Hermann Rauschning
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Hermann Rauschning (born 1887 in Thorn, Imperial Germany (present Toruń, Poland) - 1982) was a German conservative and reactionary who joined the Nazi Party, became the president of the Danzig Senate. After resigning, he fled Germany and became a bitter opponent of Nazism. He wrote several books that were quite influential, warning the world about the nihilistic nature of Hitler's movement.
Life
Rauschning was a descendant of a land-owning family of the military caste in East Prussia. He was educated in the Prussian Cadet Corps and was wounded in the Great War. As a wealthy landowner and skilled agriculturist, he became President of the Danzig Farmers Association. Believing at the time that the National Socialists offered the only way out of Germany's troubles, he joined the Nazi Party and was elected to the Danzig Senate.When party agents began to insist that he should institute the Gleichschaltung (establishment of totalitarianism), arrest inconvenient Catholic priests, disenfranchise the Jews and suppress rival parties, he refused and resigned from the party. On account of his active support of constitutionalism in the election of April 1935, he was forced to dispose of his farming interests and for reasons of personal safety had to flee from the Free City of Danzig which was increasingly under Nazi influence.
Trapped into Nazism
For the Conservative-nationalist-monarchist group, liberalism stood out as the great destroyer of all standards of Germanic and Western culture. They also feared the masses and communism. Formed by Kultur, Rauschning, like others in his political area, joined the Nazi party in the hope of restoring the national greatness of a Germany groaning under the demands of the Treaty of Versailles and defending Germany from communist revolution and liberalism. In his own words, Rauschning says,- "The countenancing of violent methods, in which the Conservatives and Nationalists should have been the last to place their faith, entangled elements inspired by the best of intentions in a "pragmatic" policy which was anything but nationalist or conservative".
Work
He wrote the first inside story of the Nazi movement since Mein Kampf.He wrote "The Revolution of Nihilism" in the winter of 1937-38 for his fellow Germans in the hope of revealing to them the disastrous course Hitler was leading them into, He also hoped it would lead to a counter-revolution against the Nazi regime. His solution to Nazism was the restoration of the monarchy as the only hope for a turn around. (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn said the same thing that the German people were made only for absolutism and that monarchy was the only German way.) His book went through seventeen printings in America.
"Rauschning's definition of Fascism": "National Socialism is an unquestionably genuine revolutionary movement in the sense of a final achievement on a vaster scale of the "mass rising dreamed of by Anarchists and Communists", "Revolution of Nihilism", pg 19.
Dispute over Hitler Speaks
Rauschning had many leftist critics of his work. In Why Hitler, the Genesis of the Nazi Reich pg 137, Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr. notes that "Wolkgang Koch, another prominent historian of the Nazi era, agrees with Turner's assessment and also points out that Reves assisted Hermann Rauschning in writing the book Hitler Speaks. referenced to H. W. Koch, "1933: The Legality of Hitler's Assumption of Power", in H.W. Koch, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985) pg 55.Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn reports that "Theodor Schieder in his Rauschnings "Gespräche mit Hitler" als Geschichtsquelle, (Opladen:Westdeutscher Verlag, 1972) contradicts them effectively".
Sayings
- "It seems to be our destiny to have to repeat the same mistakes with a berserker's infatuation." The Revolution of Nihilism, pg xiii
- "The mass understood and understands nothing and does not want to understand". Ibid, pg 20.
Miscellany
- Hermann Rauschning was known to be an accurate predictor of Nazi proclivities. In his book, Revolution of Nihilism, he uses the word "Holocaust" (in 1939) to describe what may be the result of the Third Reich.
- *"...—what is this Third Reich in reality, a new order in the making or a holocaust, a national re-birth through the historic energies of the nation or a progressive, permanent revolution of sheer destruction,..." pg xi.
Writings of Rauschning
- Die Entdeutschung Westpreußens und Posens, Berlin 1930. (On the violent de-Germanization and ethnical anti-German politics of the Danzig corridor region and of Poznan by the authorities of the Polish Republic)
- Gespräche mit Hitler, publisher:Europa Verlag, Zürich-New York, 1940. English trans: Hitler Speaks, Thorton Butterworth, London, 1939. (Interviews with Hitler.)
- *In America,Hitler Speaks was given a different title: The Voice of Destruction, publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1940.
- The Revolution of Nihilism, Warning to the West, trans. by E. W. Dickes, Alliance Book Corporation, NY, First ed. August 1939, 1940. (With over 38 uses of the word 'reactionary' in context. Warns against the anti-cultural, anti-Christian materialist philosophy of the National Socialists.)
- Make or Break With the Nazis, London, 1941.
- The Conservative Revolution, publisher G. P. Putnam's Sons, NY, 1941.
- The Redemption of Democracy, the Coming of the Atlantic Empire, publisher: The Literary Guild of America, Inc., NY, 1941. (A work against extreme liberalism.)
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