Hermann Rauschning: Nation

“My Socialism is not the same thing as Marxism. My socialism is not class warfare, but order. Whoever images Socialism as a revolt and mass demagogy is not a National Socialist. Revolution is not a game for the masses. Revolution is hard work.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), p. 175

Game

“It is not Germany that will turn Bolshevist but Bolshevism that will become a sort of National Socialist. Besides, there is more that binds us to Bolshevism than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine revolutionary feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where are Jewish Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once. The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, but the Communist always will…. Our spirit is so strong, and the power of our magnificent movement to transform souls so elemental, that men are remodeled against their will… A social revolution would lend me new, unsuspected powers. I do not fear permeation with revolutionary Communist propaganda.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), pp. 131-132

Men , Fear , Feeling , Soul

“It took three attempts in Germany to enable a coup d'état of nationalist forces to achieve such success that it could be given the character of an irresistible mass movement, a national revolution. All three attempts used the same tactics of ‘grafting revolutionary violence on constitutional legality.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 4

Success

“Nationalists were gratified by [ Franz von Papen’s ] policy of making an end of party politics and of liberalism; the state began to be authoritarian, despotic… All that united it was the negative purpose of breaking with the past system. Its two main sections, representing the industrialists and the big landowners, were directly opposed to one another on first principles: the industrialists were for free trade and unrestricted capitalist competition; the landowners were for ‘autarchy,” neo-mercantilism. ‘Enlightened capitalism’ on one side, pre-capitalist patriarchalism or post-capitalist economic planning on the other. But the great new forces of the Nationalism and Socialism were unrepresented.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 8

Past

“I have learned a great deal from Marxism as I do not hesitate to admit… The difference between them and myself is that I have really put into practice what these peddlers and pen pushers have timidly begun. The whole of National Socialism is based on it… National Socialism is what Marxism might have been if it could have broken its absurd and artificial ties with a democratic order.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), p. 186

Learning

“Goebbels is and always has been surrounded by mistrust and deep dissimulation. It was this mistrust that accounted for his being set down as a Bolshevist in disguise, though he cares no more for Socialism and Communism than for patriotism and nationalism. Germany? The testing ground for revolution. Socialism? Nothing but a means to an end a means to revolution, but never the goal of one.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 47

Communication

“Long before the party's arrival in power Goebbels had written the famous article in which he pointed out the kinship between National Socialism and Bolshevism. At times he spoke enthusiastically in favor of a peaceful permeation of Bolshevism by Nazism and a German-Russian symbiosis. But to his confidants he always showed how clearly he realized that Communism is at all times simply a path leading to a new system of private property and private capital, and that the classless society is bound to lead to a new class formation with a new grading of incomes.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 47

Peace , Confidence , Communication , Time

“The nihilist foreign policy of the National Socialism of today uses ideas as a mask, and has no philosophical basis.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 253

Idea

“Today, after six years, there are… still many respectable people associated with German ‘dynamism’ who have not yet realized that their imagined national and racial rebirth amounts to nothing more than the adoption of the revolutionary system of ‘direct action’ as the fundamental principle of the carrying of the ‘mass revolt’ to completion. Direct action is defined as ‘direct integration by means of corporativism, militarism and myth;’ this is to replace democracy and parliamentarism.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 27

People , Democracy , Imagination

“There were two modern ideas of the State which, they believed, had the same tendency to set up a despotic administrative system. One was the deification of the State and the absolute subordination of the individual to it. That was the solution of Fascism and, as they added later, of National Socialism. The other was the State of the common weal, or, as would be said today, the State of social services. It was the modern form of the ‘philanthropic’ State, in which the individual was controlled for his good by the State, down to the smallest details of life. The Bolshevist State, they considered, lay in the line of this conception.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), pp. 138-139

Life , Idea

“Those who see in National Socialism nothing more than a political movement know scarcely anything of it. It is more even than a religion: it is the will to create mankind anew.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Voice of Destruction (1940), p. 246

Religion

“The radical dynamism into which National Socialism has developed is a dangerous, destructive fever, which spreads at an uncanny rate.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 253

“Koch was one of the sincere Socialists in the movement. He was a follower of Gregor Strasser, like most of the North German bosses. ‘Of course the world will become socialistic,’ he said to me once when I went to see him at Konigsberg. ‘Capitalism has done for itself. Do you suppose that Hitler can stop at this reactionary beginning? My dear man, many things have to happen yet. Your Junker cousins, we shall kill the lot of them,’ he added, laughing. ‘We shall sweep them all away. Peasants must take over; we are settling them on the land. The things the slack Sozis (Socialists) never carried out, we shall put through. Away with the Junkers and the captains of industry! Do you suppose we were just talking through our hats about nationalizing the banks and abolishing the stock exchange and all that?… And if that whimpering instrument Hitler doesn't squeak out our tune, we shall get another fiddle to play on.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 89

World , Sincerity

“We see then that National Socialism, like the Marxist Socialist parties, has a sort of religious element that demands the sacrifice of the intellect and of individual opinions.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: Men in Chaos (1942), p. 56

“Did [Franz von] Papen really see nothing in National Socialism but its nationalism, could he have overlooked its revolutionary ‘dynamism,’ its restless and boundless revolutionary energy? That is exactly what happened… the monarchist elements imagine that they would easily put those attractive young men in their place. But there was another motive, the fear of the masses and of a revolution of the Left, the fear that the National Socialist masses might go over to the extreme Left.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 9

Men , Fear , Imagination , Motivation