The Wirtschaftliche Aufbau-Vereinigung (Economic Reconstruction Organization) was a Munich-based counterrevolutionary conspiratorial group formed in the aftermath of the German occupation of Ukraine in 1918 and of the Latvian Intervention of 1919. It brought together White Russian émigrés and early German Nazis who aimed to overthrow the governments of Germany and the Soviet Union, replacing them with authoritarian régimes of the far right. Aufbau was also the name of the organization's periodical.^[1]

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in German. Click [show] for important translation instructions. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[:de:Wirtschaftliche Aufbau-Vereinigung (Verbindungsorganisation)]]; see its history for attribution. You should also add the template {{Translated|de|Wirtschaftliche Aufbau-Vereinigung (Verbindungsorganisation)}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The organization was founded in 1921 by General Vasily Biskupsky and the political writer Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter. The future top Nazi functionaries Alfred Rosenberg and Arno Schickedanz served as officers within Aufbau^[2] According to author Michael Kellogg, the Aufbau Vereinigung was a vital influence on the development of Nazi ideology in the years before the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 as well as financing the NSDAP with, for example, funds from monarchists and businessmen, such as Henry Ford. Kellogg goes as far as to claim that Aufbau was the organization primarily responsible for Hitler's antisemitism, the Final Solution, and other Nazi ideological positions.^[3]

Aufbau members became involved in terrorist activities, including the assassinations of German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and Russian émigré Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov (both in 1922).^[4]

After the death of Scheubner-Richter in the Beer Hall Putsch, Aufbau rapidly declined, and notions of Lebensraum and Slavic inferiority, naturally unpopular with the Russians, gained a stronger hold on the Nazi movement.^[5]

Kellogg claims that the long-term influence of Aufbau played a large role in the theorization of the final solution and in Hitler's decision to divert troops away from Moscow towards Ukraine in 1941.^[6][7]

Prominent members of Aufbau included:

• Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)
• Alfred Rosenberg (a Baltic German from the Russian Empire)
• Fyodor Vinberg (Russian officer)
• Pyotr Shabelsky-Bork (Russian officer)
• General Vasily Biskupsky (Russian officer)
• Erich Ludendorff
• Max Amann
• Boris Brasol (Russian émigré)