Hermann Rauschning


Hermann Rauschning was a German conservative reactionary who briefly joined the Nazi movement before breaking with it. He was the President of the Free City of Danzig from 1933-1934, during which he led the Senate of the Free City of Danzig. In 1934, he renounced Nazi Party membership and in 1936 emigrated from Germany. He eventually settled in the United States and began openly denouncing Nazism. Rauschning is chiefly known for his book Gespräche mit Hitler in which he claimed to have had many meetings and conversations with Adolf Hitler.

Early life

Rauschning was born in Thorn, German Empire to a Prussian Army officer in the province of West Prussia. He attended the Prussian Cadet Corps institute at Potsdam and in 1911, he obtained a doctorate from Berlin University. He fought in World War I as a lieutenant and was wounded in action. After the war, he settled in the area around the Free City of Danzig, where he owned land.

Political career

He lived in Posen and was prominent in its historical society. In 1930, he published a work under the title Die Entdeutschung Westpreußens und Posens. According to Rauschning, Germans in those areas were constantly put under pressure to leave Poland.
In 1932, he moved to a new estate in Warnow and became the leader of the Danzig Land League. Previously affiliated with the German National People's Party, he then joined the Nazi Party as he believed it to offer the only way out of Germany's troubles, including the return of Danzig to Germany. He became the agricultural advisor to the local Gau in January. In February, he became leader of the Danziger Landbund, a movement that supported the taking over of the Senate by the Nazis. He became President of the Danzig Teachers' Association in 1932. Before, in 1930, the Nazis in the Danzig popular elections became the second strongest force, as the electoral potential of the rural population in Danzig was discovered. Rauschning saw this as a powerful tool to reorganize the Danzig NSDAP. The President of the Senate, Ernst Ziehm, viewed Rauschning with a strong dislike. In the summer of 1932, Rauschning and the local Gauleiter met with Adolf Hitler in Obersalzberg to discuss happenings in Danzig. After Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis in Danzig won control of the Free City's government and Rauschning became the President of the Senate of Danzig on 20 June 1933, starting the Rauschning Senate.
In foreign affairs, Rauschning did not conceal his personal desire to turn neighbouring Poland into a vassal state of Germany. As a conservative nationalist, Rauschning was not typical of Nazi members and the Nazis' violent antisemitism was alien to him. He was a bitter rival of Albert Forster, the future Gauleiter of Danzig.
There has been some debate over the importance of Rauschning to Hitler and the party. One of the reasons cited for Hitler's interest in Rauschning was his citizenship and political leadership in the Free City of Danzig. One of the first questions that Hitler asked Rauschning was "whether Danzig had an extradition agreement with Germany," which drew Hitler’s attention over the possibility of being forced to go underground. Hitler feared that the Weimar Republic might move against the party and ban it. Since Danzig retained an independent status under the League of Nations, Hitler apparently felt that the free port "might well offer a useful asylum."

Fall from power

On 23 November 1934, he resigned from the Senate and the party. In the April 1935 Danzig elections, he supported "constitutionalist" candidates against the Nazis and wrote articles supporting co-operation with the Poles, which angered the Nazis. Rauschning found himself in personal danger.
He sold his farming interests and fled to Poland in 1936. He moved on to Switzerland in 1937, France in 1938 and the United Kingdom in 1939. Rauschning joined German émigrés, left-wing Germans opposed his right-wing views and the fact that as a member of the Nazi Party, he had been instrumental in the takeover of Danzig. Rauschning represented "one of the most conservative poles of the emigration" and enjoyed celebrity status through his lectures. He sought to play a leading role in the more conservative émigré German Freedom Party, run by Carl Spiecher, later of the Centre Party, but he fell out with Spiecher, who thought Rauschning was motivated by self-interest, rather than the interest of the party.

Later life

Between 1938 and 1942, he wrote a number of works in German on the problem of the Nazis that were translated to a number of languages, including English. His Gespräche mit Hitler '' was a huge bestseller but its credibility would later be severely criticised, and it now has no standing as an accurate document on Hitler for historians. However, as anti-Nazi propaganda it was taken seriously by the Nazi regime. At the beginning of the war, the French dropped leaflets on the Western Front containing excerpts from Rauschnings writings but with little response.
In 1941, Rauschning moved to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1942 and purchasing a farm near Portland, Oregon, where he died in 1982. He remained politically active after the war and opposed the policies of Konrad Adenauer.

Writings

Rauschning's writings that were translated into English deal with Nazism, the conservative revolutionaries' relation to it, and their role and responsibility for Hitler gaining power. By conservative revolution, Rauschning meant "the prewar monarchic-Christian revolt against modernity that made a devil's pact with Hitler during the Weimar period." Rauschning came "to the bitter conclusion that the Nazi regime represented anything other than the longed-for German revolution."
In Die Revolution des Nihilismus, he wrote that "the National Socialism that came to power in 1933 was no longer a nationalist but a revolutionary movement" and as the book's title states a nihilistic revolution that destroyed all values and traditions. He believed that the only alternative to Nazism was the restoration of the monarchy. His book went through 17 printings in the United States. The book was directed at conservatives in Nazi Germany, whom he hoped to warn of the alleged anti-Christian nature of the Nazi revolution. He would reiterate the anti-Christian nature of Nazism in Gespräche mit Hitler.
His success with the publication of his Die Revolution des Nihilismus book in early 1938 made Rauschning financially able to pursue his German edition of Gespräche mit Hitler and the other early versions and translations in 1939 and 1940. The first edition of The Revolution of Nihilism was printed in German under a Zürich, Switzerland, publishing house, which was "rapidly followed by ever renewed editions." Its English translation was published in 1939 and became "the third best-seller on the non-fiction list."
Rauschning's ideas of conservative Christian resistance to Hitler met with increasing scepticism and were of no interest to Winston Churchill and his doctrine of uncompromising total war. He fared little better in the United States, where "Jewish extremists, like Henry Morgenthau argued for the radical dismemberment of the entire German nation."
At the Nuremberg Trials, the Soviet Union presented as evidence two extracts from The Voice of Destruction. Dr Pelckmann, for the defence, asked for Rauschning to be called as a witness on the matter of the party programme relating to the solution of the Jewish question and Hitler's "principle to deceive the Germans about his true intentions" so that the prosecution would have to prove that the SS "knew what Hitler actually wanted," but Rauschning was not called.

Authenticity of Hitler Speaks

Criticism by historians

According to an article by The Spectator, Rauschning had taken immediate "notes made by him at the time" during his years with Hitler, which have been considered "not a mere transcript of the notes, but an attempt to reconstruct the conversations noted."
Although Rauschning had written his book more than six years after his conversations with Hitler, German historian Theodor Schieder remarked that it—
...is not a document in which one can expect to find... stenographic records of sentences or aphorisms spoken by Hitler, despite the fact that it might appear to meet that standard. It is a in which objective and subjective components are mixed and in which alterations in the author's opinions about what he recounts become mingled with what he recounts. It is, however, a of unquestioned value, since it contains views derived from immediate experience.

Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's initial view that the conversations recorded in Hitler Speaks were authentic also wavered as a result of the Hänel research. For example, in the introductory essay he wrote for Hitler's Table Talk in 1953, he said:

"Hitler's own table talk in the crucial years of the Machtergreifung, as briefly recorded by Hermann Rauschning, so startled the world that it was for long regarded as spurious. It is now, I think, accepted. If any still doubt its genuineness, they will hardly do so after reading the volume now published. For here is the official, authentic record of Hitler's Table-Talk almost exactly ten years after the conversations recorded by Rauschning."

Trevor-Roper stated that Rauschning's account "has been vindicated by the evidence of Hitler's views which has been discovered since its publication and that it is an important source for any biography of Hitler."
In the third edition, published in 2000, he wrote a new preface in which he revised but did not reverse his opinion of the authenticity of Hitler Speaks:

"I would not now endorse so cheerfully the authority of Hermann Rauschning which has been dented by Wolfgang Hänel, but I would not reject it altogether. Rauschning may have yielded at times to journalistic temptations, but he had opportunities to record Hitler's conversations and the general tenor of his record too exactly foretells Hitler's later utterances to be dismissed as fabrication."

In his biography of Hitler, Ian Kershaw wrote: "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." Historian Richard Steigmann-Gall, in The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, also contends Hitler Speaks to be an overall fake.

Criticism by Holocaust deniers

The authenticity of the discussions that Rauschning claimed to have had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934, which formed the basis of his book Hitler Speaks, was challenged shortly after Rauschning's death by an obscure Swiss researcher, Wolfgang Hänel. Hänel investigated the memoir and announced his findings at a conference of the negationist association Zeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt in 1983.
The ZFI is a historical revisionist association that, according to one of its leaders, Stephen E. Atkins, is a Holocaust denial institution that is based in Germany. Its conferences and meetings have speakers attempting to trivialize Nazism and denying the guilt for Nazi Germany's part in World War II and other culpable activities by Nazis, in close collaboration with periodicals such as Europa Vorn, Nation und Europa, and Deutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, who promoted similar viewpoints and goals. Not long after the ZFI conference in 1983, Mark Weber, from the Institute for Historical Review, considered the mainstay of the international Holocaust denial movement, published an article condemning the "Rauschning memoir as fraudulent," which led to the Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi community campaign to deny Rauschning's writings. As director of IHR, Mark Weber has referred to the Holocaust as a "hoax" and was the former news editor of National Vanguard, a neo-Nazi publication of the National Alliance.
The Hänel research was reviewed in the West German newspapers Der Spiegel and Die Zeit in 1985.
In an effort to undercut the accuracy of Rauschning's early account of Hitler's anti-Semitic diatribes to "remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin," Weber wrote:
The Holocaust hoax is a religion. Its underpinnings in the realm of historical fact are nonexistent—no Hitler order, no plan, no budget, no gas chambers, no autopsies of gassed victims, no bones, no ashes, no skulls, no nothing.

Considered one of the first former Nazi insiders to criticize Hitler's plan for world domination and the expulsion of Jews, many of Rauschning's most skeptical adversaries have been led by "revisionist historians gathered around David Irving," who by 1988 was regarded as a proponent of Holocaust denial. In an unsuccessful 2000 libel case, Irving was discredited after he had falsified historical facts in an effort to advance his theory that the Holocaust never happened, where Judge Charles Gray concluded that Irving was "an active Holocaust denier; that he is anti-Semitic and racist and that he associates with right wing extremists who promote neo-Nazism."
The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich also considers that "the research of the Swiss educator Wolfgang Hänel has made it clear that the 'conversations' were mostly free inventions."
Other historians have not been convinced by Hänel′s research. David Redles criticized Hänel′s method, which he said consisted of
point out similarities in phrasing of quotations from other individuals in Rauschning's other books... and those attributed to Hitler in The Voice of Destruction . If the two are even remotely similar Hänel concludes that the latter must be concoctions. However, the similarities, which are mostly slight, could be for a number of reasons.... need not stem from Rauschning's attempt at forgery.

Works