Hermann Rauschning: Revolution

“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

“Nothing is more mistaken than to talk of a ‘totalitarian State’ or a “classless” society within the realm of a nihilist revolution.”

Hermann Rauschning

Source: The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West (1939), p. 26
Context: Nothing is more mistaken than to talk of a ‘totalitarian State’ or a “classless” society within the realm of a nihilist revolution. In the place of these there is a machinery of absolute dominion, recognizing independence in no sphere at all, not even in the private life of the individual; and the totalitarian collectivity of the Volksgemeinachaft, the ‘national community,’ an euphemism for an atomized, structureless nation.