Hermann Rauschning | |
|---|---|
 Rauschning in 1933 | |
| 3rdPresident of the Free City of Danzig Senate | |
| In office 20 June 1933 – 23 November 1934 | |
| Preceded by | Ernst Ziehm |
| Succeeded by | Arthur Greiser |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 7 August 1887 |
| Died | 8 February 1982(1982-02-08) (aged 94) Portland, Oregon, U.S. |
| Political party | National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) (1932–1934) |
| Military career | |
| Allegiance | German Empire |
| Branch | Imperial German Army |
| Rank | Lieutenant[1] |
| Battles / wars | World War I |
Hermann Adolf Reinhold Rauschning (7 August 1887 – 8 February 1982) was a German politician and author, adherent of theConservative Revolution movement[2] who briefly joined the Nazi movement before breaking with it.[3] He was the President of theSenate (head of government and chief of state) of theFree City of Danzig from 1933 to 1934. In 1934, he renouncedNazi Party membership and in 1936 emigrated from Germany. He eventually settled in the United States and began openly denouncingNazism. Rauschning is chiefly known for his bookGespräche mit Hitler ("Conversations with Hitler", American title:Voice of Destruction, British title:Hitler Speaks) in which he recalls meetings and conversations withAdolf Hitler.
Rauschning was born in Thorn in the province ofWest Prussia (then part of theGerman Empire; nowToruń,Poland) to aPrussian Army officer. He attended the PrussianCadet Corps institute atPotsdam and studied history, German philology and musicology at theBerlin University, where he obtained aDr. phil. doctorate in 1911. He fought in World War I as a lieutenant[4] and was wounded in action.[1]
After the war, he stayed inPoznań,[5] which (like Rauschning's home region of West Prussia) was ceded by Germany to Poland after theTreaty of Versailles in 1919. He was active in several organisations of the German minority and prominent in the Poznań historical society.[4] Disagreeing with the leaders of the German minority in thePoznań Voivodeship, he moved to theFree City of Gdansk (which was underLeague of Nations mandate) in 1926, where he bought an estate in the village of Warnau (Warnowo) in theVistula Fens and became a farmer.
During the 1920s, Rauschning was close to the "Young Conservative" movement ofArthur Moeller van den Bruck and affiliated with theGerman National People's Party (DNVP) of Danzig. In 1932, he joined theNazi Party as he believed it to offer the only way out of Germany's troubles, including the return of Danzig to Germany.[6] In the1930 Danzig parliamentary election, the Nazis had become the second-strongest force, replacing the DNVP, as they had discovered the electoral potential of the rural population in Danzig. Rauschning saw this as a powerful tool to reorganize the Danzig NSDAP. Rauschning became the agricultural advisor to the localGau in January 1932 and in February of the same year, leader of theDanzig Agricultural League(Danziger Landbund), a movement that supported the taking over of the Senate by the Nazis. He became also became chairman of the Danzig Teachers' Association in 1932.
The President of the Senate,Ernst Ziehm (DNVP) who ruled from 1931 to 1933, strongly disliked Rauschning. In Summer 1932, Rauschning and the localGauleiterAlbert Forster met withAdolf Hitler inObersalzberg to discuss happenings in Danzig. After Hitler came to power in Germany in January 1933, the Nazis in Danzig withdrew their support for the Ziehm Senate and demanded the formation of a new government under the leadership of Hermann Rauschning. Ziehm refused to form a joint government with the Nazis, but he and his Senate resigned en bloc, triggering an earlyparliamentary election in May 1933. The NSDAP won this election with an absolute majority and Rauschning became the President of the Senate of Danzig on 20 June 1933, starting theRauschning Senate which—except for the Senator of Justice—consisted exclusively of NSDAP members.
In foreign affairs, Rauschning did not conceal his personal desire to turn neighbouring Poland into avassal state of Germany.[7] As a conservative nationalist, Rauschning was not typical of Nazi members and the Nazis' violent antisemitism was alien to him.[4] He was a bitter rival ofAlbert Forster, the futureGauleiter 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 due to the possibility of him being forced to go underground.[8] Hitler feared that theWeimar Republic might move against the party and ban it. Since Danzig retained an independent status under theLeague of Nations, Hitler apparently felt that the free port "might well offer a useful asylum."[8]
On 23 November 1934, he resigned from the Senate and the party. In theApril 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.[4]
He sold his farming interests and fled to Poland in 1936.[9] 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.[4] Rauschning represented "one of the most conservative poles of the emigration" and enjoyed celebrity status through his lectures.[10] He sought to play a leading role in the more conservative émigré German Freedom Party, run by Carl Spiecher, later of theCentre Party, but he fell out with Spiecher, who thought Rauschning was motivated by self-interest, rather than the interest of the party.[4]
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. HisGespräche mit Hitler (Conversations with Hitler) was a huge bestseller but its credibility would later be severely criticised, and its standing as an accurate document on Hitler for historians was later questioned by the holocaust-denier Wolfgang Hänel andIan Kershaw. 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 Rauschning's writings but with little response.[4] Rauschning's ideas of conservative Christian resistance to Hitler met with increasing scepticism and were of no interest toWinston Churchill and his doctrine of uncompromisingtotal war against the Nazis.[11]
In 1941, Rauschning moved to the United States, becoming an American citizen in 1942 and purchasing a farm nearPortland, Oregon, where he died in 1982. He remained politically active after the war and opposed the policies ofKonrad Adenauer.[4]
In 1930, he published a work under the titleDie Entdeutschung Westpreußens und Posens (The Degermanisation of West Prussia and Posen). According to Rauschning, Germans in those areas were constantly put under pressure to leave Poland.[4]
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."[12] Rauschning came "to the bitter conclusion that the Nazi regime represented anything other than the longed-for German revolution."[13]
InDie Revolution des Nihilismus (The Revolution of Nihilism), he wrote that "the National Socialism that came to power in 1933 was no longer a nationalist but a revolutionary movement"[14] and as the book's title states anihilistic revolution that destroyed all values and traditions. He believed that the only alternative to Nazism was the restoration of the monarchy.[15] His book went through 17 printings in the United States.[citation needed] The book was directed at conservatives inNazi Germany, whom he hoped to warn of the allegedanti-Christian nature of the Nazi revolution.[16] He would reiterate the anti-Christian nature of Nazism inGespräche mit Hitler,[citation needed] where he has Hitler rule out that Jesus could have been Aryan.[17] Given that Hitler held the exact opposite view, Rauschning's intention appears to have been "to put as much distance between Hitler and Christianity as possible".[18] The main thesis ofThe Revolution of Nihilism that National Socialism was a nihilist pursuit of power with no ideological content is claimed to have unduly influencedAlan Bullock's portrayal of Hitler as acynic in his 1952Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, as well as that of Bullock's rivalHugh Trevor-Roper inThe Last Days of Hitler (1947).[19]
His success with the publication of hisDie Revolution des Nihilismus book (The Revolution of Nihilism) in early 1938 made Rauschning financially able to pursue his German edition ofGespräche mit Hitler (Conversations with Hitler) and the other early versions and translations in 1939 and 1940. The first edition ofThe Revolution of Nihilism was printed in German under aZurich,Switzerland, publishing house (Europa), which was "rapidly followed by ever renewed editions."[20] Its English translation was published in 1939 and became "the third best-seller on the non-fiction list."[21]
At theNuremberg Trials, theSoviet Union presented as evidence (USSR-378) two extracts fromThe Voice of Destruction.[22]Horst Pelckmann, for the defence, asked for Rauschning to be called as a witness on the matter of the party programme relating to thesolution 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,"[23] but Rauschning was not called.
Prophylactic Disclaimer against False Confirmation-Bias
It should be noted at the top of this discussion that Rauschning—after a sustained campaign prosecution and defamation by 'scholars' in the cottage industry ofHolocaust denial—has reentered the domain of sources approved by mainstream scholarship in the history of the period.Richard J Evans, who criticized Rauschning (along with his peerIan Kershaw) as recently as 2018,[24] began to cite from Rauschning again in his most recent work,Hitler’s People in 2024.[25] He rejoins other mainline historians and biographers of the Third Reich, such asHugh Trevor-Roper andJoachim Fest, in considering Rauschning an important source on this period and as a source-witness on the subject of the figure he is best remembered for describing,Adolf Hitler.
An issue with the text ofGespräche mit Hitler that may be hard for the novice in the general literature of historical primaries and studies of Adolph Hitler to distinguish immediately made the text an important target fornegationists.
This issue may best be summarized as follows: In this source, Hitler speaks with a frankness about his aspirations that is absent from other accounts written or included in the testimony of those amongst his Nazi colleagues who remained loyal to him throughout the period of the Third Reich. Rauschning, therefore, stands as a character-witness refuting attempts bynegationists to sanitize Hitler's personal involvement as an explicit authority and commander of programs of extermination including the Holocaust.
Rauschning was accused by the denialist community of embellishing his accounts, and of mistaking or omitting specific details as to the circumstances of his interviews with Hitler. Like all sources, Rauschning should be read critically but his memory of conversations Hitler is not more erroneous or embellished than—say for example--Albert Speer's memoirs or Leni Riefenstahl's, a preponderance of the Nuremberg testimony (in which every officer questioned on the issue denied personal commitment to the policy of radical and negatively eugenic antisemitism includingRudolf Höss,Julius Streicher etc.) or the diaries ofJosef Goebbels for that matter. Should the Goebbel's diaries (which, unlike Rauschning, show evidence of intentional and systematic deceit) be eliminated as a source on this basis? They cannot be: Too much that is truly and accurately corroborated by the Goebbels diaries would be lost or weakened in historical memory if this source was scrubbed from historical standards. Though the cases and level of exposure are different, the same considerations obtain in the case of Rauschning. If all sources were held to the standard of evidence introduced byHolocaust denialists in their critique of Rauschning as a source—which was introduced at a denialistconference in the 1980's (see below)--then scarcely any testimony from Hitler's functionaries in the regime of theThird Reich available in our extant records would be considered valid.
Controversy
The authenticity of the discussions that Rauschning claimed to have had with Hitler between 1932 and 1934, which formed the basis of his bookHitler Speaks,[26] was challenged shortly after Rauschning's death by an obscure Swiss researcher, Wolfgang Hänel—a holocaust-denier. Hänel investigated the memoir and announced his findings at a conference of thenegationist associationZeitgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle Ingolstadt (ZFI) in 1983.[27]
The ZFI is a historical revisionist association that, according to one of its leaders,Stephen E. Atkins, is aHolocaust denial institution that is based in Germany.[28] 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 asEuropa Vorn,Nation und Europa, andDeutschland in Geschichte und Gegenwart, who promoted similar viewpoints and goals.[29] Not long after the ZFI conference in 1983 where Hänel’s critique of Rauschning was introduced,Mark Weber, from theInstitute for Historical Review (IHR), considered the mainstay of the international Holocaust denial movement, published an article condemning the "Rauschning memoir as fraudulent,"[30] 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 ofNational Vanguard, a neo-Nazi publication of theNational Alliance.[31]
The Hänel research was reviewed in the West German newspapersDer Spiegel[32] andDie Zeit in 1985.[33] By 2012, the scholarly consensus was that the conversations were not genuine.[34] 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.[35]
Hitler’s orders for the Holocaust include but are not exclusive to theCommissar Order, as most articulations of his orders in this domain were channeled throughGöring,Himmler andHeydrich. Ruins of gas-chambers have been found at the concentration camps where they were said to have existed. Human remains in these areas are found frequently even discovered up to the present.GeneralPlan Ost is quite adequately documented, nevermind the reams and reams of transport documentation or the minutes of theWannsee Conference. The SS funded itself from expropriation in the east and elsewhere as is well-known. Quite literally hundreds of ton of ashes have been found and abundantly documented. The eagerness of Hänel’s cohort to dismiss such evidence should be weighed when his critique of Rauschning is considered.
As 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 sceptical adversaries have been led by "revisionist historians gathered aroundDavid Irving,"[36] 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,[37] where JudgeCharles 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."[38]
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."[39] In his biography of Hitler,Ian Kershaw wrote: "I have on no single occasion cited Hermann Rauschning'sHitler Speaks, a work now regarded to have so little authenticity that it is best to disregard it altogether."[40]
Other historians have not been convinced by Hänel′s research. David Redles criticized Hänel′s method, which he said consisted of
point[ing] out similarities in phrasing of quotations from other individuals in Rauschning's other books... and those attributed to Hitler inThe Voice of Destruction [i.e.Hitler Speaks]. If the two are even remotely similar Hänel concludes that the latter mustbe concoctions. However, the similarities, which are mostly slight, could be for a number of reasons.... [they] need not stem from Rauschning's attempt at forgery.[41]
According to an article byThe 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."[42]
Although Rauschning had written his book more than six years after his conversations with Hitler, German historianTheodor 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 [work] 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 [source] of unquestioned value, since it contains views derived from immediate experience.[43]
HistorianHugh Trevor-Roper's initial view that the conversations recorded inHitler Speaks were authentic[44] also wavered as a result of the Hänel research. For example, in the introductory essay[45] he wrote forHitler's Table Talk in 1953, he said:
"Hitler's own table talk in the crucial years of the Machtergreifung (1932–34), as briefly recorded by Hermann Rauschning, so startled the world (which could not even in 1939 credit him with either such ruthlessness or such ambitions) 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."[46]
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."[47]
Despite the problems of the source, if the same criteria that Hänel uses to discredit Rauschning were equally applied to all sources,Albert Speer,Bormann, and evenGoebbels would have to be dismissed as sources out of hand. These sources, too, should be viewed critically and corroborated—as Roper implies above Rauschning is only a reliable insofar as events and actions by Hitler corroborate his testimony (which, in a preponderance of cases, they do).
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 ofHitler 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."[48]
| Government offices | ||
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| Preceded by | Danzig Head of State 1933–1934 | Succeeded by |
| International | |
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| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
