Hermann Rauschning (1)

Hermann Rauschning was a German of aristocratic background who served (1933–1934) as Nazi President of the Danzig Senate, but openly turned against the Nazis and had to flee to Switzerland (1936). At the beginning of the War he published a book recounting a large number of alleged personal meetings with Hitler which was apparently phoney, a (successful) attempt to solve his personal financial problems. This episode is unfortunate, because it also tends unfairly to discredit another work of his, Germany's Revolution of Destruction (known in the U.S. as The Revolution of Nihilism), published in English in 1939. This book offers an unusually close-up view of Nazism by a thoughtful observer, a participant in the politics of the time who is also capable of intellectual detachment. It is on a much higher level than the technocrat Albert Speer's wartime memoir, for example, from what I remember of the latter.

Above all, the book should be of extraordinary interest to conservatives, because Rauschning, who was and remained a conservative, is unusually honest about the relationships between German conservatism and Nazism. As far as I am aware, there is no other book written from a conservative standpoint which shows such intellectual honesty. (Kuehnelt-Leddihn, to take a notable example, evades the issue by simply designating Nazism as "leftist" and denying that conservative aristocratic Nazis, like Rauschning, were of any significance.) Nazism probably would never have come to power without the tactical cooperation of moderate conservatives such as Rauschning, and he is fully aware of the catastrophic error for which he bears some responsibility. He not only admits this mistake, but goes on relentlessly to examine the contamination of conservative thinking itself by Nazi-like elements. This analysis may be of even greater significance today, when a number of intelligent observers see a danger of new right-wing extremist movements in response to what may well be the collapse of liberalism in Europe and/or the United States.