nazi leaders was never booed when addressing crowds of workers.

DVFP and NSDAP involvement

In 1924 Reventlow and Albrecht von Graefe
Albrecht von Graefe (politician)
Albrecht von Graefe was a German landowner and right-wing politician active both during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic...

 broke from the German National People's Party (DNVP)
German National People's Party
The German National People's Party was a national conservative party in Germany during the time of the Weimar Republic. Before the rise of the NSDAP it was the main nationalist party in Weimar Germany composed of nationalists, reactionary monarchists, völkisch, and antisemitic elements, and...

 to form the German Völkisch Freedom Party (DVFP)
German Völkisch Freedom Party
The German Völkisch Freedom Party was a right-wing and antisemitic political party of Weimar Germany that took its name from the Völkisch movement, a populist movement focused on folklore and the German Volk....

 which was both more “Völkish” (racist/nationalistic) and socialistic than the conservative DNVP. Both men were elected to the Reichstag as DNVP deputies, though in May 1927 Reventlow quarreled with the more conservative Graefe and left the party to join the NSDAP (Nazi Party), bringing over his faction en bloc, including Bernhard Rust
Bernhard Rust
Dr. Bernhard Rust was Minister of Science, Education and National Culture in Nazi Germany. A combination of school administrator and zealous Nazi, he issued decrees, often bizarre, at every level of the German educational system to immerse German youth in the National Socialist philosophy...

, Franz Stöhr
Franz Stöhr
Franz Stöhr was a German politician with the Nazi Party....

, and Wilhelm Kube
Wilhelm Kube
Wilhelm Kube was a German politician and Nazi official. He was an important figure in the German Christian movement during the early years of Nazi rule. During the war he became a senior official in the occupying government of the Soviet Union, achieving the rank of Generalkommissar for...

, each of whom were to enjoy prominent roles in the Nazi Party. This greatly improved the NSDAP position in northern Germany, where the DVFP had always been stronger than the NSDAP, and by the end of 1928 the DVFP had for all intents and purposes ceased to exist.

Reventlow’s group quickly allied themselves with the more socialistic wing of the NSDAP headed by Gregor Strasser
Gregor Strasser
Gregor Strasser was a politician of the National Socialist German Workers Party...

 which favored genuine socialistic measures and an alliance with the Soviets against the western democracies. Though a power in the party to the end, this group became less influential as Hitler turned to overt militarism and antisemitism after attaining power.

Reventlow was never liked or trusted by Hitler, but his personal popularity was substantial and Hitler chose not to cross him but to ignore him. Reventlow was never given a high party office nor, after the seizure of power, was he given any government post. Though often critical of government policies, he was allowed to publish his newspaper, Der Reichswart, until his death in 1943.

Antisemitism

Reventlow supported a theory first proposed by Lesley Fry, who had conceived the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as part of a conspiracy theory
Conspiracy theory
A conspiracy theory explains an event as being the result of an alleged plot by a covert group or organization or, more broadly, the idea that important political, social or economic events are the products of secret plots that are largely unknown to the general public.-Usage:The term "conspiracy...

 according to which a group led by the "cultural Zionist" Asher Ginzberg plotted world domination. At the time Ginzberg supported an international Jewish cultural and political revival rather than a single Jewish state. Reventlow named Fry as his source for his own thinking on the origins of the Protocols. After Philip Graves
Philip Graves
Philip Perceval Graves was an Irish journalist and writer. While working as a foreign correspondent of The Times in Constantinople, he exposed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an antisemitic plagiarism, fraud, and hoax.-Life:Graves, eldest son of the writer Alfred Perceval Graves , was born...

 provided evidence in The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

that the Protocols were plagiarised forgery, Reventlow published his support for Fry's theory of Ginzberg's authorship in the periodical La Vieille France. Ginzberg's supporters sued Reventlow, who was forced to retract and pay damages. However he continued to propagate his views.

Religious activism

Reventlow’s antisemitism was never racial, as was Hitler’s, but cultural, and this led to his involvement with the German Faith Movement
German Faith Movement
The German Faith Movement was closely associated with Jakob Wilhelm Hauer during the Third Reich and sought to move Germany away from Christianity towards a religion based on "immediate experience" of God...

. From 1934 to 1936, Reventlow served as deputy chairman of this semi-religious movement which postulated that every people “through its blood” developed its own religious knowledge. The movement was anti-Christian and tried to create a “species-true faith” for Germany. Reventlow quickly became disillusioned with this however, returning to Christianity even before the German Faith Movement was suppressed by the government in 1937. Reventlow's active practice of Christianity continued to his death and was another factor keeping him from Hitler's favor.

Works (in English translation)

  • “Where is God?” “Friends of Europe” publications ; no. 47, London, 1937
  • “The Neutrals In This War,” Current History, a journal published by The New York Times, October 1915, p. 169-172.

See also

  • Joseph B. Neville, Jr., “Ernst Reventlow and the Weimar Republic: A Völkish Radical Confronts Germany’s Social Question," Societas 7, 1977, pp. 229-251.
  • Christian Zentner, and Friedemann Bedürftig, “Encyclopedia of the Third Reich,” Da Capo Press, New York City, 1997.
  • Conan Fischer, “The German Communists and the Rise of Nazism,” St. Martin's Press, New York City, 1991.

External links

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