The Anti-Bolshevist League (German: Antibolschewistische Liga), later the League for the Protection of German Culture (Liga zum Schutze der deutschen Kultur), was a short-lived German far-right organization that initially opposed the November Revolution and later most notably the Spartacus League. It was founded in early December 1918 by the young conservative and ultra-nationalist publicist Eduard Stadtler. The organization was financed by large industrialists, bankers as well as former representatives of the German aristocracy.
According to Stadtler's memoirs published in 1935, German entrepreneurs organized and paid for the military operations of the Freikorps against the Berlin Spartacist Uprising and the contract killings of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht on January 15, 1919, from a fund connected to the organization.[1]
The Anti-Bolshevik League distributed anti-communist or “anti-Bolshevik” literature and leaflets, sometimes in very large numbers, and organized lectures, exhibitions and training courses. 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.
- ^ Stadtler, Eduard (1935). Erinnerungen. Als Antibolschewist 1918–1919. Düsseldorf: Neuer Zeitverlag.