Nationalist International
Internationale Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Nationalisten | |
| Abbreviation | IAdN |
|---|---|
| Formation | April 1934 |
| Founder | Hans Keller |
| Dissolved | September 1941 |
| Type | Political organisation |
| Purpose | Promotion of völkisch nationalism; opposition to liberal, communist, and Italian fascist internationalism |
| Headquarters | Zürich (1934–35); London (1935–36); Berlin (1936–41) |
The Nationalist International (Script error: The function "langx" does not exist.; IAdN) was a German political organisation active from 1934 to 1941, founded and led by the jurist Hans Keller. It promoted völkisch nationalism and sought to establish an alternative international order grounded in the concept of Volk rather than the equal sovereignty of states, positioning itself against liberal internationalism, communist internationalism, and the rival Italian fascist internationalism of the Comitati d'Azione per l'Universalità di Roma (CAUR).[1] Although it operated with the covert support of the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda (RMVP), the organisation was not officially affiliated with the Nazi Party and its founder was never a party member.[2]
The IAdN organised three international congresses — in Berlin (1934), London (1935), and Oslo (1936) — and produced a publication series distributed among right-wing circles across Europe. Its membership encompassed a broad and loosely defined network of conservative, authoritarian, fascist, and national socialist academics, intellectuals, and politicians. Historian Martin Kristoffer Hamre has described it as an early attempt to reconcile völkisch ideas with international cooperation, foreshadowing the ethno-pluralist concepts of the post-war New Right.[3] Despite projecting the image of a comprehensive international research association, the organisation functioned primarily as a one-man enterprise; the Gestapo described it in 1935 as a loose association of a relatively small group of people.[4]
The formation of the Rome–Berlin Axis in 1936 deprived the IAdN of its original purpose as a counter to Italian fascist internationalism, and German government support progressively withdrew thereafter. The organisation terminated its activities in September 1941.[5]
Background and founding
Hans Keller
Hans Karl Ernst Ludwig Keller was born on 2 January 1908 in Speyer, in the Rhineland, close to the Franco-German border. After completing his schooling in Speyer, he studied in Munich and obtained three doctoral degrees between 1930 and 1932: in economics at Munich (Dr. oec. publ.), in law at Bordeaux (Docteur en droit), and in law at Kiel (Dr. jur.).[2] He specialised in international law and sought to establish what he described as a new academic discipline of 'Comparative International Law Ideology'.[6] Between 1930 and 1936, he undertook research trips to France, the United States, Italy, and the United Kingdom, funded in part by the Rockefeller Foundation, before settling in Berlin.[7]
Keller combined his legal interests with a political agenda from early in his career, developing what he described as a 'Germanic world-ideology', defined as a 'concept of supranationalism as opposite to the internationalism of the Western world'.[6] In 1931 he founded the German-European Union (Script error: The function "langx" does not exist.) in Munich as a counterreaction to the liberal Pan-European Movement, publishing four volumes of its journal Deutscheuropa between 1932 and 1933. Contributors to the journal included writers and academics from the conservative, authoritarian, and openly fascist spectrum.[6]
When the Hitler regime was established in 1933 during Keller's stay in the United States, a Rockefeller Foundation associate noted that Keller and other German scholarship holders displayed strong sympathies with the new government and were preoccupied with reconciling their academic background with Nazi ideology.[6] In early 1934 Keller was employed briefly by the newly created RMVP as an expert on France, Switzerland and Northern Africa. He resigned after a few months, explaining to his employer that he could serve Nazi Germany more effectively on the international front.[8]
Italo-German rivalry and the creation of the IAdN
The immediate context for the founding of the Nationalist International was the rivalry between Italy and Germany over ideological leadership among the new nationalist and authoritarian movements of the 1930s. In early 1934, Keller travelled to Italy and met figures connected to CAUR, an Italian organisation founded in 1933 to promote Italian fascism internationally under the concept of 'universal fascism'. Among those he met was Asvero Gravelli, CAUR's leading ideological figure.[4] Keller concluded that CAUR's underlying purpose was to subordinate other nationalisms to Italian leadership, and wrote to the Rockefeller Foundation that a law of nations based on Italian fascism would amount to a 'danger to world peace'.[4]
This experience prompted Keller to create a competing German organisation. He persuaded the RMVP to finance the undertaking — the ministry provided 50,000 Reichsmark in 1935 — with the explicit mission of countering CAUR and promoting German Nazism internationally.[9] In April 1934 Keller founded the IAdN in Zürich, choosing a Swiss location to give the organisation the appearance of neutrality and independence from any government.[8]
The same year, Swiss newspapers reported that Keller had used the address of the Swiss National Bank as official letterhead for the organisation without authorisation. The Swiss Federal Political Department declared him an undesirable foreigner, and a border barrier was imposed in January 1935.[8] The IAdN headquarters moved to London in 1935 and then to Berlin in 1936, though Keller continued to present the organisation as maintaining offices in all three cities.[8]
Structure and membership
The IAdN operated with minimal staff. Keller's sole permanent employee was a secretary, Käte Lüttgen, the only woman directly associated with the organisation throughout its existence.[8] Keller consistently presented his network in exaggerated terms, making it difficult to distinguish between his stated ambitions and the more limited practical outcomes of the organisation.[4] No official membership list has been located in any archive; the organisation's informal and non-binding character meant that some participants appeared at only a single event while others maintained a longer association.[4]
The congresses attracted a broad spectrum of male delegates from conservative, authoritarian, fascist, and national socialist backgrounds, drawn primarily from Europe but also from the United States, China, South Africa, Mexico, and Bolivia.[10] Among the most consistent participants was Herman Harris Aall, a Norwegian jurist and ideologue of Vidkun Quisling's Nasjonal Samling, who co-hosted the Oslo congress.[10] Frits Clausen, leader of the Danish Nazi Party (DNSAP), delivered a lecture on 'Nation and Race' at the London congress.[10] The IAdN also cooperated with the Swiss National Front and its leaders Rolf Henne and Hans Oehler, while the Dutch NSB and the Swedish NSAP sent delegates to the Oslo congress.[11]
Beyond explicitly fascist organisations, the congresses drew delegates from the broader conservative and authoritarian right. The British delegation at the London congress included Daniel Gerald Somerville, a Conservative Party member of parliament. Henry Carton de Wiart, a former Prime Minister of Belgium, sent a written message to the congress, and France was represented by Louis Bertrand, a novelist, historian, and member of the Académie française.[12] Hamre characterises this breadth as illustrating the fluid entanglements between fascism, the radical right, conservatism, and existing elites in the interwar period.[12]
Congresses and publications
Berlin congress, December 1934
The first IAdN congress took place from 5 to 7 December 1934 at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, adjacent to the Reich Chancellery. The organisation claimed more than one hundred delegates from twenty mostly European countries participated.[9] The congress was marked by an open dispute with representatives of Italian fascism. Gravelli and his colleague Simon Ooms argued that Italian fascism belonged to the 'new nationalisms' the IAdN sought to promote; Keller and the German delegation rejected this, insisting on the primacy of racism and antisemitism and criticising Italian universalism as a form of imperialism. Gravelli subsequently published a critical article about the IAdN in the Italian fascist journal Ottobre.[9]
The Berlin congress took place only weeks before the rival Montreux Congress organised by CAUR in December 1934, at which Gravelli criticised Keller's undertaking and argued that German racism would lead only to war and injustice.[9] It was at the Berlin congress that the Polish delegate Zygmunt Cybichowski proposed the slogan 'Nationalists of all countries, unite!' — an imitation of the Communist Manifesto — which the IAdN subsequently adopted as its motto.[3]
London congress, July 1935
The second congress was held from 10 to 12 July 1935 at the D'Abernon Club in London, with delegates claimed from between fifteen and thirty nations.[10] At this congress Keller set out his legal programme, arguing that existing international law based on the equality of states had to be replaced by a new framework proceeding from the natural inequality of peoples and races, which he characterised as recognising what he termed 'God-willed inequality'.[13] Friedrich Grimm, an NSDAP attorney, delivered a speech titled 'Hitler and Europe', presenting Nazi Germany as a peaceful international partner.[13] Julius Evola, a pro-German Italian fascist intellectual, was invited to participate; unable to attend in person, his speech on 'Christian or Pagan Nationalism' was read aloud on his behalf.[14]
Oslo congress, July 1936
The third congress took place from 25 to 29 July 1936 at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo, with delegates from approximately thirty nations.[10] The use of the Nobel Institute's premises gave the congress an appearance of academic legitimacy; the Institute subsequently complained that its name had been misused on official congress documents.[10] At Oslo, the IAdN established the Academy for the Right of Peoples (Script error: The function "langx" does not exist.), with Keller as president, to develop the new law of nations the organisation sought to promote.[15] A fourth congress was planned for Madrid but was cancelled owing to the Spanish Civil War and a lack of funding.[10]
Publications
Alongside its congresses, the IAdN produced a publication series in German and French under the title International Voices of the Nationalists, comprising texts by contributors such as Frits Clausen and the French publicist Gustave Hervé, as well as printed congress proceedings. Keller claimed a total print run of 50,000 copies; Hamre regards this figure as an exaggeration.[9] The series was distributed to prominent figures in European fascist movements, including Quisling.[10]
Ideology
Volk nationalism and the Third Europe
The IAdN's central ideological objective was to apply the völkisch concept of Volk not only as the basis of German nationalism but as a universal framework for all nationalisms, thereby grounding a new form of European cooperation. Keller developed this programme most fully in his 1935 text Das Dritte Europa (The Third Europe), which framed European history in three stages: the Holy Roman Empire as a First Europe of harmonious coexistence; the era of competing imperialist nation-states as a Second Europe; and a coming Third Europe, grounded in the Volk concept and modelled on the Third Reich, which would supersede both.[16] Keller described Hitler as a Völker-Arzt (people's doctor) and the role model for the new nationalism.[17]
Rather than seeking to export the German Volk concept directly, Keller argued for fostering 'Volk consciousness' in each country while professing 'respect' for the ethnic particularity of other peoples.[17] This position produced a hierarchical distinction between Kulturvölker (cultural peoples) and Völker im Werden (peoples in the making, denoting indigenous and colonised peoples), with the former held responsible for the political fate of the latter.[17] The völkisch terminology created practical difficulties at the congresses, as concepts such as Volk, Volksgemeinschaft, and Rasse resisted translation and were understood differently by delegates from different national contexts.[13]
Law of nations
A second major objective was the replacement of the post-1919 liberal international order with a new law of nations premised on the inequality of peoples rather than the equality of states. Keller's 1938 monograph Abschied vom Völkerrecht (Farewell to International Law) gave this project its fullest expression. He initially embraced the principle of national self-determination, arguing that only the Nationalist International would fight for a genuine law of nations granting all peoples this right.[18] From 1937 onwards, however, he adjusted his position to accommodate demands for a German colonial empire, arguing that colonised peoples were entitled to express their 'national lifestyle' but not to establish independent states — a right he termed the Selbstseinsrecht der Völker (the right of peoples to be themselves).[15]
Opposition to internationalism
The IAdN positioned itself against three forms of internationalism. Liberal internationalism, as embodied in the League of Nations and the Pan-European Movement, was criticised for promoting an artificial equality among states and perpetuating the unjust settlement of the Paris Peace Conference.[14] Communist internationalism was identified as a second major enemy, and anti-communist arguments at the congresses were frequently combined with antisemitic claims, most explicitly at the Berlin congress when Ulrich Fleischhauer of the Welt-Dienst argued that international Jewry threatened all national development.[14] Italian fascist universalism, represented by CAUR, was the third target; Keller also characterised Catholicism as a form of hostile internationalism, referring to a 'Vatican Fascist International'.[19]
Decline and dissolution
The rapprochement between Italy and Germany, culminating in the formation of the Rome–Berlin Axis in October 1936, removed the primary justification for the IAdN's existence. The RMVP, which had financed the organisation specifically to counter CAUR, lost interest in its activities, and in April 1937 ordered Keller to dissolve the organisation entirely.[20] By early 1938, ten different German government agencies had agreed in a joint meeting that Keller's international activities should be terminated immediately.[21] In September 1939 the German Foreign Ministry arranged for the security police to revoke Keller's passport, preventing further foreign travel.[5]
The treatment of the IAdN within the Nazi state was nonetheless contradictory. While the Foreign Ministry and RMVP moved to shut it down, the organisation simultaneously received the patronage of the Gestapo and obtained monthly funding of 1,200 Reichsmark from the Foundation of German Works Abroad (Script error: The function "langx" does not exist.) between January and April 1939.[21] Hamre identifies this as an example of the competing and overlapping competencies within the polycratic governance structure of the Nazi regime.[21] The Nationalist International formally ceased all activities in September 1941.[5]
During the Second World War, the German military intelligence service Abwehr made use of Keller's international network to gather information, and Keller served as an interpreter for the Luftwaffe.[5]
Legacy and historiography
After 1945, Keller pursued a second career in West Germany, writing further on international law and serving as an elected member of the Munich city council from 1952 to 1966.[22] In 1958 he applied for civil service compensation, falsely claiming he had been forced to leave his position in 1934 because of his internationalist outlook and non-party status; Hamre characterises this as an instance of Keller's consistent pattern of misrepresenting his own activities.[5] In 1965 he stood as a Bundestag candidate for the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).[5]
Historians who had previously mentioned the IAdN interpreted it almost entirely as a German counterreaction to CAUR, emphasising its role in blocking Italian fascist internationalism.[23] Hamre's 2022 study, the first full institutional history of the organisation, argues for a broader significance. He contends that the IAdN demonstrates the existence of a distinct strand of 'Nazi internationalism' in the mid-1930s which circulated völkisch ideas internationally and attracted supporters across a wide ideological spectrum. He also argues that the IAdN anticipated the ethno-pluralist discourse of the post-war New Right, which similarly combined professions of 'respect' for national difference with opposition to liberal universalism.[24]
Personnel and ideological continuities connect the IAdN to the post-war Malmö movement, founded in 1951 as the European Social Movement. Hans Oehler, who had participated in two IAdN congresses, became an editorial board member of the movement's journal Nation Europa, and Julius Evola contributed to the same publication.[25]
See also
References
Citations
- ↑ Hamre 2022, pp. 1–2.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Hamre 2022, p. 4.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 Hamre 2022, p. 2.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Hamre 2022, p. 7.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 Hamre 2022, p. 18.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Hamre 2022, p. 5.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, pp. 4–5.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 Hamre 2022, p. 6.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 Hamre 2022, p. 8.
- ↑ 10.0 10.1 10.2 10.3 10.4 10.5 10.6 10.7 Hamre 2022, p. 9.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, pp. 9–10.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 Hamre 2022, p. 10.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 13.2 Hamre 2022, p. 14.
- ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Hamre 2022, p. 11.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Hamre 2022, p. 15.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, pp. 12–13.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 Hamre 2022, p. 13.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, pp. 14–15.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, p. 12.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, pp. 16–17.
- ↑ 21.0 21.1 21.2 Hamre 2022, p. 17.
- ↑ Neulen 1987, p. 405.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, p. 3.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, pp. 19–20.
- ↑ Hamre 2022, p. 19.
Bibliography
Books and theses
- Neulen, Hans Werner (1987). Europa und das 3. Reich: Einigungsbestrebungen im deutschen Machtbereich 1939–45. Munich: Universitas-Verlag. Search this book on
- Ledeen, Michael Arthur (1973). Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of the Fascist International, 1928–1936. New York: Howard Fertig. Search this book on
- Syga-Dubois, Judith (2019). Wissenschaftliche Philanthropie und transatlantischer Austausch in der Zwischenkriegszeit: Die sozialwissenschaftlichen Förderprogramme der Rockefeller Stiftungen in Deutschland. Vienna: Böhlau Verlag. Search this book on
Journal articles
- Hamre, Martin Kristoffer (2022). "'Nationalists of All Countries, Unite!': Hans Keller and Nazi Internationalism in the 1930s". Contemporary European History: 1–20. doi:10.1017/S0960777322000455.
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