Hermann Rauschning - Writings

Writings

Rauschning's writings that were translated into English deal with National Socialism and the Conservative Revolutionaries' relation to it, and their role/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 (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" and, as the books title states, a nihilistic revolution, destroying all values and traditions. He believed that the only alternative to Nazism was the restoration of monarchy. His book went through seventeen 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.

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 US where "extremists, like Henry Morgenthau argued for the radical dismemberment of the entire German nation".

At the Nuremberg Trials the Soviet Union presented as evidence (USSR-378) 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 program relating to the solution of the Jewish question and Hitler's "principle to deceive the Germans about his true intentions" so that the prosectution would have to prove that the SS "knew what Hitler actually wanted" but Rauschning was not called.