Hermann Rauschning

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Hermann Rauschning (7 August 1887, Thorn, Imperial Germany (present Toruń, Poland) — February 1982, Portland, Oregon, United States) was a German conservative and reactionary who joined the Nazi Party, and became the president of the Danzig Senate. After resigning, he fled Germany and became an opponent of Nazism. He wrote several books warning the world about the nihilistic nature of Hitler's movement.

Rauschning is most famous for his work "Hitler Speaks" where he describes the many meetings and conversations he had with Adolf Hitler. Many historians regard now this book with suspicion.

Contents

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 "Wolfgang 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".

Swiss historian Wolfgang Haenel investigated the memoir and announced his findings in 1983 at a revisionist history conference in West Germany. The renowned Conversations with Hitler, he declared are a total fraud. The book has no value "except as a document of Allied war propaganda."

Among the conclusions of Haenel : Rausching's claim to have met with Hitler "more than a hundred times" is a lie : the two actually met only four times, and never alone; words attributed to Hitler were simply invented or lifted from many different sources, including writings by Juenger and Friedrich Nietzsche; an account of Hitler hearing voices, waking at night with convulsive shrieks and pointing in terror at an empty corner while shouting "There, there, in the corner!" was taken from a short story by French writer Guy de Maupassant (Le Horla).

The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich considers that "The research of the Swiss educator Wolfgang Hänel has made it clear that the 'Conversations' were mostly free inventions." (MacMillan Publishing, 1991, volume 2, page 757, english translation of : Christian Zentner and Friedemann Bedürftig ed., Das Große Lexikon des Dritten Reiches, München, 1985)

And Ian Kershaw : « I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning's 'Hitler Speaks', a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether. » (Hitler, vol. 1, Londres, 1998, p. xiv.)

Nevertheless, there are historians who continue to regard Rauschning as having used reliable sources and being in this manner a reliable compiler, if not the so-called witness.

See :

  • Pia Nordblom, Wider die These von der bewusten Fälschung. Bemerkungen zu den `Gesprächen mit Hitler´, in: Jürgen Heusel und Pia Nordblom (Hrsg.), Hermann Rauschning. Materialen und Beiträge zu einer politischen Biographie, Warschau, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 2002; 2. Aufl., Osnabrück, Fibre Verlag, 2003.

[edit] Links

Institute for Historical Review

[edit] 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 and Break With the Nazis, Secker and Warburg, 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.)
  • The Beast from the Abyss, William Heinemann, London 1941
  • Men of Chaos, Putnam's Sons, New York 1942
  • Makers of Destruction - Meetings and Talks in Revolutionary Germany, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London 1942
  • Time of Delirium, D. Appleton-Century Co., New York 1946
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