Hermann Rauschning
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Hermann Rauschning (1887-1982) was a German conservative and a reactionary who joined the Nazi Party, became the president of the Danzig Senate but resigned, fled and became a bitter opponent. He wrote several books that were quite influential, warning the world about Nazism.
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Life
Raushning was a descendant of a land-owing family of 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, 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 fled the Free City of Danzig.
Entrapment in 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 hopes of restoring the greatness of Germany as a nation that was 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 "realist" policy which was anything but nationalist or conservative".
This "realist" policy led the middle class nationalism and monarchist conservatism to make compromises with the revolutionary "dynamism" of the National Socialists in hopes that they could stay in the background while National Socialism fell flat on its face in order for themselves to seize power. Another point he makes is that himself and these two groups were blinded to the real aims and means of National Socialism. Only until he was about to be forced to carry out deeds that was against his nature, his eyes were opened to the evil he was participating in. He and others had no real understanding of the core doctrine of National Socialism. They were carried away by the myth and propaganda. The middle class failed to see the revolt of 1933 was no longer nationalist in character but revolutionary extremism.
Work
He wrote the first inside story of the Nazi movement since Mein Kampf.
Writing The Revolution of Nihilism in the winter of 1937-38, he wrote this book for his fellow Germans in hopes of revealing to them the disastrous course Hitler was leading them into and hoped that it would lead a counter-revolution against Nazi power. His answer to them was the restoration of the monarchy as the only hope for a turn around. (Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn says the same thing that the German people are made only for absolutism and the monarchy is the only German way.) His book in America went through seventeen printings.
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
Raushning 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 the Reves assisted Hermann Rauschning in the fabrication of the book Hitler Speaks. referenced to H. W. Koch, "1933: The Legality of Hitler's Assumption of Power", in H.W. Kock, ed., Aspects of the Third Reich, (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985) pg 55.
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.
Miscellania
- 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
- Gespräche mit Hitler, publisher:Europa Verlag, Zürich-New York, 1940. English trans: Hitler Speaks, Thorton Butterworth, London, 1939.
- 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.)
- 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.pl:Hermann Rauschning