Swiss Historian Exposes Anti-Hitler Rauschning Memoir as Fraudulent

by Mark Weber

Virtually every major biography of Adolf Hitler or history of the Third Reich quotes from the memoir of Hermann Rauschning, a former National Socialist Senate President of Danzig. In the book published in Britain as Hitler Speaks (London, 1939) and in America as The Voice of Destruction (New York, 1940) Rauschning presents page after page of what are purported to be Hitler's most intimate views and plans for the future. They are allegedly based on a hundred or so private conversations between the two men.

Now, after more than forty years, a Swiss historian has thoroughly exposed this supposed document of Hitler's madness as completely fraudulent. Wolfgang Haenel presented the results of his research to the annual conference in May 1983 of the Ingolstadt Contemporary History Research Center in West Germany.

Rauschning's Hitler is nothing more than a nihilistic revolutionary utterly lacking in ideas, goals, principles or systematic ideology who demagogically exploited words and men to accumulate power for its own sake. He was a clever but completely unscrupulous opportunist who believed nothing of what he said. His National Socialism, according to Rauschning, was just a "Revolution of Nihilism." He was allegedly preoccupied with war. His numerous disarmament proposals and peace offers were just hypocritical rhetoric designed to mislead his future victims.

Of the man who unified Germany, Hitler is supposed to have said: "Bismarck was stupid. He was just a Protestant." He allegedly rebuked Rauschning for his qualms: "Why do you babble about brutality and get upset over suffering. The masses want that. They need some cruelty." "I want a violent, masterful, fearless, cruel youth," he is quoted as saying. On another occasion, Hitler reportedly declared: "Yes, we are barbarians. We want to be barbarians. It is an honorable title." More