National Bolshevism, whose supporters are known as National Bolsheviks and colloquially as Nazbols, is a syncretic political movement committed to combining ultranationalism and Bolshevik communism.
a synthesis of radical nationalism and Soviet socialism to oppose Western liberalism and the Treaty of Versailles. This German current, often associated with the Weimar Republic’s Conservative Revolution, sought a revolutionary “third way” that rejected capitalism in favour of a state-driven, nationalist collective.
National Bolshevism was among several early ultranationalist, and according to some fascist, movements in Germany that predate Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party.
Following the collapse of the Nazi regime after the war, these tendencies reemerged within the German Right and eventually took a broader European significance, serving as the intellectual foundations for subsequent nationalist movements.
The ideology of Ernst Niekisch and the group which had formed around the publication, named Widerstandskreis, has been described as anti-democratic, nationalist, anti-capitalist, anti-western, as well as exhibiting racist and fascist traits.
Niekisch strongly and publicly condemned Adolf Hitler, who he perceived as a democratic demagogue that lacked any actual socialism, he claimed and criticized that Hitler, after release from prison, started to look more towards Italian Fascism for inspiration, rather than Ludendorff.
Following his retirement, Niekisch moved back to West Berlin and proclaimed himself a ‘victim of fascism’ due to being blinded while imprisoned, after a long legal battle with West German courts, Niekisch received minor compensation from the Berlin government. Niekisch died in 1967.
The National Bolshevik project of figures such as Niekisch and Paetel was typically presented as just another strand of Bolshevism by the Nazi Party, and was thus viewed just as negatively and as part of a “Jewish conspiracy”. After Hitler’s rise to power, many National Bolsheviks were arrested and imprisoned or fled the country.
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