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THE WHITE INTERNATIONAL: ANATOMY OF A TRANSNATIONAL RADICAL REVISIONIST PLOT IN CENTRAL EUROPE AFTER WORLD WAR I Nicholas Alforde Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Social and International Studies University of Bradford 2013 Principal Supervisor: Gábor Bátonyi, DPhil Abstract Nicholas Alforde The White International: Anatomy of a Transnational Radical Revisionist Plot in Central Europe after World War I Keywords: Bauer, Gömbös, Horthy, Ludendorff, Orgesch, paramilitary, Prónay, revision, Versailles, von Kahr The denial of defeat, the harsh Versailles Treaty and unsuccessful attempts by paramilitary units to recover losses in the Baltic produced in post-war Germany an anti- Bolshevik, anti-Entente, radical right-wing cabal of officers with General Ludendorff and Colonel Bauer at its core. Mistakenly citing a lack of breadth as one of the reason for the failure of their amateurishly executed Hohenzollern restoration and Kapp Putsch schemes, Bauer and co-conspirator Ignatius Trebitsch-Lincoln devised the highly ambitious White International plot. It sought to form a transnational league of Bavaria, Austria and Hungary to force the annulment of the Paris Treaties by the coordinated use of paramilitary units from the war vanquished nations. It set as its goals the destruction of Bolshevism in all its guises throughout Europe, the restoration of the monarchy in Russia, the systematic elimination of all Entente-sponsored Successor States and the declaration of war on the Entente. Archival documents, memoirs and other sources expose the underlying flaw in the plot: individual national priorities would always override transnational cooperation. Bavaria and Hungary were already seeking treaty revision through a rapprochement with the Entente; White Russian forces had turned from German support in favour of the French; and finally—as pointed out by their own leaders—the member states’ paramilitary units were either untested or wholly ineffective, and thus would be no match for the national armies of the Successor States and the Entente. i Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my Supervisor, Dr Gábor Bátonyi, whose guidance and expertise were of immeasurable value to the completion of this work. In addition, I would like to thank the several individuals who contributed so much. These include my Division Deans; Dr Richard Spence at the University of Idaho, who provided the inspiration for the topic of the White International; and my colleagues at South Puget Sound College, Dr Deborah Teed, Dr Oliver Newsome, Dr Michael Beehler and Colonel Ronald Averill (retired). I wish to thank the library staff, too, especially Scott Stilson who was always able to procure for me the rarest of materials. My gratitude is extended as well to those who assisted in translations. These include Toralf Zschau, Sandra Tümmel and Judit Kovács who also served as my guide through the unfamiliar landscape of the Hungarian State Archives. Lastly, I wish to thank my family members, Michael, Bethanie, Kendahl, Julia and Donna, for their encouragement and support. ii Contents Abbreviations………………………………………………………………………….v Introduction…………………………………………………………………………....1 Part I: Preconditions for the Development of the White International Plot………….17 Chapter 1. The Military Component: The Freikorps as Reichswehr Surrogate…………………………………………………………….17 Chapter 2. Pan-Germans, the Bamberg Declaration and Post-war Nationalist Foreign Policy…………………………………………...24 Chapter 3. The 1919 Baltic Campaign as Prologue to the White International Plot…………………………………………………….26 Chapter 4. The Versailles Treaty as Catalyst: The Ludendorff-Bauer Circle and Counter-revolutionary Planning and Activity…………………..37 Chapter 5. The Political Mind of Colonel Max Bauer…….………………….….46 Chapter 6. The National Union, October 1919 to March 1920…………………..56 Chapter 7. Dress Rehearsal for the White International Plot………………….....65 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..76 Part II: Development of the White International Plot in Bavarian Exile………….....95 Chapter 8. Relocation of Counter-revolutionary Activity to Bavaria…….…......96 Chapter 9. The Task of Convincing the Bavarians to Adopt the Rosenheim Plan….………………………………………………...105 Chapter 10. Conflicting Agendas: The White International Plot in the Context of Bavarian Domestic and Foreign Policy………...123 Chapter 11. Dubious Fellow Conspirators: Support from Russian Monarchist and Baltic German Émigré Communities…………….136 Conclusion……………………………………………….………………………140 Part III: Establishment and Fall of the White International in Budapest…………...154 iii Chapter 12. Background: Hungary from the Collapse of 1918 to the Treaty of Trianon……………………………….…….……………156 Chapter 13. Negotiations with the Hungarians and Further Development of the White International Plot………………….……….………...177 Chapter 14. Hungarian Foreign Policy and the Incongruous Position of the White International………………………………………….184 Chapter 15. The White International and the Seeds of its Demise……..……….194 Chapter 16. Refusal of Support from Desired Participants……………………..201 Chapter 17. The White International on the Eve of its Fall…………..………....207 Conclusion……………………………………………….………………………219 Bibliography…………………………………………….……………..……………247 iv Abbreviations BaK. .Bundesarchiv Koblenz (German Federal Archives, Coblenz). BaMaF . .Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv Freiburg (German Military Archives, Freiburg). BHStA. Bayerische Hauptstaatsarchiv (Bavarian State Archives, Munich). MOL . Magyar Országos Levéltár (Hungarian State Archives, Budapest). SHD . .Service Historique de la Défense, Archives militaires françaises (French Military Archives, Ministry of Defence, Château de Vincennes). StAM. Staatsarchiv München (Municipal Archives, Munich). v Introduction The map of Europe was drastically changed. Czechoslovakia no longer existed; Russia and Germany again shared a border where Poland had once been; the Baltic Successor States were under German control; Austria was made a province of the Greater German Reich, bordering Hungary in a Danubian Federation; the demilitarized Rhineland was occupied anew by Germany; and France and England had been neutralized. A single Führer ruled Germany and the Versailles Treaty was a dead letter. This was not 1940, however, but 1920 and the circumstances described above were merely the envisioned outcome of a secret grand plan conceived in the small Bavarian city of Rosenheim to return to pre-World War I borders and nullify the Paris Peace Treaties by force of arms. On May 15, 1920, some eight weeks after the failed Kapp Putsch, Colonel Maximilian Bauer,1 as personal envoy of General Erich Ludendorff, stepped off the steamer from Vienna on to the quay in Budapest. The purpose of his visit was to invite the Hungarian Head of State and Regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, to join in the establishment of a Budapest-based, multinational, counter-revolutionary organization— a ‘White International’ that would implement and direct the plan drawn up in Rosenheim. The Rosenheim plan called for Freikorps (Volunteer Corps) units led by German officers to come into Hungary disguised as settlers, be secretly armed and trained, and mount an attack on Austria to destroy the social-democratic Renner government in ‘red Vienna’. This completed, Austrian, Bavarian and Hungarian paramilitary forces would then invade Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, Freikorps units from northern Germany would topple the Weimar Republic and set General Ludendorff 1 up as military dictator of a new provisional government in Berlin. Next, émigré White Russian officers in Germany and northern German Freikorps units would launch counter-revolutionary forces, made up of Russian prisoners of war still interned in Germany, on Bolshevik Russia. Poland would disappear and the tsarist regime would be restored. The Entente-sponsored Successor States would then be divided between the participating states of the White International. The last phase of the plan was to wage war on the Entente with the troops of a newly established Confederation of Greater Germany, Russia and Hungary. The entire endeavour was to be financed by a combination of German industrialists, Hungarian state funds and 2 million counterfeit Russian Duma roubles printed for that purpose. Two weeks after Colonel Bauer’s audience with the Regent, Admiral Horthy, the latter informed General Ludendorff’s envoy that he was ‘in agreement with each and every point [of the plan] and that work could now be taken up’.2 Thus Horthy’s name was added to a growing if tentative list of powerful people which included, besides General Ludendorff, representatives of the vast White Russian émigré community in Germany, the Minister-President of Bavaria, Gustav von Kahr, and official and semi- official leaders in Austria and Italy. This dissertation contends that the political aims of the Rosenheim plan, which called for the establishment of a White International,3 render this little-known plot the most ambitious of all interwar revisionist endeavours. It also argues that the very internationalist pretension of the plot was its fatal flaw.